CANCEL CULTURE AS FUNDAMENTALISM= THE HIDDEN IDEOLOGY OF COLONIALISM

by PATRICK DELANOY

The prevailing cancel culture that tries to efface everything not to its liking, ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Arundhati Roy, has its roots in the deep seated animosity of the European colonial enterprise for everything outside its immediate experiential and conceptual realms. This is what prompted Thomas Babbington Macaulay, a British civil servant in India, to `cancel’ the entire literatures of India and Arabia at one go, deeming them in their entirety as lesser in stature to a single shelf of European material. This epistemological violence, that prompted Macaulay to cancel the entire humanities of a region at one go, later took on ontological manifestations. The women in the Salem witch trials, the Roma, the victims of the trans Atlantic slavery, were all cancelled at one. Whatever is not to the liking of the palate of the imperialist fanatic is negated. There is no benefit of doubt even, forwarded to the benefit of the victims.Bernie Sanders was accused of keeping aloof from civil rights events, the entire hoopla seeking to efface him from the political mainstream. So was the case of Zizek. Everyone from Gandhi, Nehru, Marx, Lenin, to Donald Duck and Cinderella were sought to be cancelled. Sometimes these were owing to extreme politically correct stances. They were sometimes correct. But the racism of early Gandhi needn’t necessarily cancel his accomplishment of having single handedly brought into existence an edifice of peaceful protest and revolution worldwide. This has been critiqued by people belonging to various shades of the political spectrum. The Abrahamic ideologies have been in their specificity guilty of disrespecting other persuasions and cultural systems including those of India. A narrow definition of humanity developed during the enlightenment consigned large sections of humanity into the `darkness’ so to speak. Thus a universal was evoked with humongous exceptions like India, China and West Asia. In this realm, the linear narrative of the semitic faiths and their inheritors in the form of western secularism and white sociality were acceptable. Everything else was despised and looked down upon as worthy of western reform.

Even the corpus of a writer and thinker such as Slavoj Žižek reeks of Eurocentrism and prejudice against non-European streams of thought and religious persuasions. The specificity of these are lost upon a western audience devoid of exposure to the culture and religion of the east. The orient was the first entity that was sought to be cancelled by the colonial juggernaut. So much was predicted by Edward Said. Said’s fundamental argument was an anti-essentialist one. The essence that was constructed on a Platonic scale was then used to impute negative connotations upon the orient and thus to exert overwhelming power over the orient. This technique of imperial legerdemain involved cancellation of a culture as its prime narrative. The reiteration of the imperial prehistory is unfolding before the world in 2020, forcing a nonagenarian Noam Chomsky to issue an edict. Things have never been so bad, except at the origin of colonialism as an enterprise.

Dilip Menon who teaches at the Witswatersrand University in South Africa suggests the concept of paracolonialism. The simultaneous nature of neo-colonialism makes it deceptive and difficult to locate. It seeks to cancel what fails to please its whims. Thus India, Africa, China and many parts of the world have found their unbelievable rich cultures trodden over and cancelled, citing aberrations such as caste, misogyny etc. This was a case of bombing an enlightenment into existence. The first victims of the cancel culture were the Spanish Moors who were evicted from Granada in 1492. This culture of ontological cancellation has systematically effaced entire populations from the face of the earth, including the holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Sebrenica which happened in millenarian Europe, the seat of culture and civilization.

Backward regions like Afghanistan, Iran and Rwanda were systematically traumatized citing their lack of `culture’. Afghanistan as Žižek is often fond of pointing out was a hub of liberal culture with an `enlightened’ monarch, till the western instigation of the religious fundamentalists gave rise to a jihadi edifice that had far reaching consequences. The cancellation of not just personalities, but of entire cultures, as carried out in Baghdad and ongoing in Yemen, can only be compared to cultural genocide of the most atrocious kind. The incredibly rich cultures of Somalia, Vietnam and fin-de-siecle Japan were decimated in the cause of perpetuated a very narrow understanding of humanity that arose during the European awakening. This can be read into the cancellation of the early modern period as `Medieval’. The golden age of Islam was denigrated as `medieval’. The self-hating white privileged person is a favourite bugbear of the likes of Žižek. But it is the latest in a line of subjective destitutions starting with the self-hating indigenous, oriental, the kidnapped West African sold as slave and everyone included in the roster of the `other’. This double consciousness, as WEB Dubois has called it, becomes a question of debate once it completes the revolutions and reaches back into its site of origin. The `amour propre’ of western Europe meant the decimation of the indigenous populations of Africa and Latin America. Humanity or `insaniyat’ was one of the first entities to be cancelled. The imperial mechanism cancelled in its wake various epistemological edifices including those of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam etc. This has been a norm rather than an exception. The ideal of European beauty meant that oriental aesthetic was reduced to a mere exoskeleton of affective intensities. The soul was sapped from oriental art and literature in its colonial exegesis. The universal context nullified local contexts in India, China and elsewhere. A context free universalism cancelled local specificities. But the reterritiorialized and deracinated oriental faith is on the path of return, sometimes in ways hardly desirable. The upsurge of Turkish fundamentalism is a case in point. The vehemence with which the oriental, once dehumanized is seeking to take the mantle of the oppressor is the negative side of the cancel culture. The interest of Chomsky among others, though consistent with a large theoretical corpus of work, leaves much to be desired.