08 Jan General exams the re-discovery of my roots

I have a theory about graduate school – it only works if you’re humble enough to admit that you’re not perfect, if you submit yourself supple-y to the demands and admonitions, praises and critiques, mouldings and formations of the people you ask to take you on. At the same time, there is another process happening that i’m ever so grateful for – the constant re-examination of who i am and what is important to me: the Why I am Here question.

Today i’ve been writing the postcolonial section of my general exam statement. In some ways it’s been easier than i expected and in others so.much.harder. But the best part of it, even in the midst of the angst of realizing that i just haven’t read enough to be exam’ing, has been falling in love again with the depth of theory. Today’s gem: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who knew?

She describes the chapters of A critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history of a vanishing present, as not standing alone, but

They are loosely strung on a chain that may be described this way: the philosophical presuppositions, historical excavations, and literary representations of the dominant – insofar as they are shared by the emergent postcolonial – also trace a subliminal and discontinuous emergence of the “native informant”: autochthone and / or subaltern.

The native informant. That seems to be the theme today. Who is the native informant and how does the native informant retain her positionality when even as she speaks, her position shifts? Is there an undoing of her native-ness in her speech? It is in this space that she points to the shift from colonial discourse studies to the transnational cultural studies.

Transnational. What does it mean to speak of the transnational? I’ve been trailing along on the tail of cosmopolitanism over the past nine months – (t)reading lightly, nothing too heavy, as i try to grasp at the meaning of Kant’s cosmopolitan man. It’s been years since i’ve read Kant for Kant’s sake. Maybe it’s time for a perusal. I do need to re-read him before Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta’s edited book, Reading Kant’s Geography.

But what has grabbed my attention is the attempt to theorize about a globalized world without diving headfirst into monolithic descriptions of what it is to be cosmopolitan. There is, of course, the fascinating conversation between Saskia Sassen and Matthew Sparke in Political Power and Social Theory over the new formations of citizenship. For Sparke, there is a transnationalization of citizenship that is happening – not so much a de-nationalization of citizenship, as Sassen would have it. I’m inclined to agree with him.

It occurred to me yesterday that citizenship comes in two forms (not necessarily a singular form) – a cosmopolitan citizenship and a rooted citizenship. These are rough notes on my thoughts (that i scribbled while sitting through a rather uninspiring lecture about health systems), so please forgive their incompleteness. These are not two completely separate iterations of citizenship. In fact, i think i’m imagining them as dynamic and in constant state of re-formation. I’m coming at this from the back-end. Most of my dissertation will be on health citizenship –  a newly emerging citizenship project to follow on the heels of the commonly held economic, political and social citizenships laid out by TH Marshall. This is not my fantastic idea – indeed, i’m borrowing heavily from Bruce Braun, Susan Craddock and Nikolas Rose (as well as Kaushik Rajan, Adriana Petryna, and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, to name a few), so it’s all still a bit wobbly.

Where i’m imagining it going, however, is toward a more geographically nuanced frame. The fixed and rooted point not only to citizenship construction but also citizenship enactment. Citizenship is as much about how a person is perceived as it is about how a person perceives him or herself, thus, the rootedness is the national citizenship (which can be multiple for particular people) both in space/place and in ideologies of nationalism. The cosmopolitan has to do with the transnationalization of citizenship – that citizenship is not only rooted and tied to a specific place but is informed by and works in tandem with transnational movements – of bodies, resources, ideas, etc.

Here is where i’m going with it:

Haitians are rooted in their Haitian-ness. Humanitarian assistance is as much about keeping the Haitian people on their island as much as it is about helping them. That the American military immediately took over the airport after the earthquake and that the Coast Guard stepped up its patrol of the International Waters between Haiti and the US is not surprising – containment. At the same time, however, their cosmopolitan citizenship (not necessarily of their own construction) is coming through international humanitarian organizations.

Health citizenship is the individual and collective negotiations in the politics of seeking and accessing health and health care. That the health (meaning, not just health care and treatment, but all things that encompass what it means to be a healthy person – physically and mentally) of the Haitian people is very much in the hands of outside organizations – that it is being meted and managed not at all through their own devising means that their health citizenship has taken on a decidedly transnational formation. In the crudest sense, for those living in IDP camps (or not, as the 100,000 IDPs outside the Camp Corail can attest), this means that their health citizenship is intimately tied to place – and not just any place – to the small and enclosed spaces (oh – i can hear Lefebvre turning in his grave) of camps. Their citizenship is out of their hands – or is it?

How does this all relate back to Spivak? I am reminded, in reading her, what wealth of insight we can be offered by reading the philosophers and literary authors of the 19th century – what they have to offer us in richness. But more importantly, i’m drawn to thinking of the nebulous identity formation that is not a singular act of an individual even as the ownership of identity is a very personal matter. It is the rootedness of intimacy with the colouring of a transnational world…

And i’ve chased that dragon into smoke…