I have been arguing, over some years, that thinking about the postcolonial condition in relation to tragedy or, rather, through a critical perspective informed by the idea of the tragic is especially useful in a historical conjuncture in which the triumphalist narratives of national liberation, anti-imperialism, and socialism have become exhausted, if not extinct (Scott, Conscripts and Omens). Romance, it seems to me, is the predominant mode of emplotment of the anticolonial and radical postcolonial imaginarles. This is because the salient questions animating the critique of the colonial past have turned, understandably enough, on the identification of the disabling repressive harms of colonial power and the construction of the justificatory narrative of resistance that, at length, overcomes the perceived obstacles to a postcolonial state without these sources of (moral, political, cultural, economic) dissatisfaction. These are narratives of longing and vindication that link past, present, and future in a steady rhythm of progressive (sometimes righteously exultant) redemption. But what if the futures anticipated in this story form come to be fundamentally thrown into doubt so that they lose the self-evidence that so long sustained them as an effective horizon of political desire and political action? What if the futures anticipated by the past are now themselves a part of the past? I have been arguing that, as a consequence of the collapse of the great social and political hopes that went into the anticolonial imagining and postcolonial making of national sovereignties, we do indeed inhabit a postcolonial present marked by such an irreversible transformation. I have been arguing that the problem about the former colonial worlds for the present is not the superficial one of finding better answers to existing questions but the more fundamental one of altering the questions concerning the relation between past and present that have organized our expectations of possible futures.

The visitor to Karl Marx's Grave in London's highgate cemetery is confronted by a large polished granite plinth, atop which squats an imposing bronze head and shoulders of Marx. Although the artist Laurence Bradshaw designed the rectangular plinth as a proxy for Marx's body, the effect is still to emphasize the head, the supposed locus of Geist, esprit, intellect. Marx was a headworker, it is true. Even in the depths of poverty, plagued by bodily ailments, he was never obliged to purvey körperliche Arbeit (“body work,” “manual labor”) in the restricted sense—that is, a körperliche Arbeit located in a social split that structurally denies the body worker access to the abstractions of a developed geistige Arbeit (“intellectual labor”).

Unlike most others teaching (English) literature, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is intimately knowledgeable about philosophy, especially German. Her deep knowledge of Kant, Marx, and Gramsci is a red thread running through her many books. And, given her interest in what we call less and less happily “postcolonial” theory (the hesitation coming from an awareness of the problematic meaning of the prefix post-), her discussions of such canonical and inexhaustible philosophical texts never lose sight of the sociopolitical implications of the ideas gleaned from the encounter. Thus, she brings a philosophical tradition to bear on contemporary social issues of a keen actuality. This solid philosophical background does not make her texts always easy to read for literary and other cultural scholars eager to get ideas—preferably quickly—about “how to do” postcolonial literary studies. Spivak's work is as challenging to read, understand, and absorb as it is important in content.

In this brief meditation i am less concerned with how tragedy as a theatrical form relates to democracy than with how democracy entails a tragic politics, in its ancient and contemporary manifestations. My broader argument follows from three presuppositions:

Philosophically speaking, democracy is a historical manifestation of self-organized politics that rests on no foundation other than self-authorization, which, being occasional and provisional, has no antecedent and is therefore abyssal.

Politically speaking, democracy requires an imaginary of rule without archē or telos—an an-archic imaginary that disengages itself from traditional parameters of the command-obedience structure. This isn't to say that democracy entails no rule. On the contrary, it engages in the paradoxical practice of anarchic rule, or rule shared by all (even those in opposition), so that the traditional division of power between rulers and ruled is destabilized.

Ethically speaking, there is nothing good or bad about democracy; all moral imperatives are foreign, perhaps even contrary, to democracy. Hence, democratic politics operates in an ethical realm without categorical imperatives, a priori principles, or transcendental guarantees and is thereby constitutively perilous and precarious. Democracy involves a tragic imaginary, enacting a politics of tragic life that includes folly without heroic salvation and demands lucidity in conditions of total uncertainty.

When Adriana Ivancich is mentioned as a figure in ernest hemingway's life, it is usually with derision, incredulity, or else a barely constrained “Did they or didn't they?” breathlessness. The idea that Ivancich, who was not even born when Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), was the inspiration behind the teenage contessa Renata, Colonel Cantwell's improbable love interest in Across the River and into the Trees (1950), has generated a sometimes hostile reaction. However, this crucial figure in Hemingway's post-World War II life and writing deserves investigation. To the extent that she has been a blind spot in scholarly circles, the oversight can be attributed to a language gap. Her letters to Hemingway, her memoirs, her brother's memoirs, and much of the important analysis of Hemingway's involvement with the Veneto are written in Italian.

On 11 november 1844, a Mob gathered outside philadelphia's chesnut street theatre for, in the words of the theater's manager, Francis Wemyss, the purpose “of a grand row” (395). The crowd intended to prevent the opening of The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, a play George Lippard had adapted from the work he was simultaneously publishing serially; it would become the best-selling novel of the first half of the nineteenth century. Capitalizing on a sensational 1843 murder case that fascinated Philadelphians, the novel retold the story of Singleton Mercer, a Philadelphia clerk acquitted of killing his sister's seducer. Infuriated by the playbill, Mercer attempted to purchase two hundred tickets for his supporters, who threatened to destroy the theater (Durang 247). Wemyss wanted Mercer jailed, but the mayor, wary of “riot and bloodshed,” countered, “I really think you have struck the first blow in your playbill” and called for the play's cancellation (qtd. in Wemyss 319-20). As the crowd of irate Philadelphians gathered, Lippard strode through it draped in an “ample cloak and carrying a sword-cane to repel assaults” (Bouton 20). Facing the very real prospect of violence, Wemyss reluctantly canceled the production.

Postcolonialism emerged as a field within literary studies during the 1980s as part of the discipline's general restructuring. That restructuring has, perhaps, been insufficiently acknowledged by the profession, and at any rate there seems to be little consensus as to its significance and shape. But it seems undeniable that, during the 1980s, literary criticism ceased to ground itself on its attention to its objects' literary qualities or on its efforts to establish convincing literary judgments about them. It turned rather to thinking about literature as, for instance, a vehicle of cultural-political identities, or as a resistance to ideology, or, more neutrally, as articulated into broader signifying or social structures.

What does it mean to saythat we live in tragic times? the 9-11 attack was certainly a tragedy, but whose tragedy was it? What constitutes a national tragedy in the first place? Ned Blackhawk points out that a nation unable to confront its past will surely compromise its civic future (293). What are the consequences of sacralizing one national calamity (the 9-11 attack) as a world-historic tragedy while ghosting the other foundational violences of United States history, which have returned to haunt the post-9-11 era as unspeakable premonitions and accusatory revenants? “Mark me,” said the ghost.

In her essay “nationalism and the imagination,” there is a tantalizing glimpse of Gayatri before she was Gayatri Spivak. When she gave the essay as a talk at the biennial meeting of the Commonwealth Association for Languages and Literature in Hyderabad, India, and at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, her two audiences, though completely different, were evidently asking the same questions about nationalism in a supposedly postnational world. But what is most fascinating for me about the talk is that it hints at the autobiography to come, the story of a girl born in Kolkata whose earliest memories include “the great artificial famine created by the British to feed the military in the Pacific theater in World War II” (276). Would she be surprised to know that, coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire? Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.

Irony and tragedy have always been uneasy bedfellows. thus, it is no surprise that in cynical eras such as ours, in which there are no moral absolutes, no clear beliefs, no accepted authority, and no commonly shared values or ethical norms, the act of producing a Greek tragedy requires a different lens. Even so, my recent experience shows that the plays continue to exert a peculiar hold on contemporary imaginations and can find startling resonances for modern audiences.