On Moving Beyond the Romance of “Resistance”

A post regarding Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb 1990).

This week, I wanted to explore how theories of subaltern resistance have been explored or utilized within scholarship on the Arab World. The text I chose is by a highly respected anthropologist in the amorphous and contested field of Middle East Studies, Lila Abu-Lughod. As a testament to the immense power of this traveling, interdisciplinary theoretical debate, this article was cited in Robin D.G. Kelley’s Race Rebels as influential on his own conceptions of African-American modes of subaltern resistance.

Abu-Lughod’s perceptive article makes a number of points worth considering regarding broader debates. First, she helpfully advances a suggested explanation for the popularity of resistance scholarship in a particular world-historical moment, which she attributes to “a growing disaffection with previous ways we have understood power” (41). While this may seem rather vague, it is important to consider her 1990 essay was written during the end of “the Cold War” showdown between official Capitalism and Communism, or what some pompously labeled “the end of history.” Along with the collapse of official “Communism,” Abu-Lughod argues that by the 1980s, “a number of social-political movements, including feminism, [shook] the hegemony of Marxism as radical discourse and open[ed] up possibilities for rethinking power and resistance” (53 n2). Indeed, she cites James C. Scott, one of the most prominent practitioners of the resistance framework, as pointing directly to his “disillusionment with socialist revolutions” as the inspiration for his pioneering work on everyday resistance. I think Abu-Lughod is right in trying to understand this widespread turn in scholarship within larger historical events. A host of people around the world turned to this framework because it resonated in an important way.

Moving away from Abu-Lughod for a moment, allow me to attempt to flesh out how I think this turn in scholarship played out a bit more clearly. Since around the 1980s (until now?), leftists and socially engaged academics have been disillusioned both by the crassly unequal, imperialist, and structurally racist and sexist consumer societies constructed by western capitalism and with the dictatorial, bureaucratic, and lifeless command economies constructed by the nominally “socialist” regimes in Europe, as well as the “radical nationalist” states in the Third World. Looking around the world, on a humanistic level all systems failed to work according to their best aspirations. This state of affairs appeared to mark the failure of numerous collective movements for social justice in all corners of the globe, under nearly every system of political-economic organization. However, a turn to the sphere of “everyday resistance” demonstrated how people on the receiving end of power continued to fight with dignity against oppression on the micro-level, without necessarily being connected to wider social movements. While some scholars began pushing subaltern resistance, or “history from below” in the 1960s-70s, we have seen from some of my other posts that such works largely took inspiration from W.E.B. DuBois’ and C.L.R. James’ pioneering work of the 1930s. And to this list of antecedents we must add Antonio Gramsci, from whom the term “subaltern” is taken. In light of the current stagnation of the “resistance” debate, it is important and illuminating to note that Gramsci, James, and DuBois all explicitly worked for open collective rebellion and revolution as the means to transform society – and they did not appear to counterpose everyday resistance with revolution. How little have we advanced from their work…

But back to Abu-Lughod. For her, the most lamentable result of the everyday resistance craze is its greater “[concern] with finding resistors and explaining resistance than with examining power,” which results in studies that “do not explore as fully as they might the implications of the forms of resistance they locate” (41). Going further, Abu-Lughod calls into question some of her own work in this vein, stating “there is perhaps a tendency to romanticize resistance, to read all forms of resistance as signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated” (41-42). This seems to me very similar to Walter Johnson’s famous thesis “On Agency,” expressed thirteen years earlier.[1] Drawing from Foucault, Abu-Lughod suggests what can be done instead is to “use resistance as a diagnostic of power…We could continue to look for and consider nontrivial all sorts of resistance, but instead of taking these as signs of human freedom we will use them strategically to tell us more about forms of power and how people are caught up in them” (42). In other words, we need to look at resistant people(s) not as having liberated themselves from power, but as reacting to and reconfiguring, but working within power structures.

Abu-Lughod later identifies three analytic dilemmas that may stem from the use of everyday resistance paradigms. First, is the “misattribution” of “forms of consciousness or politics” onto resistant populations (47). Just because the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin women of northwestern Egypt resist patriarchal forms of domination doesn’t mean they have a “feminist consciousness” equivalent to western discourses of feminism. Secondly, Abu-Lughod seeks to acknowledge that subordinate groups “both resist and support the existing system of power,” but she rejects Marxian conceptions of “false consciousness, which dismisses their own understanding of their situation” and “impression management, which makes of them cynical manipulators” (47). Finally, she also seeks to account for forms of resistance tolerated by dominant groups (such as satirical stories or songs), without viewing society as a machine with perfectly calibrated safety valves designed to relieve pressure. All these, I think, are important dilemmas to be considered in writing about resistance and domination.

Like Johnson in “On Agency,” Abu-Lughod is not concerned “about the status of resistance itself” – whether or not a particular tactic is productive toward collective revolution, a la Genovese. Her suggestion to end the stagnation in scholarship (and remember she is arguing in 1990) is to determine “what the forms of resistance indicate about the forms of power that they are up against” (47). In other words, using her examples, how do the subversive stories by women ridiculing men and their genitalia (“pisser[s] that dangle”) diagnose particular practices of patriarchy amongst the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin? In other examples, Abu-Lughod speaks of a generational battle between the youth and their elders in practices of marriage. Instead of the rigidly hierarchical collective negotiations surrounding a marriage, the youth were increasingly taking up paradigms of individual attractiveness and expression in finding a spouse. These practices horrified the elder generation, but the youth saw this as resistance against authoritarian control over their lives. At the same time, Abu-Lughod notes that “In resisting the axes of kin and gender, the young women who want the lingerie, Egyptian songs, satin wedding dresses, and fantasies of private romance their elders resist are perhaps unwittingly enmeshing themselves in an extraordinarily complex set of new power relations” (51-52).

I found this explanation persuasive, but also inconsistent with her focus (and that of others in the resistance school) on discrediting the Marxian notion of “false consciousness.” If Bedouin youth are “unwittingly enmeshing themselves” in a new set of dominating power relations, a set that is far more powerful (and Abu-Lughod identifies this as “the global economy”), in their attempt to escape familial power, are not the youth exhibiting a “false consciousness,” according to the terms Abu-Lughod’s own analysis? While I am in agreement that there have been many clunky misuses of the “false consciousness” concept within Marxian writing, it seems to me that the concept itself is useful if used carefully. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this. To take an example closer to our course readings, did not many slaveowners think their slaves genuinely appreciated their “benevolent paternalism” and desired nothing more than to be slaves? Were not many slaveowners shocked to find their plantations deserted, or destroyed or sabotaged by their slaves during the Civil War? And if this is true, couldn’t their political and social consciousness be determined to be objectively false? Just an idea, and I would be interested to hear other’s opinions on this. But I have a feeling that too often the false consciousness paradigm is treated as a straw man.