Ghosts of Freedom:
Pheng Cheah explores the meaning of liberty

Pheng Cheah notes that you only have to pick up a newspaper to get an idea of how often the term “freedom” is used, whether in relation to protests against the World Trade Organization or justifications for war in the Middle East. But from where do our ideas of freedom arise, and do they work for everyone on earth?

Cheah, an associate professor in the Rhetoric Department, confronts those questions in his new book, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. The book examines the idea of “freedom” as defined by German philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Marx and traces the impact of those ideas to current, postcolonial movements in the Third World. While the first half of the book discusses the works of those German thinkers, the second half looks at their concepts of freedom in the specific cases of two writers, Indonesian Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

“These ideas have been transposed because of the spread of modernity and the spread of the global capitalist system,” Cheah says. “The question is: ‘What actually happens to these ideas when they’re translated outside of the North Atlantic, where the majority of the world’s population lives?’”

Cheah says that the foundation of our conception of freedom comes from 18th and 19th Century German philosophy. He believes the “orthodox” interpretation of German philosophy in intellectual history, which ties thinkers such as Hegel and Fichte to the rise of Prussian nationalism and later National Socialism, is “mistaken.” Instead of subordinating the individual subject to the state, these philosophers conceived of societies that worked much like living bodies in which every part plays an equally important role, Cheah asserts.

While Cheah calls this conception of freedom “egalitarian,” he questions whether it can be realized in the Third World today. At the same time, he notes that it not only became accepted in Europe and North America, but also animated the work of the leading thinkers of decolonization, such as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. To explore the practical impact of these ideas of freedom, Cheah examines the lives and work Ngugi and Pramoedya, two writers who have tried to advance this conception in their own novels.

Pheng Cheah

“I wanted to look at two authors who had been political activists and persecuted by various regimes,” Cheah says. “With the failure of decolonization, the indigenous elite have taken over the state apparatus of these countries and the possibility of political and economic transformation is very slight. That means culture is the only area left where contestation can take place.”

Cheah notes that the works of Pramoedya and Ngugi are “nationalist” in that they attempt to promote ideas of national dignity and retrieve indigenous cultural sources. While Pramoedya’s work touches on Indonesia and the birth of Indonesian nationalism before colonization by the Dutch, Ngugi began to write in his native language of Gikuyu in order to reach a wider audience in Kenya. Both writers have attempted to make connections with the living popular cultural traditions of their countries and tried to change the current situations by appealing to the spirit of nationalism.

“These are the same ideas of Kant and the other German philosophers,” Cheah says. “The idea that culture has this ability to incarnate the human spirit, that culture is an expression of human freedom and our capacity for transcendence because it is the stamping of ideal forms onto material reality. This is the same logic behind art museums, where cultural objects are regarded as portals to spiritual reality.”

Neither writer has had great success in changing their societies, Cheah observes. Pramoedya has been repeatedly imprisoned and persecuted, and is not widely read in Indonesia. While the Suharto government has been overthrown, Cheah notes that little actual political change has happened in Indonesia. Ngugi, after he began writing in Gikuyu instead of English, had his books banned and was forced into exile by the regime of Daniel arap Moi. Both countries continue to be ruled by corrupt governments.

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

The failure of Pramoedya and Ngugi to encourage wholesale changes in their societies is part of a larger global trend, Cheah says. “The traditional conception of freedom is that you can always manage to translate what you think into reality because human beings have dignity, freedom and the capacity to transcend external existence,” Cheah notes. “Unfortunately, in this day and age, you can no longer plausibly envision transcending the global capitalist system. For the majority of the world’s population, there is no chance of genuine social transformation, social redistribution or real democratic freedom because economic factors, such as the international division of labor and structural adjustment programs, make it impossible.”

As a result, Cheah says, the old idea of freedom inherited from German philosophy no longer holds. “The only way is to think about freedom is as something of a ghost that persistently comes back. This is a much more useful conception of freedom. The old model of freedom as transcendence, as leaping out of the box, that doesn’t work, because the system is really a network that has penetrated every pore of human existence. You can’t transcend globalization, you can only negotiate with it.”

-- Doug Merlino