Rob Nixon’s published work seems to me like a good direction for the more public, accessible side of scholarly discourse to be heading over the long haul, particularly his 2001 book Dreambirds. That could be what we’re looking for out of a scholarly career come 2030 or so, that everyone try to write one “Dreambirds” in thirty years of scholarly study. But this collection of essays is also an attractive model, and one I wish more scholars would try to emulate. Rather than trying to construct everything that is interesting to you at the moment into a tight monograph with a single argument, write a series of looser, more thematic pieces with some general connections to one another. (I don’t like Nixon’s book on Naipaul nearly as much: it seems to me to belong that moment when it was fashionable in a kind of churlish or shallow way to hiss at Naipaul. I say this as a former hisser.)
Anyway, I do remember reading Homelands with great interest in 1994, despite the fact that my copy was missing pages 53-84. This was when Routledge seemed determined to publish bazillions of books, “conference anthologies” of every single convocation of scholars in cultural studies, postcolonial theory and the like, while also having perhaps one copy editor on staff, so a book with thirty missing pages seemed kind of par for the course for them at that point. What I enjoyed about it is that it seemed to qualify as scholarship while also being readable, and while Nixon was very much concerned to demonstrate his political credentials, as every single intellectual working on South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s felt compelled to, the essays weren’t just delivery vehicles for whatever “struggle message” had come out of the South African left at the moment. (Of course, this was four years after Albie Sachs had suggested a five-year moratorium on regarding culture as a “weapon of the struggle”.)
Many of the essays in the volume do not hold up well: there is the “just-in-time” quality that a lot of cultural studies writing had in the 1990s, where there is a feeling that the analysis is being written to deliver a particular move in a Gramsican war of position. Sometimes where you’d like Nixon to just be exploratory, playful, appreciative of the messiness of past and present cultural production, he drags the subjects at hand kicking and screaming to a much more canned or preordained kind of political argument–say, for example, in his extravagant and uncritical praise of the “grass-roots left” of the South African 80s (e.g., the UDF, COSATU, and so on) against unspecified off-stage elements of the ANC who Nixon agreed lacked democratic commitments. This claim he makes in reply to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s skepticism about the ANC. Or his accurate comment that the apartheid regime was singled out internationally for the way that it wrote racism into law, without much interest in the complex implications of that difference in terms of liberalism, subjectivity, governmentality, the architecture of the state, the way law circulates as an idea in global culture, and so on (he makes the comment by way of delivering the then-conventional progressive argument that this would just make South African an “ordinary” kind of unjust society against which our struggle needs to be even more intensely directed.)
I’m less struck by some of the inaccuracy of Nixon’s readings of the political scene of that moment, because most of us were wildly wrong in our expectations about South Africa from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, and more struck just by the kind of complicated choreography of inter-left score-settling that was a big part of the South African intellectual scene in the 1980s and 1990s, the brandishing of struggle credentials and footnote rubbishing of ideological enemies while also trying to figure out how to put forth a fractional argumentative and political platform within the big tent of the anti-apartheid or nationalist position. Some of that is still with South African intellectuals. I was struck at how much of this style of thinking seems irrelevant now while talking with old friends and others this past month, but every once in a while it came roaring back. At one point during the conference I just attended, one speaker made a complimentary mention of some scholarly work by a South African academic that it had been fashionable to bash mercilessly a decade ago. It only took a few minutes for some of the old South African culture warriors to get their nationalist freak on and re-enact the bashing.
Still, Nixon was interested in a lot of subjects, issues and problems of contradiction in 1994 that a lot of the South African intelligentsia, especially historians, were not thinking about. He was anticipating how the fragmentation of the conventional wisdom of anti-apartheid thought was going to open up to a whole range of new complexities and subtleties.
Another thing I’m struck by in retrospect is the extent to which this book was a really skilled and readable example of a broadly distributed modality of cultural criticism that had a couple of underlying axioms built into it: that conflict in the domain of culture and representation was marked by deliberate, instrumental strategies, that representation had a relatively clear or coherent mapping into the political and vice-versa. Again, I’m saying this as someone who used to think rather similarly. As assumptions, these just now seem both empirically and theoretically barren to me, and I suspect Nixon too, since Dreambirds seems so much more appreciative of the organic and accidental way that culture and social life change over time.
I too admire Dreambirds. I can only aspire to write such a book.