[LINK] "The mythical post-American era"

Ehsan Ahrari's Asia Times article "The mythical post-American era" is worth reading. I've reoroduced what I see as the most important elements below.

The fact that the US not only survived the Cold War but also remains the sole superpower is the ultimate tribute to the dynamic capabilities of its economic sector to finance its military prowess.

Moreover, no one should, even momentarily, ignore the role of America's educational institutions in sustaining creativity, innovation, critical thinking and vibrancy in the vitality of its economic and defense sectors.

The secret underlying the rise of China and India is that both adopted the American "blueprint" (if it can be so labeled). China adopted that blueprint in 1978 under the rubric of Deng Xiaoping's "four modernizations", and India adopted it in 1991 by incorporating economic reforms under the highly capable leadership of its then finance minister (and current Prime Minister), Manmohan Singh.

But why is it that, while China and India emerge as "rising powers", there are so many suggestions of a "post-American" world, or that the world is witnessing America's decline, or that there is a power shift from the West to the East? These phenomena are certainly not interrelated.

[. . .]

The forces of globalization may be reducing the "developmental gap" between the US and China, the US and India, and China and India. However, they do not necessarily force one to conclude that the US has become a declining power.

Such suggestions of decline were heard before. During the 1980s, a popular proposition was about the emergence of Japan as an economic superpower and a related decline of America's economic prowess. In the first decade of the 21st century, the promise of Japanese superpowerdom seems to have faded. Japan, to be sure, is a major economic power, but it has failed to surpass the US in that realm.

The intellectual fad in the first decade of the 21st century is a "power shift" and post-Americanism. The ground realities are that America's economic dominance will be challenged; however, there is no conclusive evidence that America's decline is "inevitable". Those who make a case for the ineluctable rise of China and India assume that such phenomena would also result in a similarly inexorable decline of the US. Such a description is more a product of the flight of imagination of some strategic thinkers than a reflection of facts as studied through a variety of indicators of economic, political, social and military prowess.

Russia and Brazil have a lot of potential but their size ensures that they will be less powerful their BRIC counterparts, while the European Union is comparable in aggregate power and power potention to the United States but it is much more diverse than the United States. Barring catastrophe the United States, in short, won't be anything less than first among equals for a good while.

[LINK] "East Africa's Chapati connection"

In Kenya's The East African, Wambui Mwangi reviews a book, Blanche Rocha D’Souza’s Harnessing the Trade Winds: The story of the centuries-old Indian trade with East Africa, using the monsoon winds, that examines the very long history of interactions between India and Africa.

Networks of Indian and Arab traders were incororating the East African coast into the globalising dynamics of empires from the early Egyptian and Roman through to the British, Dutch and Portuguese colonial conquests. The lucrative transactions in African ivory, gold, silk, spices and, significantly, slaves that anchored the Indian Ocean trade circuits, inevitably brought with them their necessary traders and administrators, their spin-off ventures and migratory patterns, their cultures and commercial products, their beliefs and ritual objects, and even their vegetables, as D’Souza’s useful examination of plants introduced to Africa from Asia reminds us.

Indeed, the Portuguese found Indian settlements at significant trading points when they arrived at attempting their own conquest of East Africa. It is in any case undisputed that by the end of the 16th century, trade between East Africa and India was brisk enough for the Portuguese to levy taxes sufficient to propose building Fort Jesus in Mombasa and to import many thousands of labourers from the subcontinent to Mombasa to work on the fort’s construction, thus significantly expanding the nucleus of Indian settlement in that region, and adding a layer to the intricate weaving of social reproduction on the East African coast and its hinterland — as these trade networks extended westwards into the lands beyond Lake Victoria.

The British colonial railway project, starting at the end of the 19th century and importing Indian labourers into the East African hinterland en masse, was thus a much later, and by the terms of D’Souza’s argument, proportionately less-influential impetus to cultural exchanges between India and Africa. In any case, by the 19th century, the twin forces of pre-existing trade networks and colonialism (Portuguese, Dutch and British) had resulted in the entrenchment of Indian settlement along the East African seaboard and its hinterland, and on islands such as Zanzibar and Mauritius.

Mwangi is critical of D'Souza's thesis that Indian-African interaction is little known and questions the extent to which she excuses Indians in East Africa from collaboration with British colonialism, while also wondering about the extent to which the presentation of Indians as legitimate Africans reflects a general environment in East Africa of ethnic conflict and insecurity.

Recently, it was possible for ethnic murderers to warn passengers in one language to disembark at the next stop, because they calculated that those passengers who were not of their ethnic group would not comprehend their spoken words, and would remain in the matatu, innocently waiting to be massacred. This is what subsequently happened: The bloodbath was predicated on literal cultural incomprehensibility.

The image of that matatu, holding its multiplicity of lives and cultures in much the same way as our contemporary East African republics contain the assorted combinations of our identities and communities, should give us some indication of the urgency of work which, unlike D’Souza’s, takes into account the fact that we are constantly interacting with each other, and constantly changing our understandings of each other and ourselves.

Nevertheless, although it may not be intellectually breathtaking, D’Souza’s work is a salutary reminder of the necessary work of active social communication and cross-cultural exchanges, and of the imperative to cultivate societies based on multicultural respect and pride in the rich variety of our ways of "being East African."

Mwangi's essay is well worth reading in full.

[BRIEF NOTE] Full circle

From PZ Myers' Pharyngula, "Ambitious Vandalism!":

A couple of college students in Toronto (what is it with those ferocious godless heathens coming out of that city?) took offense at the patent absurdity of the "Bible and Bible Studies" section of a large bookstore at Yonge and Eglinton, and decided to help organize the shelves by filing their contents more appropriately. They quietly moved the contents to other places in the bookstore, like Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult. Then they sent me a photo of the end result.

From Tall Penguin, "Spreadin' the Word":

In my bookstore job, I walk the floor for hours, helping customers find books. As I walk through my department I tidy up the shelves and clean up the messes the dear customers leave behind. As I was walking through the Religion department late yesterday afternoon, I noticed that two whole shelves of Bibles were missing. I immediately called my manager to see if perhaps they'd been moved or someone was working on this; unlikely considering it was a Saturday and we do nothing but sell on a Saturday. He said that it seemed likely they were stolen.

Loss Prevention was alerted and the three of us surveyed the empty shelves, wondering how someone could walk off with 40 bibles without our noticing. We each went back to our respective jobs, feeling a little dismayed that this theft had happened. And Bibles even. Granted, it is the most stolen book.

So, I'm walking through the Cooking department, and there on the shelf where the books on cocktails and alcoholic beverages are, are 3 Bibles. I smile. I tell loss prevention and the scavenger hunt begins. I put on my fundie thinking cap and set out to all the areas in the store that a Bible-thumper would think were in need of the Good Word. And sure enough, there they were. Bibles were found in Sexuality, Erotica, the Teen section, War and Sci Fi/Fantasy.

From Phaedron Rising, "The Marketplace of Ideas":

When DK and I moved those bibles, it was done less as a political statement or some opening salvo in a campaign of petty bookstore terrorism, but more for sheer shits and giggles. We'd just come out of Harold and Kumar 2, and were in an insolent sort of mood.

I want to make only two points.

1. It's a small world after all.

2. Fundamentalisms of all kinds are, among other things, pointlessly annoying.