{"id":117266,"date":"2013-12-22T16:35:39","date_gmt":"2013-12-22T11:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=117266"},"modified":"2013-12-29T00:47:07","modified_gmt":"2013-12-28T19:17:07","slug":"a-brief-note-on-inexcusable-writing-mangalika-de-silva-in-social-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/a-brief-note-on-inexcusable-writing-mangalika-de-silva-in-social-text\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brief Note On Inexcusable Writing: Mangalika De Silva In Social Text"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Pradeep Jeganathan<\/span><\/a> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan<\/p><\/div>\n

I write to correct, for the sake of the public record, serious, egregious misrepresentations of two public interventions \u2013\u00a0 \u201cICES & I<\/a><\/span>\u201d, and \u201cSri Lanka\u2019s Common Future<\/span>,<\/a>\u201d that have appeared in print recently. In the course of an article published in\u00a0 scholarly journal [Social Text<\/i> 117 <\/i>\u2022 Vol. 31, No. 4 \u2022 Winter 2013 :1-24], ( read here<\/a>\u00a0) which will be cited here after as MDS) Mangalika de Silva, \u201cinterrogates,\u201d i.e. questions, \u201cideologies\u2026 advanced by three prominent Sri Lankan public intellectuals\u2026\u201d(MDS:2). I am one of the \u201cthree prominent Sri Lankan public intellectuals,\u201d whose work she questions. The others are Professor Michael Roberts<\/span><\/a>, a senior historian and anthropologist, whose major works, including the Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500-1931<\/i>, are scholarly classics and Dr. Dayan Jayatillake<\/span><\/a>, the author, among other work, of Fidel’s Ethics of Violence<\/i> a landmark of erudition, originality and passion. My response, however relates only to the comments about my work; I look forward to future interventions by Roberts and Dayan\u00a0Jayatillake,\u00a0if they choose in write in reply. Nor I am concerned all that very much with de Silva\u2019s larger argument here, except to note that it doesn\u2019t amount to very much at all.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, de Silva makes blanket generalizations about all three authors she is questioning. For example, she notes that they have an ideology of\u00a0 \u201cminoritarian\u2026 disposability,\u201d \u201copposi[ing]\u2026 transnational humanitarian discourse\u201d(MDS:2), \u201cIncreasing tolerance of routinized extrajudicial violence\u201d(MDS:2). In another passage, de Silva claims that, \u201cthe complicit intelligentsia of the Sri Lankan war effort strove to humanize ethnocidal war crimes by casting Tamil victims as a historically stagnant, Orientalized, and roboticized rabble\u201d(MDS:4). These are just a few examples of her generalizations. Focusing here, exclusively on my work, I underline that these are egregious and grotesque misrepresentations of the rather straightforward ideas in the two short, public interventions of mine that she cites.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, in the section of her essay that is devoted to my work, de Silva\u2019s misrepresentations move from the egregious to the downright false. Take for example this first example: \u201cIn response he [Jeganathan] proposed an affinity between the nation-state project and his version of radical democracy in accordance with the formula that \u201cthe enemy of my enemy is my friend,\u201d thereby transplanting his anticolonial rhetoric and antifascist ethics into the encampment of counterinsurgency through Carl Schmitt\u201d (MDS:15). I have not used the words appearing in quotation marks in de Silva\u2019s text, \u201c\u201cthe enemy of my enemy is my friend,\u201d\u201d in the two essays at hand. There is a very serious question here about de Silva\u2019s quotation and citation practice that continues in this manner throughout the essay.<\/p>\n

It is a simple ethical principle in any kind of writing, that text in quotation marks needs to be clearly sourced. More so if the passage is quoting the work of a particular author. So, in the passage from de Silva\u2019s work quoted above, which begins, \u201cParallel to\u2026 was the analysis of anthropologist Pradeep Jeganathan\u2026,\u201d the implicit assumption is that the phrase, \u201c\u201cthe enemy of my enemy is my friend,\u201d is taken from my work. It is not. Needless to say, I do not recognize my work in the paraphrasing \u2013 I have not suggested anything about enmity and friendship in a political sense in the essays in question \u2013 but I am focusing here on what is false.<\/p>\n

Four lines below this passage, de Silva writes, \u201c\u2026while acknowledging the relative \u201ctolerance\u201d of the Sri Lankan regime he\u2026..\u201d(MDS:15). The world tolerance, relative or otherwise is not used in the two essays in question. Again, it appears in quotation marks in a longer passage about my essays, in de Silva\u2019s article. Again, de Silva\u2019s general paraphrasing of my work is egregious \u2013 <\/b>but I focus on what is patently false, the use of the word, \u201ctolerance,\u201d by de Silva as a quotation from my work.<\/p>\n

In a later paragraph of the article, de Silva writes, \u201cFor Jeganathan, Tamils in the northeast were held hostage by the intolerance of a \u201cpre-modern,\u201d xenophobic, narrowing, minoritizing ideology, and thus their liberation by the armed forces was also a modernizing, humanitarian, and majoritarian achievement.\u201d(MDS:16). \u00a0Again, the word \u201cpre-modern\u201d is not used in the essays in question, even though it appears in quotation marks in her sentence. The quotation is false. Nor have I argued in those essays, that there was a liberation \u201cof a pre-modern\u201d Tamils, by a \u201cmodernizing, humanitarian\u201d armed force.<\/p>\n

There is little point served in re-phrasing here again what I once wrote. The reader, as I said before, is welcome to read and engage honestly and reasonably with what I\u2019ve written, rather than make up quotations from my work. It is most unfortunate that a scholarly journal, which claims to a procedure of review (de Silva thanks three readers for their comments) \u2013 has allowed such blatantly false quotation and citing practices in print. It is worth recalling, however, that the journal in question, was caught in an academic \u2018sting\u2019 operation some years ago. It published at article, which was written as a fake \u2013 assuming it was indeed authentic. The Sokal affair<\/a> <\/span>would indeed have been funny, if it is didn\u2019t call into question the publication practices of this journal. Surprisingly they don\u2019t seem to have improved.<\/p>\n

So to with de Silva. As one of the external scholars who examined de Silva\u2019s doctoral dissertation at the University of Amsterdam, together with Professors Peter van der Veer, Peter Geschiere, and Annelies Moors, and spoke on behalf of her work \u2013 which I argued was improving \u2013 I should say now, with considered dismay, that I was wrong.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan is a Consultant Social Anthropologist. For more info visit\u00a0www.pjeganathan.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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