Interview #216 — Ghassan Hage
by Sara Saleh
Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia and a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany.
He is internationally renowned for his research on migration, on the intersection of racism, nationalism and colonialism, and for his development of critical anthropological theory.
Along with the works re-published in The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism (2023), Hage’s sole-authored books include: Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination (2015), Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017) and The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World (2021).
Ghassan spoke to Sara about his most recent book, reciprocity, and whether he’ll ever join TikTok.
Your partnership with Sweatshop was a major project which took much hard work and funding, and was part of a wider community strategy. Would you agree? Why would you choose to go with a ‘local’ writers’ group to publish your most recent book The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism (2023), instead of any of the big publishers vying for you when your name is internationally renowned?
I have been wanting to publish a single book that includes my two earlier works—White Nation (1998) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2017), plus some later writings—for some time now. I actually couldn’t get any Australian publisher interested though that was my first choice; I even considered self-publishing it. At the same time, there were a couple of international publishers who were indeed wanting to publish it. In the end the discussion was progressing on a serious level only with one [publisher]. But I wasn’t happy with the process, nor with what was intended to be the final price of the volume in the bookshops. It was then that publishing with Sweatshop slowly arose in my mind. For one, that was because whenever I met people from the collective, I would feel a certain intellectual kinship with the kind of writing that was being produced there. But there was something else that was quite important as well, which I’ll describe as briefly as I can.
Like every author, I appreciate people coming up to me and telling me that they like my work. But I experienced something quite unique with White Nation: when ‘third world-looking’ Australians tell me how much my book meant to them when they were students, or as activists; there was often an intensity involved. I would even say [their reaction was] a form of love, and it was beyond anything I had ever experienced with my other work. In my dealings with Sweatshop I felt a certain crystallisation of this intensity and this love. And that was really the most important factor that led me to approach [founding director] Mohammed and ask him what he thought about publishing The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism.
Yes, I am definitely part of a group chat involving many ‘third world looking’ people who have grown up so immeasurably impacted by your work. Actually, I was part of a conversation between some staunch Arab activists after the Sydney Writers’ Fest launch. They were discussing the significance of publishing this specific body of work: that it is not only about archival documentation but also about the intergenerational sharing which has influenced so many critical thinkers, creatives, writers, etc; you yourself mentioned this at the launch. Can you expand on what you meant by this intergenerational sharing of work? Why do you think that’s important?
It’s a well-known fact that the short-circuiting of intergenerational transmission of knowledge within a culture has always been one of the aims of colonial administrations everywhere—it causes young people to believe that their ancestors have nothing of relevance to tell them. This strategy is built on the fact that it is normal for younger generations everywhere to want to distinguish themselves from the older ones and claim a certain originality.
Neoliberalism has generalised this tendency by accentuating the ideology of ‘new beginnings’, and thus the self-made social subject that goes hand in hand with it: someone with brilliant ideas that come to them as if from nowhere and who is always ready to initiate something original and ‘revolutionary’. In this sense I have always felt that a reclaiming of one’s ancestry, as Indigenous people in Australia fight for so strongly, can have an important decolonial and radical dimension. This is especially important for anti-racist writers and activists.
At the same time, as the anthropology of intergenerational inheritance shows, inheritance doesn’t only go one-way; this is where the question of intergenerational reciprocity enters the picture. It is a problem if you are a young anti-racist activist and you don’t make an effort to learn and read the works of those who have preceded you. On the other hand, it is also a problem if you’re a living elder and feel that you should only be ‘inherited’, thinking you have nothing to learn from those who have inherited you. At least, if you want to continue producing and having an impact. So, we need a reciprocity, which then makes for a truly viable trans-generational anti-racist culture.
This kind of reciprocity is an antidote to so much of our inherited anxieties and pains too. Of late, I’ve been thinking about the various interests and/or fixations that academics and artists have that don’t always make it into their work for whatever reason. What are your obsessions? Are there things you’re interested in that you don’t (publicly) write about? And why?
I don’t think there’s enough room to talk about all the things I fantasise writing about when I’m up late at night and in that somnolent creative space where everything seems magically possible. There are many things that I write about on Facebook which I would never contemplate writing about anywhere else. Food and cooking is one example. Cinema is another. Perhaps my most enduring fantasy is to write a novel, a thriller of some sort. But all my attempts at this genre of writing have failed. Let it be known though that I’m the only judge of this [so far]. I’ve written a chapter or two here and there, [which I then] go back to a few months later and say to myself, how could I have possibly written such terrible prose where each sentence feels like a 20kg backpack that you’ve been carrying for a week? So all my attempts at a novel have ended up in the bin. I find it a bit puzzling because I know that I’m not too bad a writer as far as my academic works are concerned. And I don’t mean the quality of the content so much as the quality of the writing itself. Many good writers have also told me I’m a good writer, and I know it, but somehow it [still] doesn’t translate to writing fiction. But the fantasy has not died—I still dream. One day …
Yes, you are an intellectual icon and you’ve been around for decades; you have the long view. And as much as it’s important to delve into the past and honour that, this conversation makes me think about the future too. There are lots of things to be worried about: from global warming to capitalism to Lebanon failing to elect a president for the twentieth time in a few years. But they are all frames of reference which then open up spaces we can enter into as well. What is the role for multi-disciplinary academics like yourself in creating a tomorrow?
I always half-jokingly say that there are three spaces that I have lived all my life, believing they will get better when in fact they only got worse and worser: Palestine, Lebanon and the university. I think it’s important at present for academics to develop modes of hope that encourage a sense of minimalism, and are commensurate to the limited possibilities that the current world has to offer. For instance, it’s neither intellectually nor psychologically healthy for academics to produce euphoric conceptions of decolonisation in places where colonisation is, if anything, becoming increasingly venomous, violent and domineering.
I have recently developed this concept which I call ‘fantasies of subvival’. The notion of ‘subviving’ comes from the work of a Brazilian anthropologist and philosopher couple, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski. It’s an argument [which posits] that in the face of the ecological crisis, even the notion of survival is still over-optimistic, with the ‘sur’ in the word ‘survival’ carrying the trace of human dominance. This means that we need to find modes of resistance and existence that are spurred by fantasies of subvival rather than survival.
[To elaborate],I began my academic life in a Marxist milieu during my time as an undergraduate and a postgraduate student. I think one of the characteristics of this milieu is an overinflated sense of the political importance of academic work in shaping the future. The whole idea of how ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it’ thing is really a totally unrealistic evaluation of what philosophers can or cannot do.
When I worked with [Pierre] Bourdieu I developed a more realistic sense of what academics can do. He used to make his students think very hard and very empirically about the impact of their work so that they [end up] developing a realistic sense of the scope of that impact.
Of course, academics do make an impact, but it is not helpful to think that this impact is particularly important. This is especially so in a world that is increasingly dominated by a reactionary and anti-intellectualist culture.
One of my favourite things about being on the cesspool that is Twitter was reading your anecdotal tweets on your adolescence in Lebanon, your migration story to Australia, and what seems to be your constant global travails now. Given your many ‘selves’ and mixed [cultural] backgrounds, does the concept of ‘belonging’ feel parochial or archaic to you?
I don’t think the concept of belonging is parochial and archaic at all. What is parochial and archaic is the idea of mono-belonging, or the idea that belonging has to do with adopting certain cultural norms, or that the sum total of belonging has to be 100 percent. If ‘belonging’ means investing oneself and caring about certain spaces that one inhabits more so than others, I certainly ‘belong’ to Australia and Lebanon more than I ‘belong’ to the United States, for instance.
Furthermore, I don’t feel like this belonging is of the order of 50/50; I just belong to both worlds. Sometimes I feel that I belong to one more intensely than another. There are times when the reverse is true. I refer to this in the book as ‘the right to oscillate’. I have no time for people who aim to police or fix my belonging to either.
In much the same way, I belong to certain disciplines more so than others, but I have no problem belonging to many.
Here I am also weary of another archaic way of belonging: when people define their belonging negatively by establishing boundaries and thinking of those outside those boundaries as a threat or even worse as enemies to be hated. I have invested myself in cultural studies in the past, and I have invested myself very strongly in anthropology for a long time now. I have no sympathy, however, for those who dedicate themselves to only one discipline by putting down other disciplines, or who spend their time policing the boundaries that differentiate disciplines.
What does someone like you read in your free time (and no Foucault or Derrida please!)?
It’s embarrassing but these philosophers’ work are precisely what I read most. I’m currently reading a newly-published series of lectures that Foucault has given around the specificity of philosophical discourse. It excites me to read it—as much as, if not more than, any exciting novel. For example, I just read this lecture about the different ways in which the concept of ‘maintenant’—the ‘now’—figures in philosophical, scientific, literary and everyday discourse. I can’t tell you the many amazing ways it has triggered my imagination. I literally can’t put it down. It may sound horrifically boring to some, I know.
But I read novels of course. There’s a wonderful novel by a young Sydney woman called Sara Saleh that’s coming out soon and which I’m very much looking forward to reading. I think it is called Songs for the Dead and the Living if my memory serves me well. [Ed’s note: the novel is forthcoming with Affirm Press in late Aug 2023]
Oh yes, I think I’ve heard about it ... and I’m sure it’s way better than Derrida. Speaking of, what do you consider the literary work(s) that might matter right now? Is it a battle between TikTok analysis or academic journals? Can both survive? (What the people really want to know is, will we see Ghassan Hage on TikTok?)
Despite my age, I’m still flexible and willing to experiment with new forms of communication. But I have to admit that I have not been on TikTok despite quite a few people telling me that it’s my kind of thing,
I’m also a bit wary of attempts to flatten different kinds of writing into merely ‘writing’. This ends up abstracting the very concrete labour required by each form of writing. Social scientific writing requires a certain craft that’s totally different from historical writing or literary writing, for example. So [I think the question should be] whether new forms of communication can communicate those differences or contribute to flattening them further.
In Liminal interviews, there is usually a question about self-care, but I’d like to ask you something else. If I recall correctly, I believe you like to swim, and specifically in the ocean. Is that right? What does swimming feel like for you? Why the ocean, and not for example, the pool?
Yes I’m pretty manic about my swimming. About my skiing also, but it’s not something I get to do often in Sydney. Both the ocean and the snowy mountains are to me what they have been classically depicted : a source of physical and spiritual vitality. In both cases, the demanding nature of the terrain, the need to know how to read it, the need to have the skills to navigate it—these all efficiently combine to produce a kind of active meditation. I’ve never identified with thinkers and academics who think they are just ‘brains’ and who neglect their body. There’s a lot of them around, especially in the Arab world. I also think that it’s particularly important for those of us who engage in political struggles that are often marked by depressing defeats rather than euphoric victories not to let political depression gnaw at our physical bodies.
[To give you a more empirical example], I met a very dear Syrian friend in Beirut recently. He looked really bad: depressed, chain-smoking. I could see how the events in Syria and the defeat of the revolution have been weighing on him. But I couldn’t help but say, look, so Bashar al-Assad has managed to win. He has destroyed Syria and he has control over it. But you shouldn’t let him destroy your body and soul as well. You have control over your body and soul, and Bashar al-Assad does not. Protect your body and soul from him. Self-care is a revolutionary duty. Che Guevara had his cigar. We all need our cigar, i.e. whatever is the equivalent of Che’s cigars for us. In fact, I was amused to find out a little while ago that Che had written a little text advising revolutionaries about what they need to keep in their backpacks. I wasn’t surprised to see tobacco on the list, but I was pleasantly surprised with one particular item: a hammock. So yes, we need to struggle but we also need to learn how to rest and look after ourselves [so we can continue that struggle]. I like the fact that the Extinction Rebellion mob have incorporated a dimension of self-care as an essential part of their political activism.
If you could send The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism to one person (living), who would you send it to?
Your question made me go to [look at] the short list of people I have that I want to send a copy to when I get around to doing it. I keep adding to it but here’s where I’m at now; I’ll just give you the names in the order they were written. I can’t really choose one. Nor do I have a fantasy reader that I don’t know. Maybe if I thought harder they’d be someone. Anyway, I just noted that the people on my list are mostly women. Not sure why that is, [but they comprise] Angela Davis, Noura Erakat, Diana Buttu, Gary Foley, Françoise Vergès, Houria Bouteldja, Judith Butler, Ziad Majed, Saree Makdisi.
Who or what inspires you?
As far as writers and activists are concerned, I’m always inspired by people who know a dead-end when they see it. When some decide to just give up, and others, out of stubbornness or a fear of defeat keep on keeping on regardless of the closed horizon that they find themselves in, these inspiring people can see the world anew, finding a bit of fresh hope seeping out of the cracks of the decaying world that we currently live in, guiding us towards new thinking and new activism.
Interview by Sara Saleh
Illustrations by Viet-My Bui