Essay: Confessions of a Xenophile
By: Amitav Ghosh
Published in June 2012: https://amitavghosh.com/other-works-contributions/essays-and-posts/confessions-of-a-xenophile/
What makes empire difficult to dismantle and navigate is not only its violence, but its commitment to delusions justified as righteous principles. Amitav Ghosh (2012) observes this tension in his essay, “Confessions of a Xenophile,” when he writes “Empires always profess, and sometimes believe in, noble ideas.” (para. 11). He argues that the problem is not hypocrisy, for an empire can sincerely believe it is achieving the ideals of democracy, liberty and equality by waging wars, occupying land, displacing people and mass murdering. Instead, Ghosh (2012) underlines how it is precisely the methods of conquest that create realities that excuse a permanent state of deferral from the promised ideals.
An urgent example emerged in the post-9/11 world, when the language of liberty and democracy was weaponized to legitimise military interventions. In this context, violence is no longer perceived as a contradiction to these ideals, but a necessary mechanism to achieve them. The promised future for which the empire justifies its existence will never arrive, because the present conditions always demand more control and more seizure of freedom. In this essay, Ghosh proposes the opposite approach. How can people from colonised nations engage with one another without recycling the extractive logics of empire? Against the empire's permanent deferral of justice, xenophilia unfolds through reciprocity, in which both sides remain open and responsive without demanding full comprehension or mastery.
So what is xenophilia? A term borrowed from Leela Gandhi (2006), xenophilia is the love of the stranger, of the other, “a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged” (Ghosh, 2012). In Ghosh’s essay, xenophilia is not presented as a mere concept but as a mode of relation that is manifested through face-to-face encounters shaped by difference rather than resolution. It does not promise future freedom or attempt to fill the gaps produced by the empire, but instead practices imperfect connection in the present moment. It is a yearning for a certain strain of universalism that is not grounded in homogenous and abstract principles, but is rooted in situated lived exchange.
This essay begins in 1980 when Ghosh arrives in an Egyptian village to conduct anthropological fieldwork. He recounts anecdotes where his limited knowledge of Arabic leads to amusing encounters with the local villagers. The main and unexpected medium of communication between the two parties was Hindi film songs, since the villagers knew dozens of classic Hindi movies. The children perform dance numbers and others recite large sections of dialogue in Hindi, despite not understanding their meaning. Ghosh joins in with the rest of the villagers when all other efforts of communication fail. This scene highlights how xenophilia is manifested through the villagers’ embrace of Ghosh not by demanding he adopt their culture, but by already embracing his. In his ethnography, Ghosh notes a stereotype adopted as belief by most villagers regarding cow worship. He does not play into the script of Western “correctness” or offence, even as he protests this perception but is still met with the insistence that he covertly practices this worship. Despite their unfamiliarity with it, the villagers would slow their pace whenever they passed a cow out of respect for Ghosh’s alleged religious orientation. This encounter exemplifies how xenophilia operates within the boundaries of partial understanding, rather than through the transcendence of difference.
Ghosh is careful not to isolate these encounters as merely personal. He writes, “No matter how sincere an individual’s desire for cultural communication might be, it is impossible for such exchanges to occur in the absence of an institutional framework” (Ghosh, 2012, para. 7). This claim is crucial for understanding the postwar ethos of decolonisation. Ghosh emphasises that his presence in Egypt, enabled by a visa, was only possible through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM): the Afro-Asian alignment aimed at advancing the interests of developing countries during the Cold War. Despite its failures and shortcomings, the NAM established a space where Global South interactions could happen beyond Euro-American influence. Rather than romanticising the movement, Ghosh acknowledges the very feature of it that made such encounters possible: an infrastructure that enabled cross-cultural reciprocity. His analysis is not dry political realism but an ode to Third World universalism built from below through anti-colonial struggle, where a peasant in Egypt could recognise an Indian freedom fighter as an ally without a shared language. This universalism does not erase differences or merge them, but connects actors across the Global South because of their specific historical struggles.
Ghosh ends his essay by warning that the capitalist empire is rebranding itself and that conversations opened by decolonisation are “in danger of being broken off again” (Ghosh, 2012, para. 9). He does not offer a solution but reiterates the necessity of practicing xenophilia, even if done “badly”. The love of the stranger, with the full knowledge that understanding may never be complete, is needed – especially under material conditions where freedom is structurally limited. As he writes, “Only when our work begins to embody the conflicts, the pain, the laughter, and the yearning that comes from this incompleteness will our work be a true mirror of the world we live in” (para. 14).
Reviewed by: Hinda Fneish, student of Liberal Arts and Science at Freiburg University and former intern at ABI.
References:
Ghosh, A. (2012, June 5). Confessions of a Xenophile.
Gandhi, L. (2006). Affective communities: Anticolonial thought, Fin-de-siècle radicalism, and the politics of friendship. Duke University Press.
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About this blog series
The ABI is one of many institutions working together with partners across regional boundaries, in the Global South and between the Global South and Global North, to undertake joint projects, and to co-produce knowledge. Yet even those partnerships that explicitly seek to challenge cross-regional inequalities exist within, and are thus themselves often structured by, the same power relations that they might seek to undermine. These inequalities can include opportunities to seek funding, control over resources, access to existing knowledge, divisions of roles and responsibilities, and academic authorship, as well as interpersonal hierarchies that run along intersecting lines of gender, race, location and citizenship, among others.
One persistent problem within this broader issue is that scholarship from the Global South is often not cited or engaged with in debates based in, or dominated by, research in the privileged Global North. This is in addition, of course, to the multiple barriers to publication that many scholars in the Global South face. This blog series aims to discuss, highlight, and engage with scholarship from the regions of Africa, Latin America, Middle East, and Asia (ALMA) that ABI staff and associates have particularly enjoyed reading. With this blog they aim to start new conversations, explore interesting themes and topics as well as highlight excellent scholarship.
The reviews are written in recognition of the (differentiated) forms of privilege that many of the contributors may hold, but with a determination to both challenge the hierarchies of academia in the Global North, and create more equal partnerships with our colleagues in the Global South.