Lit Review: Imperial Encounters, Roxanne Doty

Allison Voglesong

MSU James Madison College

International Relations 2010

MC 320 paper, written 2009.05.27

Part of YDS initiative to share student publications in the spirit of critical dialog. Please comment!

Review of Imperial Encounters, Roxanne Doty, Borderline Series, 1996, 224 pages

The Proletarian Third World and Discursive Representation

A Hypostatized “Other”

              The "third world" identity is politically sensitive because its discourse assumes the totalization of an "other" identity, but it is politically significant because, as a result of colonialism's imperial "rhetorical strategy" (11), the contemporary third world identity - and its development - has been hierarchically reified (36). In "Imperial Encounters," Roxanne Doty explains the discursive separation of self from other as an imperialist device employed by "Western"-thinking colonial nations (33) who contemporarily seek to "discipline" (129) the third world via development policy. She argues that the amalgamations of distinct indigenous identities were homogenized but never united, as illustrated by contemporary development theory whereby "positioning" (11) the "other" hypostatizes the third world. Doty identifies both the self/other separation and the bereavement of third world agency an expression not only of Western imperialism but also of the world capitalist system's colonial roots. Going beyond Doty's theorization of an imperialist North/South divide, I contribute the idea that such hierarchical "positioning," otherwise the simultaneous employment of the "logic of difference" and the "logic of equivalence" (12), is analogous to the social stratification of the proletariat as determined by the bourgeoisie, a theory characterized in the Marxist critique of capitalism, or as I critique, the world capitalist system.

Colonial Legacy, Aid, and the Discursive “Other”

              Colonialism's legacy both a physical and rhetorical creation of the "third world" by the Western-thinking world. In the 1890's the US sought to annex the Philippines, which Doty explains as an example of US participation in the "Western bond" whereby the "right to conquest... established a fundamental bond between powers possessing this right and a divide between these powers and their subjects/victims" (34-5). Conquest of the Philippines stigmatized the nation as a non-sovereign (44) representative entity whose quantum identity was non-white (30), while also "linking together in relations of similarity and complementarity" (43). This "discursive economy" (45) homogenized the Filipino identity as a "lower element of humanity" (43), which "rendered the Filipino incapable of exercising agency" (44). The hegemony of the Western bond discursively established the imperial representational practices seen in "the construction of the Philippine/Filipino other... Significantly, the discourse instantiated in this imperial encounter exemplified the representational practices that were at work more globally in constructing the West and its colonial other(s)" (28).

              The contemporary issues of foreign assistance, democracy and human rights importantly parallel the imperialist Western conquest of the third world in that the discussed "other," again the third world, was constructed by Western thought. Doty illustrates this with the academic discourse at MIT which constructed the third world "subject identity" (135) as passionate rather than pragmatic. In this case, the discursive economy was used to define third worlders as a "dangerous people," classified as politically unstable (132) and in need of development and democracy. Development framed under the auspices of democracy, Doty notes, was "never [in] the presence of a clear and unambiguous signified, but rather [in] the absence of certain characteristics in "third world" subjects" (136). Foreign assistance is framed by Doty as "deployment of disciplinary techniques" (129) and she notes that its "motive force remains outside of the "third world" society and its indigenous culture, social structures, and inhabitants" (134). Discriminately administered foreign assistance was therefore "a strategy for combating the dangers that confronted the project of an international, liberal, capitalist social order" (131). For Doty, this particular constitution of the North/South dichotomy "normalized... the hierarchical relationship" (142) between the West and the third world.

Positioning the Third World Proletariat

              Whereby Doty makes explicit the relationship between the creation of the North/South identity hierarchy and the world capitalist system, she less obviously explores capitalism's relationship to the concurrent internal stratification of the third world. The hypostatized "other" is evident in "the rhetorical strategies found in discourse [which] entails the positioning of subjects and objects vis-a-vis one another. What defines a particular kind of subject is, in large part, the relationships that the subject is positioned in relative to other kinds of subjects... [This] establishes various kinds of relationships between subjects and between subjects and objects" (11).              In the case of the Philippines, the Western bond undertook the divide-and-conquer practice to establish "knowledge" of the Filipino "native" in order to "justify U.S. conquest, violence, and subsequent control" (37). Doty cites Dean Worcester, who "ranked Filipinos hierarchically from the Negritos, the lowest both physically and mentally, to the Indonesians of Mindaneo, the highest" (37). Academic Kennon separated "the good but ignorant" Filipino and the bad Filipino... [which] permitted the denial of any collective sense of revolutionary nationalism" (37). The development of the very term Filipino was a representational practice which "worked to deny homogeneity or "peoplehood" to the inhabitants" (38) of the Philippines, later taking "credit for creating a unified identity" (38). This "hierarchy of race" (38) within the third world is analogous to the bourgeoisie's deliberate inter-proletarian stratification because "colonial discourse presupposed [Filipino] capacity for agency" (44), and therefore power.

              Doty indicates how the racialization of the third world is politically significant because "the earlier mission [of colonization] to uplift and civilize was replaced with the intent 'to trigger, to stimulate, and to guide the growth of fundamental social structures and behaviors'" (134). Foreign assistance was granted to "emerging peoples" (132) of nations whose capacity to self-govern was based on the discursive classification, or "reverse visibility," (142) of democracy throughout the third world. Plainly stated by Congressman Zablocki, the administration of foreign assistance based on a democratic prerogative was not to absolutely increase world democracy, but rather to "reconcile the unreconciled among men and nations to the continued validity and viability of the present world system" (132) of capitalism. A "failure to achieve practical improvements in the lives of people throughout the world would provoke unrest and bring political extremists to power" (129); similar logic guides the bourgeoisie to establish and maintain - through arbitrarily constructed, differentiated identities - a middle class buffer between itself and the disposessed proletariat. Finally, the discursive nature of establishing the non-democratic other "obscured the undemocratic character of policies ostensibly aimed at promoting democracy and of the international order itself -- institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank" (137).

Capitalism at Play

              Doty focuses on the idea that the "logic of equivalence... subverts positive identities" (11) and cancels out essential third world differences because "each of the contents of these differential elements is equivalent to the others in terms of their common differentiation between colonizer and colonized" (12). However, I believe that positioning is significant to the "representational practices... that framed North/South relations" in terms of "different and unequal kinds of international subjects" (45). This disenfranchisement and division of the "proletarian" third world therefore supports the idea of a world capitalist system. To recapitulate, "the proliferation of [self/other] discourse... illustrates an attempt to expel the "other," to make natural and unproblematic the boundaries between the inside and the outside. This in turn suggests that identity and therefore the agency that is connected with identity are inextricably linked to representational practices" (168). The third world, as the proletariat, is incapable of exercising power and agency, where distinct identities are aggregated in a hierarchical, racialized "other" position. These "representational practices were not epiphenomenal" (48) or unintentional but rather "constructed the very differences that [identity] transformation ostensibly would eliminate" (136). The third world, akin to the proletariat, has thus been conquered and divided by the hand of the world capitalist system, because "the construction of meaning and the construction of social, political, and economic power are inextricably linked" (170) to the system's stratified structure.