Synopses & Reviews
Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in
The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalisman ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But, she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhis spiritual discipline.
Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracys future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.
Review
“The Common Cause strikingly reframes the political history of the first half of the twentieth century, recovering an occulted strand of democratic practice defined by its moral imperfectionism—its dedication to forms of self-ruination, inconsequence, making oneself less rather than more. Drawing on an unusual mix of archives, and moving fluidly between dynamic analysis and vivid historical narrative, this study is a major contribution to current debates on the relation of ethics to politics. An important and original book.”
Review
“The Common Cause brings a new dimension to the history of anticolonial struggles. In forgotten meetings, surprise encounters, and anomalous events that exceed the frame of traditional historiography, Gandhi finds a transnational art of the possible expressed in a minor key, in the most unexpected of ways: asceticisms of imperfection, ethics of undoing, and celebrations of the inconsequential. But the consequences are enormous—no less than an alternate history of democracy foregrounding events of errant relation. A major contribution to postcolonial studies that not only gives us a new sense of the past, but reopens ethical paths to the future.”
Synopsis
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: 'Mother Country' PART I: MAPPING SOME TERRITORY Colouring the English; S.Thomas A Literature of Belonging: Rewriting the Domestic Novel; A.Blake Learning Me Your Language: England in the Postcolonial Bildungsroman; L.Gandhi PART II: AUTOHOR STUDIES Katherine Mansfield and the Rejection of England; A.Blake Looking from this Curious Limbo: Jean Rhys; S.Thomas A Very Backward Country: Christina Stead and the English Class System; A.Blake The London Observer: Doris Lessing; A.Blake Made in England: V.S.Naipaul and English Fiction(s); L.Gandhi Black Families in Buchi Emecheta's England(s); S.Thomas Ellowen, Deeowen: Salman Rushdie and the Migrant's Desire; L.Gandhi Liberating Contrasting Spaces: David Dabydeen; S.Thomas Works Cited Index
Synopsis
There has been much focus on the imperial gaze at colonized peoples, cultures, and lands during and after the British empire. But what have writers from these cultures made of England, the English, and the issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity and desire when they traveled, expatriated, or emigrated to England? The authors address this question through studies of representations of the English, the domestic novel and the Bildungsroman, and through essays on Mansfield, Rhys, Stead, Lessing, Naipaul, Emecheta, Rushdie, and Dabydeen.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-198) and index.
About the Author
Leela Gandhi is professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the founding coeditor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and the author, most recently, of Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Moral Imperfection: An Ethics for Democracy1 After Virtue: The Strange Case of
Belle Époque Socialist Antimaterialism2 On Descent: Stories from the Gurus of Modern India3 Elementary Virtues: Great War and the Crisis of European Man4 Inconsequence: Some Little-Known Mutinies Around 1946Epilogue: Paths of Ahimsaic HistoriographyNotesIndex