Harry Harootunian
I served on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for about ten of the fifty years now being commemorated. For me the time spent represented an ongoing education, a virtual work in progress, in disciplines, idea, and cultural and literary theories that have since become part of my own work. The experience at CI distilled for me what I believe was the distinctive critical essence of the University Chicago, which I will always cherish. As the lone historian and Asianist among specialists in literature, the experience of reading articles in fields beyond my specialty, which often seemed exotic, and discussing them brought me be back to the regions that formed my earlier education. Above all else, I learned more than I can say or repay, but principally how the appeal to specialization began to look like an enclosed space with no exit to the wider world.
In my time at CI I had the opportunity to begin writing some pieces that were unrelated to the world of my research, occasioned by the growing interest in colonial discourse and its consequences initiated by Edward Said. I would like to say here that in these articles it eventually occurred to me that I hadn’t gone far enough, that I was blindsided, perhaps, by theory itself. Even though the promise of theory is to shed new light on familiar things, sometimes the light is dimmed and we’re thrown into making our way in the dark. A recent article in the Washington Post reminded me of this defect, as well as the way some things never change. The article reported the plight of the Armenian minority in Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic enclave of indigenous Armenians surrounded by a sizeable Azerbaijani military, employed to cut off the community from road contact with Armenia. The dire situation is the result of a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the most recent in several wars after the fall of the Soviet Union. An oil rich Azerbaijan won in this round of the struggle, armed with the most advanced weapons bought from Turkiye and Israel, which should have known better. Israelis could not have been ignorant of where the weapons would be used; Turkiye was already practiced in the genocidal vocation from their near attempt to exterminate the entire population of Armenians in Anatolia in 1915-16, which makes both states complicit in Azerbaijani ‘s attempt to starve the citizens of the enclave by blockading access to food and other necessities. Extermination by starvation qualifies as genocidal intent.
Here we have an illustration of how colonialism works to eliminate indigenous populations. What has not been recognized in this familiar story is how colonizing domination invariably leads to unspeakable oppression, usually of a minority, whether Armenians, Irish, Native Americans, Ainu, or other, now identified as indigenous, through diminishing their means of subsistence, expropriation of land, theft, dispossession, and degradation ending in mass murder. It does not matter if the colonizer is a precapitalist conquest dynasty or settlers, it comes down to the same terrible conclusion, which Marx described as the “slaughter of the innocents” augmented by the agency of “so-called primitive accumulation.” This knotting of colonialism combined with expropriation and dispossession disclosed the kinship among the dominated indigenous peoples who have been forced to undergo their systematic elimination. The great French poet Aimé Césaire had Africa in mind when he accused Europeans of accumulating the “highest heap of Corpses in history.” But it needs to be said that the misrecognition of theory has inadvertently played a damaging role in reshaping this narrative. While the momentary theorization of post-coloniality contributed to sensitizing us to the ill-effects of colonial domination, it also worked to displace the denialism associated with colonization as the scene of genocidal excess by avoiding it. Instead of confronting the destructive outcome of political oppression and massive material expropriation of the everyday lives of indigenous minorities, it diverted attention to the cultural and psychological encounter, which, in some cases, inspired historians to extol empires for their ethnic multi-diversity. This approach turned to a preoccupation with subjectivity, worrying whether the subaltern could speak (when did they cease to speak?) rather than live, through the promotion of categories like negotiation and the coming together of shared subjectivities, fantasies conjured in the afterlife disappointments of new nations accompanied by failure to see colonization’s aptitude for exploitation, dispossession, and genocide, which resulted in concealing its shared resemblance to the horrors of primitive accumulation. Here, in the twenty-first century, we continue to face the figure of genocidal extermination and its enabling desire, living the present as if it was still the unfinished past. The writer Jenny Erpenbeck rightly asked “is memory an instrument of power” and answered “perhaps,” then added: “How far do you have to step back in order to see the entire historic tapestry extending far beyond your own lifetime? How much do you have to know in order to understand what it really is that’s flourishing in your own blind spot?”
Harry Harootunian is the Max Palevsky Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Chicago. He was a coeditor of Critical Inquiry and is now on the editorial board.
In the Moment 