by ANIS SHIVANI
I used to be shocked, not many years ago, to hear newly landed desi students on American shores immediately start spouting contemporary social justice jargon, as though they were born with it. Where did this strange verbal facility come from? How could they be so fluent in the language of deconstruction, when someone like me had had to laboriously struggle through the ramparts of classical liberalism, and then its various ideological opponents, just to get a handle on post-structuralist thought to see if it was relevant to my own project?
Now it’s much worse. It’s not just academics in the humanities and social sciences, but writers, artists, intellectuals — indeed, anyone with anything to say in public. With the current state of instantaneous global communications, the moment a liberal panic takes off in America, the next moment it infects opinion-makers everywhere. Whatever anxiety is agitating American intellectuals confronting a dying liberalism — #MeToo, white supremacy, transgender oppression, alleged Trumpian ‘fascism’ — it immediately saturates elite thinkers in parts of the world with no connection to the cultural petri dish wherein these self-involved viruses germinated.
This churn and froth, this lightning-fast imitation, this instant plugging into what appears as avant-garde thought, ignores that none of it is relevant to a country like Pakistan, or any developing country. The rhetoric comes from different sources and has different motivations than the needs of a violently unequal, feudal, patriarchal, even deeply misogynistic culture like Pakistan’s, where even the basics of liberal constitutionalism have yet to be worked out, let alone transcended.
Poverty, often driven by exploitative colonial dependencies, that in the case of Pakistan assumed a new darkness after the War on Terror, is the biggest problem; but the new language of social justice has nothing to say about it. It is entirely emptied of a class perspective — indeed, even in today’s popular intersectionalist vocabulary, which pretends to do so — and is rooted in the culture wars of the American right and left elites, with no relevance to working-class struggles in Pakistan or other poor countries.
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