Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

Pramod K. Nayar
Dept. of English
University of Hyderabad
pramodknayar@gmail.com
International Conference on Postcolonial Literatures and the Transnational
7-9 April 2010, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, India.
*
Postcolonialism offers a new way of thinking through the transnational
and the cosmopolitan condition. Its overarching emphasis, as critical theory and
pedagogic practice, has been on emancipation from oppression, agency and
dignity. How can the postcolonial be reconfigured in the age of the transnational?
Postcolonialism has begun to address questions of globalization, and the
problematic role of the postcolonial nation-state in the age of global capital, flows
of people, finance and information, cybercultures and genetic racisms embodied
in science and technology projects like HGP and VHP. It has addressed, if I may
offer a quick inventory:
Globalization of the Third World economy,
Cultural globalization involving both, American and European
products supplanting local/native ones and the global circulation of
ethnic products (such as the Indian curry or Hindi cinema),
A facile and commercialized multiculturalism,
Increasing fundamentalisms internally, accompanied by revanchist,
reactionary cultural nationalisms,
Greater hybridity of Third World citizens,
The erosion of the powers of the nation state in the age of
multinational capital and newer forms of imperialism by bodies
like the IMF.
In this talk I want to explore the possibilities of reconfiguring the postcolonial in
the age of the transnational, and to realign celebratory readings of the
transnational with all its hype of flows, space-time compressions, disjunctures
with the postcolonial.
Postcolonialism offers a new way of thinking through the transnational
and the cosmopolitan condition. Its overarching emphasis, as critical theory,
analytics and pedagogic practice, has been on agency, dignity and emancipation
from oppression. It is the academic, intellectual, ideological and ideational

Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

scaffolding of the condition of decolonization for nations in Asia, Africa and

South America. Anti-colonial movements in these continents generated ideas that
eventually coalesced into a body of thought within academic practices. Gandhi,
Cesaire, Tagore, Senghor, Cabral, Fanon were anti-colonial activist-thinkers
whose political views metamorphosed into political and literary-cultural theories.
While Edward Said codified it with his epochal Orientalism (1978), it was the
tungsten-lined, non-chewable prose of Spivak and Bhabha that gave
postcolonialism an academic presence, especially in the First World academia (as
Arif Dirlik pointed out in his now-classic essay, The Postcolonial Aura).
Interestingly, as early as the 1960s the Algerian postcolonial activist and thinker,
Frantz Fanon called upon the postcolonial moment to become a time [that] must
no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the
world (Wretched of the Earth, 1961). Fanon, I believe, was anticipating much of
what the postcolonial has come to be, as I hope to demonstrate.
What I propose here is an alliance, holy or unholy, idealistic or fantastic,
or even utopian. But whats wrong with utopianism? The idea of utopia has
considerable political purchase, as evidenced in the writings of the early modern
Thomas More, Marx as well as manifestoes and Constitutions. The alliance I
propose is between postcolonialism and theories of cosmopolitanism. The hook,
anchor or imbrex for such an alliance is suffering and trauma. Affective
cosmopolitanism is based on a shared recognition of suffering, risk and precarity.
Suffering as a global feature cutting across geographical boundaries and
generating its own narratives and, when in conjunction with postcolonialisms
critical pedagogy, might offer a new way of conceptualizing cultural exchanges
and dialogues in the age of the transnational.
But how is such an imbrications, in theory, of the new cosmopolitanism
based on the ethics of recognition of the suffering (of the) Other and
postcolonialism possible? This paper attempts an answer to this question of
considerable theoretical and ethical complexity. It posits an affective
cosmopolitanism that rides on the postcolonial emphases and politics of
emancipation, Human Rights and agency while encouraging a moral
imagination.
Let me begin, programmatically, with a figure located at the intersection
of postcolonialism and the transnational: the refugee. It is the refugee that
constitutes a site for what I would like to see as a revisionary cosmopolitanism.
I: The Postcolonial, the Postnational and the Refugee
This rise of the postnational and the concomitant reduction in the nation
states significant sovereignty resonates with a particular problem that
postcolonialism has been interested in since Frantz Fanon: of nationalism and
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Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

national consciousness. The ambivalence towards nationalism and national

consciousness that we see in Fanon is aligned with the celebration of the
postnational and the cosmopolitan in Bhabha (1995) and Arjun Appadurai, as Ali
Behdad points out (Behdad 2007: 72-3). Behdad also notes that such boosters of
globalization often ignore the uneven nature of global flow (p. 76) where
migrant cultures do no significantly alter European or American politics and
where the distribution of wealth and privilege is not really global at all that it
remains raced, as it used to be in colonial times. Behdad warns that
postcolonialism must address the unequal geography of globalization and its
historical links with European colonialism and the process of decolonization (p.
77). What Behdad directs us to is the racialized aspects of contemporary
globalization something that postcolonialism must address. Economic benefits
from global trade linkages rarely deliver the same benefits to Asian and African
nations as they do to the European and American one. Does this indicate that the
postnational simply means that the dissolution of national borders primarily
benefits Euro-American firms, corporations and governments? What happens to
the national economy in the postnational context?
A major contribution to postcolonial readings of globalization/postnational
versus local/national comes from Aihwa Ong (2003). Ong turns to the figure of
the refugee in late twentieth century. In the twentieth century the volume of
migration and the consequent demands have been severe, testing humanitarian
organizations, legal systems, health authorities and nation states as never before.
Extreme consequences of migration and the resultant multiculturalization of
societies/nations include genocides and ethnic cleansing (Bosnia is a recent case).
Countries now seek to screen refugees and enact requirements for allowing them
in (the Baltic states introducing language as a criterion for citizenship, for
instance).
Ong detects three technologies of subject-making (70). First, the USA
has always worked on the logic of racial bipolarity and orientalism. Whiteness
becomes established as an identity through the contrast with African slaves, and
fear and longing have influenced American interactions with and attitudes towards
Chinese and Asian immigrants. Slaves and immigrants were cleansed of ethnic
tendencies through technologies of paternalism, care, welfare capitalisms
reform and disciplining. Second, the attempts to assimilate ethnic groups into
standardized American moulds were manifest as the moral politics of poor relief
(74). Reforms aimed at the poor immigrant and the urban poor (usually migrants
from the country to the industrial city) and the rise of the welfare mode were
crucial in aligning poverty, race and morality in the discourse of
deserving/undeserving and citizenship. Third, the refugees resettlement and
return to citizenship has been a major project for most First World nation states.
The state and the refugee are often, Ong argues, situated as polarized positions.
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Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

But, she notes, different kinds of refugees have also been differently perceived
and received by peoples. National policies about refugees have often changed the
moral status of the refugee (79).
Ongs key argument is that the refugee and the citizen are not
irreconcilable opposites. Rather, she writes, the refugee and the citizen are the
political effects of institutional processes that are deeply imbued with
sociocultural values (79). Ongs reading of the refugee throws up several racerelated concerns that intersect with Critical Race Studies and cosmopolitanism.
Once the refugee has been instituted as refugee (in opposition to the
citizen) then mechanisms and technologies that change her/his status will come
into play. Here racialized discourses about the refugees health, welfare, economic
means come into force. As Ong notes:
the legacy of racializing expectations with regard to market potential,
intelligence, mental health, and moral worthiness came to influence at the
practical, everyday level the experiences and understanding of both the
newcomers and the long-term residents who assisted them.
(82-3)
Ongs work demonstrates how racial discourses merge with discourses of
health, economy, nationalism, morality and welfare in order to position the
refugee in particular ways. These discourses determine the ease or difficulty of the
refugee becoming a citizen. The task of postcolonialism within contexts of global
migration, increasing refugee populations and globalized capitalism is to inquire
into how the refugee is constructed within discourses of charity, responsibility and
eligibility. Just as the native was once subject to scrutiny as a good citizen of the
empire, the refugee becomes an ethical figure who needs to qualify as a citizen in
the postnational, globalized context. Postcolonialism must, therefore, examine the
conditions under which the Third World refugee is evaluated as a possible
citizen in any part of the First World. Does the refugee have to subscribe to EuroAmerican notions of the family and the individual? Can the refugee who retains
her/his native cultures for which s/he has been targeted, attacked and yet be a
responsible citizen in any part of the globe? Or are the obligations of the EuroAmerican globalized worlds such that difference is respected and protected? In
an age where most individuals already have mixed cultural identities and
heritages, can we think of a distinctive ethno-cultural or even national identity,
even in the case of the nostalgic refugee?
With the suffering, problematically constructed subject, the refugee as a
backdrop, I now turn to three improbable articulations that help a postcolonialinflected cosmopolitanism.
II: Frantz Fanon and a New Humanism
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Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

In his Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon argues that all forms of
exploitation are the same, all racisms are the same. Fanon opens his BSWM with
some interesting declarations: Mankind, I believe in you (1) and I believe that
the individual should tend to take on the universality inherent in the human
condition (3). It is significant that Fanon, for all his rootedness in Algeria and
Africa, is emphatic about the need to address universals. This universalism stems
from a particular humanist component of his thought.
Fanons humanism is the solidarity with the worlds suffering, irrespective
of race, colour or geography. He writes:
The new relations are not the result of one barbarism replacing another
barbarism, of one crushing of man replacing another crushing of man.
What we Algerians want is to discover the man behind the colonizer;
this man who is both the organizer and the victim of a system that has
choked him and reduced him to silence. (DC 20)
Fanon has aligned the colonizer white man with the colonized black as victims
together of a cruel process. Fanons work, I believe, is about the worlds
oppressed, and when he includes the white man as a victim of colonialism he has
sought to move beyond the racial binary. Suffering and oppression are unifying
factors for his thoughts about humanism and these factors enable him to call for
a consciousness beyond nationalisms. In another essay, Letter to the Youth of
Africa, Fanon writes:
It is essential that the oppressed peoples join up with the peoples who are
already sovereign if a humanism that can be considered valid is to be built
to the dimensions of the universe. (TAR 114)
Once again Fanon is speaking of an alignment between races.
If the color black is virtuous, I shall be all the more virtuous the blacker I
am. With this savagely ironic comment Fanon proceeds to reject the myth of
authenticity in TAR (23). He speaks of people living in the great black mirage
(27) and of blacks who aspire only to one thing: to plunge into the great black
hole (27). Ross Posnock argues that Fanons rejection of such racial binaries
enables him to move beyond identity to action (Posnock 1997: 339). This
action, as Posnock sees it, is intellectual work. This intellectual work in the
decolonizing phase is essentially, in Fanon, a turn away from the traditional
national liberation politics towards an internationalism and universalism, what
Nigel Gibson identifies as the third mode of nationalism in Fanon or nationalism 3
(see Gibson 2003, chapter 8). Like Posnock who detects in Fanon a call to
recognize humans by their actions rather than racial or ethnic identities, Gibson
argues that this nationalism3 is marked by a celebration of human action and a
critical attention to hazards of national consciousness (180). In other words, what
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Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

Gibson identifies as nationalism3 is a move of the consciousness beyond the

national one.
Writing about national cultures, Fanon says:
The colonized who are concerned for their country's culture and wish to
give it a universal dimension should not place their trust in a single
principle that independence is inevitable and automatically inscribed in
the people's consciousness. (WE 179)
This self-awareness of the limitations of nationalism and national cultures, argues
Fanon leads to guarantees greater communication. In an important comment
Fanon says: National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of
giving us an international dimension (179). What Fanon is proposing is that
revolutionary movements might be national and nationalist to begin with but the
consciousness they engender must enable a movement beyond the national
towards the universal. For this the individual must become self-aware, and this
self-awareness is the route to his own liberation. Once the individual has been
fully liberated through (i) revolutionary struggle, (ii) national culture and
consciousness he is ready to free himself of both colonialism and nationalism and
become a new man. This new man is social, seeks the universal and recognizes
the Other. In what is arguably a manifesto for the new humanist postcolonial
Fanon writes:
Since the individual experience is national, since it is a link in the national
chain, it ceases to be individual, narrow and limited in scope, and can lead
to the truth of the nation and the world. (WE 140-1)
As the individual strives to free his nation, he also will[s] here and now the
triumph of man in his totality (141). Any great revolutionary struggle, for Fanon,
will lead to a consciousness that ushers in a new human: this new humanism is
written into the objectives and methods of the struggle (WE 178). With social and
political liberation comes the liberation of the self for both colonizer and
colonized, and this is the starting point for the new human. The formerly
colonized therefore, in order to free himself in totality, brings all his resources
into play, all his acquisitions, the old and the new, his own and those of the
occupant (TAR 43). He recognizes, appropriates and internalizes the Other in
order to transcend both, his and the white mans identities. Thus the anti-colonial
struggle and its political experience is the source of a new humanism because it
facilitates the rise of a new consciousness.
The self-determined, self-aware liberated individual therefore is at the core
of Fanons new humanism. This individual is able to engage in the reciprocal
recognition which leads to the new humanism. Such a reciprocal recognition is
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Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

achieved through the recognition of shared suffering. This is yet another strand to
Fanons universalist humanism.
Building solidarities on the basis of a shared history of suffering no
matter what your racial-ethnic identity might be is a form of humanism that
Fanon seeks. To reiterate Fanons view of the responsibility of the postcolonial:
the time [that] must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but
rather of the rest of the world. This anticipates, I suggest, Ashis Nandys views
on cosmopolitanism.
III. Ashis Nandy and Affective Cosmopolitanism
In two major essays, Towards a Third World Utopia (1987) and A New
Cosmopolitanism: Toward a Dialogue of Asian Civilizations (1998), Ashis Nandy
calls for a new solidarity of peoples, one based on an economy of suffering.
Nandy writes:
The only way the Third World can transcend the sloganeering of its wellwishers is, first, by becoming a collective representation of the victims of
man-made suffering everywhere in the world and in all past times, second,
by internalizing or owning up the outside forces of oppression and, then,
coping with them as inner vectors and third by recognizing the oppressed
or marginalized selves of the First and Second Worlds as civilizational
allies in the battle against institutionalized suffering. (2004 [1987]: 441)
This is Nandys reasoning: If the Third Worlds vision of the future is
handicapped by its experience of man-made suffering, the First Worlds future,
too, is shaped by the same record (467, emphasis added). R. Radhakrishnan
points out that Nandy is arguing a case for seeing suffering as a universal and
omni-locational phenomenon, where the Third World is an imaginative topos
that seeks to bring about reciprocal recognition between vectors of oppression
that are external and those that are internal (2003: 98-9).
Ulrich Beck speaks of cosmopolitan memory using the example of the
Holocaust (2002). A cosmopolitan memory, of which the transnationalisation of
the Holocaust (20) is an example, is a global history of suffering and trauma.
Beck argues that such a cosmopolitan memory can energise thinking about a
shared collective future, which contradicts a nation-based memory of the past
(27). Nandy is speaking of suffering as providing the basis of particular forms of
archiving but also of critical knowledge. One can generate civilisational allies on
the basis of this shared recognition of suffering and therefore, envision a different
future based on this recognition. Becks new cosmopolitanism is, as I see it, is one
that Nandy anticipates in his vision of a utopia based on the recognition of cosuffering. Nandys inter-civilisational perspective on suffering comes close to
Becks formulation.
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Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

Affect and empathy is what Nandy is also, I propose, getting at when he

speaks of perspective. Nandy does not at any time seek a synthesis, not an
identification with the victim that would erase the singularity of the victim. Nandy
writes in Towards a Third World Utopia:
Ultimately it is not a matter of synthesizing or aggregating different
civilizational visions of the future. Rather, it is a matter of admitting that
while each civilization must find its own authentic vision of the future and
its own authenticity in future, neither is conceivable without admitting the
experience of co-suffering which has not brought some of the major
civilizations of the world close to each other. (468)
This is utopia, but, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, utopia has critical powers that
we should probably never give up on (2005: 131). If utopia is the imaginative
reconstruction of society, can this imagination be based on the imagination of
Others suffering? Can we imagine an-Others grief and our own precarity? It is to
these questions I now turn.
IV. Judith Butler and Differential Grieving
Judith Butler suggests that in the light of large-scale suffering and violence
our questions ought to be: Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?
And what makes for a grievable life? (2004: 20). Her answer to these questions
offers, I suggest, a geopolitics of affect when extended far enough:
Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is
possible to appeal to a we, for all of us have some notion of what it is to
have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous we of us all. (20).
When we are all increasingly vulnerable we understand a sociality of precarity:
Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social
vulnerability of our bodies loss and vulnerability seem to follow from
our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing
those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that
exposure (20).
Feelings of loss, bereavement and the anxiety of vulnerability (sentiments) are
accompanied by a political reasoning where we recognize the condition of
precarity and the need for interdependence. This political reasoning is the rise and
dissemination of emotional intelligence as a response to scar cultures discourse of
suffering and the emotional dominants of pain, horror and pity.
Framed within scar cultures and its discourses of suffering elaborated
above, this condition of precarity of the potential to be victim, to suffer can
become the basis of a community across locations and time. This is the cultural
politics of emotion as manifest in a social awareness or even campaigns. Such a
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Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

condition emerging of course demands a highly self-conscious awareness not only

of precarity but of our interdependence and our responsibility. As Butler puts it,
if my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the we is
traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against (22-3).
Relationality is the realignment of identity itself. It is not the distant Other
anymore, but one who could, given the appropriate circumstances, become me.
V. A Postcolonial Ethics of Suffering, the Moral Imagination and the
Transnational
Anthony Alessandrini has argued that Fanon was a transnational
humanist (1998). I have elsewhere referred to Nandys affective
cosmopolitanism (Nayar 2008). This is a form of cosmopolitan thought that
builds on affect, empathy and an ethics of recognition of the Others suffering.
Affective cosmopolitanism, as I see it in Nandys works, links civilizations on the
basis of their respective sufferings, but provides the platform from which the
struggle against institutional and manmade suffering anywhere in the world can
be launched. It is a whole new vision of globalization itself, and is a necessary
corrective to the techno-capitalist one. A history of global trauma constitutes a
means of communicating an alternative vision of the future. If utopia, as Nandy
proposes, is an act of communicating a vision, a language, then the time is ripe
when this must be the language of suffering rather than one of development and
progress. This is a shared language an inter-civilizational perspective on
trauma, suffering and atrocity. It generates a cosmopolitan memory, a
transnationalization of suffering that can give us an affective cosmopolitanism
where we recognize the Others suffering.
In the late 18th and early 19th century, in Europe, as Alan Lester (2000) has
persuasively argued, a global humanitarian regime was visible. This responded
to conditions of (presumed) poverty, primitiveness and social injustice in the
European colonies of Asia, Africa and South America documented by colonial
administrators and sent out vast numbers of people (priests, doctors, teachers,
missionaries, statesmen) to improve the lot of the poor natives. In the 20th
century the global humanitarian regime has taken on the form of the Red Cross,
Amnesty, Greenpeace and social movements against racism and for gender
justice. What Iain Wilkinson terms an internationalization of conscience (2005:
136-156) is akin to Lesters global humanitarian regime, and is possible only
through an ethical-affective response to the scenes of suffering. This is the politics
of compassion, undoubtedly, but one that has resulted in active campaigns against
genocide, discrimination and oppression. It is the moral imagination generated
through scar culture and its discourse of suffering, and the resultant affective
response to it that produces these social movements. Wendy Hesford writes:
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Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

Like legal processes dependent upon the dramatic spectacle of violence to

advise juries to participate in retribution, the use of testimonials within
human rights campaigns is believed to translate empathy into beneficent
action. (2004: 107)
In other words, emotions and their cultural politics can be harnessed to effective
political strategies against war and institutionalized suffering.
Sara Ahmed
argues, using Iraqs suffering people as an example:
compassion for the others suffering becomes a gift that can be extended
to others: the promise of this gift becomes the hope of the Iraqi nation.
Through our compassion, the suffering of others can be repaired, and the
nation can be restored or healed (2004: 193)
This is, in effect, a call to the ethical witnessing of such narratives rather than
mere consumption of them. New forms of international appropriation, circulation
and reception of such narratives offers a whole new form of cosmopolitanism and
globalization, a point to which I turn now.
Globalization brings with it terrors of dissolving boundaries, flows
(Castells 1996), time-space compression (Harvey 1980), liquid modernity
(Bauman 2001), the fragmentation of the social (Jenks 2005) and atomization
where there is no stability of the nation state or filiation. The new cultures of
sentiment with their discourse of suffering offer a unifying agenda to counter
these terrors of instability, displacement and non-rootedness: a geopolitics of
affect where care and concern collapse the world too. Like the global
humanitarian regimes of the colonial period, a unification of the world is on
through the activities of social movements, transnational organizations and
extended volunteerism. Resisting the space of flows and indeterminacies is the
geopolitics of affect where, moved by scar cultures representation of suffering of
the distant Other facilitated by tele-trauma organizations and individuals seek
to map a different world order based on ethics. This search for an ethical response
and world order is the emotional style merging into a social pragmatics of aid and
political intervention. It is a clear example of how emotions are political in nature
and scope.

(i)

(ii)

What I want to propose is that

the moral imagination that is triggered by tele-trauma is the arrival of
emotional intelligence, and a new way of dealing with the distant parts of
the increasingly borderless world,
expressions of solidarities with victims of oppression and suffering are the
consequences of emotional intelligence and political acts that create the
foundations of new alliances and the possibilities of a new world order.
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Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonialism, Suffering and Affective Cosmopolitanism

Here ethics, volunteerism and cooperation constitute a rationalized,

reasoned out often legally organized response to affective stimuli. The
intimate here, as we have already recorded, plays itself out when the two affect
and reason intersect, and this is visible in campaigns and political efforts at
alleviating the misery of the worlds unfortunates.
Such solidarities that turn on sentiments and affect redraw boundaries and
initiate recovery and retrieval (an example would be the thousands of dollars
worth foreign aid that came in for reconstruction after the tsunami and the Latur
earthquake). In many cases such solidarities have resulted in very powerful
narrative acts where the versions and accounts of oppression that have been
silenced by the state have been made visible. The Darfur rape camps,
Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the genocides of Bosnia and Serbia, the military
juntas cruelties in Burma are instances where the global community was able to
react on the basis of narratives smuggled out and made public. Veena Das et al
argue that clear ethnography needs to document the recalcitrance of tragedy so as
to avoid the sentimental view of suffering (2001: 25). My proposition is that the
sentimental view itself could become the basis of a new ethnography of
suffering. The sentimental voice is what appeals, and there must be the creation of
a space for such a voice. As Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith have shown (2004),
affective testimony can also serve as human rights testimomy. Human rights
scholars and theorists of autobiography have noted the legal prominence of
testimonial narratives within the international human rights movement (Hesford
2004: 104). It is precisely this shift in the recognition of voice-genres and speech
acts (hysteria, silence, screams, rantings versus rational dialogue, logical
arguments) that marks the making of the sentimental spectacle of a new culture of
sentiment.
Scar cultures of suffering reallocate identities for those identified as
wrong within a set of parameters not restricted to, ratified or even accepted by the
country/culture of the victimage. These victims become the subjects of
international human rights law rather than subjects of a country or ethnic
community. In a sense they become postnational citizens, whose interests and
rights are discussed, guaranteed and defended beyond the immediate territory of
their suffering. This construction of new identities for victims based on affective
responses leading to material, legal and social interventions is a consequence of
an act of recognition: that people, individuals and groups are violated, need
protection and have rights that might required validation and enforcement from
forces beyond the nation-state. Here sentimental responses are also rationalized,
legally-determined responses (to once again return to the dual meaning of
sentiment) and help us channel our affective reactions to suffering into and
along with emotionally intelligent reasoned measures.
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Suffering is a source of critical knowledge. Listening to atrocity narratives

or being alert to ones cultures internal oppressions as well as another cultures
suffering is to develop a moral imagination or what Nandy might term an
inter-civilizational perspective. I appropriate the term moral imagination from
Thomas Laqueur (2001), fully aware that it sounds like a European Enlightenment
driven liberal humanism. Thomas Laqueurs moral imagination is the expansion
of the capacity to feel the exigency of wrongs suffered by strangers at a distance
(134).
Perspective is to be able, when called upon, to imagine distant suffering.
What we have here in the inter-civilizational perspective is the global circulation
of local wrongs. Narratives such as truth commissions and atrocity memoirs have
a major role to play in the creation of this inter-civilizational perspective and
moral imagination. When Nandy speaks of a utopianism that is a
communication, a vision that speaks to the future (the definitions I began with),
he is speaking, indeed of a narrative basis for the ethics of recognition.
The ethics of recognition comes to us when we discover, in the pages of
the news paper, on websites and the television screen, the space of appearance as
media theorist Roger Silverstone phrased it (2007). It is where the Other and the
Others suffering appears to us. This recognition is also an act of committing to
memory, to the archive of suffering. Global trauma and its multiple histories
across geographical and political sites, it seems to me, can be a useful mode of
rethinking the transnational. And this rethinking of trauma can come to us via
what is arguably, the most sensate in terms of its sensitivity to suffering and
possible emancipation from suffering of critical approaches today:
postcolonialism.
Postcolonialism, especially that of the transnational humanist, Frantz
Fanon, the affective cosmopolitanism of Ashis Nandy and the questions of
precarious life in Judith Butlers analysis of war and suffering can be, as I have
tried to show, profitably yoked together. Postcolonial ethics can result in
solidarities with suffering peoples symbolized in the figure I began with, the
refugee across the world, an internationalization of suffering and a new form of
the transnational. The transnational, I propose, can be a cosmopolitan moral
imagination driven by questions of suffering, ethical responses and an injunction:
never forget.

References
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2004.
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Alessandrini, Anthony C. Humanism in Question: Fanon and Said. In Sangeeta

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