In Gifts, omnipertinent debates concerning the complexities and complicities of international aid are set against a backdrop of famine. Accordingly, I explore how and why a host of Foucauldian speculations, from those taxonomies of individual and collective bodies upon which international fiscal and other policies are based, to discourses of normalisation and the treatment of those designated as ‘bare life’ within certain humanitarian situations, have inspired scholars working in fields such as development and post-development studies. Moving on from the novelistic exploration of war, its escalation and fallout in Maps, to that of famine, international aid and cycles of dependency in Gifts, Secrets provides a fitting conclusion to Blood in the Sun for the comparative reader. At one of its many narrative levels, Secrets functions as a continuation as well as an intensification of what has taken place in the two earlier instalments. Once again, it focuses on those scars that mark the Somali body politic as the demise of Barre’s regime precepitates a brutal civil war. Whilst this in itself invites a bio-political reading, it is Farah’s decision to pursue a transnational AIDS narrative alongside that of domestic atrophy that is most intriguing. I argue that a more substantial engagement with the novel can result from considering Foucault’s later work and the ways its legacy has been employed by others. One of the central thrusts of this book, therefore, is that the opening up and out of Farah’s preoccupations, from what at times appears to be a hermetically sealed Somali narrative to a position where this very national thread is viewed in terms of a much more entangled, confused and often confusing (dis)order of things, finds a discursive counterpart in Foucault’s work as well as the ways in which it has been negotiated.
Building on this, the final section of The Disorder of Things considers how and why the notion of ‘entanglement’ is increasingly useful when it comes to engaging with Farah’s more recent work. This includes his journalistic study, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (2000) as well as the recently completed Past Imperfect trilogy, comprising the aptly titled Links (2004), Knots (2007) and Crossbones (2012). In this section, I am more concerned with showing how and why Foucault’s work has been put to use in a globalised context, framed by everything from an ongoing ‘War on Terror’ to the global credit crunch. If the following survey and analyses of earlier novels draws from figures such as Edward Said, Jana Sawicki and Ann Laura Stoler, all of whom rise to the Foucauldian challenge of revisioning his work for their own ends, these later chapters refer to the critical interventions of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, amongst others, to explore how and why they too carry Foucault’s legacy into our twenty-first century. It is an era in which debates concerning national sovereignty, patterns of transnational migration, networks of international terrorism and the processes by which they are monitored have emerged as the defining issues of our time. Whether it be his study of Somali refugees, his fictional exploration of Operation Restore Hope and its aftermath or his counter-hegemonic representation of piracy, Farah provides alternative narratives in order to promote alternative perspectives.
In light of the above, I suggest that Farah’s work in the roughly ten-year period from Yesterday, Tomorrow to Crossbones synthesises many of the preoccupations of the Variations and Blood in the Sun trilogies. Whether in journalistic or novelistic form, Farah offers a sustained exploration of the significant ways in which carceral and bio-political paradigms and practices have fused. It is on this globalised stage that the (dis)order of things plays itself out. As some of the most pioneering, Foucauldian-inspired scholarship has demonstrated, a concern with the various intersections of sovereign power and disciplinary societies, as well as bio-political discourses and norms, frames the agendas and practices of everyone from politicians to media providers. These and associated preoccupations cast a significant shadow over Farah’s latest work. They also correspond with something that has motivated his authorial career from the outset. This is the sense that that which appears specific to one geo-political space is in fact entangled in much more complex, often complicit and confusing, networks of power, genealogy and vested interests. As Farah emphasises at strategic points throughout his fiction, if this was the case during Somalia’s peculiarly intense experience of colonisation, so it remains in the globalised present.
As I illustrate in the remainder of this introduction, the almost all-engrossing Eurocentrism of Foucault’s work has been singled out and seized upon by a host of commentators. Yet, staying true to the generosity of discursive spirit that imbues many of his own pronouncements on his thought and its potential legacy, these critical voices have transposed its significance onto much broader geo-political and epistemological maps. This same impulse, I argue, has informed and continues to inform much of Farah’s most stimulating writing. My closing speculations, therefore, imagine what directions his work might take next. This in turn provides a final opportunity to consider how and why more substantial engagements with Farah’s oeuvre might be inspired by the kind of rich, endlessly stimulating discourse that has grown up around Foucault and of which The Disorder of Things is a direct product. It is to the ‘uncanny links’ between them that I now turn.
Spectres of Foucault: To Savage or Salvage?
If Foucault has captivated the imagination of innumerable scholars, Nietzsche had a similar effect on him. As James Miller maintains in The Passion of Michel Foucault, the ‘will to know’ impulse was to prove formative in Foucault’s intellectual development:
Philosophers, Nietzsche had written ... ‘must no longer accept concepts as a gift, not merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing. Hitherto one has generally trusted one’s concepts as if they were a wonderful dowry from some sort of wonderland.’ But this trust must be replaced by mistrust: ‘What is needed above all ... is an absolute skepticism toward all concepts.’ Hence ‘critique’. (Miller 2000: 303)
As my opening epigraph suggests, the highest tribute that can be paid to any ‘founder of discursivity’ is to listen to how and why their thought comes down to us through time, bidding us to make it groan and protest so that it might echo anew. Similarly provocative, in terms of the contrapuntal motivations behind The Disorder of Things, is an interview in which Foucault invites us to carry on and contest his interventions long after he is gone:
A book is made to serve ends not defined by the one who wrote it ... All my books ... are, if you like, little tool boxes. If people want to open them, use a particular sentence, idea or analysis like a screwdriver or wrench in order to short-circuit, disqualify or break up systems of power, including the very ones from which my books have issued ... well, all the better! (Foucault 1996: 149)
It is in such a deconstructive spirit that Laura Ann Stoler has taken up her predecessor’s challenge. Her work thus enables a wider reflection on how Foucault has been reformed and reapplied within areas of postcolonial and/or feminist study, as evidenced by Jana Sawicki’s Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (1991), amongst many others. A closer consideration of it establishes the theoretical foundation from which I speculate how Farah’s work might be added to what Said, supplementing Antonio Gramsci, has termed a critical ‘inventory’. In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler offers a contrapuntal reading of The History of Sexuality against what were then only fragments of the lectures that would become ‘Society Must Be Defended’. She declares the revisionist aims of her study, specifically the desire to transpose certain Foucauldian templates, recasting them in the colonial context of the East Indies. Stoler maintains that ‘in outlining some of the genealogical shifts eclipsed in Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West, I focus on certain specific domains in which a discourse of sexuality articulated with the politics of race’ (Stoler 1995: 11). In an appeal echoing Miller’s, she calls for ‘students of colonialism to work out Foucault’s genealogies on a broader imperial map’ (1995: 19).2 She sets