Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic 9781138061477, 9781315162300

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Introduction
Part I Iberian colonialism: some principles, people and praxis
1 Black Atlantic identity and the Spanish Inquisition
2 Picturing the Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom in early modern Spain
3 Health, raciality, and modernity in colonial Equatorial Guinea
4 From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia: Brazil–Angola cultural exchanges under the sign of coloniality
Part II Postcolonial conundrum: dystopia, relocation, and the “postcolony”
5 Origins and representations of the dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa
6 Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti: a question of locating the Tunisian revolution in relation to Haiti and the postcolonial Black Atlantic
7 No telephone to heaven: post-colonial writing, the pursuit of freedom and colonialism’s genocidal impulse
8 The lines of anti-imperialism: the circulation of militant cinema during the long 1960s
9 (Re)mapping Black Paris: African space in the imperial centre
10 Animal presences: post-revolutionary scenarios in Angola and Cuba
11 A post-colonial, national, and post-national discourse in Angolan poetry in the work of Manuel Rui
Part III Identitarian reflections
12 Citizenship and freedom in the Black Atlantic after 1945 – context and challenge
13 African diasporic autochthonomies: a syncretic methodology for liberatory indigeneities
Index

Citation preview

Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic

Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic is an interdisciplinary collection of essays of wide historical and geographic scope, which engages the legacy of diaspora, colonialism and slavery. The contributors explore the confrontation between Africa’s forced migrants and their unwelcoming new environments to highlight the unique individual experiences of survival and assimilation that characterized Atlantic slavery. As they focus on the African or Afro-diasporan populations under study, the chapters gauge the degree to which formal independence, coming out of a variety of practices of opposition and resistance, lasting centuries in some cases, has translated into freedom, security and a “good life.” By foregrounding Hispanophone, Lusophone, and Francophone African and Afro-descendant concerns, over and against an often Anglo-centric focus in the field, the book brings a more representative approach to the area of diaspora or Black Atlantic studies, offering a more complete appreciation of Black Atlantic cultural production across history and across linguistic barriers. Jerome C. Branche is Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora Series editors: Fassil Demissie DePaul University

Sandra Jackson

DePaul University

1 Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs Daniel McNeil 2 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art Charmaine A. Nelson 3 Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora Edited by Regine O. Jackson 4 Critical Perspectives on Afro-Latin American Literature Edited by Antonio D. Tillis 5 Afro-Nordic Landscapes Equality and Race in Northern Europe Edited by Michael McEachrane 6 Pilgrimage Tourism of Diaspora Africans to Ghana Ann Reed 7 The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora Transatlantic Musings Jerome C. Branche 8 Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic Edited by Jerome C. Branche

Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic Edited by Jerome C. Branche

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Jerome C. Branche; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jerome C. Branche to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Branche, Jerome, editor. Title: Post/colonialism and the pursuit of freedom in the Black Atlantic / edited by Jerome C. Branche. Other titles: Routledge studies on African and Black diaspora ; 8. Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge studies on African and Black diaspora ; 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017047098 | ISBN 9781138061477 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315162300 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: African diaspora. | Slaves – Atlantic Ocean Region – History. | Africa – Colonial influence. | Atlantic Ocean Region – Colonial influence. Classification: LCC DT16.5. P67 2018 | DDC 909.0496 – dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047098 ISBN: 978-1-138-06147-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16230-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of  illustrationsvii List of contributorsviii Introduction

1

PART I

Iberian colonialism: some principles, people and praxis9   1 Black Atlantic identity and the Spanish Inquisition

11

BALTASAR FRA-MOLINERO

  2 Picturing the Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom in early modern Spain

33

CARMEN FRACCHIA

  3 Health, raciality, and modernity in colonial Equatorial Guinea

51

BENITA SAMPEDRO VIZCAYA

  4 From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia: Brazil–Angola cultural exchanges under the sign of coloniality

75

EMANUELLE SANTOS

PART II

Postcolonial conundrums: dystopia, relocation, and the “postcolony”

95

  5 Origins and representations of the dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa

97

ROBERT SPENCER

vi  Contents   6 Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti: a question of locating the Tunisian revolution in relation to Haiti and the postcolonial Black Atlantic

119

R.A. JUDY

  7 No telephone to heaven: post-colonial writing, the pursuit of freedom and colonialism’s genocidal impulse

143

LUÍS MADUREIRA

  8 The lines of anti-imperialism: the circulation of militant cinema during the long 1960s

168

LUIS TRINDADE

  9 (Re)mapping Black Paris: African space in the imperial centre

183

MADHU KRISHNAN

10 Animal presences: post-revolutionary scenarios in Angola and Cuba

201

MAGDALENA LÓPEZ

11 A post-colonial, national, and post-national discourse in Angolan poetry in the work of Manuel Rui

218

ROBERT SIMON

PART III

Identitarian reflections

237

12 Citizenship and freedom in the Black Atlantic after 1945 – context and challenge

239

CARY FRASER

13 African diasporic autochthonomies: a syncretic methodology for liberatory indigeneities

259

MYRIAM J. A. CHANCY

Index277

Illustrations

1.1 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3

Juana Maria’s commissioned image of Santa Martha Juan de Pareja’s The Calling of St Matthew Assisting a pharmacist at his desk Pharmacy storeroom with liquid and injectable medications Itinerary of the Commission of the Instituto Nacional de Higiene, headed by Dr. Pittaluga 3.4 Itinerary of the Commission of the Instituto Nacional de Higiene, headed by Dr. Pittaluga 3.5 Health tax stamp, Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea 3.6 Hospital building at the leper compound, Mikomeseng, Equatorial Guinea, 2011 10.1 “A pig being slaughtered in a tourist area of old Havana is seen as a sign of a loss of civility” (Burnett, 2013)

22 32 53 54 61 62 64 69 214

Contributors

Jerome C. Branche is Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh. His teaching and research focus on racialized modernity and the way creative writers across the Atlantic imagine and write about slavery, freedom, the nation, being and gender. Branche’s books to date include Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature (Missouri 2006) and The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora: Transatlantic Musings (Routledge 2014). Branche has also edited, most recently, Black Writing, Culture and the State in Latin America (Vanderbilt 2015), and other collections. His current book project studies freedom narratives from the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa, before and after the attainment of independence. Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. Publications include From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions from Haiti, Cuba & The Dominican Republic (WUP 2012), and The Loneliness of Angels (Peepal Tree 2010), winner of the 2011 Guyana Prize in Literature. Carmen Fracchia is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Spanish Visual Studies, Birkbeck University of London, United Kingdom. Her forthcoming book ‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700 explores the visual articulations of ethnic prejudice, slavery, freedom, religion, human diversity, hybridity, subjectivity and the emergence of the emancipatory subject. Baltasar Fra-Molinero is a Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Bates College. In collaboration with Professor Sue E. Houchins, he wrote Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba, An African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Vanderbilt 2017). He also wrote La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid, Siglo XXI Editores, 1995). His teaching and research focus on the representation of Blacks and race in the Spanish-speaking world. Together with Professor Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, he edited the collected poems of Equatorial Guinean writer Raquel Ilombe Ceiba II (Madrid, Verbum 2015). Cary Fraser is a historian and political scientist whose work spans International Relations, US Foreign Policy, Decolonization, and Race and Politics in the

Contributors ix Atlantic World. His work has been published in Canada, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and the United States. R. A. Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches courses in world literature, critical and literary theory, and literary criticism. Professor Judy is the author of (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992) and has edited numerous special issues and dossiers for boundary 2, among which are Tunisia Dossier (2012); Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years (2003); Sociology Hesitant: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dynamic Thinking (2001); Reasoning and the Logic of Things Global (1999); and Scattered Speculations on Value: Exchange Between Etienne Balibar, Antonio Negri, and Gayatri Spivak (1999). Madhu Krishnan, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of 20th/21st Century Postcolonial Writing, University of Bristol, is the author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014). Her work centers on African literature in English and French with a focus on the intersection between aesthetics, sociopolitical interventions and cultural materialism. She has published in journals including Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Textual Practice and Comparative Literature Studies, and is guest editor of issues of Research in African Literatures and Wasafiri. Magdalena López (PhD, University of Pittsbugh) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon. She specializes on culture and literature in the Hispanic Caribbean and is the author of El otro de nuestra América: Imaginarios frente a Estados Unidos en la República Dominicana y Cuba  (Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana 2011) and Desde el fracaso: narrativas del Caribe insular hispano en el siglo XXI (Verbum 2015). She has published on Caribbean Literature and Cinema in several journals, including Latin American Research Review, Revista de Crítica de Literaria Latinoamericana, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Chasqui, Revista Iberoamericana, and Revista Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana. Luís Madureira is Professor and Chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone-African Literature (2007) and Cannibal Modernities (2005), as well as several journal articles on Luso-African literature, Mozambican theatre, Luso-Brazilian literature and culture, and postcolonial studies. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya is Associate Professor of Colonial Studies at Hofstra University, and her research interests focus on Spanish colonialism in both Africa and Latin America. She has published on the politics and processes of de-colonization and postcolonial legacies, archives, borders and ruins. Among her latest publications is Ceiba II. (Poesía inédita), an annotated edition of the unpublished poetry by Raquel Ilombe del Pozo Epita (2015). She is currently

x  Contributors working on an English language translation of the novel Ekomo, by María Nsue Angüe, and on a book project on insular Atlantic exchanges in the nineteenth century, tentatively titled Deportee Narratives and Atlantic Translatability: From Cuba to Fernando Poo and Back. Emanuelle Santos is a Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham where she leads the Portuguese Studies Programme. Her work focuses on the relationship between the Portuguese-speaking world and postcolonial theory and theories of world literature and her research interests include postcolonial theory, world-systems theory, coloniality of power, decolonial critique, lusofonia and cultural hegemony. Robert Simon serves as Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and Coordinator of Portuguese, at Kennesaw State University. His research interests include mysticism, paradigm shift theory and the evolution of nationalist discourse via the lens of Angolan, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish poetics. Robert Spencer is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His research interests include modernism, African writing and postcolonial writing more generally. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Criticism and, most recently, the co-editor of For Humanism: Explorations in Theory and Politics. Luís Trindade teaches Portuguese Culture at Birkbeck College, University of London. His most recent book, Narratives in Motion: Journalism and Modernist Events in 1920s Portugal, was published in 2016. He has also published on the histories of Portuguese nationalism, cinema and the Carnation Revolution. His current research involves a history of audiovisual culture in Portugal during the Cold War.

Introduction

The essays gathered herein originated in a series of presentations and the ensuing discussions that took place in the fall of 2015 at the University of Pittsburgh under the broad heading indicated by our book title. Our intention in convening and discussing “post/colonialism and the pursuit of freedom in the black Atlantic” was to engage the legacy of colonialism and slavery as it impacted diasporan and African populations, even as we critically considered the continuing crises being experienced by the no-longer-new nation-states inhabited by them. One of our important points of departure, as would be evident in the number of chapters dedicated to the Hispanophone and Lusophone worlds, was to expand, in more explicit fashion than is currently the case, the understanding of what constitutes the field of Hispanic and Lusophone studies. This we did by paying attention to Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Africans; Equatorial Guineans, Angolans, Mozambicans, for example, or Canary Islanders, Cape Verdeans, and so on, away, that is, from the customary focus on the maps of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. The Luso- and Hispanophone cluster does not only take us beyond “Hispanism” or “Latinamericanism,” as far as area studies go, it simultaneously expands the original “Anglo-centered” geography of early Black Atlantic discussions,1 although, in interpellating Mozambique directly, which looks out on the Indian Ocean, and the Afro-Colombian and Afro-Ecuadoran populations that look out on the Pacific, it gestures (albeit indirectly here) toward a wider geography that could only be encompassed completely under the rubric of coloniality. Even our interest in the diaspora per se, as a field intimately related to the Black Atlantic, and as seen in the thread that runs through several of the chapters, is better appreciated in its intersection with the movement over time of the Northern Atlantic European populations as actors in the larger colonial enterprise. It is in coloniality therefore that our volume has its fullest source and meaning, particularly considering the policies and practices undergirding European expansionism, the forced and voluntary migration of millions, and the labor, trade and industry involving the colonies that fueled the growth of the capitalist world-system. And if we have chosen the perhaps unorthodox tactic of introducing a slash (/) between the two terms, “post-” and “colonial,” it is simply to signal a distancing from either the use of “post-colonial” as historical and political marker, as social scientists were wont to do in referencing the post-independence era, or its unhyphenated cognate

2  Introduction “postcolonial,” energetically pursued under the rubric of “theory” since the latter decades of the twentieth century, but which, its ideological trajectory notwithstanding, has been registered as passé, prematurely, we believe.2 Robert Young was correct in observing that rather than marking out a “theory,” with the more or less evident connotations of empiricism and science that the term carries with it (64), postcolonial studies can be more usefully thought of as a body of “conceptual resources” put at the service of a “knowledge-politics.” It represents a critical positioning vis-à-vis the colonial episteme, a “decolonisation” of knowledge, as the tendency has been to put it latterly, that considers colonialism’s prejudices and its world-shaping arc, one whose emancipatory intent is served by an archeological operation of retrieval and revaluation of the subalternized actors and their thought and practices as they relate to Eurocentric dominance throughout the period of formal subjugation (Young 2001: 6). Insurgent thought and practices would take on a Marxist inflection in the cause of independence for the so-called Third World in the middle of the twentieth century, Young further notes. Indeed it was the neo-colonial pushback against antiimperialist work and thought in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 1970s, with the corresponding reassertion of the hegemony of capital through such organs as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, bolstering in turn, in many newly independent states, the phenomenon of the “postcolony,” as described by Mbembe in all its quotidian ugliness (2001), that ultimately engendered postcolonialism in its academic register. Post-independence vulnerability, given the governing economic order, was an eventuality about which Fanon was prescient decades earlier, as he spoke critically in The Wretched of the Earth, of the national bourgeoisie of these emerging nations (Chap. 3). It is the contemporary configuration of coloniality then that most urgently engages our attention in this volume, alongside, of course, its earlier historical manifestations. In thinking of the pursuit of freedom over the centuries, we cover the individual and the communitarian, as well as, by extension, the global. (Re)visiting the experiences of early displaced Africans as they confront the new worlds to which their captors take them, reading the declarations that emanate from the African societies themselves as things “fall apart” at home and the colonizers impose a new regimen of restriction and extraction, and reflecting on both the narrative architecture of colonial ideology and the responses from activist writers, poets and filmmakers, allows us to see a big picture, over time, of slavery, diaspora, and colonialism and its aftermath, and to appreciate the critical calls, made since mid-century at least, for an eschewal of the West’s gendered and raciological model of humanity, and its selective and self-centered deployment of reason and science (Césaire 2000; Fanon 2004; Hall 1997; Wynter 2003). Because we live in the shadow of expansionism, colonization and slavery, and because there is no longer an “outside” to modernity, the destiny of its (formerly colonized) “conscripts,” to borrow a term from David Scott, is inextricably intertwined with that of the larger planetary collective as overindustrialization and globalization increasingly imperil our common home. Their eventual freedom will be a measure of ours.

Introduction  3 The initial chapters by Baltasar Fra-Molinero and Carmen Fracchia place us in seventeenth-century Spain of the Inquisition, when traditional Mediterranean processes of slavery had already been supplanted, and the forms of labor acquisition and deployment that would come to define the New World agricultural economies had already been in operation for over a hundred years (Verlinden). What their chapters highlight, in opening this early window on diaspora, is the stunning process of psychic conversion that the African arrivants are subjected to as their own sense of logic and selfhood comes under the onslaught of the defining precepts of the captor culture. Correspondingly, a declaration that home (Guinea), is the place where all people are “free,” or that the alien (son of) God of the Christians might have been subject to the sexual inclinations of other mortals, become pronouncements that cross the line of religious orthodoxy and imply immediate peril for the African speaker. Fra-Molinero’s chapter allows us to see, as the Inquisition’s respondents don the mask of dissemblance, the birth of what W.E.B Du Bois would term “double consciousness” and its consequences for black existence under racialized rule. Similarly, we get with Carmen Fracchia’s account of the life and work of Juan de Pareja, early Afro-Spanish painter to the nobility, a view into the restrictions upon Otherness within the ecumene, and the discursive and psychological transactions that impinge upon being black within a racial taxonomy that equates personhood with whiteness. What is perhaps most noteworthy in Juan de Pareja’s life story as described herein is the fact of the commodification of the subject in modern racial slavery. While we note the social restrictions that limited depiction for posterity by portrait as a privilege that was limited to members of the nobility, and that Pareja, being an albeit privileged slave, was not entitled to that honour, it is the underlying principle of thingification attached to the institution, that turns out to be most striking in studying him. The services rendered by the enslaved painter did not end, as Fracchia notes, with his manumission, formally and pretentiously documented in November of 1650. And his description as “honorable” by his owner is doubly ironic considering the fact that he was passed from one generation to another within the family of his presumptive owner, and never lived outside the framework of the unfree, his manumission notwithstanding. It is in this regard that the vindication that Fracchia sees in his self-portrait turns out to be his most important legacy in that it records for us the existential cost of blackness, as well as Pareja’s contestation of social death.3 The two chapters that follow, by Benita Sampedro and Emanuelle Santos, respectively, speak more properly to the colonial period and to its ideology and agents in action. Sampedro’s description of Spain’s late return to Equatorial Guinea in the middle of the nineteenth century4 foregrounds the incipient voices of vernacular protest at native-on-native policing practices, as Fang mainlanders are placed in control of Bubi island laborers at Bioko, and as the entire native body, ethnicity notwithstanding, becomes subject to the restrictive administrative mechanisms of control and surveillance by the metropolitan center. For our purposes, it is most significant here that the bodies of the Africans are as much an object of knowledge for the colonial taxonomy as is the landscape, with its register of rivers and mountains and plains. Spanish biomedical data and discourse,

4  Introduction generated as part of the civilizing mission in Africa, would similarly be deployed in an iconography and ideology of negative racial difference that would essentialise the purported inferiority and savagery of the natives, rather than contribute to their upliftment. The clash of values, both religious and philosophical, between tradition and the colonially inflected modernity, remains a constant in contemporary creative writers from Equatorial Guinea.5 Nineteenth-century scientific racism apart, it is of historical interest that Spain’s return to Africa in the nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the loss of her American colonies, would precede by mere decades the historic Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, called by Portugal, which saw the division of practically the entire continent among 13 colonial powers. Portugal’s ambitions of spreading her political ownership across the map from west to east, that is, from Angola to Mozambique, in the infamous Pink Map or Mapa-Cor de rosa (1886), would be frustrated by the British, then desirous of bridging their own dominance in southern Africa, to their holdings in the north, from the “Cape to Cairo,” as the saying went. The already depleted political power of Portugal is reflected perhaps in Santos’s chapter, which stresses the unique development, over time, of the South American half-continent, Brazil, in a pivotal “semiperipheral” role, vis-à-vis Portugal, the seat of empire, and Angola, the source of almost 70 per cent of Brazil’s African slave labour. Angola itself would go on to serve as an important marketplace for the colonial and postcolonial production of the descendants of its forced migrants. It is a noteworthy example of the macroeconomic conversion of black bodies as “ore,” mined in Africa,6 cast in the Americas, and converted, in this bifurcated Portuguese model, into financial currency across the Atlantic. Angola would even serve as epistemic support as Portuguese imperial nostalgia deployed Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre at mid-twentieth century, to shore up its sense of universalism and mission by way of his famous writings on Lusotropicalism. In contrast to these historical voices and processes, Mahdu Krishnan’s chapter on Africans in contemporary Paris also cites France’s analogue to Portugal’s lusofonia as embodying a transnational postcolonial cultural community. “Greater France,” though, like other postcolonial iterations of extended European social and cultural imaginaries, runs up against the old prejudices and contradictions more widely associated with the imperatives of Fortress Europe, as her relocated Africans, today’s voluntary immigrants, find out. The Francophone novels that Krishnan studies, Cane’s L’aventure Ambiguë (1961) and Essomba’s Le Paradis du Nord (1996) are located in Paris. By questioning the presumptive universalism of French culture through its unconvinced former colonials, and in exploring the theme of South/North migration, they offer an interesting complement to those other narratives that examine the post-independence scenario at home, and Robert Spencer’s chapter is exemplary in this regard. His reading of Ahmadou Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (1998) of the Ivory Coast highlights the larger systemic determinants behind continuing underdevelopment for emerging African and other similarly subjugated nations, within the discussion of the personality cult of the figure of the post-independence dictator. Dictatorship in the postcolony, from this standpoint, is but an “epiphenomenon” of the larger

Introduction  5 economico-political processes geared toward the continued capitalist exploitation of the formerly denominated Third World, in which national elites make available the resources of the nation at “cut” prices, and indebtedness and underdevelopment, and the accompanying suffocation of civil rights, assume an air of permanency. With R. A. Judy’s exploration of the Tunisian Revolution in 2011, in the wake of a similar betrayal of anti-colonial principles by the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali regime, we are invited to contemplate a rare rupture with the Western world order, and new forms of sociality akin to the trajectory traced in the interior of the Haitian Revolution of two centuries ago. The chapters of Luís Madureira, Luis Trindade, Robert Simon and Magdalena López are the ones that most closely examine the Afro-Lusophone revolutionary processes in their interesting connections with international allies in art and in ideology. With Madureira’s essay, we revisit the Mozambican war of national liberation by way of Lídia Jorge’s A costa dos murmúrios (1998), which recalls, within the decade-long struggle by the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO), the war crimes perpetrated against the villagers at Wiriyamu in 1973. Both Portugal’s costly military input into the war and the ensuing revolt of the Portuguese generals that precipitated the end of the country’s decades-long dictatorship in the Carnation Revolution highlight the emerging Marxist internationalism of the moment, as the African revolutionary leadership, in this case Mozambique’s Samora Machel and Cape Verde’s Amilcar Cabral, overtly claim common cause with Portugal’s dispossessed workers and peasants. Effectively, the multiple nuclei of Third World counterhegemonic thought and action counted on significant input from the European Left, and in the area of film, as Luis Trindade’s chapter points out, militant filmmakers collaborated across borders to support the establishment, for example, of Mozambique’s National Institute of Cinema, and to make emancipatory cinema a reality. With the protracted civil wars in both Angola and Mozambique, from 1975–2002 and from 1977–1992 respectively, with their millions of dead and displaced citizens, the unanswered challenges to democratic governance, and these countries’ reinsertion into the capitalist orbit, the utopian horizon brought into focus by the liberation movement has receded significantly. The advances of neoliberalism that came after the Cold War, and the ongoing dependencies that continue to affect Angola, Mozambique and other formerly colonised nations, have often meant that underdevelopment now is paired by disillusionment in the minds of many. Robert Simon’s chapter attempts to trace this trajectory in the work of Angola’s Manuel Rui, one of the poets whose work spans the anti-colonial as well as the post-independence periods, and allows us to see the rural–urban dichotomy, as well as the cleavage between tradition and modernity, through the use of traditional vernaculars, Quimbundu and Ovimbundu, and (creolized) Portuguese, in his verse. While linguistic and ethnic diversity complicates the struggle to establish a sense of national unity following the purportedly revolutionary precepts for such states, the overly centralised economies and the bureaucratism that socialism brought with it, have stymied the very ideological project of sacrifice for development and national uplift. In Magdalena López’s

6  Introduction chapter, which compares post-revolutionary narratives from Cuba and Angola, it is precisely the exaggerated sense of sacrifice and bureaucracy associated with the Guevaran ethos and idea of socialism’s hombre nuevo or New Man, which sees a limit point to the value of political ideology. On both sides of the Atlantic, as we study Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Los sobrevivientes, 1978), and novelist Rolando Menéndez (ABC Diario, 2002), alongside Angola’s José Eduardo Agualusa (Teoria geral do esquecimento, 2012) and Manuel Rui (Quem de dera ser onda 1999), the impact of bureaucratization and food rationing, and of hunger and inherited class and race contradictions propel concerns about existence under the revolution, and take us into a realm in which humanity is displaced as the central focus of importance and the purported dichotomy with animality becomes blurred. Finally, with Cary Fraser and Myriam Chancy, we get complementary reflections on the politics of identity and liberation coming out of the matrix of coloniality and statehood. Fraser’s is a widely ranging discussion that attempts to put a finger on a commonality of sensibility among black activists and intellectuals from a variety of locations across the Black Atlantic in the shadow the second world war, and shows the conscious and unconscious connections among such personalities as James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King of the United States, Chinua Achebe, Kwame Nkrumah and Steve Biko of Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, respectively, and a Caribbean poet like Guyana’s Martin Carter. In all cases, the point is made as to the closeness between freedom thinking and freedom fighting, of the breadth of the geography of racial oppression, of the historical importance of the discourse of solidarity, and of liberation as a shared problematic for Africans and Afrodiasporans. Chancy concludes our volume with her proposal of a point of departure for thinking about identity which places emphasis on seeing black culture in terms of its “indigeneity,” rather than through the focus on ancestral retentions that for a long time had preoccupied scholar activists with a certain discourse of racial vindication in the face of white supremacist projections. It is a call to validate struggles and an idea of selfhood that connects by extension to the multiple subjectivities and circumstances that constitute what we refer to as the Black Atlantic and its ongoing pursuit of freedom.

Notes 1 See Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, for example. 2 See “Rethinking the Problem of Postcolonialism,” by Shaobo Xie, “What was Postcolonialism?” by Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, and “What Postcolonial Theory doesn’t say,” by Neil Lazarus, in this regard. 3 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. 4 Fernando Pó, today’s Bioko, was actually the first of the Iberian claims in Africa. It was named after its Portuguese “discoverer” in 1472, and ceded by Portugal to Spain in 1778. 5 See Maplal Loboch and María Nsue Angϋe in the Nueva Antología de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial. 6 The image is Mbembe’s (2017: 40).

Introduction 7

Works cited Césaire, A. (2000) Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Fanon, F. (2004) The Wretched of the Earth, 1st edn. New York: Grove Press. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, S. (1997) “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” In A. D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization, and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lazarus, N. (2011) “What Postcolonialism Doesn’t Say.” Race & Class, 53.1: 3–27. Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mbembe, A. (2017) Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mishra, V. and Hodge, B. (2005) “What Was Postcolonialism?” New Literary History, 36.3: 375–402. N’gom, M. and Nistal, G. (eds.) (2012) Nueva antología de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial. Madrid: SIAL Ediciones. Patterson, O. (1982) Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wynter, S. (2003) “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation- an Argument.” The New Centennial Review, 3.3: 257–337. Xie, S. (1997) “Rethinking the Problem of Postcolonialism.” New Literary History, 28.1: 7–19. Young, R. J. C. (2001) Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Part I

Iberian colonialism Some principles, people and praxis

1 Black Atlantic identity and the Spanish Inquisition Baltasar Fra-Molinero

The Black Atlantic is a composite of voicings that have been uttered, and muffled, for more than five hundred years. Following Paul Gilroy’s theoretical construct of the Black Atlantic, this chapter tries to understand the way Black men and women who lived in the Canary Islands from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century constructed a transnational world and made “Black commentaries on the modern which have been so far overlooked by western intellectual history” (Gilroy 1993: 45). Blacks in the Spanish-speaking Atlantic were the first to experience modernity, and they contributed to its creation as they experienced their lives in almost perpetual movement, in a series of exchanges that were tied to the Atlantic slave trade and produced a hybrid culture. If we look at the Canary Islands, we can appreciate how Spanish becomes a language of the African Diaspora. Black men, women, and children transported the Spanish language across the Atlantic into the American continent. Blacks, whether they were born on the African continent, in the cities of mainland Spain, or in the Canary Islands, were part of institutions and cultural practices  – religious confraternities, linguistic traits  – that crossed the Atlantic Ocean, a phenomenon that scholars have been pointing out for decades (Nodal 1981: 86–87). In fact, the legal arguments created around the conquest of America, their debates and doubts, also applied to the justification of the conquest of the Canary Islands (Merediz 2004: 36–37). And in all these cases, the involuntary (and at times voluntary) presence of Blacks in these Atlantic spaces is too often ignored. A linguistic term – bozal – was the first word that defined the enslaved African that crossed the waters of this sea westwards and northwards. Bozal is an enslaved individual whose voice has been rendered unintelligible by the enslaver. A bozal does not speak the language of empire – Spanish, Portuguese – and this fact alone is a marker of her inferiority, both legal and moral.1 One has to look in unusual places to hear the voice of those rendered silent. To have a voice is to have the power to answer, or the power to question, which is an act that unsettles authority. However, the existence of the very word bozal indicates the need to distinguish between those enslaved Blacks who could and did speak Spanish fluently and in fact were native speakers, called ladinos, and those who did not, due to their recent capture. This binary opposition between bozal and ladino, a non-white who speaks the language of the Whites (Spanish), became the source of an ideological distinction that had connotations regarding phenotype and place of origin.2

12  Baltasar Fra-Molinero The Canary Islands were part of one of those cultural routes Paul Gilroy defines as the channels of Black identity throughout the Atlantic Ocean. Blacks from the Canary Islands forged communities across the Ocean and between the different islands of the Canarian archipelago, as well as with other points in the Atlantic, such as London, the Netherlands, the Iberian Peninsula, the other Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, and of course, with the African continent itself (Sampedro Vizcaya 909–910). This chapter addresses the formation of a Black Atlantic identity in the Canary Islands through the testimonies written down in the Archives of the Inquisition in the Canary Islands.3 It is now accepted, following C.L.R. James, and later Sidney Mintz, Fernando Ortiz, and Robin Blackburn, that the Caribbean industrial form of labor in the sugar plantation became the economic engine of the modern state (SchmidtNowara 2001: 151). Insofar as these origins can be traced back to the sixteenth century, one must acknowledge the centrality of the Canary Islands in this development.4 The Canary Islands in many respects initiate what Achille Mbembe calls the historical identifier of Africa in history, one marked by displacement and dislocation in time (Mbembe 2001: 15). The Atlantic became the first modern global space, one defined by movement and diaspora. The Canary Islands occupied an early position in what David Nemser calls the spatiality of colonial relations of islands in the utopian imaginary of the Renaissance (Nemser 2010: 2). Insularity was synonymous with the concept of coloniality, understood as a political condition predicated on the presence of a Black population. The Canary Islands, together with the other Atlantic islands belonging to the Portuguese crown, were a primary space where this Black Atlantic identity started to take form. These Atlantic islands soon transformed themselves into plantation economies that were only possible by their being increasingly populated with enslaved Blacks from the nearby African continent (Fernández-Armesto 1987: 200–202). The new Atlantic communities that developed in these insular locations show several common characteristics in terms of social formation. These islands were multi-ethnic, multi-racial, slave societies that owed their existence to a distant political center that provided them with military might and that was the recipient of an export economy. Blacks in the territories of the Spanish Monarchy – negros, mulatos, pardos, personas de color – were the first people to create a Black Atlantic identity. I wish to define Black Atlantic identity as the awareness and recognition of place of origin of one’s ancestors, place of birth far away from that ancestral origin, and the meaning of a slave past in oneself or in one’s parents or ancestors.5 For this reason, the archives of the Spanish Inquisition of the Canary Islands offer us a unique window to the words and the self-fashioning of Black identity in the early modern world.6 The astonishing number of Black men and women processed by the Spanish Inquisition of the Canary Islands covers almost the entire history of this religious institution, the first in a European empire that had a global reach, from Spain to the American continent and further to the Philippines (Cunningham 1918: 417). Through the written records of hundreds of cases, the bureaucratically mediated voices of Black men and women, free and enslaved, speak about their travels, religious beliefs, medical practices, family ties, and relationship with the institution of slavery as the evil they were trying to escape

Black Atlantic identity  13 from. These men and women came from western Africa, but also from Boston or Barbados. Following Marcus Redicker’s theoretical construct of finding voices in the interstices of the official account of what happened to the African protagonists of the Black Atlantic, this chapter tries to do an archeology of voices from the bottom up (Rediker 2010: 36). My attempt here is to discuss a few cases of Black men and women who shaped their lives in the early modern period and lived in the Canary Islands. The lives of these men and women were dramatically changed by their encounter with the Spanish Inquisition, the first global institution in having a central role in the formation of modernity (Silverblatt 2004: 6). The Spanish Inquisition operated in an ideological world that defined new categories of knowledge. Among these new categories was racial identity, a category that was directly related to religion, to things sacred, and to magic. Michel Foucault defined power relations as a reality related to the circulation of knowledge, even if it is in asymmetrical fashion. Foucault links power to knowledge. Starting with the development of the State, power in the modern world is tied to the regime of knowledge (régime du savoir) and the production of truth. The subject of the State in western Christianity is linked to the community through the idea of salvation. The State inherits from the Church what Foucault calls pastoral power, the power to lead the individual to salvation (Foucault 1982: 781). The Spanish Inquisition was a perfected and unique modern institution of the State that controlled the power of salvation and saw itself as a safeguard against attempts to challenge the monopoly of salvation that justified the State. Modern slavery was justified by Spain and Portugal as an institution that rescued the enslaved from a life of paganism in their homeland. In the early years of the modern slave trade, rescate or resgate was the term used for a slaving expedition off the west coast of Africa. It was a word with the dual, contradictory meaning of “rescue” and “ransom.” The Black men and women who found themselves persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition faced this discourse of pastoral power and narrative of Christian salvation. They had to use a language that implicitly accepted the principle of salvation and pastoral care to answer the accusations they were facing. Central to their presence before the Inquisition was their blackness. In their responses during the interrogation, Black men and women of the Canary Islands reflect their understanding of race as a social category within the religious discourse of salvation, and their awareness of the institution of slavery as a historical process. Their words show an awareness of the Black Atlantic they were shaping in the context of modern slavery.

Barbary/Guinea/Africa as place of origin This awareness is shown in the case of some Black women born in the African continent and brought to the Canary Islands as slaves. This Black Atlantic identity – the awareness of living in an Atlantic space – also appears when some Black men and women were accused of heresy and witchcraft, which was one of its variants. Indeed, witchcraft constitutes the bulk of the cases against Black people examined by the Inquisition.7

14  Baltasar Fra-Molinero The Inquisition was an institution that regulated religious spaces  – mental, physical, and metaphysical. Religious spaces have been a mainstay in the Black Atlantic. The Diasporic nature of African-based religious systems – their circulation in all directions through history – is only the most salient aspect of a larger complex that constitutes African identities acreoss the Atlantic Ocean in history. Throughout most of the history of the Black Atlantic, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were the foremost institutions that tried to suppress and confront African-based forms of religiosity.8 Some of the earliest cases of this confrontation happened in the Canary Islands. The Spanish Inquisition of the Canary Islands was particularly busy in the persecution and suppression of Islamic practices, or what it interpreted as Islamic. The proximity to the continental coast of northern Africa allowed many enslaved and free people to travel to Berbería (Barbary Coast) without permission looking for freedom and a return to the Islamic faith (Acosta González 1989: 50). This was one of the crimes that the Holy Office persecuted with greatest zeal, as social alarm at the possible invasion by Muslims was a practical reality.9 Many Black and Mulatto men were punished for this reason, for they could sail by sea in both directions in one or two nights. Flight and Islam were mostly a masculine activity, and also an act of rebellion against slavery, and it involved Blacks (Anaya Hernádez 2008: 3). Most of the slaves that appeared in front of the Inquisition for trying to flee were also born in the African continent (Fajardo Spínola 2005: 100–102). In the case of some enslaved Black women who had been born on the African continent, the issue became exactly to what degree they participated in the circulation of power, that is, how Christian they could demonstrate themselves to be at the time they were facing a particular accusation. These women were aware of the consequences of being found guilty of religious heterodoxy. In response, they resorted to the power of silence, equivocation, or even of claiming ignorance. They used the discourse of Catholic orthodoxy to the extent that it would benefit them. They fashioned the narratives in line with what would be exemplary lives or what would be expected of the lives of Black people within the racial hierarchy established by society and authority. Black Atlantic identity appears in two cases of African-born women who were accused of saying heretical things that the witnesses interpreted as Islamic propositions. In both cases, their African origin and their lives before their conversion to Christianity play a salient role. The first case is that of Francisca de Jalofe. The second one corresponds to a Black woman called María de Candelaria, who was accused of practicing her Islamic faith in spite of having been baptized.10 Both women were born in Africa and were enslaved in the Canary Islands. Both lived in the western-most islands of the Archipelago, far away from communities of Muslim descent that were more abundant in the eastern islands such as Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, where many of the inhabitants were considered Moriscos, who could have offered them more solidarity and protection.11 The process against Francisca de Jelofe links place of origin and ethnicity with her former religious faith.12 Francisca, a Wolof woman as her surname indicates, was accused of saying and doing certain things that appeared strange to her accusers, who immediately attributed them to the Islamic faith of her place of origin.

Black Atlantic identity  15 Her process lasted for a whole year, between June 1568 and November 1569. It started with a letter by Francisca Jelofe addressed to the local commissar of the Inquisition, a self-accusatory text that lists a series of religious misdeeds: 3r. Francisca, a Black woman from the Wolof country, who appeared in front of Your Paternity yesterday Wednesday 28 July [1569] asking for mercy because in her ignorance sometimes she had eaten with her back against the fireplace, something that is against the custom among the Christians and I  protested that I would not do the same again in all the days of my life. I appear in front of Your Paternity and say that last night I was thinking whether I had done or said any other thing against the customs of the Christians. And I remembered that three years ago more or less, as I was worshipping God in front of the moon, I said the following words: that it was better to look at the moon than at a wooden god. I know that what I said was bad, and seeing that the Christians worship God’s image and I also worship it and have worshipped it in church and in my master’s home, kneeling down, [I know] I was mistaken then, because I was not instructed in things pertaining a Christian as I should have been, and because I was not realizing it, I said it. [emphasis added]13 Although in the process the Islamic faith is never mentioned, the self-accusation implies that this woman’s race – her slave condition and her ethnic origin – are meaningful in the context of her Islamic past. Her physical act of eating with her back to the fireplace, and praying while looking at the moon outside the home, are part of a series of unorthodox practices that acquire more meaning given her rejection of wooden images, possibly related to the Islamic prohibition against idolatry and polytheism (Quran 9.1–15). The letter of self-accusation is written in the first person. Its production was probably a collaboration between Francisca de Jelofe and a priest who acted as her advisor, given the careful language it uses. The text is prepared not just for the local commissar of the Inquisition in Lanzarote – after all a low-level official without judicial powers – but for the eyes and ears of the Inquisitor, who will read it and hear it read if the case comes to a full-fledged process. Francisca de Jelofe claims ignorance precisely because her African place of birth precludes intimate knowledge of the Catholic faith. In her defense, Francisca’s letter includes a veiled indictment against those who should have instructed her in the Christian faith, meaning her owner, Juan Díaz de la Vega, who is mentioned in the process as part of Francisca’s legal identity. Francisca de Jelofe had known freedom, and her words gave her away. The Inquisition followed the norm of contradicting a confession through witnesses, even when the confession seemed to be voluntary. And the witnesses said things that Francisca omitted in her self-accusation. She had said things in the past that went beyond what was permissible: “that God could not make her free.” [que Dios no la podia ahorrar]. God could not miraculously make her free – legally free – and apparently, she had said this many times. On other occasions, she had stated that “she did not expect to leave that house free” [que no esperaba salir libre de su casa]. Once the process started against Francisca de Jelofe, she defended herself against the accusation of not knowing her Christian prayers by resorting to

16  Baltasar Fra-Molinero her condition as a foreigner, saying that “her tongue tripped” [la lengua se le tropezaba] when she tried to say these prayers either in Spanish or in the Latin popularly pronounced that was part of an extended oral culture. The prosecutor goes further and interprets Francisca’s alleged outbursts that she preferred to pray to the moon than to a wooden god, as a Lutheran proposition, in an attempt to pile up charges against her. Accusing a Black woman of Lutheranism speaks to the question of how extended Protestantism was throughout the early Black Atlantic.14 Francisca de Jelofe was condemned to a relatively light sentence of hearing masses and receiving more religious instruction. This light sentence was probably connected to the fact that the island of Lanzarote was a society defined by captivity, as most of its inhabitants had been born in the African continent (Bruquetas de Castro 1994: 29). The case against another enslaved Black woman born in the African continent speaks to Hortense Spillers’ distinction between flesh and body as central between the captive and the liberated subject position in slavery, as the kidnapping and the physical effects of slavery are felt by the men and women in the flesh (Spillers 2003: 206). The flesh, as Spillers says it, is the primary narrative. The Spanish Inquisition knew it well. It made the flesh the ultimate target of its machinery. But the Inquisition is not alone in this, because the flesh of the slave, the female slave especially, becomes a surface, a vellum, on which the whip, the branding, leave their marks, lacerations, ruptures, lesions, and their permanent scars, which remain physically visible, but as importantly, remain also permanent in the memory of the one who suffered them, along with their descendants and anyone who was in contact with them. Captivity is the condition of the enslaved person who has known freedom in their land of birth, in the African continent. But captivity is also the memory of free Blacks who knew that their parents and grandparents had been made captives. Their freedom did not liberate their flesh. Blackness is the mark of slavery, even in the free Black person of the Atlantic. Africa is thus a locus of freedom and of the past, versus the Canary Islands of the present and loss of freedom. There is a degree of legitimacy in being born in Africa along the Black Atlantic that the different hegemonic powers had to suppress. In the Spanish imperial imaginary, place of birth was an important component in the concept of blood purity. Thus, one of the forms of de-legitimizing the former freedom of an enslaved person born in Africa was by attaching a non-Christian religious condition to her or his place of birth. Africa is the space of non-Christianity, and enslaved captivity is legitimized through the concept of Christian salvation. In 1606, the Inquisition moved against María de Candelaria, an enslaved Black woman born in the African continent. This case involved an accusation of blasphemy in the midst of abuse, both physical and verbal, in which María de Candelaria responded with a discourse that defended the legitimacy of Africa as her place of origin. She lived with her legal owner, Clara Inés del Castillo, in the town of Telde, in the island of Gran Canaria. In response to grievous remarks against her, María de Candelaria pronounced a series of words that were considered blasphemous and scandalous by those who heard them, including her owner, Clara

Black Atlantic identity 17 Inés del Castillo in whose presence the events took place. The records of the case in the Inquisition open with Clara Inés del Castillo’s initial denunciation: That in order to unburden her conscience, she comes to say that on the eve of the feast of St. Ann [26 July] Diego Pérez, who lives in this town, was in the house of this witness, together with Francisca M[illegible], wife of Juan Alonso, as well as Francisca, Black slave of Doña Susana del Castillo and María, Black slave of this witness. The aforesaid Diego Pérez was verbally abusing the said Black slaves, telling them that they were captives and that they served in the same way as the donkeys. To these words María, the Black slave, said that in her land everyone is free. Diego Pérez said that they were Christian here, whereas there they were not. To this María said that she would rather be a Moor than a captive. The witness understands that the said María has come speak with the Holy Office, and that what she has said is the truth, and that she is not speaking out of hatred. And that she is forty years old.15 Uttering blasphemous words during physical punishment was a not uncommon among slaves who used these words as a desperate way to call the attention of the authorities against masters who had taken their power to exert violence beyond what the enslaved could or would endure. These situations occurred along the entire domain of the Spanish Monarchy.16 Some scholars have seen in blasphemy a strategy to put limits on the power and authority of a violent master (Proctor III 2003: 55). In some cases, it was the threat of the commission of blasphemy that made the owner suspend punishment, and slaves recommended this tactic to one another. In fact, many blasphemous expressions were stereotypical, formulaic (Fajardo Spínola 2005: 165). The recourse to blasphemy was a dangerous one, however, as blasphemous words triggered an inquisitorial process of unpredictable consequences. In the case of María de Candelaria, everything was different. There was no physical violence against her originally, but verbal abuse. A painful reference to her slave condition was the insult. The words used by the witness that described the insults, dar cordel, literally, hit with a rope, metaphorically implied psychological torture.17 The insult consisted of a public comment on María de Candelaria and another Black woman’s captive status and comparing their work to that of a vile animal, a donkey. María de Candelaria, in response, proclaims her former condition as a free woman back in her homeland. Back there everyone was free – horro – the world of Arabic origin that defined someone not subject to enslavement. The key word that seems to have elicted María de Candelaria’s spirited response was the word cautiva, captive. She mentions her place of origin in the African continent as the opposite of her present condition, the memory of the freedom and the homeland now lost. Her psychological torturer continues the aggravation by proclaiming the Canary Islands as a Christian land, in opposition to the two Black women’s non-Christian land of origin. The response to this equation of land, slavery, and Christianity is one of freedom of choice, if given the opportunity. María de Candelaria would choose to be free and Muslim – mora – rather than to be Christian and a slave.

18  Baltasar Fra-Molinero But although the records of the case in the Inquisition place the owner’s denunciation in the first folios, the accused, María de Candelaria, had spoken first, just a few hours before.18 María de Candelaria’s words are carefully stated: and she said that in order to unburden her conscience, she comes to say that on the eve of the feast of St. Anne the previous year she was in her owner’s house, and in her presence and that of Diego Pérez Salaya, who also lives in this city, the said Diego Pérez said to the one declaring that in her land they did not know God, and she told him that over there they were free. And Diego Pérez said that they came here to be captives and to serve working like donkeys. So the one declaring, with the anger this provoked in her, said that she would rather be a Moor in her land than a captive in this one [underlined in the original], and that her owner scolded her and hit her, but she did not say this with the intention to become a Moor or to live apart from our Lord Jesus Christ, but rather because the said Diego Pérez had harrased her so much . . . and what she has said is the truth . . . and she did not sign because she does not know . . . and she is twenty years old.19 The language of the Inquisitorial prosecutor changes the terms of María de Candelaria’s argument in an attempt to refute her logical reasoning of equating freedom, native land, and being a Muslim: because the above-said was free in her land and here she was a slave, she said that she would rather be a Moor than a captive, from which it is evidently deduced that what she said through her mouth she had in her will, and that she believes more in that perverse sect of Mohammed and she loves it more than the Law of the Gospels and holy Catholic faith, and that if she has not committed apostasy in fact already, she has done it in her will, and that if she could have the means to do it, she would have put in execution. And she has committed other crimes that in time I declare I will accuse her of.20 In order to advance his case against her, the prosecutor changes the terms of opposition – freedom in her native land, captivity in the Canary Islands – to the proposition that María Cadelaria would rather be a Moor than a Christian, and that she wants to live in an African land that is beyond the pale of Christendom as represented by the Canary Islands. María de Candelaria wants to be free, a Moor, and live in a land beyond the reach of salvation. For the prosecutor, the desire to be in Africa is tantamount to rejecting Christian salvation, which would constitute an act of apostasy. Few examples of double consciousness appear so early in Atlantic modernity. María de Candelaria has to oppose her own sense of humanity against the dehumanizing words of her verbal abuser. Her original reasoning was based on her biographical experience, an experience that the prosecutor dismisses in his narrow logical argument. For María de Candelaria, there is no freedom for Blacks in the lands of the Christians, or at least not for her. In fact, being Black – an identity

Black Atlantic identity 19 she acquired once she arrived in the Canary Islands – has come at the price of former freedom. She knows that in her native land, she was free, and her nativeborn Muslim religion was tied to the place where she remembers she was free. However, for the prosecutor, freedom in a land of Moors is a meaningless concept. Thus, he accuses her of the heretical illogical proposition of wanting to be free and a Moor. Evidently, María de Candelaria presents being free as the highest value in life, above religion. This was her heresy. María Candelaria would be a good example of the performative aspect of abjection as explored by Julia Kristeva in her essay Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Harrington 1998: 139). María Candelaria uses negativity – her selfaccusation – to call others into accountability, but that puts her Black body in the middle and at risk of suffering the violence of the authorities, not just that of her owner. In the grammar of abjection, the subject speaks, but her words have to be filtered or authorized in order to reduce their destabilizing power. Enter the figure of the curador or guardian. Given that María de Candelaria was a 20-year old woman by her own account, she was legally a minor, so the Holy Office assigns her a guardian of her own choice. This person is the parish priest of Telde, who knows her and is in a position to give her advice. But he does much more. He speaks for her and gives an answer to the accusations of the prosecutor, speaking at the same theological level: the person I represent has not committed apostasy, and not even had the intention to reject what our Holy Catholic Faith sustains and teaches, just because she said that she would rather be a free Moor than a Christian captive. First, because the above-said words pronounced by the said minor I represent must be interpreted in the purest and most true sense one may conclude from those same words. Because the above-said person did not say them in a manner of comparison, judging the perverse sect of Mohammed as better than the law of the Gospel given by Christ our Good. Rather [her words] aimed at the target of freedom as something naturally desired by all men, as they are all born free by natural law.21 María de Candelaria had chosen well. Her guardian uses her words and translates them into scholastic terms. He breaks apart the prosecutor’s argument by stating that his charge has not committed the sin of apostasy. He demonstrates this by putting together the four elements in question  – Moor, free, Christian, captive – and puts them in two paradoxical pairs, by using the rhetorical figure of zeugma. He pairs Moor-free (a negative and a positive term), and Christian captive (positive and negative). In this way both sides of the prosecutor’s proposition nullify one another, giving a zero sum. María de Candelaria’s guardian argues that freedom is a natural right, consubstantial to all human beings. It precedes any religious discourse or law. He interprets that this was the sense of María de Candelaria’s words. María de Candelaria is defending her humanity ahead by invoking her natural freedom. Her guardian argues that any heretical interpretation of her words has to be rejected. María de Candelaria had pronounced her words in

20  Baltasar Fra-Molinero defense of an Islamic Africa just 3 years before the expulsion of the Moriscos, an expulsion that made an exception with the inhabitants of the eastern islands of the Canarian Archipelago (Lobo Cabrera 1993: 437).

The written word in the Black Atlantic People of African descent in the territories of the Spanish Monarchy belonged for the most part to the subaltern majority that was illiterate or near illiterate, and the Inquisitorial archives attest to that.22 This did not mean that they were strangers to the act of writing, its ceremonies, its power and consequences. As Jouve Martín has demonstrated in his study of the relationship of Lima Blacks and Mulattoes to the culture of the lettered city during the seventeenth century, the discourse of oral culture was always produced in reference to a culture of written texts (Jouve Martín 2005: 56). The Black women and men in front of the Inquisition of the Canary Islands were quite familiar with papers, written and otherwise. They were at the end of a historical process that had passed from an oral culture of written words that were still performed orally to a large extent (Frenk 1997: 20). The relation between the spoken word and written word was performed in every Inquisitorial audiencia (hearing). An illiterate person was familiar with the oral-academic world of the priests, their sermons (Ong 1984: 3). The subject of an Inquisitorial investigation was asked questions that were duly written down, as part of a Medieval chirographic culture that committed the spoken word to writing in order to repeat it at the will of those who controlled the production of the written word. In an Inquisitorial audiencia or hearing, the words spoken by the accused were read to them, and the presiding Inquisitor asked if the words written and read responded to what the person being interrogated had said. The Inquisitor was the ultimate reader (lector) and hearer/judge (oidor) of Renaissance humanism (Frenk 1997: 23). Then other Inquisitors in parts distant from where the words were pronounced could read them and bring others to answer about them, sometimes years after they had been pronounced and committed to the paper. No other legal system before the Inquisition had relied on written testimony so heavily, and yet the written documents of the Inquisition were produced in a world still dominated by orality and its ceremonies. As Walter Ong observed decades ago, a written culture is suffused with irony (1976: 13–14). Irony crops up in the production of meaning in a world that commits the spoken word to the fixed materiality of a written text – a world in which communication happens in absentia, where interpretation is left to the reader without the help of the writer. The Inquisition, with its bureaucratic insistence in committing the spoken word of the accused to a written page, found itself participating in the instability of meaning that characterizes irony. Its chirographic practices took the form of questions and answers. In the case of most Black people, the practice included the reading aloud of what the accused had declared, in an attempt to make the spoken word coincide with its written representation and thus stave irony off. The Inquisition tried to reduce the multiplicity of meaning in the

Black Atlantic identity 21 written word to a single interpretation by asking the person accused to agree that was being read aloud was the true version of what had been uttered. But of course, this left interpretation out. The interpreters were the inquisitors, not the accused speakers. This ironic distance between the written and the spoken is obvious in the case against three Afro-Canarians from the island of Lanzarote, one of whom, the free Black Juana María, was found to have in her possession a picture that became the central piece in an accusation of sorcery and witchcraft against them.23 The two co-defendants were from the island of Madeira, the Mulatta Ana González, who lived with Juana María, and a Mulatto man, Pedro Vidal. The process took place between December 1618 and January 1619. The case reveals not just the Atlantic dimension of the Black people involved, but also the circulation of ideas, religious beliefs, and the use of writing and paper to expand a particular cult, that of Saint Martha in this instance. When Juana María was arrested in her home, they found a small box, inside which They found three painted pieces of paper which are the ones being shown, two of them of Saint Martha, one painted in blue and sulfur and verdigris in a simple piece of paper, and the other two in a piece of paper painted in green, red, and black, one representing saint Martha with a club in her hand and an animal under her feet with a fish tail, a dog head and small wings, held from its neck by a rope the end of which fastened to Saint Martha’s belt.24 Juana María fell afoul of the Inquisition to a great extent due to her owning this painted piece of paper that she had commissioned from a man who had made it while he was in jail in the city of Las Palmas. She displayed the picture in her home, according to witnesses, making it an object of religious veneration. The Prayer of Saint Martha was forbidden as something related to a pact with the devil (Fajardo Spínola 1992: 159). The picture contains a complex representation of the world in which the sacred is represented in an Atlantic space represented by the dragon tree (Dracaena draco) to the left, a species endemic to the Canary Islands, and associated with the cult of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Candelaria. The figure of the scaly sea animal comprised of fish, fowl, and dog spoke also of a supernatural reality that could be mastered by human words and pictures outside the privileged space of the Church authority. The ironic moment manifests itself in Juana María’s attempt to distance herself from owning the meaning of a sign on a paper she has not produced (but she has commissioned): This confessant has a devotion to Saint Martha . . . and also to the other image of Saint Mark, and that she asked the above-said painter to paint for her the said two figures, and that he painted the said paper that has been shown to her, and that she does not know what those figures may mean.25 Aware of the circulation of non-orthodox beliefs and artifacts, together with having found in the possession of this woman other products associated with sorcery, such

22  Baltasar Fra-Molinero

Image 1.1 Juana Maria’s commissioned image of Santa Martha © El Museo Canario, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

as altar stone powder, the low-level officers of the Inquisition in Lanzarote decide to racialize the entire process by adding to the proceedings the racial categories (negra, mulata, mulato) that had been omitted earlier. For people who did not know how to read and write, free Black Juana María, her friends Ana González, and her cousin Pedro Vidal, both Mulattoes from the island of Madeira knew how open to interpretation a written sign is. Their ironic stance resided in attributing intention to the painter, the creator of the message, thus absolving themselves from the guilt of interpretation by way of possession of the inculpating piece. A strategy of the weak, who claims not just ignorance, but not to know the intentions of the artist. The case of heresy against Juan de Morales is a case in the instability of meaning and the irony that constitutes the distance between the spoken word and its written

Black Atlantic identity  23 text. Morales was a free Black man from the village of Buenavista in the island of Tenerife.26 One afternoon in 1660, several men and women – Black and White, free and enslaved – were in conversation while threading silk, when Juan de Morales pronounced some fateful words. The working group was probably engaged in conversation about religion, or about sex, for this is not clear in the more than 120 folios that constitute the case against him. The fact is that Juan de Morales was heard saying – by some, or by all, for this is not clear – that “Our Lord Jesus Christ had temptations of the flesh like any other man.” This proposition, according to some of the witnesses who declared, scandalized those who heard it. A White woman, Ana Cabeza del Castillo, aged 27 and single, in whose house they were meeting, rebuked him, apparently, accusing him of heresy. Juan de Morales defended himself by referring to a book where he said this was written. The White woman challenged him to produce the book, because “such book could not exist, and if it did, it should be burned”: There came Joan de Morales, free Black, a denizen of Buenavista, who works there as a surgeon. This Joan de Morales, speaking about Christ, said that he had suffered in this life. He finally said that Christ, as a man, had had temptations of the flesh and had suffered from these temptations. With this he scandalized all the women, and especially the one making this declaration, who replied to him that he should watch what he was saying, that she thought it was a bad thing to say and a matter for the Inquisiton. Joan de Morales having heard her, ratified himself and insisted on it, and he said that he would bring a book where they could see it. This declarant responded that there would be no book that would say such a thing, and if there was, it deserved to be burned because it was against our faith].27 As a free man, Juan de Morales was a figure of instability like the words he so freely pronounced on the authority of a phantom book. When it came time to tell the Inquisition about his family relations, he said that he had been born a slave in the island of La Gomera. Now he was a free Black, negro libre, a self-definition that contrasted with the identification of Mulatto given to him by mostly White witnesses. He declared that he had been manumitted at the age of 14, when his owner died and he quickly left his small island to seek better fortunes in Tenerife. His parents had been slaves, belonging probably to different owners. He had become a barber and surgeon by trade, which allowed him to travel around the northern part of the island of Tenerife. He was married and had several children. It was revealed in the depositions of witnesses that he had a mistress and children by her, a fact that played against him in front of the Inquisition. Blackness, former slave condition, present freedom and writerly speech – the use of discourse made authoritative by mentioning a book – were all salient aspects of his dynamic identity and were combined by his accusers to make the case against him. What caused trouble for Juan de Morales was his verbal use of the authoritative word written in a book that appeared to be phantom. Juan de Morales was a man who lived in a world of letters, of written papers, who understood those papers and the written word in them as a source of power that would give him authority and autonomy. What caused the accusation of heresy against him was a complex theological case – the extent of the humanity of

24  Baltasar Fra-Molinero Christ – and Juan de Morales had referred to a book as the authority to say that Christ had sexual urges. When he was arrested, they found he was carrying papers related to the cult of Our Lady of Candelaria, the Black Madonna revered in the island of Tenerife and patron saint of the Canary Islands, and a figure of devotion that had already crossed the Atlantic in both directions.28 Juan de Morales also had papers that allowed him to request donations for the images of Our Lady of Charity and that of St. Lazarus, two cults with deep African Diasporic connections in the Atlantic, particularly in Cuba, where Juan de Morales’ two sisters lived.29 In his defense, Juan de Morales indicated that he was illiterate. In his declaration, he resorted to abjection in the way Julia Kristeva defined the concept (Claiborne 29). Ironically, he had been arrested through a ruse in the form of a paper. They wrote to him that a military officer he knew well needed a tooth extracted and so did some nuns in a convent. It is not said if Juan de Morales read the letter or had it read to him, because later on, he said he was illiterate. Why send a letter to an illiterate man instead of a verbal message through a servant? Although one could speculate that a third party would have read the letter to Juan de Morales, it is unlikely, given the secrecy with which the Inquisition operated. Juan de Morales had to deny that he knew how to read and write in order to establish a distance between his subjectivity and the papers that the Inquisition was using to incriminate him. He did this twice in the course of his declaration, pleading his Black race as a mitigating argument, and confessing that he said what he said because he was given to drinking too much wine, and that “he said it as an ignorant and Black man that he is, who did not realize what he was saying . . . and that he lied when he answered that he had read it in a book, without having seen a book that may have said that nor knowning how to read.”30 Juan de Morales was playing to the expectations of his White accusers in equating being ignorant and being Black. However, the Prosecutor turned the racial tables against Juan de Morales and tied the accusation to different and more dangerous definition of race. Being a descendant of pagans, his heretical words showed that he was congenitally weak in matters of the Catholic faith, that from everything thus referred is presumed to be true due to the suspect descended from pagans and gentiles as he has confessed [emphasis in original], and that he said what was said as a man who is not very firm in the faith and evangelical law that our Holy Mother the Roman Church teaches.31 It was not his addiction to wine what made him make heretical propositions, but rather his race. Furthermore, the Prosecutor added for good measure that Juan de Morales also implied that Jesus Christ had erections (interior and exterior temptations, in the language of the Prosecutor).32 By making a theological pronouncement that involved the sacred and the sexual, Juan de Morales was a Black man invading the turf of Church officers, who had the exclusive prerogative of making doctrinal pronouncements. The association of Juan de Morales with literacy made him aware of the Atlantic world. His profession of barber and surgeon was an itinerant one, which prompted

Black Atlantic identity  25 the Inquisitors to ask him if he had travelled outside the Canary Islands and the kingdom of Castile. He had been earning his living all this time. Juan de Morales, as a Black Atlantic individual, knew of the geography of islands and shores inhabited by Blacks. In his deposition he reveals not only the Atlantic dimensions of his life but also that of other members of his family. Being Black consisted of being aware of the historical and spatial dimensions of slavery. The genealogies that the Inquisition required the accused to declare were short in the case of Black people, but very often they included the word Guinea as a space and time beyond which it was useless to ask further. Guinea cancelled the discourse of ancestry for Blacks. It also marked the time and place of freedom, and non-Christianity. In this case, Juan de Morales knows that his parents had been Africans and free as children. Although born in the Canary Islands, he knew from his parents of another place and another time, a regime of freedom.33 The Atlantic created fragmented Black families in which some members were free and others were enslaved. Juan de Morales’ two brothers, Sebastián and Pascual, were free, and they lived in the Canary Islands, one in El Hierro and the other one in La Palma. His two sisters, however were slaves, and both had travelled across the Atlantic to Havana.34 The Diasporic condition of the two sisters is transatlantic. It is reminiscent of the sixteenth-century play Los engañados by Lope de Rueda, in which a Black slave woman from Seville laments her separation from her son with tears in her eyes, who lives in Puerto Rico and from whom she has recently received a letter (Rueda 1976: 219). Los engañados is a typical drama of piracy and separation of captured twins in the Mediterranean Sea in which the playwright decided to add the real drama of the African Atlantic Diaspora.35 The inquisitors were particularly interested in knowing how he had escaped from Tenerife to Gran Canaria right after his initial arrest, in what ship, the name of the captain, and how long had the journey lasted. His embarkation had been an illegal act, as it had been made public that he had to be stopped and delivered to the authorities. After trying to escape twice from the inquisition jails, having attempted to poison himself, and having broken his water clay jar on the head of his jailer, Juan de Morales was sentenced to receive 200 lashes in public and banished from all the islands where he had family connections or to go to Madrid or any other part of the mainland. A sentence that Juan de Morales again did not serve, because he returned to his hometown of Buenavista until he was finally sent to the semi-desert island of Lanzarote. After his sentence, Juan de Morales’ freedom of movement was forbidden in an attempt to restrict his capacity to communicate with others. Thus his identity as Atlantic African Diasporic subject was subject to criminalization.

Conclusion The Canary Islands were a Black Atlantic space. Francisca de Jelofe and María de Candelaria shared a clear notion of their transnational subjectivity. A formerly enslaved Black man reveals that part of his family lives across the Atlantic Ocean. An enslaved Black woman publically affirms that she would rather be a Muslim and free in her own land than an enslaved captive in a Christian land.

26  Baltasar Fra-Molinero We accept that the spread of the Catholic religion in the Canary Islands and the Americas was a top-down imposition of the Church and the civil powers. This reading ends up being quite uncritical. To what extent did Black people in the Atlantic develop and promote the cult of the Virgin Mary, or spread theological discussions like the one Juan de Morales initiated about Jesus Christ’ sexuality is a matter that needs serious scrutiny. The dual impulse of the Inquisition is one of controlling Black bodies and expelling them across the Atlantic. It contributed to the development of the modern category of race precisely as it tried to control the fragmentation of power that Blacks and their religious practices represented. Blacks inhabited a territory of the strange – magic, sorcery, “the realms of unreason” that eighteenth-century Enlightenment would condemn (Kapferer 2002: 2). Blacks in the Inquisition of the Canary Islands interrupt the master narrative of their captors with insertions of cartography, with reminders that the Atlantic is a sea where Blacks circulate a new culture in which religious ideas are central. Thus, the Inquisition of the Canary Islands inadvertently becomes a Black Atlantic archive, a cultural space “between tradition and oblivion,” not so much a repository of roots as it is an evidence of the routes Blacks created in the Atlantic (Elmer 2005: 168). These men and women, free and enslaved, understand their blackness at the vortex of a time, a geographic space, and the peculiar political condition of an insular reality – the Canary Islands – in the middle of the Atlantic, neither a full colony nor an integral part of the White/Spanish metropolis. Blacks in the Canary Islands constructed an Other space that challenged their being included by force into the binary division between Christendom and Pagan Africa, places both real and imagined. Black people in the Canary Islands dared to create a space that confused the previous two, an insular, dynamic, Atlantic in which they journeyed.

Notes 1 Sebastián de Covarrubias, in his Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611), defines boçal as “el negro que no sabe otra lengua que la suya,” [the Black man who does not know any other language than his own]. A second meaning for the word boçal is intimately related to the first, “cierto género de frenillo que ponen a los perros y a los demás animales para que no puedan morder [a from of muzzle that people put on dogs and other animals to stop them from biting].” The relation between Africanity, animality, and rebellion is established very early. 2 Covarrubias relates the term ladino to “al Morisco y al Estrangero que aprendio nuestra lengua con tanto cuidado que apenas le diferenciamos de nosotros tambien le llamamos ladino [We also call ladino the Morisco or the foreigner who speaks the language so well that we cannot differenciate between him and us].” 3 The Archive is located in the Museo Canario in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Its holdings may be consulted at www.elmuseocanario.com/index.php/es/centro-de-documentacion/ archivo/inquisicion-busqueda?view=busqueda 4 The conquest of the Canary Islands by Castile brought the introduction of sugarcane plantations run by Genoese families as early as 1483, who commercialized it to different European ports (Gambín García 2006: 43). 5 Since the 1970s, studies have addressed the differentiated identities of local elites (Mexican, Peruvian, Sicilian, Neapolitan), calling attention to the creole phenomenon (Eliott 2001: 43–44). The study of a Black Atlantic identity in these territories adds a new dimensión that cuts across class and ethnicity.

Black Atlantic identity 27 6 The Holy Office of the Inquisition was established in 1505 in the Canary Islands (Ronquillo Rubio 1990: 10). It was the smallest of all the different tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition in terms of geographic and population range. Other tribunals, like the ones in Lima and Mexico covered entire continental areas (Contreras Contreras and Dedieu 1980: 37). 7 Blacks and Mulattoes represented more than 45 per cent of the cases of witchraft and sorcery in the Archives of the Inquisition of the Canary Islands, against 35 per cent of Whites and more than 19 per cent against Moriscos, the category that included people of Muslim ancestry (Fajardo Spínola 1992: 326). 8 The Portuguese Inquisition persecuted Blacks in Brazil who were trying to establish autonomous forms of Christian religiosity. Some of the Black people who suffered prosecution were African born, as exemplified by the cases of Rosa María Egipcíaca and Domingos Alvares studied by Luiz Mott and James Sweet respectively. 9 The eastern islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura were populated mostly by enslaved Muslims and freed Moriscos, a denomination that in the Canary Islands corresponded to Muslims converted to Christianity or descendants of Muslims (Raphaël Carrasco 1985: 381). The Inquisition saw the need to persecute renegados, Moriscos – free or enslaved – that used the opportunity to escape to freedom and reintegration to the Muslim faith once they reached the coast of the African continent. Evidence in the Archives of the Inquisition of the Canary Islands shows how freedom was one of the main objectives of many Moriscos and Blacks, as there was an extended belief that once the runaways stayed in the Continent for the space of one year and one day, their owners in the Canary Islands lost their right of property over them (Lobo Cabrera 1982: 280–281). 10 Museo Canario. Archivo de la Inquisición. ES 35001 AMC/INQ-137.007. Old Catalog signature: CXVI-11a. Contra María de Candelaria, negra esclava de doña Clara Inés del Castillo, vecina de Telde, por mahometismo. Junio-Julio 1606. 11 The population of Muslim descent – free or enslaved – in the islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura was of such importance and number that after the decrees of expulsion of all Moriscos from Spain between 1609 and 1614, an exception was made for these islands. The authorities and the landed aristocracy claimed that the application of the measure would result in the near total depopulation of the two islands (Fajardo Spínola 2006: 94), and they also claimed that these Moriscos, as slaves and former slaves of very important Old Christian people, were good Christians themselves and would defend the islands against Muslim incursions (Lobo Cabrera 1993: 438–439). 12 Museo Canario. Archivo de la Inquisición. ES 35001 AMC/INQ-096.004. Old Catalog signature: CXLIV-7. Contra Francisca, negra, esclava de Juan Díaz de la Vega, por blasfemar. July 1568-November 1569. 13 Museo Canario, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Archivo de la Inquisición. ES 35001 AMC/ INQ-096.004, fol. 3r. Francisca, negra de Jalofe que ayer miércoles veinte y ocho de del mes de julio pareció ante v. P. Pidiendo misericordia de cómo ignorantemente algunas vezes había comido las espaldas vueltas a la lumbre que es contra las costumbres delos cristianos y proteste de no hacer cosa semejante en todos los días de mi vida – Paresco ante v. Pd. Y digo que toda esta noche pasada me he ocupado en pensar si yo había hecho o dicho otra cosa contra la costumbre de los cristianos y me acordé que había tres años poco más o menos que estando yo a la luna alabando a Dios dije estas palabras que valía más mirar a la luna que a dios de palo. Yo conozco que dixe mal e visto como los cristianos adoran la imagen de Dios y yo también la adoro y he adorado en la iglesia y en casa de mi señor, hincada de rodillas y yo estuve entonces engañada y por no estar enseñada en las cosas de cristiana como había de estar y no haber caído en ello lo dije. 14 We can read this in the case of Antonio Luis, a Mulatto of Garachico, whose sister was married to a White Dutch man. They are all accused of Lutheranism, although they fled to the Netherlands from Tenerife. Antonio Luis represents an example of people of African descent who navigate between two European powers at war with each other, who travel from the Canary Islands and the Netherlands, who inter-marry, and who are in a position to help a rebel province against a Spanish Empire that cannot dominate the Canarian Archipelago, the attacks against the Canary Islands by Francis Drake and

28  Baltasar Fra-Molinero the Dutch had the authorities worried about the reality of collaboration of the local population with the Protestant attackers (Archivo del Museo Canario. Las Palmas. ES 35001 AMC/INQ 064.012, between December 2, 1605 and January 21, 1607). 15 Archivo del Museo Canario. Las Palmas. ES 35001 AMC/INQ 137.007. Fol. 3r [Que por descargo de su conciencia viene a decir cómo la víspera de señora Santa Ana pasada estando en casa desta testigo Diego Pérez, vecino desta ciudad . . . y Francisca M . . . mujer de Juan Alonso y Francisca negra de doña Susana del Castillo y María negra desta testigo el dicho Diego Pérez estaba dando cordel a las dichas negras diciendo les que eran cautivas y que servían como asnos, a lo que dicha María negra dixo que en su tierra todos son horros y el dicho Diego pérez dixo que acá eran cristianos y allá no a lo qual la dicha María dixo más quisiera ser mora que cautiva y que entiende que ya la dicha negra se ha venido a diferir a este Santo Oficio y lo que ha dicho es la verdad por el juramento que hizo, y que no lo dice por odio, y que es de edad de cuarenta años] 16 In Colonial Mexico, blasphemy was the most common source of processes against slaves, ranging up to 80 per cent of all of them between 1590 and 1620 (McKnight: 229). 17 The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española of 2010 defines dar cordel as “to aggravate someone’s displeasure by insisting on talking about the very thing that causes it.” 18 Her owner’s declaration is dated June  10, 1606, the same date of María’s first self-denunciation. 19 Archivo del Museo Canario. Las Palmas. ES 35001 AMC/INQ 137.007. Fol. 9r. [y dixo que por descargo de su conciencia viene a decir que la víspera de la señora Santa Ana del año pasado estando en casa de su dicha su ama presentes ella y Diego.   Pérez Salaya vecino de esta ciudad el dicho Diego Pérez dijo de esta declarante que en su tierra no conocían a Dios y ella le dixo que allá eran horros y el dicho Diego Pérez le dixo que acá venían a ser cautivos y a servir como asnos y estonses esta declarante le dixo con el enojo que recibió que más quisiera ser en su tierra mora que no en esta cautiva por lo cual la dicha su ama la riñó y le dio pero que esta no lo dixo con intento de hacerse mora ni apartarse de la fee de Nro. Sr. Jesucristo, sino por haberla aperrado tanto el dicho Diego Pérez y lo que ha dicho es la verdad  .  .  . y no firmó porque dijo no saber firmar . . . que es de edad de veinte años.] 20 Archivo del Museo Canario. Las Palmas. ES 35001 AMC/INQ 137.007. Fol. 15r [cómo la susodicha en su tierra era libre y acá era esclava dixo que más quisiera ser mora que cautiva de lo cual evidentemente se colige que lo que por la boca dijo tenía en la voluntad y que cree más en la perversa seta de Mahoma y es más afecta a ella que no a la ley evangélica y santa fe catholica y que si no ha apostatado de ella de hecho lo ha hecho con la voluntad y si pudiera y tuviera lugar para ello lo hubiera puesto en ejecución y ha cometido otros delitos de que a su tiempo protesto acusarla.] 21 Archivo del Museo Canario. Las Palmas. ES 35001 AMC/INQ 137.007. Fol. 20r [. . . dicha mi parte no ha apostatado ni menos tenido ánimo de apartarse de lo que nuestra Santa Fe Catholica tiene y enseña por solo haber dicho que más quisiera ser mora libre que christiana cautiva, lo primero porque las susodichas palabras en la dicha mi menor deben ser interpretadas en el más sano y verdadero sentido colegido de las mismas palabras, no que la susodicha dixese hablando por comparación juzgando por mejor la perversa secta de Mahoma que la ley evangélica dada por X° nuestro bien sino que hacían puntería e iban enderechadas al blanco de la libertad como cosa naturalmente deseada por todos los hombres nasciendo todos ellos libres por derecho natural.] 22 For the Tribunal of Toledo, 85 per cent of men and women who belonged to the servant class (which would include slaves) did not know how to sign (Rodríguez and Benassar 1978: 30). 23 Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001 AMC/INQ-065.019. Old signature: XLI-24B. The case is mentioned briefly in Fajardo Spínola 1992: 157–158. 24 Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001 AMC/INQ-065.019. Fol 6r. [hallaron tres estampas que son las que le han sido enseñadas las dos de santa Marta, una pintada de azul y azufre y cardenillo en un papel sencillo y las otras dos en un papel pintadas de verde colorado y negro la una de santa Marta con una maza en la mano y

Black Atlantic identity 29

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un animal debajo de los pies con cola de pescado y cabeza de perro y alas pequeñas y asido al pescuezo con un cordón y el cabo del cordón asido al cinto de santa Marta.] Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001 AMC/INQ-065.019. Fol. 9r. [Dixo que esta confesante es devota de santa Marta . . . y lo mismo lo es de la otra de san Marcos que al dicho pintor que refiere le mandó le pintase las dichas dos figuras y que él la pintó el dicho papel que le ha sido enseñado y que no sabe qué significan las dichas figuras.] Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001 AMC/INQ-155.002, March  29, 1660–November 5, 1663. Against Juan de Morales, Black, from Buenaviata (Tenerife), for heretical blasphemy. When he spoke of Christ, he sustained that, as a man, he had had temptations of the flesh, and suffered from those temptations [Contra Juan de Morales, negro, vecino de Buenavista (Tenerife), por blasfemia herética, al afirmar, cuando hablaba de Cristo, que en cuanto hombre había sido tentado de la carne y padecido esas tentaciones]. Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001 AMC/INQ-155.002, March  29, 1660-November 5, 1663. Against Juan de Morales, Black, from Buenaviata (Tenerife), for heretical blasphemy. When he spoke of Christ, he sustained that, as a man, he had had temptations of the flesh, and suffered from those temptations [Contra Juan de Morales, negro, vecino de Buenavista (Tenerife), por blasfemia herética, al afirmar, cuando hablaba de Cristo, que en cuanto hombre había sido tentado de la carne y padecido esas tentaciones]. Our Lady of Candelaria was venerated in Mexico as early as the first days of the conquest, and friars who lived in Mexico travelled to the Canary Islands later in the sixteenth century “searching” for the Virgin of Candelaria in a movement that infused this cult with many American aspects (Merediz 2001: 119–120). This Lazarus, or Lázaro in Spanish, is not the friend Jesus returned to life (John 11:1– 44), but rather the leper Lazarus who is despised by the rich man (Luke 16:19–31). This St. Lazarus is the patrón saint of lepers and those who suffer other contagious illnesses, and in whose names many leprosy hospices were named. In modern times, the leper St Lazarus is associated to the oricha Babalú Ayé in Santería (Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert 2011: 57 and 268, note 34). Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001. AMC-INQ 155.002, fol.110v. [que lo dijo como hombre ignorante y negro sin reparar en lo que decía . . . y que él con metira respondió que lo había leído en un libro sin haber visto libro que diga tal ni saber leer.] Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001. AMC-INQ 155.002, fol. 58r [Que todo lo referido se presume ser cierto por ser el susodicho descendiente de paganos y gentiles como tiene confesado y que dijo lo referido como hombre poco firme en la fe y ley evangélica que enseña nuestra Santa Madre la Iglesia Romana.] Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001. AMC-INQ 155.002, fol. 57v. [que en cuanto hombre había sido tentado de la carne y padecido esas tentaciones, que creyendo y teniéndolas padeció interiores y exteriores como los demás hombres, con lo que escandalizó a los que lo oyeron.] Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001. AMC-INQ 155.002, fol. 48v. Of his paternal grandparents, “Dijo que no los conocía ni sabe sus nombres porque a su padre lo trujeron niño de Guinea y los dichos sus abuelos se quedaron allá.” [That they brought his father from Guinea as a child, and the above-said grandparents remained there]. The same about his maternal ones: “Dijo que no sabe sus nombres ni los conoció porque su madre vino muchacha a la isla de la Gomera y sus padres se quedaron en Guinea.” [He said that he does not know their names, nor did he know them because his mother came as a girl to the island of La Gomera and her parents remained there]. Archivo del Museo Canario. Inquisición. ES 35001 AMC-INQ 155.002 fol. 48v. “María Huerta, en la isla de la Habana, en las Indias. Ana, que así mesmo está en la dicha isla de la Habana y ambas son esclavas.” [Maria Huerta, in the island of Habana, in the Indies. Ana, who also resides in the said island of Havana, and both are slaves]. The commerce of slaves from the Canary Islands to Havana in particular increased from the middle of

30  Baltasar Fra-Molinero the seventeenth century onwards. Many Black slaves complained of being separated from their spouses and families, others were sent to Cuba on a rental basis, their different skills being in high demand overseas (Hernández González 2006: 35–36). 35 Apart from writing plays, Lope de Rueda was famous for his impersonation of Black women on stage, as Miguel de Cervantes reminds us (Cervantes 1987: 8).

Works cited Acosta González, A. (1989) “Moriscos e Inquisición en Canarias durante el siglo XVI.” Revista de la Facultad de Geografía e Historia de la Universidad de Las Palmas, 4: 31–68. Anaya Hernádez, L. A. (2008) “Los delitos de los moriscos.” Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos, 54.1: 451–467. Bruquetas de Castro, F. (1994) La esclavitud en Lanzarote (1618–1650). Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Ediciones del Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria. Carrasco, R. (1985) “Morisques et Inquisition dans les Iles Canaries.” Revue de l’histoire des religions, 202.4: 379–387. Cervantes Saavedra, M. d. (1987) “Prólogo.” In F. S. Arroyo and A. R. Hazas (eds.), Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos: Teatro completo. Barcelona: Ed. Planeta. Claiborne, C. (1996) “Leaving Abjection: Where ‘Black’ Meets Theory.” Modern Language Studies, 26.4: 27–36. Web. Contreras, J. and Dedieu, J.-P. (1980) “Geografía de la Inquisición Española: la formación de los distritos (1470–1820).” Hispania: Revista española de historia, 40.144: 37–94. Cunningham, C. H. (1918) “The Inquisition in the Philippines: The Salcedo Affair.” The Catholic Historical Review, 3.4: 417–445. Eliott, J. (2001) En búsqueda de la historia atlántica. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Cabildo de Gran Canaria. Elmer, J. (2005) “The Black Atlantic Archive.” American Literary History, 17.1: 160–170. Fajardo Spínola, F. (1992) Hechicería y brujería en Canarias en la Edad Moderna. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria. Fajardo Spínola, F. (2005) Las víctimas de la Inquisición en las Islas Canarias. La Laguna: Francisco Lemus Editor. Fajardo Spínola, F. (2006) “Inquisición y sociedad en Canarias: Trayectoria y perfil del Tribunal insular.” Paper presented at the Seminario V Centenario de la Creación del Santo Oficio de la inquisición de Canarias. XVI Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana (2004), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Fernández Olmos, M. and Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2011) Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction From Vodou and Santerâia to Obeah and Espiritismo, 2nd edn. New York: New York University Press. Fernández-Armesto, F. (1987) Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Foucault, M. (1982) “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, 8.4: 777–795. Frenk, M. (1997) Entre la voz y el silencio (La lectura en tiempos de Cervantes). Alcalá de Henares: Biblioteca de Estudios Cervantinos. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press. Harrington, T. (1998) “The Speaking Abject in Kristeva’s ‘Power of Horror.’ ” Hypatia, 13.1: 138–157. Hernández González, M. (2006) “Canarias en el comercio atlántico de esclavos.” In A. H. P. d. S. C. d. Tenerife (ed.), Esclavos: Documentos para la historia de Canarias, vol. VIII. La Laguna, Canary Islands: Gobierno de Canarias, 27–40.

Black Atlantic identity  31 Jouve Martín, J. R. (2005) Esclavos de la ciudad letrada: Esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (1650–1700). Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Kapferer, B. (2002) “Introduction: Outside All Reason: Magic, Sorcery and Epistemology in Anthropology.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 46.3: 1–30. Lobo Cabrera, M. (1982) La esclavitud en las Canarias orientales en el siglo XVI: negros, moros y moriscos. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Ediciones del Excmo. Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria. Lobo Cabrera, M. (1993) “Los moriscos de Canarias exceptuados de la expulsión.” Paper presented at the V Symposium International d’Études Morisques (Zaghouan 1991), Zaghouan. Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Merediz, E. M. (2001) “Traveling Icons: The Virgin of Candelaria’s Transatlantic Journeys.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 5: 115–132. Merediz, E. M. (2004) Refracted Images: The Canary Islands Through a New World Lens: Transatlantic Readings. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Mott, L. R. B. (1993) Rosa Egipcâiaca: uma santa africana no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Bertrand Brasil. Nemser, D. (2010) “Governor Sancho and the Politics of Insularity.” Hispanic Review, 78.1: 1–23. Nodal, R. (1981) “Black Presence in the Canary Islands (Spain).” Journal of Black Studies, 12.1: 83–90. Ong, W. J. (1976) “From Mimesis to Irony: The Distancing of Voice.” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 9.1/2: 1–24. Ong, W. J. (1984) “Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization.” New Literary History, 16.1: 1–12. Proctor III, F. T. (2003) “Afro-Mexican Slave Labor in the Obrajes de Paños of New Spain, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Americas, 60.1: 33–58. Rediker, M. (2010) “The Poetics of History From Below.” Perspectives on History: A Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 48.6: 36–38. Rodríguez, M.-C. and Benassar, B. (1978) “Signatures et niveau culturel des témoins dans les proces d’inquisition du ressort du tribunal de Tolede (1527–1817) et du ressort du tribunal de Cordoue (1595–1632).” Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brésilien (Caravelle), 31: 17–46. Ronquillo Rubio, M. (1990) El Tribunal de la Inquisición en Canarias (1505–1526). Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria. Rueda, L. d. (1976) Los engañados: Teatro Completo. Barcelona: Bruguera. Sampedro Vizcaya, B. (2012) “Engaging the Atlantic: New Routes, New Responsibilities.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 89.8: 905–922. Schmidt-Nowara, C. (2001) “ ‘This Rotting Corpse’: Spain Between the Black Atlantic and the Black Legend.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 5: 149–160. Silverblatt, I. (2004) Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spillers, H. J. (2003) “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, xviii, 552 p. Sweet, J. H. (2011) Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Image 2.1  Juan de Pareja’s The Calling of St Matthew © Museo Nacional del Prado.

2 Picturing the Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom in early modern Spain Carmen Fracchia

In The Calling of St Matthew, the Afro-Hispanic painter Juan de Pareja positioned his self-portrait against the backdrop of the local and transatlantic slave trades, the final expulsion of the Muslims between 1607 and 1614, and the post-Tridentine mission of Christianization of enslaved Africans in early modern Spain.1 I intend to explore the articulation of freedom from slavery in imperial Spain by concentrating on the construction of the visual voice of the ex-enslaved subject in the only extant self-depiction of which we know of a freedman in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. I will therefore focus primarily on the ways in which the enslaved Pareja and the freedman Pareja confronted the ideological associations of the words black and slave, the paradoxical beliefs in the whitening of the soul of Africans and the policies of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) that from the middle of the sixteenth century legally formalized the categories of “old Christians” and “new Christians” (Moriscos and Conversos − Muslims and Jews converted to Christianity − Jews, Muslims, black and mixed-race people) in Spain.2 This policy became the cardinal principle that “created a caste society based on the notion of purity of blood” (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 263–264) in colonial societies. The most dramatic consequence of the requirement of certificates of limpieza de sangre, which consisted of “sworn statements that the bearer had no Jewish, Moslem, or heretical antecedents . . . for holding various office” (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 263) and even for emigrating to the New World, was the social exclusion and marginalization of “new Christians” from the societies of imperial Spain. Pareja was born c. 1606 in the city of Antequera, in the Province of Málaga, home to Africans mostly of Muslim origin from North Africa, especially after Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros’s conquest of Oran (Algeria) in 1509.3 Furthermore, Málaga was the most important slave port in the Iberian Peninsula after Lisbon, Seville and Valencia. Pareja was the slave of Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), painter to King Philip IV of Spain. He therefore lived and worked in Madrid at the Habsburg court until his death in 1670. Pareja was at the centre of political power in imperial Spain, and he had a special relationship with his master. Velázquez trusted his slave to sign many legal documents as his witness, from 1634 to 1653 in Spain, and later in Rome, where both lived from 1649 to 1651(Aterido Fernández 2000: 684), and where Velázquez decided to legally liberate his slave on the 23rd of November 1650 (Montagu 1983: 684). Pareja’s

34  Carmen Fracchia notarial document Donatio Libertatis announces that Diego Velázquez, resident in Rome, granted freedom from captivity to his schiavo Joannes de Parecha. The Italian document clearly states that Pareja’s freedom will be applicable in Spain. It specifies, following the formula traditional in most documents of manumission, that he should serve his master for another 4 years. In fact, when Velázquez died in 1660, Pareja became the “servant” of his master’s son-in-law, the Court painter Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo (1605–1667) until his death. Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco in his art treatise Museum Pictorium (El museo pictórico y escala óptica, 1715–1724) recorded that Pareja was so honorable as to continue, not only to serve Velázquez, as long as he lived, but his Daughter after him.4 Manumission or legal freedom from slavery was uncommon in early modern Spain, and the status of emancipated slaves was not the same as “that of a free born person” (Martín Casares 2000: 435–69). Freedom from slavery could only be obtained either by documents of emancipation (cartas de ahorrías or cartas de ahorros) or by the expressed wish of the slave’s owner in the latter’s will. Since the economic cost of liberation was greater than the purchase price of a slave, a document of freedom would mainly be obtained with the help of the slave’s own family. Captive Moors from Granada, Málaga and from North Africa were successful in this endeavour, but not slaves from Sub-Saharan Africa, Native Americans from the New World or slaves from the Canary Islands.5 In Rome, between July  1649 and March  19th, 1650, Velázquez also painted Pareja, before he liberated his slave (López Rey 1963: 176). Palomino gave an account of the origin of the portrait Juan de Pareja: When it was decided that Velázquez should make a portrait of the Sovereign Pontiff [Innocent X], he wanted to prepare himself beforehand with the exercise of painting a head from life; and he made one of Juan de Pareja, his slave and a painter himself, with such likeness and liveliness that when he sent it with Pareja for the criticism of some friends, they stood looking at the painted portrait and the model with admiration and amazement, not knowing which one they should speak to and which was to answer them.6 Velázquez exhibited this portrait on March  19th, 1650, at the Roman Pantheon, where the Renaissance master Raphael is buried, and it had an outstanding success: Of this portrait (which is half-length, from life) a story is related by Andreas Schmidt, a Flemish painter of the Spanish court, who was in Rome at the time. In accordance with the custom of decorating the cloister of the Rotunda (where Raphael of Urbino is buried) on Saint Joseph’s day [March  19th], with famous paintings, ancient and modern, this portrait was exhibited. It gained such universal applause that in the opinion of all the painters of the different nations, everything else seemed like painting but this alone like truth. In view of this Velázquez was received as Roman Academician in the year 1650.7

The Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom  35 Velázquez portrayed Pareja with a powerful expression of pride before he was made free from slavery, even though Pareja could not have been depicted as a gentleman, since his social reality as a slave would not have qualified him as an individual worthy to be portrayed for posterity. Nor could he be painted as a painter, since only a free man could be an artist (Fracchia 2013a: 146–169). Velázquez’s depiction of his slave shows that he was in tune with the early modern Spanish belief that the physical appearance of blackness was a signifier of the specific social condition of slavery (Fracchia 2012: 204). So was Palomino when he defined Pareja as “of mestizo breed and strange color” in the biography he dedicated to him in the first part of the eighteenth century.8 The word black designated a diversity of ethnic backgrounds and included groups of people mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, Berbers, Iberian Muslims and to a lesser extent Jews. The classification of blackness found in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury documents from Málaga, the region where Pareja was born, shows how the term black already generated a range of arbitrary and contradictory colour classifications regardless of the person’s origins: black (negro); dark (moreno); somewhat dark (moreno claro); quince (membrillo); cooked quince (membrillo cocho); light cooked quince (membrillo cocho claro); dark cooked quince (membrillo cocho oscuro); light wheat (trigueño claro); dark wheat (trigueño oscuro); wheat (trigueño); blond (rubio); pink or rosy (rosa); with a black skin or with black hair (pelinegro); and good colour (buen color) (Gómez García and Martín Vergara 1993: 29). This earlier classification coexisted with the categories of “old Christians” and “new Christians” in the societies of imperial Spain, and it foreshadowed the taxonomic classification of intermixture in the casta system in the colonial society of New Spain. The word castas was used to signify the mixed-race population resulting mainly from the mixture of the Native American, black and white populations, and this process was visually articulated in the sets of casta paintings from the early eighteenth century until the abolition of the casta system in 1810 by the Mexican State.9 Documentary, critical and visual evidence shows that Pareja was already an independent visual artist before his manumission. The recent restoration of two paintings in the Hermitage revealed Pareja’s signature: on the back of the canvas of the Portrait of a Gentleman of the Order of Santiago, possibly dated in the 1630s, well before his legal freedom from slavery, and on the work Portrait of a Capuchin Provincial dated 1651, one year after his manumission.10 Pareja’s career as an independent artist goes against the theoretical belief that painting as a liberal or intellectual art could only be practised by free men, according to the premises set up since antiquity (Gállego 1976: 85). However, new documents also reveal that Pareja was not an exception since economic considerations allowed the presence of slaves or freedmen in the artistic workshops of early modern Spain (Méndez Rodríguez 2001: 243–256). The records reveal that slaves and ex-slaves were artisans, painters, sculptors and silversmiths. In addition to mechanical activities, Afro-Hispanic people sold their masters’ work in the street or they mass-produced paintings to be sent to the New World, or else they were trained as craftsmen in the owners’ workshops. The most notable seventeenth-century slave owners

36  Carmen Fracchia were the painters and art theorists Vicente Carducho (c.1576–1638) and Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644). The painter Bartolomé Estéban Murillo (1617–1682) also had a slave, who became an independent painter, the Granada-born mixed-race Sebastián Gómez known as El Mulato (1646–1682). Palomino singled out Pareja’s portraits for praise. He pointed to the portrait of The Architect José Ratés Dalmau (c. 1665–70): Our Pareja had in particular a most singular talent for portraits, of which I have seen some that are most excellent, such as the one of José Ratés (Architect in this Court), in which one recognizes totally the manner of Velázquez, so that many believe it to be his.11 In 1957, Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño recorded Pareja’s lost and surviving religious compositions and portraits (Gaya Nuño 1957: 271–285). The whereabouts of almost 20 paintings by the artist out of the 30 recently identified by María del Mar Doval Trueba are still unknown, such as the Portrait of Philip IV and several portraits of unidentified subjects, such as Bust-length Portrait of a Gentleman, portraits of a Boy, a Man, a Cleric, a Knight, and a Lady Wearing a Nun’s Habit (Doval Trueba 2000: 238–241). There are also religious paintings under this category: the Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple, The Annunciation, The Visitation, a St Barbara signed by Pareja, and the four pictures which the traveller Antonio Ponz saw in 1776 in the Augustinian Monastery of los Recoletos in Madrid: St John the Evangelist, St John the Baptist, St Orentius and the Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico (Ponz 1776: 55). Other paintings noted by Gaya Nuño are the Battle of the Hebrews and the Canaanites in the University of Saragossa  – recently attributed to the painter Matías de Torres on stylistic grounds, even though the inscription on a label on the back reads “Juan de Pareja (the mulatto) / year 1660–1 / author of the Calling of St Matthew in Seville.”12 It is also accepted that the portrait of the playwright Agustín Moreto y Cabañas in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid, attributed to Pareja (Camón Aznar 1978: 390–392), probably dates from the 1650s; therefore, this is one of his earliest portraits we know by the artist. Other paintings attributed to the Andalusian artist are the portraits of Don Martín de Leyva and Don Alonso de Mora y Villalta in the Hispanic Society of America in New York.13 The surviving works of Pareja’s that are signed and dated are The Flight into Egypt (1658),14 The Calling of St Matthew (1661), three versions of the Immaculate Conception (Payo Hernanz 2013: 60–64), the Baptism of Christ (1667), also a very large oil on canvas that is stored in the Prado Museum in Madrid, The Last Communion of St Mary of Egypt (Doval Trueba 2000: 234–236), and the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (1669), executed a year before his death.15 It is significant that Pareja’s devotional work shows his engagement with postTridentine Catholic theology and the key narratives promoted for the conversion and catechism of enslaved Africans and freedmen in Spain and in the New World, as we shall see. In The Calling of St Matthew, Pareja decided to represent himself. Nothing is known about Pareja’s client, or the functions of this hugely ambitious oil painting

The Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom  37 on canvas, measuring over 3 metres in length. It was first mentioned in the royal inventory of the La Granja Palace in the collection of Queen Elizabeth Farnese (1692–1766), wife of King Philip V of Spain (1683–1746). This painting was inherited by their heir, King Charles III of Spain (1716–1788), who had it displayed in his dressing room in the royal palace of Aranjuez, south of Madrid (Madrazo 1872: 513). This work was first recorded in 1800 by Agustin Ceán Bermúdez in his Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes de España (Ceán Bermúdez 1800: 52). Pareja’s painting is now in the storage facility of the Prado Museum in Madrid; it is therefore still invisible to the general public, except for two occasions when it was briefly shown at the museum. In the painting, Pareja is the only figure that is looking straight at the viewer, while all the other characters are involved in the religious event of the calling of St Matthew. The chosen narrative is an episode related in the Gospel of Matthew (9: 9): “Jesus saw a man called Matthew at his seat in the custom house, and said to him, ‘Follow me’, and Matthew rose and followed him.”16 Matthew is seated in front of the column at his desk, and he is looking towards Christ with a surprised expression and pointing to himself in wonder at his call to follow him. On the right, Pareja sets the figures of Christ and a group of apostles, who are distinguishable from the third follower by the white divine light of grace above their heads, while on the left, tax officials and members of the public are gathered at a table. Pareja inserts himself next to another man who is looking outside the picture and they are both standing behind the elegant client sitting at the corner of the table, viewed in profile and from behind. In the space of Matthew’s tax office, a great wealth of material culture is displayed, including the oriental carpet that unusually covers the table, coins, jewels, sheets of paper, books, urns and a picture that hangs on the wall in the background, depicting Moses and the Brazen Serpent. Below this painting and between Matthew and the bespectacled bookkeeper is a young page holding a large folio volume, and behind him are four figures. The one standing by the column is the only visibly black man of the composition who is behind and above Matthew’s head, with his face illuminated by the white divine light of grace, which crowns the apostle’s turban. I would argue that in this work, Pareja also codified the collective identity of Africans and their struggle for freedom in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón. In 1661, a year after his master’s death and 11 years after his manumission from slavery in the city of Rome, Juan de Pareja inserts himself at the extreme left margin of his composition, beneath the window with his head against a halo-like golden plate. He portrays himself as a contemporary white Spanish gentleman with his sword, and he makes sure that his audience is aware of his authorship by holding a piece of paper where he has signed and dated: “Juan de Pareja F[ecit].1661.” The view Pareja has of himself substantially differs from the view his master had of his slave, although Pareja follows Velázquez’s subversion in depicting a slave as a human being and as a subject. Pareja even has in mind his master’s self-portrait as a nobleman and member of the Order of Santiago in Las Meninas (1656), and the place his ex-master occupies in his huge canvas peopled by members of

38  Carmen Fracchia the Habsburg monarchy (Fracchia 2013a: 153–155). While Velázquez is depicted in the act of painting, Pareja does not represent himself as a painter engaged in manual activity. Instead, he chooses to embed himself as a Spanish nobleman in the context of a complex religious narrative. This is an interesting choice not only because the latter had to defy the perception that slaves were confined to mechanical activities, but also because in Spain, the liberal arts were still considered a manual activity until the end of the seventeenth century (Pérez Sánchez 2004: 228). When Velázquez depicted him as a proud mixed-race nobleman, he was still a slave, but 11 years later, when Pareja fashioned himself with Europeanized features as a Spanish nobleman, he was a freedman. Pareja could however have depicted himself as a mixed-race man following Velázquez’s example in his Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus since he re-appropriated his master’s juxtaposition of the image of a slave at her workplace with a sacred scene in the background (Fracchia 2013a: 160–161). Pareja’s problem was that the colour of his skin would have signified his previous condition, and it would not have conveyed his freedom from slavery. The association of the terms black and slave created serious problems as the 1566 document from a widow in Granada, who donated her estate to two free siblings of African origin, testifies: “The colour of their faces gives rise to the suspicion that they are slaves, but I say they have never been but free people” (Martín Casares 2005: 252). Pareja had to find a visual device to convey his freedom from slavery. He would certainly have been aware of the notion in early modern Spain of the conversion of Africans and the whitening of their souls by the transformative powers of the sacrament of baptism. I believe that Pareja, in fact, made use of the deep belief in the whitening of the soul and its visualization in early modern Europe to fashion himself. It is significant that Velázquez’s Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus probably belonged to the Archbishop of Seville, Pedro Castro y Quiñones, who published his Instructions for Remedying and Ensuring that None of the Blacks Is Lacking in Sacred Baptism in 1614 to promote the baptism of Africans in Seville (Borja Medina 2010: 85–88). This mission was in perfect agreement with the belief in the universality of the Catholic Counter-Reformation Church and in its evangelical charitable mission (Borja Medina 2010: 75–94). Needless to say that when Castro was writing this treatise, Velázquez’s father-in-law, the painter and art writer Francisco Pacheco, was collaborating with the Archbishop in championing the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in Seville (Tiffany 2008: 42), the subject of at least three of Pareja’s paintings. Castro’s arguments also affected Velázquez’s parents in their decision to baptize their slave’s daughter in 1621 (Tiffany 2008: 42). His work had a great influence on the 1627 Treatise on Slavery (De instauranda Aethiopum Salute, 1627) by his friend the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval from Seville. The latter personally promoted the baptism of African slaves in Cartagena de Indias in the Viceroyalty of New Granada (Colombia) between 1605 and his death in 1652 (Tiffany 2008: 43–46). In the frontispiece of his 1647 edition, on either side of the Adoration of the Magi at the top of the engraving,

The Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom  39 there is an image of the collective Baptism of Africans. The neophytes are not black, but they are rendered as white Europeans.17 Sandoval stated that baptism was a sacrament intended for the inner whitening of all humans and that one of its effects is the erasure of blackness: “although they [slaves] are black to the eye, they can have the innocence and whiteness that Christ’s blood gives to one who is washed in it” (Tiffany 2008: 44). Sandoval also promoted the cult of “Ethiopian saints” as “models of black sanctity” to the Afro-Hispanic enslaved and liberated. There is no doubt that Pareja was familiar with these images displayed in the black confraternities of Seville, where he visited with his master. Velázquez was born in this cosmopolitan slave centre and lived there until 1623 before he moved to the Habsburg court. The most popular black saints were Princess St Iphigenia, who was baptized by St Matthew18 and St Eslabaan, King of Ethiopia (Castañeda García 2012: 241), and above all St Benedict of Palermo. A slave from Spanish Sicily (1526–1589) and the son of Christianized African slaves, he was a Franciscan lay brother and was considered the first black European saint, even before he was beatified later in 1643 and canonized in 1807 (Moreno 1997: 120). Benedict was known during his lifetime as “The Holy Black,” and soon after his death (4 April  1589) and especially from 1606, following the arrival of his relics in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón, he was adopted as the patron saint of black slaves not only in Spain, but also in Portugal and in the New World (Minnich 2005: 299). The cult of saints was promoted by the Council of Trent (1545–1563). It was inseparable from the liturgy and feasts of saints and it gave a sense of social continuity and corporal identity to members of the same confraternity (Moreno 1997: 65). In fact, a proliferation of penitential confraternities in Spain took place after the reforms initiated by the Council, which passed legislation to inspect the religious and financial activities of these institutions.19 Black brotherhoods were founded with the dedication to black patron saints, such as St  Benedict of Palermo or St  Iphigenia of Ethiopia, and mixed-race confraternities were dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, a cult promoted by the Dominicans in 1571, after the Spanish victory over the Moors at Lepanto. Pareja might have also been aware of the whitening of an African man in the popular prints of the Baptism of the Ethiopian by Saint Philip, where the only clue to the ethnicity of the African neophyte was to be found in the written inscription below the images, as in the engraving of this same subject by Michel Lasne: “You are not washing the Ethiopian in vain. Do not stop. The water poured by the priest can illuminate the black night” (Massing 1995: 188–191). Sandoval included in his list of Ethiopian saints the African neophyte baptized by Saint Philip. He was the eunuch prime minister of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, and when St Matthew, subject of Pareja’s painting, went to Ethiopia, he stayed at the minister’s house.20 In The Calling of St Matthew, the spiritual legitimization of the process of selfwhitening or the Europeanization of African features gives a clear signal of the new status of a freedman in early modern Spain and his struggle. Pareja’s transformation, which subverts the genre of portraiture, does not disguise his attachment

40  Carmen Fracchia to his collective African past. This is evident in the visual and conceptual relations that the artist establishes between Matthew and Moses and between Christ and the nobleman Pareja. Matthew, the apostle of Ethiopia, considered the first Christian nation, became one of the four evangelists, and he is positioned between Moses and Christ. Matthew is seen as the instrument of Christ’s liberation in Ethiopia. Moses is presented as a liberator of the enslaved Jews from Egypt where Matthew also preached and in accordance with Catholic doctrine he also represents Moses as the precursor of Christ as the liberator of Humanity (Fracchia 2013a: 159–160). Moses prayed for his people and on God’s command he made a serpent of brass, which he fixed to the top of a pole. All those who gazed on it were safe from the poisonous snakes (Numbers 21: 4–9). This story foretold the healing effect of Christ’s death and resurrection. In the New Testament, John the Evangelist (3: 13–15) explains that as the Israelites were saved by looking at the bronze serpent at the top of the pole, so all those who gaze at Christ on the cross will be saved and enjoy eternal life. Not only does Pareja depict Moses and Christ as wearing the same robes and colours, but he also positions himself at the other end of the table, mirroring Christ, and in this way refers to himself as a biblical Ethiopian and subsequently as a free man. Thus, Pareja makes it clear to his audience that he himself belongs to the first Christian nation, which became the first source for “old Christians” before Spain. Pareja’s self-portrait also defies the core of the imperial policy of purity of blood that excluded “new Christians” in terms of their lack of purity of faith and therefore from economic and political power (Fracchia 2013a: 160). Thus, Pareja implies that biblical Ethiopians are older and purer than the orthodox Christians of Spain. We have also to bear in mind that a correlation between “blackness” and unorthodox Christianity was reinforced by the tribunal of the Inquisition (Favrot Peterson 2012: 50). This institution defended the purity of the Catholic faith that, in law, was equated, after the middle of the sixteenth century, with purity of lineage or blood. The main targets of the Inquisition were the “new Christians” who “were suspected of having covertly returned to their old beliefs,” the marginal and the foreign, including enslaved and liberated AfroHispanics. In the list of the 309 people condemned to death at the royal prison in Seville, from 1578 to 1616, provided by the preacher the Jesuit Pedro de León,21 Mary Perry identified “one was a gypsy, 17 were foreigners and 42 were moriscos (Christianised Moors), Negroes and mulattoes” (Perry 1980: 67, 83). Even if baptism had the power to whiten the soul, this sacrament did not remove the stigma of slavery and did not improve the social condition of AfroHispanic slaves, freedmen and freedwomen. The established association that existed between the early modern social condition of chattel slavery, the identity of “new Christians” and the non-white skin colour of the Afro-Hispanic people, made sure that the latter group, even after their emancipation, could never escape their marginal position. Thus, in my opinion, the baptized and Europeanized freedman Pareja in The Calling of St Matthew chooses to articulate his attachment to his Christian African past, primarily to differentiate himself from black Muslims, especially after their final expulsion from Spain by 1614. However, I would also like to propose that in his painting Pareja shared and codified the painful and

The Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom  41 ambivalent experiences of the enslaved and liberated Afro-Hispanics in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón. Their exclusion from membership of the city’s guilds and from religious confraternities, and the social restrictions which Africans suffered (Pike 1972: 181), partly prompted the foundation of exclusively black and mixed-race confraternities mainly by freedmen in Spanish urban centres.22 The exclusion of Africans is clearly articulated in most of the confraternities’ regulations “regarding the qualities that those who want to become our brothers must have” in Seville, the most important slave city of the kingdom of Castile (Moreno 1985: 5). The 1691 rules of Confraternity of Cristo de la Expiración y María Santísima del Patrocinio are a clear example: We command that the Persons who might become Brothers of this Confraternity be good Christians and not Moors, Jews, Mulattoes, nor Slaves, not those newly converted to our holy faith, nor the sons of such [persons], nor still less condemned to shameful penalties by the Court, nor Indians, but honorable People of good reputation lifestyle and habits [about] whom information is collected by the Officials of our Confraternity [and] about whom we search our consciences. (Verdi Webster 1998: 39) The oldest black confraternity in the Western world run by black freedmen in Seville was dedicated to Our Lady of the Kings (Moreno 1997: 51–52). This referred to the Magi, and 6 January, day of the Epiphany, was the congregation’s most important festivity, also because on this occasion their members nominated their own King (Moreno 1997: 50–53). This institution for liberated slaves was legally formalized at the end of the fourteenth century by Cardinal-Archbishop Gonzalo de Mena y Roelas of Seville (1394–1401), primarily to regulate the social behaviour of the enslaved and the manumitted (Moreno 1977: 60). The confraternity’s rules specified that only black ex-slaves were to be members. They were given the possibility to join the black confraternity as members under certain conditions, such as the presentation of a written licence from their owners with their signature, and if they could not write, they should provide witnesses (Moreno 1977: 61). Mixed-race people (pardos or loros) were excluded from this confraternity. In Seville in 1572, mixed-race slaves and freedmen also created, with the authorization of the archbishop of Seville, Cristóbal Rojas y Sandoval (1571–1580), their own Confraternity for pardos, dedicated to Our Lady of the Presentation in the parish of San Ildefonso, inside the city walls, where they stayed until it was abolished after the last procession of Holy Week in 1731(Moreno 1977: 76). On 8 November 1475, owing to the increase of the black population in Seville, the Catholic Monarchs nominated their royal servant Juan de Valladolid as the first steward of black and mixed-race slaves and freed slaves. According to the historian Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga (1677), Juan de Valladolid was an African of noble descent and a servant in the royal chambers. He was also known as the “Black Count” (Conde Negro) and behind the confraternity’s chapel the street is named after him, Conde Negro Street until today.23 His main duties were to

42  Carmen Fracchia represent and to act as intermediary between the Afro-Hispanic population and the civil, religious and political authorities. Stewards also could help slaves to go to court if they were promised freedom from their slave owners, but it had not been delivered or when there were strong social pressures from wealthier confraternities and from the royal authorities to dissolve the black confraternities by constantly accusing them of theft, alcoholism, riots and killings. In fact, when the black confraternity in Seville was suppressed in 1614, their members appealed to Pope Urban VIII, and their confraternity was successfully reinstated in 1633 (Moreno 1977: 34). Their steward also represented the interests of the brothers and acted as their intermediary in the judicial system, organized their festivals (fiestas), dances (zarabanda and paracumbé) (Moreno 1977: 54), weddings and processions, such as at Corpus Christi and in Holy Week.24 In 1504, Juan de Castillo was the first designated confraternity leader elected and defined as the “King of Blacks.”25 The confraternity’s aims were to run the Hospital-House that was founded at the same time for the black population, especially for the sick, the elderly and the disabled, to offer decent burials for their dead, and to support their widows (Moreno 1977: 71–72). This congregation also adopted mechanisms to punish the immoral behaviour of their members (Armenteros Martínez 2011: 8). In 1587, the oldest black brotherhood merged with the black Confraternity of Our Lady of Piety, a penitential group, founded in 1554 in Seville. The new black brotherhood adopted the name of Our Lady of the Angels.26 Their members were allowed to participate as equals in the city’s religious celebrations and in the Holy Week processions with the rest of the city’s confraternities that numbered 40 by 1602. The denomination of this Confraternity as that of “little blacks” (vulgo de los Negritos), that is still in use today, was added to the name of the confraternity for the first time in 1784 (Moreno 1977: 25, 141). Enslaved blacks and freedmen exclusively composed the governing board of Our Lady of the Angels, until the beginning of the eighteenth century and one century later, there were no black members left.27 Their members met periodically to organize and control their finances and their membership, and they were chosen annually by general election: a steward (mayoral), a supervisor to collect money from their members, a secretary to keep the books, a treasurer, a caretaker of the chapel, images and altars, four deputies, various magistrates, and the collector of alms from the public. The key source of funding was donations in wills of money, property or belongings. This income enabled members of the confraternity to hire white priests to celebrate mass and perform the sacraments, to maintain and commission devotional images and altars, and to meet the confraternity’s charitable aims.28 The confraternity’s chapel was built in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the prominent images of devotion were Our Lady of the Kings; Our Lady of the Nativity; the Flight into Egypt; and St Ferdinand and other saints. When Pareja was working at the Habsburg court and visited Seville with Velázquez, the most venerated images were the three main sculptures still displayed in their chapel: Our Lady of the Angels; Christ on the Cross (1622) known as Cristo de la Fundación by Andrés de Ocampo (1560–1623) (Moreno 1977: 99, 100); and St Benedict the Moor of Palermo.

The Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom  43 Black confraternities were intended to control the social behaviour of the enslaved and freed Afro-Hispanic population, but these congregations also provided an opportunity for the support and representation of Africans within the city. They were, as the Spanish anthropologist Isidoro Moreno rightly argues, the only formal place for the black community to assert their collective identity with dignity. Their members conceived these religious institutions as their symbolic “black nation” (nación de negros) and were devoted to Ethiopian saints, regarded “as the resident patrons of their communities” (Cervantes 1994: 57–58). The concept and infrastructure of Our Lady of the Angels were adopted by confraternities for black and mixed-race people, enslaved and liberated, in most urban centres in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries: Barcelona, Valencia, El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz, Málaga, Jaén, Jerez de la Frontera, Granada, Gibraltar,, Úbeda, Baeza, and the Canary Islands, amongst other cities.29 Our Lady of the Angels also became the prototype for the Native American and black confraternities in the New World from the second half of the sixteenth century, promoted mainly by Franciscans and Carmelites as means of evangelization.30 I believe that in the Calling of St Matthew, Pareja codified the collective identity of the Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves, which they forged in their black and mixed-race confraternities. The paradoxical position that enslaved and liberated Afro-Hispanic people suffered in the societies of imperial Spain was conveyed in their poems (villancicos de negros) written in their black confraternities to accompany their public religious processions in urban centres (Swiadon Martínez 2004–2005: 285–304). Their proverb “Though black, we are people” (Aunque negro, gente samo), written in black speech, was codified in 1627 by Gonzalo Correas.31 It clearly expressed their painful experience and resistance. In his painting, Pareja’s visual and symbolic process of self-Europeanization signifies the price that the Afro-Hispanic community had to pay to achieve their freedom. They were paradoxically both included in and excluded from the societies of imperial Spain. The Europeanization of Pareja’s features visually cleansed the stigma of manumission to reclaim his social status as a free man and therefore as a painter at the Habsburg Court in Madrid. However, his visual transformation did not disguise his full engagement with the African experience in Spain. I consider the self-portrait of the freedman Juan de Pareja and the narrative of the calling of the apostle of Ethiopia as well as the portrait of the enslaved Pareja by his master Velázquez as expressions of resistance and codifications of an exceptional instance of recognition of the subject’s humanity. These portraits are unique if we consider that Afro-Hispanic slaves, and ex-slaves were not included in portraits of the aristocracy in Spain during this period, in contrast to the situation elsewhere in Europe. Most depictions of black people (who were perceived as slaves) are to be found in religious compositions, like the Adoration of the Magi, the Miracle of the Black Leg (Fracchia 2013b: 79–91), the Immaculate Conception or depictions of black saints (Fracchia 2007: 180–184). The low visibility of enslaved Afro-Hispanics and freedmen in early modern Spanish visual culture needs to be addressed, and it requires further research. I would however argue, as

44  Carmen Fracchia the case of Juan de Pareja shows, that in early modern Spain the invisibilization and marginalization of Africans, rooted in the stigma of slavery and inscribed on the non-white colour of the enslaved, did not completely prevent the struggle and the contribution made by Africans in the visual field.

Notes 1 The painting The Calling of St Matthew by Juan de Pareja is a very large oil on canvas (225 x 325 cm) and is kept in the Prado Museum in Madrid. See www.museodelprado. es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-calling-of-saint-matthew/34917e11-611e-451d84df-a0efb1ac6381 (Accessed December  22, 2016), The Calling of St  MatthewMuseo Nacional del Prado. 2 John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London: Penguin, 2002), 107, 221. 3 María Dolores Torreblanca Roldán, La redención de los cautivos malagueños en el Antiguo Régimen (Siglo XVIII) (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1998), 33; María Carmen Gómez García and Juan María Martín Vergara, La esclavitud en Málaga entre los siglos XVII y XVIII (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1993), 77; and Raúl González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la Edad Media (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 2006), 20, 59, 457–468. 4 Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, “Life of Juan de Pareja,” in An Account of the Lives and Works of the Most Eminent Spanish Painters, Sculptors and Architects, and Where Their Several Performances Are to Be Seen. Translated from the Museum Pictorium of Palomino Velasco (London: printed for Sam. Harding, on the pavement in St. Martin’s-Lane, 1739), 75. For the Spanish version, see Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, “Juan de Pareja,” in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–1724) (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1947), vol. 3, p. 961: “todo lo restante de su vida sirvió, no sólo a Velázquez . . . sino después a su hija, que casó con Don Juan Bautista del Mazo.” This and all translations following is the responsibility of the author. 5 José Luis Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1989), 140–152; Alfonso Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media (Seville: Gráficas del Sur, 1979), 243–246; Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de América Española (1503–1886): Documentos para su estudio (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá and Universidad de Murcia, 2005), 26–28, 52–54; and William D. Philips, Jr., Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 122–145. 6 Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, “Life of Velázquez,” translated from Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–1724), 3 vols (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1947), in Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1982), vol. 3, p. 209. 7 Palomino, “Life of Velázquez,” 209–210. 8 Palomino, English translation, “Life of Juan de Pareja,” 73. For the original version, see Palomino, “Juan de Pareja,” 960: “de generación mestizo, y de color extraño.” 9 For the most up-to-date analysis and bibliography on casta painting, see María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth Century Mexico (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004); Magali M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003); Ilona Katzew (ed.), New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America (New York: Americas Society Art Gallery, 1996); and María Concepción García Sáiz, Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico Americano (Milan: Olivetti, 1989).

The Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom  45 10 Ludmila Kagané, La pintura española del Museo del Ermitage. Siglos XV al XIX (Seville: Fundación del Monte, 2005), 94, 160, 318, 322, 410, 477. 11 Palomino, English translation, “Life of Juan de Pareja,” 75. For the original version, see Palomino, “Juan de Pareja,” 961: “Tuvo especialmente nuestro Pareja singularísima habilidad para retratos, de los cuales yo he visto algunos muy excelentes, como el de José Ratés (Arquitecto en esta Corte) en que se conoce totalmente la manera de Velázquez, de suerte, que muchos lo juzgan suyo.” See also María del Mar Doval Trueba, “Los ‘velazqueños’: pintores que trabajaron en el taller de Velázquez,” Doctoral thesis, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, March 24, 2000, 236–237. The portrait José Ratés is in the Museo de Bellas Artes, in Valencia. 12 J. A. Gaya Nuño, “Revisiones sexcentistas: Juan de Pareja,” Archivo Español de Arte, 30 (1957), 280: the inscription in the painting Battle of the Hebrews and the Canaanites reads: “Juan de Pareja (el mulato) / año 1660–1 / autor de la Vocación de San Mateo de Sevilla.” The oil on canvas belongs to the Prado Museum, and it was originally in the Museo de la Trinidad. Pareja’s painting has been attributed to Matías de Torres (Aguilar de Campoo, Palencia, 1635– Madrid, 1711) by José María Quesada, “Perspectivas y batallas de Francisco Gutiérrez y Matías de Torres,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 79 (1994), 278–282. 13 Doval Trueba, Los “velazqueños,” 237–238: the inscription on the canvas portraying Don Alonso de Mora y ViIlalta reads: Alonso de Mora / y ViIlalta Nat. de Malaga / Cauallero de el Orden / de Santiago. 14 Pareja’s The Flight into Egypt, oil on canvas, is in Sarasota, Florida, Bequest of John Ringling, Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Museum of Florida John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art: see Gaya Nuño, “Revisiones sexcentistas: Juan de Pareja,” 276 and Anthony F. Janson (ed.), Great Paintings From the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (New York: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 1986), 113. 15 Pareja’s painting is in the parish church of Santa Olaja de Eslonza, in the province of León. I would like to thank Dr José Antonio Díaz Rojo, then Director of the Instituto de Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación López Piñero (IHCD), Centro mixto de la Universitat de València y del CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) in Valencia, for this invaluable information. 16 The Holy Bible, English New Revised Version: With Illustrations From the Vatican Library (London: HarperCollins, 1996). 17 Victor I. Stoichita, “La imagen del hombre de raza negra en el arte y la literatura españolas del Siglo de Oro,” in Helga von Kügelgen (ed.), Herencias indigenas, tradiciones europeas y la mirada europea (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2002), 259–290, and his chapter “The Image of the Black in Spanish Art,” in David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (eds.), The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, 3, part 1 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 225–226, 228–229, 232–234. 18 Rafael Castañeda García, “Devociones y construcción de identidades entre los negros y mulatos de la Nueva España (s. XVIII),” in Memoria del VI Encuentro Internacional sobre el Barroco. Imagen del Poder (La Paz: Visión Cultural, 2012), 242. See also Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. and adapted by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1941), 561–566. 19 Susan Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain: Sevillian Confraternities and the Processional Sculpture of Holy Week (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 23–24, 48. See H. J. Schroeder (ed.), Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1950), Session 22, 157. See also Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 116–119.

46  Carmen Fracchia 20 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. 2, p. 184: “was given hospitality by the eunuch of Queen Candace, whom Philip had baptized.” 21 Pedro de León, “Compendio de algunas experiencias en los ministerios de que usa la Compañía de Jesús, con que prácticamente se muestra con algunos acontecimientos y documentos el buen acierto en ellos, por orden de los superiores, por el Padre Pedro de León, de la misma Compañía,” in Pedro Herrera Puga (ed.), Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía: Testimonio de una encrucijada histórica (1578–1616) (Granada: Facultad de Teología, 1981), 393–600. I  am extremely grateful to Mairi Macdonald for this reference. 22 Isidoro Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, poder y sociedad en 600 años de Historia (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1997); Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Debra Blumenthal, “ ‘La Casa dels Negres’: Black African Solidarity in Late Medieval Valencia,” in Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe (eds.), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 225–246. 23 R. Pike, Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (London and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 174; Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, 43, 53. 24 Moreno, (1971) La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, 43–44, 54; Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, 178–179. 25 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, 44. The Spanish historian mentions that the black confraternities in the Caribbean and in New World followed this tradition. 26 Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, 33, 34, 35, 38; Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, 223; I. Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas: estructura, simbolismo e identidad (Seville: Editoriales Andaluzas Unidas, 1985), 195; Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: género, raza y religión. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2000), 423. 27 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, 188–189, Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, 140–141; Bernard Vincent, “Devoción a Santa Ifigenia en España,” in Aurelia Martín Casares and Rocío Periáñez Gómez (eds.), Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la España de los siglos XVI–XIX (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2014), 115. 28 Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, 36–37; Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, 59–67. 29 A bibliographical sample is Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, 194–197; Joaquín Álvaro Rubio, La esclavitud en Barcarrota y Salvaleón en el período moderno (Siglos XVI–XVIII) (Badajoz: Diputación de Badajoz, 2005), 173–136; José Luis Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España (Madrid, Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1986), 175; and Philips, Jr., Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, 94. 30 Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, 196–197. See also Castañeda García, “Devociones y construcción de identidades entre los negros y mulatos de la Nueva España (s. XVIII).” 31 Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales y otras fórmulas comunes de la Lengua Castellana, en que van todos los impresos antes y otra gran copia que juntó el Maestro Gonzalo de Correas, Catedrático de Griego y Hebreo en la Universidad de Salamanca (1627), ed. Miguel Mir (Madrid: Jaime Ratés, 1906), 27–28. For the translation of this proverb, see Jeremy Lawrance, “Black Africans in Renaissance Spanish Literature,” in Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe (eds.), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 76.

The Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom  47

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48  Carmen Fracchia Fracchia, C. (2012) “The Urban Slave in Spain and New Spain.” In E. McGrath and J. Michel Massing (eds.), The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem. The Warburg Colloquia Series, vol. 20. London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Ed. Fracchia, C. (2013a) “Metamorphosis of the Self in Early Modern Spain: Slave Portraiture and the Case of Juan de Pareja.” In A. Lugo-Ortiz and A. Rosenthal (eds.), Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Fracchia, C. (2013b) “Spanish Depictions of the Miracle of the Black Leg.” In K. W. Zimmerman (ed.), One Leg in the Grave Revisited: The Miracle of the Transplantation of the Black Leg by the Saints Cosmas and Damian. Groningen: Barkhuis. Franco Silva, A. (1979) La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media. Seville: Gráficas del Sur. Gállego, J. (1976) El pintor, de artesano a artista. Granada: Universidad de Granada. García Sáiz, M. C. (1989) Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico Americano. Milan: Olivetti. Gaya Nuño, J. A. (1957) “Revisiones sexcentistas: Juan de Pareja.” Archivo Español de Arte, 30: 271–285. Gómez García, M. C. and Martín Vergara, J. M. (1993) La esclavitud en Málaga entre los siglos XVII y XVIII. Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga. González Arévalo, R. (2006) La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la Edad Media. Jaén: Universidad de Jaén. Janson, A. F. (ed.) (1986) Great Paintings From the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. New York: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Kagané, L. (2005) La pintura española del Museo del Ermitage: Siglos XV al XIX. Seville: Fundación del Monte. Katzew, I. (ed.) (1996) New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America. New York: Americas Society Art Gallery. Katzew, I. (2004) Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth Century Mexico. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Lawrance, J. (2005) “Black Africans in Renaissance Spanish Literature.” In T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (eds.), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. León, P. de (1981) “Compendio de algunas experiencias en los ministerios de que usa la Compañía de Jesús, con que prácticamente se muestra con algunos acontecimientos y documentos el buen acierto en ellos, por orden de los superiores, por el Padre Pedro de León, de la misma Compañía.” In P. Herrera Puga (ed.), Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía: Testimonio de una encrucijada histórica (1578–1616). Granada: Facultad de Teología. Lomnitz-Adler, C. (1992) Exit From the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and Oxford: University of California Press. López Rey, J. (1963) Velázquez: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Oeuvre. London: Faber and Faber. Lucena Salmoral, M. (2005) Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de América Española (1503–1886): Documentos para su studio. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá and Universidad de Murcia. Madrazo, P. de (1872) Catálogo descriptivo e histórico del Museo del Prado de Madrid. Escuelas Italianas y Españolas. Madrid: Rivadeneyra. Martín Casares, A. (2000) La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: género, raza y religión. Granada: Universidad de Granada.

The Afro-Hispanic struggle for freedom  49 Martín Casares, A. (2005) “Free and Freed Black Africans in Granada in the Time of the Spanish Renaissance.” In T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (eds.), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martínez, M. E. (2008) Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Massing, J. M. (1995) “From Greek Proverb to Soap Advert: Washing the Ethiopian.” Journal of the Warburg and the Courtauld Institutes, 58: 188–191. Méndez Rodríguez, L. (2001) “Gremio y esclavitud en la pintura sevillana del Siglo de Oro.” Archivo Hispalense, 84: 243–256. Minnich, N. H. (2005) “The Catholic Church and the Pastoral Care of Black Africans in Renaissance Italy.” In T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (eds.), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montagu, J. (1983) “Velázquez Marginalia: His Slave Juan de Pareja and His Illegitimate Son Antonio.” Burlington Magazine, 125: 683–685. Moreno, I. (1985) Cofradías y Hermandades andaluzas: estructura, simbolismo e identidad. Seville: Editoriales Andaluzas Unidas. Moreno, I. (1997) La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, poder y sociedad en 600 años de Historia. Seville: Universidad de Sevilla. Ortiz de Zúñiga, D. Anales eclesiásticos y seculares de la Muy Noble y Muy Leal ciudad de Sevilla, metrópoli de Andalucía (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1677). Palomino de Castro y Velasco, A. (1739) “Life of Juan de Pareja.” In An Account of the Lives and Works of the Most Eminent Spanish Painters, Sculptors and Architects, and Where their Several Performances are to be Seen. Translated from the Museum Pictorium of Palomino Velasco. London: Sam. Harding, St. Martin’s-Lane. Palomino de Castro y Velasco, A. (1947) “Juan de Pareja.” In El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–24), vol. 3. Madrid: M. Aguilar. Palomino de Castro y Velasco, A. (1982) “Life of Velázquez.” In El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–24), vol. 3. Madrid: M. Aguilar, trans. E. Harris, Velázquez. Oxford: Phaidon Press Ltd. Payo Hernanz, R. J.“Una Inmaculada de Juan de Pareja”, in Archivo Español de Arte (2013), vol. 86, n. 341, pp. 60-64. Pérez Sánchez, A. E. (2004) “El retrato clásico español.” In Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado (ed.), El Retrato. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Perry, M. E. (1980) Crime and Society in Early Modern Seville. Hanover: University Press of New England. Philips, Jr., W. D. (2014) Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pike, R. (1972) Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century. London and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ponz, A. (1776) Viaje de España en que se da noticia de las cosas más apreciables, y dignas de saberse, que hay en ella, vol. 5. Madrid: D. Joaquín Ibarra, Impresor. Quesada, J. M. (1994) “Perspectivas y batallas de Francisco Gutiérrez y Matías de Torres.” Boletín de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 79: 278–282. Schroeder, H. J. (ed.) (1950) Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. St. Louis, MO: B.Herder Book Co. Stoichita, V. I. (2002) “La imagen del hombre de raza negra en el arte y la literatura españolas del Siglo de Oro.” In H. von Kügelgen (ed.), Herencias indigenas, tradiciones europeas y la mirada europea. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert.

50  Carmen Fracchia Stoichita, V. I. (2010) “The Image of the Black in Spanish Art.” In D. Bindman and H. L. Gates, Jr. (eds.), The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, vol. 3.1. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Swiadon Martínez, G. (2004–2005) “Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de negro del siglo XVII.” Anuario de Letras, 42–43: 285–304. Tiffany, T. J. (2008) “Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velázquez’s Supper at Emmaus.” Art History, 31: 33–56. Verdi Webster, S. (1998) Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain: Sevillian Confraternities and the Processional Sculpture of Holy Week. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vincent, B. (2014) “Devoción a Santa Ifigenia en España.” In A. Martín Casares and R. Periáñez Gómez (eds.), Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la España de los siglos XVI–XIX. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. Voragine, J. de (1995) The Golden Legend, trans. W. G. Ryan, vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

3 Health, raciality, and modernity in colonial Equatorial Guinea* Benita Sampedro Vizcaya

Medical interventions played a pivotal role in shaping the contours of European colonization of Africa: the centrality of medical projects and public health initiatives in the process of territorial expansion should not be underestimated. Spanish scientists and strategists of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century – just like their counterparts in other European nations – uniformly associated the metaphorical health of the colonial project in Africa with the specific demands of public health management and control overseas. Morbidity and disease were a constant preoccupation  – and, occasionally, even an obsession  – for colonial medical officers, administrators, politicians, the military, settlers, and religious orders alike. In the Spanish territories, as in other colonial settings, “Western medicine was generally presented as one of the few indubitable benefits of European imperialism” (Anderson 1998: 522). Yet, as Frantz Fanon cautions us in his essay on medicine and colonialism, statistics on sanitary improvements were “not interpreted by the native as progress in the fight against illness, in general, but as fresh proof of the extension of the occupier’s hold on the country” (1978: 229). The role of medicine and science in the architecture of the colonial administration was, therefore, inextricably intertwined with the legitimization of occupation, and linked to the ostensible ‘civilizing’ mission (Medina Doménech and Molero Mesa 2002: 392). Scholars of the colonial history of medicine are keenly conscious of these considerations in tracing the inherent associations between health and empire, from the “colonial production of disease” to “medicine and public health as technical discourses of colonialism” (Anderson 1998: 523). The development of a biomedical discourse as part of the Spanish colonial enterprise in the Gulf of Guinea contributed, from a very early stage, to the construction of the extensive and elusive entity we call “Africa”, and of the individual African body itself, as a site of disease requiring social repair and as an object of knowledge in a repressive colonial state. As Ruth Mayer has pointed out, even if colonial fears and projections have been progressively overcome, “No other continent has ever gained as dangerous connotations as the African” (2002: 257). Spanish biomedical technologies, that is, research and sciences applied to human health, diseases, and psychology, as well as the political economy of health, served as powerful colonial instruments for domination in the former Spanish Territories on the Gulf of Guinea. They also served as imperializing cultural forces in and of themselves, between the end of the nineteenth century (when the active Spanish colonization of the territories

52  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya officially began in earnest) and 1968 (when the territories obtained independence from Spain). This chapter will examine how colonial biomedical knowledge  – often coming in the shape of a repository of mortality, morbidity, disease, degeneration, and ruination – was produced and applied in this region, and simultaneously brought into circulation in metropolitan Spain for popular consumption or propaganda purposes. Biomedical discourses and practices put to work some of the inherently colonial elements about medicine: it is no revelation to state here that they privilege bodily markers such as gender, race, ethnicity, age group, and even kinship relations, easy categorizations for difference and for otherness. This politics of difference lies at the heart of most technical and scientific debates emanating from colonial medical personnel and health field researchers.1 The purpose of colonial medicine is, of course, not always – and, in fact, not necessarily – local health. It is, instead, a vital administrative colonial instrument, intimately linked to both military and missionary projects: military hygiene is a critical point of transfer, while suffering and sin are inseparable in Catholic medical missionary discourses. Furthermore, the implementation of modern European medical practices in non-European societies has an unquestionable – if perhaps not always easily quantifiable – impact in dislocating and progressively displacing local healing knowledge and traditions. Again, as Fanon points out, “colonialism obviously throws all of the elements of native society into confusion” and, as a result of this unsettlement, “colonial domination distorts the very relations that the colonized maintains with his own culture” (1978: 237). Local responses to colonial biomedical and sanitary impositions, including exposure and forceful subjugation to often humiliating and dehumanizing testing methods, are indispensable parts of the equation in any comprehensive study of colonial health. Yet “we should not assume that the colonial world was a passive receptacle for germ theories or any other form of Western medical knowledge” (Anderson 1998: 526). In fact, manifestations of endless forms of passive and active resistance to mandatory health impositions abound, and often transcend the individual to encompass the collective, impacting the way in which these practices served to confront and stratify local communities along ethnic divides. As a response to the compulsory trypanosomiasis testing, initiated around 1928 in the island of Fernando Poo (today Bioko), Armando Ligero Morote, a member of a second generation of colonial health professionals, took note of the following claim, made by a Bubi plantation worker, in his extensive personal repository of anecdotes, newspaper clippings and health ordinances that circulated in the colony: A nosotros los Bubis nos dan palo por rechazar esa “tontera” de las tomas de sangre por una enfermedad que nos han traído ustedes y sus braceros y al continental, al Fang, ningún castigo, y le dan premio en forma de hacerlos guardias para que nos muelan a palos, latigazos y meternos en la cárcel. [You beat us Bubi because we reject the foolishness of giving blood samples over a disease that you and your workers brought, and [for] the people from the mainland, the Fang, no punishment. In fact you reward them and make the guards to kill us with blows and throw us in jail].2 (Ligero Morote 1997: 135)

Health, raciality, and modernity  53

Image 3.1 Assisting a pharmacist at his desk Fernando Poo, 1929. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Spain.

Although my focus is not exclusively limited to the political economy of health and disease management, this passage may also serve to suggest that the history of medicine illuminates both the power and the limitations of the colonial order. It would be critically unproductive for me to ask what is colonial about European medicine in an African setting. But it seems fair to reframe the question and interrogate, instead, what is distinctive about its practice in a particular colonial context, and how biomedical theories and their implementation contributed, in a definitive way, to solidifying the colonial architecture of power in the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea. In this sense, it might be useful to link the work on the political economy of health with a separate, yet not disparate, body of critique of medicine as a colonial discourse, and its impact on the colonized body, including the gaze of the camera, through genres such as the radio and later the TV, films, photography, and literature in the analysis of the colonial medical imaginary.3 The following pages will also take, as a point of reference, Anna Laura Stoler’s theoretical aspiration in her work on ruins and ruination: “to refocus on the connective tissue that continues to bind human potentials to degraded environments, and degraded personhoods to the material refuse of imperial projects,” and to be able to reflect “on ways of addressing these more protracted imperial processes that saturate the subsoil of people’s lives and persist, sometimes subjacently, over a longer dureé” (2008: 192–193). Although the budget typically assigned by the Spanish colonial administration for local health provisions in their African territories was generally limited and

54  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya insufficient, the impact of colonial sanitary practices on the local population, both in the short and the long term, was pervasive. Succinctly put, “la intervención sanitaria se caracterizó por las medidas asistenciales y la injerencia en el cuerpo de los colonizados” [sanitary intervention was all about social work and medical meddling with the bodies of the colonized] (Medina Doménech and Molero Mesa 2002: 392). Their importance for the rational planner manifests itself consistently in the archived administrative documentation. At a public lecture in Barcelona in 1907, before the Real Sociedad Geográfica, Ángel Barrera y Luyando (General Governor of the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea between 1906 and 1907, and then again between 1910 and 1924), traced a logistical design for the edifice of colonial health: Se debe crear el Cuerpo de Sanidad de la colonia, cuya plana menor la formen los practicantes; que deben construirse hospitales en Santa Isabel y Bata, y emprender trabajos de saneamiento, que mejorarán rápidamente las condiciones de vida en aquellas posesiones.4 [A Health Corps for the colony should be created, with nurses as its foundation; hospitals should be built at Santa Isabel and Bata, and sanitary work initiated. Living conditions in those possessions will improve right away]. (25)5

Image 3.2 Pharmacy storeroom with liquid and injectable medications Fernando Poo, 1929. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Spain.

Health, raciality, and modernity  55 Colonial health, then, occupied a pivotal place within a larger ideological framework. Administrative investment in local sanitary provisions was proportional to the expectations of economic and political returns. Health was not an end in itself, but rather the prerequisite for colonial penetration first, and colonial modernity later. Preserving the health of the European settlers in the colonies responded to the same practical imperative. Unsurprisingly, Barrera y Luyando prefaces his petition, in the same public address, by invoking the ideological order of empire: “Jamás quede abandonada la salud de los que prestan servicio a tu Patria en aquellas latitudes” [The health of those who provide service to the nation in those latitudes should never be neglected] (24). While several scholars specializing on the Spanish Territories in the Gulf of Guinea have produced important research on economic and political history (addressing cocoa production, agricultural revenues and plantation economy, and labour relations), relatively little attention has been paid to the health implications of the Spanish colonial interventions. Yet a small flurry of articles and collective volumes on the history of colonial sciences and medicine (those by Medina Doménech, Molero Mesa, Meléndez Navarro, Díez Torre, Belaustegui Fernández, and De Granda Orive), as well as on collateral health issues such as the alcoholization of the local populations (Perlasia 2009), has already started to lay some of the groundwork in the field. Moreover, scholars have also begun to address local medical knowledge, practices, and tradition in a postcolonial context in a range of productive ways (Fons 2004; Sales Encinas and Sánchez Zarzosa 1990; Gómez Marín 1989; Sainz de la Maza and González Kirchner 1985; and Jones). From the very beginning, the first preoccupations of early Spanish settlers in the Territories of the Gulf of Guinea – in the mid-nineteenth century – were health and hygiene. The urge to domesticate foreign lands and peoples, to rationalize and categorize them, marked the initial military and civilian projects in the region. Spanish sanitary provisions for the territory arrived simultaneously with the first administration in 1858.6 As De Granda Orive observes, in his study of military health in Fernando Poo during the regime of the brigadiers (1858–1868): The first organic statutes of the colony, passed in 1858, established a new administrative and military organization for the islands, which tried to push forward the colonization of Guinea. During the ten years of applicability of this decree the governors of these possessions were four Army brigadiers, while a Medical Service platoon was responsible for the medical care of the population. (2011: 53) Not surprisingly, natural history and biomedical sciences went hand in glove in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Hygiene and public health, applied to the colonial context, produced a substantial amount of empirical research blending health, geography, and the natural context or environment: the genre of “medical topography,” which conceived the genesis and evolution of any particular illness as closely associated with the climate and the region. Theories of geographical

56  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya determinism were, of course, in full force. Although the related concept of medical geographies was not entirely new, it encountered a new raison d’etre, and new vitality, in this formative phase of European colonial expansion in Africa. Medical treatises scientifically ratified the intrinsic relationship between space, health, and nation within the colonial framework. Statistics and data on meteorology, hydrology, demographics, forest density, and agriculture were intertwined, as part of the same empirical argumentation. These medical topologies were usually financed, commissioned, and promoted by government, military, institutions or agencies who, in turn, benefited directly from the results of the research. It was not until the development of bacteriology, which began to conceive illness as a purely biological phenomenon  – in the case of Spain by the 1910s  – that these medical topographies began to fade. In the Spanish Territories in the Gulf of Guinea, José Villar Rubín y Yedra, member of the military health division, was appointed to Fernando Poo in 1861 with the task of writing a Historia Natural y Médica de la isla;7 for his part, Antonio San Martín y Montes published in 1867 his Estudios topográfico-médicos en la isla de Fernando Poo. As late as 1893, army doctor Luis López Saccone defended his doctoral dissertation with the title, Apuntes médico-geográficos sobre la isla de Fernando Poo. This tradition, of course, encompassed territories far beyond the African colonies. The army doctor Federico Montaldo, who had held positions in other island locations of the Spanish empire prior to his appointment to Fernando Poo, authored two treatises in 1898: the Guía práctica, higiénica y médica del europeo en los países tórridos (Filipinas, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Fernando Poo, etc.), and Fernando Poo: observaciones médicas e higiénicas. Montaldo highlighted the pivotal role of hygiene in every colonial enterprise, expressing high praise for the military hygiene implemented by the British in the Ashanti territory (in modern Ghana) and by the Germans in Cameroon. Health inspections constituted a great part of colonial military strategy, and typically preceded the arrival of any new detachment. Treatises like Montaldo’s were designed to provide guidance to the Europeans back in the metropolis, with specific instructions and warnings for travellers and settlers on how best to prepare for the experience: Todavía en los albores de este siglo, eran las tierras intertropicales el foco de que irradiaban infinitas leyendas seductoras, sin más base ni fundamento que la imaginación descarriada de viajeros indoctos, antes poetas líricos que observadores técnicos y cuyas descripciones floridas encantaban á los Gobiernos y embaucaban á las gentes, haciéndoles creer que en estas regiones intertropicales todo eran jardines deliciosos, naturaleza pródiga y eternas primaveras. De ahí nacieron, y sólo así se explican en cierto modo, esas expediciones colonizadoras, seguidas de aterradores fracasos, que sembraron de cadáveres europeos todos estos soñados paraísos é infundieron el terror en los Gobiernos. [The intertropical lands were, even at the turn of the century, still the source of endless seductive legends, without more foundation or basis than the derailed imagination of unschooled travellers, who were more lyrical

Health, raciality, and modernity  57 poets than technical observers, and whose flowery descriptions charmed the governments and deceived the people, making them believe that these intertropical regions were all delightful gardens, prodigious nature, and eternal spring. From this were born – and this is the only way that some of it can be explained – these colonizing expeditions that ended in terrifying failures, planted European corpses in all these dreamed-of paradises, and filled governments with terror.] (Montaldo 1898b: 3) These manuals further extended the premise of “la influencia de la higiene en el mejor éxito de las empresas coloniales” [the influence of hygiene as the major element of success in colonial enterprises] to the realm of sexuality, anxiously demarcating sexual boundaries and indicating the supposed consequences of racial contamination. As Anne McClintock has pointed out, “in the eyes of policymakers and administrators, the bounds of empire could be secured and upheld only by proper domestic discipline and decorum, sexual probity and moral sanitation” (1995: 47). Some of these treatises are loaded with racist and misogynistic warnings, born out of the same social categories that generally operated to justify the colonial enterprise as a whole: Frente a la abundancia y baratura de la fácil mercancía femenina, ya se pague en dinero ó en comodidades, ó en satisfacciones de los sentidos y de la vanidad, que de todo esto hay, se levantan casi siempre los obstáculos, sea dicho en honor al buen gusto europeo, de la fealdad y de la porquería, generales en la mujer indígena, capaces de levantar también el estómago á cualquiera, y el que opone muchas veces la propia dignidad á un comercio carnal en el que sólo puede tomar parte la bestia que cada hombre lleva en sí. [Given the abundance and cheapness of the easy female merchandise, whether paid for in money or commodities, or by way of the satisfaction of the senses or in vanity, because all of that is involved, obstacles are always in the way, let it be said in honour of European good taste, of ugliness and crudity, which are normal in the local women, enough to make anyone puke, and to which one’s own sense of dignity objects as regards a transaction of the flesh in which only the beast that lives in each man can take part.] (Montaldo 1898a: 6–7) The hygienist tradition had a long life among biomedical practitioners and theoreticians in Spain, and occasionally generated interesting (if sometimes unintended) perspectives on geographical sciences, regional and ethnographic studies, ecology, and relevant anthropological data collections. In his study from 1900, Fernando Poo y sus dependencias. Descripción, producciones y estado sanitario, Pablo Ferrer Piera articulated a medical metaphor to define Spain’s imperial position within the larger European context, one that imbricates health and imperialism, body and nation. Four long chapters on malarial infections, testing, etiology, and clinical treatment were followed with an optimistic survey of the

58  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya “Estado sanitario de Fernando Poo” [Sanitary conditions in Fernando Poo], and concluded with a chapter full of medical recommendations to make these colonies “prósperas y felices, levantando con ellas el prestigio de esta infortunada España” [prosperous and happy, raising with them the prestige of this unfortunate country, Spain] (205). For today’s reader, perhaps the most striking portion of his book is the detailed description of his tours around the island of Fernando Poo, his visit to the different elders in the various towns and communities, and his observations of local medical practice. His stop in the town of Batete on the southern part of the island, where he meets with the elder authority of the community, prompts a sustained appraisal of medical knowledge among the Bubi community: Practican la Medicina y Cirujía con bastante sentido común. Sumamente parcos en la medicina interna, se contentan con administrar purgantes, estimulantes y diaforéticos. Usan una planta sumamente aromática en la pulmonía, otra para las hematurias y otra para el paludismo. Las demás, repito, son de aplicación general y las administran con cautela, por conocer las propiedades tóxicas de algunas. . . . El tratamiento de las fracturas en nada varía del usado por nosotros. . . . Practican asimismo la sangría en la mediana basilica. [They practice medicine and surgery with much common sense. Extremely frugal in internal medicine, they are satisfied with administering purgatives, stimulants, and diaphoretics. They use an aromatic plant for pneumonia, another one for hematuria and yet another one for malaria. The rest, I repeat, are for general use and they administer them with caution, as they are aware of the toxic properties of some of them. . . . The treatment of fractures does not differ from our methods. . . . Similarly they practice bloodletting as we do, using medium sized veins]. (116–118) There is no doubt that his studies were born of a self-interested conception of public health, in which most of the premises and supporting statistics are based on casualties from within the colonial military forces and administration, and are designed to prevent future ones. The primary focus of colonial public health was preserving the life of the European population and military personnel, not the local population; except, of course, when epidemics began to decimate the local workforce to a degree that posed a serious threat not just to individual Europeans but to the colonial economy itself. Aside from its pragmatic implications, this implicit association between Africa and the supposed “terror” described above by Montaldo – linked with disease, death, and cadavers – is a classical trope of fear of the unknown in the western imagination (Quinlan 2005: 106). Concepts of race, pollution and purity had entered the debate over diseases and the politics of public health in the African colonial context since very early on; but always, a particular diseased body was the result of an inherently diseased human and geographical environment. As Quinlan has noted, “in contrast to physicians in Europe (who emphasized differences of class), colonial doctors frequently laid stress on biological differences of a racial type” (2005: 107).

Health, raciality, and modernity  59 The etiology of malaria, which was among the earliest and most frightening concerns for Spanish settlers and participants in scientific expeditions in the region, along with yellow fever and smallpox epidemics, frequently invoked racist principles and practices, including segregation or forced labour. Luis López Saccone described malaria through this prism of scientific racism, and asserted confidently that “blacks seem to have a certain resistance against malaria, which allows them to tolerate the hardships of work in the fields without dying” (cited in Medina Doménech 2003: 395). This, of course, was a claim with wide currency throughout the nineteenth century and beyond in biomedical discourses about Africa. Assumptions of medical immunity to diseases permeated the medical repositories for, in colonial circumstances, race was always intertwined with susceptibility to disease as the basic framework for scientific or pseudo-scientific analysis. It is true that López Saccone nuanced his statement slightly: malaria affects all races, but affects the Caucasian more emphatically. Racial disparity, therefore, came to provide the scientific rationale for the justification of exploitation: No creemos que exista una raza que pueda citarse como tipo de inmunidad para el paludismo. Limitándonos á nuestra observación personal, podemos afirmar que los individuos de raza negra que viven en Fernando Póo, padecen fiebres muy frecuentes, aunque conservando una especie de tolerancia muy relativa que no han llegado á adquirir aún los cubanos y europeos que viven en la isla. En estos últimos, la influencia nociva de la localidad se refleja de un modo tan poderoso, que no creo haya ninguno que pueda afirmar no haber padecido fiebre después de una larga estancia en el país. Extendiendo estas consideraciones á otros lugares en las que existen representantes de razas diversas, parece comprobarse la aseveración. [We don’t believe that any race exists that can say of itself that it enjoys immunity from malaria. Based on our personal observation, we can state that individuals of the black race who live on Fernando Póo frequently suffer from fever, although they do have a kind of relative tolerance that the Cubans or the Europeans who live on the island have not yet acquired. As to the latter, the negative impact of the place is so powerfully evident, that I don’t believe that there is anyone who can say that they have not been affected by the fever after having spent a long time in the country. We can prove my assertion by making a comparison with other places where different races live.] (López Saccone 1893: 35–36) Malaria was an illness with particular importance, in the eye of the medical Spanish administrator, allowing or impeding access to the continent. Reflecting on his experiences as a colonial doctor in an interview after the Spanish Civil War, another army doctor, Nájera Ángulo, recalled that, “fue un español . . . quien al descubrir las quinas nos entregó la llave de los países tropicales y especialmente de África . . . Gracias a esta nueva arma . . . es como el hombre blanco ha podido penetrar en los países tropicales” [it was a Spaniard . . . who, upon discovering quinine, gave us the keys to tropical countries and especially Africa. . . . Thanks to

60  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya this new weapon . . . the White man can penetrate tropical countries] (1944: 302). And he continued, “el siglo veinte será el siglo de la colonización africana . . . Pero toda empresa colonizadora es fundamentalmente y antes que todo empresa sanitaria” [the twentieth century will be the century of African colonization . . . but all colonization is basically an exercise in sanitation] (1944: 302). Some diseases sparked the imagination of colonial administrators and health inspectors more sharply than others although, again, for rational strategists, health was not an end in itself, but rather a prerequisite for colonial development (Davidovitch and Greenberg 2007). This fact is starkly illustrated by one of the most devastating health issues in the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea during the first part of the twentieth century: the massive circulation of imported alcohol. The European commerce in liquor, and the constant influx of wine and other alcohol products, created widespread addiction. As one historian reports: “las grandes cantidades de licor vendidas a principios del siglo veinte hacen pensar en un consumo masivo: en una sola factoría, la Staner de Punta Mosquito, se vendieron 9.700 botellas de caña en sólo tres meses” [the great quantities of liquor sold at the beginning of the twentieth century make one of think in terms of massive consumption: in a single factory, Staner at Punta Mosquito, in only 3 months 9,700 bottles of cane rum were sold] (Nerín 2010: 154). By the year 1920, the Spanish colonial governor, Ángel Barrera, was aware of the “alcohol poisoning” of the local population, but he was also constrained by the lucrative opportunities that this commodity represented for metropolitan lobbies, such as the Spanish National Association of Wine Producers.8 The alcoholization of the population went side by side with a form of structural infantilization: ultimate responsibility regarding the local population’s health – or lack thereof – resided, in the end, with their respective colonial master or local administrator. This was an instrumental feature in the automatic reinforcement of racial, ethnic, and class boundaries. The extractive economic practices that characterized the island of Fernando Poo  – and increasingly the continental part of the territory today comprising Equatorial Guinea – during the first decade of the twentieth century were mirrored in the realm of medicine by the newly generalized medical practice of blood tests. The massive extraction of blood was a process that particularly targeted the male population, which constituted the bulk of the workforce in the plantations and timber industry. It is against this backdrop that we can best critically assess the symbolic impact of some of the medico-scientific expeditions to the Gulf of Guinea, including the one led in 1909 by the parasitologist Gustavo Pittaluga, commissioned by the National Hygiene Instituted directed in Madrid by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Pittaluga’s immediate objective was to conduct studies on trypanosomiasis,9 the cause of an important mortality rate during the first two decades of the century, which he compiled in his book Estudios sobre la enfermedad del sueño y de las condiciones sanitarias de la colonia (1910), and on the various reports he produced for the administration as a result of the expedition.10

Health, raciality, and modernity  61

Image 3.3 Itinerary of the Commission of the Instituto Nacional de Higiene, headed by Dr. Pittaluga Fernando Poo, and Guinea Continental Española, 1909.

He generated large numbers of statistics through compulsory blood tests. The deepest significance of these mandatory blood extractions, beyond their metonymical value, is that in a colonial culture that progressively implemented the enforcement of public health policies, such practices served to effectively establish new checkpoints. Blood tests became one among many mechanisms of colonial

62  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya

Image 3.4 Itinerary of the Commission of the Instituto Nacional de Higiene, headed by Dr. Pittaluga Fernando Poo, and Guinea Continental Española, 1909.

surveillance technology. A “blood test certificate” became mandatory for any of the basic transactions of the local population in a colonially regulated system: El análisis de sangre acabó convirtiéndose en un sistema de vigilancia de la población al hacerse obligatorio el ‘certificado de análisis’ para la expedición del pasaporte y prohibiéndose, en su defecto, la salida del país. . . . Esta

Health, raciality, and modernity  63 intervención masiva en el cuerpo de los nativos no se produjo sin la resistencia, en ocasiones enérgica, de la población. [Blood tests ended up becoming a system of surveillance over the population as the “blood test certificate” became compulsory for issuance of passports and without which it was forbidden to leave the country. . . . This massive intervention on the native’s body was not done without the resistance, energetic on occasion, of the local population.] (Medina Doménech and Molero Mesa 2002: 393) Such sanitary policies predicated the enforcement of public control of maritime and land movements and migration, health inspections at ports and other entrance points, establishing new sanitary frontiers (Barona Vilar and Bernabeu-Mestre 2008). They also produced large numbers of medical statistics, and the creation of new centres for the study of health to train nurses, doctors, and specially health aid practitioners of the lower ranks selected from among the local elites.11 This policy was accelerated and intensified after World War I: in 1928, a new health document – the “health passport” – was summarily imposed by means of a population mapping that included door-to-door health inspections of villages, from the closest to the most remote. Without these documents, people could not move freely from one locality to another, cross borders into neighbouring countries (Cameroon or Gabon, where this health passport had also been implemented), sign a job contract or any other formal agreement, effect any commercial transaction, obtain a hunting license, get married, or obtain a permit to build even a modest house. Those passports were to have a number of required stamps: clear of trypanosomiasis; fit for work; vaccinated against smallpox, and later on, clear of leprosy (Ligero Morote 1997: 136). This mandatory document, which was to be validated by an official stamp, represented an effective new tax on the population. If, at first, it was only required for adults, it was soon extended to the whole population. There were costly fines for the violation of these procedures, so unaffordable for most that they could only be paid with a prison term or commuted with forced labour. Gustau Nerín provides further details on its implementation across the territory: Las autoridades coloniales obligaban a grandes masas de población a pasar pruebas médicas y extendían miles de cartillas sanitarias que la mayoría de sus portadores no comprendían, pero que resultaban vitales para su futuro: eran necesarias para desplazarse por el país, para firmar un contrato, para obtener licencia de armas e, incluso, para solicitar permiso para construir una casa. En Guinea, como mucha gente no llevaba ropa, o la llevaba sin bolsillos, la administración repartía una especie de jaulas metálicas para guardar los certificados que se colgaban con una cuerda del cuello o del taparrabos. [Colonial authorities forced great masses of people to pass medical tests and they gave health certificates that the majority of the bearers did not understand, but which were useful for their future: they were necessary in order to travel about the country, to sign a contract, to get a gun licence, and even to get a permit to build a house. In Guinea, as many people went without

64  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya clothes, or whose clothes did not have pockets, the administration handed out a kind of metal box for keeping the certificates and which they would hang on a string around their neck or from their loincloth.] (2010: 162) Guinean historian and writer Donato Ndongo Bidyogo reflects critically on the longue durée effects of such health passports, claiming that, “han generado toda una cultura represiva, pues aún en la actualidad, los gobiernos nacionales que sustituyeron a los coloniales han continuado la costumbre como método de represión y control de la población” [they have generated such a culture of repression, that even today, the national governments that took over from the

Image 3.5 Health tax stamp, Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Spain.

Health, raciality, and modernity  65 colonial ones have continued this custom as a means of repression and control of the population] (1998: 150). However, it was the last phase of the colonial period – after World War II – that marked the apex in the proliferation of scientific reports filled with anthropometric charts (weight, height, size, thorax, vision angle, dexterity, memory), and, as a new addition, the child psychology tests, with specific applications to pedagogy and labour performance. Intelligence tests were conducted across the board in schools and orphanages in the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea. Books such as El niño guineano. Estudio antropométrico y psicotécnico del niño negro, published by colonial school director Jesús de la Serna y Burgaleta in 1956, were the scientific result of hundreds of soi-disant intelligence tests on children age 6 to 14, with data analysis on vision angle, hearing ability, memory, and attention measurements, fusing the disciplines of pedagogy and psychology to map out the younger population and their workforce potential. The results of these tests allowed the author to advance the thesis that “pueden llegar a considerar al niño negro como un ‘ligeramente retrasado mental’ o un ‘retrasado pedagógico’ pues su atraso más tiene de debilidad derivada de causas accidentales que de tara mental” [the black child can be considered to be ‘slightly mentally retarded’ or as ‘educationally backward’ as his backwardness is more a result of accidental causes than mental ones] (85–86). In practical terms, this exemplifies the expansion of the colonial architecture of health into a new realm, that of education; that is, education as a powerful colonizing agent, at the doorsteps of colonial modernity. Another such study, widely referenced due to its highly inflammatory title, Capacidad mental del negro, was published by two doctors of the Servicio Sanitario Colonial, Vicente Beato and Ramón Villarino in 1952. This too, was part of a larger bibliographical corpus of heavily racialized colonial bio-knowledge production, meant to provide means of educational intervention, and work exploitation, through the maximization of effectiveness.12 The methodology under which these tests operated, and which the Spanish colonial system appropriated and adapted to its colonizing projects, had been formulated decades earlier by psychologists Robert Yerkes and Alfred Binet. The Spanish administration applied them not just to children, but also to teachers, health care workers, members of the colonial guard, and other local employees of the colonial administration. Beato and Villarino’s treatise starts off with a number of questions, ¿Qué es capaz de hacer este hombre negro . . . ?¿Qué capacidad somática y psíquica alcanza a desarrollar? . . . ¿Qué trabajo es capaz de desarrollar? La solución de todos estos problemas la consideramos absolutamente necesaria, si queremos colonizar racionalmente nuestros territorios. [What is this Negro capable of doing.  .  .? What somatic and psychical capacity is he capable of achieving. . .? What tasks can he develop? The solution of all these problems is considered by us to be absolutely necessary if we are going to colonize our territories rationally.] (Beato and Villarino 14)

66  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya Their answer was extremely pragmatic: Los ‘entendidos’ dicen que el negro es la columna vertebral de la colonización africana; sin él no sería posible la explotación de este continente salvaje y preñado de riquezas. No podemos pues, prescindir del negro. Su brazo es sustantivo para el logro de los fines colonizadores en los tiempos presentes. Hay que conseguir, por tanto, por medio de una labor sanitaria organizada, futuros braceros lo más sanos y fuertes posible. [Those “in the know” say that the Negro is the backbone of African colonization; without him it would not be possible to exploit this savage continent full of riches. We cannot, therefore, do without the Negro. His labour is necessary for carrying out the colonizing tasks of the present time. It is thus necessary, by means of organized sanitary work, to get future workers who are as strong and healthy as possible.] (Beato and Villarino 16) This is not to say that these tests did not meet with resistance; children in particular often tested their examiners’ patience by not providing any answers in the time allocated for each trial, typically set at 45 to 60 minutes, according to the doctors: En ocasiones, aún después de asegurarnos bien de que habíamos sido comprendidos, no daba respuesta ni buena ni mala, siendo el silencio la única contestación. Aquí es en donde se ponía a prueba nuestra paciencia. [On occasion, even after we had confirmed that they had understood us, they gave neither a good nor a bad response, and silence was their only reply. Here is where our patience was put to the test.] (Beato and Villarino 20–21) Their study rested, in large part, on faulty evaluation of skewed results based on illegitimate scientific premises, mediated by the evaluators’ own limitations in understanding local cultural and environmental criteria, and behavioural patterns, compounded by short-sighted preparation. One particularly striking feature in the topography of colonial biomedical repression and confinement in Equatorial Guinea was the leper colony in the city of Mikomeseng, established in the 1930s and officially inaugurated in 1945.13 Mikomeseng is a town located near the border with Cameroon and, although it is a deeply inland territory, during the colonial period it was in effect an institutional island, the kind of institution that Ann Laura Stoler has eloquently termed “the carceral archipelago of empire” (2008: 203). In the 1940s the number of cases of leprosy in peninsular Spain itself increased exponentially as a result of the devastation and poverty that followed the Civil War. The Franco dictatorship perceived this pandemic as an international embarrassment, and sanitary provisions were put in place across the nation. The campaign to eradicate leprosy in the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea resided partially in the fact that it allowed the

Health, raciality, and modernity  67 colonial regime the opportunity for imperial redemption through the relief of suffering. This campaign was characterized, both in Spain and in the colonies, by close collaboration with the Catholic Church. As Martínez Antonio points out, the Franco regime capitalized on its sanitary interventions in Africa: En Guinea, el franquismo tuvo su espacio de mayor potencial colonialista en el ámbito de la salud y la enfermedad. La malaria, la fiebre amarilla o la enfermedad del sueño habrían permitido y justificado la elaboración de un discurso “colonial” o “tropical” con el que patologizar y uniformizar al conjunto de la población en base a criterios raciales. . . . Guinea sirvió como espacio preferente de representación simbólica de las amenazas a que debía enfrentarse el primer franquismo y de la represión que debía ejercerse sobre ellas. En este sentido, el discurso de la lepra fue subordinante y patologizador, algo que se refleja claramente en Los enfermos de Mikomeseng, no sólo en la institución de la leprosería, sino en los propios saberes y prácticas científicos relativos a la enfermedad. [In Guinea, the Franco regime’s greatest area of influence was in the field of health and illness. Malaria, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness had allowed and justified the elaboration of a “colonial” or “tropical” discourse used to pathologise and homogenise the entire population along racial ­criteria. . . . Guinea served as a preferred space for the symbolic representation of the threats that early Francoism needed to face, and the repression that in turn needed to be exercised. In this sense, the discourse around leprosy was pathologising and inferiorising, something that is reflected clearly in The Sick People of Mikomeseng, not only in the leprosarium, but in the knowledge and scientific practices related to the illness.] (2009: 13) This imperialist agenda of the dictatorship was partially constructed through the commission and dissemination of colonial films and other visual artefacts, focusing the lens on colonial health provisions. As Cécile Stehrenberger analyses, the Francoist filmmaker Manuel Hernández Sanjuan, through his company Hermic Films, produced four documentaries focusing on health services in the colony in 1946: Los enfermos de Micomeseng, Médicos coloniales, Tsé-Tsé, and Fiebre amarilla. A fifth one, Misión Sanitaria, on the treatment of leprosy, was shot in 1953 (Stehrenberger 2014). The dictatorial regime in Spain was never short of publicists for their African colonies.14 Yet on the ground Mikomeseng was, quite literally, a colony within a colony; it offered the colonial public health administration the possibility of bioengineering a new local community and space under metropolitan values and categories.15 The fortress-like compound included a hospital (with operating room and maternity ward); a clinic for daily treatment and examinations; lines of huts for the inmates; a central house for the Spanish doctors, nurses, and administrators; a church; and an area for cultivating crops, since it was to be operated as an agricultural settlement, drawing on the mandatory labour of the interned men and women. The most feared section of

68  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya this architecture of confinement was the isolation unit. The structure effectively embodied a small, independent, highly controlled and totalitarian mini-state, with its own metal currency,16 official regulations, and medical authorities. Every hour of the day, work and kinship relations were monitored, while life and death were at the mercy of those in charge. With gates and walls permanently patrolled by the colonial guard, the space guaranteed complete isolation from the outside world for the patients confined inside. In the year 1946, a new hygiene feature was added at Mikomeseng, and in other locations: the so-called Casa-cuna (or orphanage, although it was not in fact exclusively designed for orphans, but also for the children of leper patients). Managed exclusively by Spanish nuns from the health services personnel, these institutions highlighted the repressive nature of the confinement policy: all babies born of patients from the leper colony were to be forcefully taken away from their mothers at birth, and raised as orphans, or given to foster families after the age of 5. This was another way in which the health system (aided by the Catholic Church) exercised power over the female body, by controlling the birthrate. Doctor Martínez Domínguez, director of the centre at Mikomeseng, admitted that “eran frecuentes los casos de ocultación de niños y de fuga de gestantes para evitar la separación” [cases of the hiding of children and of pregnant mothers escaping were frequent, to avoid the separation of mother and child] (42). One of the collateral impacts of these policies was that the infant mortality of children raised in orphanages and separated from their parents was astonishingly high; for some years, it was reported to be higher than 70 per cent, while the mortality rate of children raised directly by parents was at least five times lower (Martínez Domínguez 42). Administrators provided terse explanations, blaming the fact on the inability of black children at the orphanage to tolerate baby formula (Martínez Domínguez 42–43). The repressive force imposed on the population by these health care facilities cannot be entirely disconnected from the fact that in Equatorial Guinea, it was precisely at cities like Mikomeseng that the first emancipation movements of the country emerged, during the 1950s, by such pro-independence leaders as Acacio Mañe, Enrique Nvo, and others. The ruined body of the leper was a particularly critical site of colonial intervention. This extended to their capacity to develop family relations, modes of parenthood, ethnic and community relations. The leper’s body, as a symbolic site in ruins, contains an important traffic in meaning, and it can be reframed in this form of ruination as a moment in a broader history of biomedical technology implementations. The theme of ruins, as an allegory of the body dismembered, resurges in the colonial and administrative categorization and treatment of the diseased body; it is a powerful trope that condenses images and meaning. Most treatises on leprosy, as well as of other illnesses, resemble nothing less than a tropical medic’s catalogue of horrors: they often display full-page photographic collections of the most dehumanizing forms of diseases. From elephantiasis of the scrotum to advanced cases of leprosy, the display of human monstrosity in these books is rampant. Sometimes they provide the image before and after the treatment, as proof of the system’s professional success. They expose the relentless

Health, raciality, and modernity  69 empiricism of the early tropical doctor, and the obsession with cataloguing and labelling the territory and its peoples, while the subjects of their study appear nameless, expressionless, unengaged, a scientific objectification under which we often read a caption with statistics, biometrics, and pharmaceutical verbiage. Collections of anonymous body fragments, limbs, parts of faces, faces from different angles, are underlined by the treatment or the diagnosis on these treaties: Photograph number 1: Treatment from January 1950 to September 1952 (Sulphetrone, 896 pills of 0.5 grams; Diasone, 152 pills of 0.3 grams); Photograph number 2 . . . (Martínez Domínguez 1954). The complexity of the relationship between picture and colonialism makes it difficult either to display or even to describe these archives of illnesses, body deformities, and other representations of human ruination as they appear in these scientific and pseudo-scientific colonial texts. As Nancy Rose Hunt cautions us, we should not repeat and not reproduce the tenacity of the visual, and the sense of shock that it inflicts (2008). Here, as elsewhere, the body becomes an occasion for a taxonomical reflection. The visual and the health sciences supplement one another: photography had emerged as an ostensibly scientific mode of representing human types, used to measure and display people’s bodies. Colonial bodies and colonial minds had been “the subject of concern, scrutiny, anxiety, and surveillance” in the colonial architecture of health in the former Spanish Territories of Equatorial Guinea. They received – and retained – “the attention of imperial officials in ways that demonstrate how crucial its management was believed to be for social order and political stability” (Ballantyne and Burton 2005: 5).

Image 3.6 Hospital building at the leper compound, Mikomeseng, Equatorial Guinea, 2011 Photo by Benita Sampedro Vizcaya.

70  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya Attentive to “unexpected sites in which earlier imperial formations have left their bold-faced or subtle traces and in which contemporary inequities work their way through them” (Stoler 2013: 3), I have engaged here with the colonial biomedical apparatus to problematize questions of duration, reproduction, and repetition. The immense social and economic inequalities, which persist today in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea,17 beg serious questions regarding the recently restored compound of the leper colony in Mikomeseng, the various orphanages across the geography of the country, the hospitals at Malabo or Bata, and many other precariousat-best medical or infirmary facilities in Equatorial Guinea. Under what conditions are these sites left to ruin, re-consigned, remodelled, or abandoned to their fate? Some such ruins are ignored, as innocuous leftovers; others have endured; still others are stubbornly inhabited, making a political point to the present. In the end, as Ann Laura Stoler aptly reflects, “Modernity and capitalism can account for the left aside, but not where people are left, what they are left with, and what means they have to deal with what remains” (2008: 204).

Notes * I wish to thank Jerome C. Branche for the translations into English of all Spanish quotations in this chapter, and for the opportunity which the conference he organized at Pittsburgh in November  2015, under the same title as this volume, afforded for dialogue and exchange on the subject. A team grant from the Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitivity [Code # 1913–1916 HAR2012–34599] for a project titled “What we know, what we ignore, and what we make up about the past and present of Equatorial Guinea: Multidisciplinary critical revision and new paths for research” facilitated research exchanges. A 2013–2014 Hispanex grant was instrumental in conducting archival research. I also wish to thank colleagues at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, at Harvard University’s Dudley House, and at the University of Warwick, for their comments on earlier formulations of this essay. A shorter and preliminary version, in Spanish, appeared in the journal Éndoxa, Series Filosóficas under the title “La economía política de la sanidad colonial en Guinea Ecuatorial.” 1 This is, of course, by no means exclusive to the European colonization of Africa, as Shula Marks has studied in relation to the Australia’s Northern Territories, “the discourse of ‘tropical medicine’ was  .  .  . used both to assert the capacity of settlers to survive in the tropics and to justify the control of a ‘pathologized’ Aboriginal people and their confinement to reserves. Thus, as in Africa, ‘tropical medicine’ was used to justify segregation and highly coercive forms of medical intervention at times of epidemic disease” (1997: 213). 2 All translations of quotations, from Spanish into English, are by the editor. 3 On the role of radio, TV, film, and literature in the process of dissemination and popularization of colonial sciences and medical technologies there is already an extensive body of scholarship in Spanish, including the work by Fernandez-Fígares Romero de la Cruz 2003; Medina Doménech and Menéndez Navarro 2005; Martin-Márquez 2008; Martínez Antonio 2009; Tabernero Holgado 2010; A. Elena 2010; Bayre and Valenciano Mañé 2009, 2011; and Stehrenberger 2014, among others. 4 “Lo que son y lo que deben ser las posesiones españolas del Golfo de Guinea. Conferencia leída en reunión extraordinaria de la Real Sociedad Geográfica el 20 de junio de 1907.” 5 Medina Doménech provides a persuasive political and economic rationale to explain the sudden influx, in both legislation (including public health provisions) and funding,

Health, raciality, and modernity 71 towards the Spanish territories in Africa around 1928: “Entre las razones de este súbito afán legislador del gobierno por la colonia guineana pueden señalarse: la intensificación del reformismo social como única fuente de legitimación nacional e internacional de la dictadura en esta etapa del régimen dirigida a la creación de un nuevo estado; la pacificación de Marruecos (1927) y la consiguiente liberación presupuestaria para las arcas estatales; la reforma administrativa de la estructura política colonial – ahora dependiente directamente de Presidencia dentro de la recién creada Dirección General de Marruecos y Colonias – ; y, quizá, cierto clima cultural proclive a lo africano” [Among the reasons behind this sudden interest by the government in legislation for the colony in Guinea are the following: the intensification of social reform as the only source of national and international legitimation for the dictatorship at this stage of the regime, intent, as it is, on creating a new state; the pacification of Morocco (1927), and the subsequent budgetary freeing up of the state coffers; the administrative reform of the colonial political structure – at present directly dependent upon the Presidency within the recently created General Directory of Morocco and the Colonies; and perhaps, a certain political climate that favors things African] (2003: 406). 6 “Around 1834 some traders from the Balearic Islands set up a hospital on Corisco to treat sailors suffering from fever. In 1858 the Governor of Fernando Po, Carlos Chacón, brought with him a doctor and a prefabricated hospital” (Liniger Goumaz 1989: 27–28). 7 Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares. Section 15 (4), box 81/6963. 8 Gustau Nerín provides further data: “El Consejo de Vecinos de Santa Isabel se opuso en 1926 a la imposición de tasas a la venta de vinos, porque consideraba que esta medida afectaría duramente a los comerciantes españoles. En 1915 el ron, el coñac y el aguardiente eran los productos más utilizados para practicar el intercambio con los fang. Y entre 1917 y 1928, el comercio de alcohol no hizo sino aumentar” [The Santa Isabel Citizens Council objected in 1926 to the imposition of taxes on the sale of wine, because it considered that this would affect Spanish business harshly. In 1915, rum, cognac, and whiskey were the products most used for barter with the Fang people. And between 1917 and 1928, business in alcohol only increased] (2010: 155). 9 According to Corral-Corral and Rodríguez Navarro, “Along four months they travelled through the Spanish territories of Guinea, collecting clinical and epidemiological information on sleeping sickness and other diseases, and examining a great number of patients, who had hematological and parasitological studies performed” (2012: 49). 10 Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares. Section 15 (4), box 81/6436 contains numerous reports, and test results of this expedition. 11 In 1934, the Revista Estampa, of wide circulation in Spain, opened its pages with a long article entitled “Las negras de Guinea se hacen modistas, enfermeras, mecanógrafas” [Black Guinea women are becoming stylists, nurses, secretaries], including the display of several photographs of young Guinean women receiving training in the peninsula for these professions. 12 As Tabernero Holgado aptly points out in his analysis of the discourses and representations of colonial Africa under the Franco dictatorship in Spain, and in relation to its propaganda institutions: “El carácter ‘científico’ que el régimen quiere otorgar a la empresa colonial se hace patente con la creación del “Instituto de Estudios Africanos (IDEA), que más adelante se hizo depender del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pero que en realidad estaba al servicio de la Dirección General de Marruecos y Colonias” [The “scientific” character with which the regime wants to imbue the colonial enterprise is made obvious through the creation of the Institute of African Studies, which later on was linked to the Higher Council for Scientific Research, which was really at the service of the General Office of Morocco and the Colonies] (2010: 34). 13 The “Misión especial de endemias” began in 1933, leading to the establishment of “Poblados de segregación de leprosos,” the first of which was set up by J. Chacón in Ebebiyín (Martínez Domínguez 1954).

72  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya 14 One such example is that provided by Jesús Salafranca Ortega “en el campo de la salud pública es donde la política colonial cosechó sus mejores logros, consiguiendo erradicar las endemias y vencer a la muerte, dejando de ser Guinea uno de los lugares más insalubres del mundo. . . . Sin afán alguno apologético podemos agregar para finalizar que la infraestructura médica de la Guinea Española fue hasta 1968 una de las mejores de África” [colonial policy reaped its greatest rewards in the area of public health, by managing to eradicate endemics and overcome death, so that Guinea stopped being one of the most unhealthy places in the world. Without any apology we can add in conclusion that the medical infrastructure in Spanish Guinea was, up to 1968, one of the best in Africa] (2001: 282–283). 15 According to Megan Vaughan, “The leper settlement, like other colonial institutions, was a place of complex social organization, on which a number of medical, religious and social ideas were brought to bear” (1991: 83). 16 “incluso, para evitar la contaminación del dinero corriente, circula interiormente una moneda metálica especial” [and even to avoid contamination through money, a special metal currency circulates inside the leper colony] (Martínez Antonio 2009: 14). 17 For the role of oil in politics and society in contemporary Equatorial Guinea, see Alicia Campos Serrano 2011 and Jordi Saint Gisbert 2008.

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74  Benita Sampedro Vizcaya Montaldo, F. (1898b) Fernando Póo: Observaciones médicas é higiénicas. Madrid: Celestino Apaolaza, Impresor. Nájera Ángulo, L. (1932) Los territorios españoles en el Golfo de Guinea: Estado sanitario actual y su influencia sobre el desarrollo de la colonización. Madrid: Imprenta del P. de H. de Intendencia e Intervención Militares. Nájera Ángulo, L. (1944) “La sanidad pública y la colonización africana.” Revista de sanidad e higiene pública, 18: 299–304. Ndongo Bidyogo, D. and Castro Antolín, M. (1998) España en Guinea: Construcción del desencuentro (1778–1968). Toledo: Ediciciones Sequitur. Nerín, G. (2010) La última selva de España: Antropófagos, misioneros y guardias civiles. Madrid: La Catarata. Perlasia, J. M. (2009) “Alcoholismo, identificación étnica y substitución cultural en Guinea Ecuatorial (1904–1928).” Afro-Hispanic Review, 28.2 (Fall): 179–202. Pittaluga, G. (1910) Estudios sobre la enfermedad del sueño y de las condiciones sanitarias de la colonia. Madrid: J. Blass y Cía. Quinlan, S. (2005) “Colonial Bodies, Hygiene, and Abolitionist Politics in EighteenthCentury France.” In T. Ballantyne and A. Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Revista Estampa. (1934) “Las negras de Guinea se hacen modistas, enfermeras, mecanógrafas.” February 3. Saint Gisbert, J. (2008) “El petroleo y las urnas: Evolución del Estado en Guinea Ecuatorial.” Revista Nova África, 23. Sainz de la Maza, M. and González Kirchner, J. P. (1995) Epidemiología y salud reproductiva de la población fang de Guinea Ecuatorial. San Vicente de la Barquera, Cantabria: Ceiba. Salafranca Ortega, J. F. (2001). El sistema colonial español en África. Málaga, Editorial Algazara. Sales Encinas, R. and Sánchez Zarzosa, I. (1990) Manual de la partera tradicional. Madrid: Cooperación sanitaria española con Guinea Ecuatorial, Ministerio de sanidad y consumo. San Martín y Montes, A. (1867) Estudios topográfico-médicos en la isla de Fernando Poo. Ferrol: El eco ferrolano de D. F. Suárez y García. Serna Burgaleta, J. (1956) El niño guineano. Estudio antropométrico y psicotécnico del niño negro. Madrid: CSIC-IDEA. Stehrenberger, C. (2014) “Medicina colonial y literatura franquista: el caso de las novelas de Liberata Masoliver.” Revista Debats, 123.2 (April): 48–57. Stoler, A. L. (2008) “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology, 23.2: 191–219. Stoler, A. L. (ed.) (2013) Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tabernero Holgado, C. (2010) “Discursos y representaciones médico-sanitarias en el cine documental colonial español de la posguerra (1936–1950).” Master’s Thesis, History of Sciences, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Vaughan, M. (1991) Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

4 From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia Brazil–Angola cultural exchanges under the sign of coloniality Emanuelle Santos The relations between the peoples inhabiting the spaces of modern-day Brazil and Angola predate the very existence of these states. Stemming from the late sixteenth century, when Portuguese colonialism began to transport enslaved people from its colonies in Africa to work in the sugar plantations of its colony in the Americas, the relationship between what today are Brazil and Angola has, in many ways, determined essential historical, economic, social and cultural aspects that are perceived as inherent to both spaces. As a result of such an important connection, there has been a growing demand for scholarly work dedicated to the study of cultural exchanges between these spaces, contributing to a welcomed increase in the number of works in the field, most of which focus on African influences on the fabric of the Brazilian population and its popular culture. However, conveyed through a lexicon of fraternity that seeks to do justice to the African contribution in the making of Brazil, studies in the field tend to gloss over the violence underpinning this colonial encounter. Aiming at contributing to the development of critical studies of the postcolonial condition in the peripheries and semiperipheries of the world-system, this chapter will analyse contemporary cultural exchanges between Brazil and Angola in the wake of their colonisation. By paying special attention to the conditions of production and circulation of cultural goods between these countries, this study seeks to draw attention to the unevenness that inescapably taints all forms of exchange taking place under the different forms of capitalism.

A history of uneven exchanges Brazil was the single largest recipient of enslaved African people transported during the almost four centuries of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Data collected by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database show that of the total of 12 million captives embarked in the many ports located in Africa between 1514–1866, Brazil was the destination of almost 45 per cent, and that ports situated in what today is Angola were the point of embarcation of 69 per cent of the number of enslaved Africans sent to Brazil. This huge population transfer has definitely marked the making of Brazil, as it was essential to the development of the initial plantation economy that guaranteed its position as the jewel of the Portuguese colonial

76  Emanuelle Santos enterprise and defined its privileged position vis-à-vis the African colonies. After the importation of sugarcane production techniques developed in the Portuguese Atlantic islands, and especially with the lessons learned in the sugar production enterprise in São Tomé during the first part of the sixteenth century, Brazil started the seventeenth century with a robust sugar production. Its consolidation did not only eventually contribute to the wreckage of the Santomean sugarcane industry rendered unprofitable given the challenges faced by a such a small island compared to the many advantages of producing in Brazil (Schwartz 1985: 14). It also laid the foundations for the uneven relationship between Brazil and Angola once the economic activities in the African colony came to be determined almost exclusively by Angola’s role in supplying colonial Brazil economic development with the slave labour it required. In his book Brazil and Africa, the historian José Honório Rodrigues registers with great detail the relationship of dependency binding Angola and Brazil during the colonial period. He argues that [t]hat dependency began with the complete subordination of the [Angolan] colony to the interests of Brazil. From the very beginning Angola did not serve its own independent interests, but those of the homeland [Portugal], which were centralized in Brazil. . . . Angola existed to furnish Brazil with slaves, without slaves, no [sugarcane plantations in] Pernambuco; and without Angola, no slaves. (1965: 18) As it is largely known, effective Portuguese efforts to develop its African territories were only carried out intensely after the loss of Brazil, whose independence in 1822 drove the metropolitan attention to its then neglected African colonies, inaugurating what historians call the Third Portuguese Empire (1822/1825–1975) (Clarence-Smith 1985). Prior to that moment, the interest of the Portuguese in Angola was not only limited to the provision of slave labour for Brazil, but they even placed the African colony under Brazilian administration. As Rodrigues Honório details, Angola was so important for the economy of Brazil in the seventeenth century that even the Dutch realised that without securing positions in West Africa their seizure of northeast Brazil and its valuable sugar industry (1630–1654) would fail. As the business was strictly dependent on the continuous supply of enslaved African people, the Dutch invaded and held Luanda for 7 years (1641–1648), a conquest that ended through armed intervention organised, financed and dispatched from Brazil. Following these developments, Brazil’s intervention in Angola grew to the point at which slave traders handling the commerce and transportation of enslaved Africans in Angola came to be known as Brasileiros (Brazilians), a term which referred not to their place of birth or of permanent residence, but to the economic interests they represented (Thompson 2011: 75). Since the Atlantic currents made it faster for a ship to sail from the southern Angola port of Benguela to Rio de Janeiro than to the colony’s northern capital,

From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia  77 Luanda, the economic relationships between Brazil and Angola grew exponentially during the first three centuries of Portuguese colonialism. As Thompson puts it, “[t]his maritime highway allowed for the development of a bilateral navigation route between the Brazilian and Angolan coasts, one that excluded the metropole as an essential part of it” (2011: 76). Additionally, products brought from Asia also reached Portugal more easily via Rio de Janeiro. By the end of the eighteenth century, with the rise in the exploitation of gold and diamonds in Brazil due to the flow of African captives from Angola, the relationship between both spaces was so strong and independent from Portugal that it has led historians to state that “Brazilians . . . were the real masters and arbiters of Angolan trade and Angola was indeed no more than a Brazilian colony” (Rodrigues Honório 1965: 29). The quasi-colonial nature of the tie between Brazil and Angola is certainly demonstrated by the intensity of the commerce between these spaces during the time in which Brazil was under the Portuguese crown. At the end of the eighteenth century, roughly two decades before Brazil’s independence, movement recorded in the port of Rio de Janeiro shows Angola as the second main destination of Brazilian produce after Portugal. Products shipped to the ports of Luanda and Benguela in Angola included sugar, cachaça (brandy), rice, wheat flour, dry meat, tobacco, bacon, flour and beans (Rodrigues Honório 1965: 33). In the end, the Angolan market paid surplus value to acquire that which the exploitation of its own main commodity, slave labour, was used to produce elsewhere in Brazil. Seen from a world-systems perspective (Wallerstein 2000), on a macro scale, the commodity production and consumption at play amongst Portugal, Brazil and Angola is part of the internal dynamics of a European capitalist world economy, and in this scale both Brazil and Angola occupy peripheral positions in relation to Portugal which would be at the core of the production of Portuguese colonialism. However, by employing the same world-systemic view to the internal dynamics of these spaces within Portuguese colonialism, we see that while Portugal maintained its role as the core, given that colonial control made it the unquestionable beneficiary of any profits obtained in the trade of Brazilian produce in the world markets beyond its colonial borders, Brazil assumed a role of semiperiphery in relation to Angola. This was a product of the extent to which enriching the local merchants and bourgeoisies was important to local development, measured at this point as the feasibility of rupture with the colonial system of exploitation, resulting in a positive balance for Brazil in relation to Angola. It is no coincidence that after just over two centuries of an economic development, reached at the expense of the exploitation of African enslavement promoted mainly in Angola, that Brazil met the minimum conditions required to successfully attain its independence from Portugal. It was the privilege and relative advantage in the international division of labour within Portuguese colonialism that allowed Brazil to develop faster than Angola, which still needed to wait over 150 years and to mount a 13-year-long colonial war to manage to free itself from colonialism. Intertwined with the economic consequences of the unequal positions of Brazil and Angola in the Portuguese colonial system are its social and cultural implications. Racism was the ideological basis for the enslavement of Africans and came

78  Emanuelle Santos to constitute one of the cornerstones of Brazilian society which, unfortunately, did not vanish at the moment in which slavery was abolished in 1888. On the contrary, racist perspectives were solidified in the actual racist distribution of wealth when slavery, perceived as a backwards practice associated with the primitivism of the African, gave way to the institutional promotion of immigration of white Europeans to Brazil. Data by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics show that between 1884 and 1933, over 3 million immigrants from white Europe – namely Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal – arrived in Brazil, meaning that in a narrow period of 49 years, the country welcomed the equivalent to 59 per cent of the total number of enslaved Africans embarked to Brazil in the 349 years between 1551 and 1890. As Brazilian anthropologist Giralda Seyferth (2002) details, a series of governmental decrees promoted by independent Brazil from 1824 all the way into the 1940s designated the State budget and land to sponsor the transportation and the settlement of immigrants coming exclusively from Europe, purposefully ignoring the needs or the capacity of the national population of the country. Freed slaves were paid no compensation after abolition, prompting a nationwide phenomenon of unemployed people, whose visible outcome in the present includes the abyssal income gap between Brazil’s black and white population of which the full establishment of the country’s favelas is a continuous reminder. Following the abolition of slavery, which was the strongest tie connecting Brazil and Angola, ideologies of developmentalism and modernity associated the black body and the idea of Africa to concepts of backwardness, primitivism, poverty and failure. Works by Brazilian intellectuals, including abolitionists such as Joaquim Nabuco, would refer to Africans as responsible for the malaises of the country, and to miscegenation with black people with doom for Brazil (Nabuco [1883] 2003: 131–133). However, despite the many efforts to whitewash the population, miscegenation continued, and with time, its unavoidability was acknowledged as a legitimate feature of the country. This is the period in which the ideas of Gilberto Freyre were articulated in his 1933 book Casa-grande e Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime Patriarcal. There Freyre expresses his views on Brazil’s racial composition promoting the myth of the Portuguese male as a natural coloniser who is adapted to live in the tropics given his own Iberian hybrid origins. Brazil is seen as a large and abundant but challenging land, which made the mixture of races through the sexual encounter of the male European with the female Indigenous and enslaved Africans into the most efficient colonising strategy. Highly praised by the vanguard of the Brazilian intelligentsia of their time, Freyre’s ideas shaped what came to be one of the most successful ideologies of coloniality, lusotropicalism.1 The term “Luso-tropical” was first used by Freyre during his trip through the overseas provinces of Portugal in the 1950s as a guest of the Portuguese dictatorship, the Estado Novo (New State). At that time, Portugal needed to justify its possession of the African colonies given the fact the in the aftermath of World War II, the world no longer endorsed States which held overseas territories based on supremacist racial arguments, such as the ones employed by the Portuguese dictatorship to keep and rule its African colonies and which had to be converted into

From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia  79 Overseas Provinces from 1951. Upon his travels through the Portuguese overseas territories, Freyre then wrote a number of other works in which he emerges as an advocate for Portugal’s methods of colonisation. These works were printed in Portugal and widely circulated amongst diplomats and administrators to ensure the spread of the lusotropical ideology. Brazilian coloniality and lusotropicalism Lusotropicalism, therefore, constitutes a State-sponsored colonial ideology deployed to ensure Portugal’s political, economic and epistemological hegemony of its African colonies, which continued to be treated as such regardless of the series of reforms implemented in the 1950s and their new nomenclature.2 In this sense, lusotropicalism illustrates what Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano ([1992] 2007, 2000) has called the coloniality of power. Having the paradigmatic cases of Latin American colonisation in mind, Quijano devised the term to describe the lingering colonial practices in the organisation of knowledge following Eurocentric paradigms in the aftermath of colonialism. For Quijano coloniality is the production and spread of knowledge based on the premise of racial hierarchy implemented world-wide during European colonisation, and serves to perpetuate a power structure of European and Western3 privilege through which the Global North continues to exploit the Global South.4 In the context of its time, lusotropicalism reworked the idea of race through miscibility achieved by means of patriarchy, spreading wide the fallacious notion of Portuguese exceptionalism. It was all conveniently engineered and organised, almost spontaneously, by a scholar coming out of a prosperous and successful former colony. While Freyre’s locus of enunciation added a valuable layer of legitimacy to Portugal’s colonial needs, it also worked to re-centre Brazil. It served as evidence, now in the realm of epistemology, that the semiperipheral position enjoyed by the country during Portuguese colonialism had exceeded its scope, and was restating independent Brazil’s hegemonic position in relation to Portuguese-speaking Africa. The case of Lusotropical ideology is essential for a critical appreciation of the cultural exchanges between Brazil and Angola in the aftermath of colonialism. Understanding the role of both countries in this ideological construct designed from one of these spaces for the subjugation of the Other is of high relevance, if one is to appreciate the unevenness that marks the cultural exchanges between contemporary Brazil and Angola. At its core, lusotropicalism is a systematization of the racial development of Brazil that seeks, despite giving remarkably little attention to the importance of its indigenous peoples, to carve a racial narrative for the mestiço nature of the country’s population through the recognition of the role of enslaved black Africans in it. Taken by many scholars, such as the sociologist and Brazilian ex-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, as one of the books that “invented Brazil” (Cardoso 1993), Casa Grande & Senzala’s recognition of the African contribution to the formation of the country celebrates an extremely phallocentric form of patriarchy, even though it did, in fact, break with a more traditionally racist historiographic tradition. The book’s blatant objectification of

80  Emanuelle Santos black Africans, presented in pages and pages of references to intercourse between Europeans or white men and African or black women, was built on the exotification of a presumed African primitivism which seems to have met the patriarchal criteria required to be accepted as a valid scientific foundational narrative to the country. By conflating an idea of Africa with the body of the black woman whose duty it is to serve the white male sexually and to nurture his child so that a nation can be born, Freyre romanticizes the actual violence of the colonial encounter between Europeans and Africans. If the metropolitan Portuguese crafted the philosophical, juridical and material aspects of the colonial encounter, it was in Brazil that many of its atrocities happened in unparalleled scale on a daily basis. The Eurocentric and patriarchal terms of Freyre’s imagery seem to have pleased the tastes and prejudices of Brazil’s white ruling classes, while, by attributing Africa with features of an exotic, backwards and passive woman, he normalized the view of the African continent as a recreational space that the white man had the historical right and biological capacity to invade at his will. The portrayal of Africa in Casa Grande e Senzala projects Afro-Brazilian culture and society as a place of otherness and submission that reifies the centrality of a male European descended coloniser with whom the ordinary male member of the country’s elite could easily identify. The Brazilian make of such a narrative of national formation is also significant when it comes to the analysis of the concept of coloniality of power from a perspective of south–south relations. Quijano’s elaboration of the concept clearly indicates a racially charged Eurocentric epistemic order that excludes non-Western knowledge and peoples, which makes it into an extremely valuable tool to address power hierarchy in a global macro scale. Nonetheless, what we see in the case of lusotropicalism is a Latin American country whose own culture is capable of producing such a Eurocentric ideology that it was good enough to be institutionally deployed by a European colonial power to justify its exceptional entitlement to African territories in the aftermath of World War II. Even though Quijano alerts us to the seductive nature of coloniality (2007: 169) and acknowledges the role of Eurocentrism as a distorted mirror in front of which Latin America seeks in vain to recognise itself (2000: 556), no detailed attention has been given to cases in which Latin American cultures, armed with a sense of entitlement based on their European heritage, perpetrate on other cultures the same epistemic violence which once victimized it. The detailed overview of the impact of Latin America’s semiperipheries on the development of the coloniality of power shows the concept’s important grounding in its moment of emergence in the early 1990s when the continent as a whole faced yet even more severe economic challenges resulting from the globally led Western spread of neoliberalism. And given that these macroeconomic hierarchies continue to operate, the concept is still widely applicable. Coloniality of power however does not yet fully account for unevenness at the world-system’s peripheral and semiperipheral levels, contributing to the false impression of a horizontal oneness in relations within and between peripheral societies which, as we know,

From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia  81 are always already inherently uneven, in principle, simply on account of their placement within the framework of capitalism.5 While the macroeconomic scope of the concept allows us to tackle the exercise of the coloniality of power by specific economic cores in Western Europe and North America, it lets slide structurally similar forms of economic and cultural domination that occur in the interplay between emerging economies and their zones of influence. This phenomenon, which is apparent throughout the continuous process of the making of Brazil, now enters into a new transnational phase as the Lusotropical ideology is replaced by the idea of Lusofonia.6

Brazilian coloniality and Lusofonia Dictionary definitions of the Portuguese term lusofonia vary. The dictionaries edited in Portugal tend to give three definitions to the noun, denoting it as the quality of being Portuguese, as the community of countries that have Portuguese as the mother tongue or official language, and as the diffusion of the Portuguese language around the world (Madeira 2003: 12). Brazilian dictionaries, on the other hand, use the term simply to refer to a community of countries that have Portuguese as the official or dominant language or as having adopted it where it is not native (Padilha 2005: 14–15). Comparing these country-specific views of the term, we see that while on both sides of the Atlantic the idea of lusofonia is very much attached to the use of Portuguese beyond the borders of Portugal, signifying a transnational community of speakers and the spread of the language through foreign territories, in Portugal itself the term can also denote a Portuguese kind of belonging, that includes a possessive trace that has not been received in an unproblematic way. Despite ideological differences, research has demonstrated that the term lusofonia was not registered in Portuguese dictionaries until the second half of the 1990s (Madeira 2003: 11), and it has been causing controversy in the transnational space of circulation of the cultures of Portuguese-speaking countries ever since. The rise of the term in dictionaries coincides with the official creation, in 1996, of the Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa (Community of Portuguese Language Countries), more frequently referred to by its acronym CPLP. It is believed that the idea of lusofonia underlies the creation of the transnational community, but as verdicts on this stance may differ depending on the preferred meaning given to the term, the fact is that a visit to the CPLP website will show that the community avoids mention of lusofonia altogether. Composed initially by the founding member-states Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe, the community has grown with the inclusion of East Timor in 2002 and of Equatorial Guinea in 2014. Given its transnational composition, the community seems to have consciously chosen a somewhat longer but indisputably more neutral language of países em/de língua portuguesa (countries of the Portuguese language) to refer to the community of countries sharing the language to fill in for the adjective lusófono, equivalent in English to lusophone. Distancing itself from the idea of lusofonia, at least when

82  Emanuelle Santos it comes to the language of its institutional communications, the CPLP signposts an interesting turn of events when it comes to the development of coloniality in the postcolonial transnational space of countries in which Portuguese is spoken. The idea of lusofonia has definitely shaken the never really settled ideas of Portuguese identity, at the crossroads of greatness and subalternity. The nostalgic national tropes of fado and saudade, for which the country is notorious, is intrinsically linked to the sense of loss following the dissolution of a global Empire that had lasted for almost 500 years. Given its economically fragile and industrially backward sittuation vis-à-vis the rest of Europe, the loss represented a gap ready to be filled by an ideal of lusofonia that would provide the material evidence of a Portuguese legacy in the world with the potential to forever be a reminder of Portugal’s former imperial splendour. In such a conjuncture the coloniality of lusofonia was quickly picked up by many, including by important members of the Portuguese intelligentsia. One of the greatest contemporary Portuguese philosophers, Eduardo Lourenço, has alerted us to the many dangers of the idea in terms of imperial nostalgia, as he put it “Lusofonia today is our rose-coloured map where all our empires might be inscribed; invisible and even ridiculous for those who see us from the outside, but shining like a flame in the atrium of our soul”7 (2004: 177). Lourenço’s comment brings to mind the frustrated attempt by Portugal during the Berlin Conference to claim the African territories between its colonies of Angola and Mozambique, from the British. It inscribes contemporary Portuguese ambitions of coloniality of power through lusofonia as a narrative of doom and delusion. As history has it, in addition to being denied the claimed territories, the British backlash to Portugal consisted of an ultimatum that demanded its withdrawal from the occupied areas, whose acceptance by the king of Portugal greatly dissatisfied its population, leading the country to the end of the monarchy. Through Lourenço’s tragic parallel, we see the importance of lusofonia as an identitarian concept that follows the same need underlying its resource to the lusotropical discourse. In both cases, we have the promotion of the centrality of Portugal vis-à-vis its former colonies: in the case of the lusotropical discourse the emphasis fell on the Portuguese inherent right and aptitude to colonize; when it comes to lusofonia it is the Portuguese legacy of language, and by extension culture, that is stressed as a factor for the success of its former colonies now on their way to development. Coincidently, though, similar to what happened in the case of lusotropicalism, engineered primarily from Brazil, the CPLP was also initiated during talks held at the summit of heads of state of the Portuguese-speaking countries, convened by the Brazilian government in 1989. Following that, another meeting took place in Brazil in 1994 and, after a third meeting in Lisbon in 1995, the community was officially formed in 1996. However, while the colonial mission of Lusotropicalism was of no economic interest to an industrialising Brazil, in the current area of financial capital and transnational investments, the CPLP plays an important part in the country’s strategy to widen its geopolitical prestige and influence. Here Portuguese and Brazilian interests regarding the transnational communities of Portuguese-speaking countries differ; Portugal as a result of its postimperial

From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia  83 nostalgia, promotes the idea of lusofonia, whereas Brazil, much more interested in geopolitical economic influence, stands for the developmentist project of the CPLP. Whereas a number of scholars such as Eduardo Lourenço believe in the complete juxtaposition of both interests, the roles played by Portugal and Brazil in the community show slightly different ambitions. Nonetheless, as the CPLP is also an institution committed to the propagation of cultures in Portuguese, and as cultural hegemony fosters economic hegemony, we see the slow but sure increase in Brazilian interest in a cultural market that is distinctly lusófono. It is remarkable to note that despite Brazil’s strong ties to Portugal and its growing interest in Portuguese-speaking Africa, lusofonia as a term is almost unheard of there, especially considering the term’s currency in Portugal. There, the widespread use of the word has been steadily replacing the adverbial phrase de/em língua portuguesa in a wide range of means of communication. In Brazil, though, the term circulates almost exclusively amongst academics occupied with the cultures and societies of the Portuguese-speaking countries who are in dialogue with Portuguese scholarship. A singular example of this difference of diffusion and popularity of the idea of lusofonia can be found at the French chain of bookstores FNAC, popular in Portugal and in Brazil. A visit to the literature section of their Portuguese website will find two main divisions: first we have a subsection of autores lusófonos (lusophone authors), with short list of names of bestselling authors from all Portuguese-speaking countries, followed by another section labelled foreign authors where one finds a similar list of authors from all over the world. On the other hand, while the Brazilian FNAC website has the same format of two main subdivisions with a short list of bestselling authors under the literature section, these subsections are labelled Brazilian authors and foreign authors, respectively. The difference in classification of authors between both operations of FNAC stores speaks volumes, as it operates strongly on the retail market. It does not just evidence how widespread the idea of lusofonia is in Portugal, but hints at the ambiguity of the term vacillating between its linguistic and national inflections that are not only visible by its contrast with concept of foreign literature which it is in opposition to, but also by the contrast with the organisation of the Brazilian website, clearly set along national lines. Yet, this does not mean that Brazil is not interested in cultural exchange with a world organised around the idea of lusofonia. Sharing the Portuguese language is a major advantage to Brazilian investors given the country’s historically low rate of second-language learning, and it also facilitates the penetration of Brazilian cultural products in other Portuguese-speaking countries. At the moment Angola has already three Brazilian television channels operating in the country, and the renowned Brazilian soap operas or telenovelas are broadcast by free public channels. They introduce Angolans to a variety of Brazilian products related to lifestyle, fomenting a market of Brazilian products that crosses high- and lowincome households, as the consumer of Brazilian fashion brands is paralleled by the growing market of the sacoleiras, women who travel between Angola and Brazil, mostly to the textile neighbourhood of Brás in São Paulo, from time to time to buy the latest novela-inspired outfits and accessories to resell in Luanda. If

84  Emanuelle Santos compared, it is clear that whilst the Portuguese investment in the troubled promotion of lusofonia is enmeshed in the typical Eurocentric form of coloniality that Quijano describes, Brazil’s apparent disengagement towards it does not keep the country from profiting from it, evidencing a Brazilian form of coloniality much more in tune with the neoliberal economic ethos of its time. Brazilian cooperation efforts with Africa in general, and with Portuguesespeaking Africa in special, have contributed enormously to the country’s emergence as a regional power in the Southern Cone. This diplomatic verve though does not come unaccompanied by economic interests and achievements, experts remark that Brazil’s approach to Africa may be interpreted as the combination of selfinterest with an increasing sense of responsibility as an emerging global leader.  .  .  . [I]t it is increasingly evident that the continent forms a crucial part of Brazil’s next phase of industrial development – in sectors like mining, energy and agriculture  – and more broadly in its global political and economic aspirations. (White 2013: 118–119) A typical example of Brazil’s double agenda in Africa is the pragmatism of the country’s military dictatorial government that ensured the immediate recognition of Angola’s independence, unilaterally declared by a revolutionary party in 1975. The apparent vanguard action actually masks a history of colonial ambivalence from the Brazilian government which, despite unwillingness to openly support the unsustainable colonial claims of Portugal, was zealous about keeping diplomatic ties with its ex-coloniser – at the time equally happy with non-democratic forms of government – but could not do without Angolan oil at a time when it was struggling to deliver on its populist promises of development within its own borders (Pinheiro 2007). Contrastingly, Brazil’s dramatic widening of the relationship with Angola in the twenty-first century is unapologetically committed to the country’s economic interests. Even though Brazil has been developing social programs in Angola and in Brazil, this is never done at a loss given that Angolan development has the potential to increase the consumption of Brazilian products, and also solidifies Brazil’s image as a leading power in the continent with continuous economic growth and valuable oil reserves, the number one product used by Angola in the quid pro quo with Brazilian government investments. On the commercial side of things, relations have never been more amicable. The Brazilian giant Odebrecht, the biggest private company in Angola, which has more than 20,000 employees in the country, is present in a variety of economic sectors, including not only construction which is its core business, but also diamonds and supermarkets. Data show that by 2007, at least 200 Brazilian companies were installed in Angola, making the Brazilian presence in the country alone worth around 10 per cent of the African country’s gross domestic product (Fellet 2012). Brazil’s presence in Angola though, is also criticised, as Brazilian companies providing infrastructure services there are accused of discriminating against

From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia  85 Angolan workers, paying them much less than what they pay Brazilian employees brought in as expats. Observers also criticize Brazil’s silence in regard to the permanence of the Angolan president in office for over 36 years and point out the country’s indifference of the suspicious participation of Angolan government officials in large trade deals. Such vices are certainly too close to home for Brazilian officials, to be much of an obstacle. As the giant Odebrecht has been involved in a series of major corruption scandals that have drastically destabilised politics in Brazil in 2015 and 2016, it might seem that a certain margin for a number of bad practices is a trace found in the culture of both nations.

Brazil–Angola cultural exchanges The cultural exchange during the centuries of population transfer from Angola and Brazil has definitely shaped Brazilian culture. As the 2010 census has evidenced, Brazilians of African descent are now the majority of the population in the country. Of a total population of almost 210 million inhabitants, 50.7 per cent have declared themselves as black or mixed black and white (pardo) – 7.6 per cent black and 43.1 per cent of pardos  – versus a total of 47.7 per cent who see themselves as white. With the almost 3 million people who arrived in Brazil departing from Angola during Brazil’s first few centuries of history came the languages, music, religions and traditions that have greatly contributed to Brazil’s distinctive imprint in the world. All Brazilian typical cultural icons recognised abroad such as Samba, capoeira, and candomblé, to name but just a few, have an African matrix, mostly brought from Angola. When it comes to the development of Brazil, African influence has definitely marked Brazilian cuisine, the way Brazilians speak Portuguese, which is clearly different from the use of the language in Portugal, and the way Brazilians practice religion. Yet, in spite of its massive imprint in the very notion of Brazilian identity, its appreciation in the country was not unconditional. The racism which has historically characterised the many institutions in the country systematically marginalised any cultural expression of African origin. Brazilian cultural aspects of African heritage had a very low cultural currency until the 1940s when the social sciences wave that gave way to books such as Casa Grande e Senzala contributed to a hesitant recognition of the role of Africans in the making of the country, but the troubling nature of this new ethos was apparent in the very ways in which the African heritage was recognised as a form of culture of national dimensions. As Livio Sansone tells us, the recognition of capoeira as a national sport happened only in the 1920s, after the acceptance of moral and practical guidelines originally designed to wash the sport away from its racial and class roots. It was also only in the 1950s that the Carnival of Rio was finally valued as a cultural asset, and while forms of carrying the body associated with the black population such as the male ginga and the female rebolado were, respectively, punishable by the police or deemed as indecent when performed by black men and women in the streets of Brazil, they were celebrated when used in Hollywood-produced films of the white Portuguese singer and performer Carmen

86  Emanuelle Santos Miranda, being accepted as a valid part of the country’s culture after that (Sansone 2000: 92–93). The observation of the examples above shows that the recognition of Brazilian cultural expressions rooted in the country’s African heritage passes through a double process of validation that is dialectically symbolic and material. Regardless of the extent of the diffusion these cultural expressions in the country, it becomes clear that in the exchanges between Brazil and Angola, that which has come from Angola to Brazil has historically been tainted with prejudice, being accepted only to the extent in which it might be turned into a cultural product with export potential. The perception of Africa as a barbaric place without culture was a key argument for the colonial enterprise, allowing it the excuse of the civilising mission for centuries. The devaluation of the African persona, and later of the African descendant of her and his cultural expressions, was a process directly related to the devaluation of African civilisations. While Africa would supply Brazil with a much needed but completely despised enslaved population, Brazil has furnished Angola with Governors, slave traders and all sorts of people considered degraded by the colonial administration (Rodrigues 1965: 108–111). It constitutes just another bit of evidence of the hierarchy between these two spaces, in which Brazil received the healthiest and strongest Africans, and sent back in return their production at elevated prices, as well as Brazilian bureaucrats and conspirators, and confirms a type of relation that reflects the historical coloniality underpinning the conditions under which Africans were brought into Brazil, as people whose worth was determined solely by their productive capacity converted into potential economic gains. As a result of this highly problematic asymmetry, we have the historical disinterest of Brazilian scholars for Africa. José Honório Rodrigues clearly states that in 1965: “[i]n spite of all the studies on Africans in Brazil, Africa itself continued to be forgotten and in Brazil the Negro was the Brazilian Negro” (102). The interest in the black population of Brazil  – be it of Africans or of African descendants – happened to become a matter of studying the country itself, once the idea of national identity had come to terms with including the black people who have been an expressive part of the country’s population from its beginning. The study of other African countries, as entities in their own right, though, was extremely dependent on the gradual deconstruction of an imaginary of Africa as a backwards and primitive continent marked by slavery, and the recognition of its cultural diversity and wealth was something that could only happen after the country’s valuation of its own African heritage. This process, as we have just seen, was slow and problematically dependent on the commodification of Brazil’s African heritage. Acknowledging both the lack of information on African descendants and of African countries in Brazil, the federal government approved the law 10.639 in 2003 making the study of African history compulsory in the national curriculum. This law modified, in part, a multitiered 1996 decree demanding the inclusion of Afro-Brazilian history and culture in the national curriculum which, by beginning with the history of enslaved Africans in the country, contributed to the

From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia  87 perpetuation of negative stereotypes of black people in the national imaginary. Consequently, to complete the picture of the history of African people in Brazil, the text of 2003 strictly targeted this aspect of the previous law concerning the national curriculum by making compulsory the study of history of Africa and of African peoples, the struggle of blacks in Brazil, black Brazilian culture, and the role of blacks in the formation of the nation in order to validate the contribution of black people in the making of the country. The 2003 decree also demanded the inclusion of the Dia Nacional da Consciência Negra (National Black Consciousness Day) in the school calendar. The chosen date, 20th of November, is the date attributed to the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, free-born son of a runaway slave who successfully fought the Portuguese defending his Quilombo (fugitive settlement) in the Brazilian northeast during the seventeenth century. These initiatives attest to major governmental efforts to bridge the abyssal social and economic gaps of Brazil’s black population, and also show the government’s comprehension of the importance of African countries in their own right, outside of the framework of Afro-Brazilian culture. This effort, however, seemed to be largely in tune with the government’s strategic movement towards African countries detailed earlier on in this chapter. Speaking about the relationships between Africa and Brazil, Celso Amorim, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs during some of the most important years in the approximation between Brazil and various African countries (2003–2011), clarified the government perspective on the issue: [U]m dia, um jornalista brasileiro, não necessariamente muito bem informado, perguntou: ‘Ministro, por que é que o senhor dá tanta atenção à América do Sul?’ . . . Eu disse: ‘Porque eu moro aqui. Se eu morasse noutro lugar, morasse na Europa, talvez eu desse mais atenção à Europa, mas eu moro aqui na América do Sul, eu vivo aqui na América do Sul.’ E eu acho que, da África, a gente pode, por fazendo uma troca, dizer: a África mora aqui. Então, a razão principal do Brasil dar atenção à África – há muitas outras: econômicas, estratégicas, políticas –, mas a principal é essa: a África mora no Brasil. Ela mora em nós. [Once, a Brazilian journalist, not necessarily well informed, asked me: ‘Secretary, why do you give so much attention to South America? . . . I said: ‘Because I live here. If I lived elsewhere, if I lived in Europe, maybe I would give more attention to Europe but I live here in South America, I live here in South America.’ And I believe that when it comes to Africa, we can change it: Africa lives here. So, the main reason for Brazil to give attention to Africa – there are many others: economic, strategic, political, but the main reason is that one, Africa lives in Brazil. It lives in us.] (Amorim 2015: 17) Despite its relative emotional charge, Amorim’s speech demonstrates that the interest in African countries such as Angola is still enmeshed in Brazilian selfserving needs expressed either by the country’s national necessity to come to

88  Emanuelle Santos terms with its own African heritage, or by the economic, political and strategic advantages that such approximations can grant the country. No explicit mention to the many endowments of the countries located in the African continent is made, nor reference to the continent’s importance in world history or lessons that the many cultures of the continent have to teach are present in his commentary. Once again, the interest in Africa is conflated with material rather than with cultural gains, further evidencing the lingering coloniality in the exchanges between Brazil and the countries of the continent in the twenty-first century.

A mode of resistance: exchanges in literature Although not extensively or openly discussed, the issue of the uneven nature of the cultural exchanges between Brazil and Angola has certainly been noticed by some of the country’s cultural agents on both sides of the Atlantic. On an interview to the BBC, the canonical Angolan novelist Pepetela has openly stated that Os angolanos olham para o Brasil, mas o brasileiros, de um modo geral, não olham para Angola. Desconhecem, não sabem que existe, isso é muito desigual. Os angolanos, em seu imaginário têm o Brasil como uma de suas referências principais, ao passo que os brasileiros não tem Angola sequer como uma referência. [Angolan people look towards Brazil; however, Brazilians in general do not look towards Angola. They do not know of its existence, that is very unequal. The Angolan imaginary has Brazil as one of its main references, while Brazilians don’t see Angola even as a reference.] (Carneiro 2011) That is certainly supported by the route of literary influence between both countries that is usually evoked by African writers not only from Angola but from Portuguese-speaking Africa in general. The Angolan Luandino Vieira, winner of the most prestigious literary prize for works written in Portuguese, the Prêmio Camões (Camões Prize), and seen as one of the forefathers of Angolan literature, openly admits that the peculiar reworking of the Portuguese language to give voice to an Angolan subjectivity, which is a distinctive feature of his work, is a lesson he learned from the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa, he then passed on to the canonical Mozambican writer Mia Couto: Essa foi a lição do [João Guimarães] Rosa. Pode-se inventar uma língua, pode-se inventar tudo. . . . E, muitos anos mais tarde, eu disse isso na União dos Escritores, assim em voz baixa, a um miúdo que apareceu com o Craveirinha, que se chamava Mia Couto, e ele nunca mais se esqueceu. [That was the lesson of (João Guimarães) Rosa. A language can be created, everything can be created. . . . And, many years later, I said that in the Writer’s Union, softly like this, to a young man who showed up there with Craveirinha, his name was Mia Couto, and he never forgot it.] (Leite et al. 2012: 45)

From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia  89 This is somewhat natural, given that by the time that writers of Angola started to systematically design a literature that was decidedly national and anti-colonial, Brazil had been independent for over a century and a half, the reification of Brazilian influence in Angolan literature can give way to the solidification of a hierarchical difference between both countries. Seen exclusively from this perspective, one can hastily reach the conclusion that while Angola has given Brazil forms of popular expression largely perceived as low culture, Brazil has given Angola items associated to an idea of high culture, as it is the case of literature. Yet, research and consumption of literary works by Angolan writers has been growing in Brazil, as more works become available due to the increase in demand supported by the 2003 law that thickens this area of scholarly activity already installed in Brazil since the 1970s. Brazilian interest in the works by Angolan writers has been enough to sustain their regular visits to the country and to motivate at least two Angolan authors to reside in Brazil. Constantly circulating amongst Luanda, Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, José Eduardo Agualusa is even a partner of a newly founded publishing house in Brazil, Língua Geral, that since 2006 has been editing works by African writers in the country. In addition, Brazil also has the presence of the young but highly celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki, who also lives in Rio, making his presence in literary fairs, universities and cultural events in general much more intense. Despite these promising developments, the interest in Angolan literature still seems restricted to university circles. As the pioneer professor in the field of comparative literatures in Portuguese, Benjamin Abdala Júnior has noted, the interest in the literatures of Portuguese-speaking Africa has grown firstly at a scholarly level, when young academics and students, locked within a dictatorial context in Brazil in the late 1970s and early 1980s, looked up at the examples of engaged anti-colonial literature produced all over Portuguesespeaking Africa as a mode of inspiration and a means of solidarity (Abdala Júnior 2009). It was at that point that Ática publishing house started its African authors’ series which published 27 titles from 1979 to 1991, 11 of which were authored by Angolan writers and 7 by writers from other Portuguese-speaking African countries. With the end of the dictatorship in Brazil and as Angolan writers became more concerned with the internal state of affairs of their own country in the aftermath of their independence no more having to fight a colonial tyranny, the urgency of the solidarity between these literary spaces waned even when postgraduate programs dedicated to the study of the literatures of the Portuguese-speaking world kept growing at a steady pace. The analysis of this historical background indicates that the increase in the interest in the literatures of Portuguese-speaking Africa in Brazil, albeit still pretty much concentrated around the university, is not only aligned with the 2003 law but with the country’s own slow, steady but massive cultural turn towards a valuation of Africa and of the Afro-Brazilian that took place in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Since the early 2000s, Brazil has witnessed a resurgence of grassroots black movements deeply concerned with the deconstruction of negative stereotypes related to black culture, identity and the body in society. These movements, much more active and connected after the advent of social media, have

90  Emanuelle Santos now a much more direct contact with African authors, and a growing interest and knowing more about African identities. Here, similar to what took place between 1970s and 1980s, Brazil is learning how to resist and to invent itself through the influence of African literature, illustrating the true potential of these cultural exchanges.

Towards a decolonial exchange In the course of this chapter, we have looked at the cultural exchanges between Brazil and Angola with special attention to the constitutive bond of violence and unevenness that characterised their interaction under colonialism, as well as its reverberation in the aftermath of Brazil’s independence. We have shown how a Brazilian coloniality of material contours towards Angola developed during Brazil’s subjugation to Portuguese colonialism, has evolved in the aftermath of Brazilian independence into an immaterial coloniality of cultural contours. As Brazil’s strong bilateral commercial ties with Africa were loosened, a Brazilian imaginary of the African continent was shaped around the situation of precariousness inflicted upon its Afro-Brazilian population. A population group kept in a marginal position as they were victims of an internal practice of coloniality of power perpetrated by the country’s white elites as exemplified by the lusotropical ideology. However, the re-approximation between Brazil and Angola that took place in the aftermath of Angola’s independence has granted both countries a chance for a fairer start, based on their shared ground as postcolonies, away from the clutches of colonialism. Here, we could perceive Brazil’s ambivalence towards Angola expressed in its double agenda of economic interest through a politics of affection that has developed from a phallocentric patriarchal lusotropical mould into a possible politics of fraternity under the south–south relations wrapped around, at least in part, the idea of lusofonia. Under such an uneven scope, cultural exchanges between Angola and Brazil have been marked by asymmetry. While exchanges between the countries have been intense across the centuries and can be seen as constitutive of national identities in both sides of the Atlantic, the contribution of each country is not perceived to hold the same currency. In the framework of an economic world-system based on the hierarchical organisation of the international division of labour, the contribution of Angola to Brazil is perceived as one of a lower added value in relation to the Brazilian contribution to Angolan culture, a misconception based on the principle of coloniality of power which is the cultural cement holding this uneven economic system together. Seen outside of this ideological framework what we have is a mutual constitution. The only way in which Brazil was able to reach its current levels of economic and cultural development was through the benefit from the Angolan human contribution. Therefore, if the country once has been in a position to offer Angolan writers aesthetic blueprints to handle matters of national identity, it was because of Angola’s gift of racial diversity that marked Brazil’s distinction from European forms of cultural expression in literature and beyond. Or, if Brazil is today in a

From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia  91 position of relative economic advantage in relation to Angola, it was due to the country’s privileged position within the colonial system that exploited Angola. Seen from this perspective, although hierarchies in the historical conditions surrounding the production of culture will remain, hegemonies in the order of the symbolic value between each country’s cultural production might disappear and bring up the hope for a future with more fairer exchanges and less unevenness. The attribution of equal values to cultural constructs in the cultural exchange between both countries depends on the advancement of a decolonial cultural turn currently moving at a slow pace in Brazil, where the elitist and colonial nature of national independence meant that the country was never fully decolonised. As a result, the perpetuation of the colonial ideology in the country’s aftermath of independence has given rise to a postcolonial nation that still looks at Africa with colonial eyes, being incapable of giving the continent’s contribution to its national culture the worth it actually has. Brazilian coloniality, therefore, is not simply a malaise that the country inflicts; it is first and foremost a malaise from which it suffers. The semiperipheral position of Brazil in the world-system traps the country in an ambivalent position in which it perpetrates, at a national and transnational sphere, the same coloniality of power with which it struggles at the global level. Decolonisation is perhaps one of the most valuable lessons that the cultures of countries such as Angola have to teach Brazil. By being forged in the fires of the struggle against colonialism, literary works from Angola have challenged the racist nature of colonial domination in a way that Brazil still struggles to do when it comes to the coloniality of power within its own culture. And as the previous wave of Brazilian interest in the literatures of Angola has shown, despite its limited circulation, the freedom pursued by Angolan writers has inspired a whole generation of Brazilian scholars. So today, as Brazil continues to experience the long chain of social changes of a decolonial nature started in the early years of this century, we witness a second and potentially larger wave of approximation of the Brazilian reader with Angolan literature. Maybe with this exchange, Brazil will learn the lesson it needs to fully release itself from the shackles of its long-lasting postcolonial coloniality.

Notes 1 By spelling the words lusotropicalism and lusotropical without a hyphen, I refer to the name of the lusotropical ideology that followed Freyre’s work. The hyphen will be preserved when reference is made to the use of the words in Freyre’s works. 2 In his analysis of Portuguese handling of its overseas provinces in the 1960s, Perry Anderson not only describes it as colonialism, but as ultracolonialism. In his words: “Portuguese overseas domination has been defined as ‘ultracolonialism’, that is, both the most extreme and the most primitive modality of colonialism. Forced labour in the Portuguese colonies is the most extreme form of exploitation existent anywhere in Africa. Its human regime is a degradation beyond anything that any other colonialism has produced” (1962: 87). 3 In “Coloniality and modernity/rationality” Quijano addresses mainly the Eurocentric reason of colonialism; however, he also refers to Western imperialism, conceived as a Euro-North American descendant of European colonial power structures (2007: 168).

92  Emanuelle Santos 4 The concept of coloniality, which lays at the heart of decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel and Maria Lugones among many others, is essential in the deconstructing epistemologies of subalternity, opening new ways to articulate knowledge such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Menezes’ Epistemologias do Sul (Southern Epistemologies) (2010). 5 Given this text’s concern with the relations between peripheral spaces, it only explores uneven relations within the peripheral country’s borders to the extent in which they are relevant for the analysis of the cultural exchanges between Brazil and Angola. For this reason, the focus given to the situation of historical disadvantage of the Afro-Brazilian is not paralleled by similar attention to the grave colonial situation experienced by Brazilian indigenous peoples. While the scope of this study does not leave room for a full appreciation of the complex racial and social hierarchies in Brazil, it should be emphasised that it is integral for a wider comprehension of the country and for a more extensive critique of coloniality in Latin America. 6 Given the term’s conceptual charge it will not be translated into English throughout this chapter. 7 “Lusofonia is today our rose-coloured map where all these empires [of ours] can be inscribed, invisible and even ridiculous to those who see us from a distance, but shining to us as a flame in the centre of our soul.” (emphasis in the original, my translation).

Works cited Amorim, C. (2015) “Um balanço das relações Brasil  – África.” Diálogos Africanos, 1 (July/August/September): 17–27. Anderson, P. (1962) “Portugal and the End of Ultra-Colonialism 2.” New Left Review, I/16: 88–123. Cardoso, F. H. (1993) “Livros que inventaram o Brasil.” Novos Estudos, 37 (November): 21–35. Carneiro, J. D. (2011) “ ‘Angolanos olham para o Brasil, mas brasileiros não olham para Angola’, diz escritor.” BBC Brasil [Internet]. Available from: www.bbc.com/portuguese/ noticias/2011/09/110908_angola_entrevista_jc.shtml [Accessed December 1, 2016]. Clarence-Smith, G. (1985) The Third Portuguese Empire 1825–1975: A Study in Economic Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fellet, J. (2012) “Com BNDES e negócios com políticos, Odebrecht ergue ‘império’ em Angola’, O Estado de São Paulo.” [Internet]. Available from: http://internacional.estadao. com.br/noticias/geral,com-bndes-e-negocios-com-politicos-odebrecht-ergue-imperioem-angola,932219 [Accessed December 2, 2016]. Freyre, G. (2003) Casa Grande e Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime da Economia Patriarcal. Sao Paulo: Global Editora. Júnior, B. A. (2009) Literatura, História e Política: Literaturas de Língua Portuguesa no Século XX. São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial. Leite, A., Khan, S., Falconi, J. and Krakowska, K. (eds.) (2013) Nação e Narratiava PósColonial II: Angola e Moçambique. Lisbon: Edições Colibri. Lourenço, E. (2004) A Nau de Ícaro seguido da Imagem e Miragem da Lusofonia. Lisbon: Gradiva. Madeira, A. I. (2003) Sons, Sentidos e Silêncios da Lusofonia: Uma Reflexão Sobre os Espaços-Tempo da Língua Portuguesa. Lisbon: EDUCA. Nabuco, J. (2003) O Abolicionismo. Brasília: Edições do Senado Federal. Padilha, L. C. (2005) “Da construção identitária a uma trama de diferenças – Um olhar sobre as literaturas de língua portuguesa.” Revista Critica de Ciências Sociais, 73 (December): 3–28.

From lusotropicalism to Lusofonia  93 Pinheiro, L. (2007) “‘Ao vencedor, as batatas’: O reconhecimento da independência de Angola.” Estudos Históricos, 39 (Jan–Jun): 83–120. Quijano, A. (2000) “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South, 1.3: 533–580. Quijano, A. (2007) “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies, 21.2–3 (March/May): 168–178. Rodrigues, J. H. (1965) Brazil and África. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Sansone, L. (2000) “Os objetos da identidade negra: Consumo, mercantilização, globalização e a criação de culturas negras no Brasil.” Mana, 6.1: 87–119. Santos, B. S. and Menses, M. (eds.) (2010) Epistemologias do Sul. Porto: Edições Afrontamento. Schwartz, S. B. (1985) Sugar Plantations and the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seyferth, G. (2002) “Colonização, imigração e a questão racial no Brasil.” Revista USP, 53 (March/May): 117–149. Thompson, E. C. (2011) “Negreiros in the South Atlantic: The Community of ‘Brazilian’ Slave Traders in Late Eighteenth Century Benguela.” African Economic History, 39: 73–128. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trate Database (2013) Voyages Database [Internet]. Emory University. Available from: http://slavevoyages.org/ [Accessed December 1, 2016]. Wallerstein, I. (2000) “Africa in a Capitalist World.” In I. Wallerstein (ed.), The Essential Wallerstein. New York: The New Press, 39–68. White, L. (2013) “Emerging Powers in Africa: Is Brazil Any Different?” South African Journal of International Affairs, 20.1: 117–136.

Part II

Postcolonial conundrums Dystopia, relocation, and the “postcolony”

5 Origins and representations of the dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa Robert Spencer

What this chapter endeavours to demonstrate is that authoritarian states in Africa have, during the colonial period and subsequently, been brought into being precisely to serve the wider requirements of the capitalist world-system. It is the system that is dictatorial, local tyrannies being merely its epiphenomena. Axiomatic for me is the belief that continuing economic and political under-development in much of Africa results from the peculiarities of the continent’s insertion into the capitalist world-system under colonialism. But rather than talk vaguely about “the system,” I will try to provide a much more detailed account of the way in which a profound crisis of profitability in global capitalism since the 1970s has led, among other things, to what John Saul calls the concerted “recolonization” (Saul 2001: 25) of Africa in this period. It is the aim of this chapter to explain as meticulously as possible both why what Giovanni Arrighi calls the “US-led capitalist counteroffensive of the late 1970s and early 1980s” (Arrighi 2010: 328) (usually referred to as neoliberalism) is chiefly responsible for the prevalence and durability of dictatorship in postcolonial Africa, and how African novels about dictatorship draw our attention to this fact. My main example is the 1998 novel Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages) by Ahmadou Kourouma of Côte d’Ivoire.1 In the 15 years after the war, one European power after another abandoned its attempts to retain its colonies as first Holland and Britain, and then Belgium and France, and eventually even Portugal, lined up behind the United States and committed themselves to its project of exerting more indirect (though often no less coercive) forms of imperial power in cahoots with conservative ruling elements in the postcolonial world. One of the main aims of the new arrangement was to foil the efforts of those nation-states that sought, in Noam Chomsky’s words, to “separate themselves from the U.S.-dominated world-system and attempt to use their resources for their own development” (Chomsky 2003: 8). Nobody has put that point as pithily as Chomsky and Edward Herman: The old colonial world was shattered during World War II, and the resultant nationalist-radical upsurge threatened traditional western hegemony and the economic interests of Western business. To contain this threat the United

98  Robert Spencer States has aligned itself with elite and military elements in the Third World whose function has been to contain the tides of change. (Chomsky and Herman 2015: 8–9) Western powers greeted independence for Africa, which they could do nothing to prevent, as an opportunity to prolong and also to conceal their sway over their former colonies. “Elites” in those new nation-states, shielded from democratic accountability, presided over dependent and under-developed economies the principal purpose or function of which, looked at globally, was to produce cut-price resources for corporate monopolies. This is a system that Africans inherited from their colonial oppressors. Africa’s economies were severely skewed and hampered at independence, geared principally to resource extraction for export and accumulation overseas. By far, the most significant element of Africa’s “recolonization” since the 1970s has been the imposition of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) by the international financial institutions and the Western states that control them. Sub-Saharan Africa’s largely dependent and foreign-owned economies generated little in the way of surpluses in the first years after independence. So new governments borrowed from Northern banks the investment capital they needed to stimulate development and to finance infrastructure programmes. They were soon crippled by the burden of debt. Because African economies could not (or rather, were not permitted to) compete with those in the first world, the interest payments quickly outweighed the benefits of the extra investment. As a result, the cost of debt-servicing soon became unmanageable. The SAPs imposed in return for further loans have meant the suspension of the moderately successful interventionist model of “import substitution” development employed by African states in the years following independence. In the late 1970s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) changed its role from a provider of credit to countries with a short-term current account deficit to what Vijay Prashad has called “a weapon to demand structural economic changes” in the postcolonial world (Prashad 2007: 222). The debt crisis became “the Trojan horse for an assault” against the project “for the construction of Third World sovereignty” (Prashad 2007: 231). More than 70 third-world states submitted to SAPs in the 1980s, including most of sub-Saharan Africa, making the “shock therapy” administered by the World Bank and IMF “the common condition of the South in that decade” (Bello et al. 1994: 31) in Walden Bello’s words, “a permanent part of life in most of the developing world” (Stiglitz 2002: 14) in those of Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank’s former chief economist. Thirty-six sub-Saharan African states contracted for 241 SAPs with the World Bank and IMF (Van de Walle 2001: 7). Essential loans were made conditional on drastic cuts in government spending on health, education, infrastructure and social provision (ostensibly to control inflation), the removal of food subsidies and tariff barriers, currency devaluations (supposedly to make exports more competitive), the deregulation of markets (including agricultural markets), the privatisation of state and parastatal industries and the removal of restrictions on foreign investment.2

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa 99 These so-called reforms led invariably to lower and even negative rates of growth, to slumps in investment as well as much greater poverty and inequality, not to mention housing crises and environmental degradation. SAPs devastated the living standards of the poor by reducing incomes and employment and by introducing user fees for public services, although as Mike Davis observes they “made no counter-effort to reduce military expenditure or to tax the incomes or real estate of the rich” (Davis 2006: 155). By encouraging rapid increases in exports, SAPs also contributed to a collapse in the world prices of primary commodities “due to a large increase in their supplies” (Chang 2010: 118); SAPped economies exported more but earned less. But the SAPs achieved their real objective. Protectionist restrictions on foreign investment were summarily dismantled so that, as Bello explains, African economies might be “blasted open” by first-world capital, domestic entrepreneurial groups weakened, and thus Africa fully subordinated once more to “the North-dominated world economy” (Bello 1994: 5). The endemic debt crises of African and Latin American economies in the 1980s and 1990s were also a means of redistributing assets on a massive global scale and of feeding the reckless financialisation of first-world economies. SAPs did much more than rescue Northern banks from their excessive exposure to thirdworld debt in the 1970s. David Harvey estimates that this version of “trickle-up” economics has actually resulted in nearly $5 trillion (the equivalent of more than 50 Marshall Plans) being sent by these economies to their first-world creditors (Harvey 2005: 162). The very purpose of those loans was to furnish a pretext for removing impediments to foreign “investment” in the postcolonial world and to transfer the public assets of the poorest nations on earth gratis to Western banks and corporations. Structural adjustment did not lead to recovery or development, alleviate poverty or deal with health crises. Nor did it encourage foreign direct investment, except in areas in which high returns can be guaranteed for international capital such as resource extraction where the wider effects of that investment are either paltry or positively deleterious.3 Structural adjustment was also much more likely to exacerbate problems of capital flight.4 Indebtedness became a permanent crisis: Sub-Saharan Africa’s total foreign debt rose from $61 billion in 1980 to $177 billion in 1990 (Harrison 2010: 88). Frequently derided as failures, SAPs were in fact, as Mark Curtis argues, “fundamentally successful” at resubordinating the Global South (Curtis 1998: 103). This period saw “a massive net outflow of resources that could otherwise have gone to domestic investment and sustained growth” (Bello 1994: 34). As Fantu Cheru has argued, structural adjustment and its epigones violated any number of fundamental human rights detailed in the Universal Declaration, including the right to education and the right to health; the reduction in public health expenditure led, for example, to a “brain drain” of qualified health care professionals to the West and compounded the HIV/AIDS pandemic (Cheru 2002). SAPs also violated political rights. In most cases, they were accompanied by state repression against the urban poor, students and trade unionists. The international financial institutions’ brand of undiluted market fundamentalism is of course inimical to the interests and aspirations of the people it most directly affects: as the late

100  Robert Spencer Nigerian activist Claude Ake has written, “there is no way of implementing the structural adjustment programme without repression” (Ake 1989: 62). John Walton and David Seddon count 146 “IMF riots” in 39 indebted countries between 1976 and 1992, including food riots, demonstrations and general strikes (Walton and Seddon 1994). In this period, the state abandoned its responsibility for development and redistribution but retained its roles in quelling dissent and facilitating the returns of local elites and foreign firms. Thus, continuing economic underdevelopment has gone hand in hand with continuing political under-development, that is, state repression. Mobutu can no longer be seen strolling through the Chinese pavilions of his absurd jungle Xanadu at Gbadolite and Bokassa no longer sits atop his golden throne in Bangui. But it would be a profound mistake to think that the fall of such despots or the “good governance agenda” or even the ostensible rebirth of political pluralism on the continent in the last 20 odd years has made African states substantially more democratic, let alone substantially more equal. It would also be an error to assume that the emphasis now placed by the World Bank and IMF on “democracy” and “participation” signaled a desire to renounce the rapacious priorities of structural adjustment. Dictators no longer rule such states since the substantial democratic wave that swept the continent in the 1990s, largely in response to the intolerable effects of structural adjustment. But their governments could scarcely be characterised as democratic. The declared aim of “structural adjustment” was to reduce the size of the state and thus create a flood of private investment as well as liberate the energies of some nebulous entity called “civil society.” Nicholas van de Walle shows that it had the opposite effect. The infliction of severe austerity in addition to African states’ withdrawal “from basic developmental activities” in order to focus expenditures “entirely on government consumption” (Van de Walle 2001: 16) has increased corruption in addition to inflating both the bureaucracy and the state’s repressive functions (275–276). Where they take place, multiparty elections are frequently a mere camouflage for the uninterrupted rule of a country’s incumbent elite, whereas party allegiances are sometimes further manifestations of clientelism. The state still looms over the people, but it no longer pretends to perform any developmental role, except insofar as it presides over a much-trumpeted process of “growth” that is in reality both superficial and restricted to elites. The international financial institutions are “demoralizing,” to use the anthropologist James Ferguson’s word (2006: 69–88); they replace a moral and political with a technocratic rhetoric for thinking about the actions of African governments. To harp on the undemocratic nature of African politics in such a situation risks overlooking a whole regime of profoundly undemocratic decision-making that encompasses the IMF and World Bank, foreign banks, the strings-attached charity of liberal states in the West, foreign multinationals, various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and development agencies, and even do-gooding firstworld celebrities. The current fixation with “good governance” in Africa covers over the fact that a government that is good is not one that obediently does the bidding of this unaccountable regime of invigilation, but one that responds to

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa 101 the needs and aspirations of its voters. The emphasis of reform in Africa, as Pita Agbese and George Klay Kieh have argued, should not be on “good governance,” but on “democratic governance” (Klay Kieh and Agbese 2007: 286). According to the World Bank: Good governance includes the creation, protection, and enforcement of property rights, without which the scope for market transactions is limited. It includes the provision of a regulatory regime that works with the market to promote competition. And it includes the provision of sound macroeconomic policies that create a stable environment for market activity. Good governance also means the absence of corruption, which can subvert the goals of policy and undermine the legitimacy of the public institutions that support markets. (World Bank, World Development Report 2002: Building Institutions for Markets, quoted in Cammack 2003: 48) It is clear from this list of demands that “good governance” is just another way of saying “obedience to the requirements of international capital.” Even corruption is described as undesirable only insofar as it hampers capital accumulation, although of course the maintenance in power of narrow state elites whose function is to facilitate the accumulation of capital by foreign firms is what causes graft in the first place. The vapid term governance is a poor substitute for its perfectly serviceable synonym, democracy, which is properly speaking not a mere label affixed to governments that submissively do the bidding of the “markets” (another euphemism) or even to governments that permit minimum standards of political rights. “Democracy” refers in fact to states that allow for the maximum amount of participation in determining a country’s political and economic priorities. That is still not the case in contemporary Africa, where economic “liberalisation” and under-development (which are sides of the same coin) persist in spite of ostensible transitions to democracy. After the economic crises of the 1970s, global “elites” contrived not only to ensure that Africa’s wealth continued to pour northwards, but actively to increase the rate of flow. For the peoples of the South, as Bello has argued, the “defining features” of this period have been “the rollback of their living standards, the virtual loss of their economic sovereignty, and the increased hollowness of their political independence” (Bello 1994: 2). We need to recognise the miscarried or even abortive quality of Africa’s anti-colonial revolutions, one of the deepest aspirations of which, I am claiming, was to construct egalitarian alternatives to the coercive nature of the colonial state and its successors as well as to the exploitative economic system those states exist to superintend. Since the 1970s, the efforts of radical movements in Africa to break away from the subordinate role long ago assigned to that continent in and by the world economy have been repeatedly foiled. Why? Because it was deemed necessary to nip the revolutionary promise of decolonisation in the bud, “to keep the Third World in line,” in Susan George’s stark formulation (George 1988: 5).

102  Robert Spencer The “recolonization” of Africa during this period has been an essential part of the response of the ruling classes of Western states to a crisis of profitability in the capitalist world-system. Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and Adam Smith in Beijing (2007), magisterial surveys of capitalism’s development and expansion since the fifteenth century, offer the best explanation of this link. These two books present the history of capitalist development as a succession of systemic cycles or phases of accumulation, each one led by hegemonic states: Italian city states (in alliance with the armed power of Portugal and Spain), the Netherlands, Britain and latterly the United States. What Marx identified as the tendency for the accumulation of capital to outstrip what can be profitably reinvested within existing territorial systems led to the downfall of each of these hegemons and, at least until now, to the passing of the baton to another hegemonic power that is able to renew the process of expansion on an even larger scale. In each instance, the downfall of a particular hegemon and the exhaustion of a particular phase of accumulation commences when surplus capital is directed to financial speculation and other desperate palliatives designed to ensure the continued power of that hegemon as well as secure conditions for profitable accumulation. Structural adjustment was one of these. Arrighi thus describes a “US-led capitalist counteroffensive of the late 1970s and early 1980s” that sought to restore profitability at the expense of the social democratic aspirations of labour movements in the first world, of the very existence of the nominally socialist second world and of the revolutionary aspirations of national liberation in the third world. The United States assumed a global economic leadership role at the end of the Second World War, with the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates binding the capitalist economies together. The idea was that the United States’ surplus capital would be exported in the form of direct investment to its allies and protégés, not least Japan and West Germany, whose debts were forgiven and who also benefited from lavish Marshall Plan aid. At that time, American manufacturing dominated the world market. But a combination of domestic and international factors gradually ate away at those surpluses. US corporations were assailed in the 1960s by intensified competition from Japan and West Germany. In addition, the “Great Society” programmes of the Johnson Administration that were intended in part to placate opposition to the war in Vietnam as well as the radicalism of the civil rights movement contributed to the empowerment of labour in the United States and therefore to a wider squeeze on corporate profits in this period. Wage militancy and the enormous costs of the war in Vietnam exacerbated the US growing fiscal crisis. Arrighi focuses on a fateful policy response to this predicament on the part of US elites that, while it gave rise to new levels of (unevenly distributed) prosperity in the United States itself, produced a prolonged period of crisis and stagnation in the under-developed world. The so-called Nixon shock, the cancelling in 1971 of the dollar’s convertibility into gold, and therefore the beginning of the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, was the result of a decision taken by the US government “to compete aggressively for capital worldwide, to finance a growing trade and current account deficit in its own balance of

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa  103 payments; thereby provoking . . . a major reversal in the direction of global capital flows” (Arrighi 2002: 21). From 1971, the US pursued a novel solution to its ballooning budget and trade deficits: to expand them both. From being its major source of direct investment, the United States suddenly became the world’s main debtor nation and its largest recipient of foreign capital. The United States was able to run massive deficits in its balance of trade, not least because of the unique privileges of dollar seigniorage, sucking in manufacturing imports, but only at the price of the permanent indebtedness of the state itself and of US consumers. Yanis Varoufakis has dubbed this peculiar system “the global minotaur”: the defining characteristic of the post-1971 era was a reversal of the flow of trade and capital surpluses between the United States and the rest of the world. The hegemon, for the first time in world history, strengthened its hegemony by wilfully enlarging its deficits. (Varoufakis 2015: xiv) Just as the Cretan minotaur of Greek mythology fed each year on the seven young men and the seven young women sent to his labyrinth as foreign tribute by the Athenians, so the similarly voracious American minotaur has feasted on “a constant flow of tribute from the periphery to the imperial centre” (23). The world’s leading surplus economies exported goods to the United States and transferred most of their profits to Wall Street where they were turned into high-risk loans and complicated new financial instruments like collateralised debt obligations and the derivatives racket (with eventual consequences that are well known). The “global minotaur” was effectively an ingenious but ultimately unsustainable mechanism for recycling surplus capital that was used to provide credit to US consumers and direct investment in US corporations and to finance US government deficits (222). This is no doubt quite a complicated narrative, but it contains one explanation for why Africa turned out to be so much more vulnerable than South and East Asia to the harsher winds that have blown through the world economy since the end of the 1960s. In fact, that question could be rephrased as a question about who was best placed in this period to compete for a share of the United States’ seemingly insatiable demand for consumer goods. The short answer is: not Africa, because it has been definitively “peripheralised” over the last century (its role being to provide a continuous supply of cheap primary commodities) and because in the 1980s its economies were being deliberately bled dry by structural adjustment. Capital investment now moved from the surplus economies of Japan, Germany and China to the United States and, obscenely, via the enormous tribute payments of structural adjustment, from the third world to the first. If the “reserve army” of new proletarians was provided by the low-cost, low-regulation economies of Asia, then an even grimmer fate awaited much of Africa, where un-, semi- and formerly employed workers were reduced to destitution by indebtedness and deindustrialisation.

104  Robert Spencer World history since the 1970s, the age of what would come to be known as neoliberalism, is therefore the story of ruling elites’ effectively counter-revolutionary efforts to combat a crisis of profitability on a global scale. The history of Africa since independence cannot be understood without also analysing the efforts of ruling elites in the world’s major powers (as well as their local proxies) “to cope with the problems posed by world-wide decolonization” (Arrighi 2010: 331). The United States and its auxiliaries refused to tolerate the political and economic independence of those newly independent resource-rich states on which Western economies depended. [T]he full sovereignty of Third World states constituted a latent and growing challenge to US world power, potentially far more serious than Soviet power itself. This challenge was both economic and political. Economically, the remaking of Western Europe and Japan in the US image . . . combined with the permanent US–USSR armaments race, put tremendous pressure on the world supplies of primary inputs. This combination also enhanced the strategic importance of the Third World as a reservoir of natural and human resources for the satisfaction of the present and projected needs of First World economies. . . . The exercise of full sovereignty rights by Third World states was bound to reduce this flexibility [in the use of third-world resources by first-world capital], and eventually eliminate it completely. Should these states feel free to use their natural and human resources as they saw fit  – including hoarding or mobilizing them in the pursuit of domestic, regional or world power, as sovereign states had always felt free to do – the pressure on supplies generated by the expansion of the US regime of accumulation would inevitably implode in the form of “excessive” competition within and among First World states. (Arrighi 2010: 332) Via structural adjustment, the use and threat of military force and the co-option of elites, the United States and its allies brought third-world states to their knees. Neoliberalism, as Harvey shows, has been a prolonged and ongoing effort to free capital from the constraints imposed by the political-economic organisation of working classes: from, for example, “burdensome” taxation, from employment regulations, from political and state “interference” in the right of “entrepreneurs” to get a quick and easy return on their investments, from environmental legislation and, most significantly of all (though this is not a point that Harvey’s classic Brief History of Neoliberalism looks at in any detail), from the desire of militant movements in the decolonising world to own and control their own resources. Arrighi allows us to see that the reorganisation of the world economy since the early 1970s was in large part a response to the growing strength of organised labour, but also to the revolutionary threat posed by an insurgent third world, exemplified by the defeat in Vietnam, by socialist revolutions in Africa and Latin America and by what Bello calls “the vision of a global redistribution of economic power” articulated by the programme for a “New International Economic

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa  105 Order” adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974 (Bello 1994: 9).5 It has always struck me that the high point and encapsulation of the third-world 1960s were the half-forgotten (or, more likely, wilfully repressed) proposals contained in the NIEO, a prospective “trade union of the poor” in Julius Nyerere’s words (Nyerere 1980: 60) whereby newly independent states might respond to the economic crisis of the 1970s by forming cartels in raw materials and other primary commodities “to complete the liberation of the Third World countries from external domination” (61). The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) established in 1964 sought to aid development in the Global South by stabilising commodity prices, cancelling debts, setting up a system of preferential tariffs that would give third-world manufactures competitive access to first-world markets, legitimising protectionist trade policies in the Global South and expanding foreign assistance as a form of reparation for European colonialism (Bello 2004: 35). Such proposals and initiatives would have had profoundly revolutionary effects in practice, overturning as they sought to do the entire structure of the world economy and in the process imperilling the long-term prospects of first-world capital. Prashad has narrated the compelling story of what he calls “the thirdworld project” to overturn the legacies and continuities of colonialism and of how governments in the Global North set about foiling the vision of more equitable forms of development contained in the NIEO proposals. The institutions of the United Nations, especially the General Assembly and UNCTAD, were gradually marginalised; the catastrophe of structural adjustment was unleashed, and classic tactics of colonial divide and rule split the third world’s least developed countries off from its most developed. A crucial move in the defeat of the NIEO project and therefore in the advent of neoliberalism was the co-opting of the dominant classes in third-world states, as Prashad argues. The narrative on the origins of neoliberalism formulated by scholars like David Harvey leaves out the role of the demise of the Third World Project, and the enthusiastic commitment to the ideology from the emergent elites in the “global cities”: of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The IMF did not force them into these ideas; they came to them willingly. . . . The elites of the South pushed against the nationalist expectation that they maintain a patriotic and social commitment to the working class and peasantry, whose struggles had won freedom for their countries a generation before. (Prashad 2014: 134) If the dawning age of neoliberalism had debt peonage and primary commodity production in store for most of Africa and unregulated, inexpensive wage labour in mind for much of Asia (with a combination of the two fates set aside for Latin America), then dominant classes in those states could do very well from this turn of events. Those “elites” became managers on behalf of first-world capital, not leaders in any authentic sense with a sincere or even just a half-hearted commitment to addressing the larger causes of their people’s lasting impoverishment, but

106  Robert Spencer overseers or sanctioned chiefs whose privilege it was to take a cut from the profits and rents being passed northwards along the great commodity chains of the world economy. The “IMF riots” of the 1980s, the renewed struggles of the 1990s and the latest protests against austerity should be seen as part of an ongoing struggle against this capitulation and for a new economic order that would finally fulfil the dreams of independence. We should therefore go so far as to say that “the US-led capitalist counteroffensive of the late 1970s and early 1980s” was in large part an attempt to resist the revolutionary challenge of decolonisation or, put differently, to exorcise the spectre of what Fredric Jameson calls the global 1960s (the period, he says, between the late 1950s and around 1974). “All of world history looks different,” as Susan Andrade suggests, when “one regards the 1960s from the different cultural and geographic points of view” of, for example, West Africa (Andrade 2012: 292). What is frequently dismissed as a short-lived student rebellion in Paris can then be recognised as a manifestation or expression of a much larger, indeed systemic, crisis. What I’m characterising quite broadly as the contradiction and choice between the regime of capital and the liberationist ideals of decolonisation became visible at this time. Andrade’s readings of the two major West African francophone novels of 1968, Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendances and Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence take stock of the disappointment and dissipation of the revolutionary energies of African decolonisation. Or rather, these novels reveal that those energies and aspirations were bound to be frustrated within the constraints of existing economic and political structures (specifically, a capitalist world-economy and the undemocratic state, both inherited from colonialism). In Andrade’s words, “by 1968 the global South strongly prefigured distrust of the state and the belief that the national bourgeoisie was more dangerous than good for the nation” (Andrade 2012: 308). If it is true that in Africa neoliberalism meant inequality, indebtedness, deindustrialisation, an epidemic of un- and under-employment, the growth of gigantic slums in the continent’s proliferating “megacities,” the ruthless assertion of state power, the continued evacuation of commodities to the global economy (to use Joe Trapido’s phrase (Trapido 2016: 57) – in short, all the phenomena that Saul says amount to the continent’s “recolonization” – then we are forced to admit that the continuities in Africa’s polities and economies since the 1960s are at least as conspicuous as the discontinuities and that in fact “recolonization” might be the wrong word since Africa was never definitively decolonised in the first place. Postcolonial African fiction tells the story of the continuing imperialist domination of Africa in the years after the continent’s supposed decolonisation. It does so in countless different ways of course, from different perspectives and in different forms. Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, for example, is concerned with the disturbing similarities between the colonial state and the ostensibly postcolonial state; with the causal connection between Africa’s continuing economic under-development and its political under-development (between imperialism and undemocratic state structures); and, ultimately, with the consequent need to view the political tasks of Africa’s peoples in terms of conflict and

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa 107 struggle, specifically the struggle to prevail over imperialist domination, to pioneer substantive alternatives to Africa’s nations and its states in the context of a continent finally delinking itself from the capitalist world-system. According to Jean Ouédraogo, however, the “ambition” of Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is “to speak of the Cold War and its ravages in Africa” (Ouédraogo 2004: 2). My claim is that, to the contrary, the preoccupation with the Cold War in Kourouma’s oeuvre should be seen instead chiefly as a way of addressing the larger context in which Cold War rhetoric was used to license the continuing depredations of imperialism in postcolonial Africa and therefore the maintenance in power of authoritarian regimes.6 In Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, the provisional title of which was The Cold War (Ouédraogo 2000: 1338), “anti-communist” propaganda is portrayed as a mere camouflage for the inexorable rule of the République du Golfe by Koyaga, the “Supreme Guide,” “Founder President and President for Life” (WWBV, 340) and his French and American patrons. The new title refers to the dictator’s belief that in the event that he should be in danger of losing an election the beasts would provide him with a majority, a satire of course on the hunter-dictator’s grandiose delusions but also on the brazenness and guile with which figures like the obvious model for Koyaga, Togo’s Gnassingbé Eyadéma, managed to ride out the democratising wave of the 1990s. Even after 30 years, Koyaga’s power (like Eyadéma’s until his death in 2005) remains invulnerable, despite the end of the Cold War and despite the national conference that Eyadéma, like his fictional avatar, convened in response to strikes and antigovernment protests in 1991 and then subsequently outmanoeuvred. Authoritarian state sovereignty in postcolonial Africa is so interminable and apparently so magically indomitable that even “democratisation” becomes a mere chapter in its enduring sway. Readers learn a great deal about Koyaga’s personality cult, which is virtually indistinguishable from) the well nigh Orwellian dimensions of Eyadéma’s. The latter consisted, as the cultural anthropologist Charles Piot reminds us, of ubiquitous portraits, an attendant troupe of dancing “animators,” a “fetishized and fictionalized” biography of miraculously foiled assassination attempts and deliberately cultivated rumours about the protecting graces of powerful deities (Piot 2010: 25–27). The veritably occult character of the regime, even more importantly, is to be found above all in its seemingly magical and fetishised fixedness, in a kind of amazing and preternatural indestructability that is manifested not only in the dictator’s fabled imperviousness to coups d’état, but in the deplorable continuities of a system of authoritarian rule that has survived uninterrupted and in all important respects substantially unchanged from the original conquest by France, through the nominal transitions to independence and the long years of despotism and even since the apparent transition to multiparty democracy. The state is presented by Kourouma’s novel as a Leviathan that has not ceased terrorising its subjects. Yet the state’s disturbing resemblance to its murderous colonial predecessor is revealed most tellingly by the language or idiom with which the state presents itself both to itself and to the novel’s readers. What we

108  Robert Spencer ascertain by these means is that since its inception the state has viewed its subjects as a collection of bêtes sauvages to be, successively, disciplined by la mission civilisatrice, distracted by the postcolonial state’s extravagant performances of invulnerability and, latterly, swindled and coerced by the vampire state of the post-Cold War era. The purpose of this apparently indomitable device for oppression and plunder has certainly not been to “contain” the “Soviet threat,” but in fact repeatedly to “contain” something that is infinitely more dangerous to the regime and its patrons: the bêtes sauvages who perennially threaten to overpower the predatory state in a democratic revolution. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote should therefore be read as a text that encourages attention to the relentlessly authoritarian character of political power in what it presents as “by far the continent richest in poverty and dictators” (WWBV, 440). “Richest” is a strangely inapposite word to use in this context, or at least it appears to be until one recalls that the form of this text is a profoundly ironical donsomana or praise poem addressed to the dictator in the second person, a Malinké hunters’ ritual the ostensible or official purpose of which is to renew and prolong the dictator’s power in the presence of his fellow hunters and dictators. The novel is narrated in a language of sustained and sweeping hyperbole. It is a kind of irreverently ingenuous history of “measureless Africa, a land as rich in tyrants as it is in pachiderms” [la vaste Afrique, terre aussi riche en potentats qu’en pachydermes] (315) or, further on, “a land as rich in violators of human rights as it is in hyenas” (320), “a land as rich in shameless lying heads of state as it is in vultures” (335) and “a land as rich in kleptomaniac dictators as it is in tragedies” (355). At the level of form and language, these expressive refrains are something like a cross between the windy banalities of official oratory and the patronising clichés of mainstream travel writing. At the level of content, however, they manage to subvert the belittling preconceptions of conventional discourse about “Africa,” with its dehumanising tourist’s-eye fixation with landscapes and wildlife, presenting Africa instead as a continent rich only in the predatory fauna of tyrants who have devoured its wealth. Christiane Ndiaye is absolutely right to say that the dominant critical reception of Kourouma’s work in France, where his novels have been garlanded with numerous accolades and awards, tends to minimise what she calls its “literariness.” Kourouma tends to be presented not as a novelist at all but as “the author of historical documents or ethnographic studies” (Ndiaye 2007: 97). Whether critics are praising the “authenticity” of his Malinké-infused French or lauding him as a courageous witness to dictatorship and violence, they tend to present Kourouma’s work as an essentially realist undertaking, in the process (I would add) missing this novel’s meditation on how “the real” is actively distorted and concealed by the very discourse of dictatorship that the text adopts. It might be more accurate to characterise what Ndiaye calls the novel’s “literariness” as its intensely modernistic (as opposed to realist) stress on the non-transparency of language, on language’s partiality and figurativeness. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote certainly is not a “historical document,” but to the contrary a sustained testament to (even outwardly an example of) history’s censorship and distortion at the hands of state propaganda.

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa 109 The donsomana is ostensibly a ritual of catharsis and purification narrated mainly by Bingo, a sora or hunter’s griot, and by Bingo’s “apprentice” and “responder” Tiécoura (WWBV, 2). Together, they relate the convoluted story of the dictator’s rise to power to help him, after a reign of three decades, to relocate the two fetishes that are the source of his strength and of his celebrated invulnerability to assassination: his mother’s aerolite and the marabout’s Qur’an (67). Bingo comes not to bury Caesar, but to praise him: “A sora is a teller of tales, one who relates the stories of the hunters to spur their heroes to greater feats” (2). Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is therefore not a work that explicitly denounces dictatorship, but one whose ostensible or official purpose is to celebrate dictatorship. My claim, however, is that the donsomana also requires, indeed potentially fosters, alert readers capable of detecting the irony in the novel’s protracted paean of praise, and proficient therefore at deciphering and seeing through the official narratives and myths of Koyaga’s rule’s “permanence” (WWBV, 330) and invulnerability that Bingo so vividly performs. Here the griot is far more than just a praise-singer. What appears to be a narrative told on behalf of the powerful is so intensely hyperbolic and so manifestly partial that it might be received and understood by its auditors in radically different ways. The novel, in short, performs dictatorship to produce the kind of readers and citizens required to denounce dictatorship and instate more democratic forms of political rule. Kourouma has spoken of “the need to clear our History of any myth, to free the people from the ancient myths” (Ouédraogo 2000: 1342). The permanence of state power is the most important of these. Fetish objects in the novel, according to Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra’s compelling reading, “make visible the ways in which dictatorial power constructs and maintains its authority and are central to the analysis of authoritarian power” (Armillas-Tiseyra 2015: 125). If the term fetish is understood “in the sense inherited from anthropology and colonial ethnography: an inanimate object imbued with magical powers that stirs superstitious or irrational dread and yet also reverence,” then power itself needs to be defined as a kind of fetish. In Kourouma’s novel, Africa’s dictators present their power as being as ineluctable and as magically invulnerable as the fetishes from which that power is drawn. Both the fetish and the dictatorial power that depends upon it are imbued with magical strength. We can therefore say that the power of the fetish and the continuing fetishism of power are Kourouma’s novel’s main themes. Even Tiécoura’s extended account of de Gaulle’s 1958 ruse of conceding nominal independence for the various states of Afrique occidentale française in exchange for continuing economic subordination, the whole scheme to be administered by a network of pliant and murderous despots, toes the official line and only hints at what an alternative account of the history of la françafrique might sound like. French West Africa could not become la France d’outre-mer, Tiécoura tells us: For obvious reasons, it looked as if it would be impossible to integrate an entire sub-continent inhabited by more than 50 million Negro savages – all

110  Robert Spencer of them primitive, some of them anthropophagous  – into the French state without some risk that sooner or later France would be colonised by those it had colonised. On the other hand, it was unthinkable to leave such vast, prosperous territories, not to mention the considerable French interests and investments they contained, at the mercy of inexperienced, dishonest and irresponsible African demagogues. A political genius, General de Gaulle managed to find a satisfactory solution to the problem. De Gaulle succeeded in granting independence without decolonising. He succeeded in this by inventing and supporting presidents of republics who referred to themselves as fathers of the nation, architects of the independence of their countries, when in fact they had done nothing to win independence for their republics and were not the real masters, the true leaders of their peoples. (WWBV, 86–87) Elections and referendums are “rigged in favour of . . . the candidates whose manifestos did not significantly clash with the colonial notion of the inferiority of the lazy, thieving Negro” (WWBV, 88). The new leaders are coached in diplomatic protocol before being congratulated by de Gaulle on their “vigilant anti-communism” and presented to the “Queen of England and the President of the United States – as Cold War politics demanded.” Furnished with the paraphernalia and elite privileges of flag independence they then “return to the colonial governor’s palace and proclaim a one-party state” (89). Intellectuals in the new republic, eager to secure ambassadorial positions, busied themselves in devising a historic legitimacy for the President. They wrote hagiographies, composed poems to be sung by schoolchildren. The country’s greatest stars turned out songs celebrating the thousand exploits of the Father of the Nation, the architect of independence, this Prometheus, the hero who had snatched the sovereignty of the land of their ancestors from the claws of the evil colonial oppressor. (WWBV, 89) There is a great deal of cynical realpolitik in Tiécoura’s account of these manoeuvres. But there is no overt criticism of de Gaulle’s neo-colonial subterfuge. Rather, what these extended passages do is accentuate the constructedness of the narratives and meanings used to legitimise dictatorship and thus the prolongation of colonial power relations. It does so not only by describing the intelligentsia’s eager assumption of the role of Koyaga’s functionaries and propagandists, but also by, as it were, performing that role, albeit in the kind of exaggerated way that stresses the triteness and the sheer spuriousness of the regime’s blustering hype. Koyaga cannot be both “the architect of independence” and the “genius,” de Gaulle’s obedient factotum, both a “Prometheus” and a servant of the French Gods that continue to rule West Africa. The “historic legitimacy” devised by the intelligentsia is clearly fabricated and misleading. Just as importantly however, the official rhetoric of the new republics also colludes in camouflaging the

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa 111 continued sway of the former colonial power. The praise-singing of the donsomana, the demagogical and patriarchal fantasies about the nation’s “hero” and “Father,” even the militant rhetoric about the restoration of national sovereignty – these things are not only fallacious, but also structurally identical to (and surprisingly compatible with) a colonial worldview that Tiécoura deploys with equal fluency: the unabashedly racist tropes, the patrician dismissals of inexperienced and demagogic African politicians and the cold ethnographic clichés about cannibalism. The hagiographic idiom of the donsomana is unmasked as a continuation of the self-glorifying lexicon of la mission civilisatrice. Kowtowing to both de Gaulle and Koyaga, these discourses are two techniques for legitimising the unvarying sovereignty of the colonial governor’s palace. Something is missing from both those paradoxically compatible idioms of course, which is the most important thing of all, amounting to a gigantic blind spot, the existence of which these manifestly partial narrative viewpoints constantly point towards but do not specify. And from that day forward, the titanic struggle would begin between the Father of the Nation and architect of independence, and underdevelopment. A struggle whose consequences are known to everyone today: through the tragedies into which such unspeakable aberrations plunged the whole continent of Africa. (WWBV, 89–90) This is an enormously suggestive and complex passage. It commences in the Fanonian and Marxisant mode of anti-colonial revolt, evoking a heroic and herculean fight against economic backwardness albeit with a distinctly un-Fanon-like faith in the “titanesque” figure of the nationalist leader. The cynical misuse of this radical idiom as a legitimation for dictatorial rule works to conceal what Tiécoura has already made clear: that independence on these terms means not a struggle against under-development, but a perpetuation of it in conformity with “French interests and investments.” What are not spelt out, though there is no need to because apparently they “are known to everyone today,” are the results of this merely rhetorical rather than actual struggle against under-development: “les tragédies dans lesquelles les ineffables aberrations ont plongé le continent africain.” It is not so much that the outcome of independence is actively concealed by the text, because Tiécoura is surely right to assume that to readers of African fiction the manifold symptoms of political and economic under-development are indeed all too familiar. Rather these results of independence cannot be spoken of or, crucially, cannot be explained in the propagandistic idiom employed by the novel. The consequences of the failed struggles for authentic independence are well known; they are indeed “unspeakable” in the sense of being indescribably appalling, instances of physical and mental suffering beyond the power of mere words to capture. But what these consequences mean in the deeper sense of what caused them and what they tell us about the past and future of the continent is unspeakable in a slightly different

112  Robert Spencer sense, that is, inexpressible (ineffable) specifically by the novel we are reading. Faced by the reality of immiseration and oppression the novel resorts to massmedia cliché, characterising such human catastrophes as tragedies (which is to imply that they were somehow fated and inevitable, crimes without perpetrators), and to vagueness, presenting these misfortunes as aberrations or deviations from the norm and not, as they obviously are, typical features of a remorseless system. None of this is spelt out for us, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote being a novel that requires and calls forth (because it does not itself undertake) the intellectual labour of critique and the practical labour of corrective political action. What is instructive about the novel’s sixth and final vigil is that it frustrates and postpones the anticipated political comeuppance, revolution, of the dictatorial system of power it has thus far carefully discredited. It incites but does not satisfy the craving for a conclusive endgame. Kourouma refrains from delivering a definitive or reassuring account of the necessary outcome or end of dictatorial power, bequeathing the task of imagining and effecting such a resolution to his readers. The final vigil opens with an extravagant celebration of the Supreme Guide’s 30  years in power. This ostentatious, spendthrift performance of the dictator’s and therefore the regime’s vigour is exemplified by the “interminable procession” (WWBV, 399) of regiments, women’s and youth groups, cavorting troupes of the dictator’s offspring, bands of sorcerers and shamans, party activists and many others. Seemingly the entire population of this pintsized state is assembled not to be looked at but to feast their eyes on the totally (and symbolically) unmoving and seemingly unmoveable figure of the despot, resplendent in his marshal’s uniform, arm raised in perpetual salute. But the magnificent celebration is also, the novel briefly allows us to believe, “the incident that was to set everyone free” (WWBV, 397). Government employees have not been paid and the managing director of the Agricultural Production Stabilisation Fund is obliged to tell Koyaga that he can no longer disburse enough money to compensate for the falling world prices of cotton, coffee and cocoa, the remaining funds having been embezzled to pay for the anniversary celebrations (400). At this point, the novel becomes a veritable catechism for those who, like the dictator, are uninitiated into the magical convolutions of structural adjustment (401). Mitterrand has advised African leaders “to change their policies, to cease operating as dictators and become saintly democrats.” France has accordingly ended its automatic payments to the treasury and “requires that the dictator first sign an SAP with the IMF” (WWBV, 401). A baffled and angry Koyaga and the secretarygeneral of the country’s sole trade union soon sign the agreement. This is a key moment in the novel when a befuddled and blindsided (as opposed to omnipotent) regime is obliged to comply with the post-Cold War dispensation of structural adjustment. Likewise, the previously obedient (if puckishly arch) voice of the main narrator, previously so reticent about the effects of Koyaga’s power, becomes loquaciously didactic as the local representative of the IMF spells out at length the draconian terms of the SAP: Everything must cease, everything must be stopped, suspended or interrupted, trimmed down or cut back, cut short or pruned, simplified or abandoned,

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa  113 given up or sacrificed, shut down or relocated. No more subsidised festivals or dances. Cut backs in the number of teachers, nurses, women in childbirth, newborn babies, schools, policemen, sentries and presidential guards. No more subsidies for rice, sugar, milk for babies, cotton, and bandages for the wounded, tablets for leprosy and those with sleeping sickness. Construction of schools, roads, bridges, dams, maternity clinics, health centres, palaces and prefectures must be sacrificed. No further help for the blind, the deaf, no subsidies for paper, for sinking wells, for eating butter and cocoa. Reduce the workforce, close down companies, etc. (WWBV, 401–402) This IMF-dictated orgy of austerity and deregulation represents an intensification of oppression and impoverishment, a retreat of the state to its repressive function and its total abandonment of any developmental role. The prospect of a substantive transformation in the République du Golfe depends upon the arrival on the national scene of a third actor, in addition to the “authoritarian state and the submissive populace” (WWBV, 401): “wasted youth, a tribe of the ‘unschooled’, the aimless, of pickpockets and burglars,” referred to “in one of your [i.e. Koyaga’s] astounding, hate-filled diatribes . . . in front of the Assembly as bilakoro [uncircumcised] thugs, drug-addicts and homosexuals . . . the drop-outs, the stone-throwers” (403). Such abusive epithets show that Koyaga and his acolyte Bingo find it impossible to account for the visibility and political strength of this new constituency. These are the educated but jobless youth, the “young workers driven out of offices and factories by closures, cut-backs and business restructuring,” those “who had learned from bitter experience, from injustice and lies” and who heard the tolling of “the bell signalling the leap from dictatorship to democracy” (405): in short, the “wild beasts” or les bêtes sauvages “which would destroy you” (404). That appellation now refers both to the hunter Koyaga’s veritable hecatomb of slaughtered fauna and to the dictator’s other victims who have been disinherited by the expedient compact with Mitterrand and the IMF. What the English adjective wild hardly captures is the regime’s obsession with the reputed “savagery” of a group to which Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly give the more respectful (if somewhat imprecise) term “political society.” The continued use of the racist language of colonial ethnography and the civilising mission illustrates the superficially transformed state’s consistent resemblance to its colonial predecessor. The novel attributes the involvement of this growing urban underclass in political protest to its intense economic deprivation and insecurity. Political society’s “relation to state power” is “a relation defined by an alternation between neglect and direct violence” (Branch and Mampilly 2015: 20). Those relations are rarely mediated by law or by institutions. Without any such investments in the status quo, this group therefore “targets all aspects of life – political, economic, social, and cultural” (33). Of course, the amorphous revolt of “political society” is not enough to make a lasting and substantive revolution. For that there must be concrete demands and programmes, in addition to alliances with rural groups, workers and others. When the IMF’s “restructuring” of state companies leads to

114  Robert Spencer compulsory redundancies in the railway sector the bilakoros therefore join the striking workers on the picket lines (WWBV, 411). When the state responds with massacres the bilakoros attempt to gain the sympathy of powerful external actors by taking the bodies of the dead to be laid out in the gardens and surrounding streets of the French and US embassies. Koyaga’s pleas for support from his former patrons and his threats “to switch sides, to become a red, to bring Cubans to Africa, Chinese from mainland China” are greeted only by the blunt declaration that “[t]he Cold War is over, done with” (WWBV, 413). The dictatorship requires a new ideology to license its depredations. The constitution is amended, trade unions legalised and a general amnesty announced. But this alternately neglected and violently policed underclass of savage beasts who have not yet been permitted to vote, with nothing to lose in the current order and therefore everything to gain from establishing a new one, is in any case betrayed by the intellectuals who return from their exile in France to hijack the National Convention that Koyaga concedes at the height of the revolutionary violence. Descendants of “Christian freedmen . . . exempted from the duties of forced labour,” the “[e]volved Negroes who, logically, constituted a separate class midway between the white civilised Christian and the naked, savage Negro simpleton” (WWBV, 422), this privileged class takes “over the leadership of the revolution” (423). The novel depicts “countless non-governmental associations” (423) and “black French executives who lived in France and whose assets and families, in their entirety, were in France” (434) assuming control of the country. Described in the language and official categories of colonial administration as “évolués,” these democratic technocrats are in fact the latest in a succession of ruling elites going back to the period of direct French control. Still, nothing important has changed. In the end, the revolution does not succeed in “exorcising the country, its people, its beasts, its things, everything that had been ensnared, bewitched by Nadjouma and her aerolite, Bokano and his Qur’an” (WWBV, 425). We should understand the abortive revolution as a moment of failed or only potential transition to a more democratic order, one that is countenanced but not undertaken, shown to be possible but not carried through to completion. The delegates to the Convention vote themselves a gigantic salary and disregard the “clear-cut demands” of the bilakoros (427). “The struggle, the uprising had profited only the delegates, the messengers boys and the militia; all in all a minority, a mere handful of the bilakoros” (428). The only legitimate claim to novelty enjoyed by the “new era of liberty, fraternity and respect for human dignity” that is toasted at champagne dinners to the gentle accompaniment of orchestras (430) is its high-sounding watchwords: saintly “democracy,” “humanism and universalism” (424). But even these new slogans sound suspiciously like the fetishised ideologies of la mission civilisatrice. The dictatorial power of the state is substantially unreformed, a verdict confirmed when the army accompanied by the disillusioned bilakoros dissolve the Convention, imprison the delegates and restore Koyaga to supreme power. If the objective of the donsomana that we have been reading is to relocate the fetishes then the ostensible task of the novel is likewise to reconstitute

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa  115 dictatorship, to eulogise and censor dictatorship, to relocate and reaffirm the fetish of power by convincing Bingo’s despairing listeners of dictatorship’s permanence even in an era of apparent democratisation. So, when we recall that it is dictatorial power itself that is the supreme fetish in the postcolonial state, then we must conclude that dictatorial power’s renewal is dependent in part on how the donsomana is received by its auditors. Is dictatorship too wily and resilient, its allies too powerful, and the forces of opposition too divided and disorganised? Is its invulnerability to revolutionary challenge positively preternatural? Does the donsomana really have the power to reconstitute dictatorship? Or is this protracted performance of power in fact a cryptic advertisement for state power’s secret vulnerability? There is no guarantee that this performance will be read in the way that Koyaga and his accomplice hope or expect it to be read. Like the habitually insubordinate responder Tiécoura, we are capable of reacting to this tale with disobedience and to the cryptic final proverbs, as Tiécoura seems to, with scepticism, utopian longing even in the midst of despair and with a tentative trust in the possibility of a political daybreak after the night of dictatorship that “goes on and on” (WWBV, 445). Kourouma’s novel shows therefore that the Togolese state has certainly not yet “withered” (Piot 2010: 19), as Piot puts it, in the Marxist sense of disbursing its functions to a democratically empowered populace. The elections that Eyadéma called after the national convention of 1991 were won with 96 per cent of the vote after an opposition boycott. The subsequent elections in 1998 were blatantly fixed, since when there have been several further examples of vote-rigging and the manipulation of electoral law. It is difficult to see why Piot characterises the 1990s in Togo and elsewhere in West Africa as a moment of radical rupture when in his next breath he laments “the de facto continuation of the dictatorship” (Piot 2010: 33). Even after Eyadéma’s death in 2005, his family remain in power and the country is still dominated by a corrupt political class. The massive anti-government protests of the early 1990s and the “liberalisation” of the country’s cultural life did not change the fact, which Kourouma’s novel insists on most vehemently, that whatever expedient adjustments it has undergone, state power, not just in Togo but in the rest of postcolonial Africa, still awaits a truly fundamental democratic transformation. Since the nineteenth century, imperialism has beset Africa, the whole continent and not just parts of it, with a force and a pertinacity that have been, and still are, very difficult for Africa’s peoples to withstand. When it comes to postcolonial African history, it is the continuities and similarities as much as the discontinuities and dissimilarities that strike us. It would simply be wrong – empirically and verifiably incorrect – to state that, even after the democratising wave of the 1990s, the various polities and economies that make up the continent of Africa are subject to popular control or that the proceeds of economic development are trickling down to the masses. Even those states that are richest in resources are frequently the most impoverished because the democratic institutions that should enable accumulated capital to be reinvested in social and economic infrastructure, health care and education as opposed to being spirited away by foreign firms and

116  Robert Spencer local “elites” are simply too weak. My point is that dictatorship in one form or another is a general and a lasting problem in postcolonial Africa. As ever, in Patrick Bond’s words “[t]he bottom line is enhanced profit for international capital and despotism for the citizenry” (Bond 2008: 19). Africa has been at the very forefront of what Graham Harrison characterises as neoliberalism’s “global social engineering.” Its states reduced to their police functions, its economies condemned to dependency on credit, aid and agro-mineral exports, doomed to miniscule tax bases and meager accumulation, its elites gorged on privatisation sprees and new sources of investment from Asia, its infrastructure and services wasted or else non-existent, its populations segregated (in what Mike Davis calls the “late-capitalist triage of humanity” [Davis 2006: 199]) into a handful of mega-rich plutocrats and a slum-stowed mass of informally employed paupers, Africa might be said to be at the vanguard of neoliberalism’s permanent counter-revolution, the “cutting edge” as Harrison puts it of “neoliberalism-inpractice.” But perhaps if Africa has been at the vanguard of neoliberalism, then its peoples’ continuing struggles against this state of affairs might also make it the advanced guard of the counter-counter-revolution. In Africa, structural adjustment was one episode in a recurring sequence of colonisations of and scrambles for that continent. But it is not just this dispiriting sequence that novels like Kourouma’s emphasise, but the reality of struggle and the continued availability of alternatives.

Notes 1 Page references are given in the main text after WWBV. 2 On the punitive “conditionalities” attached to SAPs, see Toussaint and Millet 2010: 106–124. 3 On the ways in which “mineral dependency” generates unrepresentative and often authoritarian state structures and narrow ruling elites that rely on the rents from resource extraction, see Bush 2004. 4 See Ndikumana and Boyce 2011. 5 See also Hudson 2005. 6 Carrol F. Coates (2007) presents Kourouma’s whole oeuvre, from Les soleils des indépendances to the unfinished Quand on refuse, as an unrelenting “excoriation” of dictatorial regimes in postcolonial Africa, particularly that of Côte d’Ivoire’s Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Her analysis is more concerned with the content rather than the forms of Kourouma’s work.

Works cited Ake, C. (1989) The Political Economy of Crisis and Underdevelopment in Africa: Selected Works, ed. J. Ihonvbere. Lagos: JAD Publishers. Andrade, S. Z. (2012) “Realism, Reception, 1968, and West Africa.” Modern Language Quarterly, 73.3: 289–308. Armillas-Tiseyra, M. (2015) “The Dictator and His Objects: The Status of the Fetish in the African Dictator Novel.” In G. Ndigirigi (ed.), Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 125–140.

Dictatorial state in postcolonial Africa 117 Arrighi, G. (2002) “The African Crisis.” New Left Review, 15: 5–36. Arrighi, G. (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. Arrighi, G. (2010 [1994]) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso. Bello, W. (2004) Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy. London: Zed Books. Bello, W., Cunningham, S. and Rau, B. (1994) Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment, and Global Poverty. London: Pluto Press. Bond, P. (2008) “Accumulation by Dispossession in Africa: False Diagnoses and Dangerous Prescriptions.” In J. Mensah (ed.), Neoliberalism and Globalization in Africa: Contestations From the Embattled Continent. London: Palgrave, 17–31. Branch, A. and Mampilly, Z. (2015) Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change. London: Zed Books. Bush, R. (2004) “Undermining Africa.” Historical Materialism, 12.4: 173–201. Cammack, P. (2003) “The Governance of Global Capitalism: A New Materialist Perspective.” Historical Materialism, 11.2: 37–59. Chang, H. J. (2010) 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cheru, F. (2002) “Debt, Adjustment and the Politics of Effective Response to HIV/AIDS in Africa.” Third World Quarterly, 23.2: 299–312. Chomsky, N. (2003 [1982]) Towards a New Cold War: U.S. Foreign Policy From Vietnam to Reagan. New York: The New Press. Chomsky, N. and Herman, E. S. (2015 [1979]) The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 1. London: Pluto Press. Coates, C. F. (2007) “A  Fictive History of Côte d’Ivoire: Kourouma and ‘Fouphouai.’ ” Research in African Literatures, 38.2: 124–139. Curtis, M. (1998) The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and the World Order. London: Pluto. Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Ferguson, J. (2006) Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. George, S. (1988) A Fate Worse Than Debt. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Harrison, G. (2010) Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering. London: Zed Books. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hudson, M. (2005) Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order, 2nd revised edn. London: Pluto. Jameson, F. (1988) “Periodizing the 60s.” In Ideologies of Theory – Essays, 1971–1986, vol. 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 178–208. Kieh, G. and Agbese, P. (2007) Reconstituting the State in Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kourouma, A. (1998) En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Kourouma, A. (2004) Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, trans. F. Wynne. London: Vintage. Ndiaye, C. (2007) “Kourouma, the Myth: The Rhetoric of the Commonplace in Kourouma Criticism.” Trans. J. Ouédraogo. Research in African Literatures, 38.2: 95–108. Ndikumana, L. and Boyce, J. K. (2011) Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent. London: Zed Books. Nyerere, J. K. (1980) “Unity for a New Order.” The Black Scholar: 55–63. Ouédraogo, J. (2000) “An Interview With Ahmadou Kourouma.” Callaloo, 23.4: 1338–1348.

118  Robert Spencer Ouédraogo, J. (2004) “Ahmadou Kourouma and Ivoirian Crises.” Research in African Literatures, 35.3: 1–5. Piot, C. (2010) Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa After the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prashad, V. (2007) The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. London: Verso. Prashad, V. (2014) The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. London: Verso. Stiglitz, J. E. (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Toussaint, E. and Millet, D. (2010) Debt, the IMF and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers. New York: Monthly Review Press. Trapido, J. (2016) “Kinshasa’s Theatre of Power.” New Left Review, 98: 57–80. Van de Walle, N. (2001) African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979– 1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Varoufakis, Y. (2015) The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy. London: Zed Books. Walton, J. and Seddon, D. (eds.) (1994) Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment. Oxford: Blackwell.

6 Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti A question of locating the Tunisian revolution in relation to Haiti and the postcolonial Black Atlantic R.A. Judy The phrase restless flying references and comprehends a reading of two poetic lines. They are refrains of different provinces, one Tunisian and one Caribbean, in different tongues, Arabic and French, yet with remarkable harmonic resonance. For reasons of greater linguistic distribution having to do with modern imperial expansion, and a controversy between two well-known Francophone poets about the proper poetic legacy of that expansion, the French is more familiar. It is the opening couplet of the third strophe from Aimé Césaire’s 1955 poem, addressed to the young rising-star Haitian poet, René Depestre, which appeared in its first published version in Présence Africaine under the title, “Réponse à Depestre, poète haïtien. Éléments d’un art poétique.”1 marronnerons-les Depestre marronnerons-les comme jadis nous marronnions maîtres à fouet Let us fly away from them Depestre, fly away from them As we already flew from the masters of the whip The controversy in question was initially prompted by Depestre publishing a letter to the poet, Charles Dobzynski, in the June 1955 issue of Les Lettres Francaises, where he embraces Louis Aragon’s argument for returning to classical measured rhymed as a way to galvanize national spirit.2 “Since the French linguistic domain has expanded beyond the national and geographical borders of France,” the poet of Haiti writes, it is natural that any debate raised on questions of form should also be the responsibility of those who have the honor, as a result of the avatars of the French Political history, to share with you, French creators, the legacy of song, the legacy of prosody, the renewed continuation of the traditional measures proper to the development of poetry in France. This was provocation enough, but then Depestre proclaims that Aragon in his genius and example has shed light, on what ought to be the direction of our Haitian poets, leaving us the responsibility, with the proper coefficient of our talent, to use the foreign material

120  R.A. Judy from the French domain. We must penetrate the essence of his approach to discern in the cultural heritage that comes to us from Africa what can be harmoniously integrated with the French prosodic heritage.3 We can see, then, what drove Césaire to write in the second strophe of his poem in response: DEPESTRE Vaillant cavalier de tam-tam est-il vrai que tu doutes de la forêt natale de nos voix rauques de nos coeurs qui nous remontent amers de nos yeux de rhum rouges de nos nuits incendiées se peut-il que les pluies de l’exil aient détendu la peau de tambour de ta voix DEPESTRE Courageous tom-tom rider is it true that you doubt the native forest and our hoarse voices our hearts that come back up on us bitter our rum red eyes our burned out nights is it possible that the rails of exile have slackened the drum skin of your voice? At the heart of the debate between Césaire and Depestre was the difference between a syncretic conception of créolité, which construes the long-historical event of modern European imperialism (Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese and English), as engendering the circumscribing context for the perpetual convergence of indigenous, African, Asian and European forms, all of which constitute the full heritage of formal poetic expression; and négritude, calling for a return to authentic African sensibilities as the basis of formal expression in French. Haiti is the historical epicenter for both poetic conceptions as a matter of historical precedence, as the place where a distinctive New World consciousness strives for political form; and the fact that the Article 14 of the 1805 Constitution expressly uses the “dénomination génériques de noirs [the generic appellation, Black]” to define Haitians regardless of color underscores the convergence of créolité and négritude in its space. Black connotes dynamic admixture as a conception of being. In this sense, Depestre epitomizes the Haitian when, characterizing himself as a “geo-libertine rooted-nomad,” and a “banyan man voodooist poet” in his 1998 collections of essays, Le Métier à métisser, he declares négritude to be a form of being in créolité . . . when creativity becomes self-conscious and revolts against racism. One day creativity entered into the country-side with

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti 121 Césaire’s rebellion to assume our past as slaves [in formal expression] and to dance [in] our historical situation.4 The last sentence acknowledges the force of Césaire’s pronouncement in Poésie et Connaissance [“Poetry and Knowledge],” where he asserts, following Aristotle’s Poetics: “But a man who saves humanity, a man who re-places it in the universal concert, a man who marries a human flowering to the universal flowering; this man is the poet.”5 As Maryse Condé has remarked, developments in the history of ideas have made the debate mute and the difference between the two Caribbean poets seem less pronounced. Still, the thing that is most germane about the controversy to my reading of Césaire’s couplet is precisely Depestre’s self-description. Even more precisely, it is how his itinerant life as a Marxist revolutionary so warrants that description. Beside the roaming from 1946 to 1952 that brought him to Brazil, one year after the public debate with Césaire he went to Paris, taking part in the Premier congrès des artistes et écrivains noirs at Sorbonne in September  1956, before returning to Haiti, only to be exiled again for his public opposition to Duvalier’s regime. Arriving in revolutionary Cuba, at Che Guevara’s invitation, he served the revolutionary project there in numerous official capacities until 1978 when, disagreeing with the increasing authoritarianism of Castro’s regime, he returned to France, where has remained since then, obtaining citizenship in 1991. In other words, reading the couplet along the same lines as Sylvia Wynter, when Césaire transvalues the substantive maroon as a verb “marronnons-les,” he invokes a historical practice among the enslaved Africans in the New World to escape the confinement of the European in the fullest sense: physically, politically – creating communities founded on principles other than capitalist property – and cognitively. The latter meaning in consciousness and its forms of expression. But Césaire is doing something else as well. He is speaking to what Depestre has already been doing, what he and Depestre constantly do, not merely as a matter of political exigency, but also as a matter of historical being; and that should be what circumscribes their poetic form. In the 1956 reprinting of Césaire’s poem its title is changed to Le Verb Marronner (“The Verb ‘Marronner’ ”), making the activity of flying as dynamic practice its defining character. The couplet is also revised from a transitive to an interrogative future, and the reference to the “masters of the whip” is dropped altogether, giving us: marronnerons-nous Depestre marronnerons-nous? Shall we fly away Depestre, shall we fly away? My departing from Eshleman and Smith’s translation, as well as Clifford’s rendering marronner as flying is in keeping with Greg Thomas’s inclination to anglicize the French verb as the phrase, “to go Maroon,” which he deploys in association with Wynter’s sense of it as a dynamic mode of being in distinct apposition to the ethno-biological class formations of capitalist modernity. “Flying” is also in keeping with the etymology and history of the term, marron, which Neil

122  R.A. Judy Roberts has recounted recently for us, and, in that recounting, underscored the sociopolitical connotations of being-under-way. That is to say, not so much stateless as being on the way to a state not having already belonged to, or originated in a prior state – and here I am quibbling a bit with his argument about marronnage for reasons that will become apparent momentarily. In any event, Roberts has given us one of the more insightful readings of this poem, and there have been many, and his interpretation of Césaire’s elaboration of marronner as the action of social transformation in flight to be a distinct concept of freedom is fully in keeping with Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s extraordinarily poetically critical reading of Le Verb Marronner as both inviting and defying critical representation; its being a potent instance of performative mimesis. The second, less familiar poetic line is a hemistich from the tenth-century Abbasid poet, al-Mutanabbi’s qasīda (ode), titled (Baqā’ī shā’ laysa hum irtihalan, “Thankful They Are Not Willing Migrants”). Restless [‘alā qalaqin], as if riding the wind/Steering me South or North. My reading of the line, however, is its recitation in 1994 by Mohamed-Salah Omri in his interview with the Tunisian writer Mahmud al-Mas‘adi, who as Secretary of State for Education, Youth and Sports in President Habib Bourguiba’s post-independence government undertook institutional execution of the Education Reform law number 58–118 of November 1958 that engendered the subjects that would come to lead the Tunisian Revolution for Dignity and Freedom. Omri’s recitation was in an effort to solicit from Mas‘adī some explanation of the pertinence the concept of restlessness has for his seminal work, ‫ح ّدث أبوحريرة قال‬ (Haddatha Abu Hurayra qāla, Abu Hurarah Said). The writer responded promptly to the query, stating: The image is poetic. We are in the realm of poetry, imagination and imagery. I  would like to point out a matter of principle. A  part severed from the whole loses the meaning it acquires by being in a relationship with a whole. Taken separately, the part seems cut off, which changes its definition and meaning. Taking note of the close association of poetic expression, imagination, and imaging – which here surely entails the psychological, or in more current language, the cognitive – al-Mas‘adi’s insistence that full meaning is in association, in the relationship between part and whole, is striking, almost strident, and calls for some care. The line is the 17th hemistich of Mutanabbi’s 30-line qasida. There are too many many lines to give in full here, but the immediately preceding hemistich, reinforces Omri’s sense of pertinence: َ‫عت عَن أ‬ ُ ‫ َوال أَز َم‬ ‫رض زَواال‬ ٍ

َ‫لت في أ‬ ً ‫رض ُمقاما‬ ُ ‫فَما حا َو‬ ٍ

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti  123 If, along with Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arrī, we read the verb (azm‘atu [“I came to crisis”]) to mean “I came to a decision,” (‘azmatu) in a way analogous to the classical Greek sense of “krīsis” (κρίσις), this line can be taken as an oxymoron. To paraphrase: “I have not tried to establish fixed residence in any one place as a homeland because I am in transit from one homeland to another whilst still at home.” In other words, I am perpetually on the back of a camel, night and day, making it effectively my homeland. This is not a metaphor for perpetual travel from one place to another. Not having tried to establish a homeland means that there is no necessity to decide to leave. Nor is it a figure of exile. Rather, it is a figure of being transitional existentially. Mutanabbi’s figural designation for the (‘ala qalqin), which can be paraphrased as, existentially transitional is “I am on disorder and movement” or, “I am on the back of a restless fast moving camel . . . remaining so agitated in motion” ( /‘ala qalqin), that it as if I were riding the wind’s back, directing it however I desire. This is a metaphor of relatively unrestricted agency and desire, of freedom. But what is meant by freedom here? Mas‘adī presents a way of addressing this question in his explanation of the meaning he takes from al-Mutannabi’s lines: “Restlessness means being unsettled . . . out of place, as in a stone that is not in its proper place in a building.” By this explanation, “placelessness,” having no proper place of origin – in another language this is termed “homelessness,” in the sense of without founding mythology – which is how Mas‘adī is construing restlessness ( /‘ala qalqin), is not a pitfall, but is enabling. He makes this very point when in continuing his response to Omri’s query he adds: “In this respect, Abu Hurayra refers to Abu al-‘Atāhiyya’s line: ‘I sought residence in every land/But found rootedness nowhere.’ ” The line from Abu al-‘Atāhiyya referred to is the first of two hemistiches: ُ I sought settlement in every land/But saw nowhere any homeland for me. I obeyed my desires and they enslaved me/Although I was convinced I was free. It is not just that one has no homeland and has no longing for homeland; it is that one is not driven or compelled in any way by the conventions or dictates of, let us say in an admittedly anachronistic mode, national patriotism. Put somewhat more critically, for Abu al-‘Atāhiyya, the truth of one’s self is not defined by a relationship to the “umma,” privileged by and in power – he is, after all, the poet who famously made the Abbasid Caliph Harun Rashid weep by telling him that all the rewards of earthy life and power are an illusion. The perils of too carelessly identifying the political structures of the late eighth-century Caliphate with those of the mid-twentieth-century nation-sate notwithstanding,

124  R.A. Judy Mas‘adī clearly deploys these lines to mark a certain existential condition, a certain type of human persona or subjectivity. Restlessness ( /‘ala qalqin) is his descriptor for that existential human condition, which he further elaborates is human life itself as continuous and renewed movement. “Life is becoming, impossibility and tragedy,” he says. The person who takes on this responsibility after gaining insight or discovering feelings and ideas through thought would not be able to settle down. That person is someone who accepts the responsibility of being, someone who goes through life as if it were an adventure and as if everything in front of him were part of this unknown. This the existential restlessness is what Mas‘adī advocated and sought to promul/ gate with his education reform. The effect was to engender a population of al-qaliq (the restless), capable of an ongoing open-ended practice of discovery. The reference for the sort of subject Mas‘adī characterized as qaliq (restless) is undoubtedly to Sartre’s sense of inquiétude as the condition of absolute human freedom; but it is equally, and this is paramount, undoubtedly a reference to Mutanabbi’s figural designation for the existentially transitional subject who has been the focus of so much thinking and ink in the Islamicate theorizations of what Fanon describes as individuation. In that vein, restlessness is not a transitional phase, however, moving from one regime of order to another, a symptom of collapse into anarchy, an emotional outburst. Instead, it is perpetual movement, perennial transitionality  – which I  now pointedly mark as an exercise of what Michel Foucault called “practices of freedom,” taking that to be akin to what Tony Bogues has recently designated as “common association” in his attempt to think the centrality of artistic and poetic expression in the Haitian peoples’ effort to actualize a free revolutionary subject in the immediate aftermath of 1804, the genealogy of which cannot be delineated in accord with the historical formation of the bourgeoisie.6 Thinking along these lines, with regard to how the Tunisian Revolution can be located in relation to the Haitian, the postcolonial nation-state – the 1804 Republic of Hayti be arguably the first instance of such – maybe the grounds or sufficient cause for practices of freedom, but it is not the actuality of freedom, or even the necessarily desired telos. Whether or not Mas‘adī read Césaire or Césaire Mas‘adī – they both shared the French language in colonialism, as well as the surrealist movement – I read their poetic lines to eloquently state the problematic tension between the anarchic freedom of perpetual flight – , what Robert’s designates the flying of marronnage, and Fred Moten has called fugitivity – and state government: how do spontaneously constituted insurrectionist collectives maintain their freedom while aspiring to state government without degenerating into repressive regimes? That was indeed a paramount question among Tunisians during the electoral campaign of October 2015, and it has been a perennial question of every revolution since the eighteenth century; success being measured by how stable the

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti  125 transition from insurrection to representative democratic government is. And, on this score, we are to believe that the Tunisian Revolution is the exception of success among the Arab Revolutions, and the Haitian a profound failure. Perhaps, however, those metrics are off, taking as they do the French experience as paradigmatic. What I propose here is hypotyposis, a preliminary sketch of an account of how the insurrections in Tunisia and Haiti present us with a constellation of forces that call for another historiography of revolution, but also an alternative anthropology, by which I mean an alternative radical humanism.

Location Let us begin the sketch by turning our attention back to the essay title and pressing some on the singular verb in it, “locating.” Without appealing to the rather authoritative force of etymology  – itself a mode of placement and so begging the question – I’ll merely point out that to locate something is to place it within some set of boundaries and to so settle it; to situate it. How does one situate or settle revolution except to stabilize it in the manner of the French National Convention in 1795, having just repressed the last uprising of the revolutionary Parisian sans-culottes and yielding power to the Directory. Nor is it a trivial fact for our purposes here that chief among the institutions of stability was the comprehensive public education law enacted in October of that year, establishing the Institut national de sciences et arts (National Institute of Sciences and Arts), whose expressed mission was indeed to advise the Directory about intellectual work, both scientific and literary, in France and abroad, which might have been of use in stabilizing the energies of the revolution, thereby promoting the glory of civic republicanism. This was perhaps most successfully realized in the work of the Institut’s second class, the Classe des sciences morales et politiques (Class for Moral and Political Sciences), in which de Tracy’s Idéologues held considerable sway; a heuristic of some of the pitfalls involved in the academicization of revolution well worth attending to now. Nevertheless, it warrants pointing out that in its voluminous work of memoirs, the Institut national de sciences et arts achieved a corpus of psychological social science, including theories of mind as well as ethics, all focused on the well-tempered individual as proper embodiment of revolutionary force, that still contributes to our understanding of proper social order in change. And that is precisely why we cannot “locate” the Tunisian Revolution per se. Even if we were to locate it in the seemingly straightforward geo-political sense of placement, I should still dissent, because it is not facilely circumscribed within the ambit of the Arab World, having been for millennia Africa, and Ifriqiya, and it remains porous both northerly and southerly in a way that severely troubles the distinguishing boundaries of Europe, Mediterranean and Africa. “Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre” wrote Pilny the Elder, “Africa always brings [us] something new.” And to repeat what I’ve stated elsewhere, when he said that, he was quoting Aristotle, who was postulating the perpetual biological hybridization of African life forms. The pertinence of this provenance to my remarks here is its indicating the antiquity of the Northern association of Africa with the

126  R.A. Judy encounter of profoundly alien entities, the synthetic result implicit in Aristotle’s original remark notwithstanding. A synthesis that the tenth-century Arab literatus, al-Jāhiẓ, whose grandfather was a Black cameleer, showed us was more imaginatively aspirational than factual. My point with this last remark is that “Africa” designates what is emergent in the encounter without synthesis, the non-synthetic that does not so much point to a “dark continent,” but rather to the common history of human emergence, and as Pico Mirandola asserted at the beginning of our early modernism, “humanism.” In paraphrase of Fanon, the Tunisian revolution is a step towards a new humanism that sets out to shed the synthesizing tendencies of Mirandola’s European-forming humanism by foregrounding that African being is being perpetually in between, on the way, as in al-Mas‘adi’s restlessness /‘ala qalqin). In other words, the emotion – in the old sense of the term, ( which I shall say more about momentarily – of the Tunisian Revolution does not settle nicely into the community of nation-states, the international systematization of the earth as a world order, as much as it exacerbates the conceptual crisis of such an order. This resistance to settlement, this un-situatedness that vexes in a fundamental way the conceptualization of the world-system, is not without a very pertinent precedent. I refer to Haiti, of course. So, then, rather than locating the Tunisian Revolution anywhere, I  put it in relation to Haiti, raising the question: what is it, and how it is meaningful as an earthly historic human event? The most succinct answer to this question is that the Tunisian Revolution, which we have seen unfolding in our day, whether it may succeed or miscarry . . . finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in the game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race. The last sentence sums things up: this revolution is evidence that humanity can progress of its own accord. That, I think, is the significance of the Tunisian Revolution of Dignity and Freedom in all the details of its events beginning in Gafsa in 2008 up through to the moment. And, in that regard, it is far more analogous to the events that shook the Caribbean French colony of Saint Domingue from 1791 to 1804 than it is to either those that transformed France from 1789 to 1795, or those from 1848 to 1871, which ushered in the hegemony of the European bourgeois liberal nation-state. I know this seems like a radical provocation. I do not, however, intend it as a scandalous remark, but rather as a serious proposition aimed at getting us to think something else, as Fanon put it. Its seeming scandalous has to do with its incomprehensibleness, which in turn has to do with a failure of knowledge regarding those events of Haiti that, as the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserted in 1990, persist as “unthinkable facts  .  .  . for which one has no adequate instruments to conceptualize.”7 The true scandal is not in the proposition of analogy between the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions, but in this epistemological failure, which perpetuates the refusal to recognize that they

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti 127 are not derivative analogues of the French Revolution or the European Spring of Revolution, but are distinctive events of social transformation, which while in part stimulated by a certain set of Enlightenment concepts and institutions, have taken a course that cannot be charted according to the dominant mapping of our common modernity. In this regard, the Tunisian Revolution’s un-situatedness, its African troubling of boundaries by not settling nicely into the international systematization of the earth as a world order is precisely where the question of the Black Atlantic arises.

Black Atlantic According to Douglas Chambers, the Black Atlantic has been brought into focus in the past decade through the convergence of two major trends in the historiography of the early modern Western world. One being the generalized “Atlantic turn,” which he roots in the 1980s with historians of colonial Americas, the relevant metropolitan European merchant empires, as well as Atlantic Africa and Africa diaspora responding to the increasingly integrated global world.8 This could more rightly be seen as having been prompted by the Marshall Plan and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the aftermath of World War II, as Bernard Bailyn has persuasively argued, discovering the impetus in Walter Lippmann’s 1917 vision of the Euro-American Atlantic highway9 – itself an iteration of Alfred Mehan’s earlier vision of US expansion, an oceanic conception of the world in which nations are islands of resources securing perpetual commercial movement and growth across the globe. Both Chambers’ and Bailyn’s accounts belong to the lineage of Charles Verlinden’s les origines de la civilisation atlantique – described as the common civilization of the Nations of Europe, the two Americans and South Africa; an affair involving Pan-America and Europe to which “Africa is fatally linked,” as Verlinden put it.10 The transatlantic slave trade, of course, was an element in his historiography, tracking the commercial structure of medieval European slavery through their Mediterranean transformation into their extensive regularizations in the New Atlantic World. And we ought not to overlook the Chaunus’s Séville et l’Atlantique. Yet, while slavery and the demographic study of the transatlantic slave trade have been an element in the general Atlantic turn since Curtin and Lovejoy, it has indeed been brought to the fore of systemic analysis in the past 20 years or so. Most of that scholarship, Curtin’s initial work, the 1953 Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, notwithstanding, has been focused on the market and political economics of the trade and not the workplace, to speak metaphorically of the slave ship/plantation matrix. Let us allow a qualified exception to Genovese-Fox’s The World the Slaves Made; qualified because of its acute US focus. Addressing the generative dynamics of ship/plantation fell to the creolist, Sidney Mintz, Richard Price, and Kamu Brathwaite. Particularly pertinent to our concerns here is their postulate that in the intense violence of the matrix of transatlantic slavery, the diverse populations constituted as Negro forged ad hoc progenitive socialities that have endured and thus can be studied ethnologically

128  R.A. Judy as well as historically. Using David Scott’s 1991 critique of what he called the anthropology of African diasporas, within which he included the creolist thesis, Chamber’s heralds the second prevalent historiographical trend corresponding with the general Atlantic turn: the so-called cultural turn, in which questions of identity, agency and, quoting Bailyn, “the descriptions of internal states of mind and their relation to external circumstances and events.”11 This is taken to mean centering Africans in the development of the civilization of the Atlantic world. Not only were African slaves instrumental as capital assets in the formation of Atlantic civilization’s political economy, but they were also instrumental in the formation of its cultural and social development. This is what Chamber’s is after when he sets out to displace the “new,” the “Americanization” of the Mintz/Price creolization thesis with “Africanization.” Largely on the force of Thornton’s work, but not exclusively, Chambers construes the formation of new compound political and cultural identities among not only Africans enslaved in the New World, but those in Africa implicated in the Atlantic World system as an Africentric if not African process, albeit a multifaceted Africa of diverse ethnicities and neo-ethnicities. This entails disaggregating the diaspora – Chambers specifies Africa and the Americas, but by his own argument, that also means Europe – “recasting agency along Africanist lines, writing the Black Atlantic on global, transnational, interregional, and local levels.”12 In other words, writing it as an aspect of the establishment of the modern capitalist world-system. All this is fine and good, and the point in rehearsing it briefly here is to draw attention to how Chambers’ dismissal of the creolist theory of the spontaneity of Black socialities in the world-system in favor of Africanist solidarity loses sight of a long-recognized important aspect of the Atlantic World: revolution. This is not a small thing; it touches on the vexing issues of conceptualization and perspective, from Silvio Zavala’s and Herbert Bolton’s grasping for a proper Pan-American focus in the Atlantic World, to Robert Palmer’s insistence that the eighteenthcentury revolutionary movement was a phenomenon of the Atlantic civilization in general and not imitated from the French. There is, of course, C.L.R. James’s still invaluable analysis of the global significance of the long Haitian revolution. Not to mention, the work of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, all of which explore the perennial presence of revolutionary formations. We could easily add to this Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein’s study of antisystemic movements as a constitutive aspect of the planet-wide extension of the capitalist world-system, noting in passing its failure to attend to those formations that don’t so readily fit the two options of class an sich and status für sich laid out by Max Weber, who recognized through his dealings with W.E.B. Du Bois that there was in the formation of Negro socialities another process his analysis could not adequately account for. Nonetheless, in dismissing the creolist thesis of spontaneous sociality, Chambers implicitly disarticulates the scholarship from its revolutionary ideology, which had to do with its being engendered with the anti-colonial struggles of the second half of the twentieth century. David Scott has reproached postcolonial scholars to not be remiss in critiquing that ideology, calling us to confront the new constellations of forces and interests

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti 129 shaping our analyses of the present and the past. Or rather he confronts us with the question of whether our analyses are sufficiently attentive to those constellations of forces. Arguably, events such as Tunisia – which is only one of many, but significant because of how it seems to have succeeded in reimagining the state – are among those forces. What does it mean to jettison the creolist model of spontaneous sociality – which, pace Chambers, has not been definitively exposed as historically and interpretively bankrupt – at a moment when we are witnessing a remarkable spate of such formations around the globe? To paraphrase Scott, albeit somewhat perversely, that model might well serve to help us to discover what is really happening. In this vein, I am not claiming the need to expand the conceptual category of the Atlantic, whether general, Black or Africanized, so as to include Tunisia. Again, I do not want to locate the Tunisian Revolution, not even in the Atlantic Worldsystem; but, moving from Tunisia to Haiti, my aim is to place it in relation to the revolutionary, or antisystemic tendency of that world-system. Doing this requires another historiography of revolution, one that not only makes use of alternative archives, but also deploys an alternative anthropology, by which I  mean an alternative radical humanism. Pursuant with this aim, I am proposing that in addressing the question what is this and how it is meaningful as an earthly historic human event in the world-system, we need ask what does it look like; hence, my answer: Haiti. This takes Tunisia to the Black Atlantic, recognized as a movement articulated with the world-system, placing the Tunisian Revolution of Dignity and Freedom in the lineage of, to put it bluntly, “other-than-European” popular revolutions. By designating that lineage thus, I do not mean non-European, which would assume the question of Europe itself is settled. It is not, but rather the question of Europe is only one, demonstrably inadequate, formulation of the principal conundrum of modern political science, as well as human sciences: what are we and how can we see ourselves in common? The incomprehensibleness of the commonality of the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions to the current political and sociological analysis is indicative of the utter failure of these sciences to adequately address that question. In the case of Haiti, this is expressed as an outright hostility to the possibility of there ever being let alone ever have been a revolution. In the case of Tunisia, it is manifested as an equally assertive indifference. Both responses have a similar affect: the blockage of destructive neglect of the revolutionary momentum. There are two specific points of analogy to which I wish to draw attention. The first has to do with why it is that both Haiti and Tunisia are incomprehensible as revolutions in their own right. The second has to do with how, their incomprehensibleness notwithstanding, the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions function in common as actual catalysts for world-wide revolution. Both are emblematic of the movement of les damnes of modernity to realize the better aspirations of humanist modernity: universal human dignity and rights. This has certainly been so for Haiti historically, which has long been an emblem of radical revolutionary freedom among radicals, and not just Black radicals for 200 years despite, not precisely because of the efforts of the great powers to erase it. Tunisia may perhaps, and this is the aspirational bit, come to be the same for our era.

130  R.A. Judy Taking up the first point, I’ll remark what has already been noted in marginalia, which is that my proposition that the Tunisian Revolution is evidence that humanity can progress of its own accord is a paraphrasing of Immanuel Kant’s assessment of the French Revolution given in his treatise on education, The Conflict of the Faculties.13 Kant’s pronouncements of revolution have come under considerable scrutiny among political philosophers of late in accordance with a renewed investment in his conception of cosmopolitanism; the reason having to do with the idea that we may be indeed approaching such a world order. Of course, Kant is notoriously counterrevolutionary, precisely because, as Lewis Beck and even Chris Surprenant have pointed out, his theory of the deontological foundation for the origins of civil society dictates an absolute prohibition on violent rebellion. Nonetheless, he did publicly express enthusiasm for the French Revolution, seeing in the events of 1789 to 1798, when he wrote in The Conflict, a mode of thinking – we might best call it, daring to correct him, an emergent intelligence – that “demonstrates a character of the human race at large and all at once.”14 That this should have emerged all at once, spontaneously, among the populous without the benefit of the discipline, Zucht, achieved through cultured pedagogy, trending toward instituting a civil constitution is precisely what recommends it as evidence of human progress. It was evidence of the inherent universal human tendency of progressive change, where the movement is towards realizing a common association of life and living. The fact that even though, for Kant, this is expressly a communicative association in reason, its conceptual schemata is principally a function of imagination need not concern us here. I merely want to mark it as a useful insight for understanding the eventfulness of the Tunisian people spontaneously manifesting a certain sort of sovereignty when chanting in chorus while demonstrating on Avenue Habib Bourguiba in January 2011 the slogan now identified world-wide with the Arab revolution, “  [Ashsha‘ab yurīd isqāt· an-niz·ām (The people want to bring down the regime)].” That slogan was extrapolated in paraphrase from the title of Abou el-Kacem Chebbi’s 1933 poem, (Itha a sha‘ab yumān arād al-hiyāh), commonly translated as “Will to Live,” but more literally rendered as “If the People One Day Will to Live.” Chebbi’s poem, plainly aligned with the classical qasīda (ode) in form and thematic as it is, has long been acclaimed throughout the Arab World as a rallying cry for Arab independence. We could, however, term this the natural sovereignty of human freedom, as in self-conscious autopoesis; and that it is precisely the unlawfulness of such collective imagination that inclined Kant to view the events unfolding on Saint Domingue during the same time as those in France as the purest instance of collective irrational emotion – in the sense of ill-directed public commotion and unrest: riots, which is what the term initially connoted when it came into English in the late sixteenth century – acting against moral reason, and so absolutely an illegitimate eruption of violence against not only government, but also civil society. By that same token, I’ll not rehearse Kant’s account of the deontological foundation for the origins of civil society, with its complicated elaboration of duties of right – virtue to the self and justice to others – and his notion of authorized reciprocal coercion, which lay the foundation for his views

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti  131 on revolution. It suffices to remark here that his account turns on the postulate that humankind is comprised of individuals who, even in the state of nature, are all rational, autonomous beings. These two aspects of Kant’s thinking are key reasons why all he could see happening in Saint Domingue was a Negro slave rebellion. It is crucial we understand that this was a failure of personal morals, or some kind of irrational reaction to human difference. It was a fundamental function of Kant’s transcendental deduction, which is to say of his account of what is our reality and how we have it, and so what it means to be a free human subject capable of enlightenment, of warranting the motto Sapere Aude (Dare to be wise). In his assessment on all that, the Negro is a type of hominid firmly situated in the natural domain of things governed by physical law, but not so fully within the supranaturalistic domain of persons governed by the rational moral law. By that light, the basis of the Haitian Revolution’s incomprehensibleness Trouillot references, and which Kant so nicely exemplifies, has precisely to do with the priority of the individual in the tradition of European political philosophy. It is because the Negro cannot be admitted into the ranks of rational cosmopolitan individuals, and so cannot be the generator of civil society that the prospect of a revolution forming a republic – that is, constituting a civil society – is unfathomable, and nearly unimaginable. My point here, however, is not about race per se. Rather, it is that what in Haiti’s case gets expressed as a problem of race is indicative of a more fundamental problem of anthropological psychology and philosophy: the long enduring premise that only one mode of subjectivity drives history, and it has a definitive formation. That the Haitian Revolution is a contradictory corrective to this premise was announced by Jean-Jacques Dessalines on 28 April 1804, when he proclaimed the island’s independence from France with the words: “We have paid these true cannibals back in full; war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. . . . I have saved my country. I  have avenged America.” With this proclamation, Dessalines, declared the establishment of the Republic of Hayti, in his capacity as its first president. Naming the new country by the assumed Arawakan term for the island of Hispaniola, the very first place to see the arrival of Iberian colonists and the emergence of Europeans on the world stage, was a symbolically powerful statement, as was his reversing the accusation of cannibalism that had long justified the autochthonous people’s enslavement and murder. With these statements, Dessalines signified an act of solidarity with not only all the oppressed populations, les damnes, of the Western hemisphere, but also the entire world, as was made explicit in the language of the 1804 constitution. One is inclined to agree with Nick Nesbitt and recognize in that constitution the first attempt to construct a society in accordance with the radical Enlightenment axioms of universal emancipation and universal human autonomy, calling for a society in which all human subjects retain their autonomous constituent power.15 Dessalines thus defined the Haitian Revolution as a war of worlds, one that in “saving” Haiti from colonial slavery had avenged an entire hemisphere. In so doing, he expressly took up the Radical Enlightenment, further radicalizing in turn that very Enlightenment, which had refused to address Africans as full subjects of human rights.

132  R.A. Judy As Nesbitt characterizes it, the Haitian Revolution amounted to an “invention of an egalitarian freedom unknown in the North Atlantic.” One might quibble with the term invention, preferring manifestation, yet concur fully with the assessment of the revolution’s scope. That this was the articulation of a distinctive historical subjectivity – that is distinct in its formation from that of the bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment – was remarked by Dessalines’ secretary, Pompee-Valentin baron de Vastey, who also served his successor King Henri Christophe in that capacity as was the earliest Haitian theorist and polemicist for the revolution. Vastey wrote in his An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti of a population that only 25 years earlier was “in slavery and the most profound ignorance, with “no idea of human societies, no thought of happiness, no kind of energy,” yet through massive spontaneous individual autodidactic effort – “many of them learned to read and write of themselves without an instructor.” 16 He writes further. They walked about with books in their hands, inquired of persons whom they met, whether they could read; if they could, they were then desired to explain the meaning of such a particular sign, or such a word. In this way many of the natives succeeded, without the help of education, though already advanced in years. 17 Through such autodidactic learning, the native Haitian population produced a corps of indigenous “notaries, barristers, judges, statesmen, that astonished every one by the solidity of their judgment. One may readily conceive what such men would have been, had they been trained with the care and method of a classical education.”18 Even more significant than this being a direct contradiction of Kant’s dismissal of the Negro as an inferior more natural hominid, is that the fact of Haitian autodidactic activity is in evidence of his theory of humankind’s capacity for autopoetic progression; and that, even more than the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution proves this. So what the incomprehensibleness of the events of the Haitian Revolution clearly indicates is not merely that they are unthinkable in accordance with the reigning cosmology, but that the cosmology is woefully, on its fundamental premises, incapable of yielding any truly adequate knowledge about the eventfulness of humankind, about how the societies in which we actually live are as they are. Which is to say, they are far away from giving a full picture of how humanity lives life in our world. To see how this problem of incomprehensibleness and contradiction relates to the Tunisian Revolution, and so underscore this point about the resemblance between the events begun at Bois Caïman on 28 August 1791, and those that began at Sidi Bou Zid on 17 December 2010, we need merely recall something Alain Badiou said on 19 January 2011, just 5 days after the fall of Ben Ali, about the Tunisian Revolution. During the fourth session of the seminar, he was conducting at the École Normale Supérieure under the rubric Que signifie “changer le monde”? (“What does ‘Change the World’ Mean?”), Badiou proposed the topic, Les émeutes en Tunisie (“The Tunisian Riots”). The events taking place in Tunisia directly pertained to the expressed main concern of the seminar, which was, as

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti  133 Badiou put it, with interrogating the past two centuries of enchantment (enchanté) with the idea of revolutionary transformation. What struck Badiou about the events in Tunisia was they contradicted the fin de l’histoire, the end of history thesis of globalization that postulates “le fin de l’événementialité historique [the end of eventful history], the end of a moment where the organization of power could be overthrown in favor of, as Trotsky said, ‘the masses entering on the stage of history.’ ” So that precisely such events as Tunisia were supposedly no longer possible. For the past 30 years, neoliberal globalization has been, as Badiou says, “The only tenable norm of general subjectivity (la seule norme tenable de la subjectivité générale).” Once again, we are held captive by a powerful idealist concept of things – and especially, so when it is touted as a reductive behavioralism or functionalism – that interferes with our capacity to see what is unfolding before us. Certainly, this subjectivité, this person, becoming the global norm has been the meaning of globalization until now. It has been a globalization from above that we have called, in the French mode, “Américanisation,” underscoring its association with imperialism, or more consistently neoliberalism, which is characterized by the premise that market values  – the dynamics of high capitalist finance  – are the absolute measure not just of human progress, but existence as well. And so, the economy of consumption and desire, desire and consumption has been the sole determinate of what we are. Until now. I say until now, because what the Tunisian émeutes signal is another mode of globalization, one expressly based on a set of values – dignity, liberty and social justice – long been associated with the civic republicanism of the three late-eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions, which neoliberalism is supposed to have superseded. And this is what Badiou grasped, declaiming: “What is fascinating above all else in the Tunisian events is their historicity, providing demonstrative evidence that the capacity to create new forms of collective organization [nouvelles formes d’organisation collective] is intact.”19 In his drawing attention to the historicity of the Tunisian events, he highlights two remarkable aspects of those events: that the values of civic republicanism were espoused by the masses on their own without the vanguard leadership of the elite – even the syndicalist leadership played a supporting-role to the popular insurrection; and that the new forms of collectivity emerging in the course of the revolution is in contestation with the market-driven processes of social formation. Although Badiou does not mention Haiti in his pronouncement on the historicity of the Tunisian events, both of these aspects in tandem were more pronouncedly and profoundly in evidence with the Haitian Revolution than the American or the French. In fact, it was the general insurrection launched by the slaves on 14 August  1791, in the North province of Saint-Domingue, the wealthiest and most important of the ancienne colonies françaises, that first made it clear there was tension between the revolutionary principles of universal human freedom enshrined in the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen and the political economy of the market. Overthrowing the Bourbon Ancien régime did not end the French Colonial Empire, and the National Convention’s being at war with the princes and kings of Europe made it all the more dependent on the

134  R.A. Judy revenues generated by Saint-Domingue’s extensive system of slavery-based plantation agriculture. Unlike the failed insurrection of the gens de couleur libre led by Vincent Ogé during the last 3 months of 1790, which sought to extend civic republicanism to all free Frenchmen regardless of color, the slaves’ insistence on their liberté immediately precipitated a systemic economic crisis that jeopardized the revolutionary French Republic’s continued possession and control of the colony’s resources, and concordantly its capacity to wage war for its own survival. It is precisely those circumstances that led to the first successful armed native struggle for liberation from the French Colonial Empire, resulting in the establishment of the world’s first independent Black republic. They also, however, were elemental in the struggle for what will eventually be le République d’Haïti inaugurating an historical lineage of postcolonial state formation, whereby the newly founded nation-state, in order to generate the revenues essential for its political and social viability, is compelled to continue its relationship to the imperial metropolis, reconfigured within the parameters of the international system’s political-economy, as a provider of the natural resources fueling metropolitan capital growth. The political-economic conditions of the de-colonized state’s legitimate inclusion within the international system calls for securing the economic sector so as to ensure continued productivity in a way that, more often than not, results in a militarized or quasi-militarized regime of control in tension with the foundational tenants of civic republicanism. The Haitian provenance of this formation is clear when we bear in mind the historical events of the independent nation’s emergence pertaining to the relation between republican freedom and economic discipline. A history that warrants recalling briefly because the instruction it provides about the historical development of the modern conceptions of freedom.

Freedom Reconciling the revolutionary principles of freedom and citizenship with the demands of a war economy, and the harsh realities of plantation agriculture, while securing the Republic’s possession of the colony and suppressing the slave insurrection, was the task given the three civil commissioners, Leger-Felicite Sonthonax, Étienne Polverel and Jean-Antoine Ailhaud, sent in 1792 by the National Convention, to administer the North, West and South provinces respectively. Sonthonax led the way in seeking a solution with his Emancipation Proclamation of 29 August 1793, which was the first of its kind in the New World. While legally freeing the slaves and granting them the universal rights of French citizenship, it did not do so in full accord with the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. By Sonthonax’s terms, freedom was contingent upon work. To be free, the field workers had to be tied for the first year to the plantations of their former owners, where they would continue to labor in the field 6 days a week. Their recompense was to be, collectively, in one-third of the plantation revenues, or one-quarter after government tax deductions, to be divided among them in accordance with rank, occupation, age and sex. Another one-third would constitute the owner’s profits, and the remaining third would be attributed to maintenance and operating

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti  135 expenses to be engaged in cultivation. The territorial scope of Sonthonax’s proclamation was initially limited to the western part of the Republican North province of San Domingue where he had jurisdiction; the eastern part being under the control of the insurrectionist slave forces led by Jean-François, Georges Biassou and Toussaint Louverture, who were allied with the Spanish authorities of Santo Domingo. Polverel, whose jurisdiction was initially in the West province but with the death of Olivier Delpech, who had replaced Ailhaud, came to include the South as well, issued his own proclamation abolishing slavery universally in both provinces on 31 October 1793. Polverel’s proclamation also made freedom contingent upon work. Addressing the field workers directly as Africains, in accord with the local idiom distinguishing them from gens de couleur libre, its preamble states: “Africains, listen well. This land does not belong to you. It belongs to those who purchased it or to their inheritors.”20 It further stipulates that the Africains did have a right to a portion of the yield as workers, but only if they worked a full 6 days per week, just as they did under slavery. Along similar lines as Sonthonax, Polverel distributed the yield in thirds, with one-third going to the workers collectively and two-thirds to the plantation owner. Should the Africains decide to work only 5 days, being free to do so, their recompense would be reduced by half to one-sixth of total production. Slavery effectively abolished universally in Republican Saint Domingue, Sonthonax’s proclamation became the order throughout the colony. Both his and Polverel’s, however, defined freedom for the Africains as the freedom to be wage laborers bound to plantations. This identification of freedom with work was reinforced by Polverel’s subsequent labor code promulgated on 7 February 1794, in which he admonished the freed slaves become wage laborers to, “Never forget that the only rights you have are those that come from your collective labor for the owner, on the owner’s estate.” Still admonishing the Africains, Polverel reinforces the restriction of their republican freedom in quasimoralistic terms of civic duty: The material well-being [le Bonheur] of each one of you is inseparable from that of the owners and depends proportionately upon your efforts to multiply the owner’s wealth. That is why I gave you a good share of the collective revenues and to each family a small piece of land to cultivate for yourselves. The National Convention’s universal abolition of slavery and extention of citizenship to freed slaves in all French territories, issued just 3 days prior to Polverel’s labor code, did not, once again, end empire, rather it redefined the metropolitancolonial relationship in terms of racialized labor within in a concomitantly racialized hierarchy of civic order. Even though, when he consolidates his rule over a unified Saint Domingue as a territory of the Republic  – having successfully expelled the British forces and conquered the Spanish portion of the island – Louverture renounces the racialization of work, he embraces Polverel’s terms of identifying freedom with work in his own work-code. To guarantee that slavery was permanently abolished, a powerful permanent military was required to defend freedom; and that required restoring the economic prosperity of the plantation

136  R.A. Judy system. For Louverture, the abolition of chattel slavery is one thing, but freedom as the right of enfranchised citizens to exercise individual liberties was something altogether different, which he opposed as leading to vagrancy and the degeneracy of moral and civic virtue. A distinction that is formalized in his Constitution of Saint Domingue, promulgated on 8 July 1801, Title II, Article 3 of which proclaims: “There can be no slaves on this territory; servitude has been forever abolished. All men are born, live and die there free and French.” Title VI, Articles 14 states: “The colony, being essentially agricultural, cannot allow the least interruption in its labor and cultivation.” Article 15, designating the plantation a habitation defines it as: “a factory that demands a gathering together of cultivators and workers; it’s the tranquil asylum of an active and constant family, of which the owner of the land or his representative is necessarily the father.” Following this legislated paternalist authority of the plantation owner, Article 16 declares: “Every cultivator and worker is a member of the family and a shareholder in its revenues.” It then prohibits free movement by the worker from the plantation: “Any change in domicile on the part of cultivators brings with it the ruin of farming.” Declaring this “a vice disastrous for the colony and contrary to public order,” it invests the governor with absolute authority to promulgate and regulate all measures of controlling agricultural discipline, “in conformity with the Policing Regulation of 20 Véndemiaire 9 [12 October 1800] promulgated by the Governor General, Toussaint Louverture, in accord with the Proclamation of 19 Pluviôse 2 [7 February 1794].” Referring to this Constitution, Louverture writes: “I have never believed freedom to be license, or that men who have become free should be able to give themselves over to disorder and idleness.”21 Louverture’s continued enforcement of the identification of work with freedom led to the farm workers revolt of 1801. That identification is not to be found in the first Constitution of Hayti proper, promulgated by Dessalines in 1805, although its Article 21 reaffirms the centrality of agriculture, and 23 the militarized policing of agriculture and commerce. Even though the Constitution of 1806, promulgated by Alexandre Pétion for the southern Republic of Haiti, and the Constitution of 1807, promulgated by Henri Christophe in the northern State of Haiti also do not legislate the connection of freedom with work, they too prioritize the army in distinction from the workers. Thus, is was that concomitant with the formation of Haitian citizenship after the independence of 1804, there emerged a military state, the basic foundation for which was laid down by Louverture using the material provided by Polverel. Tony Bogues has characterized this situation as that of two contradictory logics within the Haitian revolution, one that “circled around practices of freedom of the ex-slaves, and the other around the revolutionary army, which becomes a political elite with different conceptions of what the new state should be.”22 The event of the first independent Black republic occurred at the collapse of the first French Colonial Empire (1605–1814), having been a major factor in that collapse. Yet, the pattern of its post-independence formation, is equally discernable in the African states that achieved independence from the Second French Colonial Empire in Africa (1830-1962), including Tunisia. This is the pattern

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti  137 just described, in which an emergent national bourgeoisie vanguard, bolstered by a subordinate militarized class, presumes to protect the newly gained national freedom by securing continued access to the metropolitan-centric international system’s commodity markets through a policed disciplining of the economic sector’s productivity. Fanon, we know, designates this formation “neocolonialism” in his analysis of what he forecast may very well befall post-independence Africa, describing the emergent national bourgeoisie as a managerial class that regulates production in the service of the metropolitan markets, functioning as the transmission belt (courroie de transmission) for capitalism.23 We could say that he was calling on the historical Haitian experience, albeit not by name, in that analysis. Fanon focuses attention on how the de-colonized national bourgeoisie’s role in determining the way the state functions in regulating the relation between the individual and the economy is an aspect of its disarticulation from the national consciousness, effectively working more as a manager for metropolitan capital interests than an agent of the nation’s revolutionary social transformation. At the crux of his analysis of the “misadventures of national consciousness” is the tension between the sociopolitical realization of the ideals of civic republicanism and the economic necessities attending that realization; and at the crux of that tension is the connection between economic production and freedom, both individual and national. More plainly put, the matter at hand is the identification of work with freedom. The postcolonial national bourgeoisie’s success is contingent upon their continued management of economic production and the forms of work required or permitted the population. The point in recounting with such detail Sonthonax’s and Polverel’s proclamations is to highlight that this antinomy of freedom and work so vividly presented with the Haitian struggle is endemic to the political realization of Enlightenment revolutionary civic republicanism. What’s more, the crux of the problem is the identification of work and freedom as somehow a characteristic of what it is to be human, the characteristic Marx claimed Hegel demonstrated. This is something Bogues intimates when he attributes to the ex-slaves’ qua workers made subaltern by the emergent military state a recognition of their continual struggle for full civic and political enfranchisement that is expressed by the question: “What kind of free is this?” The question has a particular provenance, which Bogues marks when he specifies its being asked in the middle of the nineteenth century, citing Mimi Sheller’s Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. The question, which is attributed to an anonymous Jamaican ex-slave farm worker, quoted by John Salmon in a letter to T. F. Pilgrim, dated 25 June 1848, reads in full: “What Kind of free this? This free them gee we. This Free worse than slave, a man can’t put up with it.”24 The Jamaican context of its utterance was analogous to that of the Haitian. Having abolished slavery on the island in 1838, the Jamaican plantation owners were confronted with the very same conflict between freedom and work. As Governor Metcalfe acknowledged, the problem was not that the freed Blacks would not work but that they refused to give “continuous labour . . . working only just as much as they like” for the plantations and dedicating much of their labor to their freeholds. It was not possible,

138  R.A. Judy he observed, to combine the occupation of market gardener with estate laborer.25 As Holt remarks in this regard, “the success of the gardener deprived the planter the control over his labor essential to plantation profitability.”26 The problem was resolved by implementing stringent labor laws rather like those of Haiti under Louverture, effectively establishing a share-cropper economy. And as with the Haitian ex-slaves, this was ardently resisted by the Jamaican freedmen for whom as well, freedom meant being able to decide when and how to work, and to do so for one’s own property. Expressed positively, it was the freedom to be at work for oneself as one pleases; a condition that was diametrically opposite to the discipline of work on the large-scale estate plantation. Negatively, it was the freedom from being compelled by the law of state to work for the profit of others at their bidding. No matter that the Haitian context was the independent state, whether republic or empire, and the Jamaican was that of a colony still under direct rule from the metropolis, for both situations, the question of freedom in relation to work was fundamentally about the nature of the triadic relationship between individual, market, and state. The state legislates the form whereby the individual enters or otherwise engages the market as labor, giving capital investment greater leeway. The market may very well determine the need for, as well as the type of work required for capital growth through its technologies and concomitant disciplines of production; but it is the state that manages individual access or availability to work. And in the independent state of Haiti, as well as the colony of Jamaica, the agenda was to bring as many individuals into labor as the plantations needed for the sake of profit. But what happens when work does not make one free, or when no work disqualifies one from the full rights of citizenship and simple dignity as a human? To put it in a more radical way, what happens when freedom and dignity are disarticulated from work? The answer is a different narrative of freedom, one connoted by the Jamaican’s remark, and manifest in the 1801 Haitian farm workers revolt, as well as the Tunisian Revolution of Dignity and Freedom. This is to put Tunisia in relation to Haiti along an apposite line to that of the militarized neo-colonial state. Pursuing that line, we should take note that at issue in the contestation between the processes of market-driven subjectivity and the revolutionary capacity to create new forms of collectivity is some process of individuation that has the practical and very material function of socialization, of creating a certain type of individual suitable for a certain type of sociality. The individuation process of the capitalist market – and I mean throughout its history from the early commodity markets of tenth-century Europe to the current neoliberal market of global finance – may indeed have engendered the normative subjectivity of the market through its endless refashioning and management of desire and imagination, but it also engendered something else, as is evidenced by the Tunisian Revolution. This something else is what Zygmnt Bauman termed an aesthetic sociality, the spontaneity of subjective feeling into volatile and unpredictable occasions of consensus. As he says: “The instantaneous sociality of the crowd is a counter-structure to socialization’s structures.”27 We can understand by this that the cumulative institutionalized practices of disciplining normality, the genealogies of which Foucault

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti  139 elaborated under the lose rubric of biopolitics – to which Bauman includes the legislative rationality of cognitive space thereby referencing the methodological practices of the human sciences in the university – are interrupted by the faceless agency of the crowd. This interruption holds the promise of what Fanon referred to 43 years ago in his aspirational analysis of the potential of the Algerian Revolution as “doing something new.” This gets generally paraphrased as neo-humanism, but I prefer to call it radical humanism, meaning a humanism predicated on something other than the transcendental self behind subjective, as well as objective idealism, being the articulation of a distinctly different epistemology from that of the bourgeoisie, even in the latter’s revolutionary articulations. The experience of the Algerian revolution, however, teaches that this radical humanism also remains, as Bauman recognizes, susceptible to the managerial strategies of the state. Then again, perhaps it is not the best model after all. Despite Abane Ramadan’s and Fanon’s heroic efforts to make the Algerian revolution a popular-based and led struggle, it was not such; it was from the beginning a vanguardist initiative aimed at bringing the people into massive political and military action, and not a spontaneous leader-less insurrection of the people in the way Haitian and Tunisian Revolutions have been. Granting that, Haiti shows such struggle is also susceptible; and the iteration of its postcolonial state formation throughout Africa and Asia, as well as the Black Atlantic and Latin America suggests the inevitability of its being so. We do not yet know about Tunisia. Caveat notwithstanding, what both the Tunisian and Haitian revolutions put on display for the entire world to see is the very real capacity of the spontaneous intelligence of the people to generate new forms of sociality, not totally comprehended by the market-based processes of socialization; that is to say, its values are not reducible to matters of exchange or even the practical, in the Kantian or even pragmatic sense of the term, matters related to exchange-value. On this question of spontaneity, the Tunisian revolutionary sociologist Mouldi Guessoumi, pondering the hard question of whether the Tunisian events announce a new paradigm of revolutionary transformation, remarks: This is a revolution that has not affected Tunisia’s mode of production, or the overall structure of its society, or even the political consciousness and reasoning. Rather, it has been a surgical intervention undertaken by the citizenry in the daily life practices of society. Perhaps the clearest, although not simplest, illustration of this is the insistence of the people in Sidi Bou Zid that they be able to eat bread without having to beg, an aspiration expressed by the multitude in the streets with the slogan (kāramat-ul-insān [“human dignity”]). A society in which one can eat bread without begging, where one’s desire is not the instrument of one’s exploitation, that, I add, is the meaning of radical humanist dignity. This sense of dignity is foundational to the “humanist” tendency of modernity. We need only recall Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man” of 1482, the so-called Manifesto of the Renaissance, in which he attributes to

140  R.A. Judy “Abdullah the Muslim” the claim that the wonder of man is due to humanity’s being of indeterminate and indifferent nature, without a peculiar fixed function of form except that function and form which it gives itself according to “its desires and judgment,” both of which are bound only by its imagination. The most pertinent aspect of which is his connecting the concept of dignity with imagination, the material manifestation of which is poetic expression. Mirandola was an Arabist and had studied the works of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and ibn Sīna (Avicenna), from whom he likely got the concept of the spontaneous activity of imagination, and for whom such activity was the very energy of the social formation he called uma shi‘rīya. Meaning the social collectivity based on common affect realized through and with poetic expression; a collective with political potential. The resonance is significant here because the concept of humanity as fashioning itself in accord with its spontaneous imaginative capacity and techniques in concert with its desire is what is at stake in Bauman’s conception of the aesthetic response. This spontaneity is precisely what Badiou has in mind with his fascination at the Tunisians’ capacity to create new forms of collective organization; marking them, as it were, as the most current actual expression of what Fanon struggled so hard to conceive and engage in his effort to think about, or if you will, theorize the global historical significance of the Algerian: what are the conditions of possibility for the sustainable articulation of the creative free revolutionary subject? On this point, I emphasize the importance of the Tunisian Revolution’s fundamental insistence on individual responsibility for life in association with others – (kāramat-ul-insān), which raises to prominence the question, How am I engaged in ethical relation with others? It is what the Tunisians refer to as the project of (al-akhlāq al-tunisīya al-fatrīya/inherent Tunisian ethics), and what the late Chokri Beliäd spoke about as the “Tunisian intelligence” (al-dhikā al-tunisīy / ) by which he meant a critical mass of educated subjects, including the labor movement and the various institutions of civil society, formed through a specific educational system and a confluence of historical and geographic factors, unique to the country. This sense of (kāramat-ul-insān) is not a translation of the French Revolution’s Dignité. And even though it can claim among its philological ancestry as a political concept the French Revolution’s discourse, like the Haitian Creole slogan, libète, its preponderant valence or provenience entails a long alternative tradition of social intelligence that expresses a set of attitudes toward humanity, animality and recognition; one whose time may well be at hand. In this way, just like Haiti, the Tunisian Revolution is evidence that humanity can progress on its own accord.

Notes 1 Aimé Césaire, “Réponse à Depestre, poète haïtien. Éléments d’un art poétique,”Présence Africaine, n° I–II (nouvelle version), avril–juillet 1955. 2 Louis Aragon, Journal d’une poésie nationale (Lyon: Les Écrivains réunis, 1954). 3 René Depestre, “Lettre au poète Charles Dobzynski,” Les Lettres Francaises, 573 (juin 16–23, 1955). Partially reproduced in Présence africaine, nouvelle série, no. IV (October–November 1955), 36–38.

Restless flying from Tunisia to Haiti  141 4 René Depestre, Le Métier à métisser: Essai (Paris: Stock, 1998), 188. 5 Aimé Césaire, “Poésie et connaissance,” Tropiques. Revue Culturelle, 12 (janvier 1945), 163. 6 Tony Bogues, “And What About the Human: Freedom, Human, Emancipation, and the Radical Imagination,” boundary 2, 39.3 (2012), 40. 7 See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti: State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 82. This was a reiteration of what he had already set out in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995); and in his landmark 1977 work, Ti difé boulé sou Istoua Ayiti, which was the first book-length monograph in Haitian Creole on the origins of the Haitian Revolution. 8 Douglas B. Chambers, “The Black Atlantic: Theory, Method, and Practice,” in Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts (eds.), The Atlantic World, 1450–2000 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 155. 9 Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6–9. 10 Charles Verlinden, Les origines de la civilisation Atlantique; de la Renaissance à l’âge des lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 1966). 11 Bernard Bailyn, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review, 87.1 (1982), 22. 12 Chambers, “The Black Atlantic,” 161. 13 Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten [The Conflict of the Faculties], bilingual edn, trans. Mary Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 153–157. 14 Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 153. 15 Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 154. 16 Pompee-Valentin Vastey, An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti, Being a Sequel to the Remarks upon Certain French Publications and Journals Concerning Hayti, trans. W. H. and M. B. (Exeter: Western Luminary Office, 1823), iv. 17 Vastey, v. 18 Vastey, An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti, iv–vIbid. 19 Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Que signifie “changer le monde?” (Paris: Fayard, 2017). 20 Étienne Polverel, Règlement sur les proportions du travail et de la récompense, sur le partage des produits de la culture entre le propriétaire et les cultivateurs, petite habitation O’Sheill, Plaine-du-Fond de l’lsle-à-Vache, 7 fév. 1794 (Archives Nationales), dxxv, 28, 286. Quoted in Carolyn Fick, “The Haitian Revolution and the Limits of Freedom: Defining Citizenship in the Revolutionary Era,” Social History, 32.4 (November 2007), 402. 21 Cited in Claude Moïse, Le Projet national de Toussaint Louverture et la Constitution de 1801 (Montréal: Éditions du CICIHCA, 2001), 66–67. 22 Anthony Bogues, “The Dual Haitian Revolution and the Making of Freedom in Modernity.” In Jose-Manuel Barreto (ed.), Human Rights From a Third World Perspective: Critique, History and International Law (Newcastle-upon-tyne: Cambridge Scholars Pub, 2017), 229. 23 Frantz Fanon, Les damnes de la terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1961), 98. Cf. Frantz, Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 100. 24 John Salmon to T. F. Pilgrim, 25 June  1848, encl. with Charles Grey to Earl Grey, 7 July 1848, no. 64, Colonial Office Records, Original Correspondence of Jamaican Governors 137/299; quoted in Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1992), 174. 25 Metcalfe to Lord Holland, 18 June 1840, Holland House Papers, Add. MS. 51, 819, 141–46; Metcalfe to Russell, 30 March. 1849, no, 50, CD 137/248; quoted in Thomas

142  R.A. Judy C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1991), 174. 26 Idem. 27 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

Works cited Aragon, L. (1954) Lettres Françaises, (11 février et 3 mars), cite dans le Journal d’une poésie nationale. Lyon: Les Écrivains réunis, 31. Badiou, A. (2017) Le Séminaire: Que signifie “changer le monde?”. Paris: Fayard. Bailyn, B. (1982) “The Challenge of Modern Historiography.” The American Historical Review, 87.1: 1–24. Kant, I., Gregor, M. J. and Anchor, R. E. (1979) The Conflict of the Faculties: Der Streit der Fakultäten. New York: Abaris. Bailyn, B. (2005) Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 6-9. Bogues, A. (2013) “The Dual Haitian Revolution and the Making of Freedom in Modernity.” In Human Rights From a Third World Perspective: Critique, History and International Law. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bogues, T. (2012) “And What About the Human: Freedom, Human, Emancipation, and the Radical Imagination.” Boundary 2, 39:3, 40. Césaire, A. (1945) “Poésie et connaissance.” Tropiques. Revue Culturelle, 12 (Janvier): 163. Césaire, A. (1955) “Réponse à Depestre, poète haïtien. Éléments d’un art poétique.”Présence Africaine, n° I–II (nouvelle version), avril–juillet. Chambers, D. (2008) “The Black Atlantic: Theory, Method, and Practice.” In T. Falola and K. D. Roberts (eds.), The Atlantic World, 1450–2000. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 155. Depestre, R. (1955) “Lettre au poète Charles Dobzynski.” Les Lettres Francaises, (juin 16–23): 573. Partially reproduced in Présence africaine, nouvelle série, no. IV (October–November 1955): 36–38. Depestre, R. (1998) Le Métier à métisser: Essai. Paris: Stock, 188. Holt, T. C. (1992) The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 174. Moïse, C. (2001) Le Projet national de Toussaint Louverture et la Constitution de 1801. Montréal: Éditions du CICIHCA, 66–7. Nesbitt, N. (2008) Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 154. Polverel, E. (2007) “Règlement sur les proportions du travail et de la récompense, sur le partage des produits de la culture entre le propriétaire et les cultivateurs, petite habitation O’Sheill, Plaine-du-Fond de l’lsle-à-Vache, 7 fév. 1794 (Archives Nationales), dxxv, 28: 286. Quoted in Carolyn Fick, ‘The Haitian Revolution and the Limits of Freedom: Defining Citizenship in the Revolutionary Era.’ ” Social History, 32.4 (November): 402. Trouillot, M. (1990) Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Trouillot, M. (2015) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 82. Vastey, P. (1969) An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti, Being a Sequel to the Political Remarks Upon Certain French Publications and Journals Concerning Hayti. New York: Negro Universities Press,. Verlinden, C. (1966) Les origines de la civilisation Atlantique; de la Renaissance à l’âge des lumières. Paris: Albin Michel.

7 No telephone to heaven Post-colonial writing, the pursuit of freedom and colonialism’s genocidal impulse Luís Madureira

Tous les cieux se sont vidés de leurs divinités.

– Alain Touraine

According to the main character in Germano Almeida’s satirical novel O Meu Poeta, a second-rate versifier active in the tumultuous inaugural decades of Cabo Verdean independence in 1975, poetry functioned as “a lethal weapon” during the “glorious struggle” for national liberation1 (1989: 45). The ironic mordancy of the “biographer’s” rendering of this opinion is of course patent, especially since, a few pages earlier, this same narrator classifies the unexceptional bard’s poetic production as “excessively obese,” perennially in need of editorial “cuts,” “abridgements that could shrink it to the size of an aspirin easy to swallow with a drop of whisky” (38–39). Similarly, a character in Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa’s As mulheres do meu pai (My Father’s Wives), whose parents had militated zealously against the colonial dispensation, contemptuously describes Angola’s anti-colonial literature, or, “what some call Angolan literature” as “political pamphlets, more often than not very poorly written” (2007: 26). One of the titles he comes across is perhaps inevitably: a poesia é uma arma [poetry is a weapon]. It is in effect something of a commonplace to affirm that “resistance” was the prevalent literary “mode” in the heady years of anti-colonial struggle, not only in Cabo Verde, but in other emergent Portuguese-speaking African nation-states as well. In an analysis of this arguably infelicitous subsumption of literary production to the confining teleology of the socialist revolution, Mozambican novelist and historian João Paulo Borges Coelho remarks that what passed for literature during the early post-independence period “was mostly pamphleteering, shallow, and moved by non-literary aims,” while the “resistance poetry” associated with anti-colonial militancy was “narrow in approach, technically fragile and often naïve . . . a ‘literature’ that has not resisted well the passage of time” (2013: 26, 25). Patrick Chabal remarks congruently that, “most anti-colonial writing has seldom been anything else than sloganising and propaganda. If it has a place in the history of the nationalist struggle, it contributed little to the construction of an African literature” (1996: 22).

144  Luís Madureira With key variations, stemming largely from Portuguese-speaking Africa’s deep-seated commitment to the socialist revolution at the time of independence, this fraught link between literature and emancipation can of course be broadly ascribed to most African literature from the period of de-colonization. What is perhaps less commonplace is that this literary (re)turn to emancipation should happen concurrently in the former colonizing power. Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos notes appositely that the “independence of African colonies occurred concomitantly with profound, progressive transformations in Portuguese society,” signifying that with de-colonization came “a shared sense of liberation, both for the colonizer and the colonized” (2002: 34). Appraising the effects of de-colonization on the metropolitan “psyche,” the Portuguese novelist Lídia Jorge regards the loss of empire and the attendant emphasis on political liberation (underpinning Portuguese prose fiction from the 1980s) analogously, as belonging to two opposite but “indissociable poles”: On the one hand the sense of amputation, the loss of an empire, which led to . . . a symptomatic experience of our smallness as a national body; on the other hand the verbalization of a mythology of freedom and liberation, of personal and individual emancipation . . . the sense of amputation also corresponding to and coinciding with that of collective emancipation. (1986: 58) In a later essay, Jorge, again, defines “the Portuguese novel from the 1980s as a novel of sustained resistance, or of revisited resistance against various instances of domination” (2003: 20). The key moment around which this uneasy symbiosis between literature and resistance coalesces is of course the revolution on April 25, 1974, that toppled Portugal’s nearly five-decade old dictatorship and ushered in a new era of de-colonization in Portugal’s African colonies. How are we to understand this arguably exceptional historical coincidence between de-colonization and the metropolitan struggle for political emancipation? Is one the other’s condition of possibility, or do they together constitute a fundamental shift in the global order? Given the ultimate “failure” of both revolutionary projects, does this unique epochal concurrence ultimately suggest that the pursuit of freedom they both embody ineluctably recedes into an imagined past, or signposts a future that is always beyond the temporal horizon. These are the central questions that arise from a reading of Lídia Jorge’s A costa dos murmúrios (1988), a fictionalized account of the colonial war in Mozambique told from the perspective of a military officer’s wife. What underpins Jorge’s text is precisely a sense of the preeminence of the April Revolution, not only at the diegetic level (as the “epicenter” of an epochal political shift), but with respect to the emergence of a new mode of narrative fiction, or fictional representation of history. Set in the waning years of Portugal’s colonial rule in Mozambique, the novel opens with a brief lyrical narrative titled “Os Gafanhotos” [The Locusts], while the ensuing narration retells the events of this prelude (which occur around the time of a major offensive carried out by Portugal’s colonial forces against Mozambique’s national

No telephone to heaven  145 liberation army [Frelimo] in 1970), from the viewpoint of its female protagonist, an officer’s wife named Eva Lopo. This second, much lengthier, more caustic and considerably less cohesive account seeks to amplify, complicate, and ultimately, as Eva Lopo remarks at the end of the novel, “annul” or cancel (anular) the presumably male-authored narrative with which the novel begins (Jorge 1988: 259). Since its publication almost three decades ago, critical readings of Jorge’s novel have tended to focus on its supposedly postmodern structure, in which a narrator purposefully dismantles and de-authorizes an inaugural, putatively masculine version of the same story, thus appearing to suggest that “to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological” (Hutcheon 1988: 110). Concurrently, criticism of the novel has underscored its “deliberate ironic appropriation” of a “literally unfaithful, unauthorized” female perspective (Ramalho 1989: 64). Whether “ironic” (Ramalho 1989: 65) or “rigorous” (Medeiros 1999: 65); whether under the “contrapuntal sign of memory . . . dispersed and irrelevant like the real itself” (Vieira 2005: 67); whether an “anti-mimeticist, anti-humanist” exercise (Owen 1999: 88) or an “aggressive” undoing of “misogynist” war stories (Ferreira 1992: 276), the novel remains, in the eyes of most of its critics, a “deconstruction” of the traditional war narrative in particular (Ramalho 1989: 67; Ferreira 1992: 269; Medeiros 1999: 64), or in a broader sense, of the authority of dominant historical discourses about the colonial wars (Ramalho 1989: 67; Kaufman 1992: 43; Cabral 1997: 284; Medeiros 1999: 63; Owen 1999: 84; Vieira 2005: 81). While, broadly speaking, I concur with the gist of these readings, I must hasten to adduce that A costa dos murmúrios, as Jorge herself insists, is “a novel of continued or revisited resistance against various dominant instances” (2003: 20). To be sure, to regard it in the light of this emancipatory project is not necessarily to view it as an uncompromising repudiation or “deconstruction” of humanist or mimeticist notions of the historical. Jorge’s “immodest” definition of herself as a “witness to [actual] times and spaces,” along with her related assertion that “the compulsive force of History, lived out in a very particular fashion, [is] transfigured at the level of fiction” into ‘History’s double’ (2003: 20, 23), acquire particular significance in this respect. The key question that emerges, then, is how the novel’s allegedly deconstructive (“anti-mimeticist,” “non-humanist”) project can cohabit with the ethics of resistance that arguably underpin it. How, for instance, can the novel propose on the one hand “an alternate, non-humanist concept of History,” and denounce the “misogynist” tradition of colonial war novels, on the other (Ferreira 1992: 272, 276)? How does its “anti-mimeticist poetics” denote at the same time “the specifics of Portuguese empire and its collapse” (Owen 1999: 88, 93)? Indeed, how does its “ironic deconstruction” simultaneously assert itself as an “implacable denunciation of imperialism, colonialism, the war, oppression, violence and sexism” (Ramalho 1989: 67)? Can the ethical framework that inescapably underpins what appear to be a poetics and politics of emancipation and subversion coexist with an allegedly postmodern incredulity in the “reality effect,” or with a sedulous circumvention of teleological modes of representation?

146  Luís Madureira Although these questions have not been extensively and systematically addressed in the numerous analyses that have been published about the novel, a few readings have laid the groundwork for a keener understanding of this apparent dichotomy. Thus, in an early and influential reading of the novel, Maria Irene Ramalho refers to Fredric Jameson’s classic and polemical reading of “third-world” (or peripheral) novels as national allegories that are “situational and materialist” despite themselves. In contrast, their “first-world” counterparts are putatively characterized by an “epistemologically crippling” inability to grasp the “social totality.” Taking Jameson’s “radical” distinction between first- and third-world novels as a point of departure, Ramalho defines A costa as a “semiperipheral” novel, one that evinces a conscious and at times bitingly satirical political engagement with the Portuguese nation’s ambivalent status as an economically dependent colonizing power (1989: 65–66). As such, Jorge’s novel differs fundamentally from the modernist and postmodernist literary production of the capitalist “core” but conforms at least in part with the “laborious retelling of the experience of the collectivity” that novels from the periphery would always supposedly entail (Jameson 1986: 86). In another early reading of Jorge’s novel, Maria Manuela Cabral argues concurrently that Jorge’s political lucidity and commitment to social change suggest an enduring engagement with modernity’s emancipatory project, modulated or counterpoised by a postmodern sensibility underpinned by an unbelief in (or interrogation of) that very project (1997: 265–269). Perhaps one of the key symbols of this incredulity is the reference to the selfimmolation on January 16, 1969, of the Czech student Jan Palach, who was, like A costa’s protagonist, a history major. According to Evita, Palach (who set himself alight at the end of the Prague Spring and in the wake of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armies) did not kill himself “for the sake of the Czech fatherland [but] for another fatherland that he thought existed beyond” it (126). Likewise, Evita describes her own efforts to denounce what appears to be a mass poisoning scheme by colonial settlers as a renunciation of the “poison that has fallen no one knows from where, upon everything” (126). Although the meaning of this uncharted numinous terrain remains ambiguous, it seems plausible that, as an inopportune reminder of Soviet imperialism, the episode muddles the ostensible moral clarity of a tricontinental or socialist revolutionary struggle, in which the former Portuguese colonies and the former socialist bloc were presumably united in opposition to colonial oppression. Ella Shohat points out in a classical piece on postcolonialism that, “the collapse of Second World socialism . . . has not altered neocolonial policies, and on some levels, [it] has generated increased anxiety among . . . Third World communities . . . concerning their struggle for independence without a Second World counterbalance” (1992: 111). By contrast, the allusion to Jan Palach stands as a subtle but powerful reminder that the “second world,” too, was far from exempt from the kind of brutal “coloniality of power” that the Portuguese empire routinely deployed.2 For Jorge’s Evita, the incipient interrogation of the viability of the emancipatory project she professes to have adopted by virtue of her education is registered in the biblical metaphor to which she resorts as a justification of

No telephone to heaven  147 the urgency to resist against and denounce the genocidal penchant of Portuguese colonialism: “the university imbued me with the belief in the voice . . . that cries out in the wilderness, but cries out nonetheless” (126). It is as though, Evita, or more accurately perhaps, Eva Lopo (her older self who recalls her emergent militancy in the dying days of Portuguese colonialism) glimpses the teleological rupture of the collective emancipation project she is beginning to embrace. Despite this inchoate disillusionment, however, Evita remains engaged with the struggle for liberation. Her creeping cynicism notwithstanding, Jorge’s Evita holds resolutely onto “the belief in the voice that cries out from the roof of a building. The voice that cries out in the wilderness, but cries out nonetheless” (1988: 126). What I wish to underscore is that this (admittedly) ironic commitment to the pursuit of freedom is firmly anchored in History. Its condition of possibility, as Jorge herself has insisted, is “the compulsive force” of a History, or “reality of which [the novel, as “the extension of real life,”] is also the child and the mirror” (Jorge 2003: 20, 17; Jorge 1986: 62). These assertions seem to veer us afield from definitions of A costa as “an historiographic metafiction” (Faria 2001: 28) or claims that the novel proposes “an alternate, non-humanist concept of History, [disclosing] a close affinity [with] Nietzschean or . . . Foucauldian thought” that in the end, it undoes “factual truth or even verisimilitude” (Ferreira 1992: 272, 274). Rather, the complex relationship Jorge’s Eva/Evita reveals with “real life” seems more closely to resemble the stance of the historical novel’s narrator, as defined by Catherine Gallagher: she seems to go to considerable lengths “to create the impression that the fictional moments are plausibly consistent with the historical record. ‘History’ is their horizon of possibility, the ground against which we judge them probable or improbable” (2011: 320). Indeed, as Hilary Owen pertinently remarks about A costa, “Historically indexed referents . . . inflect the transhistorical generalizations of displacement poetics with the specifics of Portuguese empire and its collapse” (1999: 93). Perhaps the most productive way to begin to disentangle this apparent dichotomy between an ostensive labor of “deconstruction” and historical plausibility is to look more closely into the fraught relationship between the main narrative and the opening short story titled “Os Gafanhotos.” As I  mention above, the bulk of the novel retells the events narrated in this preambular and “deceitfully innocuous” (Ramalho 1989: 67) tale from Eva’s point of view. Several critical readings of the novel grasp the relationship between the two narratives as fundamentally agonistic, underpinned by Eva’s aggressively calculated attempt to de-authorize the initial telling. “Os Gafanhotos” is thus posited either as the “manipulated  .  .  . official and coherent version of events,” “counterpoint[ed]” by Eva Lopo’s account (Vieira 2005: 67), or as “a basically male” (and mysoginistically lupine)3 colonial war narrative which Eva’s version “systematically” deconstructs (Ferreira 1992: 276). As “tempting” as it may be to discern in this inaugural text an instance of authoritarian discourse (Madeiros 1999: 64), or a “vain effort to reproduce official History” (Vieira 2005: 68), such assertions fail to bear up under closer scrutiny. Indeed, it is arguable whether the tale’s perspective is “effectively that of the oppressor”

148  Luís Madureira (Medeiros 1999: 66). Medeiros adduces that a similar ironic tone to the one that prevails in the rest of the narrative suffuses the opening story (1999: 66), while Hilary Owen shrewdly notes that “Eva’s narrative is certainly more detailed and more deconstructively incisive than ‘Os Gafanhotos,’ but it is barely more stable than the text it displaces” (Owen 1999: 80). Irony and instability are hardly the hallmarks of discourses of officialdom and authority. As Medeiros notes, far from endorsing ‘official discourse,’ and much like Eva Lopo’s allegedly corrective text, the first narrative exposes the breakdown of colonial ideology. Hence, the fact that the first tale’s epigraph cites a fragment from a poem by a dissident biracial journalist (Álvaro Sabino, a central character in Eva Lopo’s narrative) signifies, for Medeiros, that “the traditional discourse [is placed] under the sign of the discourse that it proposes to silence” (1999: 66). Nonetheless, Medeiros argues, in the last instance, the short story remains complicit with the very dominant discourse it undoes. I want to suggest instead that the rapport between Sabino’s text and “Os Gafanhotos,” just like the one between this narrative prelude and Eva Lopo’s retelling, is ultimately not starkly oppositional, but rather defined simultaneously by agonism and contiguity. In other words, I am positing a dialectical link between the short story and the ensuing narrative. The verb anular in the novel’s last sentence (which describes Eva Lopo “annulling ‘Os Gafanhotos’ ”) would thus be read in the classic Hegelian sense of aufheben, or “sublate.” While, to be sure, Eva’s account displaces or undermines specific elements of the first narrative, it also preserves others, among them the irony and volatility Medeiros and Owen identify in both texts. In sum, the dialectical opposition I am postulating does not so much signal the substitution of a dominant and univocal representation of History by a “corrective” or “deconstructively incisive” one (Owen 1999: 79, 80), as it stages a decisive diachronic shift in the nature and aim of Portugal’s fictional production. With minor variations, Jorge has described this transition on several occasions. She cites Eduardo Lourenço’s seminal 1966 essay on the then “new generation” of Portuguese fiction writers, “Uma literatura desenvolta, ou os filhos de Álvaro de Campos”4 [“A  nimble literature, or the children of Álvaro de Campos”], in which the Portuguese philosopher and critic links the unique creative energy of Portugal’s fictional production from the 1960s with the latent yet persistent legacy of “that continuously expanding spiritual earthquake called Álvaro Campos” (Fernando Pessoa’s most radical and innovative heteronym) (Lourenço 1993: 260). Jorge invokes the old shibboleth that Portugal’s literary “genius” resides in poetic expression, only promptly to recast it in light of the (post-April revolution) context of her own generation of writers: It seems as though the principle that our natural mode of [literary] expression lies solely in Poetry can today be contravened, or at least counterbalanced with the certainty that, in terms of diversity, quality, quantity and future ambition, the 80s generation has contributed to mitigating the asymmetry between Portuguese fiction and Poetry’s crushing weight. Or at least, for the

No telephone to heaven  149 first time  .  .  . we appear to have witnessed the nearly simultaneous eruption of a group of new fiction writers . . . motivated by intense personal life experiences, [who] developed a genre of fiction rooted in recent History, and wrought upon the poetic texture of the Portuguese language.5 (2003: 19) In the reading I  am proposing, “Os Gafanhotos” would exemplify the kind of lyrical or “nimble” literature Lourenço ascribes to the 1960s children of Álvaro de Campos.6 It would constitute a fictional discourse, whose stylistic or lyrical exuberance operates as a kind of aesthetic compensation for a political situation in which “the totality of [Portugal’s] historical project as the product of a collective will” remains inaccessible to its citizenry, or at least perceptible only as a flimsy ideological “mask” (Lourenço 1993: 258). Like the narratives Lourenço examines, “Os Gafanhotos” thus turns deliberately away from the outside world depicted “on the front pages of newspapers”; it is characterized by “non-insertion into a collective project,” and a “stellar flight” from “Portuguese reality” (Lourenço 1993: 257, 259). In contrast, Eva Lopo’s ensuing retelling, an “immodest” testimonial of late colonial “times and spaces” (Jorge 2003: 20), while acknowledging (perhaps ironically) the aesthetic value of the opening tale,7 proceeds to make rather more explicit its “resistance”8 not only to an anachronistic colonial empire and its derisory “masks,” but the post-imperial effort to efface the Estado Novo’s war crimes. As Eva pointedly observes to the narrator of “Os Gafanhotos,” “An enormous effort has been made over these [last] years to forget it . . . to erase it all” (Jorge 1988: 136, 131). Arguably, one of the key ethical imperatives of Jorge’s narrative is to prevent these war crimes from falling irrevocably into oblivion. The other aspect that “Os Gafanhotos” shares in common with the prerevolutionary fiction Lourenço discusses is precisely its “allegorical character” (Medeiros 1999: 66), which Eva Lopo likewise underscores, advising the tale’s anonymous author “not to worry about truth which is not to be reconstituted, nor with verisimilitude which is an illusion of the senses. Worry about correspondence. Or do you believe in a truth other than the one attainable through correspondence?” (42). Jorge’s appraisal of the story seems uncannily to echo Lourenço’s critical evaluation of the “New Literature,” which he defines as “an immense parable of our own absence from ourselves, [an] absence . . . which is our true life. By describing it, this Literature [paradoxically] fastens onto Portuguese reality” (259). I would therefore submit that when Eva Lopo insists upon the (Baudelairean? Pessoan?) “truth” of “Os Gafanhotos,” adducing that, in her own retelling, she will not expose the former’s figuras (either characters or rhetorical figures) as “wrong,”9 we ought not reflexively to assume that truth “is connoted negatively here” (Vieira 2005: 67). Rather, we should take Eva Lopo at her word. Like the epigraphic text it professedly wishes to silence (Medeiros 1999: 66), the inaugural narrative can be readily interpreted as a parable of the end of empire. That is its figural “truth.” After all, it closes with the death of a colonial

150  Luís Madureira officer, whose body is shipped back to the metropolis aboard a warship (39). This final image is reproduced and amplified at the end of Eva Lopo’s narrative: There was another image of return to original locations – a ship packed with soldiers sailed down toward the port . . . As much as I realized that everything was transitory and that the land belonged to absolutely no one, I couldn’t help seeing, in that ship, a portion of the fatherland descending. (259) It is with a metaphor of the end of empire that Álvaro Sabino’s text (quoted in its entirety toward the end of the novel) closes as well. In Eva’s narrative, the journalist pointedly informs her younger self that she has “nothing to do with the armed, or unarmed struggle,” and that, although free to write whatever he wants in his weekly column, he needs to do it in a “difficult” mode: “to write without denouncing or deluding” (126–127). The opening images of Sabino’s prose poem10 (the locusts or “flying emeralds,” a sky burning green), quoted in the epigraph, are accordingly ambivalent. Read against the backdrop of a familiar metaphor in anti-colonial literature which associates the arrival of Europeans with a plague of locusts,11 the “flying emeralds” might be read as heralding not the arrival but the imminent flight of the colonizer. Similarly, the piece’s burning horizons remit us to a locus classicus of Luso-African resistance poetry: Agostinho Neto’s “Para Além da Poesia” [Beyond Poetry], in which “horizons on fire” denote something like a violent and anticipated nationalist renewal.12 The relationship between “Os Gafanhotos” and Sabino’s fragment is thus not that of a dominant and suppressed text, but of two contrapuntal (or broadly oppositional) literary discourses, one metropolitan, the other African. It stages the aforementioned historical concurrence between de-colonization and the metropolitan struggle for political emancipation. The juxtaposition of the two texts points, albeit obliquely, to the political and artistic allegiances that a small but culturally influential number of white dissidents forged with black or biracial artists against the backdrop of political authoritarianism prevailing throughout the late colonial period. In this context, the white Mozambican poet Virgílio Lemos (1929–2013) recalls how in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “there was a strong sentiment against Salazar’s regime and against colonialism” (Laban 1998, 1: 385). Lemos reportedly believed, along with the poet José Craveirinha and many other dissident artists that, in spite of the reigning dictatorship, it was possible to build a ‘utopian’ nation predicated on “black independence, to be sure, [but] racially harmonious . . . that would respect minorities [with] a place for all, without exclusions” (Laban 1998, 1: 373). Jorge’s novel on the other hand seems to insist on the discontinuity between these two emancipatory projects. Indeed, for Jorge, this alleged historical concurrence calls for a crucial rethinking of Portugal’s anachronistic colonial enterprise. Her novel seeks precisely to pay heed to the “distance” or incommensurability between metropolitan and colonial conceptions of emancipation. Although traces of this vigilance recur in the text, I should like to focus on a particularly resonant one, a fragment

No telephone to heaven  151 which contains the novel’s only detailed portrayal of an African character: an assimilado hotel switchboard operator named João Bernardo. In Eva Lopo’s description, Bernardo’s body bears the unmistakable outward signs of his assimilated status – that is, the distinctness related to his effort to identify with the colonizer.13 Yet, almost immediately after she thus singles him out, the narrator proceeds steadily to wipe away Bernardo’s identity (or difference, which in this specific instance turns out to be the same thing). As he slides vertiginously along an elaborately unfolding tropological chain, Bernardo’s difference (or singularity) becomes exchangeable, excessive, indeed expendable. To cite Eva Lopo’s ironic remark to the author of the inaugural tale, Bernardo’s character needed to be expunged from “Os Gafanhotos” so as not to hamper the seamless linearity of its plot,14 so as to leave untroubled the preambular narrative’s articulation of a cohesive, and arguably parabolic or allegorical truth.15 Thus, like the “dispersed,” “slippery,” and “irrelevant” shards of quotidian living (whose disjointed and ungoverned totality makes up the bulk of the novel), like Eva Lopo’s own “imperfect recollections” (which, in contrast to the figural “truth” of “Os Gafanhotos,” cannot easily fit into a teleological notion of the real), Bernardo is, from the outset, relegated to a sort of diegetic waste product (desperdício) (85). It all seems to happen as though what produces Bernardo’s superfluity is precisely his distinctness.16 As soon as the narrator initiates her portrait of the remarkable switchboard operator, then, he becomes effectively “flattened” by the surfeit of tropes that she marshals to characterize him: He . . . had become as symbolic a figure as a flag, or, more than a flag, an elaborate allegory. On the phone, João Bernardo was an ensemble of various symbols, and you couldn’t behold him from afar, . . . without noticing how the indomitable wills of the princes of House of Avis flowed together into him, . . . propelling the ships to sail to the end point of the spherical Earth. It was there in the final port that Bernardo had been found. By himself Bernardo was able to represent the conquest that, starting with that conjoined impetus of a single family, had been enacted throughout history precisely so that peoples came to understand that salvation existed beyond History, if they were perchance to pray. The path had been difficult but it had been worthwhile. You could see him from the door of the lobby, because Bernardo had some beads hanging from a phone switch, and he used to pray. This was a powerful symbol. But there was more.17 (86) By overburdening Bernardo with figural meanings, and as a result, divesting him of his own culture and history, Jorge’s narrator also inescapably drains him of socio-cultural and existential density. As a privileged and “powerful” emblem of a multi-secular epos of expansion and conquest, Bernardo plainly signifies only insofar as he reflects back to the conqueror his distant and framing gaze,18 his or her own will to conquer. In this regard, the narrator’s discourse comes to reproduce – in a manifestly ironic register – the logic of forced conversion and colonial

152  Luís Madureira assimilation. One is inevitably reminded of Fanon’s lapidary words: “The colonist makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning”19 (2005: 14). Nonetheless, in striking contrast to the “innovative dynamism” which Fanon attributes to the colonizer (2005: 15), the colonizing hero in Jorge’s passage remains moored in a remote, pre-industrial past. What justifies his “civilizing mission” is not the ruthless yet necessary insertion into his own particular “History” of peoples who have hitherto lingered irremediably at its threshold, but rather the bestowal of eternal salvation. Concretized in the rosary beads hanging from the switchboard key and the framed image of Bernardo at prayer, this pre-Hegelian theodicy transcends historical time: “salvation existed beyond History.” Sitting at the telephone, Bernardo exhibits a familiarity with European technical culture which purportedly denotes his rise from a “primitive” stage. Nevertheless, what reveals the full measure of his redemption is not this acquired skill, but what the Christian bauble draped over the apparatus symbolizes. The rosary “transcends” or negates the secular model of technological progress which the switchboard signifies, since the figure that supplies compelling ocular proof of the hallowed value of the overseas conquest (“it had been . . . worthwhile. You could see . . .” [86]), the “powerful symbol” of the salvation in which the teleology of expansion culminates, is that of Bernardo praying. In this sense, the succession of tropes ascribed to Bernardo replicates the string of rosary beads (or prayer sequence) whose crux is of course the same: the crucifix (the even more “powerful symbol” or “banner” [bandeira] under which Portugal conquered): the fifth of the so-called sorrowful mysteries whose “fruit” is precisely salvation. The “private [branch] exchange” (i.e. pbx) with Heaven and the Christian god, which the superimposition of the rosary upon the switchboard would emblematize, duplicates the very ideology of empire which anachronistically constructs Christian salvation as the final legitimization of a brutal colonial military operation in the latter half of the twentieth century.20 Much like a palimpsest in reverse, the beads dangling from the switchboard figure a past to which Portugal, notwithstanding the cruel modernity of its ongoing counter-insurgency campaign, appears compelled to return. In the end, to invoke the gift of eternal salvation as the catalyst for modern colonial warfare is ineluctably to place the latter not just “beyond” but outside human history. It is to lock the Portuguese colonial project in a sacred or mystical time which loops obsessively back to the fifteenth century, to the sacralized moment when the “indomitable will” of the Princes of the Royal House of Avis set the caravels to sail beyond Cape Bojador. Just as, in the words of Henry the Navigator’s panegyrist, the Infante’s main reason for sponsoring the voyages of “discovery” was to “be propagate the holy faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and bring to it all the souls that wish to be saved” (Zurara 1978: 45), so twentieth-century Portugal, according to an official account of Marcelo Caetano’s 1969 tour of the colonies, for example, “continues under the sign of the crusade that joins together the Christian West against barbarism” (Boletim 1969: 368). As Jorge’s gloss of the familiar line from Pessoa’s Mensagem appears to suggest (“havia valido a pena”; ‘it had been worthwhile’), the temporality of Portugal’s colonial enterprise under

No telephone to heaven  153 the Estado Novo – “a crusaderism entirely oriented towards the past,” as Eduardo Lourenço memorably called it (1978: 123) – partakes of the repeatable cyclicality of aesthetic inventions. It is symptomatic of the “lack of historical realism” that, according to Lourenço, underpinned Portugal’s ruling ideology throughout the Salazarist period (2004: 109). One of the principal consequences of this anachronistic enterprise is to have produced what Amílcar Cabral once branded “the most retrograde colonialism on earth” (1973: 23), a colonial condition in which, to quote the “admirable synthesis” that an unnamed military officer provides with more than a tinge of irony in “Os Gafanhotos,” “we have everything . . . [from] the nineteenth century except the emancipation of the slaves” (12). Yet, the most egregious abuses of modern colonialism will always have been justified (“havia valido a pena”) by the eternal salvation which conversion (or, the edifying sight of an African switchboard operator mouthing a string of Hail Marys) presumably confers. If one of the defining traits of Portugal’s modern empire is to have remained outside of History, then, by dint of a symmetry that seems to owe something to the formal unity of the work of art, its most potent legitimization will also always already have been located outside historical time. In other words, if it is in the name of eternal salvation that Portugal carries out its colonial enterprise, then the latter’s main justification will inevitably reside not in an historical task (a civilizing mission, development, etc.), but elevated beyond the historical to the realm of the timeless, or eternal. And it is the praying switchboard operator who is made to bear the symbolic burden of this imperial mysticism. As charged with ideological signification as he is, in the role he is subsequently assigned, the operator exceeds (or supplements) this potent legitimating function: “Mas tinha mais” (“But there was more”). And what there is besides the farreaching allegory of conquest and conversion he is made to represent is the stubborn remainder of savagery that Bernardo must be ready to perform on demand: When the telephone apparatus stopped ringing for a bit, he would be called from the switchboard to explain how his uncle was a leopard hunter and the witch doctor had ordered him killed. It was important . . . to understand how an immense savagery beat its drums in the African interior, where the rebellion was coming from. The confusion between ‘father’ and ‘uncle’ was also curious, since the uncle performed the father’s functions, which proved how human ties could be promiscuous and confusing when there was no writing. Bernardo, that figure who would not fit in your account, would shake his head, saying no, all the while laughing copiously.21 (87) If, in the beginning of the episode, Bernardo is marked as distinct from his fellow Africans because he is culturally and religiously similar (assimilated) to the colonizer, here he is peremptorily bereft of this distinction. He is compelled to speak and stand for an alternate form of difference, one that ultimately threatens to annul his original singularity. This supplementary “symbolic” function (the

154  Luís Madureira stereotype of the native informant) is, in a political sense, incommensurable with the redemptive narrative he embodies in the earlier fragment. In order to corroborate the familiar transformation of cultural difference into a hierarchized and spatialized temporality, Bernardo must be alternately a native (indígena) and an assimilado.22 He must be a social equal (“the symbol of integration” [86]) as well as an inferior: “The power of that symbolism, as heavy as a crown, was further demonstrated by how everybody addressed him by the familiar pronoun [tu] . . . To say ‘you’ [tu] to Bernardo proved that the social world was in order” (87). Bernardo thus transcends his primitive stage only to re-enact it pedagogically as a colonial stereotype.23 If the first demonstration of the legitimacy and moral ascendancy of colonial rule hinges on Bernardo’s deliverance from his savage past, the latter legitimization of empire requires that he remain inexorably fettered to that past. It demands, in short, that he insistently reaffirm the savagery which, as an assimilado, he is enjoined to negate. He is saved only to be damned again and again. In an uncanny repetition of the temporal structure of the expansionist ideology whose “singular” figure he becomes, Bernardo is therefore obliged to return continually to a “primitive” past from which – despite his ostensible Christianity and technical proficiency – he apparently cannot detach himself. Like the colonizer’s appeal to salvation, the cultural difference Bernardo must perform on cue also lies beyond the threshold of the historical.24 Whereas, in the latter instance, ahistoricity is a sign of “savagery,” in the first it is contradictorily the hallmark of an ecumenical civilizing mission. However, in the light of this structural symmetry, the ascription of a universal purpose and design to the compulsive regression to a past, which is not only more remote but just as local as the one defined as savage and pre-historical, cannot but appear unjustifiable. Both the narrative of eternal salvation and the pedagogy of the civilizing mission thus face the continual risk of reverting to the status of quaint local fictions with as much catholic authority as, say, a tale of leopard hunters and vengeful sorcerers. This arbitrariness is subtly underlined by Bernardo’s copious laughter and by his gentle yet insistent rejection of the proofs (gleefully submitted by his audience of colonists) of the unruly sexuality governing his pre-scriptural wild state.25 His laughter and mild denials not only stage an understated refusal of colonial stereotypes of wildness, but they disclose Bernardo’s superior or excessive cultural knowledge. Since Bernardo has a much more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of his native culture than the colonizer, he can readily identify the latter’s racist distortions. On the other hand, he must possess a sufficiently subtle grasp of the dominant culture and its repressive mechanisms to recognize, first, that these stereotypes enable and sustain the colonial condition and, second, that, if only as a strategy of survival, he needs to downplay and even dissimulate this recognition. Side by side with the edifying portrait of Bernardo silently praying, the image of Bernardo shaking his head and laughing imposes a radical reassessment of the earlier emblematic gesture. Slyly, Bernardo’s self-effacing bemusement at the bigotry and stupidity of the colonists introduces the possibility that his conversion and assimilation were indeed incomplete, that precisely

No telephone to heaven  155 because of the remnant of “savagery” which seems ineluctably to supplement it, his assimilation has always been performative, strategic, and hence at the most basic level, profoundly menacing to colonial authority. In effect, an element of contingency had already begun to draw the sacred time of eternal salvation back into a relativistic temporality, almost as soon as salvation was posited as the justification of conquest: “so that peoples came to understand that salvation existed beyond History, if they were perchance to pray [se acaso rezassem]” (86; my italics). Structurally, this “if” clause relates to the eschatological narrative as Bernardo does to “Os Gafanhotos.” It is a syntactical “supplement” which comes after the end of days, or non-time of salvation, only to undo the finality of its eschatology. On the one hand, eternal salvation constitutes the final purpose of the colonial project. On the other, however, its fufilment becomes subordinated to the chance performance of a religious rite. If it is dependent on a random act, sacred finality can remain neither sacred nor final. It is as though the phrase tears a small rift in the ornate fabric of the expansionist theodicy, allowing another time (or a “time of the other”) to peer momentarily through. Not only does the clause’s “subjunctive” temporality belong to the randomness and perplexity of lived experience (acaso), but by registering the probability of the other’s repudiation of salvation (or her choice not to pray), it clears the ground for the emergence of an agency (or “will”) that resists and inevitably de-legitimates the colonizer’s evangelizing mission. If the teleology of colonial conquest stands or falls on the casual performance of an alien ritual by those whose conversion constitutes the first and final cause of the colonial project, then with a simple gesture of refusal, this project’s ecumenical time faces the redoubtable threat of shattering into “Different times that relativize all times” (196). What the conditional clause seems to propose, in other words, is that for Bernardo there may be no telephone to Heaven. It is, in fact, by indicating this sort of relativistic notion of time that the usually silent Eva Lopo timidly retorts to the imperious (and dimly Hegelian) assertion of her professor of Contemporary History that the History of the World is the working out of God’s plan.26 By “relativizing” colonialism’s capacity to project a Christocentric, that is a local form of European knowledge and history as a universal design, the “if” clause opens up the possibility of reducing the History professor’s theodicy to a willful invention, to nothing. As Eva Lopo concludes in her hesitant interpolation, “time is an illusion. That is to say, it is nothing!” (196). Once the element of chance and gratuitousness attaches to it, nothing (or at least only disjointed and incoherent shards) will remain of this teleology of empire. In this way, both Bernardo’s laughter and Eva’s timid retort perform a similar kind of disruption. With modest efficacy, they empty out the eschatological narrative of expansion subtending Portugal’s colonial enterprise. Like Eva herself, who quietly refuses to play Penelope to the derisory, sycophantic Odysseus that her secondlieutenant husband would be; like Eva, whose unruly narrative continually defies the formal and epistemological strictures of “Os Gafanhotos,” Bernardo, too, consistently overflows the exemplary function into which the Salazarist axiomatics of empire would have confined him. In a sense, then, Bernardo’s affable refutation of colonial stereotypes concerning the immense savagery throbbing in the heart

156  Luís Madureira of Africa performs the recalcitrant randomness of the “if” clause. It marks a different time that surreptitiously undercuts the sacralized temporality of conquest and conversion. Finally, Bernardo’s denials suggest that the beating of African drums, far from being just wild nonsense, may actually mask an idiom and a syntax whose intricacies cannot but remain an enigma to the colonists. They indicate, perhaps even more alarmingly, that, like the colonizer, the colonized can also make history: The switchboard operator had the capacity to recall the numbers he was asked to dial by the second time he dialed them, and he stunned the lobby with that recollective skill. It was proof that Africa could keep a memory of itself if it wanted and elected to. And then, at last then, he was a symbol overflowing itself because it meant the Portuguese accepted him, and allowed the secrets of the switchboard to pass through the dark ears of a nephew-son of a leopard hunter.27 (87) The disparate temporality of Bernardo’s memorizing capacity thus entails a crucial double negative. First, its persistence tacitly repudiates the colonialist relegation of “traditional” Africa to the threshold of history. Second, precisely by unveiling the distinct and yet equivalent historicity of this “interior” cultural space, it implicitly rejects the imperialist commonplace that history begins with the colonizer. By potentially endowing with a specific agency or conscious “will” (querer, dispor) the plural subject of the previous “if” clause (“if they were perchance to pray”), the latter conditional phrase (“had [Africa] wanted and elected to”) completes and illuminates the gesture of resistance that the former adumbrates. It is therefore at the point where assimilation exceeds the regulatory logic of empire, where it becomes paradoxically “proof” of Africa’s capacity to make its own history (or, “keep a memory of itself”), it is at the point where assimilation can be turned strategically against itself28 that Bernardo begins to embody an uncontainable supplementarity: “a symbol overflowing itself” (87). For, if the colonist knows the operator’s culture only as racist caricature, Bernardo, in contradistinction, knows it from the inside out, and is, moreover, allowed to eavesdrop on the colonist’s most intimate exchanges. While the colonist knows nothing of Bernardo’s customs and practices, the switchboard operator partakes of the former’s secrets. It is in large measure because of the agency that his surplus knowledge signifies that Bernardo becomes potentially dangerous. Ultimately, only death appears able to contain the peril he embodies. For the critical piece of data I have been withholding from the beginning of this discussion is what every reader of the novel has known from the outset: Bernardo’s body is already lifeless when Eva Lopo introduces him into her narrative. Much like the novel itself, the scene stages a kind of post-mortem of the unburied legacy of colonial power. Along with countless other Africans whose bodies wash ashore near her hotel Bernardo poisoned himself by ingesting methanol. His corpse differs from the other victims’ corpses because it is clothed, because, as we have seen, those clothes single him out as an

No telephone to heaven  157 assimilado.29 In this distinction resides one of the paradoxes that define not just his life but his death as well. According to the official story, the mass poisoning constitutes a “scene of barbarism” (24). It confirms the Africans’ immense and infuriating stupidity (23). As Captain Jaime Forza Leal, one of the novel’s central characters, tells it in “Os Gafanhotos,” the “blacks” (in English in the original) had stolen a shipment of methanol drums from the loading docks and, mistaking the chemical compound for white wine, distributed the drums in the native shantytowns (bairros de caniço), where they were recklessly consumed (23). In keeping with this story’s plotline, Bernardo’s death affords a didactic occasion which the military doctor who examines his body promptly seizes: “the doctor wanted all of the bare-chested kitchen help looking on to come closer and see what happened to those who drank poison from the drums” (88). If this version of the episode stands, however, the operator’s death ends up overturning the very logic that subtends the official account of the mass poisoning. For, only by fully embodying the stereotype of the stupid savage could Bernardo have poisoned himself. Yet Bernardo supposedly distinguished himself from the other natives not only for having transcended their “primal scene,” but also by functioning as the privileged symbol of that transcendence. So, either Bernardo has successfully feigned his assimilation, or the project of assimilation has failed in his case. If we follow the consequences of both of these possibilities to their inevitable conclusion, they end up exposing the vulnerability of colonial authority. They signify either that the colonizer was completely deceived by a mere savage or that he fell dangerously short of even the most banal requisites of the civilizing mission. In neither instance can Bernardo’s symbolic force prevail, since he cannot simultaneously serve as a model of assimilation and an example of its complete breakdown. Silently refusing to heed the doctor’s tutorial, the African servants, for all their purported idiocy, appear to be more cognizant of the implications of this subversion of colonial pedagogy than the doctor himself: “the helpers, wearing shorts, would not come closer” (88). The paradox surrounding Bernardo’s undoing may begin to elucidate his superfluity to the seamless narrative of “Os Gafanhotos.” It may explain why his wellclad body floating among the nameless and naked dead would trouble the linearity of Captain Forza Leal’s reassuring account of the mass poisoning. In effect, the other, more disturbing reason for Bernardo’s death – one that is not even broached in “Os Gafanhotos,” but which constitutes one of the central propositions of Jorge’s novel  – is that, in the last instance, the logic of colonial warfare and occupation demands the switchboard operator’s elimination, despite (and indeed because of) his exemplary assimilation. Of course, this alternate explanation of Bernardo’s demise makes sense only if Forza Leal’s version turns out to be false, only if the collective consumption of the methanol is revealed never to have been a scene of unrestrained barbarism, but a crime, or “several crimes,” something “that looks like genocide,” in fact (103, 125). This crime becomes the target of an investigation Eva Lopo initiates upon discovering, drifting on the beach, a vinyl bag containing a sealed bottle filled with methyl alcohol and disguised with a counterfeit wine label.30

158  Luís Madureira With trenchant irony, Eva Lopo uncouples this mass murder from “the General’s” proposed “resolution” of the colonial “problem,” namely, the implementation of effective measures to arrest the natives’ “explosive” birthrate: But obviously this crime does not have to do with the General. The General had merely propounded that order should be imposed on the native birthrate, that a cap be found . . . that thwarted the birthrate now threatening to explode . . . [a] process that would slash in half the growth curve in the birth rate. The General had not, could not have placed the wine labels on the bottles of poison. The General had just been the herald of a desire and of a movement . . . and therefore the General deserved the respect of all those who were aware of the efforts he had undertaken to weave the mousetrap strategy in [the northern province of] Cabo Delgado.31 (103–104) Keeping in mind the novel’s avowed function as “History’s double,” a function that posits ‘History’ as the ground against which we adjudicate the ‘plausibility’ of fictional characters and events, we might reasonably identify ‘The General” here as Kaúlza de Arriaga, the then commander-in-chief of Mozambique’s colonial army and the key strategist behind Operation Gordian Knot (the mousetrap strategy)32. As its name implies, this massive campaign was to deal the final and decisive blow against FRELIMO forces in 1970. To evoke “the General” in this context is to link the premeditated murder of countless civilians with the large-scale military operations unfolding concurrently in northern Mozambique. Soon after she comes upon the incriminating evidence inside the vinyl bag, Eva Lopo views a series of photographs of Portuguese troops, commanded by Captain Forza Leal and her own husband, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed civilians. She later obtains corroboration of the horrific acts documented in the pictures from a wounded officer who also took part in the slaughter. Indeed, General Arriaga’s name remains closely associated with the massacres Portuguese troops perpetrated in 1972 in the Mozambican villages of Wiriamu, Juwáu and Chaola, while he was still Commander-in-Chief of Portuguese armed forces in Mozambique.33 The practices denounced in Eva Lopo’s narrative belong to the lengthy catalog of horrors committed under the colonial dispensation, to an “experience . . . of loss too great to quantify,” to quote Wole Soyinka in a slightly different context (1999: 193). They exemplify a type of colonial sovereignty that relegated the bodies of the colonized to the status of “a material mass and mere inert object [that] could be destroyed, as one may kill an animal” (Mbembe 2001: 27). As Mahmood Mamdani argues in his analysis of the Rwandan genocide, such war crimes are ultimately the expression of one of the two opposing “genocidal impulses” that colonialism produces: “the genocide of the native by the settler [which]  .  .  . became a reality when the violence of pacification took on extreme proportions” and the retaliatory genocide of the settler by the native, which is usually the result of anti-colonial violence (2001: 9, 10). Mamdani goes on to affirm that if “the

No telephone to heaven  159 Holocaust [became] unique in the imagination of the West” (78), it was because the design to exterminate an entire people for the first time targeted a people in the heart of Europe . . . Nazi ideology having cast the Jewish people as a race apart from Europeans, Nazi power set out to eliminate them as a people. The imperial chickens, as it were, came home to roost. (78) Similarly, Amílcar Cabral identifies a vacillation between imperialism’s genocidal “ideal” (the liquidation of “practically all the population of the dominated country”)34 and the unviable assimilation policies which colonial empires routinely put into practice in “a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question” (1973: 40). The episode of the mass poisonings ought therefore to be grasped in the sinister light of this history of racial polarization and attempted extermination of entire peoples. Even in this context, however, the motive for Bernardo’s alleged murder remains obscure. If, as Cabral suggests, assimilation (as “the more or less violent” negation of the colonized’s culture) operates as something like the obverse of the settler’s genocidal impulse, then to target a consummate assimilado would appear at first glance to contradict or exceed this genocidal logic. Yet, as it happens, the operator’s murder is entirely consistent with the solution “the General” (Arriaga) proposes to the colonial question in a 1966–1967 text:35 We will not be able to maintain white domination, which constitutes a national objective, if the white population cannot maintain a [growth] rate that matches or surpasses, even slightly, the birthrate of civilized blacks [negros evoluídos]. Because if the contrary should occur, if the white population is surpassed in numbers by developed blacks, then two fateful things must needs happen: either we install apartheid which will be terrible and which we cannot sustain, or we will have black governments with all the consequences that that produces (dismantling of the overseas provinces, etc.) . . . White settlement does not aim to balance the blacks’ demographic potential, it aims to balance the number of civilized blacks.36 (Qtd. in Cabral 1988: 7–8) Only the “demographic” imperative to “slash in half the growth curve in the birthrate” of (civilized) blacks (Jorge 1988: 104) can fully elucidate the paradoxical superfluity of a colonized subject whose key symbolic or ideological function is not just to figure but legitimate the colonial project. For Cabral, Arriaga’s fragment “reveals the main line of the current Portuguese strategy in Africa” (1973: 40): One of the main objectives of the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa thus becomes more evident: in the immediate impossibility of limiting the birthrate to assure the supremacy of the white population, the [colonial army]

160  Luís Madureira resorts to physically liquidating the populations, through the increasingly more frequent use of areal bombardments, of napalm and other means of mass destruction of the Africans, and the deliberate practice of genocide.37 (1988: 8) It is as though the heavy crown with which Bernardo’s symbolic role is compared in the novel (“that symbolism, as heavy as a crown” [87]) turns out to be the counterpart of the crown of thorns that Christ wears on the cross. It is as though the salvation promised Bernardo is, in the final instance, the product not of the Messiah’s sacrifice, but his own. The transhistorical purpose for which he needs apparently to forfeit his life is the perpetuation and consolidation of white rule. What Eva Lopo’s narrative presents as Bernardo’s diegetic excess now emerges as the trope for a dangerous [demographic] supplement that might, if unchecked, finally bring down colonial domination. For the assimilated switchboard operator, in brief, there will never be a telephone to the heaven proffered by assimilation. Finally, the colonial situation represented with such ironic intensity in the João Bernardo episode sheds another significant light on the juxtaposition of “Os Gafanhotos” and Eva Lopo’s narrative. As I  indicate above, her account signifies a key discontinuity in Portugal’s post-April Revolution fictional production. What João Bernardo’s figure introduces, on the other hand, is a rift in the “sense of liberation” that Portugal supposedly “shares” with its former colonies. As Mia Couto has written, the term “de-colonization” itself masks a crucial differend around its very definition. “Who decolonizes whom?”; was the independence of the former colonies “the result” of the metropolitan revolution that toppled the dictatorship, or was it the wars of liberation that, along with the political struggle of the Portuguese people, brought about the “April Revolution” (2005: 57)? As I argue elsewhere,38 it is critically important that we remain attentive to this “distance” [distanciamento] separating metropolitan and Mozambican conceptions of “liberation” (Couto 2005: 58). This is especially the case when assessing the purported coincidence during the epoch of anti-clonial resistance between black or mestiço Mozambican artists and intellectuals and their white dissident counterparts  – a concurrence (or “complicity”) presumably exemplified in the relationship between the mestiço poet-journalist Álvaro Sabino and the author of “Os Gafanhotos,” as I suggest above. Despite the shared desire for liberation, such partnerships or collaborative relationships were not always bereft of asymmetries. In some instances, they took the form of protection and patronage, with all their attendant contradictions and limitations. Writing on the eve of independence (and only a few months after the April 1974 Revolution), for example, Russell Hamilton gives a shrewd appraisal of the double-bind that sometimes accompanied these relationships: Certainly, in the practical sense, the good offices of a white elite have afforded some blacks and mestiços an opportunity that the general racist structure of Mozambican society would ordinarily deny them. But the lack of a certain self-determination has the disadvantage of a kind of vassalage which means

No telephone to heaven  161 that when the non-white becomes more than just a clever black lad he represents a threat to the white fief. (1975: 176–177) As the Mozambican writer Luís Bernardo Honwana argues, barring rare and exceptional instances where several “children of the colonial bourgeoisie” militated for majority rule, in the main, while vigorously opposing the Estado Novo’s authoritarian rule, the white class seldom if ever put the colonial situation to question (Laban 1998, 2: 663). If, as I  indicate above, for Santos, the historical coincidence between de-­ colonization and metropolitan democratization becomes a sign of the “difference” or subaltern character of Portuguese colonialism, for Jorge, on the other hand, this concurrence calls for a crucial rethinking of Portugal’s anachronistic imperial project and its abrupt post-revolutionary plunge into ideological and existential “perplexity” (2003: 22). Indeed, in the wake of the April Revolution (which began as a coup carried out largely by veterans of Portugal’s protracted colonial wars), C.L.R. James contends similarly that, “revolutionary developments in Africa have affected the future of Portugal itself” (1992: 377). As several Portuguese colonial soldiers purportedly discovered in their exchanges with Angolan, Guinean and Mozambican freedom fighters, “the average Portuguese peasant was not in a very different situation from the peasants in Africa whom they were fighting” (1992: 378). Following this argument to its logical conclusion, we could perhaps assert that the dialectical obverse of the “medal of anachronism” that the colonial wars pinned on the chests of an entire generation was the “hour of the future” that had rung throughout the continent but was yet to be heard in Portugal (Jorge 2003: 21). As Amílcar Cabral maintained shortly before his assassination, “through the armed struggle, we are contributing to the fall of fascism in Portugal, and thus providing the best proof of our solidarity with the Portuguese people” (1988: n.p.). In her unflinching representation of João Bernardo’s predicament, Jorge articulates in complex and subtle fashion the irreducible discontinuities in the temporality and modality of metropolitan and colonial struggles for political liberation. If, for instance, Boaventura Santos’s counter-intuitive and attendant assertion that the Portuguese colonizer was “himself a colonized other”39 (2002: 34, 17) were to assume the density and complexity of concrete socio-cultural and historical reality, then the contours of this metropolitan colonized condition would require a more material expression than the unflattering portrayals of the Portuguese which “North European travelers, traders, and monks” left behind “from the fifteenth century onwards” (Santos 2002: 21). This “Calibanized Prospero” would have had to endure the same horrors at the hands of the so-called Super-Prosperos that he himself perpetrated upon the populations under his rule. He would have had to face, or even, like João Bernardo, fall victim to the genocidal impulse of those same “hegemonic” colonizers, not as a result of his cultural difference, but of his redoubtable “resemblance” to this same colonizer. Otherwise, the gap between the indisputable fact that Portugal was an enfeebled and incompetent colonial power and the re-formulation of this structural weakness as a colonized condition can

162  Luís Madureira be bridged only by a leap of faith. In other terms, only by reducing colonialism to a metaphor are we able to perceive Portugal’s subalternity as a de facto colonial relation. Perhaps Eva Lopo’s good-natured “restitution” and “annulment” of “Os Gafanhotos” at the end of the novel rather than aggressively “desconstruct” misogynist war stories or counterpoint an official and coherent narrative of events, etches in faint yet indelible script the irreducible difference between metropolitan and colonial projects of emancipation.

Notes 1 The ironic mordancy of the “biographer’s” rendering of this opinion is of course patent, especially since, a few pages earlier, this same narrator classifies the unexceptional bard’s poetic production as “excessively obese,” perennially in need of editorial “cuts,” “abridgements that could shrink it to the size of an aspirin easy to swallow with a drop of whisky” (38–39). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Portuguese are my own. 2 Evita’s enigmatic words find an uncanny echo in those of a former doctor and burns expert (Jaroslava Moserova) who was reportedly the first to attend to Palach: “It was not so much in opposition to the Soviet occupation, but the demoralization which was setting in, that people were not only giving up, but giving in . . . were on the verge of making compromises” (Radio Praha website). 3 “Eva (as) a potential shewolf (Lo(b)o), waiting for the moment to attack and disrobe the scriptural cloak of any mysoginist ‘wolf’ of history, that is, Lobo Antunes, or the tradition he emulates in his colonial war novel Os cus de Judas” (Ferreira 276). 4 Eduardo Lourenço, O canto do signo: existência e literatura (1957–1993) (Lisboa: Editorial Presença, 1994), 255–267. 5 Parece que o princípio de que a nossa natural expressão se encontra apenas na Poesia pode ser hoje controvertido, ou pelo menos contrabalançado, pela certeza de que, em diversidade, qualidade, quantidade e ambição de horizontes, a geração de 80 contribuiu para fazer esbater a assimetria entre of peso esmagador da Poesia sobre a Ficção portuguesa. Ou pelo menos, pela primeira vez, durante os anos 80, parece ter-se assistido ao irromper, quase em simultâneo, dum grupo de novos ficcionistas . . . motivados por vivencias fortes muito próprias, [que] desenvolveram um género de ficção enraízada na História recente, e realizada sobre a textura poética da língua portuguesa a que dificilmente se poderá negar a originalidade. 6 Is it mere coincidence that the author quoted in the epigraph is also named Álvaro? 7 The first sentence of her “dialogic” narrative reads: “Esse é um relato encantador” (41) (“That is lovely narrative”). 8 “Agora porém, eu culpo” (124) (“Now, however, I lay blame”), Eva Lopo remarks to the journalist. 9 “Not at all. Everything is right and everything corresponds” (43). 10 “Oh, how it rained flying emeralds! The sky burned green even where it didn’t need to – all the fires along the coast took on that color” (9). 11 The touchstone of this metaphor is of course the Umuofia oracle’s comparison of the arrival of the first white man in their village as the first in an looming plague of locusts, “a harbinger set to explore the terrain” in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (97–98). 12 “The blaze consuming/ consuming/ the scorching land of the horizons of fire” (Sagrada esperança 67). 13 “Um telefonista tão singular . . . o seu corpo distinto, trajado de branco e azul!” (“so peculiar a switchboard operator . . . his distinctive body clad in white and blue!”) (86).

No telephone to heaven  163 14 “Como ele impediria a linearidade da sua invenção” (“how he would have ruined the linearity of your creation”) (86). 15 “Como criaria trambolhões na harmonia da sua verdade!” (“How [he] would have slipped up the harmony of your truth!” (86). 16 “E para quê o Bernardo n’Os Gafanhotos?  .  .  . um telefonista tão singular.  .  .  . O Bernardo, essa figura que não caberia no seu relato . . . reconheço [que] . . . seria um estorvo . . . na paz d’Os Gafanhotos” (“And why [put] Bernardo in ‘The Locusts’? . . . so peculiar a receptionist . . . Bernardo, that character [or figure] who would not fit in your account, . . . I recognize [that] . . . he would be an encumbrance to the peace of ‘The Locusts.’ ” (85–88). 17 “Tinha-se tornado uma figura tão simbólica quanto uma bandeira, ou mais do que uma bandeira, uma extensa alegoria. João Bernardo ao telefone era um conjunto de vários símbolos e não se conseguia olhá-lo de longe . . . sem reparar como nele vinham confluir as vontades indomáveis dos Príncipes de Avis . . . empurrando os barcos até ao último ponto da esfericidade da terra. Lá, no último porto, fora encontrado o Bernardo. O Bernardo podia representar sozinho a conquista que, a partir desse impulso uníssono duma só família, tinha sido perpetrada através da História, precisamente para que os povos entendessem que a salvação estava além da História, se acaso rezassem. Tinha sido uma senda difícil, mas havia valido a pena. Via-se a partir da porta do hall, porque o Bernardo tinha umas contas penduradas da cavilha do pbx e rezava. Este era um poderoso símbolo. Mas tinha mais.” 18 “Behold him from afar . . . from the hallway door” (86). 19 As Fanon adduces, this concerted expansionist impetus (impulso uníssono, in Jorge’s fragment) is invariably inscribed upon native bodies rendered inert and “almost inorganic” by this very violent inscription (51). 20 A cogent emblem of this anachronism was the inclusion of the Order of Chirst Cross, the same cross that had adorned the sails of the famed caravelsof Christ from the fifteenth century, on the fuselage of the colonial airforce’s warplanes and helicopter gunships. 21 “Quando o aparelho deixava de tocar por um pouco, ele costumava ser chamado do posto do telefone para explicar como o seu tio era um caçador de leopardos, e tinha sido mandado matar pelo feiticeiro. Era importante que . . . se compreendesse como uma enorme selvajaria batia tambores no interior de África donde vinha a rebelião. Era também curiosa a confusão entre o pai e o tio, uma vez que o tio desempenhava as funções de pai, o que provava como os laços humanos podiam ser promíscuos e confusos, quando não havia escrita. Bernardo, essa figura que não caberia no seu relato, abanava a cabeça, negando, mas rindo imenso.” (86–87) 22 Between 1926 and 1933, the Portuguese regime enacted legislation defining Africans as a separate element of the colonial population, branding them as indígenas. Those who learned to speak Portuguese, took commercial or industrial jobs, and conducted themselves as Portuguese citizens were labeled assimilados. The colonial administration stringently applied the conditions for assimilation. According to a 1950 official census, for instance, assimilados represented less than 0.01 per cent of the total population in the colonies. Male indígenas were required to carry identification cards and pay a head tax. If they were unable to raise the tax money, they were compelled to work for the colonial government for up to six 6 out of each year without wages. This compulsory labor system remained in force until 1962. Although the 1951 constitutional amendments officially abolished the distinction between indígenas and assimilados, re-classifying Angola, Mozambique and Guinea as provinces with the same status as those in metropolitan Portugal and attributing Portuguese citizenship to all their inhabitants, regardless of status, most of its degrading and discriminatory aspects remained firmly in place until independence. In a legal and political sense, Bernardo obviously cannot be both indígena and assimilado at the same time.

164  Luís Madureira 23 “He would be called . . . to explain . . . It was important . . . so they could understand.” 24 “When there was no writing.” 25 “. . . Which proved how human ties could be promiscuous and confusing when there was no writing. Bernardo, that character who would not fit in your account, would shake his head, saying no, all the while laughing copiously.” 26 “Não vejo outra saída para o conceito de tempo senão o amor de Deus. O verbo é a sua pessoa. O tempo é o seu regaço” (“I see no way out for the concept of time other than that of God’s love. He is the Word. Time is his bosom”) (195). 27 “O telefonista conseguia precisamente fixar os números para onde ligava, à segunda vez que ligava, e espantava o hall com essa inteligência rememorativa. Era prova de que África podia guardar memória de si mesma se quisesse e dispusesse. E depois, finalmente depois, ele era um símbolo que extravasava de si porque significava que os portugueses o aceitavam, e permitiam que os segredos do pbx passassem pelos ouvidos escuros dum sobrinho-filho de caçador de leopardos.” (87) 28 One need only recall how many of the anti-colonialist militants were the “beneficiaries” of assimilation policies. 29 “No meio dos afogados nus, o seu corpo distinto, trajado de branco e azul!” (“mid the naked, drowned bodies, his own distinctive body dressed in white and blue!” (86). 30 “Ninguém me pode tirar a certeza de que levo dentro do saco a prova do crime” (“No one can dissuade me from the certainty that I’m carrying the proof of the crime inside this bag” (103). 31 “Mas obviamente que este crime não tem a ver com o General. O General apenas tinha preconizado que se estabelecesse uma ordem na naturalidade nativa, que se encontrasse uma rolha . . . que impedisse a natalidade agora ameaçando explodir. . . . Um processo que rachasse a curva da natalidade a meio. O General não tinha, não poderia ter colocado rótulos de vinho em garrafas com veneno. O General apenas tinha sido o arauto dum desejo e dum movimento . . . e por isso, o General merecia o respeito de todos os que tinham conhecimento do esforço que esse homem desenvolvia para tecer a técnica da ratoeira em Cabo Delgado” (103–104). 32 One of the possible historical counterparts to this “strategy” may be Kaúlza de Arriaga’s “técnica do peixe” [fish tactic]: “The guerrilla is like a fish: just as the latter lives in the water, which is its life-giving element, so the guerrilla lives in the midst of the population, that is where he moves, where he is protected and fed. When it is impossible for us to catch the fish with net or hook, let us dry up the lake. . . . Thus if it becomes impossible or very dangerous to fish out the guerrillas one by one from the midst of the population, then let us eliminate the entire population. And we need to do it in such a way that the massacres can be blamed on the terrorists” (“O guerrilheiro é como o peixe: tal como este vive na água, que é o seu elemento vital, também o guerrilheiro vive no meio da população, ali se desloca, é protegido, alimentado. Na impossibilidade de pescar o peixe com a rede ou o anzol, sequemos o lago. . . . Assim, se se torna impossível ou muito perigoso pescar um a um os guerrilheiros no meio da população, eliminemos a população inteira. E é preciso fazê-lo de tal modo que os morticínios possam ser atribuídos aos próprios terroristas.” (quoted in Cesare Bertulli, A cruz e a espada em Moçambique. Trad. Mário Costa. Lisboa” Portugália Editora: [1975], 88). 33 Considered among the most serious war crimes committed by Portuguese colonial troops, these massacres reportedly claimed the lives of several hundred villagers. In its aftermath, Salazar’s successor (Marcello Caetano) lost confidence in Arriaga and formally asked him to relinquish his command in July 1973. Despite Arriaga’s subsequent insistence that Wiriamu was “um incidente infeliz mas corrente de guerra, sem matéria de crime, nem motivo para maior procedimento” (“an unfortunate but common occurrence in war, not a criminal matter, nor a motive for further proceedings” [www. cidadevirtual.pt/k-arriaga]), incidents like Wiriamu were the exception rather than the

No telephone to heaven  165

34

35 36

37

38 39

rule during the colonial wars. In effect, a Portuguese historian was recently recalling in a newspaper interview that a 1973 report by a UN commission charged with investigating human rights violations in “Portuguese Africa” had accused the Estado Novo regime of sanctioning recurrent and widespread practices amounting to “a policy of genocide” (Braga). Indeed, as early as 1966, a UNESCO General Resolution had “solemnly condemn[ed]” Portugal for “challenging the conscience of the world and the international community” by following a “policy of genocide and racial extermination . . . in [the] territories under its domination” (Records 87). Unsurprisingly, Arriaga continued to brand reports of these massacres “a monstrous hypocrisy and a miserable defamation”; www.cidadevirtual.pt/k-arriaga). Arriaga’s persistent and vehement denials replicate the reiterated exculpations of “the General” in the fragment from Jorge’s novel cited in the preceding paragraph. Mamdani is apparently echoing the late Aimé Césaire’s provocative assertion that liberal European humanism regarded the Holocaust as an unforgivable crime because the Nazis “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa” (Discours sur le colonialisme 14). By the same token, Arriaga’s predecessor as commanderin-chief of the colonial army in Mozambique, general Carrasco, appears to have confirmed the genocidal impulse Cabral defines here. The aptly named Carrasco (carrasco means “executioner” in Portuguese) reportedly “scandalized” the civilian, religious and military guests of an official banquet by revealing his strategy for eradcating the subversion carried out by “Frelimo bandits on the payroll of international communism”: “We must kill them all indiscriminately: the men because they’re terrorists, the boys because they’re future terrorists, the women because they’re the mothers of terrorists, and the girls because they’re future mothers of terrorists” (Bertulli A Cruz e a Espada 84). Titled Problemas Estratégicos Portugueses, it was reportedly written while Arriaga taught military strategy at Portugal’s Instituto de Altos Estudos Militares (1964–1968). “Não poderemos manter a dominação branca, que constitui um objectivo nacional, se o povoamento branco não se efectuar a um ritmo que acompanhe ou ultrapasse, mesmo ligeiramente, a produção de negros evoluídos. Porque se se produz o contrário, se o povoamento branco é ultrapassado pela produção de negros evoluídos, então duas coisas acontecerão fatalmente: ou nós instalamos o apartheid que será terrível e no qual não nos aguantaremos, ou teremos governos negros com todas as consequências que isso provoca (desmembramento das províncias ultramarinas, etc.). . . . O povoamento branco não visa o equilíbrio do potencial demográfico negro, visa o equilíbrio dos negros evoluídos.” “Um dos objectivos principais das guerras coloniais portuguesas em África torna-se assim mais evidente: na impossibilidade imediata de limitar a natalidade a fim de assegurar a supremacia do povoamento branco, recorre-se à liquidação física das populações, pela utilização cada vez mais intensa dos bombardeamentos aéreos, do napalm e de outros meios de destruição maciça do homem africano, através da prática deliberada do genocídio.” “Nation, Identity and Loss of Footing: Mia Couto’s O Outro Pé da Sereia and the Question of Lusophone Postcolonialism.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Spring/Summer 2008): 200–229. “The Portuguese Prospero is not just a Calibanized Prospero; he is a very Caliban from the viewpoint of the European Super-Prosperos. The identity of the Portuguese colonizer is thus doubly double. It is constituted by the conjunction of two others: the colonized other, and the colonizer as himself a colonized other. Because of this profound duplicity, the Portuguese were often emigrants, rather than settlers, in “their” own colonies. Indeed . . . it remains to be decided whether their identity as colonized does not precede their identity as colonizer” (Santos 2002: 17).

166  Luís Madureira

Works cited Agualusa, J. E. (2007) As mulheres do meu pai. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. Almeida, G. (1989) O Meu poeta. Lisbon: Caminho. Boletim Geral do Ultramar 45. (1969) (n° especial) (Visita do Presidente do Conselho Professor Doutor Marcelo Caetano às províncias da Guiné, de Angola e de Moçambique), April. Cabral, A. (1973) Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amílcar Cabral. Edited by Africa Information Service. New York: Monthly Review Press. Cabral, A. (1988) A Acção armada e os métodos militares, 22: A situação da luta do PAIGC em Janeiro de 1973. N.p.: Editorial Avante. Cabral, M. M. L. A. (1997) “A Costa dos Murmúrios de Lídia Jorge – Inquietação PósModerna.” Línguas e Literaturas, XIV: 265–287. Chabal, P., Augel, M. P., Brookshaw, D., Leite, A. M. and Shaw, C. (1996) The Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa. London: Hurst & Company. Coelho, J. P. B. (2013) “Writing in a Changing World: The Difficult Relationship With Reality.” Luso-Brazilian Review, 50.2: 21–30. Couto, M. (2005) Pensatempos: textos de opinião. Lisboa: Caminho, Fanon, F. (2005) The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Faria, Â. (2001) “Face à palavra silenciada: sedução e transgressão.” In S. R. Jorge and M. S. F. Alves (eds.), A Palavra Silenciada. Rio de Janeiro: Vício de Leitura, 23–31. Ferreira, A. P. (1992) “Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios: History and the Postmodern She-Wolf.” Revista Hispánica Moderna, 45: 268–278. Gallagher, C. (2011) “What Would Napoleon Do? Historical, Fictional, and Counterfactual Characters.” New Literary History, 42: 315–336. Hamilton, R. G. (1975) Voices From an Empire: A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hutcheon, L. (1988) A Poetics of Modernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. James, C. L. R. (1992) “Black People in the Urban Areas of the United States.” In A. Grimshaw (ed.), C.L.R. James Reader. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 375–378. Jameson, F. (1986) “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text, 15 (Autumn): 65–88. Jorge, L. (1986) “Escrita e Emancipação.” Revista crítica de Ciências Sociais, 18/19/20 (Fevereiro [February]): 57–62. Jorge, L. (1988) A Costa dos Murmúrios. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. Jorge, L. (2003) “Romance como crónica do tempo.” In M. Mendes (ed.), A língua portuguesa em viagem: Actas do colóquio comemorativo do cinquentenário do leitorado português da Universidade de Zurique, 20 a 22 de Junho de 1996. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Teo Ferrer de Mesquita, 17–25. Kaufman, H. (1992) “Reclaiming the Margins of History in Lídia Jorge’s a Costa dos Murmúrios.” Luso-Brazilian Review, 29.1: 41–49. Laban, M. (1998) Moçambique: Encontro com Escritores, 3 vols. Porto: Fundação Eng. António de Almeida. Lourenço, E. (1978) O Labirinto da saudade. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. Lourenço, E. (1993) “Uma literatura densenvolta ou os filhos de Álvaro Campos.” In O canto do signo: existência e literatura (1957–1993). Lisboa: Editorial Presença, 255–267. Lourenço, E. (2004) Destroços, O Gibão de Mestre Gil e outros ensaios. Lisboa: Gradiva. Mamdani, M. (2001) When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

No telephone to heaven  167 Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Medeiros, P. (1999) “Memória Infinita.” In Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 2. (Special issue: Lída Jorge in Other Words/por Outras Palavras). Guest editor: Cláudia Pazos Alonso, 61–78. Owen, H. (1999) “Back to Nietzsche: The Making of an Intellectual/Woman. Lídia Jorge’s a Costa dos Murmúrios.” In Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 2. (Special issue: Lída Jorge in Other Words/por Outras Palavras). Guest editor: Cláudia Pazos Alonso, 79–98. Ramalho, M. I. (1989) “Bondoso Caos: A costa dos murmúrios de Lídia Jorge.” Colóquio, Letras, 107: 64–67. Santos, B. de S. (2002) “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Inter-identity.” Luso-Brazilian Review, 39.2 (Special issue: Portuguese cultural studies): 9–43. Shohat, E. (1992) “Notes on the ‘Poscolonial’.” Social Text, 31.2 (Third World and Postcolonial Issues): 99–113. Soyinka, W. (1999) The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vieira, P. (2005) “Sob o signo de Mnemósine: memória e olvido em A costa dos murmúrios.” Ellipsis, 3: 63–85. Zurara, G. E. (1978) Crónica dos feitos notavees que se passarom na conquista da Guinee por mandado do Iffante dom Hemrique, ed. T. de Sousa Soares. Lisboa: Academia Portuguesa da História.

8 The lines of anti-imperialism The circulation of militant cinema during the long 1960s Luis Trindade

In 2011, Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray put forward the concept of Ciné-Geography to think about the ways in which militant cinema, particularly in the 1960s, went beyond traditional forms of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist critique. In a context of world-wide political radicalization (and mass circulation of images), the role of political cinema had to be reframed geographically, that is, captured as an object in circulation. From shooting to ‘dissemination’, militant cinema constituted a specific mode of film production, one capable of creating alternative film politics.1 But this was not a mere adaptation of a specific artistic form to contemporary political (or geopolitical) circumstances. Rather, a focus on film in an analysis of 1960s’ radical politics, more than being an interesting, illustrative, case study of a wider situation, reveals itself as a particularly active agent in the definition of the period’s political cultures. Accordingly, this chapter will try to follow what I will call the ‘lines of circulation’ of militant filmmakers involved in radical politics throughout the ‘long 1960s’ (the period of social transformation and political rebellion going from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s),2 while simultaneously tracking down the images they produced as these circulated. Such forms of circulation, I will argue, inverted given geopolitical hierarchies – between north and south, or the first and the third worlds  – thus helping to reshape contemporary world politics in line with the spirit of the Tricontinental conference held in Havana in 1966, whose aim was, precisely, that of bringing together anti-imperialist movements from all over the world in order to re-center global politics.3 Cinema’s key role in this confrontation is thus to a large extent explainable by the fact that audiovisual forms were already at the center of the processes of political hegemony. In other words, considering that the circulation of images and sounds were seen as forms of neo-colonialism, contestatory initiatives had to engage in the organisation of alternative forms of audiovisual production. Cinema, in this sense, is a particularly appropriate object to address antiimperialism in a moment of transition from anti-colonial struggles (and the processes of de-colonization in all European empires) to what at the time was perceived as neo-colonialism, that is, new forms of soft power to a large extent identified with North American mass culture, of which Hollywood films were the most recognisable signifier. Cinema thus constitutes a key site of the struggle  – rather

The lines of anti-imperialism  169 than just a weapon in that struggle – for political hegemony between the different worlds that formed the period’s geopolitics.

Lines of circulation In 25, a documentary film made by Brazilian filmmakers José Celso and Celso Lucas on the independence of Mozambique, the new president Samora Machel gives a speech where he declares that the struggle of Frelimo4 had been against Portuguese ‘fascist imperialism’ and not against the Portuguese working class.5 Moreover, he adds, the struggle of Frelimo against the Portuguese armed forces since 1964 had played a decisive role in the coup of April 25 1974, in Lisbon, that toppled Portuguese dictatorship and put an end to the colonial wars. Ultimately, the Mozambican people, with their ‘brothers’ in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, the two other Portuguese colonies at war against the metropole since the early 1960s,6 had helped in liberating Portugal itself from fascism. Machel’s point here thus completely turns around the Eurocentric order in which history is traditionally told: the colonial army triggered a revolution that led to Portugal’s democratisation and, subsequently, opened the way for African de-colonization. On the contrary, the Mozambican president adopts an internationalist discourse deploying the political grammar of marxism, in which any anti-imperialist struggle, regardless of its geographical situation, is always a joint struggle with the world proletariat (including the working classes from Imperial nations such as Portugal). But his discourse does more. By situating the struggle of Frelimo on the same ground as that of the working class of a European country, it not only activates forms of political modulation historians have identified in the struggles of the 1960s (a global circulation of ideas, images and gestures)7 but it seems to place Mozambique (and with it African anti-colonialism, or indeed the rise of the third world) in the ‘vanguard of the world’ – still another point of attraction that helped in de-centering the period’s geopolitics from first-world power to new focuses of third-world resistance. Indeed, even the most cursory survey of 1960s radical politics shows how non-Western, third-world political struggles, revolutions and ideologies not only pervaded, but were in fact constitutive of rebellious political cultures world-wide: the Vietnam war was instrumental to the mobilization of North American and European youths; African anti-colonialism served in different ways as a background to the civil rights movement in the United States; Maoism and Guevarism became forms of political identification within radical politics; the impact of the Algerian war was decisive to cement anti-state forms of generational identity within the French youth prior to 1968, etc. I take the expression ‘vanguard of the world’ from Ros Gray, who used it as a felicitous expression to situate Mozambique at the center of another key phenomenon of the long 1960s: the development of lines of circulation of filmmakers and films, of which, towards the late 1970s, Mozambique seemed to be one of the most exciting hubs.8 The route taken by the directors of 25 illustrates the power of attraction of independent Mozambique to militant filmmakers: fleeing dictatorial Brazil to revolutionary Portugal in order to participate, as filmmakers, in the

170  Luis Trindade events, José Celso and Celso Lucas then decided to move on to Mozambique when the Portuguese revolution reached an impasse. The title 25, as we have seen, makes reference to this political circulation, including important dates of moments both distant in time (from the beginning of the armed struggle to independence) and in space (from the African colony to the metropole and back to the now independent country).9 But Celso and Lucas are just two cases among many. Ruy Guerra, for example, would play a more central role in the formation of Mozambique’s Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC; National Film Institute), to which I’ll return later in this chapter. What interests me, for now, is to follow Guerra’s own biographical circulation as a militant filmmaker, starting when he was only 17, still in colonial Mozambique (where he was born), as a film critic, before travelling to France to study cinema, after which he would make a decisive contribution to the Cinema Novo movement in Brazil, until he finally moved back to Mozambique and contributed in the creation of a national cinema in the newly independent country. Other filmmakers were truly revolutionary globetrotters, drawing, with their circulation and the images they produced, a true map of radical politics. North American Robert Kramer, who started in the United States in the 1960s, in a collective militant cinema producer called Newsreel, had a first foreign experience in Venezuela, made one of the most important films about the Portuguese revolution, travelled to independent Angola, to Vietnam, and ended up in France working at the margins of French mainstream cinema. Thomas Harlan, the son of a nazi filmmaker, Veit Harlan, started by reflecting on the nazi past in Germany, from where he moved on to film in France, Israel, the USSR, Poland, Portugal, Italy, Chile, Bolivia and the United States. Santiago Alvarez, one of the leading names of Cuban cinema (and a key name, like Guerra in Mozambique, in the creation of the Cuban Film Institute), travelled to Mozambique, Colombia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, among other countries and political scenes. Chris Marker, who in France developed the militant Medvedkin group, deeply engaged with worker’s struggles around 1968,10 also travelled widely through sites of political contention and historical transformation: China, Siberia, Israel, Cuba, North Korea, Japan, Brazil, Chile, Cape Verde or Guinea-Bissau. The examples could go on. But more than presenting more names or offering a more comprehensive description of the names given, what is interesting is to stress the common drive taking these film directors to every corner of the (revolutionary) world in the long 1960s. Like Robert Kramer said, speaking of his relation with the Portuguese revolution (which did not involve any particular sympathy with the country): ‘basically, my radar is leading me to the places where people are acting in what’s often called an infantile way, that’s to say, they are actually asking the big question, which is: what’s the best way for people to live together?’11 In line with the complex combination between ideological and subjective transformation with which we usually identify the political culture of the 1960s, Kramer, with his personal search of sites of political activism, collapses the individual drive of the militant with the utopian idea of a world revolution (or of an idea of revolution that could be taking place anywhere in the world).

The lines of anti-imperialism 171

Cinema and politics: cultural revolution So, it was not only individuals who circulated. In fact, it could be suggested that, just like in the case of global political ideologies in circulation mobilizing activists all over the world, the circulation of filmmakers followed a specific idea of what film production should be like. Going back to Mozambique as one of the many possible centres of this idea, it is interesting to notice how the role given to cinema in the mobilization of an overwhelmingly illiterate society around the new nation, was in line with the Pan-African movement that, from the late 1960s had been envisaging the creation of an emancipated African culture with an autonomous cinema, that is, not only African films, let alone films about Africa, but indeed an alternative African circuit of production, distribution and exhibition in the continent.12 The creation of the Mozambican Instituto Nacional de Cinema in 1976 was in this sense an opportunity to re-think the viability of film production in a country with scarce technological resources and know-how (particularly after the Portuguese left in 1975). The donation of material by the Soviet Union; the technical support (and political experience) of British film activists like Margaret Dickinson and Simon Hartog, who tried not only to give basic instruction to Mozambican film technicians, but also to prepare the country for the foreseeable boycott by North American–controlled distributors; the training received by a Cuban delegation of the Instituto del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos led by Santiago Alvarez; or the role played by Ruy Guerra, in the formation of the INC and the birth of Mozambican cinema, as we have seen, all these contributions draw a map through which one can truly see how militant cinema helped modulating 1960s and the 1970s radical politics at large.13 And the main outcome of all this shared militant knowledge showed precisely how forms of international film solidarity could contribute to the rise of national consciousness in a new African nation: the series of monthly 10-minute newsreel Kuxa Kanema (the birth of cinema) that, from 1978 and well into the 1980s, tried to show Mozambique to the Mozambicans and thus forge the ties of their emancipated society.14 Kuxa Kanema is thus particularly interesting as an example of the radical idea of cinema I  am trying to explore in this section, for it combines, as we have seen before with the circulation of filmmakers, the local and the global: the creation of a sense of national identity through images and internationalist practices. More specifically, it is the struggle of the Mozambican people, framed in a global context, which will then allow its president to offer that particular example as a model to world-wide political struggles – as we initially saw, in the ironic suggestion by Samora Machel that Frelimo was also fighting for the working class of Mozambique’s coloniser. In this sense, my insistence on internationalism – as the decisive mark of a long 1960s’ global ideology – goes beyond the mere combination of local action and global thinking, a well-known post-modern slogan. For to treat Mozambique – an example among many, it should be stressed – as a center of world politics in the 1970s is not equivalent to saying that the center could be anywhere. This is still not the de-centered world described by Negri and Hardt in Empire.15 Imperialism, in the long 1960s, was actually becoming gradually

172  Luis Trindade re-centered: from the many metropoles of European empires to the United States of America as the head of world capitalism. Now, with the gradual transition from old forms of colonialism to what contemporaries identified as neo-colonialism, the anti-colonial struggle – invariably based on guerrilla warfare – had to adapt to resist the new forms of power. In short, struggle was now becoming less a question of fighting back colonial armies and American marines than resisting Hollywood and the other aggressive aspects of North American capitalism.16 This is why, along with ideologies of internationalism, namely third-worldism, or events such as the Tricontinental, the anti-imperialist frame of resistance necessarily had to include forms of cultural resistance of which third cinema – to which we will come back later – is probably the most meaningful example. But before trying to define third cinema and its origins, it is important to stress how the circulation of filmmakers and the efforts to come up with alternative forms of film production in the context of anti-colonialism, already presupposed a kind of spontaneous, or informal, ‘third cinema’ (even if not defined as such), that is, practices and reflections trying to re-invent a cinema of the third world that, more than just reproducing other forms of film production (from Hollywood to the several European nouvelle vogues), could actually produce a new, emancipatory, kind of cinema. In other words, if we apply the inversion of global hierarchies we started with (when an African politician declares that his struggle also contributes to the emancipation of the European working class) to militant film practices, it becomes easier to understand how the circulation of filmmakers, more than a contribution of first-world radical artists to the emancipatory efforts of the third world, was indeed an opportunity for those artists to rethink their practices in line with the radical questioning of anti-imperialism. This second inversion, in which Western film directors and crews were forced to re-invent film production under the demanding conditions of third-world emancipation (which goes well beyond the mere lack of resources or know-how, as it also involves a certain political aesthetics), will help us understand the projects, and the failures, of two other circulating filmmakers that visited independent Mozambique in the late 1970s: Jean Rouch and Jean-Luc Godard. In different ways, both tried to think about, and experiment with, forms of independent film production and the creation of an autonomous filmic image of, but above all by, the Mozambican people. Jean Rouch, by bringing Super 8 film equipment to work with the students of the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, to allow them to film ‘postcards’ that were both cheap and fast. However, the ‘disposability’ of the medium became a problem in itself, as what was perceived as the priority for the Mozambicans involved in film production was exactly the opposite: the creation of an audiovisual memory for the new nation.17 As for Godard, he tried to explore the potential of video in the creation of a kind of artisanal television with local communities. Godard’s daring project failed as well, for lack of support by the Mozambican government. The concerns of the European filmmaker – despite Godard’s political radicalization in the 1970s – did not necessarily coincide, here too, with the urgent needs of Mozambique’s audiovisual.18

The lines of anti-imperialism  173 And yet, his main purpose echoed the key aspiration of the whole third cinema project in the long 1960s: to open a front in the realm of the audiovisual that recognised the strategic role of moving images in the period’s struggle for hegemony. In other words, by supplying the basic technology and know-how to allow Mozambicans to decide on their own images, Godard seemed to have in mind the central aspect of this radical political culture, according to which subjectivity is power’s ultimate point of contention. This was, after all, what a cultural revolution in that context truly meant: the forms of expression were as constitutive of the struggle for emancipation – that is, the formation of free subjectivities – as guerrilla warfare and national independence. To seize speech in 1968 France, as Michel de Certeau argued, or to seize the production of images in 1978 Mozambique, one could also add, was to the long 1960s what the taking of the Bastille had meant to the French Revolution.19 In a visual essay published in the Cahiers du Cinema – the only document that came out of Godard’s project – one can see how this entailed a form of indistinction between ideology and aesthetics. The fact that Godard’s team alone (three or four people) had as many video cameras as the whole of the Mozambican population (some 13 millions people), that, in his own words, his project was about the ‘brief encounter between a country still without television and a small team from a country with too much television’,20 meant that this inequality of resources had a direct impact on the inequality between both sides – the European filmmaker, the population of a new African country – in the making of their own forms of filmic subjectivity. Godard’s self-awareness of the problem did not stop his project from failing, as we have seen. But the whole project (including its failure) remains a good example of the challenges posed to internationalist political activism: in a photo published in his visual essay to the Cahiers du Cinema, one can see Godard explaining to Mozambican students how the video camera works: despite the critical caption (‘an image not to be seen anymore: the white “Bwana”. The “specialist” ’),21 it is impossible not to see the distance between Samora Machel’s commitment to the liberation of the European working class and the European filmmaker teaching film technique to African students, as while the former turned the colonial relation upside down, the latter, despite all its good intentions, still kept its hierarchical structure.

Thinking radical politics through cinema As we have seen, these reflections did not start with Godard, in Mozambique, in 1978. In its political concerns and filmic engagement, it echoes, for example, Godard’s own discussion with Chris Marker in the late 1960s around Marker’s film activism with the Medvedkin group in the struggles of factory workers in Besançon, and the later creation, by Godard and other militants, of the Dziga Vertov group. The discussion, there already, dealt with the relation of militant filmmakers and the working class, and in particular with the contribution of political cinema to the autonomy of workers’ visual self-expression (rather than just the same old imposition of working class identity by a political and artistic avant-garde). In

174  Luis Trindade short, the two Soviet directors, Dziga Vertov and Aleksandr Medvedkin, worked as referents to the two options faced by Godard and Marker in the 1960s: between a stronger focus on the autonomy of film technique to any emancipatory project deploying cinema (in the ‘pair’ Vertov/Godard) and the effort to bring cinema to the people, or, better still, to make the people participate in the production of its own cinema (in the Medvedkin/Marker ‘pair’).22 Godard’s experience in Mozambique, as I have already suggested, echoed even more closely the then already quite familiar theorization of Latin American third cinema, the period’s most developed and consistent rethinking of the whole cinematic apparatus, from production to reception. A text like Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema”, where the Cuban filmmaker proposed a new film poetics based on a democratisation of film production that would eventually lead to the disappearance of the figure of the director altogether, seems remarkably close to what Chris Marker was trying to do in Besançon, or Rouch and Godard in Mozambique.23 The conception of third cinema, in the way it was formulated by Fernando Solanas’s and Otavio Getino’s 1968 founding manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema”, is particularly ingenious in the way it attributes a specific logic to film within the Cold War power system: more than the cinema of the third world, third cinema follows a geopolitics internal to film, as an alternative to the hegemonic first-world Hollywood cinema, but also to the impasses reached by the series of new wave cinemas of the 1960s.24 In this sense, Solanas and Getino follow a true program of what one might be tempted to call filmic warfare, but only as long as it closes the circle of the 1960s’ radical political culture from anti-imperialist struggle all the way down to subjective emancipation. Starting with the identification of neo-colonialism as the new tool of oppression, as ‘mass communications are more effective . . . than napalm’,25 it establishes the task of ‘decoloniz[ing] culture’ as the new political priority, which involves, above all, the creation of a margin to all existing forms of film production: ‘making films that the system cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its needs, . . . making films that directly and explicitly set out to fight the system.’26 More than just a theoretical manifesto, “Towards a Third Cinema” also involves a reflection about contemporary audiovisual and, in particular, all the technical innovations that, from the ‘simplification of movie cameras and tape recorders’ to ‘rapid film that can be shot in normal light’, could contribute to ‘demystify filmmaking and divest it of that almost magic aura that made it seem that films were only within reach of “artists”, “geniuses”, and “the privileged” ’.27 Finally, this filmic transformation (this project to transform the world through cinema) only closes with the creation of a new spectator that, precisely, is not exactly a spectator anymore: this person was no longer a spectator; on the contrary, from the moment he decided to attend the showing, from the moment he lined up himself up on this side by taking risks and contributing his living experience to the meeting, he became an actor, a more important protagonist than those who appeared in the film.28

The lines of anti-imperialism  175 The full circle completed by third cinema in the context of radical politics in the long 1960s (the comprehensive critique from the identification of neo-colonialism as the new enemy all the way down to subjective emancipation in the figure of the spectator), makes it a privileged object to think the period’s geopolitics as a whole. Let me insist on this: it is not just that militant cinema in the third world becomes an interesting example to look at the global picture; both because of its ‘critical’ subaltern status within the system of imperialism and because of the aesthetic and political self-reflexivity involved in the critique of neo-colonialism, third cinema produces a synthesis. On the one hand, it relates to the cultures of all different worlds at play in the 1960s: it struggles against the culture of the first world, it strategically uses aspects of the culture of the second world (that is, from the socialist system under Soviet control, from which third-world cinema appropriates parts of the ideology and benefits from technical support), and it produces a specific theory for an emancipated culture of the third world.29 On the other hand, and more specifically (and probably more decisively), third cinema seems to collapse the three different families of twentieth-century marxism, whose incommunicability Enzo Traverso has recently analysed. It is worth following Traverso’s broad picture of twentieth-century marxism at length, in order to then better situate third cinema in it: Inscribing this missed dialogue into the broader question of the relationship between Marxism and the West, one could interpret it taking into account their different connections with the three dominant currents of Marxism in the 1930s and the 1940s: classic, Western, and Black Marxism. In the first half of the twentieth century, classic Marxism still existed as a theory of revolution embodied in a variety of tendencies (Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Pannekoek, and the like). Its exhaustion coincided with Stalinization of the international communist movement. Its core was Europe and its cultural background was Eurocentric, but it announced, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, a new wave of struggles against imperialism. Tracing the genealogy of postcolonialism, Robert Young designates the Congress of the Peoples of the East, which took place in Baku in 1920, as one of its premises. According to Perry Anderson, western Marxism was born in the 1920s from the defeat of the revolutions that followed the Great War. It corresponded with the advent of Stalinism in the USSR and the rise of fascism in Western Europe. Skeptical with respect to the revolutionary potentialities of the working classes, Western Marxism neglected history, economics and politics to withdraw into philosophy and aesthetics. Of course, we should not underestimate the very heterogeneous character of Western Marxism, in which Gramsci and Adorno coexisted, but Anderson’s definition captures quite well the general orientation of the Frankfurt School. Besides these two currents, there was a third, still marginal one, embodied in a variety of Black intellectuals (West Indians like C.L.R. James, African Americans like W.E.B. Du Bois, those from the French Caribbean like Aimé Césaire) who reinterpreted Marxism, focusing on the question of racial and colonial oppression. In their view, race was as

176  Luis Trindade central as class and colonialism was as crucial as industrialism in the history of capitalism.30 The broad picture given by this (rather long) quotation is engaging and, in many ways, rigorous. And yet, it is interesting to notice how third cinema breaks these distinctions and absorbs aspects of all three marxisms: the postcolonial, of course, but also the revolutionary drive of classic marxism to seize state power and, perhaps surprisingly, even the aesthetic critique attributed by Enzo Traverso to Western marxism (the critique of neo-colonialism by third cinema is a critique of Western culture industries and societies of spectacle). They can all be found in the theory and practice of third cinema. In these circumstances, the whole debate around the definition of third cinema allows us to think not so much of how the structure of inequality during the Cold War – between capitalist first world, communist second world and the exploited third world – impacts in world-wide film production and distribution, but indeed how the latter, as I have been insisting, helps give (filmic) shape to world politics. In other words, if we accept the idea that third cinema synthesizes the three different families in twentieth-century marxism and occupies a critical space at the center of the ‘culture in the age of the three worlds’, it will become possible to narrate the period’s politics from the point of view of cinema. In this sense, the appropriation of politics by film (which is something different, and slightly more interesting, than the mere politicization of cinema) allows us to shift virtually any kind of political category into filmmaking. Domination, for example, can now be seen as a hegemonic regime of images, whereas emancipation – as we have seen in the case of Mozambique – can be achieved by learning how to manipulate a video camera. In the context of radical politics being world-wide modulated across different struggles, we also saw how two other categories became particularly challenging to filmmaking: those of neo-colonialism and imperialism. The contribution of film theory (or third cinema theorization) to radical politics in the long 1960s is here particularly evident, as cinema – both as a site of domination and a tool of rebellion and emancipation – seems to provide a rather advantageous perspective on how imperialism had become a combination of traditional forms of power – say, a military intervention in Vietnam – and exploitation with new insidious forms of neo-colonialism based on ideological hegemony, as when a country’s audiovisual landscape was swamped by Hollywood film production. But to be truly consistent, especially within a theoretical tradition that breaks the gap between theory and practice, this theoretical challenge to think of a period when all manifestations of capitalism become global and power seemed more fluid and de-centered than ever before, necessarily had to be given an aesthetic counterpart. It is in this sense quite interesting how “Towards a Third Cinema”, the manifesto, was a theoretical articulation of a pre-existing film, La Hora de Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), the long documentary film where Solanas and Getino tried to come to terms with the subaltern situation of Argentina in the world-system of the 1960s. Accordingly, rather than the response to a specific theory, the film is what establishes the ground for the reflection in the founding

The lines of anti-imperialism 177 manifesto of third cinema and, as such, it invites us to think of the specific cinematic ways third cinema deployed to come to terms with the challenges posed to representation by both imperialism and neo-colonialism. In short, whereas imperialism, with its global hierarchies and mechanisms of exploitation seemed to require an ability to show everything at the same time, the critique of neocolonialism would have to be able to deconstruct (and thus destroy) the power of the images of capitalism. This is, I  believe, what was efficiently achieved in the famous sequence, already towards the end of the first part of La Hora de los Hornos, where Solanas and Getino summarize some of the most dramatic moments of their narrative that far, and intersperse them with images of advertising and consumerism, westerns and the Vietnam war, in sum, the whole imaginary of capitalism. The sequence opens with the rhythm of a pop song (which not only fills the screen with a festive atmosphere, but also determines the increasing speed of the editing) unsettled by intertitles with political messages: ‘Reality, Truth, Reason, are, like the people, on the margins of the law. Artists and intellectuals are integrated into the system. Violence, Crime, Destruction, become Peace, Order, Normality.’31 The expression of violence turned into normality then becomes the challenge to which the sequence will try to respond. As the sound-track becomes more chaotic – with the song progressively silenced with screams, which, ironically, seem to come from a party – the images enter into a frantic succession mixing dream and horror (advertising and violence), completely shattering the elitist discourses we had heard before, and that are now again confronted with in a completely new visual context. In short, the increasing acceleration of both images and sounds turn what at first is a visual exercise unmasking the contradictions of capitalism (an image from a hangman cut to the logo of Mercedes-Benz) to an enhanced critique of images (‘monstrosity disguised as beauty’, one can also read in intertitles) in which it is the rhythm itself that establishes the simultaneity, or, better still, the causality, of young bodies in adverts and police violence, American presidents and crying Vietnamese, super-heroes and corpses, until it reaches an almost unbearable climax when the velocity of successive frames is set by the sound of gunshots.

Conclusion: counter-lines The succession of frames as gunshots in La Hora de los Hornos gives us a clear enough sense of how third cinema could be thought of as a weapon. But the frantic interweaving of antagonistic images and, perhaps even more to the point, the acceleration of the cuts followed by a growing disagreement between sound and image, all these elements have a particularly dramatic effect in transforming the images of capitalist desire  – advertising, the iconography of Hollywood  – into images of imperialist oppression. There are many different things being suggested here, from the Benjaminian thesis equating civilization and barbarism to all the more recent filmic and theoretical reflections on the relation between montage and the challenges posed by capitalism to representation.32 In fact, all this is visible not only in La Hora de los Hornos, but also in other contemporary films. One only has

178  Luis Trindade to remember Santiago Alvarez’s editing exercises in a film like L.B.J. to argue that experimental montage, with its appropriation of first-world images and critical use of the counter-images of third-world exploitation, constituted a key technique in militant cinema.33 But I would prefer to turn, before concluding, to still another radical film experiment of the long 1960s, to a certain extent the work that concludes and summarises the whole movement of the period’s militant cinema. In the opening sequence of Grin Without a Cat, Chris Marker shows us another succession of different images, apparently distant in both space and time: fingers in V (for victory), demonstrations, tears and homage to fallen heroes, marches, speeches, clenched fists, but also escapes and sit-downs, fearful faces, fallen bodies and police beatings, a whole portfolio of militant gestures and revolutionary iconography.34 Again, the whole meaning is being produced by montage, but here we see not only how the filmic device is able to bring together distant struggles and their gestures, words and repressive responses, but also a specific lineage that starts with modernist soviet cinema (Eisenstein, but also Vertov and others), lineage in which montage becomes the specific grammar for a history of communism, that is, and following the tension inherited from Marx’s work between the political program of the Communist Manifesto and the critique of Capital, a history that in rare but precious moments cancelled the power of hierarchies and centres, as when the president of an African colony assumed the task of liberating its coloniser.

Notes 1 According to Eshun and Gray, in these circumstances Ciné-Geography ‘refers not just to individual films but also to the new modes of production, exhibition, distribution, pedagogy and training made possible by forms of political organisation and affiliation. . . . And it refers to the medial circuits of dissemination through which these texts and films travelled and were (mis)translated in order to multiply the ways and places in which cinema could be “instrumentalised” . . . as a tool of radical social change in processes of decolonisation and revolution.’ Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray, “The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography,” Third Text, 25.1 (January 2011), 1, 2. 2 The long 1960s is a form of periodization deployed by Arthur Marwick in The Sixties, with which he was able to broaden the phenomena of social transformation and political rebellion usually identified as the sixties to the 1950s, first, and well beyond 1970, later. This allows us, on the other hand, to include important events such as the end of the Portuguese Empire and the independence of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau in 1975, in the temporal frame of the sixties. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 3 An interesting debate about the historical meaning of the Tricontinental conference on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary took place in the University of Coimbra in September 2016. The event’s presentation and rationale can be read here: ‘Legacies of the Tricontinental’, www.tricontinental50.net/tricontinental-conference/ (Accessed January 10, 2017). 4 The liberation movement that fought Portuguese colonialism since 1964, then turned, in 1975, into the party in power of the newly independent Mozambique. 5 The title, 25, refers to different relevant dates of the Mozambican anti-colonial struggle: the foundation of Frelimo, in June 25, 1962; the first clash with the colonial army,

The lines of anti-imperialism 179 June 25, 1964; the date of the revolution in Portugal that toppled the colonial regime, April 25, 1974; and the date of Mozambican independence, June 25, 1975. Cf. Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 94. 6 The anti-colonial struggle within the Portuguese Empire started in 1961, in Angola, with the first subversive actions of MPLA, Angola’s first and most important liberation movement. The struggle would then spread to Guinea-Bissau, in 1963, and Mozambique, in 1964. 7 In The Spirit of ’68, Gerd-Rainer Horn circumscribes his analysis to Western Europe (including southern countries such as Italy, Spain and Portugal) and North America. His point, however, stresses the global character of the period’s forms of rebellion, and its transmission across countries and continents. Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8 With ‘vanguard of the world’, Ros Gray deploys a political expression initially coined by Amílcar Cabral (to describe the anti-colonial struggle of Guinea-Bissau) and puts it to use in her analysis not only of the processes of African independence, but indeed of the role played by cinema in taking those same processes to the centre of world politics: ‘During the Revolution, therefore, Mozambique became a key site for theorising and, for a time, realizing the decolonisation of cinema in the region. This had a series of unexpected effects that rupture both Eurocentric assumptions that the West is the site of radical innovations that are belatedly exported to the ‘Third World’ and a certain scepticism that such projects are yet another manifestation that mirrors the dynamics of Imperialism, in which Europe projects its utopian fantasies onto Africa as if it were a blank slate waiting to be inscribed.’ Ros Gray, “Ambitions of Cinema: Revolution, Event, Screen,” PhD Dissertation, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, 2006, 104. 9 Mozambican writer Mia Couto insists in this same appropriation of 25 as the day of African independence, rather than European revolution, marking his distances to the latter and defining a different, properly Mozambican, commemoration: ‘In 1999 my Portuguese publisher asked me to write a piece for an anthology commemorating the 25th anniversary of the April revolution. I  refused, and explained why. The Mozambique anniversary commemorates a 25th day, but not that of April. I said this to a range of media and was not always understood. Some were hurt, thinking that I was distancing myself from Portugal because of resentment. That is not the case. But Africans cannot be expected to celebrate 25 April as the Portuguese do. It is an important anniversary for us and we celebrate it. But we do so with the respectful attitude of a guest, not the exhilaration of a host. We don’t expect the Portuguese to celebrate our independence day, 25 June  1975, in the same way we do.’ Mia Couto, “Thirty Years Ago They Smiled,” Le Monde Diplomatique, April  2004, http://mondediplo. com/2004/04/15mozambique (Accesse January 12, 2017). 10 cf. Trevor Stark, “ ‘Cinema in the Hand of the People’: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film,” October, 139 (Winter 2012), 117–150. 11 Sérgio Tréfaut, “Última entrevista de Robert Kramer” [Last Interview with Robert Kramer], 1998, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nkep4zzUVo (Accessed January  11, 2017). 12 cf. Olivier Hadouchi, “ ‘African Culture Will Be Revolutionary or Will Not Be’: William Klein’s Film on the First Pan-African Festival of Algiers (1969),” Third Text, 25.1 (January 2011), 117, 128. 13 This map is further conceptualized by Ros Gray: ‘Radical filmmakers were drawn by this revolutionary promise from around the world, continuing a practice that had begun during the armed struggle when Frelimo did not have the means to make its own films. A number came directly from other revolutionary situations in Portugal, GuineaBissau and elsewhere. The Mozambican Revolution was an opportunity to move

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19

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beyond the limitations of working as an individual militant filmmaker by contributing to the construction of an anti-Imperialist cinema on a national scale. Filmmakers who made repeated visits, including Ruy Guerra, Med Hondo, Ousmane Sembene and Santiago Alvarez, are figures whose trajectories mark out a map of engaged cinema that connects Mozambique to diverse radical forms through which cinema has embodied Revolution, from Dziga Vertov to Sergei Eisenstein’s innovations with montage, through Italian Neorealism to Brazilian Cinema Novo.’ Gray, “Ambitions of Cinema,” 104. Margarida Cardoso’s documentary Kuxa Kanema is a good introduction to the history of the project, from its conception to the preservation of its precious archive. A special issue of the Journal of African Cinemas (Volume 3, Number 2, 2011) includes several articles with analysis of the foundation of film production in independent Mozambique, in general, and of the newsreel Kuka Kanema in particular: Maria Loftus, “Kuxa Kanema: the rise and fall of an experimental documentary series in Mozambique”; Ros Gray, “Cinema in the Cultural Front: Film-Making and the Mozambican Revolution”; Mahomed Bamba, “In the name of “cinema action” and Third World: the intervention of foreign filmmakers in Mozambican cinema in the 1970s and 1980s”. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). It could be said that this was merely the arrival to the newly independent third world of phenomena of cultural Americanization already experienced in Europe since at least the 1920s. cf. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). cf. Gray, “Ambitions of Cinema,” 115. Manthia Diawara identified – as in the case of Jean Rouch – this discrepancy between Godard’s plans (the plans of the European avant-garde filmmaker) and the needs of the new independent country: ‘Maybe Godard was not even interested in producing the images as much as he was in trying to define these images, trying to lay the groundwork, preparing the kind of television they should construct given the world situation. This is what he was doing, but what people were expecting (including Godard himself) was at least some examples of these images: the images we want and need. In some ways for materialists like myself, one can describe this project as a failure because he broke with [Ruy] Guerra and the Mozambican people. In that sense, there was an idea of failure, but for Godard in a way, the project was to provoke thinking about the image and to make the people ask themselves, “what do we want when we have television?”.’ In Daniel Fairfax, “Birth (of the Image) of a Nation: Jean-Luc Godard in Mozambique,” Film and Media Studies, 3 (2010), 55–67, 61. ‘Last May speech was taken the way, in 1789, the Bastille was taken. . . . This right commanded, for example, the reactions of assemblies that were always prepared to defend it whenever it appeared to be threatened in the heat of debate: ‘Everybody here has the right to speak.” ’ Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11. Jean-Luc Godard, “Le dernier rêve d’un producteur,” Cahiers du Cinema, 300 (May 1979), 70–129. ‘Une image à ne plus voir: le “Bwana” blanc. Le “spécialiste” ’, in idem. ‘The profound difference between the position that the two filmmakers would develop in response to these questions can already be glimpsed in an interview given by Godard in the months following the March 1967 strikes at Rhodiaceta. Here, Godard speaks candidly of the unbridgeable separation between the struggles of the proletariat and the specific demands of the cinematic medium, and implicitly cites Marker’s work at Rhodiaceta as a counterexample: ‘The thing is, once again, the men who know film can’t speak the language of strikes and the men who know strikes are better at talking Oury than Resnais or Barnett. . . . If it were made by a movie-maker, it wouldn’t be the movie that should have been made. And if it were made by the workers themselves – who,

The lines of anti-imperialism 181

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

from a technical point of view, could very well make it, if someone gave them a camera and a guy to help them out a bit – it still wouldn’t given an accurate picture of them, from the cultural point of view, as the one they give when they’re on the picket lines. That’s where the gap lies.” ’ In Stark, “Cinema in the Hand of the People”, 140. Julio García Espinoza, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” in Michael T. Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997). Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” idem. Idem, 48. Idem, 42. Idem, 45. Idem, 54. Apart from the questions of production and circulation (not to mention content and ideology), it is interesting to notice how third cinema’s discussion of the condition of spectatorship (as a critique of spectacle) already presupposes many of the problems recently raised by Jacques Rancière in his discussion of the ‘emancipated spectator’. I take this cultural triad from Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004). Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 175–176. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, La Hora de Los Hornos Argentina, 1968. cf. Alexander Kluge, News of Ideological Antiquity. Marx/Eisenstein/The Capital, Germany, 2008; Francesco Casetti, The Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Santiago Alvarez, L.B.J., Cuba, 1968. Chris Marker, Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge [Grin without a cat], France, 1977.

References and bibliography Bamba, M. (2011) “In the Name of ‘Cinema Action’ and Third World: The Intervention of Foreign Film-Makers in Mozambican Cinema in the 1970s and 1980s.” Journal of African Cinemas, 3.2: 173–185. Casetti, F. (2008) The Eye of the Century. Film, Experience, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Couto, M. (2004) “Thirty Years Ago They Smiled.” Le Monde Diplomatique, April. De Certeau, M. (1997) The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. De Grazia, V. (2006) Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Denning, M. (2004) Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. London: Verso. Diawara, M. (1992) African Cinema: Politics and Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Eshun, K. and Gray, R. (2011) “The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography.” Third Text, 25: 1–12. Espinoza, J. G. (1997) “For an Imperfect Cinema.” In M. T. Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Fairfax, D. (2010) “Birth (of the Image) of a Nation: Jean-Luc Godard in Mozambique.” Film and Media Studies, 3: 55–67. Godard, J.-L. (1979) “Le dernier rêve d’un producteur.” Cahiers du Cinema, 300: 70–129.

182  Luis Trindade Gray, R. (2006) “Ambitions of Cinema: Revolution, Event, Screen.” unpublished thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London. Gray, R. (2011) “ ‘Cinema in the Cultural Front: Film-Making and the Mozambican Revolution.” Journal of African Cinemas, 3.2: 139–160. Hadouchi, O. (2011) “ ‘African Culture Will Be Revolutionary or Will Not Be’: William Klein’s Filmo on the First Pan-African Festival of Algiers (1969).” Third Text, 25: 117–128. Horn, G.-R. (2007) The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loftus, M. (2011) “Kuxa Kanema: The Rise and Fall of an Experimental Documentary Series in Mozambique.” Journal of African Cinemas, 3.2: 161–171. Marwick, M. (1998) The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Negri, A. and Hardt, M. (2001) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Solanas, F. and Getino, O. (1997) “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World.” In M. T. Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Stark, T. (2012) “ ‘Cinema in the Hand of the People’: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film.” October, 139: 117–150. Traverso, E. (2916) Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Films 25, José Celso and Celso Lucas, Mozambique, 1976 Kuxa Kanema, Margarida Cardoso, Portugal, 2003 L.B.J., Santiago Alvarez, Cuba, 1968 La Hora de Los Hornos, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Argentina, 1968 Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge [Grin without a cat], Chris Marker, France, 1977 News of Ideological Antiquity. Marx/Eisenstein/The Capital, Alexander Kluge, Germany, 2008 Última entrevista de Robert Kramer [Last Interview with Robert Kramer], Sérgio Tréfaut, Portugal, 1998

9 (Re)mapping Black Paris African space in the imperial centre Madhu Krishnan

Early in the pages of Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture, Christopher Miller makes the  assertion that over the course of the twentieth-century “France, through a strange twist of fate, [has become] an appendage of Africa” as much as Africa, through colonialism, was once an appendage of France (1998: 56). If the project of French colonialism was to absorb its African holdings into a Greater France, that is, made most visible in the years following World War II with the inauguration of the Union française and the sweeping legislative reforms of the October 1946 Constitution, its legacy, Miller argues, is most potently seen in the multidirectional remainders of that rendering. Despite what may at first appear to be a startlingly incongruous statement in a landscape still mediated by the inequities of imperial rule and the asymmetrical hierarchies of power which define global geopolitics, Miller’s claim speaks to the larger dynamics of spatial interpenetration which have long defined France’s relationship with its colonies. In this chapter, I consider the changing trajectories of this phenomenon through an exploration of the construction of what I  am loosely terming “Africa in France”, comprised both by the lived realities of African being within the imperial centre and the construction of a spatiality specifically predicated on the presence of Africa – in both physical and symbolic terms – as a constitutive element of metropolitan space more broadly. To do so, I read three francophone African novels written and published in the latter half of the twentieth century: Senegalese writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’aventure ambiguë (1961); Cameroonian J. R. Essomba’s Le Paradis du Nord (1996); and his countrywoman Calixthe Beyala’s Le petit prince de Belleville (1992). Each novel foregrounds themes of migrancy, displacement and diasporic identity in the context of post-war African migration to the French metropole, a place “as significant for its imaginary topography as for its actual landscape” (Eburne and Braddock 2005: 732); equally, however, each demonstrates the historical mutability of the production of a type of African or Africanized space on a transnational scale, as well as its internal heterogeneity across class, gender and other forms of identitarian affiliation. Through the re-mapping of space and symbiotic entanglement of the public and private spheres, each text presents a vision in which the Africanisation of France remains an agonistic process mediated by the persistent

184  Madhu Krishnan legacies of imperialism and colonialism. In many ways, the Africanised Paris portrayed in these texts departs from the open potentialities so often associated with Black Paris. At the same time, they indicate the variety of ways in which African subjectivities, collectivities and sociopolitical formations continue to be integral to the wider French imaginary and perhaps offer other, more lateral outlets for thinking Black France. Taken together, these three novels illustrate the dynamism of space as a totality defined by its multiplicity, lending credence to Doreen Massey’s claim that “The spatial” . . . can be seen as constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations across all spatial scales, from the global reach of finance and telecommunications, through the geography of the tentacles of national political power, to the social relations within the town, the settlement, the household and the workplace. (2005: 4) Far from passive, space shifts and re-configures itself in line with its society, while simultaneously shaping that very social base. Stretching across all elements of lived experience, space, through its very elasticity and inherent mutability, becomes the medium under which to monitor, read and analyse the larger forces of social (re)production which mediate human becoming against the backdrop of the body politic. In recent years, much has been written about the constitution of postcolonial space and, more specifically, literature’s role in so doing. In my own work, I have traced the ways in which spatial anxieties, from the latter period of colonisation through the anti-colonial era of independence movements and into the present day of neoliberal global financialisation, manifested most potently in the work of Bretton Woods institutions in the development of post-colonial (hyphen use deliberate) Africa, have been alternately registered, contested and reified in literary writing from Africa and its diasporas (see, for instance, Krishnan 2015; Krishnan forthcoming). Central to this perspective is the notion of space as a site of production, which itself produces the categories of meaning which mediate its emergence. For Lefebvre, space is best characterised through its internal and inherent multiplicity, rendered through a “trialectics” operated across the levels of the perceived, conceived and lived, each roughly analogous to his concepts of spatial practices, representations of space and spaces of representation. In the postcolonial context, the production of space is of a particularly acute importance, given imperialism’s task to re-map the geographies of the colonised world to best serve its ends. As the French case so aptly demonstrates, the production of space, evolving from the Union française through the Communauté française to l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, is no mere supplement to imperialism’s political and economic ends, but rather the very field through which these ends might be met. To understand the basis on which Miller makes his claims, it is important to recall the particular  – and particularly spatial  – dynamics which defined the

(Re)mapping Black Paris  185 project of Greater France, as the French empire styled itself in the inter- and postwar eras. As Gary Wilder notes: Following World War I, the persistence of the empire served as one of the few sure signs that France itself had survived the war in a recognizable form. Supposedly external and secondary colonial possession curiously came to signify the durability of the self-contained French nation, especially in the context of disruptive sociopolitical transformations between the wars. Through a new discourse of Greater France, a large sector of public opinion regarded a revitalized empire as the guarantor of international prestige and economic prosperity. Colonies were reconceptualized as integral, if legally ambiguous, parts of the French nation. This emergent national-imperial imaginary consolidated as postwar socioeconomic conditions further integrated metropolitan and colonial societies. Yet the very force driving imperial interdependence also disrupted many of the empire’s underlying precepts. (2005: 4) The vision of a transnational France with global reach and influence inherent in the concept of Greater France was solidified following the Second World War and the inauguration of the Union française. With a range of reforms including the extension of citizenship to all imperial subjects, direct representation in the National Assembly, the abolition of forced labour, and the creation of the Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (FIDES) to finance development projects in the colonies, this was a period in which the spatial enlargement of the metropole from the hexagon to Greater France provided the scope for French Africans to participate in public life in the imperial centre while simultaneously making claims “directed towards the objective of turning into reality the commitment contained in the constitution to a French Union based on the principle of equal rights” (Chafer 2002: 93). Frederick Cooper has written that “the goal of ‘Greater France’ [fostered during this era] turned into a trap, as African social and political movements used the language of imperial legitimacy to claim all the social and economic entitlements of metropolitan citizens” (2002: 39), suggesting that, despite an imperial policy ostensibly intended to maintain French influence, shifts in policy in this period – notably the adoption of a developmentalist framework, expansions to education, political and economic reform, and rural modernisation programmes – resulted in a series of administrative decisions which would effectively sound the death knell of direct colonisation. Indeed, primary documents from this time indicate a central tension at play between a desire for continued domination in the region and an increasing anxiety over the costs of its maintenance, broadly speaking. Enlivened by African demands for equity articulated in the language of French rights and rule, it would nonetheless be wrongsighted to view the creation of Greater France in strictly unidirectional terms. Indeed, even as it resulted in a host of greater rights and allowances to its African populations, as captured in Miller’s

186  Madhu Krishnan comments above, the spatial expansion of Greater France equally affected a fundamental change within the metropole itself, now positioned as one node  – if a central one  – in a larger complex of affiliations. Gary Wilder describes this situation: Once we recognize the existence of these spheres of empirewide economic, social, and cultural circulation, it becomes easier to reframe the familiar metropole-colony binary. A new topos emerges in which Paris can be seen as one among many nodes in an imperial network. Of course it was a privileged hub of the imperial system in which massive military, economic, and administrative power was concentrated. But Paris did not simply rule its overseas territories from a distance. (2005: 28) Following Wilder, it is important to highlight the extent to which the spatial shifts so effected functioned not as an alternative in the sense of separation from, but rather as a constitutive facet of the larger development and production of social space and the public sphere. France’s own dependence on its African colonies as a source of post-war national identity, as well as its pressing economic need for output able to meet the demands of dollar debts, speak to a larger spatial totality in which exchange, however asymmetrical, functioned along multiple axes and at different vectors of force. In the inter- and post-war eras, Paris served as a key site for the transnational exchanges which would become so instrumental to fighting the domination of empire (Eburne and Braddock 2005: 733). Wilder writes that expatriate Africans and Antilleans participated in metropolitan French civil society and constituted an alternative black public sphere through which they raised questions about republicanism, nationality, and rights as they intersected with colonialism, culture, and racism. These subject-citizens confronted the emancipatory and oppressive aspects of both the universalizing and particularizing dimensions of French colonial politics. (2005: 5) In the literary field, this was a phenomenon directly linked to the exigencies of French colonialism and the forging of a Great France, underwritten by a form of mediation through negrophilia and support for black African writers whose work would “disseminat[e] at least an idea of France”, thus “allow[ing] for a redrawing of the geographic boundaries of Africa and France in [the literary] imagination” (Thomas 2007: 6). Yet, in the years following the Second World War, the city began a transition from its historical position as the capital of a transatlantic black intelligentsia, and concomitant public sphere, into a space of renewed racial determination, with the imposition of controls on movement between the once-linked spaces of France and the African continent, and greater regulation of the population flows once central to the colonial mission (Thomas 2007: 42). Indeed, from 1958 to

(Re)mapping Black Paris 187 the present day we may identify a gradual erosion of what Wilder terms the black public sphere once present in the capital, what we might conceive of as a closing off of alternative forms of sociopolitical spatial arrangement in favour of a renewed focus on the hexagon as the locus of sovereignty, ironically enacted through the modalities of imperial devolution. It is thus important to differentiate the spatial phenomena which I discuss in this essay from the broader concept of Black Paris, by now well documented in literary studies. Correlated to the twinned notions of “Afrique sur Seine” and “migritude”, both coined by Jacques Chevrier (2004), this is a spatialised paradigm which emphasises the “hybridity and decentred lives” of black African writers in the metropole, identifying “a kind of French-style ‘world literature’ . . . symbolize[d in] a kind of ‘third space’ ” (Thomas 2007: 5). Despite a vocabulary predicated on the language of exchange and cultural métissage, it would be false, as outlined above, to view these cultural shifts in purely symmetrical terms. As Thomas notes, the very “colonial mechanisms” on which the mobility which led to Black Paris was based “were erected on an ethnocentric assimilationist paradigm that refused to interpret culture as a dynamic process and, accordingly, to incorporate African cultural elements, preferring instead to dismiss, repudiate, and systematically erase African contributions to some kind of universal entity” (2007: 9). Fundamentally asymmetrical in its foundations, then, the patterns of movement and re-formation on which Black Paris was founded nonetheless functioned through an overwhelming adherence to the principles of the centre and its peripheries. Pius Adesanmi has noted how “for the African subject in Black Paris  – as opposed to African Americans and Caribbeans in the same context – the inevitability of métissage as a resolution of the latent identity crisis comes at a greater risk” because of the inherent differentials in power between “Western” and “African” identities (2005: 964); while acknowledging the agonistics which underwrote this process, it is thus equally important to acknowledge the limitations inherent to formations like Black Paris, specifically, and the productive capabilities of unevenly stacked modes of cultural hybridity more generally. A central motif in both Aventure ambiguë and Le Paradis du Nord is a notion of spatial difference predicated on a binary logic of displacement. In the larger archive of colonial history, this form of Manichean meaning-making was continually reproduced as part of a larger rhetorical effort to cover over the spatial imbrication through which France and its African colonies existed, in the name of a relationship of paternalistic domination, an erasure of conviviality (cf Mbembe 2001). Yet, what is striking about the ways in which Kane’s and Essomba’s texts function is the manner in which this form of spatial differentiation both shifts in its evaluative valences over time and simultaneously functions through a form of fragile contingency. In L’Aventure ambiguë, originally written in 1951 (although not published until 1961), for instance, there is developed a consistent opposition between the spiritual fullness of the Diallobé – figured as a form of rot, an ability to stand “plus proche de la mort” (Kane 1961: 161) [“closer to death” (Kane 1963: 134), which would paradoxically drive its own extinction – and the scientific and detached rationality of the hexagon – a place where the sheer humanity of existence is as hidden as the feet of its inhabitants, whose soles, swathed in leather,

188  Madhu Krishnan never touch the ground. The novel develops the central tension at the heart of this form of ordering, setting the wholeness and oneness of the Diallobé in tandem with the inevitability of its destruction by powers able to win, as the novel tells us, without being right. Indeed, for protagonist Samba Diallo, it is the eventual breakdown of differentiation between Paris and the Diallobé which leads to his unraveling, first hinted at in the novel’s portrayal of the metropolitan centre as itself a place of half-lives, which more than superficially resemble death: Samba Diallo, lentement, descendait le boulevard Saint-Michel. Il marchait dans un état de demi-comnolence, engourdi par le chaleur. Un filet ténu de pensée Claire filtrait avec difficulté de la loured nappe de ses sensations, comme un courant d’eau fraiche à travers la masse inerte d’une mer tiède. Samba Diallo s’efforçait de concentrer ce qui lui restait d’attention au point de resurgence de la petite lueur. “Ces rues sont nues,” percevait-il. “Non, elles ne sont pas vides. On y rencontre des objets de chair, ainsi que des objets de fer. À part cela, ells sont vides. Ah! On y rencontre aussi des événements. Leur consecution encombre le temps, comme les objets encombrent la rue. Le temps est obstrué par leur enchevêtrement mécanique. On ne perçoit pas le fond du temps et son courant lent. Je marche. Un pied devant, un pied derrière, un pied devant, un pied derrière, un . . . deux . . . un . . . deux . . . Non! Il ne faut pas que je pense: un . . . deux . . . un . . . deux . . . Il faut que je pense à autre chose. Un . . . deux . . . un . . . deux . . . un . . . Malte Laurids Brigge . . . Tiens! Oui . . . je suis Malte Laurids Brigge. Comme lui, je decends le boulevard Saint-Michel. Il n’y a rien . . . que moi . . . que mon corps, veux-je dire. Je le touche, je touche ma cuisse à travers la poche de mon pantalon. Je pense à mon gros orteil droit. Sinon, leur rue est vide, leur temps encombré, leur âme ensablée là-dessous, sous mon gros orteil droit et sous les événements et sous les objets de chair et les objets de fer . . . les objets de chair et. . . . ” [Samba Diallo was walking slowly down the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Benumbed by the heat, he was walking half-asleep. A firm-spun thread of clear thought was filtering with some difficulty through the heavy down of his sensations, as a current of cool water courses through the inert mass of a tepid sea. Samba Diallo was forcing himself to concentrate what remained of his attention on the point where that slight gleam of thought came through. “These streets are bare,” he was noticing. “No, they are not empty. One meets objects of flesh in them, as well as objects of metal. Apart from that, they are empty. Ah! One also encounters events. Their succession congests time, as the objects congest the street. Time is obstructed by their mechanical jumble. One does not perceive the background of time, and its slow current. I walk. One foot before, one foot behind, one foot before, one foot behind: one-two, one-two. No! I must not think: one-two, one-two. I must think of something else. One-two, one-two . . . Malte Laurids Brigge. . . . Look! Yes – I  am Malte Laurids Brigge. Like him, I  am walking down the Boulevard

(Re)mapping Black Paris 189 Saint-Michel. There is nothing, nothing but me, nothing but my body, I mean to say. I touch it. Through the pocket of my trousers I touch my thigh. I think of my right big toe. There is nothing but my right big toe. Otherwise, their street is empty, their time is encumbered, their soul is silted up down there, under my right big toe, and under the events and under the objects of flesh and the objects of metal – the objects of flesh and –] (Kane 1963: 114–115) Paris, ironically, is figured in terms not dissimilar to those used earlier in the novel to describe the land of the Diallobé: empty, parched and suffocating in its weight. Yet, unlike the Diallobé, in Paris, this stagnant nothingness is characterised by its embodied physicality, where the self is reduced to a mere “object of flesh”, objects among objects, in Fanonian terms, devoid of the spiritual grace that a nearness to a death more genuine might bring. Estranged from the “regain d’authenticité” (Kane 1961: 161) [“aftermath of authenticity” (Kane 1963: 134)] found through the immediacy of faith in the land of the Diallobé, Paris becomes a place of numbness and benumbing. Later in the Parisian scenes of the novel this is a condition described by Samba in which he “vis moins pleinement qu’au pays des Diallobé . . . ne sens plus rien, directement” (Kane 1963: 161) [“see[s] less fully here than in the country of the Diallobé . . . no longer feel[s] anything directly” (Kane 1963: 133)] under the weight of “une grande absence” arisen from “[la] vacuité que donnent les rues de cette ville – par ailleus si bruyante cependant” (Kane 1961: 160) [“a great absence” arisen from the “vacuity which the streets of this city may give – streets nevertheless so noisy in other respects” (Kane 1963: 132–133)]. That Paris should be described in terms which place its vacuity in stark relief to the fullness of the land of the Diallobé is of particular significance for its peculiarly alienating effects; as one commentator notes, “the footsteps and Samba Diallo’s self-consciousness in observing them be-speak an irresolvable tension between before and after, past and future, tradition and modernity, Africa and France” (Caplan 2005: 943), an interpretation of the discourses of space and time whose disorienting effects resist a simple act of untangling. At the same time, the stultifying weight of this Parisian landscape, severed from the immediacy of experience, forces an irrecoverable change upon Samba through its unmasking of Paris’s very sameness as part of a spatial network of continuity with the Diallobé. Through this manoeuvre, the myth of spiritual fullness and of mystic ascendancy of the Diallobé is erased, estranging Samba from the world around him and preventing his engagement in the social spaces which define his existence. It is of course significant that Samba’s arrival in Paris comes under the auspices of a colonial education, a central theme to Kane’s novel. In the context of French colonialism, education played a central role in the formation of the évolué, or elite classes, inculcated into a strictly hierarchical system of values and valuation: Assimilation seems inadequate in its attempt at describing colonizing mechanisms whose objectives were in fact closer to the reduction of the other

190  Madhu Krishnan toward sameness. For the rationale behind the actual merging of cultural elements contains the implication that métissage would be theoretically possible, a dimension that would of course run contrary to the ideals of French assimilation, itself founded on a civilizing imperative whose foundational tenets are situated in the act of compensating for perceived cultural, linguistics, political, religious, and social inadequacies. (Thomas 2007: 8–9) Driven by an ideological agenda in which Africa could be little more than a negative space whose entry into modernity was only under the civilising grace of colonialism (Thomas 2007: 47), actualized through an educational system best described alternately as “an aggressive violation of local practice” in its totalising aims (Thomas 2007: 61) and “a catalyst in the traditional world of the African village to the wider world influenced by European values” (Little 2000: 71). While it is certainly the case that such educational practices were far from uniform, reserved only for a small elite, it is nonetheless difficult to downplay the extent to which the education of this class resulted in a bifurcation of practice in which the prerequisite for political emancipation would be cultural dependency, a “profoundly ambivalent” move which would foreground “a tension between, on the one hand, the demand for more and better French education and on the other, the valorization and promotion of African culture” (Chafer 2002: 98). Much of the drama of L’aventure ambiguë’s first half thus stems from the struggle faced by the elders of the Diallobé over whether or not to send Samba Diallo to “the new school”. As articulated by la Grande Royale, this is a place in which the children of the Diallobé would learn to “à lier le bois de bois . . . pour faire des édifices de bois. . . . ” (Kane 1961: 21) [“to join wood to wood – to make wooden buildings” (Kane 1963: 8), a metaphor for survival and which appears to articulate with Samba Diallo’s later torment over living pas [comme] un pays des Diallobé distinct, face à un Occident distinct, et appréciant d’une tête froide ce que je puis lui prendre et ce qu’il paut que je lui laisse en contrepartie. Je suis devenu les deux. Il n’y a pas une tête lucide entre deux termes d’un choix. Il y a une nature étrange, en détresse de n’être pas deux. (Kane 1961: 162–163) [Not (as) a distinct country of the Diallobé, against a distinct West, and appreciating with a cool head what I could take from it and what I have to leave in return. I have become both. There is no lucid mind between two terms of a choice. There is a strange nature, in distress for not being two]. (Kane 1963: 135) Samba’s metaphysical crisis, precedent to his physical destruction, thus comes through “not being two” through the collapse of the “cool” distinction which allows “ici” (here) to remain distinct from “là-bas” (cf Thomas 2007: 35). Rather

(Re)mapping Black Paris 191 than function through a sense of alienation, then, Samba’s torment appears to operate from the multiplicity of affiliation which his education has enforced upon him, a multiplicity in which the spatial myths of difference and displacement are no longer allowed to hold. Extant literature has frequently described Samba Diallo’s struggle as one based on alienation from traditional norms, a form of acculturation; yet, in its spatialised reading, this is an alienation whose potency stems from its partial nature, its inability to fully erase or subsume one for the other. Estranged from the public sphere and from public space with it, the évolué, or educated classes, are left only with partial entry into a French civil sphere which always remains riven by its hierarchical formations and submerged polarities. Through the collapsing of space and subjectivity, the barrier erected to erase the continuity between centre and periphery is dissolved, leaving behind only a profound crisis of identification. Shortly after his deadening walk down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, Samba comes across “un vieux nègre”, a man advanced of age, but not bent of back. Joining the older man for a coffee, Samba listens as Pierre-Louis enacts a veritable roll call of black solidarity, discovering his first moment of relief. Here, at last, Samba is able to articulate his dislocation in Paris, his fears of a metamorphosis of no return which he had preciously struggled to name except as a strange sense of incompletion. In the company of Pierre-Louis, by contrast, Samba temporarily escapes the fugue state into which his Parisian life has descended. Later expressing this as “l’impression qu’il me remettait à flot, dans le courant” (Kane 1961: 160) [“the feeling that he set me afloat on the current again” (Kane 1963: 133)], Samba perceives in Pierre-Louis a source of emancipation realised through the possibility of pan-African identification and solidarity within the deadening space of the capital. It is of no little consequence, then, that Pierre-Louis describes his own work in terms which speak starkly to the puissance of a transnational African affiliation as the locus of an alternative rendering of civil society and engagement, realised, for the older man, thorugh a career in law spent “[en] defend[ant] [ses] compatriots gabnais, camerounais, contre l’État et les colons français” (Kane 1961: 142) [“defend(ing his) compatriots, from Gabon and Cameroon, against the State and the French settlers” (Kane 1963: 116)]. Indeed, it is within PierreLouis’s apartment that a truly Afro-Parisian, or African-in-Paris, space emerges. Described not in physical terms but through the enlivening of its inhabitants, it is here that Samba Diallo finds a form of recognition exemplified in the innate empathy expressed towards him by Marc and the sympathetic anger articulated by Adele. The apartment thus transforms into a spatial order which enables him to break however briefly from the benumbing effects of Paris’s streets and dark cafés, to return to equilibrium and re-orient himself within the (re)productive matrix of Parian space more broadly. Yet, despite its productivity as a lateral spatial formation, Pierre-Louis’s apartment fails to attain the full force of an alternative public sphere through its own enclosure within this broader space, a consequence of its differential positioning. Rather than function as a productive and positive counter-public, that is, the apartment can only serve a fleeting purpose, apparent only in this scene. A private space, literally walled away from the world outside,

192  Madhu Krishnan the apartment may retain the status of refuge, but cannot overwrite the larger spatial formations within which it functions and which overwhelm its cleaved off location. Essomba’s Le Paradis du Nord, written some four decades after Kane’s novel, plays with a similar staging of the distinction between France and Africa. Yet, where the image of stillness and decay is portrayed as a form of spiritual fullness in L’aventure ambiguë, the stagnation of Essomba’s Douala bears no such merit. For Samba, to abandon the land of the Diallobé, first for the colonial school and then for Paris, is to be sent on a teleological voyage whose terminus can only mean the dissolution of meaning and consequent destruction. For Essomba’s Jojo, by contrast, to travel to France is to finally attain a measure of realness forever lost in a Douala dragged down under “une chaleur lourde qui vous pousse à boire sans arrêt” (Essomba 1996: 11) [a heavy heat that pushes one to drink without stopping]. Though distinct from the rest of French Africa through its status as a United Nations Trust Territory, Cameroon nonetheless faced a situation more similar than not to these other holdings, particularly with respect to its transition to political independence and post-independence development. Most pertinently, for Cameroon, like the rest of French Africa, political independence failed to translate into an erasure of dependency from the former imperial centre. The extent to which the ostensibly independent country remained dependent on its former master is evidenced in a range of affairs spanning French influence in the highly contested 1992 presidential elections; economic subordination, first under the Fonds d’Aide et de Coopération, the post-colonial successor to FIDES, and later under the auspices of structural adjustment credits; and France’s status as primary importer of timber and coffee from the territory. Taken together, these lines of influence indicate the entrenchment of a form of dependency, which intensified in the decades following ostensible political independence. Rooted in Cameroon and travelling to Paris, the spatiality performed in Le Paradis du nord is thus deeply rooted in the logic of la Francophonie. Though only inaugurated as a global network in the late twentieth century with the institution of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the concept of Francophonie and its rooting in France’s imperial history has persisted for far longer, transforming from an interest in la langue française, the French language, into what has been called a hierarchical, cultural project, seeking both to enshrine France at the centre of a global network of neo-imperial influence and to protect (and project) French cultural interests on a global sphere increasingly dominated by American influence. The spatial logic of la Francophonie, based upon assimilation and directed firmly towards a metropolitan centre, demonstrates a vertical ordering, an imposition of values and identity from the top down, what one commentator has described as its “reproduc[tion of] imperialistic patterns of French dominance, which go along with rather clientelistic entwinements” (Glasze 2007: 669). Writing in a 1985 issue of Mongo Beti’s “Peuples noirs – Peuples africains”, Guy Ossito Midiohouan describes the origins of la Francophonie: Le contexte dans lequel l’idée et le mot ont été lancés et le processus grâce auquel ils ont réussi à s’imposer sont révélateurs du caractère impérialiste de

(Re)mapping Black Paris  193 cette idéologie qui en affirmant la primauté du culturel (mais quelle culture?) sur la politique, tout comme l’idéologie coloniale dans les années 1930, en détournant les pays africains de leurs intérêts et de la nécessité de construire une Afrique auto-centrée, entièrement maîtresse de son destin, constitue objectivement un obstacle à leur indépendance et partant à leur épanouissement. [The context in which the idea and the word were expressed and the process by which they succeeded in imposing themselves reveal the imperialist nature of that ideology which in asserting the superiority of the cultural (but what culture?) over politics, as the colonial ideology in the 1930s, by diverting African countries from their interests and from the necessity to build a self-centered Africa, entirely mistress of her destiny, objectively constitute an obstacle to their independence, and thus to their development.] (1985) Africa, so positioned, would turn away from itself, looking instead to France for salvation and guidance, with the material needs and interests of the continent neglected under a perpetuation of imperialism’s logic. Ostensibly a cultural organisation, la Francophonie would instead enable the sedimentation of a vertical spatiality in which French puissance would re-centre itself, buttressed by its ostensible submergence as one node among many. This is ironically reflected in Jojo’s recurrent fantasies of Parisian life, a sense of desire propelled by his nightly ministrations under a map of France, a map towards which he looks with what is described, in the novel, as a near-religious devotion: comme d’autres se jettent sur leur bible ou leur chapelet pour faire une prière, lui, il plongeait dans sa carte de France. . . . Oui, comme les autoroutes de France, tous ses rêves convergeaient vers Paris. Dans ces rêves-là, les images puisées à la télévision, au cinéma, dans les livres et aussi dans son imagination s’entremêlaient allègrement et de façon chaotique. Pour lui, Paris était synonyme de paradis. [like others throw themselves at their Bible or their rosary to pray, he plunged himself into his map of France.  .  .  . Yes, like the motorways of France, all of his dreams converged at Paris. In these dreams, images collected from television, from the cinema, in books and also in his imagination mixed up in a chaotic fashion. For him, Paris was synonymous with Heaven.] (Essomba 1996: 13–14) Paris, Jojo imagines, is a land of opportunity, an open space where freedom and mobility rein, and where the material cares of life in Douala cease to matter. This Paris of Jojo’s dreams is a place of opportunity, a place ripe with the fullness of its promise to which he travels in his dreams every night. Driven by his dreams of a freedom only realisable in this Paris, Jojo decides, at the urging of his friend Charley, to undertake a clandestine passage to the metropolitan centre. Jojo’s decision marks a significant shift from the spatial formations evidenced in Aventure ambiguë. No longer the beneficiary of citizenship rights in the metropole, Jojo can only dream of entering through informal means, his access to the

194  Madhu Krishnan civic and public spheres of French society already truncated by the marginalised position of Cameroon vis-à-vis the former centre. As Stovall writes by the late 1970s the processes of decolonization and immigration had converged, transforming the former colonial native into the new postcolonial immigrant. As a result, the contradiction that lay at the heart of the republican empire, the idea that all men deserved freedom as long as they accepted civilization, metamorphosed into the effective marginalization of those whole racial and religious traits which did not conform to traditional expectations of what it meant to be French. (2009: 265) Ironically, then, the end of direct colonisation might be read as delimiting the possibilities available to the African subject. Marginalised anew under the financialization of the world economy, with its attendant insistence on structural adjustment as a newly entrenched form of dependency, and stripped of the ostensible claims to equal rights and citizenship once available under former structures, Jojo instead represents a class of individuals subjugated under the newly static boundaries which define the global hierarchies of power. Despite the continued force of French puissance in neo-colonial Cameroon, that is, political independence operates as a sort of alibi under which a more rigidly fossilised and hierarchical spatial order may proliferate. Indeed, throughout its descriptions, the novel portrays Jojo’s journey to Paris not as a race towards freedom, but rather, a heightening of enclosure. On the “vieux cargo” which they take to Spain, Charlie and Jojo are encased in a tank intended to hold drinking water (“Pour les faire monter à bord, on les avait enfermés dans des tonneaux qui étaient supposé contenir de l’eau potable” (Essomba 1996: 41) [To get on board, they were hidden in tanks which were meant to contain drinking water]. Travelling from the Spanish coast to Toulouse, the second leg of their journey, the two men are hidden under the boot of a car Le convoyeur fouilla la poche de son pantalon, en sortit un grand tournevis qu’il introduisit dans une petite fente du plancher et souleva. Une petite planche rectangulaire sauta et dévoila un anneau en fer. L’homme attrapa et tira de toutes ses forces. Tout un pan du plancher se souleva, découvrant un double fond. – Vous allez vous allonger là-dedans . . . [The conductor searched in the pocket of his trousers, pulling out a large screwdriver which he inserted into a small crack in the flooring and lifted. A small plank popped out and revealed an iron ring. The man grabbed it and pulled with all his strength. An entire section of flooring popped out, uncovering a double bottom.] (Essomba 1996: 48–49) Arriving in Toulouse, met by two compatriots charged with conducting them to Paris, Jojo and his companion Charlie are drugged, robbed and abandoned in a subterranean car park on Paris’s peripheries, where, spotted by a woman walking to her

(Re)mapping Black Paris  195 car, the two men are made subject to the racist logic of a xenophobic France, accused of rape in a Paris where any African is made suspect by virtue of his very appearance. In both Essomba’s and Kane’s novels, the spatial difference which initially characterises the relationship between Africa and France is destabilised upon arrival in the metropole. For Samba, the instantiation of this spatial collapse occurs through the idiom of stagnancy which characterises his time in Paris, an oddly still, unpeopled place. In a sense, the true horror of Paris resides not in its difference from the Diallobé country, but from its sameness, amplified by its inability to grasp its proximity, its insistence on compartmentalization through the denial of death. For Jojo, by contrast, Paris displays its full congruence with Douala in starker terms, taking on the vestiges of stagnancy and enclosure that once served to differentiate the former, becoming itself a prisonhouse of space. Yet, for Jojo, this does not result in a radical revisioning of the allegedly binary relationship between the metropole and its former colonies. Instead, what emerges is a spatial inversion, where Douala takes on the role of the exalted and impossible Paradise once he is stranded in France, nostalgia perpetuating a flipping of terms which nonetheless maintains the logic of centre and periphery. Driven out onto the streets, Jojo and Charley seek refuge in a Paris in which all routes, even those chosen “au hasard”, end in an “impasse” (Essomba 1996: 76). Eventually, recalling a conversation once overheard at the Sovotel Hotel, Jojo and his companion head to the Château-Rouge, a place where “on y trouve tellement de Noirs qu’on a l’impression d’être en Afrique” (Essomba 1996: 77) [one finds so many black people that one has the impression of being in Africa]. Here, the two men find a space described as a negative effect/affect, a space predicated on the inverted rejection of a norm left unfulfilled: A Château-Rouge, il y avait en effet beaucoup de Noirs et de produits africains, mais il manquait l’âme qui fait l’Afrique. Non, ce n’était pas L’Afrique! C’était juste la mauvaise version d’une chanson qu’ils connaissaient bien. Une chanson qu’ils ne pouvaient plus fredonner sans soulever en eux de grosses vagues de nostalgie. [At Château-Rouge, there are many black people and African products, but it lacks the soul that makes Africa. No, it isn’t Africa! It’s just the bad version of a well-known song. A song that they can no longer hum without drawing up in themselves huge waves of nostalgia.] (Essomba 1996: 77) Met with the jaded exhaustion of its patrons, whose best suggestion for Jojo is that he lands himself in prison as soon as possible, the only place in the city where a black man might find a free bed and meal and where, with “un peu de chance, ils vous renverront peut-être chez vous” (Essomba 1996: 78) [a little luck, they will perhaps send you home], le Chateau-Rouge provides no alternative possibilities, its spatial structures dominated by the hegemonic public sphere without, prevented from the creation of a genuine counterspace within. The possibilities once engendered by the appearance of Africa as a floating signifier, open and accessible to all (c.f. Amselle 2001) no longer hold, subsumed with a Paris in which little

196  Madhu Krishnan space exists for the creation of a genuine counter-public, free of the exigencies of the civic republic without. Even the transient moments of alternative spatialities, the black private spheres, made possible in Samba Diallo’s era, appear impossible, the relative efficacy of a black public sphere made little more than a nostalgic remainder, and little true solidarity available to be found. Even Jojo’s sister, now living in Paris as a sex worker, cannot help him, the tenuous bonds of blood and family overwhelmed by the exigencies of a Parisian space with no room for lateral constructions, its most verdant spaces, its private “veritable petite[s] jungle[s]” (Essomba 1996: 92) [genuine, small jungles], invaded by the forces of law and authority, destroyed. Eventually, Jojo finds himself with nowhere left to go but a squalid squat, a place where “Pour raisons de sécurité, il faut éviter de sortir d’ici le jour” (Essomba 1996: 111) [for reasons of security, it is necessary to avoid leaving from here during the day], in which entry only comes by slipping one’s body “dans le trou” (Essomba 1996: 111) [in the hole] that serves as entrance. Marginalised, submerged and discarded, both literally and metaphorically, African space no longer develops even the potential for temporary relief or refuge in a hostile Parisian space, flushed out to the margins, but never erased. The shift in the determination of African spaces within the Parisian metropole which occurs in the half-century that separates Kane’s and Essomba’s texts attests to a range of forms of spatial administration and re-alignment in the post-independence period which, despite its ostensible aim of liberation, resulted in the foreclosure of alternative paradigms and possibilities. Calixthe Beyala’s Le petit prince de Belleville, by contrast, develops a constitution of Parisian space in which the potential for an alternative public sphere re-emerges, mediated through a gendered lens of spatial practice which is “both oppositional and collaborative” in its rendering of “social norms about the place and role of women in nationalist discourses of home” (Coly 2010: xvii). In many ways, the Parisian spaces performed throughout the novel display a range of correspondences with those of Kane’s and Essomba’s texts. Yet, Beyala’s novel remains highly distinct. In contrast to Kane’s or Essomba’s, Le petit prince takes as its fulcrum the second-generation African experience in France, narrated from the perspective of Loukoum, the only son of Malian migrant Abdou, living in the titular urban village. Born in Paris out of wedlock and raised by his father’s two wives, Loukoum’s experience of France runs in sharp contrast to either Jojo’s or Samba’s, amplified by what has been called the “metonymic reflex” which mediates his African identity as a secondgeneration subject (Gauch 2010: 209). Throughout the novel, we witness his movements across the immigrant quarter of Belleville in what has been characterised as an “assimilationist narrative” of France as home (Coly 2010: 67), made with remarkable freedom of movement and in the company of an assortment of characters across races, gender and class position. It is only in the brief sections of the novel narrated from father Abdou’s perspective that a Paris more closely recognisable to its literary antecedents emerges, characterised by nostalgia and loss. In these extracts, written in italics and set off from the main text at the start of each chapter, the narrative reproduces Abdou’s lamentations for a lost land of sun and promise, his bitterness at the failed promises found on arrival to France, and

(Re)mapping Black Paris 197 his fears for a family which with each passing month becomes less recognisable, gradually inculcated into a set of hexagonal norms exterior to his own. Significantly for the novel’s spatial rendering of Paris, Beyala’s gendering of space subverts many of the tropes seen in earlier novels through a reproduction of colonialist paradigms of modernity and tradition which implicitly re-affirms the universalist ideals of the French republican civic. The gendered component of space is of particular interest here. Susan Z. Andrade, for instance, notes the ways in which women’s writing from the African continent has historically suffered from an interpretative matrix which severs the largely domestic concerns of these works from the larger national and political narratives of male writers (2011: 5). For Andrade, this is a tendency built upon the impulse on the part of readers and critics “to experience and interpret the public and private realms of human life as separate, despite the fact that feminism and Marxism have taught us that they are linked” (2011: 1). At its opening, Le petit prince appears to reify these claims, developing a spatial landscape in which the private and public operate as distinct and oppositional zones in a manner not unlike that seen in Le Paradis du Nord and L’aventure ambiguë. For Beyala, this is articulated in the contrast between the masculine counter-public encapsulated in M. Guillaume’s café, a space populated by a diverse mix of Afro-Parisians, prostitutes and n’er do wells and the regulated and estranged space of nativist, patriarchal domination that is Loukoum’s home, ruled by a domineering father and served by two mothers who exist as virtual shadows. Yet, in much the same manner that the so-called public sphere penetrates into the private spaces of Essomba’s and Kane’s texts, by the end of Le petit prince, these spaces have shifted, each subject to administration and invasion by the French republican civic, violently absorbing the one, as fascist policemen invade Guillaume’s bar, arresting all of its black male patrons and reducing their pan-African bluster to infantile pleadings, and enabling a productive regeneration of the other. Differentiated by this latter effect from its male counterparts, then, Beyala’s novel produces a spatial ordering in which it is precisely the subversion of the private/ public dichotomy which enables feminine and feminist subjective being to emerge. Empowered by the teachings of Madame Saddock, a left-wing French feminist who seeks to inculcate her into the secular virtues of French feminism, amplified by the tragedy of co-wife Soumana death, M’am, Abdou’s first wife embodies Beyala’s play with the gendering of space in the Parisian metropole. Introduced as a duty-bound index for the maintenance of ostensibly traditional norms operational only within the confines of domestic space, M’am, by the end of the novel, assumes the position of family matriarch, moving from a space of subservience and internal exile to one of domination and pure independence: Je sais pas c’qui se passe dans [la] tête [de mon père]. M’am, ça l’intéresse pas. On dirait que c’est elle qui le voit plus. Il fait tout. Il aide M’am à cuisine le dimanche. Ensuite, il l’emmène promener au jardin. M’am n’a plus la même allure. Elle met des pantalons, des bleus, des jaunes, des rouges aved des sandales assorties. Elle paraît plus jeune, plus insouciante. (Beyala 1992: 245)

198  Madhu Krishnan I don’t know what goes on in [my father’s] head. It doesn’t interest M’am at all. You’d think it is she who no longer sees him. He does everything. He helps M’am with the cooking on Sundays. Then he takes her for walks in the park. M’am no longer has the same appearance. She wears trousers, blue, yellow, red ones with matching sandals. She looks younger, more carefree. (Beyala 1995: 172) Much of M’am’s new independence stems directly from her role as family breadwinner, having taken, in the wake of Abdou’s arrest in conjunction with Soumana’s death, Loukoum’s childish business making leather bracelets from Malian sandals into her own hands and creating a minor empire. Where, for much of the novel, M’am “seems to move from one sedentary and bounded space to another, where patriarchal norms remain unchanged and unchallenged” (ní Loingsigh 2009: 155), operating in stark contrast to the mobility of the novel’s male characters, by its end M’am inhabits a form of productivity rendered through the displacement and re-emplacement of seemingly opposed spatial zones. As Loukoum muses, “on fabriqué des bagues. On gagne du fric et M’am est vraiment contente. En plus, elle a l’idée géniale d’embaucher un Blanc” (Beyala 1992: 239) [“We make rings. We earn money. An M’am is really pleased. Moreover she has the extraordinary idea of hiring a white man to swindle the other white men”] (Beyala 1995: 168)], a statement which encapsulates not only M’am’s growing financial independence, but ability to manipulate racialized hierarchies in the larger public sphere of Parisian space as a means of re-formulating its boundaries, norms and administration. Yet, for M’am, the impetus to this change comes not just from her growing inculcation into French republican norms, but her simultaneously adoption and adaptation of the indigenous West African figure of the self-reliant market woman, trading in leather curios and accessories. In this sense, then, the redemptive possibilities of the Parisian metropole as a space of gendered liberation come not merely from the adoption of secular and civic virtues, as critics of Beyala have long suggested, but more directly from a selective marriage of indigenous and metropolitan values which more strongly indicates their co-constitutive nature as a dynamic more complex than any Manichean arrangement might suggest, not a form of hybridity in which two parts dissolve into a liminal third space, but an agonistic rendering of convivial tension. That Paris should be positioned as a space of potential liberation in Beyala’s novel is perhaps no great surprise, given the novel’s focus on the intersection between cultural politics and gender norms. Yet, there remains a sense of ambivalence even in this more optimistic portrait of African space in the French city. For all her newfound independence, that is, M’am remains within the family home, subject, at least in part, to its administration even as she shifts the terms on which it operates. Liberation itself appears to come only through the dual workings of death and the racialized logic of the law, which together reframe the landscapes of domestic life which previously contain M’am. While Beyala’s vision of Paris is one which appears to surpass the enclosures of Essomba’s and the debilitated

(Re)mapping Black Paris 199 duality of Kane’s, it nonetheless functions as a space which is far from utopian and far from egalitarian in its potentialities. As these three novels show instead, the instantiation of Africa in Paris remains a process of antimonial agonistics, dependent upon contingencies of class, gender and sociopolitical form and subject to the larger administration and regulation of spatial systems.

Works cited Adesanmi, P. (2005) “Redefining Paris: Trans-Modernity and Francophone African Migritude Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies, 51.2: 958–975. Amselle, J. (2001) Branchements: Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures. Paris: Flammarion. Andrade, S. (2011) The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beyala, C. (1992) Le petit prince de Belleville. Paris: Albin Michel. Beyala, C. (1995) Loukoum: The Little Prince of Belleville. London: Heinemann. Caplan, M. (2005) “Nos Ancêtres, les Diallobés: Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure and the Paradoxes of Islamic Negritude.” Modern Fiction Studies, 51.4: 936–957, 979. Chafer, T. (2002) The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? Oxford: Berg. Chevrier, J. (2004) “Afrique(s)-sur-Seine: autour de la notion de ‘migritude.’ ” Notre Librairie, 155–156: 96–100. Coly, A. (2010) Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield. Cooper, F. (2002) Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge. University Press. Eburne, J. and Braddock, J. (2005) “Introduction: Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic.” Modern Fiction Studies, 51.4: 731–740. Essomba, J. (1996) Le Paradis du Nord. Paris: Présence Africaine. Gauch, S. (2010) “Sampling Globalization in Calixthe Beyala’s Le petit prince de Belleville.” Research in African Literatures, 41.2: 203–221. Glasze, G. (2007) “The Discursive Constitution of a World-Spanning Region and the Role of Empty Signifiers: The Case of Francophonia.” Geopolitics, 12.4: 656–679. Kane, C. (1961) L’aventure ambiguë. Paris: Julliard. Kane, C. (1963) Ambiguous Adventure. New York: Melville House. Krishnan, M. (2015) “Postcoloniality, Spatiality and Cosmopolitanism in the Open City.” Textual Practice, 29.4: 675–696. Krishnan, M. (forthcoming) “From Empire to Independence: Colonial Space in the Writing of Tutuola, Eswensi, Kane and Beti.” Comparative Literature Studies. Little, J. (2000) “Autofiction and Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë.” Research in African Literatures, 31.2: 71–90. Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: SAGE. Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Midiohouan, G. (1985) “Portée idéologique et fondements politiques de la Francophonie (vue d’Afrique).” Peuples Noirs – Peuples africains, 43. Miller, C. (1998) Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

200  Madhu Krishnan ní Loingsigh, A. (2009) Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Stovall, T. (2009) “Diversity and Difference in Postcolonial France.” In C. Forsdick and D. Murphy (eds.), Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 259–270. Thomas, D. (2007) Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Wilder, G. (2005) The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

10 Animal presences Post-revolutionary scenarios in Angola and Cuba Magdalena López

You and your friends fill your mouth with big words, Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution, and meanwhile people weaken, get sick, many die. Discourses won’t feed you . . . I am only interested in the revolutions that begin by seating the people at the table. – José Eduardo Agualusa, Teoria Geral do Esquecimento

Introduction On April  14, 2016, the Spanish newspaper El País published an article about the exploitation of African immigrants in the Catalan meat-processing industry (Verdú 2016). The article reported that a worker had been abused by his boss (“Fucking nigger, I’ll send you back to Africa to starve”), when he demanded respect for his labour rights. Moroccan and sub-Saharan workers, not unlike the animals they slaughter, are today’s organic matter feeding the global capitalist industry of pork. Hogs and workers share the same living regime in an order that has abandoned twentieth-century modernity to enter present day’s “carnophallogocentrism” (Derrida 1990: 953). Although Jacques Derrida coined the term to refer to sacrificial violence over non-human life, cases of destitute and racialised alterities, like the one just mentioned, bring about a necropolitics in which the limits between the animal and the human become irrelevant. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, in Venezuela today, the regulatory mechanisms of the so-called twenty-first-century socialism are, paradoxically, equally thanatical. News reports and photographic coverage reveal Venezuelan “carnophallogocentrism” as the extreme violent consequence of food restrictions imposed by the State:1 The looting of livestock in transport and the improvised slaughterhouses in the roads of Venezuela account for the failure of the biopolitical order posited as an alternative to the capitalist model. Animal violence and violence towards animals (and people) signal coincidences between the socialist and capitalist orders, making the ideological distinction irrelevant. As such, the possibilities of emancipation for the Global South require a politics of

202  Magdalena López relation different from the rationality of the modern humanist subject and its discriminatory categories, which were historically shared by leftist projects. In Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Susan Buck-Morss argues that twentieth-century socialism was so strongly linked to the Western modernising tradition that its failure questioned the totality of the Western narrative (2004: 16). The failure of socialist utopias in Angola and Cuba, therefore, serves to propose a critical revision of the leftist modernising projects, which aimed at disciplining bodies based upon the paradigms of a universal revolutionary subject. In particular, I want to explore how the literary and visual representation of the topics of starvation and animality in the South Atlantic reveal tensions between the biopolitics of the State and the emancipation of bodies. I argue that in addition to restrictive power mechanisms, these representations also reveal productive mechanisms that serve to imagine alternative forms of commonality. Researchers like Cary Wolfe (2003) and Gabriel Giorgi (2014) have established a fundamental analogy between the binaries with which the West considers social identities, and the “discourse on the species”, which establishes human superiority and the hegemony of humanity over the rest of animals. In both modes of thinking, it is possible to detect the same mechanisms for legitimising sovereignty over all kinds of alterity, being national or regional, or referring to gender, ideology, or race. The limits that signal the inequality among species have served to build communities more or less locked in their sameness. It is for example possible to conceive the political discourse on a utopian, unified “Third World” as a sort of revolutionary sameness between Africa and Latin America, in antagonism with the hegemonic powers of the 1960s and 1970s. In effect, the Cuban official discourse established a historical genealogy that connected the nineteenth-century struggles for emancipation (like those of the Lucumi slave Carlota and the mambi guerrilla fighter Antonio Maceo) with the struggles for national liberation in the African continent in the twentieth century. Thus, Fidel Castro termed the internationalist mission in Angola “Operación Carlota” and, in the early 1990s, Raúl Castro welcomed the last group of Cuban internationalist fighters next to the tomb of the pro-independence leader Antonio Maceo. In the 1970s, Fidel Castro conceived of the intervention in Africa in terms of a historical reparation pending since the times of slave trade: “Those who once enslaved men and sent them to America might not ever have imagined that one of the nations that received those slaves would send its soldiers back to fight for freedom in Africa” (2014: 36). As early as 1965, Ernesto “Che” Guevara went to the Congo to support anti-colonial struggles, a sort of prelude to the resolute internationalist endeavour a decade later. It is estimated that between 1975 and 1990, Cuba sent approximately 300,000 soldiers in military missions to Angola and Ethiopia, mostly black and mulatto (Domínguez 2004). As Cuba was the utopia for the leftist imaginary of the period, it was only logical for Cuban support of revolutionary African wars to be interpreted as a projection of that very utopia in

Animal presences  203 the African continent. The shameful transatlantic slave trade would be reverted in the twentieth century with the “export” of a liberatory regime. Nowadays, though, a shared critical consciousness between Cuba and Africa exists, albeit from a different perspective. Rather than the liberatory epic, the common experience of the downfall of the socialist utopia can be resituated as a space of encounter. Such downfall was connected to an identity that animalised the Other on the basis of the humanist paradigm of a universal revolutionary subject. In Cuba and Angola, this paradigm had at least two variants. The first, established with great impact in the two countries by Che Guevara in 1965, was the paradigm of the New Man (Hombre Nuevo), who would emerge in future generations unpolluted by the capitalist system. Key to Che’s proposal was an imperative of extreme sacrifice, similar to that of Christian martyrdom. The second paradigm was outlined in Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay-manifesto “Calibán” (1971) (2003), in which he posited that the Latin American identity was founded on a genealogy of black, indigenous, and mestizo rebels characterised by their resistance against colonialism and imperialism. The colonial figure of the cannibalistic native served Fernández Retamar to celebrate a cultural “swallowing up” of the West. For all their differences, an epic and teleological vision of history, sustained on a moralising and dichotomal episteme, was shared by both models. The universal revolutionary was marked by his combatant spirituality, in opposition to the exploitative materialism of the “first-world” enemies, being capitalists, counter-revolutionary, or traitors.

The beginnings: immunity and the animal To a great extent, identity binaries respond to immune responses. Roberto Esposito proposes the concept of immunity to consider mechanisms that foreclose connections with others (2009a: 49). In opposition to the sense of community, immunity implies a defensive sealing off of the subject around its own particularity. In Esposito’s words, “If the community determined the breaking up of the protection barriers of individual identity, immunity constitutes an attempt to reconstruct it from a defensive and aggressive standpoint, against any external element that may threaten it” (2009b). The negation of common experience can even become a selfdestructive process, which would act upon the very subject. Immunity responses serve to account for the film Los sobrevivientes (1978), by renowned Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and the novel Teoría Geral do Esquecimento (2012) by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa. Diegetically, both stories embrace the initial days of the respective revolutionary regimes in Cuba and Angola. But the chronological distance between the two works, and the different political positioning of both authors, result in two different treatments of the dynamics between community and immunity in the representation of the topic of starvation in contexts of socialist transition. Inspired by Luis Buñuel’s Ángel exterminador (1962), Gutiérrez Alea’s film recreates the history of a high-class Cuban family that decides to lock itself up in the ancient family mansion after the triumph of the 1959 revolution. Under the

204  Magdalena López guidance of the old patriarch, Marquis Sebastián Orozco, the family carries on with its aristocratic way of life, totally isolated from the rest of the island. Catholic rituals, the relationships between the black servants and white lords, traditional gender roles and vigilance of “good manners” are only a few of the traits that characterise this reactionary heterotopia. In the film, the decadence of the old Cuban bourgeoisie is presented, as years go by, as a historical involution, even reaching the point of reestablishing the system of slave plantations to preserve old social privileges. Towards the end of the film, the family is without food, and the servant-slaves rebel or flee. The aristocratic mansion eventually turns into a prison-like dystopia from which the younger generation cannot escape. As it is evident, Gutiérrez Alea’s film parodies the Cuban high-class that opposes the official discourse. As such, the protagonists represent a historical aberration condemned to extinction in front of the teleological drive of the revolution. Such aberration is expressed by means of the progressive “naturalisation” of the familiar space of the Marquis. Animals, plants, and even natural phenomena such as a lightning bolt, reveal the process by which the bourgeoisie returns to a Hobbesian state of nature in which survival is paramount. Gutiérrez Alea inverts the negative vision of the popular classes, reframing instead the criollo bourgeoisie as wild and irrational animals. In subverting the value of the “natural”, the director’s revolutionary discourse rejects pre-revolutionary social inequality. At the same time, though, the film inherits from the modern humanistic discourse the supremacy of the human over the animal, and affirms it. At the end of the day, it is the “I’m hungry”, uttered by the heir of the patriarch, that negatively defines the bourgeois. The members of the family refuse the all too human activities of working or harvesting, and survive by eating cats, birds, and ultimately, people. This predatory chain foregrounds a basic antinomy, that which obtains between a bygone animalised subjectivity and a humanistic future subjectivity – from which the parody is undertaken. The distance between bourgeois and revolutionary subjectivities is thus predicated upon the limits established by immune responses. Immunity, though, applies both to the characters locked in the old mansion, with their backs to the revolution, as well as to the film’s ideology, stubbornly setting an unbridgeable separation with respect to an animalised alterity. Indeed, the ultimate consequences of the immunity apparatus of the New Man and Caliban’s paradigms might not differ much from that of the old Cuban bourgeoisie. Twenty-four years after Gutiérrez Alea’s film, Ronaldo Menéndez published “ABC Diario” (2012), a short tale in which, rather than an aristocratic family, we find most of the people of Havana hunting during the Special Period. Literacy primers, a significant emblem of the modernising project of the revolution, acquire a new meaning, with the first three letters of the alphabet referring to the somber reality of the narrator: “A” stands for his useless grandparents (abuelos), who the narrator would like to see dead but rather takes care of in order to keep receiving the cigarettes assigned to their pensions; “B” corresponds to his inexistent “banquets”, which require him to live solely on carrots. And “C”, for fishing rod (caña), which the narrator ultimately uses to hunt cats and pass them off as rabbits in the stews his serves his family. As in Gutiérrez Alea’s

Animal presences  205 film, the contiguity between animals and humans is negatively portrayed, and serves to denounce the collapse of the social order and the resulting historical involution. As Adriana López-Labourdette notes in regard to another novel by Ronaldo Menéndez, the animal element accounts for the rupture of the social pact and a return to a natural state (2016: 224). A reading of “ABC Diario” seems to suggest that the socialist regime was victim of its own immune responses: the field of antagonism extended to such extent that even the Cuban people were left without food. In what follows, we aim at examining starvation and animality from a nonanthropocentric approach, departing from the paradigms of the New Man and Caliban. The implication would be to consider the animal elements in terms of relation with, rather than opposition to, humans, holding the dichotomies of the immune responses in abeyance (Yelin 2013). The novel Teoria Geral do Esquecimento by José Eduardo Agualusa narrates the story of Ludovica Fernandes Mano (aka Ludo), a character equivalent to the Cuban bourgeois in Gutiérrez Alea’s film. Ludo is a fearful Portuguese woman who locks herself up in her luxury apartment in Luanda when the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola takes over the government and independence is declared in 1975. Unlike the majority of the high-class whites who abandon the country, Ludo decides to confine herself in her apartment for 28 years. Through her little balcony garden, she observes the world outside, terrified of the crowds and of the news that initially reach her through the radio about armed struggles involving Cubans, South-Africans, factions of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Removed from human life, her sole relationship with a living being is with her dog Fantasma. The relationship becomes strained when food becomes scarce, but relief arrives when the dog hunts a dove in the balcony that feeds them both. From that moment on, Ludo sets clever traps to attract birds and manages to steal a chicken now and then from her new neighbours, migrants from inner rural areas who have occupied the building along with their animals. Throughout her reclusion, the protagonist writes down thoughts, poems, and dreams in a diary and on the apartment walls, writings that reveal a subjectivity very close to animals. Once, Ludo dreams she is a jelly-fish; in another moment, we perceive a connection with birds: “I  have achieved the habit of speaking alone, repeating the same words for hours on end. Chirp. Tweet. Gaggle. Wing. Flutter. Chirp. Tweet. Gaggle. Wing. Flutter” (Agualusa 2012: 75–76). This series of disjointed words, in which the avian element not only points to food, but also to the liberation from her self-imprisonment, reveals a language that goes beyond representation. Animal references, though, are far from being romanticised. Ludo’s contiguity with animal life rejects the Manichaeism that rules the difference between bio and zoe, and set out the relationship with the living beyond any ethical norm: it becomes a procedural rather than ethical issue (Massumi 2014: 39). This dynamic embraces empathy and affect, as well as cruelty and “raw” self-interest. As Ludo’s relationships with animals become further distanced from the ethical humanistic paradigms – those which, as we

206  Magdalena López have seen, were shared by socialism – she progressively abandons her identity, that is, her unitary positioning as a high-class white European woman in an African country, estranging her from humanity: “I am a stranger from everything. Like a bird fallen in the current of a river” (Agualusa 2012: 37). Her displacement towards an un-personal space supposes that the centrality of the self is challenged and thus, “life emerges as the threshold of strangeness and anomaly with respect to the normativity of the individual and the human” (Giorgi and Rodríguez 2007:12). Anomaly translates into the de-terrorialisation of the Cartesian subject. Ludo writes the following about her conversations with the spirit of the dog: “Since Fantasma died, I revere his spirit. I talk with him. I believe he listens to me. I don’t think this is because of some particular effort of imagination, even less of intelligence; rather, of another faculty which we might call unreason [desrazão]” (Agualusa 2012: 119, my emphasis). The post-humanist metamorphosis that we witness has the effect of relinquishing the binaries that sustain her subjectivity. The climax of the tension between human identity and animal alterity takes place when Ludo lures an injured monkey into the apartment. Once inside, she stabs and cuts the monkey’s throat, and once dead, she adds salt so she and Fantasma can eat it. “I never saw in a human being such an intensely human stare” (Agualusa 2012: 77), Ludo writes about the victim’s gaze. Moreover, the telling fact that she had named the monkey “Che Guevara” might be considered the taunt of a conservative woman, but she identifies herself with the animal: at one point, she notes that the monkey “might belong to someone, it might have escaped or its owner has abandoned it. I sympathise with it. Like myself, it is a body foreign to the city” (Agualusa 2012: 51, my emphasis). Ludo’s anti-human immune response, which makes possible an opening at the end of the story, is predicated upon this erasure of the limits between the animal (monkey) and the human (revolutionary subject), upon the continuity between nature (hunger) and culture (writing). The resulting subjectivity is quite different from that of the paradigms of Caliban and the New Man. When the protagonist breaks through the wall she had erected in the door of her apartment, the Angolan socialist regime has reversed direction towards neoliberalism, and collective memory is filled with the traces of war, torture, poverty, and starvation. At that point, Ludo admits to herself: I cry for your blindness, for your infinite stupidity. It’d have been so easy to open the door, so easy to get out in the streets and embrace life. I see you spying through the windows, like a child curling in bed terrorised of monsters. Monsters, show me the monsters: these people on the streets. My people. (Agualusa 2012: 231, my emphasis) Once the paradigm of the universalist revolutionary fails, once the contiguity with animals is acknowledged, the monstrous alterity is not a radical exteriority anymore. The discovery of “my people” marks the emergence of a community of feeling with Angolan multitude, which is not posited in ideological terms.

Animal presences 207

Porcine dystopias Up to this point, we have examined how the animal element affects immune responses both to reaffirm them (as mechanisms of exclusion), as well as to generate different scenarios that depart from dichotomal paradigms. Los sobrevivientes and Teoría Geral do Esquecimento focus on moments of revolutionary transition. What occurs, though, when the biopolitics of a new order reaches beyond public into domestic spaces? One of the ways in which socialist states practised their sovereignty over bodies was through alimentary regulation. Ration cards constituted forms of repression of the organic within an official rhetoric that privileged spiritual over daily needs. Animal imaginaries disrupt the ideological binary between spirit and body to question the paradigms of Caliban and Che Guevara, as well as to open potential lines of escape from state biopolitics. In the works Quem me dera ser onda (1982) by Manuel Rui, and Las bestias (2006) by Ronaldo Menéndez, grotesqueness, eschatology, and parody, in opposition to the abstract ideals of purity and harmony, serve to de-mythify the official discourses of the Angolan and Cuban regimes. The pig stands out among the repertoire of the most recurrent destabilising images: its reputation for dirtiness and greed metaphorically marks an antithesis to idealism. Traditionally reviled by those religions that stress notions of purity, pigs reappear in modern ideologies as a negative signifier. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), pigs initiate, lead, and finally destroy their own revolutionary utopia. In the resulting order of the farm, differences between the present leaders and the old lords, between pigs and humans who formerly oppressed all animals, are progressively blurred. Orwell thus turns inside out common motifs of the leftist imaginary – the “capitalist pig”, the “bourgeois pig” – to elaborate a fierce criticism of Soviet communism. But even in the work of the highly critical Orwell, it is possible to detect a degree of ambiguity regarding animals: let’s remember that it is the wisdom of the elderly pig Old Major which leads to a collective awareness on the animals’ subalternity with respect to humans. Such “porcine ambiguity” – similar to the ambiguity animals pose for Ludo – offers a glimpse into the complex reconfiguration of subjectivities in Cuba and Angola after the collapse of the socialist utopia, a complexity that rejects the Manichaeism of the epic paradigms of the New Man and Caliban.

A pig in Luanda Once established as a slave-supply colony, Angola can be considered today a locus par excellence of the capitalist transatlantic machine. For three centuries, slave ships sailed from the coast of Luanda towards the colonies in Brazil and Cuba. After the country’s independence from Portugal in 1975, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) laid out the foundations of the nation on the awareness of this historical record of slave trade. Linked with Cuba by ideology and military exchanges, the MPLA ended up as the victor in the different internal

208  Magdalena López struggles for power, and established a single Marxist–Leninist Party system. The coherence between the Angolan foundational identity and the Cuban revolution was thus evident. The anti-slavery discourse and a reevaluation of Africa over ethnic differences were further reinforced during the clashes of Angolan-Cuban armies and South-African troops during 1970s Apartheid. But during the next decade, the Angolan utopia started to crumble as a result of the civil conflicts that targeted the MPLA’s hegemony as well as of faults of the same revolutionary system. Angolan writer Manuel Rui published in 1981 his most well-known work, Quem me dera ser onda, a parody that narrates the different events that unfold when a family decides to raise a pig in a Luanda apartment block to alleviate the effects of food rationing. The plot allows Rui to expose the tough living conditions in the capital during MPLA’s regime. The clandestine rearing of an animal in an urban setting shows the extent to which the idealism of the socialist regime was at odds with the desires and “material” needs of Angolan people. The pater familias Diogo rails against the biopolitics of “friedfishism” (peixefritismo), that is, the imposed rationing that limits his diet to fried fish, exclaiming to his wife: “Don’t talk to me of isms, wife, they don’t fill the belly. Friedfishism, mushroomism, and other isms in people’s belly” (Rui 1982/1999: 9). To denounce the dogmatism that legitimises the State’s sovereignty over the people’s bodies, Diogo parodies the myriad of “isms” (socialism, Marxism, equalitarianism, or Leninism) in official jargon. The sort of rationing that “don”t fill the belly” acts as a bodily discipline aimed at shaping functional subjects for the new National State, sustained on an identity of sacrificial revolutionary mysticism that disdains the materiality of bodies. Against the modern imperative which opposes spirit, or rationality, and the body, striving to eat meat becomes subversive. Parodically distorting the State’s discourse, Diogo justifies his illegal possession of the animal on the ideological legitimacy of Cuba: “Let’s see: a revolutionary nation like Cuba is of the same opinion, they eat lots of pork” (Rui 1982/1999: 53). Diogo’s demythologising marks a tension between the sovereignty claimed by the State and the sovereignty claimed by the bodies. They resist starvation through the desire for meat. The violation of the law forbidding the raising of animals for consumption within city limits gives rise to events, which are ultimately positive for the offenders. The continuous clashes between Diogo’s family and government officials, hilariously narrated in the story, invariably end up with transgression taking the upper hand. For example, when the people’s assessors of Diogo’s building learn that their neighbour is raising a pig, they summon an official. When he shows up in Diogo’s apartment, he only finds the two little children, who prior to opening the door have locked the pig in the bathroom. When the official enters the apartment, the children explain that a relative is occupying the bathroom, and the individual who is actually raising pigs is the people’s assessor living next door. When the suspicious official insists, the children accuse him of being a thief under cover, and he is forced to run away under the rage of the neighbours. The children’s savvy in eluding and tricking the authorities is also revealed when they falsify official documents to get daily meat leftovers from a hotel off-limits to

Animal presences 209 the majority of Angolans. As in the genre of the picaresque, a social reality of abuse, privileges, and corruption of the authorities lurks behind the children’s mischief. In that falsely egalitarian regime, humour invites the celebration of the transgressed practices that enable daily survival. The children and their father’s behaviour also signals how mockery is used to destabilise the social and political hierarchies of the revolutionary order. The climax of teasing occurs when the children dare to correct a board written by the popular assessor: – Excuse me comrade Nazário, but porcine is with p, discipline goes before vigilance, and before the fight continues you have to write by the People’s Power, and at the end, write the year of the creation of the Assembly of the People and Extraordinary Congress of the Party! – This has gone too far! – Nazário spoke threatening with his right hand – children giving orders to the elders. Without us you wouldn’t have independence or schools. (Rui 1982/1999: 21) Comrade Nazário vindicates his authority on the basis of his age and his alleged participation in the revolution. But far from observing it, the children persist in their mockery. In contrast to the eventual acceptance and return to the status quo of the characters of the picaresque genre  – as in famous examples of Spanish baroque picaresque like Lazarillo or Guzmán de Alfarache2 – children’s recurrent challenging of authority results, paradoxically, in the recovery of those aspects of the utopia that seem excluded as a result of bureaucratic formalism, influence peddling, governmental harshness, and empty jargon. The return to the origins of utopia by means of the destabilisation of revolutionary order produces a critical reactivation. While the children try to save the pig’s life, the father considers the pig a piece of meat to break the fasting of “friedfishism”. For the government officials, the pig offers an opportunity to assert their authority and get something out of the situation; for the children, the animal is a living being with whom they have a relationship based in affect. These perspectival differences with respect to the pig allows us to interpret it as a signifier where different meanings, both utopian and dystopian, converge. The pig is called Carnaval da Vitória (Carnival of Victory). In addition to an allusion to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical inversion of hierarchies, the name refers to the state’s appropriation, in the first decade of the Angolan independence, of the traditional, popular, and very much corporal festivity of the Carnival to commemorate the South-African defeat in 1976 in southern Angola (Salgado 2003). What are the implications of naming a pig after such an historical event? Does not the parody of the official celebration result in a devaluation of the victory against the domination and neo-colonial racism of South Africa? The negative dimension of the animal seems reinforced by its association with the stereotypes of the bourgeoisie. When the pig won’t stop squealing, Diogo shouts: “Shut up, you pettybourgeois pig, in Cobimba you only smelt fish bones and now you have a house to live in, you don’t pay rent and you eat everything I can afford” (Rui 1982/1999: 55).

210  Magdalena López The pig Carnaval da Vitória, then, becomes the antithesis of the universal revolutionary: the one who eats at leisure without working; an insatiable, fattened-up parasite. But these attributes can also critically describe the socialist regime itself, which have deviated from its original ideals, populated by officials who benefit from their political position and who certainly are much better fed than the rest of the citizens. Besides Diogo’s negative vision of the Carnaval da Vitória, though, the pig also conveys the possibility of engaging with life from a non-utilitarist perspective, as that of Diogo’s children, who see the pig as a victim removed from its natural habitat to be fattened and eaten. Their efforts to save the animal are thus motivated by opposite motivations than those of Diogo, solely interested in satisfying his hunger. Whereas the animalisation of the official celebration of a victory suggests a devaluation of the nationalist (anti-racist) utopia, the rescue of the pig implies the necessity of preserving the utopia. The relationship between the children and the animal thus gestures towards the existence of forms of continuity with animals in which affect and generosity have not been polluted by the discourse on the hierarchies between species. The animal’s death (which ultimately cannot be prevented by the children) and the consequences, bring about new turns in the story. In an unexpected display of generosity, Diogo invites all his neighbours, even the officials he had repeatedly confronted, to share a feast of roasted pork. Several characters bring kitchen utensils and help in the cooking. The animal that Diogo has clandestinely fed for months is dispatched in one single meal, given the number of guests, so that the dinner brings to mind persisting forms of rural collectivism over the recent modernisation led by the MPLA. This transcultural banquet3 is antipodal to the one from the final scene of Animal Farm, a merely accultural phenomenon in which the pigs replicate the old dichotomal and oppressive order of humans. The Angolan dinner serves to unify a community fragmented by personal and political immune responses and, in the context of shortages and friedfishism, suggests the revalorisation of a certain degree of sovereignty beyond the limits of the Party-State. It signals the recovery of what is common by means of meat, rather than ideology; it displays a revitalising hedonism, rather than the state’s discipline. Transgression would thus be an element originated in pre-national commonality that persists in the present in the form of resistance. Such community of guests, however, is temporary: the banquet only lasts a single night, and consequently, the utopian space still awaits realisation, an unaccomplished emancipation captured in the desire of the children, who pronounce the sentence which serves as the title of the novel, while observing the sea waves breaking on the coast: “Quem me dera ser onda” (I wish I was a wave). Nature is not opposed to culture; rather, the sea expresses the wish of the new generations for the sort of freedom, which the pig, always tied up and subject to the will of others, has lacked. The marine image is reinvented as the reverse and continuity of historical memory upon which it is still necessary to establish a politics of the common good. Once a scenario of colonial violence and slave trade, the sea offers now an emancipatory opening towards the desired fulfilment of a pluralistic Carnival.

Animal presences 211

A pig in Havana On the opposite shore of the Atlantic, the novelette Las bestias features the raising of another pig. In the height of the Special Period, art history professor Claudio Cañizales decides to raise a pig to alleviate the rigours of rationing. In contrast with Rui’s Quem me dera ser onda, the context is not that of the first years of the revolutionary regime, but its decadence.4 Las bestias does not have the degree of positive productivity, which Rui’s work reveals via the juxtaposition of rural habits in the urban context. Whereas the raising of the pig in Luanda empowered a transgression that somehow reinstituted a sense of pre-national community, the same activity in Havana conveys a regressive displacement towards a Hobbesian state of nature that dissolves moral and social laws in the face of the demands for survival. Instead of a process of negotiation and accommodation of the rural element and modernisation in the positive terms of Ángel Rama’s transculturation, Menéndez’s text reveals a total unhinging of the characters, vilifying them by means of animalisation. The pig raised in Claudio’s bathtub is but a fragment of a city in which a starving population hunts cats, carries off ostriches from the zoo, and procreates abundantly. Collective starvation alternates with blackouts that leave the city in total darkness. Sounds in this sinister jungle include the squeals of pigs raised in apartments, or the voice of the Leader interspersed with the broadcast from round tables on old Soviet TV sets. In sum, the city constitutes a historical aberration where the animal element has devoured the human: people are described by their “ape-like” manners, as “mandrills”, or as “herds”, “lynxes”, and “slugs”. Such demonisation of the city is not novel in Latin American literature, where it has often been associated with a certain resistance to the ways in which modernisation and capitalism acted as dissolvents of traditional social networks. An antecedent to Menéndez’s work is the short tale “Los gallinazos sin plumas” by Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro (1955), in which an elderly man raises a pig to sell in Lima’s outskirts. The title refers to the protagonist’s grandsons, two children obligated by the tyrannical grandfather to scavenge food in rubbish dumps, where they suffer starvation and extreme insalubrity, and who have to witness their grandfather feeding their pet dog to the pig. At the end of the story, the children manage to flee while the pig devours their grandfather, who has fallen into the pigsty. For Ribeyro, outskirts and rubbish dumps are the scenarios of the bare life of thousands of people forced to abandon their rural origins to move to a city that throws them to the margins. The pig’s voracity, paralleling the grandfather’s greed, marks the capitalist thanatopolitics that lies behind the Peruvian promise of modernisation. Menéndez takes this porcine dystopia to turn Havana into as hostile a place as Ribeyro’s Lima, but his presentation of the image of the pig allows him to denounce the biopolitics of Cuban socialism. Thus distanced from an anti-capitalist Latin American tradition, Menéndez brings his intervention close to Orwell’s Animal Farm. In both texts, pigs and humans are indistinguishable after the decomposition of the revolutionary order. Such decomposition is evinced in several ways, but perhaps its most outstanding

212  Magdalena López trait, especially in comparison with Rui’s novelette, is that the focus is placed on a totally isolated single individual, rather than a family unity or another collective structure. While in Quem me dera ser onda meat opens a horizon of encountering the others, in Las bestias, meat alludes to the radicalism of an immune response that reduces Claudio Cañizales to absolute loneliness, to the point of killing him. One day, Claudio learns of a plot to murder him. Ignorant of the reasons for the plot, he is forced to evade his murderers, anticipate their moves, and kill them instead. In parallel, and facing lots of difficulties resulting from the generalised deprivation, he feeds his pig with a disgusting stew of leftovers that momentarily appease the animal’s extraordinary voracity. Locked in a bathtub, the pig is now and again described as a “machine that devours everything except his own body”. Ridden by the animal’s squeals, Claudio hires a vet to extract its vocal chords, turning the “devouring machine” sinisterly quiet. Abjection reaches its climax when Claudio imprisons one of his murderers along with the silent pig. Even though Claudio initially sought to discover why the man intended to kill him, this reason rapidly becomes irrelevant. From that point on, his prisoner needs to compete for food with the pig, while keeping the animal from eating him. In the second week of captivity, Claudio’s cruelty radicalises, and he again summons the vet, this time to perform the same operation on the shouting prisoner. The scene in which the prisoner is left without most of his vocals chords is atrocious: the pieces of flesh removed from his vocal chords are thrown to the ground, only to be devoured by the pig. To worsen the torment, the prisoner learns that he might be sacrificed on the July 26 celebration. In contrast with the “Carnaval da Vitória” – an official celebration tinged with ambiguity – this revolutionary commemoration is totally devalued by its connection with the possibility of a murder. After the first month of captivity, the prisoner has nearly lost all his humanity. Threatened, injured, and filled with pustules, living among leftovers and excrement, the prisoner starts to get confused with the pig. In Claudio’s words, he is not “the black man” anymore (a derogatory allusion to his skin colour), he has become “blackness” (Menéndez 2006: 100). “Blackness” and “black man” are key in the characterisation of a postrevolutionary dystopia in which the “enlightened” aims of the paradigms of the New Man and Caliban have vanished from sight. The African legacy is not revalued; Angola is not exalted. On the contrary, continuity is established between Africa and the “darkness” about which Claudio writes a doctoral dissertation. He does not conceive Angola to be different from the nightmare he endures. Anxious because of the impossibility of abandoning Cuba, he states: He had left the country! He had travelled! (That’s how he thought about it, with exclamation marks). And he’d never, he knew, do it again. It was impossible that the absolutist government would treat him with another stimulant trip to South America. Maybe to Africa, to Angola, where there was war, but . . . (Menéndez 2006: 13, my emphasis)

Animal presences  213 Actually, Claudio’s racism, and the degrading way in which an Abakuá secret society, dedicated to the extermination of people with AIDS, is portrayed (Claudio is unaware that he is sick, and that is why he was going to be assassinated), echo the end of the transatlantic ideal of emancipation. But the climax of racial disdain is revealed in the way Claudio sees his prisoner: [T]he captive is a black man. As I  have become the guard of the captive, I own a black. Even more: not only he is below the rest of mortals by several degrees of inferiority, he doesn’t even have the individual status of a black. That, a oblique living, a dark prism that can decompose the light of potens, a begging bulk at the corner, that is Blackness. (Menéndez 2006: 98) Darkness, the “Blackness” about which Claudio writes his dissertation, is “coloured” and made literal to the point that social collapse brings about a return to slavery. For Claudio, it is no longer a matter of knowing why they want to kill him, it is about “owning a black”, a sentence that brings us back to the paradigm of Caliban. From the perspective of an anti-colonial epic, Fernández Retamar proposed identification between rebel slaves and Caliban; in Menéndez’s story, there is a regression towards the legitimisation of the Shakespearean character of Prospero who, like Claudio, is an intellectual whose vision of the “blacks” reproduces the colonial stereotypes of barbarism and cannibalism. Thus mixed up with the pig, the prisoner is also a “machine that devours anything except his own body”. In the symbolic terms of Fernández Retamar, devouring became an empowering cultural recycling; now, it has become fratricidal. Late-twentieth-century Havana is the perfect locus for crimes among people suffering the same collapse. At the end, Claudio murders the prisoner and the pig with a machete, and locks himself in to fatten up until he dies. As López-Labourdette affirms, the animal, the flip side of the revolutionary discourse of the New Man, is tamed, sacrificed or just left aside by the rhetoric and action of the Revolution, and thus becomes the limit which the biopolitical machinery has not reached and will not be able to reach. (2016: 212) Once Claudio becomes pure flesh without the thelos of modern historicity, he dramatises the violence of the biopolitics and immune response of a state that took food rationing to the extreme, as well as an animality removed from the universal revolutionary order. The abject in Las bestias signals the collapse of the meanings that structured the revolution. Among those, that of the necessity of a process of emancipation sustained on the shared colonial memory with Africa. Whereas Rui’s novelette demystifies revolutionary praxis, in Menéndez’s text such rejection extends to the modernising episteme. Both narrations reflect different moments of their

214  Magdalena López revolutionary regimes. In contrast to the closing scene in Rui’s novel, there are no future generations in Menendez’s story: neither the New Man nor Caliban are a possibility anymore.

Bringing the transatlantic cimarron up to date A feature published in the New York Times (Burnett 2013) summarises a discourse by Raúl Castro to the National Assembly. Throughout his speech, the elderly president criticises what he terms a relapse in culture and civility. According to Castro, Cubans today build unauthorised houses, fish endangered species, urinate on the streets, destroy public phone booths, accept bribes, dress inappropriately, stalk tourists, throw stones at trains, torment neighbours with loud music, and raise pigs in cities. The article is illustrated by a photograph by José Goitia that shows two young men with their naked torsos cleaning and butchering a pig in front of a house in Havana, while an older man observes them. The photograph offers a reformulation of the post-revolutionary dystopian imaginary. Eight years after the publication of Las bestias, it is Cuba’s national leader, and not a writer, who sketches a similar scenario to describe the situation in Cuba. Animals and people inhabit the same space in a kind of continuity among the living, which expresses quite accurately the paradox underscored by Giorgi, that is, that the people, the foundation of the State’s sovereignty, are simultaneously animalised by the State (Giorgi 2014). Raúl Castro’s words are an official acknowledgement of the revolutionary collapse – although, unlike the case of the

Image 10.1 “A pig being slaughtered in a tourist area of old Havana is seen as a sign of a loss of civility” (Burnett 2013) Jose Goitia/The New York Times/Redux.

Animal presences  215 character Claudio Cañizales, such a scenario does not seem to reach the president directly. Castro qualifies the situation as an “atmosphere of indiscipline”, which, as in all instances of state power denouncing indiscipline, awakes the concern for the legitimation of further corrective and punitive policies. Quem me dera ser onda deals with the state mechanisms of regulation which Angolan people had to negotiate to eat pork. It is precisely this disciplining that is challenged through the vicissitudes of the characters evading the law and reconstituting communal forms beyond the State. How, then, should we interpret Raúl Castro’s lament over indiscipline? Regarding the real reasons for the vindication of discipline against the lack of “culture and civility” in Cuba, Haroldo Dilla (2013) notes that the regime aims at creating the right conditions for a restoration of capitalism. According to Dilla, a normative imperative demands efficient subjects for the economy of the new political system, which would be the ultimate intention of some recent state policies undertaken under the euphemism of “actualisation”. Taking off from Dilla, and reframed by the New York Times photograph, let us go back to the ambiguity of animal imaginaries: while the young men who slaughter the animal evince that the socialist state has failed to ensure an appropriate or desirable daily diet to its citizens, they also exhibit an undisciplined behaviour that escapes the biopolitics of both socialism and the foreseeable capitalist system. It is precisely in this sense that a picaresque, as the one proposed by Rui, might be actualised in the contemporary scenarios of Angola (turned into a neoliberal country in 1992) and Cuba (where president Obama’s 2016 visit to the island and recent economic reforms seem to indicate a similar path). Given, as we have argued, that animal ambiguity lies in the fact that animalisation can become an instrument of subjection of, as well as resistance to, the universalist ontological paradigms and their immune responses, we can posit its productive potentiality. The social depredation denounced in Menéndez’s novelette might be seen as an empowering picaresque in connection with the tradition of the cimarron, a picaro who, instead of being absorbed by the State as in Peninsular Baroque literature, constitutes a rebellious bios. The reconnection between Latin America and Africa might benefit from the recovery of the rebelliousness of the former slaves, a rebelliousness that does not cipher a normative nationalist epic (as the one present in the foundational discourses of the socialist regimes in Angola and Cuba), but forms of resistance based in the opacity of bodies. By the early twenty-first century, Fernández Retamar’s Caliban and the Che Guevara’s New Man might thus be swallowed to give rise to proposals that, while preserving a shared historical memory, can reestablish a post-humanist space of inclusion for Africa and the Caribbean.

Notes 1 Nicolás Maduro’s government created the Local Committees for Supply and Production (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción, or CLAPs) to remedy the shortages of food, medicines, and hygiene products. The committees distribute subsidised bags of food to its supporters. 2 See Beverley (1987) for an analysis of the exemplary function of Spanish Golden Age picaresque in so much as it dealt with the disciplining of the picaro protagonist by means of the narration of his final reintegration into the State’s order.

216  Magdalena López 3 For Ángel Rama (Transculturación narrativa en América Latina), transculturation is a process of cultural plasticity that allows the incorporation of autochthonous or rural elements into the modernising discourses. 4 Menéndez’s novelette can be inserted in the dystopian trend of a kind of post-Soviet narrative in which, according to Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, the magnification of chaos reveals the crisis of the historical thelos (2012: 22–23, 29).

Works cited Agualusa, J. E. (2012) Teoria Geral do Esquecimento. Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote. Beverley, J. (1987) Del Lazarillo al sandinismo: estudios sobre la función ideológica de la literatura española e hispanoamericana. Minneapolis, MN: Prisma Institution in cooperation with the Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature. Buck-Morss, S. (2004) Mundo soñado y catástrofe. La desaparición de la utopía de masas en el Este y el Oeste, trans. R. Ibañez. Madrid: La Balsa de Medusa. Burnett, V. (2013) “Harsh Self-Assessment as Cuba Looks Within.” New York Times, July  23. Available from: www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/world/americas/harsh-selfassessment-as-cuba-looks-within.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [Accessed November 11, 2016]. Casamayor-Cisneros, O. (2012) Utopía, distopía e ingravidez: Reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. Castro, F. (2014) “Angola: un Girón africano.” In M. A. Walters (ed.), Cuba y Angola: Luchando por la libertad de África y la nuestra. Nueva York: Pathfinder, 35–41. Derrida, J. (1990) “Force of Law: The ‘ “Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ” Trans. M. Quaintance. Cardozo Law Review, 11: 920–1045. Dilla Alfonso, H. (2013) “Raúl Castro, el Chapulín Colorado y los buenos modales.” Cubaencuentro, July 22. Available from: www.cubaencuentro.com/cuba/articulos/raul-castroel-chapulin-colorado-y-los-buenos- modales-288149 [Accessed November 2013]. Domínguez, J. (2004) “La política exterior de Cuba y el sistema internacional.” In J. Tulchin and H. Ralph (eds.), América latina en el nuevo sistema internacional. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 255–286. Esposito, R. (2009a) “El sentido de una comunidad bipolítica.” Mensaje, 58.576: 48–50. Esposito, R. (2009b) Comunidad, inmunidad y biopolítica, Kindle edn, trans. A. G. Ruiz. Herder. Fernández Retamar, R. (2003) Todo Calibán. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón. Giorgi, G. (2014) Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia. Giorgi, G. and Rodríguez, F. (2007) “Prólogo.” In G. Giorgi and F. Rodríguez (eds.), Ensayos sobre biopolítica: Excesos de vida. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 9–34. Guevara, E. (1965) “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba.” Marxist Internet Archive. Available from: www.marxists.org/espanol/guevara/65-socyh.htm [Accessed November 19, 2016]. Gutiérrez Alea, T. (dir.) (1978) Los sobrevivientes. Havana: ICAIC. López-Labourdette, A. (2016) “La Patria Puerca. Discursos y contradiscursos de la especie en la Cuba postsocialista”, “Dossier: Cuba va: Figuraciones de la Cuba contemporánea.” Boletín Hispánico Helvético, 27: 211–236. Massumi, B. (2014) What Animals Teach Us About Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Menéndez, R. (2006) Las bestias. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo.

Animal presences 217 Menéndez, R. (2012) De modo que esto es la muerte. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 27–31. No author (2013) “Descuartizan ganado en plena vía tras colisión de una gandola en la Carretera Morón-Coro.” Noticias 24. Available from: www.noticias24.com/venezuela/noticia/ 223996/en-fotos-descuartizan-ganado-en-plena-via-tras-colision-de-una-gandola/ [Accessed November 19, 2016]. Orwell, G. (1978) Animal Farm. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Rama, Á. (1982) Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Mexico D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno. Ribeyro, J. R. (1955) “Los gallinazos sin plumas.” Ciudad Seva. Available from: http:// ciudadseva.com/texto/los-gallinazos-sin-plumas/. Rui, M. (1982/1999) Quem me dera ser onda. Lisbon: Ediciones Cotovia. Salgado, M. T. (2003) “Quem me dera ser onda – O riso na literatura angolana de língua portuguesa.” O Ponto de Encontro. Available from: www.ponto.altervista.org/Livros/ recensioni/quemmedera.html [Accessed November 19, 2016]. Verdú, D. (2016) “Sobrevivir al matadero.” EL País, April 14. Available from: http://ccaa. elpais.com/ccaa/2016/04/13/catalunya/1460547371_634790.html [Accessed November 19, 2016]. Wolfe, C. (2003) Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Yelin, J. (2013) “Para una teoría literaria posthumanista. La crítica en la trama de debates sobre la cuestión animal.” Hemispheric Institute E-Mesferica, 10.1. Available from: http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-101/yelin [Accessed November 22, 2016].

11 A post-colonial, national, and post-national discourse in Angolan poetry in the work of Manuel Rui Robert Simon The trajectory of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century Angolan poetry may be defined both as one of revolution against oppression from outside of the self (such as that of the Portuguese colonial government, and later, that of Angola’s own post-independence regime) and as one of the intimate exploration of that self’s identity within the newly forming concept of the Angolan nation. A critical construct based on notions of socially oriented versus a more intimately oriented poetic may suffice to discuss individual poets within this complex artistic stratum. Within the latter, we find Manuel Rui’s poetic trajectory. Rui’s constant linguistic and thematic recombination insists, and rightly so, on a vision of a nation’s strengths and challenges from the unique perspective of an individual who has experienced a country’s utopian ideals upon formation and subsequent failures to fulfill the dream envisioned during the War of Independence against Portuguese colonial rule. Utilizing as example a thematic and rhetorical analysis of three works in chronological order, Onze de Novembro (1984), Ombela (2006), and O Semba da Nova Ortografia (2009), it is possible to perceive the struggle of the poetic subject who suffers in a context of social inequality and cultural shifting. There appear to be, according to this approach, first conceived from the writings of Inocência Matta, two principal areas of poetic discourse in the poetry of Angola as it has developed over the past century and a half. They seem to run in confluence. One is the socially committed trajectory, whose intimacy the poetry does not necessarily express; the other, the intimate experience of the social, in which the poetic voice/poetic subject finds encapsulated the ontological within a greater epistemological structure of his or her social context (2001: 23). Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing on, “fez-se, pois, um longo percurso: a retórica do discurso identitário (angolano) polarizará, doravante, uma bissemia: a dimensão épica e a dimensão construtiva” [“a long course was taken: the rhetoric of the discourse of (Angolan) identity would polarize, from here on, bissemically: the epic dimension and the constructive dimension.”] (2001: 96). In this sense, the poetic reflecting an ontological framework for social liberation and, later on, the disenchantment engendered from this discourse’s failures, finds its equilibrium with the “epic”; the somewhat more individually oriented poetry of the subject within the social context, in essence, tethering the hybrid state of the single to that the individual and/or communal. The latter, a process of identity

The work of Manuel Rui 219 building, then allows a “constructive” poetry to occur. We will see here the adherence to the former in Rui’s poetic expression, while the very intimate nature of his poetic subject’s struggle makes difficult a corroborating of his verses with the latter. This contrast, between the “social” and the “constructive” poetics, as Matta and Chabal have described in their critical apparatus, tends to function less descriptively than one would hope when the sociopolitical and sociolinguistic contexts, both of which evolve diachronically, are overlapped onto each other’s respective framework. In other words, if taken as separate processes, parallel yet not in competition, one may accept their existences as two tendencies within the Angolan poetic of the twentieth century. However, the situation becomes even more confusing if both frameworks are enacted simultaneously, since each seems to serve as a clear reaction rooted in distinct epistemological approaches to the same artistic, cultural, political, and social issues.1 In speaking of these issues, a brief review of sociopolitical happenings in Angola during the 1970s to the present may inform better on the poetic described above, as well as on Rui’s own verse. Following the 25 April, 1974, “Carnation Revolution” in Portugal, the new government quickly acted to negotiate a ceasefire and subsequent process of de-colonization of Portugal’s holdings in Africa (these included Angola, Cape Verde, Guine-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé e Príncipe). By the end of 1975, the Portuguese, along with most of the European colonists the Portuguese had encouraged to settle in Angola, had left. Agostinho Neto, along with the majority of the MPLA (Movimento Popular da Libertação de Angola), the ruling faction in Luanda and much of the north and central provinces by 1975, took control of the country and began a pro-communist campaign both to consolidate power and to marginalize the other major parties/fighting groups of the period, namely, UNITA and the FNLA. In 1978, with the death of Neto, José Eduardo dos Santos was elected president. He quickly consolidated power within a small circle of eite, crioulo families and began eliminating his competitors. This, among other points of conflict between the parties, ignited the civil war which lasted until 2002. Inasmuch as Angola’s recent history encompasses a protracted period of civil disturbance and rebellion, those most suffering the consequences, that is, the rural peoples on and around whose lands the fighting generally took place, began moving into the larger cities (particularly the capital, Luanda, as well as Benguela and various inland urban areas). This dislocation forced people from differing cultural spaces to break boundaries of communication in order to survive. Once more, when the Portuguese-speaking MPLA took control of the national government, most jobs required more than a conversational knowledge of Portuguese (albeit the Angolan Portuguese dialect which had evolved from the European Portuguese dialect spoken by the ruling colonial state). This meant that, while some vocabulary from languages such as Kimbundu and Ovimbundu survived, the speakers of those languages quickly became Portuguese speakers; their children, now a second generation of urban dwellers, are, for the most part, native speakers of Portuguese. Culturally, this has also signified a loss of direct connection with the less urbanized and rural lands from which their parents and

220  Robert Simon grandparents came, further dividing the country into a largely urban majority with a rural minority divided among several nations. In these lands, the Portuguese language has made headway as a second language, concomitant to efforts on the part of sectors of the MPLA to conserve the other languages and customs of the country with a framework of “unity through diversity.”2 Poetry of the period, in very general terms, followed the swift changes from independence and hope toward disillusionment and violence. The poetic of Neto and others of his generation (in particular, António Jacinto) sought to express the desire for unity and nationhood as an escape from colonial suppression. By 1980, it was clear that the attempt had failed, and by the 1990s, the poetic had turned away from the hopefulness and unified discourse of the previous generation; in the works of poets such as Fonseca Wochay and Ana Paula Tavares, the emotive and psychological results of this unexpected and destructive world become evident for the reader. Rui, as pertaining to both the pre- and post-independence groups, reveals the possibility of a writer’s passage from one phase to another.3 Manuel Rui represents what one could perhaps denominate as the more subtle and intimate “constructive” variant of Angolan poetry (as opposed to an “epic,” or very collectively oriented poetic), one which builds on the more intimate and individual, sentimental nature of the human condition to create a new space for a national identity. Critics such as Arenas have discussed how, as an activist against colonialism and government abuses, his pre-independence artistic works outline utopian hopes and discourse, followed by the disillusionment of post-independence. Striking are Rui’s use of Angolan Portuguese terms in his prose and the development, over time, of works which focus more on individual struggles within the new context, one which includes the sharp division between the relatively prosperous urban social classes and the underdeveloped interior (as opposed to a much more and almost purely socially oriented one as seen in the former case). When referencing Rui’s prose, Macêdo has noted that “Manuel Rui é um escritor que tem na cidade o cenário de sua ficção e nos luandenses, com sua malandragem e linguagem peculiar, as personagens privilegiadas” [“Manuel Rui is a writer who has as a stage of his fiction the city and the residents of Luanda, his privileged characters with their swindling and peculiar language.”] (2006: 60).4 In his poetry, one may find examples of this “constructive” poetic. In collections such as 11 de Novembro, Ombela, and Semba da Nova Ortografia, the reader may find both the political struggle for nation and the individual’s nuanced suffering in the hands of that nation as simultaneous forces functioning in a subtle yet palpably dolorous harmony. The notion of a national discourse, from this more intimate, personal, and non-combative perspective, seems to allow the post-national, deconstructive voice in his poetry to germinate. Manuel Rui was born in Huambo in 1941. He completed his primary studies in Huambo and then his Law degree at the University of Coimbra in Portugal; it was common for educated colonial subjects to further their studies in Portugal, given the lack of higher educational opportunities in the colonial territories. As with fellow Angolan writers Agostinho Neto and António Jacinto, Rui became a political activist at the Casa de Estudantes do Império. He returned to Angola in 1974

The work of Manuel Rui 221 after having been imprisoned in Portugal (due to his anti-imperial activism) and having worked there as a lawyer. While in Coimbra, Rui served on the editorial board of Vértice, and later in Angola in a variety of important posts for the MPLA controlled post-independence government beginning in 1975. In recent times, he has left Angola and pursued other activities from his home in Portugal. An activist against colonialism and government abuses, his pre and postindependence artistic works outline utopian hopes and discourse followed by the disillusionment of post-independence (Arenas 2012: 160). This may show clearly in both his recognized artistic work, critical of the lack of progress in the post-1974 era, and the fact that he simultaneously penned the lyrics for the Angolan National Anthem (2012: 160). His parentage may also be of interest, since it reflects a reality more akin to a type of “decontinentalization” [“descontinentalização”] – his father was a Portuguese settler and his mother herself the child of a Portuguese settler and Angolan mother (Vianna 2006: 246). Some of this will be reflected in his acceptance of various forces in the Post-Colonial Angolan cultural sphere, namely, the use of Portuguese language alongside a variety of local symbolic and linguistic elements. Rui’s use of Angolan Portuguese terms in his artistic works (Arenas 2012: 161– 162) become noticeable as does the development, over time, of poetic and prosaic forms of expression which focus more on individual struggles within the new context of the palpable and explicit division between the relatively prosperous urban social classes and the underdeveloped interior (2012: 162).5 This thematic would also allow for a discussion, particularly in his prosaic work but occasionally present in his poetry, on issues of race and ethnicity in the country as an essential element of the national building process (Vianna 2006: 247). His “sociopolitical criticism through satire” does not go unnoticed in either form, although as we will see and has been studied by Afolabi (1997: 100), Arenas (2012: 162–163), and Vianna, the realization of that satirical and socially committed voice happens via a very individualized and intimate perspective.6 By 2002, Angola had passed through three post-independence civil wars, each with a short period of calm in between and each involving the ruling political party, MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), fighting in the rural areas of the country against one of several independence-period groups. During this time, the question of nationality became intrinsically linked, at least in official discourse, with the ideology of the ruling party, that of “unity through diversity” and the ideal of several internal groups in the creation of a common national identity. This ideal, in the end, created more complexities in the multifaceted case of Angola’s various ethnic and cultural groups than it solved, something which Rui’s prose has commented on at length (Arenas 2012: 163–164). Returning to the literary, and in particular to the poetic end of the literary, the reader of Rui’s poetry will undoubtedly feel the presence of history and the peoples whose lives this artistic expression reflects. As a writer in formation during the beginning of the post-independence phase of Angolan poetry’s evolution (which sets an unexpected difference from his pre- and post-independence prose), his use of common symbols combined with rhetorical figures more akin to a more difficult poetic, support a rich and diverse thematic approach.

222  Robert Simon Yet despite the overwhelming focus on Rui’s prose fiction and prosaic achievements, by critics his poetry reveals itself as just as significant, taking advantage of a much less apparently combative critical strategy. Essentially, his verses reveal a multifaceted perspective in relation to his country’s crisis of identity as a consequence of Angola’s development from 1975 through the civil war period and postwar twenty-first century from what in almost all cases may qualify as a uniquely intimate perspective (again, in contrast to previous studies on Rui’s prose). The first work to visit here, 11 Poemas em Novembro (1984), is part of a larger poetic commentary about the late independence period, the struggles of the Angolan people, and the ideals of freedom from the perspective of a poetic subject navigating this complex historical landscape. The work is very short, encompassing only 12 individually titled poems. It would be difficult to discuss any apparent “sections,” or other internal divisions between themes in the work as such. Nonetheless, it is possible to speak of a general tone, one which, at least on the surface, reminds the reader more of chapbook of love poetry than one of social critique. The constant references to a young woman, her beauty and fecundity, make this reading a seemingly simple one. Even though in its totality the collection develops a social conscience from within an individualized perspective, it is possible to view many of these in a smaller sample of poetry. The examples below, thus, highlight such a thematic richness present in the work. One striking poem in the collection is titled “Insónia.” This sonnet speaks of the new, Angolan nation within an intimate symbolism using implicit references rather than the more overt language of poets like Agostinho Neto. Teu rosto as linhas dum perfil distante em pálpebras de fugaz serenidade talves [sic] sonhando o sonho que é saudade longe de tudo e do vazio que é constante. Teu corpo abandonada curva navegante na adormecida tristeza que é verdade enquanto um braço teu aponto prá cidade num gesto de infeliz comediante. E enquanto nesta insónio eu sou amante mesmo da ruga que adivinha a nova idade respiro o teu sonho e hesitante à proa do teu seio sempre novidade entrego minha boca delirante. É quase um crime trazer-te à realidade. [Your face the lines of a distant outline in eyelids of swift serenity

The work of Manuel Rui  223 perhaps dreaming the dream that is memory far from everything and from the emptiness that is constant. Your body an abandoned, navigating curve in the sleepy sadness that is the truth while an arm of yours points toward the city in the gesture of an unhappy comedian. And while I am your lover in this insomnia even from the wrinkle that gives away this new age I breathe your dream and hesitating on the prow of your breast always something new I give my delirious mouth. It is almost a crime to bring you to reality.] (1984: 12) As stated above, this poem (as well as several others in the collection) give the impression that the poetic subject must be speaking about a woman. Yet through a guided, careful analysis of the poem, we may perceive a more contextually oriented symbiotic. In the first stanza, for example, the closeness between Rui’s poetic subject and the object of affection becomes clear; verses such as “Teu rosto as linhas de um perfil distante” (1984: 12), and the mention of “saudade” (1984: 12), express this. The vision of Angola as a “perfil,” a continuous coastline visible from afar, implies both a personal relationship as well as a more widely recognizable motif of the national geography. Similar to the distance between the national space and the self from Ana Paula Tavares’ example, the nation becomes a symbolic lover tied with the poetic subject’s own sentiments regarding the self’s extension into the wider world. Continuing the sonnet, the verse “enquanto um braço teu aponta prá [sic] cidade/num gesto de infeliz comediante” ending the second stanza follows the technique of implying geography and national history on a symbolic and intimate epistemological level. An “arm” of land encloses the harbor of Luanda. The “gesture of an unhappy comedian” may refer to the contradictory sentiments which both the poetic subject and the Angolan people have concerning their city; yet, the perspective is that of the lover, a very intimate experience of the nation. The “insónia” which brings about this relationship (and from which the title is born) emphasizes further the complexity of the exchange – the poetic subject adores the city for what it is in a half-dream state, while the city must continue to live in such a state in order that the dream of the nation still exist. The poem finishes with the verse “E é quase um crime trazer-te à realidade,” yet again pointing toward such a message. Essentially, and as part of a larger system in the Lusophone poetic concerning the female body as both object of the lover’s gaze and metaphor for the nation, what looks to be a love poem may actually refer to a larger issue of national/individual identity.

224  Robert Simon The final poem of the collection in Portuguese, “Nas Calemas”7 (“In the Waves”) also demonstrates the social thematic within a superficially non-social allegory:8 Se ficarmos só areia é tudo natureza nem há que protestar pela franqueza do mar Calemas vêm já no nosso calendário não interessa chorar monotonia de que não vai mudar o mar foi sempre igual erguendo vagas arrastando pragas mas também boas promessas por vezes submersas mas marés [If we become only sand everything is nature it is not even necessary to protest from the frankness of the sea Waves come according to our calendar it does not help to cry monotony since it will not change the sea was always the same lifting spaces dragging plagues yet also good promises at times submersed yet tides]

(1984: 16)

The short poem relies on two basic symbols, that of the “calemas” and that of the submersed object, in this case, the “good promises.” The poetic subject both loathes the monotony of the waves and looks forward to the possibilities each “calema” brings with it for some new “promise” washed up on shore. Of course,

The work of Manuel Rui  225 taking the work’s thematic and this study’s analysis into account, it should be evident that the contextualized poetic subject is speaking of the monotony of the social ills which had so far continued the country’s destruction and disunity, and the simultaneous promise of a better future and possibility for something even worse (v.11–12, “lifting spaces/dragging plagues”). The reader may then perceive of the complex nature of Angolan post-independence identity, one which speaks of a hope yet tempered with the stark and repetitive reality in which the poetic subject must survive. In comparison, Rui’s later work titled Ombela (2006) differs substantially in form and theme from the previous one studied here, in that any clear social issues become even more subsumed in an intimate allegory, based within a rich symbolic natural pantheon. It reveals an evolution of Rui’s work away from relatively overt sociopolitical poetic discourse (always within, of course, an intimately rooted epistemological framework) of his first collections.9 The poems also appear in a bilingual edition in Portuguese on the left side and Ombundu on the right (we should note that even the title, Ombela, means “rain” in Ombundu). These prose poems with parallel text in each language may desire to express an appreciation for other Angolan languages, despite the process of linguistic uniformity in the country which has come to light in various critical works and in several fields. As seen in Derrida’s seminal work, Glas, the concept of “différance” appears by way of simultaneous and parallel texts connoting a space for a relative and traceable locus for denatured yet perceivable understanding between them, an effect of being “suspended in a metastatic state” (Leavy 2008: 64), or the consequence of the constant transition between the two parallel, translated/ translatable texts. It may then be asserted that, in according with our interpretation of Derrida’s own ideas of literature as being “um gesto que se constrói a partir das ruínas de um monumento que nunca chegou a existir” [“a gesture which is built from the ruins of a monument that never came to exist”] (Guimarães 2011: 246), the use of blank space above and between the parallel sets of verses and the abstraction inherent in the act of denaturing language(s) from a common meaning would actually create a new, if not more readable, meaning. In Ombela, the abundant blank space on each page and parallel texts then imply a mirroring of the Derridean technique. It is also possible that this space may serve as a locus for unread and metalinguistic communication between the two tendencies (one toward Portuguese, the other toward Ombundu and/or other pre-colonial languages in Angola), a possibility supported by the author’s own biography. This prospect would fit well with the other Derridean ideas expressed here, at least in a more altruistic way, as well as for the general notion of “decontinentialization” commented above. In any case, the work may serve as an intimate symbolic and simultaneous national allegory, as do so many of his works of both poetry and prose. We may characterize his work as harnessing the ironic nature of the promise of an Angola panacea, following by a “corrupt” and broken society after 1975 (Arenas 2012: 161–163). The underlying theme of language is, concomitantly, vital to the work: the poetic subject has gone so far as to divide it into chapter-like poetic narratives

226  Robert Simon called “palavras,” or “words.” Along with the theme of creation and the symbolic use of the feminine self as both nature and as the nurturer of a new world, the reader perceives the notion that the poetic word bears others, and as such, becomes fruitful when uttered.10 The allegory stretches across the symbolic, thus, into the realm of the political, social, and metonymic. The first sentence of the collection’s first poem, “1ª Palavra,” uses zeugmas to engender a scene which signifies the beginning of a process of creation: “Um pássaro minúsculo de azul inventado em sílaba de mato mangal de mar mabangas em rumores de areia a filtrar a água relâmpago da placenta submersa” [A miniscule, blue bird invented in syllables of mangrove forests of a ‘mabanga’ sea in soft sounds of sand filtering water thunder of a submersed placenta”] (8). The symbols of femininity and the process of birth here seem abundant – nature protects the submerged “placenta” as it gives life to a new world. Moreover, and in speaking of the theme of language use, the presence of a word like “mabanga,”11 unknown in Continental Portuguese, serves as an example of accepted Angolan Portuguese, since the word exists only there and is recognizably Angolan outside of the country.12 Near the end of this first poem-chapter, the poetic subject states: “Eu? Eu sou a chuva trago todas as sílabas e digo a palavra. . . . ” [“I? I am the rain I bring all syllables and say all words. . . . ”] (2006: 12) The incorporation of the self into a greater, natural discourse (again, a motif in contemporary Angolan lyric) appears as a continuation of that process of birth and the nurturing of life. It is vital to note that the subject continues repeating, emphatically, that “Eu sou a chuva!” (2006: 14), or the rain from which the poem’s title comes and which gives life. This seeming self-importance within the allegory of the natural as a representation of poetry’s creation makes perfect sense when seen as part of a greater insertion of the self into the intimate process of poetic expression and the building of a new world through such a process. The poetic subject reveals itself as the “mulher amada/de água” [“loved woman/ of water”] (2006: 14), the female whose reproductive power invoke images of a sort of “mother nature” as both creator and expresser of such a world. This figure continues to evolve through the work. As an example, at the “11ª Palavra,” the first section begins with the word “Okalusimba” (2006: 72). Interestingly, this word is given its own footnote with the definition “-que não chega ao sítio onde está” [“which doesn’t arrive to the place where it is”]. This is a rare instance in the work for which a word in Ombundu is not either translated into “standard” Portuguese or assumed to be part of the Angolan Portuguese lexicon. Perhaps the author believed this to be a word which, while recognizable among Ombundu speakers (whose numbers are relatively few despite the obvious intent to build a space of equality between the languages). The word’s meaning implies duality of presence/absence and, as

The work of Manuel Rui 227 such, the binary oppositions inherent to a mystical space and time.13 The notions of distance and intimacy, along with a subtle voyeurism in the poetic subject’s nakedness (“só para me verem chover . . . eu estou toda nua e ando a chover onde não chovo só me podem ver . . . ”) [“only to see me rain . . . I am nude and walk and rain where I do not rain they can only see me. . . . ”] (2006: 72) also pervades the lyrical discourse. Again, as a narrative of self and poetic creation, these verses speak of the public spectacle of art and the vulnerability which the poetic subject may feel upon “raining down” onto the land for others to see. These others run from her, for which she states “não fujam. . . . ” [“do not flee. . . . ”] (2006: 72). As for the distance, again, there exists both a purity in the relationship between reader and read, as well as a unilateral perspective on it since only the poetic subject feeds the land; the land cannot do so for the poetic subject. This becomes so apparent that later on the poetic subject states, in what seems like both an erotic and symbolic gesture, “as mãos dos homens não me tocam mas desejam-me” [men’s hands do not touch me yet they desire me] (2006: 74). The final moments of the poem relate to both this eroticism (“Onde não estou tenho meus orgasmos de prazer imenso juntamente nos horários/dos orgasmos do sol” [“Where I am not I have my orgasms of immense pleasure together with/the orgasms of the sun”] (2006: 74, 76) and the peculiar bilingualism which the reader perceives in the beginning of the poem. The words “onjamba,” or “twin,” and “ekumbi,” or “sun,” (the latter of which has already appeared in Portuguese) again have their own footnotes, despite appearing also in Ombundu on the right side of the page (as an example, “ . . . pole citava okuti ombela kwenda onduko ikwavo onjamba akukala londuko yekumbi” (2006: 77) appear as the Ombundu expression of the verses translated above into English). We will discuss the nature of language use later on; for now, the notion that an eroticized relationship between rain and sun, or between the poetic subject and greater forces of nature, may frighten yet also nurture and feed them takes a central importance. In sum, Ombela presents a nuanced vision of how society and nature may function as a symbolic representation of the need for a tolerant, culturally polyvalent Angola. This idea differs from the push toward a more monolithic national identity; yet, we may also sense it as in tune with the utopian desire for a diverse and accepting society (at least in general, linguistic and cultural terms). As a purely bilingual text, the collection makes evident the subtleties of each language, while simultaneously delineating the challenge of building a nation by way of an appreciation for the belief systems and various socio-cultural strata involved. The interpretation of the use of blank space as a marker of Derridean trace also fits into this complex, yet not undecipherable, society of nurturing which Rui’s poetic subject encapsulates. O Semba da Nova Ortografia [The Semba of the New Orthography] is an inviting chapbook made up, essentially, of a long poem somewhat divided in sections (although these tend to run together in such a way that it is difficult, as a reader, to see them as truly separate pieces). One of Rui’s more recent works (published in 2009), it characterizes much of what previous poetic accomplishments have offered in thematic terms but within a novel and previously unforeseen topic of artistic conversation. In an unexpected way, it also will reflect the issues of linguistic and cultural diversity in contemporary Angola, and in particular, within the

228  Robert Simon context of pressure to engender a more unified national identity for individuals as well as the population as a whole. O Semba is meant as a brief commentary on some of the changes which the most recent Acordo Ortográfico [Orthographic Accord] has specified. In principle and according to Rui himself in a brief correspondence in January  2016, the work is [“destined to aid in the learning of the new orthography (to) which Angola subscribed but never again ratified”] “destinado a ajudar a aprendizagem da nova ortografia que Angola subscreveu e nunca mais ratificou” (Rui 2016: par 1). There is a palpable nuance in this statement which we may also find embedded in the work: the desire to follow the agreements with other Lusophone countries in terms of linguistic progress (insofar as we may assume), while simultaneously commenting on the odd imposition of an un-ratified, yet wholly adopted, dactylographic standpoint. As the work progresses, the reader verifies this mixed feeling concerning the superficial purpose of the work in conjunction, and at times opposition, to its true meaning. The first several stanzas of the work highlight the purpose and principal thematic of the work, while also revealing other rhetorical devices necessary for the comprehension of Rui’s deeper message: Ler em voz alta é declinar a vida inteira das Palavras escritas Agora mais bonitas do que antes Pois foram libertadas consoantes Aquelas que estavam escritas mas não se liam coitadas Ficavam mudas e não se ouviam porque tristes e amuadas. Abaixo o protecionismo que agora perdeu um cê E também a reação O abstracionismo é uma maneira de ver Mas o acionamento do voto é um dever Muito mais fácil de exercer com um cê a menos Porém quando articulado Vai de regra com o cê Na palavra faccioso Reparem que o cê tem trabalho Como em friccionar Diferente de antigamente Em que o cê de refe ctir Tinha lugar sem servir Zarpou e eu em vez de refletir Deu-me vontade de rir De ver o cê a bazar!

The work of Manuel Rui 229 Era assim antes actual o cê desaproveitado Agora escreve-se atual e atualmente Tal e qual como se lê! Que lindo e tão simples Como confecionar papagaios de papel Também sem mais aquele cê que não ia voar Só por estar Sem ser articulado E sendo assim detetado Deixou de ser ativado Mas se o cê estiver a trabalhar num texto ficcional Continua muito bem ortografado E o cê a cantar que Agora Até que enfim Vou-me embora Da mudez De emprego desempregado Só fico para outras palavras Onde seja articulado. Não fazia nada em atual Mas fazia e continua a fazer Na palavra ficcional. Mas tomem muita atenção Que já não se escreve acção Um cê também foi embora Nesta nova projeção que também perdeu o cê Como acontece em ação E na nossa ortografia Vamos embora para a frente Aliviando as palavras de tanto cê indolente E sem qualquer distração Um pedaço é uma fração Contra a lei é infração Esta nova ortografia é uma boa Para no CAN o mangolé-mangolá Só ter uma direção FORÇA ANGOLA! FORÇA PALANCA-NEGRA NOSSA ÓTIMA SELEÇÃO!

230  Robert Simon [Reading out loud is to refuse the full life of Written words More beautiful now than before Since consonants have been freed Those who were written but not read poor things They stayed mute and were not heard from being sad and tired. Under “protectionism” (protecionismo) which has now lost a “c” And also the “reaction” (reação) “Abstractionism” (abstracionismo) is a way of seeing But the “action” (acionamento) of voting is an obligation Much easier to perform with a “c” fewer Yet when articulated With the “c” it follows the rules In the word “factious” (faccioso) See how the “c” has work to do Such as in “to rub” (friccionar) Different from in the old days When the “c” in “reflect” (reflectir) Had its place for free It left and I instead of “reflecting” (refletir) It made me want to laugh from seeing the “c” at the bazaar! It was like this before “nowadays” (actual) the wasted “c” How it is written “atual” and “atualmente” Just like you read it! How pretty and so simple Like “making” (confecionar) paper kites Also no longer with that “c” that would never fly Just for being there without being spoken And being as such “detected” (detetado) Stopped being “activated” (ativado) Yet if the “c” should be working in a “fictional” (ficcional) text It continues to be well written And the “c” singing that Now Finally I am leaving My silence Of unused use

The work of Manuel Rui  231 I remain for other words Where I may be pronounced. I didn’t do anything in “atual” But I did and continue to do In the word “ficcional.” But play close attention Since you no longer write “action” (acção) A “c” also has left This new “projection” (projeção) which as also lost a “c” As happens in “ação” And our orthography We leave for the front Alleviating the words with such an indolent “c” And without “distraction” (distração) A piece is a “fraction” (fração) Against the law of the “infraction” (infração) This new orthography is as good one For the ACN14 the mangolé-mangolá Is to have only one “direction” (direção) GO ANGOLA! GO PALANCA-NEGRA OUR AWESOME NATIONAL TEAM!]15 (Rui 2009: 11–14) This poem works on several levels, looking to link the new orthography with cultural and linguistic phenomenon which the general public may recognize. There is an evident focus on the orthographic changes which the newest “Acordo Ortográfico” had proposed and which have been adopted in all Lusophone countries. Here we may observe, then, an expected beginning – the poetic voice first draws attention to the positive, most concrete side of the new spelling in that it reflects better actual pronunciation. The use of anaphora highlights the changes toward a less antiquated form of writing. In theory, according to the poetic voice, this should free the writer/speaker from an unnecessary orthographic knowledge. By the second stanza, however, the notion of liberty from the first and second stanzas begins to erode with the ironic use of old and newer spellings (shown in bold over the whole of the cited stanzas) in juxtaposition and/or semiotic contrast. This happens in opposition to the simpler, more positive approach in the first stanzas. It is the “song” making up the third stanza which brings about an explicit indication that, perhaps, the poem is not so much an approval as it could be a commentary. The juxtaposition of “atual” with “ficcional,” both spelled as pronounced but the latter using the “c” which the former has dropped, strikes the reader as humorous since the idea of something happening now in the real world with something created in abject opposition to it.

232  Robert Simon At this point in the poem, then, the reader is faced with the possibility that other words noted over the course of the poem may also hold another meaning, in symbolic resonance with the kind of critical eye pervading Rui’s previous poetic works. Terms such as “protectionism” and “action,” as well as words pertaining to the areas of law and actuality, are modified, yet “fictional” is not. Given the intimate and social combinations of Rui’s poetry, it may be possible to infer an implicit, if not at least partial, self-awareness of this selectivity.16 The final stanza of the cited verses moves into the realm of soccer, an evidently popular sport which draws the attention of the population as a whole and serves as a national spectacle in the majority of countries on the planet. In this case, the idea of attending a soccer match and cheering on the national team serves as a point of arrival for the poetic voice, rather than as a moment of linguistic shifting. We may then return to the notions of the spectacle and that of the “fictional” as reference points for a secondary interpretation of the Orthographic Accord, as well as taking into account Rui’s own correspondence concerning the imposition of this new system. There is perhaps a criticism of its implantation made here, in that the only element of the new dactylographic matrix which does not bend toward the new rules is the idea of fiction, of the unreal as reflecting a flawed reality (an idea on which Arenas has commented in his writings on Rui’s prose). The unreal extends into the soccer field in the historical anachronism of the “distraction” of the populace and of the individual which it represents, to the point at which even the poetic voice has shifted from commenting on changes in legal terms to yelling “go team” for Angola at the African Cup of Nations. The individual, then, becomes subsumed in the larger process of national consolidation with the use of a new writing system as one in a plethora of tools utilized to this end. The positive message from the first stanza, in this context, is deconstructed and, as such, loses its authority over the reader. This deconstruction happens at important intervals in the poem. For example: Aceção não leva pê Nem tão pouco deceção Fica mais suave e simples Mas quando o pê se articula Sem qualquer interrupção E fica mesmo naquela De nome corrupção. [‘Meaning’ (Aceção) does not have a “p” Nor does “deception” (deceção) It is smoother and easier But when the “p” is pronounced Without any “interruption” (interrupção) And it certainly remains in the one With the name “corruption” (corrupção).] (2009: 17)

The work of Manuel Rui  233 Here the juxtapositions become more acerbic, placing the notion of meaning against the idea of interruption, or the censuring of meaning, and deception with corruption. The spelling choices, then, connote a referentiality of past to present, or the old corrupt ways with the new meaning through silence. Again, even though on the surface this seems a rhythmic way of describing a somewhat confusing new set of orthographic rules, the implicit criticism may be found upon further analysis. Several more examples of this occur until the final stanza, a sort of conclusion to the discussion the poetic voice raises in the work: Quem sabe, noutro momento Volte por algum querer No vir da chuva ou do vento Que estas de ortografia São boas para não parar E andar para a frente é mudar No semba da ortografia Passadas novas nos pês Cantares e cantares nos cês Aiué vamos dançar Esta nova ortografia Cantada na fantasia Dos braços caligrafia Xinguilando17 o verbo amar. [“Who knows, some other time It18 may return through some desire In the coming of rain or wind That these things about orthography Are good for not stopping And walking forward is change In the Semba of orthography New steps in the “p”s Songs and songs in the “c”s Hey let’s dance This new orthography Sung in fantasy From our arms calligraphy Entering the verb love into the ancestral trance]19 (2009: 22) The return to the idea of “xinguilar” brings the process full circle. Rain/wind, Ombela, natural symbols whose semiotic transfer between language and the human life cycle cannot be ignored. The notion of “querer,” or wanting/desire,

234  Robert Simon relates to nature as a fecund, seductive force; while in the former work this represented an individual perspective on a social ill, here it means to support the poetic voice’s wish to continue moving “forward” and progressing into modern times. However, the “semba” and “xinguilar” serve as a counterpoint to these verses, thereby re-inserting the nuance of a multifaceted temporal and spatial discourse within the framework of contemporary Angolan language and the desire to make more monolithic her cultures. Language must then nurture the people, not for the sake of a greater power’s wishes but for the prosperity of the people themselves. In sum, O Semba da Nova Ortografia touches on two core themes in Rui’s poetry which are not without precedent in contemporary Angolan poetics. The first, the theme of national solidarity, is not spoken explicitly. Rather, it makes itself known through references to cultural manifestations both in common with the general interests (such as the effervescent national fervor which springs forth during an international soccer match) and the lesser celebrated but very present non-European, or without direct influence or interference from European, cultural manifestations. The semba and the language associated with it serve to exemplify this. The second, language, overlaps with the first (particularly in this work, dedicated of course to the imposed changes to the written language) in both scope and intensity. The combination of the new, international standard of written Portuguese and the applicability of specifically Angolan lexical markers lays bare the beauty, irony, and perhaps violence of interference not from the former colonizer, but from the governing body which seeks to impose its norms on the individual and social body of the masses. When taken together, these thematic approaches and their subsequent results reveal the very personal struggle (yet easily brought into the more social realm by virtue of the notion of collectivities and their rituals) of living in a complex society whose various cultural, political, and linguistic manifestations cannot lose their interconnectivity. Manuel Rui’s verses, as we have seen, are rooted in an intimate and personal framework whose social and national themes find expression implicitly and through a nuanced web of natural (in reference to the natural pantheon), social, political, and finally (meta)linguistic symbols. Each of the poetic collections analyzed above has expressed both an adoration for the ideal of nation and some of the realities of its manifestations in the current temporal and spatial context. Allegories of love and nature, while normally associated with a poetic tradition of orality and, at times, combined with influences from the former colonizers’ literary traditions, function more so as commentaries on the challenges which the nascent Angolan nation currently faces. In essence, the poetic subject’s exploration of the self, occurring in a culturally and linguistically complex context of overlapping and competing discourses of power and epistemologies of identity, form a matrix through which the notions of bilingualism and love for country are mitigated by history and beliefs. This process does not evolve in an imposing way, insofar as Rui’s prose works would have expressed; rather, it serves as a reminder of the path the nation has taken, its potential affirmation for each individual, and the capacity for love and violence in this relatively new nation’s political and cultural evolution. The national has become the post-national, the expression from

The work of Manuel Rui  235 beyond merely the nation-state, for which Rui’s readers will find the profoundness of his poetry evident.

Notes 1 Such a shift in interpretation makes yet more evident the need to re-examine the general understanding of Angolan poetry’s overall development, and thus, emphasize the secondary purpose of the present study, that of revealing an alternative approach to the reading and analysis of Angolan poetics in the final quarter of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. 2 For more information, please consult Chabal (1996, 2002). 3 For more information, please consult Matta (2001). 4 It should be noted that Macêdo’s article serves as an initial comparison between the figure of the “malandro,” or crook, in contemporary Brazilian letters and those of Angola in an attempt to draw arguable comparisons between them. There is a particular focus on the definition of the term “malandro,” which the reader would find functional for cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. As such, the use of the term “maladragem” in the quote above does not reflect a vision of the people of Angola; rather, it means to highlight the changes in what the Brazilian critic believes to be the Angolan “malandro” in Rui’s novels and stories. 5 Chabal has seen this usage as having so penetrated the more standardized language readers would have been used to that he has designated it “[an] ‘Angolan’ Portuguese language” (“Aspects,” 27). 6 It is useful to note, yet again, that a “constructive” poetic does not need to focus entirely on the self; rather, it may delve into sociopolitical issues insofar as the personages describing, narrating, etc., utilize a personal and more subjective voice, rather than attempting an objective one such as the poetic voice of Agostinho Neto’s Sagrada Esperança. 7 The word “calema” refers to an occurrence along the Western African coast in which the energy of several waves merges close to the shore pushing loudly upon the beach. 8 The final poem of the collection, “Patos Fora,” with the exception of the title, is written in Spanish. 9 As I  argue in a book currently under contract, the differentiation of “constructive” and “epic” poetic postures begins to break down in writers of the post-independence period. Rui’s verses, although not so extremely different between the decades, point toward this tendency for intimate, critical discourse in the poets who succeeded him. 10 We see this phenomenon in poetry in both Angola and Portugal over the 1980s and 1990s in writers such as the Portuguese writer and activist Joaquim Pessoa, and in the work of the aforementioned Angolan author and scholar, Ana Paula Tavares. 11 This is a type of shellfish. 12 The overlaying of a word from one tradition with references that modify its meaning in the new lexographic context may be considered a type of “grafting,” a technique on which Lozier (2008) comments in her article on Derrida and Genet (58–61). 13 We may again refer to the more recent poetry of Ana Paula Tavares, also from the central plains (Huíla) and expressing a similar dichotomy. 14 The “African Cup of Nations,” known in Portuguese as the CAN, or “Campeonato Africano das Nações,” is one of the principal soccer competitions on the continent. 15 For this translation, I have chosen to leave the original words in Portuguese in parenthesis unless repeated, for which I place them in quotes. 16 We should note that in many dialects of Portuguese the word “ficcional” is pronounced “ficional,” and is written as such in Brazilian Portuguese. 17 The verb “xinguilar” is a specifically Angolan Portuguese word meaning to enter into a trance during a spiritual ritual. It is associated with ancestral beliefs.

236  Robert Simon 18 “It” here refers to the poetic commentary (21) on the removal of the hyphen in certain compound words in Angolan and European Portuguese, which had been common throughout the twentieth century. 19 See note 15.

Works cited Afolabi, O. O. (1997) “Regeneration in Lusophone African Literature: Subversion in the Works of Luís Bernardo Honwana, Manuel Rui, Mia Couto, and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa.” Unpublished Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Arenas, F. (2012) “Manuel Rui.” In M. Rector and R. Vernon (eds.), African Lusophone Writers. Detroit, MI: Gale, 159–164. Chabal, P. (1996) “Introduction.” In P. Chabal (ed.), The Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP. Chabal, P. (2002) “Part I: Lusophone Africa in Historical and Comparative Perspective.” In P. Chabal (ed.), A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 3–136. Guimarães, R. (2011) “Os Outros do outro: o espaço da alteridade no pensamento de Octavio Paz, Emmanuel Lévinas e Jean-Paul Sartre.” Revista de Letras, 51.2: 245–263. Leavy, J. (2008) “Contretemps: Qu’est-ce qui Arrive? – Two Texts, Divided in Two, After Glas: What? Who?” Discourse, 30.1–2 (Winter–Spring): 54–70. Lozier, C. (2008) “Becoming a Monstrous Text? The Process of Grafting in the Work of Jean Genet and Jacques Derrida’s Glas.” Graft and Transplant, 1.1: 58–66. Macêdo, T. (2006) “Angola e Brasil: Com os Malandros em Cena.” In R. Chaves, C. Secco and T. Macêdo (eds.), Brasil/África: Como se o Mar fosse Mentira. São Paulo: Universidade Estadual Paulista, 53–67. Print. Matta, I. (2001) Literatura Angolana: silêncios e falas de uma voz inquieta. Mar Além: Lisboa. Rui, M. (1984) Onze Poemas em Novembro (Ano Sete). Luanda: Cadernos 50, Lavra e Oficina (União de Escritores Angolanos). Rui, M. (2006) Ombela. Luanda: Editorial Nzila. Rui, M. (2009) O Semba da Nova Ortografia. Luanda: União dos Escritores Angolanos. Rui, M. (2016) e-mail correspondence, January 16. Vianna, M. F. (2006) “Manuel Rui: Uma Flor para Angola.” In M. T. Salgado and M. do C. Sepúlveda (eds.), África e Brasil: Letras em Laços. São Caetano do Sul: Yendis, 246–266.

Part III

Identitarian reflections

12 Citizenship and freedom in the Black Atlantic after 1945 – context and challenge Cary Fraser

In 1977, Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness Movement leader in South Africa, was killed while in the custody of police in the apartheid state as it confronted the growing challenge from communities of colour seeking their freedom and full citizenship. His death sparked a protest movement among students that lasted for more than a decade and led to the end of the apartheid state. The adoption of a new Constitution resulted in the election by popular majority of a government in 1994, and the elevation of Nelson Mandela to the role of President. Mandela was the leader of the African Nationalist Congress who had been jailed for his clandestine political activities after having been captured in 1962 – reportedly on the basis of information provided by the American Central Intelligence Agency.1 The American role in helping to frustrate the popular challenge to the white minority-based apartheid regime prior to 1992 in South Africa was one dimension of the American centuries-long role in promoting the politics of white supremacy and its corollary, black subjugation, in the Atlantic world. The United States was itself confronted by the rising challenge to the Jim Crow order within American life in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. By the early 1960s, American culture and politics was being shaken by the rise of the civil rights movement spearheaded by the African-American community, with support from whites and other communities of color in America. That movement paved the way for the legal reforms that sought to create a society based upon the idea of racial equality and the removal of barriers to equal citizenship for people of color in American life. The struggle for legal reform made considerable strides in redefining the legal status of African-Americans within the United States by 1968, but it also provoked a backlash among various sectors of the white majority – a backlash that still animates American life in the new millennium. The 1960s in the United States was also defined by the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy – key figures in the struggle to move Americans beyond the culture and structure of Jim Crow life. In effect, the stories of South Africa and the United States were part of the larger post-1945 Black Atlantic context in which the simultaneous struggle against European colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean, Jim Crow in the United States, and apartheid in South Africa, redefined the notions of freedom and citizenship

240  Cary Fraser in the Atlantic World. The communities of African descent across the Atlantic mounted a sustained challenge to the centuries-old order of white supremacy in its manifold forms that had emerged from the era of European expansion after 1492. In brief, the challenge to colonial rule, Jim Crow, and Apartheid represented a struggle against compromised citizenship by Africans, and others of African descent, in their societies of origin and in the other societies of the Atlantic world to which they were transplanted – first by slavery and, later, by migration. The struggle against the Jim Crow order in American life became a stimulus to the challenge to colonial rule among African and Caribbean communities in the Atlantic World – even as the de-colonization process also became a catalyst for international pressures upon America to transform its domestic racial regime and its relations with its own colonial possessions. The British government introduced universal suffrage in Jamaica in 1944 as part of its strategy of colonial reform in the Caribbean adopted after the riots and disturbances of the 1930s. This extension of the suffrage – in a black-majority colony in the Caribbean – was a major initiative for colonial reform prior to 1945. It was a precedent that led to a process of progressive self-government and, eventually, independence for other British colonies in the Caribbean and Africa after 1945. By 1957, the British government conceded independence to its Gold Coast colony, which was renamed Ghana. It was perhaps serendipitous that independence for Ghana came on March  6, 1957  – the centenary of the Dred Scot decision delivered by the United States Supreme Court which had asserted that people of African descent in the United States should not be eligible for citizenship within the United States. Further, in 1957, the Eisenhower administration – in collaboration with the Democratic Senate Majority leader, Lyndon Johnson – enacted legislation designed to restore voting rights to people of color in the United States as part of the effort to address the obstacles that defined their compromised citizenship status. The bipartisan effort to provide redress against the Jim Crow order in the United States was one consequence of the tragedy triggered by ideas of racial supremacy that had evolved as the handmaiden of the European colonial enterprise in the non-European world – and which was deployed with devastating effect upon European minority groups in Europe during the 1939–1945 war. In effect, the post-1945 drive for de-colonization, the challenges to Jim Crow, and the struggle to end apartheid marked the dawn of a new era in the Atlantic World. The recognition of new possibilities for the redefinition of the role and status of African and African-descent communities in the Atlantic World, opened a series of intense and extended debate among intellectuals in Africa and in the diaspora. This debate focused upon the possibilities and processes for intellectual and political liberation leading to social transformation in communities/societies of the Black Atlantic world. As a consequence, these intellectuals became engaged in a self-conscious project of creating a culture of resistance and renewal – for both the individuals and the larger communities with which they identified. They were engaged in confronting societies that represented, in extremis, the cohabitation of the torments of the colonial era and the impetus for post-colonial transformation that has since defined contemporary societies in the Black Atlantic. These myriad

Citizenship and freedom  241 struggles shared certain commonalities: first, overcoming the colonial imperatives of racial subjugation; second, dismantling the politics of dispossession and “separate/native” development  – by virtue of colonial state policy driving the exploitation and distribution of resources including land; and, third, confronting the oligarchic cultures of power embodied within state structures that were/are ostensibly democratic in design. These structures of inequality that constituted the architecture of colonial rule remain defining characteristics of these societies well after colonial rule ended. In sum, it is possible to argue that the historical evolution of these Atlantic societies suggest that the post-colonial context has been but a variation upon the themes that defined the colonial era, and the legacies of the culture of fear derived from ideologies and policies of dispossession which informed colonial rule perpetuates the politics of oppression in the post-colonial context. As a consequence, the transition from colonial polity to post-colonial state may imply a change in the institutional framework of governance, and a change in political status of an individual from colonial subject to post-colonial citizen – but the end of colonial rule has not had the salutary transformative consequences that were promised by many nationalist leaders in the Black Atlantic. Nor have the legacies of the civil rights struggle proven to be immutable as de facto segregation on grounds of race continue to define much of America’s landscape – notwithstanding the election of Barack Obama as President. In South Africa, similarly, the end of apartheid has yet to translate into the reduction of the stark inequity that defined the politics of apartheid under black-majority rule. Oppression in many societies of the Black Atlantic has continued despite the changes in institutional structures and in political status that result from the end of colonial rule, Jim Crow, and apartheid. The politics of oppression and compromised citizenship in former colonial societies of the Black Atlantic has been accompanied by the demographic changes that have occurred in the Euro-Atlantic societies which were colonial powers. After 1945, the Europeans encouraged migration from their former colonies to address the shortage of labour that had resulted from the Great European Wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945. That migration has sparked the debates about colonialism and its legacies within the European states where the migrants and their descendants are domiciled – often under conditions of marginalization and oppression. The legacies of empire have evolved into domestic problems that are located within the imperial centres – and the political consequences resulting therefrom are reshaping these post-imperial states. The 1966 observation offered by Louise Bennett, the Jamaican poet and folklorist, that Jamaican migration to England after 1945 represented a process of “colonization in reverse” has acquired a French counterpart in Michelle Houellebecq’s provocative novel Soumission/ Submission in which he speculates about the election of a Muslim President in France. Among the interesting consequences of this migration are the transformation of the urban landscapes and demography of major European capitals such as London and Paris, and the politics of marginalization that is a marked feature of these immigrant communities in their new homelands.

242  Cary Fraser In effect, race as a marker of compromised citizenship is a fundamental construct of the social order in societies that compose the Black Atlantic and the struggle over racial equality and the politics of representation remains a pivotal issue for the past, present, and future of these societies. The politics of participation, and the terms of such participation, within many of these societies remain clouded by the history of colonial/imperial regimes that fostered identity in terms of race as the basis of governance. In these societies, the idea of race has stultified intellectual development across the board simply because race is an imaginary – or more accurately, a series of imaginaries – which created the logic of governance under the colonial order and continue to define the post-colonial order. In sum, the legacy of slavery and racial subordination weighs heavily upon the present and future of the Atlantic world through the persistence of compromised citizenship as a foundation of the social order – in both post-colonial and post-imperial states.2

The intellectual challenge It was against this backdrop of compromised citizenship that Black Atlantic intellectuals began to articulate the fundamental challenges that required them to reconstitute their identities and transform the societal contexts within which they lived by confronting the politics of racial oppression. The challenge posed by this issue was captured in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, where he wrote: “What I want to do is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment.” Later, Steve Biko, in the profundity of his wisdom drawn from the struggle against apartheid, offered a powerful insight into the predicament of South Africa and other post-colonial societies – The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed (Speech in Cape Town, 1971). In effect, both Fanon and Biko had captured the problematique of self-transformation within the politics of subjugation in the Atlantic World – the need to articulate a vision of humanity that would dismantle the idea/reality of racial hierarchies within society and the politics of oppression and marginalization which had been shaped by the European colonial projects. The rest of this chapter will explore the evolution/transformation of sensibility and the ways in which intellectuals from Africa, North America, and the Caribbean have grappled with “being” in the post-colonial Black Atlantic context – a process which began in the 1940s and is yet to be resolved seven decades later. In effect, for the intellectuals the goal of any serious post-colonial project required liberating “the mind of the oppressed” from “the hands of the oppressor” – as a precondition for the transformation of the “colonial subject” into the “citizen of a free state.” This imposed a double obligation upon the intellectuals to chart a path away from the colonial project and to provide the signposts for themselves and the wider communities in which they claim(ed) citizenship. As Martin Carter, one of the most enigmatic and brilliant Caribbean intellectuals of the post-1945 era, wrote in his May 1958 essay “Artist as Artist”: And may I say too that the job of the artist and intellectual in the West Indies is no different from the job of the artist and intellectual in every part of the

Citizenship and freedom  243 world. We are concerned always with the human condition and the establishment of value. Everything is to be taken in the hand and transformed and given meaning. (1993a: 128) Carter, in 1958, was making the case for agency by intellectuals in the British West Indian colonies in the effort to reshape the imagination and context of social life in the region. In an earlier essay in January 1958, “Sensibility and the Search” – Carter wrote: to live here and have our being here denotes immediately a particular kind of sensibility, derived from the actuality of slavery, and a particular kind of status, derived from the actuality of colonial life. I contend too that the sensibility of the slave and the status of the colonial combine to make us what we are, in the innermost meaning of the term . . . our status as colonial will change when our sensibility is transformed, and with the transformation of our sensibility will come the birth of a people. (1993b: 77) Carter captured the fundamental challenge that confronts the citizens, societies, and states in the Black Atlantic in the post-colonial context – “the transformation of . . . sensibility” required to ensure “the birth of a people.” In effect, Carter proposed a very simple strategy for the transition away from colonialism as political and intellectual context – the transformation of sensibility as a precondition and catalyst for social change and intellectual regeneration. Carter’s insight is validated by the experience of several leading intellectuals from the Black Atlantic who have addressed this issue from a variety of national perspectives. There was a process of cross-fertilization of ideas in which the Black Atlantic intellectuals were participants, and that process of cross-fertilization, it is arguable, helped to shape the idea of the Black Atlantic as a culture sphere and the transformation of sensibility emerged as both an individual and collective endeavor. In effect, the emergence of these solidarities across geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries provided a strategy for reconfiguring the terms of reference for those who wished – in Biko’s terms – “to free the mind of the oppressed from the hands of the oppressor.” In exploring the politics of solidarity and the transformation of sensibility, Martin Luther King Jr. – the African-American leader – provides an interesting point of departure. From his visit to Ghana in March 1957 to attend the country’s independence celebrations until his death in 1968, King recognized that the challenges faced by African-Americans to resolve the post-colonial dilemma of compromised citizenship was intimately connected with, and could be positively influenced by the post-1945 de-colonization struggle in Africa. On the night of Ghana’s independence, in Accra, King gave an interview to an American journalist in which he said: I think this event, the birth of this new nation, will give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world. I think it will have worldwide implications and

244  Cary Fraser repercussions – not only for Asia and Africa, but also for America. As you well know, we have a problem in the Southland in America, and I think this freedom – the freedom in the birth of a new nation – will influence the situation there. This will become a sort of symbol for oppressed people all over the world. Just as in 1776 when America received its independence, a harbor of New York became a sort of a beacon of hope for thousands of oppressed people of Europe; and just as when after the French revolution Paris became a beacon of hope for hundreds and thousands of common people; now Ghana will become a symbol of hope for hundreds and thousands of oppressed people all over the world Africa and in Asia, and also oppressed peoples in other sections of the world. (1957: 146) Ghana in 1957 had become, like Haiti in 1804, a symbol of Black freedom in the Atlantic World. Even more interesting are the ways in which that visit to Ghana, and King’s return to the United States by way of London, led to a series of reflections which formed the basis of his sermon the next month at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.3 In that sermon, King advised his congregation that upon seeing the reality of Ghana’s independence, he recognized that: “This nation was now out of Egypt and had crossed the Red Sea. Now it will confront its wilderness.” He then advised that Ghana offered several important lessons for African Americans – “Things that we must never forget as we find ourselves breaking aloose from an evil Egypt, trying to move through the wilderness toward the promised land of cultural integration: Ghana has something to say to us.” King’s sojourn in Ghana had a catalytic effect upon his sensibility and sharpened his focus around shaping a political strategy for the legitimation of the African-American struggle against the Jim Crow regime in the United States. We should also keep in mind that Ghana was being led into political independence by Kwame Nkrumah who had studied at Lincoln University outside of Philadelphia during the Jim Crow era. Nkrumah had his early exposure to American life through his reading of W.E.B. Du Bois in the Gold Coast before embarking upon his course of study at Lincoln University. Thus, Ghanaian independence in 1957 was an incubator and symbol of a new sensibility and the locus of an increasingly vigorous search for a vision of political and intellectual liberation in the Black Atlantic. Even Richard Nixon  – an unlikely candidate for intellectual membership in the Black Atlantic world – recognized that the de-colonization of Africa would require the transformation of American sensibilities on the issue of race and the black freedom struggle. In a report to the President after attending Ghana’s independence celebration and visits to other African states including Morocco and Ethiopia, Nixon indicated: As a result of skillful propaganda primarily inspired by the enemies of freedom, a consistently distorted picture of the treatment of minority races in the United States is being effectively presented in the countries I visited. Every

Citizenship and freedom  245 instance of prejudice in this country is blown up in such a manner as to create a completely false impression of the attitudes and practices of the great majority of the American people. The result is irreparable damage to the cause of freedom which is at stake. (636) As a consequence, Nixon recognized that We cannot talk equality to the peoples of Africa and Asia and practice inequality in the United States. In the national interest, as well as for the moral issues involved, we must support the necessary steps which will assure orderly progress toward the elimination of discrimination in the United States. And we should do a far more effective job than we are presently doing in telling the true story of the real progress that is being made toward realizing this objective so that the people of Africa will have a true picture of conditions as they really are in the United States. (636–637) The irony that underpinned Nixon’s and King’s presence at the ceremonies for Ghana’s independence is that it is often not well recognized that Ghana’s independence occurred on March 6, 1957 – the 100th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision delivered on March 6, 1857, as pointed out earlier. Ghana’s independence was a catalyst for the American search for an alternative to its post-colonial dilemma, posed by the assumed inviolability of the colonial ideology of race as a marker of human inequality that had been articulated in the Dred Scott decision. The importance of Nixon’s presence in Ghana to celebrate political independence for Africans was the American domestic resistance to change illustrated in the intractability of the “American Dilemma” faced by African Americans trapped in Jim Crow’s nest.4 Nixon, in 1957, was relatively enlightened on issues of race in America and his report to the President conveyed his awareness of the absurd position in which the country found itself  – trailing a world shaken by the decolonization struggle which was largely moving beyond the anachronism that was Jim Crow America. Beyond the irony of the historical and political context of Ghana’s emergence at the intersection at independence with the centennial anniversary of the Dred Scott decision in American history, Ghana was a catalyst in the transformation of the sensibility of African Americans. In a speech in 1964 in London, a few days before he travelled to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize, King addressed this issue of a transformed sensibility among African Americans with a very succinct analysis of the challenges that had confronted them in the civil rights struggle and the way in which Ghana had helped to shape that new sensibility: While living with the conditions of slavery and then, later, segregation, many Negroes lost faith in themselves. Many came to feel that perhaps they were less than human. Many came to feel that they were inferior. This, it seems

246  Cary Fraser to me, is the greatest tragedy of slavery, the greatest tragedy of segregation, not merely what it does to the individual physically, but what it does to one psychologically. It scars the soul of the segregated as well as the segregator. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, while leaving the segregated with a false sense of inferiority. And this is exactly what happened. Then something happened to the Negro, and circumstances made it possible and necessary for him to travel more – the coming of the automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, the Great Depression. And so his rural plantation background gradually gave way to urban industrial life. His economic life was gradually rising through the growth of industry, the development of organized labor and expanded educational opportunities. And even his cultural life was gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. All of these forces conjoined to cause the Negro in America to take a new look at himself. Negro masses all over began to re-evaluate themselves. And then something else happened, along with all of this: The Negro in the United States turned his eyes and his mind to Africa, and he noticed the magnificent drama of independence taking place on the stage of African history. And noticing the developments and noticing what was happening and noticing what was being done on the part of his black brothers and sisters in Africa gave him a new sense of dignity in the United States and a new sense of self-respect. The Negro came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God loves all of his children and that all men are made in his image, and that the basic thing about a man is not his specificity, but his fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin, but his eternal dignity and worth. And so the Negro in America could now cry out unconsciously with the eloquent poet, “Fleecy locks, and black complexion cannot forfeit nature’s claim; Skin may differ, but affection dwells in black and white the same,” and, “Were I so tall as to reach the pole, or to grasp the ocean at a span, I must be measured by my soul; the mind is the standard of the man.” And with this new sense of dignity and this new sense of self-respect, a new Negro came into being with a new determination to suffer, to struggle, to sacrifice, and even to die, if necessary, in order to be free. In that speech, delivered 7 years after his visit to London following Ghana’s independence celebrations, King sought to illustrate the transformation of sensibility that had occurred among African Americans and the influence of African de-colonization as a catalyst in that process. His analysis of the shift in African American political and intellectual consciousness mirrored his own experience in 1957 – an interesting example of the symbiosis that informed the relationship between personal and social transformation in the Black Atlantic. The second African American intellectual who represents the symbiosis of personal and social transformation of sensibility is James Baldwin, the African American writer and essayist who has provided searing analyses of the

Citizenship and freedom  247 multiple traumas that have shaped the American order. Baldwin experienced a profound shift in sensibility while living in post-war Paris and that shift included an enhanced appreciation of the creative power of English as a language that would allow him to address the African American experience. Baldwin published an essay in 1964 in The Observer in London – “Why I stopped Hating Shakespeare” – in which he recounted the transformation of his own sensibility while living in France. He wrote: My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the language; but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test. Baldwin continued: Again, I was listening very hard to jazz and hoping, one day, to translate it into language, and Shakespeare’s bawdiness became very important to me, since bawdiness was one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous, loving, and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which the body contains, which Americans have mostly lost, which I had experienced only among Negroes, and of which I had then been taught to be ashamed. My relationship, then, to the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but more probably the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw.5 Beyond Baldwin’s lyricism in the essay, it is evident that having lived outside of the United States sharpened his perspective on the ways that his command of English as a writer could be used to reshape the analysis of American life and highlight the post-colonial absurdities that were abundant therein. In his earlier essay, My Dungeon Shook, a letter to his nephew, which was first published in December 1962 in The Progressive magazine, Baldwin spoke directly to the climate in the United States, which had been reshaped by the civil rights struggle: Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don’t be afraid. I  said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man’s definitions, by

248  Cary Fraser never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality.6 In these few lines, Baldwin captured the disoriented state of America in 1962 as the challenge to the ideology and politics of Jim Crow intensified. Baldwin published his essay prior to the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy during the period 1963–1968 and these events – amid increasing tension and violence that swept the society. In effect, in 1962 Baldwin had anticipated the agonies that shook the United States as the civil rights struggle discredited the legacies of the Jim Crow order that defined the United States. Baldwin had become the witness to the power of a changed sensibility among Americans who sought a respite from the quotidian tragedies that underpinned the Jim Crow order. Just as important, Baldwin’s exploration of William Shakespeare’s creativity which became the source of the English Bard’s greatness as a chronicler of human life that transcends the ages. In the 1964 Observer essay, Baldwin wrote: I still remember my shock when I finally heard these lines from the murder scene in Julius Caesar. The assassins are washing their hands in Caesar’s blood. Cassius says: Stoop then, and wash. – How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, In states unborn and accents yet unknown! It was a very trenchant observation made by Baldwin in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. It may also have captured his sense of foreboding about the possibility of real change in America  – given that the Jim Crow regime had been built upon the ruins of slavery that emerged from the bloody American Civil War. Baldwin recognized the homage to violence that had shaped American history and culture and, writing a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin – better than many of his contemporaries – perhaps understood the exorbitant blood price required to pay for any realistic effort to transform the politics of racial inequality in America. The immediacy of events heightened Baldwin’s sense of historical context in the early 1960s, and he later evoked the sense of despair that had shaken America in the wake of King’s assassination. Baldwin’s profound sense of irony was simply extraordinary  – then and now. Much has been made of Baldwin’s “anger” in his work, but his use of irony was a very powerful source of insight into the context and course of his life. He remained a persistent critic of American claims to serve as a model of human progress. Baldwin had freed his mind from the hands of the oppressor by invoking the history of the colonial project from which America originated and its legacies upon American society in the second half of

Citizenship and freedom  249 the twentieth century. By 1964, his personal sensibility had shifted to the extent that he could use the language of the colonizer to explore the dilemmas of the American post-colonial order – in London, the capital of the colonial power. Just as important, the power of his essays and creative imagination opened a window into the dilemmas confronting the post-colonial order in the Atlantic World since he was able to reach a wide audience in North America, Europe, and Africa. In a letter penned to Angela Davis in November 1970 Published in the NYRB, January 7, 1971, Baldwin wrote, with evident anguish: The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own – which it is – and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. Therefore: peace. Brother James7 Baldwin’s letter recognized the enormous shift in sensibility that had occurred in America and the violent price paid by African Americans and their allies for that transformation. More important, his letter openly acknowledged the importance of challenging the possibility that the horrors of Nazi-era Germany could become another response of the Jim Crow order to the challenge from the historically disadvantaged communities. Baldwin’s early ambivalence about the use of English to convey the story of the African American experience was not singular in the in the post-colonial Black Atlantic. Chinua Achebe grappled with the issue in his 1966 essay – The African Writer and the English Language. In that essay Achebe was particularly focused upon the use of English to produce literature for a multi-ethnic nation to be fashioned upon the foundations of colonial geography. As he argued: Those of us who have inherited the English language may not be in a position to appreciate the value of the inheritance. Or we may go on resenting it because it came as part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value and the positive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice, which may yet set the world on fire. But let us not in rejecting the evil throw out the good with it. (1997: 345) Achebe saw the benefits of having access to a global language and audience. In addition, he recognized and understood English as a practical device for

250  Cary Fraser surmounting the problem of writing in his own indigenous language for his countrymen whose languages were not of his own group, and for others on the continent. If he wrote in a language that excluded them, his ability to contribute to the transformation of sensibility of others as Africa would be limited in a postcolonial era? In effect, he accepted the need to deal with the reality that colonialism had created a context in which the language of the colonial power becomes a critical element of the official infrastructure needed to shape debate and engagement in building an effective post-colonial order. In his final section of that essay, Achebe wrote: The real question is not whether Africans could write in English but whether they ought to. Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But, for me, there is no other choice. I have been given this language and I intend to use it. I hope, though, that there always will be men, like the late Chief Fagunwa, who will choose to write in their native tongue and ensure that our ethnic literature will flourish side by side with the national ones. For those of us who opt for English, there is much work ahead and much excitement. (348) Achebe then referred to the Baldwin’s comment in the Observer essay about his ambivalence about the use of English and wrote: I recognize, of course, that Baldwin’s problem is not exactly mine, but I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings. (349) This excerpt from Achebe’s essay captures one of the ways in which African and African diaspora intellectuals in the 1960s effectively grappled with the commonalities of their shared experiences and allowed them to frame the conversation about the African and Black Atlantic post-colonial experiences – then and now. The importance of this relationship between language and the transformation of sensibility is further illustrated in an interview conducted by the Haitian poet and activist, Rene Depestre, with Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, at the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1967. In that conversation, Aimé Césaire, makes a very interesting observation: Whether I want to or not, as a poet I express myself in French, and clearly French Literature has influenced me. But I want to emphasize very strongly that – while using as a point of departure the elements that French literature gave me – at the same time I have always strived to create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage. In other words, for me

Citizenship and freedom  251 French was a tool that I wanted to use in developing a new means of expression. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character. (83) These literary ruminations – in print – need to be further explored, as they were a critical part of the wider processes of cultural interchange/cross-fertilization which need to be mapped more systematically in exploring the evolution of the Black Atlantic beyond those writers whose works are most easily accessible in any single language. A facility with multiple languages will inevitably enrich the discourses and the intellectual products that result from the engagement across cultures just as – Aimé Césaire’s and Frantz Fanon’s writings helped to shape the streams of consciousness that have informed debates about the colonial and the post-colonial worlds and the Black Atlantic. Both Césaire and Fanon – representing different generations of Martinicans – were conscious of the American context as a point of reference for their work and in the 1967 interview, Depestre and Césaire had a very interesting exchange: RD 

– Do you see a relationship among the movements between the two world wars connected to L’Etudiant Noir, the Negro Renaissance Movement in the United States, La Revue Indigene in Haiti, and Negrismo in Cuba. AC  – I was not influenced by those other movements because I did not know of them. But I am sure that they are parallel movements. RD  – How do you explain the emergence, in the years between the two world wars, of these parallel movements – in Haiti, the United States, Cuba, Brazil, Martinique, etc. – that recognized the cultural particularities of Africa? AC  – I believe at that time in the history of the world there was a coming to consciousness among Negroes, and this manifested itself in movements that had no relationship to each other. RD  – There was the extraordinary phenomenon of jazz. AC  – Yes, there was the phenomenon of jazz. There was the Marcus Garvey movement. I remember very well that even when I was a child I heard people speak of Garvey. RD  – Marcus Garvey was a sort of Negro prophet whose speeches had galvanized the Negro masses of the United States. His objective was to take all the American negroes to Africa. AC  – He inspired a mass movement, and for several years he was a symbol to American Negroes. In France there was newspaper called Le Cri des negres. RD  – I believe that Haitians like Dr. Sajous, Jacques Roumain, and Jean PriceMars collaborated on that newspaper. There were also six issues of La Revue du monde noir, written by Rene Maran, Claude McKay, Price-Mars, the Achille brothers, Sajous, and others. AC  – I remember very well that around that time we read the poems of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. I knew very well who McKay was because in 1929 or 1930 an anthology of American Negro poetry appeared in Paris. And

252  Cary Fraser McKay’s novel, Banjo – describing the life of dockworkers in Marseilles – was published in 1930. This was really one of the first works in which an author spoke of the Negro and gave him a certain literary dignity. I  must say, therefore, that although I was not directly influenced by any American Negroes, at least I  felt that the movement in the United States created an atmosphere that was indispensable for a very clear coming to consciousness. During the 1920’s and 1930’s I came under three main influences, roughly speaking. The first was the French literary influence, through the works of Mallarme, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and Claudel. The second was Africa. I knew very little about Africa, but I deepened my knowledge through ethnographic studies. RD  – I  believe that European ethnographers have made a contribution to the development of the concept of Negritude. AC  –Certainly. And as for the third influence, it was the Negro Renaissance Movement in the United States, which did not influence me directly but still created an atmosphere which allowed me to become conscious of the solidarity of the black world. RD  – At that time you were not aware, for example, of developments along the same lines in Haiti, centered around La Revue Indigene, and Jean Price-Mars’ book, Ainsi Parla l’oncle. AC  – No, it was only later that I  discovered the Haitian movement and PriceMars’ famous book. RD  – How would you describe your encounter with Senghor, the encounter between Antillean Negritude and African Negritude? Was it the result of a particular event or of a parallel development of consciousness? AC  – It was simply that in Paris at that time there were a few dozen Negroes of diverse origins. There were Africans, like Senghor, Guianans, Haitians, North Americans, Antilleans, etc. This was very important for me. RD  – In this circle of Negroes in Paris, was there a consciousness of the importance of African culture? AC  – Yes, as well as an awareness of the solidarity among blacks. We had come from different parts of the world. It was our first meeting. We were discovering ourselves. This was very important. (Interview with Aimé Césaire-in Aimé Césarire Discourse on Colonialism, 86–88) It should be recognized that the encounter among African and African Diasporic artists/intellectuals in metropolitan communities and other spaces need to be understood as vital points of intersection which helped to fuel developments across the Black Atlantic. Decades later, Gilberto Gil sang – in Brazilian Portuguese – a cover of the Jamaican Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” and he acknowledged that his own artistic trajectory had been influenced by his participation in the Second World Festival of Black Arts and Culture in Nigeria (FESTAC) in 1977. According to Gil, in an interview, FESTAC had inspired his shift to using

Citizenship and freedom  253 his music to address racial issues in Brazil through his interaction with many of the leading artistes of Africa and of African descent at FESTAC 1977: We had gathered in Lagos 4,000 black writers, musicians, artists, poets, playwrights, dancers – from all over Africa and the world. From the whole diaspora: Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, everywhere. For one month, we were discussing, trying to produce a reflection on negritude, racism, struggle, the fight for independence. The [whole] black world, it was a strong thing. I met Stevie Wonder for the first time in Fela Kuti’s house.8 Gil’s experience in Nigeria was undoubtedly replicated among other participants and illustrated the dynamism that informed the cross-cultural and international dimensions of shifting sensibilities among artists and intellectuals in the Black Atlantic. It was also a reflection of the inter-generational focus upon the politics of personal transformation as a vehicle for addressing social change in the Black Atlantic and the ecumenical approach adopted by artists and intellectuals. The shifting sensibility displayed among both African intellectuals and their counterparts in the Diaspora created a broader context for the engagement of literatures and ideas across cultures/languages in the Black Atlantic. This intellectual eclecticism was also influential in the work of a major figure – Derek Walcott of St. Lucia who won the Nobel Prize in 1992 and his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1992 illustrated the breadth of imagination and influences that helped to shape his artistic output and the willingness to engage with traditions of the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Walcott was born and educated in St. Lucia and his early career was shaped by his move to Trinidad. These societies shared the use of both English and French creole and that linguistic versatility was undoubtedly a powerful influence upon his imagination and work. In his Nobel Prize Lecture, Walcott reflected upon the multi-faceted dimensions of Caribbean artistic culture: I was entitled to the feast of Husein, to the mirrors and crepe-paper temples of the Muslim epic, to the Chinese Dragon Dance, to the rites of that Sephardic Jewish synagogue that was once on Something Street. I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad. Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. (2004: 2–3)

254  Cary Fraser Walcott used his lecture to illustrate the complex roots of cultural identity in the Caribbean and the contribution of Asian cultures in forging the cultures of the Caribbean which is a constituent region of Black Atlantic civilization. The Caribbean intellectual pantheon includes – among others – Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, Nicolás Guillén, Derek Walcott, and Vidia Naipaul – a mix of intellectuals drawn from different linguistic/cultural traditions whose perspectives were forged in the cauldron of modern history and culture that is the Caribbean. It is also a reminder of the African American poet Langston Hughes’ artistic and intellectual engagement with Nicolás Guillén, his Cuban counterpart, which forms part of the complex web of race within US-Cuban relations since 1898. Later, after the Cuban revolution had overthrown the American-backed regime of Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro visited the United States in 1960 and chose to stay at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem – as an act of solidarity with African Americans in the midst of their growing challenge to the Jim Crow order. This web of intellectual exchanges among intellectuals in the Black Atlantic forged over the course of the twentieth century also includes Toni Morrison as a writer who grappled with the link between the transformation of sensibility and the search for intellectual/artistic autonomy. Morrison has acknowledged that it was the work of African writers that helped her to attain the sense of autonomy that has shaped her own work: I have had reviews in the past that have accused me of not writing about white people. I remember a review of “Sula” in which the reviewer said this is all well and good but one day she, meaning me, will have to face up to the real responsibility and get mature and write about the real confrontation for black people which is white people. As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze. And I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books. The people who helped me most arrive at that kind of language were African writers – Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head. Those writers who could assume the centrality of their race because they were African. And they didn’t explain anything to white people . . . when I read the poetry of Césaire or the poetry of Senghor, the novels particularly – “Things Fall Apart” was more important to me than anything only because there was a language, there was a posture, there were the parameters. I could step in now and I did not have to be consumed by or concerned by the white gaze.9 For Morrison, her literary skills and artistic perspective were honed by way of engagement with Black Atlantic writers from outside of the “mainstream” of the American literary tradition. The transformation of her sensibility that was induced by that process elevated her art to a level that won her the recognition of the Nobel Prize. Her struggle to achieve intellectual and artistic autonomy while writing from within the American post-colonial context  – for an audience that transcended her own national context – speaks volumes about the power of the currents of intellectual life in the Black Atlantic to reshape the Black image in the

Citizenship and freedom  255 White mind. In real terms, the Black Atlantic intellectual struggle had attained a global significance well before the “globalization” process as international political economy – of recent decades. This shift in sensibility that Morrison attributes to the influence of African writers becomes even more vivid when one examines this process of cross-fertilization across the Atlantic and across the generations. Chinamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian writer who was born in September 1977, experienced an epiphany that replicated Morrison’s literary voyage of discovery. In an interview, Adichie was asked: What book had the biggest impact on you? Why? Camara Laye’s The Dark Child and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because they gave me a glorious shock of recognition. Until I  read them, I was not consciously aware that people who looked like me could exist in books. I grew up in a Nigerian university town, and all the books I read before then were foreign children’s books with white characters doing unfamiliar things. Adichie’s answer to the question about the books that influenced her deserve closer examination. Her role as an African writer forged within the post-colonial tradition of the Black Atlantic was shaped by the recognition that her childhood had obscured the African presence in the literature that she read until she encountered Achebe and Laye through their books.10 Adichie was the child of African academics and grew up in a University town in post-colonial Nigeria. Her response suggests the extent to which the colonial legacy remains within the post-colonial order. In addition, Adichie explored the shifting terrain of identity in the Nigerian context when she wrote in her book – Half of a Yellow Sun – where the Master says: “Of course, of course, but my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe,” Master said. “I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I  am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.” (2016: 25) In this brief statement, Adichie captured the challenges posed by the post-colonial context as the novel explored the Nigerian Civil War after Independence. The quote above illuminated the politics of identity across the pre-colonial, the colonial, and the post-colonial periods. In effect, she has illustrated that the simple binary of colonial and post-colonial is inadequate to meet the challenge of reconfiguring identity in the contemporary African context. Adichie has also acknowledged that writing about the Biafran War in Half of Yellow Sun was “bearing witness for my generation” – analogous to the task undertaken by the Haitian author – Edwige Danticat – when she wrote about the

256  Cary Fraser Duvalier regime in Haiti. In effect, literature as a vehicle for and interrogating history and establishing points of departure has been a feature of the work of Achebe, Adichie, Baldwin, Danticat, and Morrison among African and other writers from the African Diaspora. African and African Diaspora intellectuals  – through their creative endeavours – have helped to forge an intellectual community and a culture sphere in the Atlantic World. Their engagement across the region, and their focus upon redefining themselves and changing their societies, have contributed to a rethinking of the contemporary world and the role of African and African-descent populations therein. In effect, these intellectuals have been engaged in a project of personal empowerment and social/national renewal from the debris of the colonial projects and the ideology of white supremacy that was forged after 1492. The politics of language was central to those challenges and the Black Atlantic intellectuals recognized the importance of prose, verse, and musical lyrics as the terrain upon which that struggle to liberate the minds of the oppressed. The Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo, had emphasized the use of indigenous languages as a strategy for the affirmation of self in the struggle against the domination of the mental universe of the colonized by the use of the language of the colonial power. For Ngugi, the use of indigenous language provided one way of lifting the hands of the oppressor from the mind of the oppressed. However, it is interesting that in his book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature – he acknowledged that: The theme of this book is simple. It is taken from a poem by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter in which he sees ordinary men and women . . . who have declared loud and clear that they do not sleep to dream, but ‘dream to change the world. (3) Ngugi’s source of inspiration came from a poet who wrote in the language of the colonial power but whose sensibility was radical and committed to self and social transformation – a commitment that had liberated his imagination in the search for a vision of humanity redefined. Some 16 years after his seminal essays of 1958, Carter delivered the Convocation address at the University of Guyana in 1974 where he observed: It is precisely in times of crisis that we must re-examine our lives and bring to that re-examination contempt for the trivial, and respect of the riskers who go forward boldly to participate in the building of a free community of valid persons. (1993c: 32) This is the intellectual challenge to the post-colonial – as person and as project – participation in the building of free communities of valid persons in the Black Atlantic. It is a challenge that has passed to successor generations who continue

Citizenship and freedom  257 to widen the spaces through which their full humanity can be expressed and recognized.

Notes 1 D. Johnston, “C.I.A. Tie Reported in Mandela Arrest,” The New York Times, 1990. 2 Brazil has been an interesting example of this phenomenon. Celene Fonseca, an anthropologist, explains why racism is hidden in Brazil: “You have the formal democracy in Brazil, but we are not part of it. Black, Indian, Metis people in general, we are not here,” she said. “In Brazil, there is an apartheid who does not say its name. We are servants of the white people, even if we represent the overwhelming majority of the population.’ Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff says she wanted to have a World Cup without racism; but, outside the stadiums, the reality is different for black people. Social worker Elaine Amazonas describes the daily humiliations. ‘The restaurants . . . the stores you go to, the grocery stores when you go shopping, the security guy accompanying you,’ she said. ‘It’s a daily thing.’ Black teenagers are the first victims of the current situation. According to Suely Santos Souza from the Unified Black Movement, nine out of 10 children killed between the ages of 12 and 23 are black.” (qtd. In Nicolas Pinault 2014 “Brasil Racism Out of View at World Cup,” The Voice of America). 3 During that visit to London, King also met with the C.L.R. James and George Lamming – prominent Caribbean intellectuals who were very complimentary about King’s leadership in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. See “Ghana Trip 1957” Martin Luther King Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. 4 It was an irony of which King reminded Nixon when they met at a reception during Ghana’s independence celebrations. “King arrived in Accra, the Gold Coast (soon to be Ghana), on 4 March and attended a reception where he met Vice President Richard Nixon King told Nixon, ‘I want you to come visit us down in Alabama where we are seeking the same kind of freedom the Gold Coast is celebrating.’ ” See http://kingency clopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_ghana_trip_1957/ 5 See James Baldwin, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” The Observer, April 19, 1964. 6 James Baldwin, “A  Letter to My Nephew,” http://progressive.org/magazine/letternephew/. 7 James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss  Angela Davis,” The New York Review of Books, January  7, 1971, www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/01/  .  .  . / an-open-letter-to-my-sister-miss-angela-davis/ 8 Chris McGowan, “Gilberto Gil: Cultivator of the Spirit,” www.thebraziliansound.com/ gil2.htm (Accessed June 13, 2017). 9 Toni Morrison on the white gaze – Wed 30 Nov 2011 by abagond. 10 See “20 Questions With Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,” www.oprah.com/oprahsbook club/20-Questions-with-Author-Chimamanda-Ngozi-Adichie#ixzz3dXSiaUBj.

Bibliography Achebe, C. (1997) “English and the African Writer.” Transition, 75/76: 342–349. Adichie, C. N. (2016) Half of a Yellow Sun. London: Fourth Estate Ltd. Baldwin, J. (1964) “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” The Observer, April. Baldwin, J. (1971) “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis.” The New York Review of Books, January 7. Available from: www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/01/ . . . / an-open-letter-to-my-sister-miss-angela-davis/ Carter, M. (1993a) “Artist as Artist.” Letter, Kyk-Over-Al, 8.23, May 1958 (republished in Kyk-Over-Al Special Issue, 44: 128).

258  Cary Fraser Carter, M. (1993b) “Sensibility and the Search.” Kyk-Over-Al Special Issue, 44: 77–81. Carter, M. (1993c) “A Free Community of Valid Persons.” Kyk-Over-A Spacial Issuel, 44: 30–32. Césaire, A. (2000) Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Johnston, D. (1990) “C.I.A. Tie Reported in Mandela Arrest.” The New York Times. Available from: www.nytimes.com/1990/06/10/world/cia-tie-reported-in-mandela-arrest.html/ [Accessed June 10, 1990]. King, M. L. (1957) “Ghana Trip 1957.” Martin Luther King Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. Available from: http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/ encyclopedia/enc_ghana_trip_1957/ King, M. L. (1964) “Exclusive: Newly Discovered 1964 MLK Speech on Civil Rights, Segregation  & Apartheid South Africa.” Available from: www.democracynow.org/ 2015/1/19/exclusive_newly_discovered_1964_mlk_speech McGowan, C. and Pessanha, R. (1991) The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova, and the Popular Music of Brazil. New York: Billboard Books. Nixon, R. (1957) “The Emergence of Africa: Report to President Eisenhower.” State Department Bulletin, (April 22): 635–638. Pinault, N. (2014) “Brasil Racism Out of View at World Cup.” The Voice of America. Available from: www.voanews.com/a/brazil-hidden-racism-world-cup/1953533.html/ [Accessed July 8, 2014]. Thiongʾo, N. W. (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey, Portsmouth, N.H. Walcott, D. (2004) “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” In M. Kuss (ed.), Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1–8.

13 African diasporic autochthonomies A syncretic methodology for liberatory indigeneities1 Myriam J. A. Chancy

In July 2014, I attended the International Association of Genocide Scholars conference for the first time. It was held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a city with a long history of intransigence with regard to First Nations rights; the conference theme was “Time, Movement, and Space: Genocide Studies and Indigenous Peoples.” Although the central question throughout the conference was whether or not the colonial injuries suffered, and suffered still, by First Nations people, could be understood as “genocidal” and taken to claim in international courts (which currently do not define the wiping out of Indigenous/First Nations people as genocide any more than they recognize slavery as genocidal, though more claims of cultural genocide in recent civil wars have made Indigenous/First Nations claims more plausible legally because of the recent inclusion of state-sponsored sexual violence/rape as a “weapon of war” with genocidal purpose), an excursion to the Sagkeeng First Nation territory on the outskirts of town on our first day of the conference proved illuminating. At Turtle Lodge, we were taken through a series of cleansing rituals, while also being taught about the history and culture of the Sagkeeng First Nation. The tribal elder of the Sagkeeng told us, in no uncertain terms, that what we would experience on this day would be a glimpse into community efforts to “rehumanize” through culture, that they and other First Nations groups had decided that it was no longer of central importance to confront former colonizers with their crimes, or demand recognition of these, firstly because recognition would always be partial and incomplete, and secondly, because it tethered identity to colonial history rather than to Indigenous history. Instead, the group had decided to focus on ancestral knowledge, healing practices, and resurrecting these to strengthen the community from within. Here, I thought, sitting on the edge of my seat, is where African Diasporic Studies should be situated, from within the locus of its varied traditions, rather than locked in combat with an unfinished history and growingly indistinct adversary. In making this claim, I  am not only stating the obvious  – that the colonial histories of First Nations societies are comparable to those of African origin, but more importantly, that in so recognizing analogous histories, we also recognize the ways in which both have developed strategies of resistance consonant with one another. The statement of the Sagkeeng elder underscored a shift in

260  Myriam J. A. Chancy indigenous resistance practices, one that has moved from centralizing the relationship to colonizing cultures to centralizing the sanctity of the indigenous relationship to cultures of origin. They have recognized, as philosopher Kelly Oliver has observed, that “the pathology of oppression creates the need in the oppressed to be recognized by their oppressors, the very people most likely not to recognize them,” and, “the very notion of recognition as it is deployed in various contemporary theoretical context is, then, a symptom of the pathology of oppression itself” (9). Oliver, in suggesting an anti-Hegelian approach to subjectivity, also posits that to be “othered” is to suffer a damaged subjectivity; as an “other,” one is no longer a subject. Thus, being “other” is not a subject position, but it is the result of oppression, a displacement from subjectivity. For Oliver, a subject is a subject by virtue of their ability to speak – to address and to respond. But in her concept of “response-ability,” Oliver also encodes an ethics to response; speaking subjects respond and are responsible towards others, thereby not reproducing the logic of objectifying those existing beyond themselves. Such an ethic cannot exist in vertical, hierarchical relations of power. Another way to understand both the First Nations example, and that to which Oliver’s contestation of Hegelian subject identities might lead, is to recognize the subjectivity of the formerly colonized as inhabiting spaces of indigeneity autonomous from colonial history. From these, new approaches to identity and subjectivity could be productively deployed. Part of this process, as I  will explore shortly, involves recognizing the indigeneity of societies of African descent alongside the ways in which Indigenous studies has increasingly borrowed from postcolonial studies related to African tropes to articulate a new agenda for itself. By doing so, we can better understand the interconnectedness of formerly colonized societies, be they First Nations or African. Finally, we must recognize that the forced displacement of both First Nations and African societies as well as the subsequent formation of their diasporas have made them each global and transnational in nature at present. Indigenous societies, then, First Nations and African, have in common their indigenous cultures, histories of colonialism, resistance to that colonialism, displacement leading to migratory patterns and eventually to global, transnationally redefined cultural identities centered in new world realities that eschew Manichean dualisms in favor or revitalizing cultures of origin which, though no longer necessarily situated in the ground of origin, remain vital to cultural continuity and thus to identity.2 It is in this renewed call to arms with attention to the integrity of identity as emerging from cultures of origin, indigenous cultures, that I  have coined and foregrounded in my title, the neologism, “autochthonomies.” This concept combines the word “autochthone,” commonly used in French but also in Anglophone Caribbean studies, to describe “native” peoples, literally meaning, “of the earth, ground, or soil” or “of or pertaining to indigenous peoples, or land occupied by them” or “natural, innate, native,”3 with the term autonomy, a term often used to signify freedom, but which literally refers to “the right or condition of selfgovernment” or “a self-governing country or region.” In most countries of the world, indigenous peoples, robbed of their lands through colonialism, seek the right of self-governance that, very few, if any, have been granted since colonialism.4 By

African diasporic autochthonomies  261 definition, then (and this remains the legal definition of the UN), we might surmise that native peoples are those who have lost access to their lands and who, as such, continue to seek both this access and self-governance; since self-governance without land ownership is difficult to come by, most indigenous peoples continue to struggle for the acknowledgement of their right to sovereignty. Consequently, though it has been an increasing practice not to define Africans as “indigenous” except in the case of ethnic groups continuing to live in the traditional manner of their ancestors, to assume that the “modernization,” through colonialism, of African peoples has invalidated their identifications as “native” or “indigenous” even as they continue to live on the land of their ancestors or reconstitute their cultures in other than their “native” lands, and therefore that their right to sovereignty is in question, my use of the term autochthonomy to describe present-day Africans and African diasporics means to highlight the relationship of African-descended people to their lands and cultures of origin. It also serves to highlight the fact that, in many geopolitical situations, African-descended populations are either self-governing, or that African-descended communities without political self-governance have developed ways of being that are otherwise self-regulating in observance of ancestral knowledge, retention, or revival. This means that we can no longer think of “indigeneity” solely as a sort of preserved “primitivity,” or pre-modern form of existence within modern or Westernized societies; we must think of indigeneity as having transformed over time, as have African/African-descended and First Nations societies. As such, such societies are a part of the West, but are not “Western,” bridging pre- and post-colonial societies, being transformed in the process, but also retaining salient features of their original indigenous societies.

“Autochthonomy” as disciplinary intervention A number of recent studies have brought to light the contributions of African Diasporic subjects to the historical, literary, and cultural traditions of the West from the age of Enlightenment to the present day. These include texts such as, Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford 1997), Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (Harvard 2000) and Against Race (Harvard 2002), Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (U. of California Press, 2001), Brent Hayes Edwards’ The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard 2003), Michelle M. Wright’s Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Duke University 2004), and Mimi Sheller’s Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency & Caribbean Freedom (Duke 2012). These studies tackle the knotty issue of race and racism in an age when “race” has long been proven to be a fiction (at least in scientific terms). What none of these studies attempt, however, is a reconsideration of how community is defined for people of African descent outside of the parameters of enslavement or colonialism. Each, at times in the most productive of ways (as the interdisciplinary impact of Gilroy’s works testify), focuses primarily on how to integrate information about the perspectives of people and thinkers of African descent within “Western” models of rationality,

262  Myriam J. A. Chancy modernity, history, and difference. They also fail to take into consideration that a transnational African diasporic culture has emerged over the last several decades. My larger study thus departs somewhat from those cited above by arguing for a paradigmatic shift in how the work of African-descended subjects should be framed and analyzed, which is the topic of this chapter. I argue for an epistemological reconsideration of subjectivity and identity formation by focusing on the philosophical and spiritual ground of the works by African diasporic cultural workers (not all of whom can be categorized as “Black”). In this sense, following Gilroy, I am assuming from the outset that authors and artists of African descent, beginning in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first century, take an active part in shaping modernity. Further, in addressing how concepts of subalternity, modernism, cosmopolitanism, and nationhood can be redefined through the tenets of postcolonial studies due to new migration patterns emerging from the African continent as a result of preceding colonial periods (for example, genocides in Rwanda and Darfur), I  argue that African-descended cultural producers writing through these global shifts express ethnic identifications which are tethered not to “race,” but to non-European cultures and nationalities in order to actively present models of personhood that defy easy categorizations. The continuing intellectual labor of demonstrating or “proving” the humanity of people of African descent is not only wasted energy at some point, but it also distracts us away from reading practices and theories that could make sense of and encapsulate the vision of artists of African descent who choose not to be confined by what Abdul Jan Mohammed has accurately described as the Manichean dialectics of colonialism. Rather than mount yet another argument against what is well understood by now to have been social constructions created to support Western expansion, land-grabbing, and the forced subordination of civilizations, while stripping the latter of as much of their cultural capital as possible by supplanting it by that of the victors, I suggest, as have more recent philosophers concerned with social equity and the legacy of continental thought, such as Emmanuel Eze, that we revise what we understand by terms such as reason, modernity, difference, even emancipation. My work is situated in the premises developed by Pan-Africanists mid-twentieth century to bring together the experiences, movements, and knowledge of populations of African descent both in the continent and dispersed throughout Europe and the Americas with an emphasis on transnational interactions between African cultural producers and sites within the Americas, Europe, Central and Southern Africa. James Clifford notes that Pan-Africanism had two movements, one originating in the Americas from the nineteenth century on, articulated by figures such as Garvey and Du Bois, while the continental movement emerged post-war (from the 1940s) forward with the rise of African nationalists such as Nkrumah and Padmore. So, contends Clifford, Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic,” revives and revises the Pan-Africanist model, “with a postcolonial twist”: Gilroy returns the ‘black cultural tradition to a historically decentered, or multiply centered, Atlantic space. In the process, he breaks the primary

African diasporic autochthonomies  263 connection of black America with Africa, introducing a third paradigmatic experience: the migrations and resettlings of black British populations in the period of European colonial decline. (1997: 261–262) Clifford’s accounting of Pan-Africanism only holds, however, if one assumes it to be an endeavor situated only in the Anglophone world. In this sense, Gilroy’s project is an extension of Anglophone projects that compellingly centers the conversation in (Black) Britain (albeit via the discourse of African Americans as per the trajectory of W.E.B. Du Bois, for example). However, there are many Pan-­ Africanisms, with overlapping linguistic traditions and actors. Keeping this plurality in mind, Zeleza thus contents that there were not two but six articulations of Pan-Africanism: (1) “linking continental African and its diaspora in the Americas”; (2) confining “itself to the African diasporic communities in the Americas and Europe, excluding continental Africa” (ex. Gilroy’s Black Atlantic); (3) “focused primarily on the unification of continental Africa”; (4) “restricted themselves to the peoples of the continent north and south of the Saraha”; (5)  Pan-Arabism, “extended itself to western Asia or the so-called Middle East”; and (6)  “seeks to reclaim connections of African peoples dispersed to all corners of the globe” (2011: 36). My project situates itself, then, within the seeds of the first movement, and it is propelled by the last, or sixth, the global. Pan-Africanism, according to Zeleza, was “born and bred in the diaspora where the collective racialized subjugation and the consciousness of Africaness first developed” and was, in itself, a “burgeoning transnational identity” (2011: 35). Zeleza here is referring to the fact that the architects of Pan-Africanism (Césaire, Senghor, among others), were outside of their native lands when they conceived of Pan-Africanism, but also originated in different parts of the world, held together by the signal event of colonialism and its effects on both the continent and its diasporas. Zeleza claims that Pan-Africanism lost influence in the 1960s because it became regionalized or nationalized; in short, as engineers of the concept returned to their homelands and acquired political power, it became institutionalized, local, and lost its transnational character due to the new focus of acquiring independence from local colonizers, not the relation to other people of African descent. However, one defines Pan-Africanism and its variations, what unites these is their transnational feature, and entanglements with notions of diaspora. There are continued tensions between Black Nationalist/Pan-African discourses and those seeking a post-national, transnational locus, reconciled in part through Stuart Hall’s cultural studies focus wherein “Africa is neither an [sic] origin nor an essential culture or civilization, but a symbolic marker of shared histories of displacement, oppression, resistances, counter-memories, and resemblances in cultural production” (Lao-Montes 2007: 312). For Lao-Montes, Hall’s reconciliation of Africa with its diasporas, enables him to “conceptualize the African diaspora as a multicentered historical field, and as a complex and fluid geo-cultural formation and domain of identification, cultural production, and political organization that is framed by world-historical processes of domination, exploitation, resistance, and

264  Myriam J. A. Chancy emancipation” (2007: 313). I walk a piece of the way with Lao-Montes in locating my texts, their authors, and cultural production in a multicentered historical field which finds coherence in the imaginary space I term lakou consciousness, a term I will elaborate in the final section of this chapter, below. I depart in re-imagining this space as itself framing the world-historical processes that have contributed to its inception.

Redefining emancipation Once one moves this discussion into the space of the “transnational,” however, one is immediately confronted with a variety of tools with which to think through situating the African Diaspora, from cultural and feminist studies to postcolonial methods. Within this context, modernity itself has been a term and concept under constant revision. In the context of Caribbean Studies, as Michelle Stephens has argued in her own intellectual work, this has meant focusing on issues of exile and migrancy, “the fluidity and mobility of identity itself” (2003: 169) which moves our focus from debates over nation-states and their boundaries into “a new world geography and world history, one which begins in the colonial world rather than in the once imperial metropoles” (2003: 170). In some ways, I pursue a similar objective here, which is to de-emphasize the role of imperial metropoles within African Diasporic subject formation but, more so, I  am also intent on demonstrating how our own processes of reading such re-orientations should also have us question the very notion of the “colonial world” which, by definition, yokes African diasporic cultural production to the former imperial metropoles. Are there other ways of defining these spaces? Of conceiving of African diasporic identities as they circulate within and between these sites, physically as well as imaginatively? Stephens claims that the increasing focus on migrancy/transnationalism in postcolonial, Caribbean, and American Studies (through the disparate works of scholars such as Said, Clifford, Glissant, Benítez-Rojo, Boyce Davies, Hall, Kaplan and Gilroy) produces a remapping [that] foregrounds colonial geographies, be they on the islands and in once colonial territories, in the metropoles, or on the seas, highlighting race as a central category for our global analysis of twentieth-century geopolitics. It also opens up a new conceptual space for thinking about black transnationality in the Americas. (2003: 170) Though Stephens accurately describes the essential grouping we might make of the scholars she foregrounds within the Caribbean studies, and I essentially agree with the idea that we must jointly create and think through “a new conceptual space for thinking about black transnationality,” I part ways with the notion that this transnationality should be defined as black if this term refers simply to a racialized demarcation produced by and through colonialism and the slave trade; I  also part ways, solely in this project, with the notion that “race” should be a

African diasporic autochthonomies  265 central category for global analysis for the simple reason that this project seeks to advocate for a cultural rather than racial basis for analysis, one that would have us interrogate how race is defined and whether that term remains useful for the purpose of understanding what is at stake in competing ontological terrains. That cultural basis is situated geographically as rooted in Africa and its diasporas, not as a consequence of “race,” but of genomic patterns. I argue, then, that African Diasporic spaces, as I construe them in this project are both the product of “imagined communities” and of geographical nomadism. If Stephens’ project is to suggest “some of the ways in which both early and late twentieth-century black transnational political discourse impacts our humanistic project of understanding modern constructions of racial identity” (a project I admire and with which I have no essential quarrel; Stephens 2003: 170), mine is to travel a parallel path to suggest that what shared epistemic and cultural values permit assertions of what social-psychologists would call “core” selves, as opposed to “racial” identities with which subjects might not readily identify (and which can shift according to locale, nation). “Core” selves could, thus, also operate in a collectivity that is socio-cultural, but not necessarily defined by that which constitutes itself as dominant. In other words, if racial selves are the product of hierarchies of power, and power is situated elsewhere than in such hierarchies by the subjects they are meant to dominate, then it is plausible that identities belonging neither to imperial metropoles and their colonies circulate and proliferate in circuits of their own making having for basis matrices of understanding that do not depend on colonial/ postcolonial, modern/postmodern couplings to be discernible to those who participate within such exchanges.5 At this historical juncture, I believe that it is possible to think of an African Diaspora, or members within it, that does not, or do not, think of itself/themselves as only subjects of domination, of exploitation, resisting these formations in order to find their emancipation. If we begin with different starting points, one, following Morrison/Gilroy contending that Africans were the first global “moderns,” and Rancière’s re-thinking of “emancipation” not as a freeing from domination but as “each man becoming conscious of his nature as an intellectual subject” (Ignorant 1991: 35), then we ought to arrive at different conclusions regarding the nature of (socio-cultural) identity formation. As I will demonstrate, these alternate starting points (alternate to situating contemporary African Diasporic cultural production as postcolonial or postmodern within a Euro-American historical polity), once followed, reveal that certain African Diasporic expressions of such identity will come to produce very different effects and affects than would be assumed if read solely through “dominant” interpretive perspectives, tools, or theories. Considering Rancière’s alternate definition of emancipation, whereby the emancipated person enables the freedom of others by performing an awareness of “what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself” (Ignorant 1991: 39), might yield productive new avenues for readings commensurate with the “interpretive communities” that have produced texts aligned with this alternate understanding of freedom’s ways. To this, Rancière adds a reversal to Cartesian logic when he asserts that “man is a will served

266  Myriam J. A. Chancy by an intelligence” (1991: 55). Such a thinking subject has a direct relationship to the world unmediated by other intelligences; it is emancipated when it acquires knowledge of free will, a will given to it by none other than itself. When these individual wills become what Rancière calls “distracted” and submit their will to a collective, a society, then they enter the realm of the fictional (1991: 81/109), and of the irrational: “Inegalitarian society tries in vain to understand itself, to give itself a natural foundation. It’s precisely because there is no natural reason for domination that convention commands and commands absolutely” (1991: 88).6 The uneducated, the poor, the dispossessed, the marginal, must all be made to believe in their inferiority in order to be dominated. Their education is not a form of edification, but what Rancière calls a “stultification,” by which their native, individual intelligence is suppressed. But, if we begin with the idea of that of the equality of intelligences, that every individual can freely access the potential of their own mind, then we begin elsewhere than with the stultification of society. And though societies exist, it seems reasonable to state that the capacity to access one’s mind remains inviolable, even when one is in a state of subjugation (whatever one’s place in the social hierarchy). Thus, in speaking of the role of governments, of the nation-state, in educating its people, Rancière states: “government doesn’t owe the people an education, for the simple reason that one doesn’t owe people what they can take for themselves. And education is like liberty: it isn’t given; it’s taken” (1991: 106–107). Rancière’s comparison of education to liberty is felicitous to my task as it reveals why I contend that his concept of emancipation could be useful to a better apprehension of how works by African Diasporic artists who, like him, believe in the equality of intelligences, across time, space, “race,” state, among other socially constructed identities, participate in performing this emancipated consciousness, or in periods of physical and legal constraint, its awareness. Taken together, for instance, it becomes startlingly facile to see why the Haitian Revolution would stand as “modernity disavowed” – to quote Sybille Fisher  – as the Revolution both instantiated a modernity that was not yet supposed to have entered (Euro-American) historical time, and its actors took back their innate liberty, their intelligence, against the irrationality of their violent and dehumanizing subjugation. This is a historical example, yet it is possible to find many more, even now, when despite the Haitian Revolution’s example, despite so many treatises and academic books written of the equality of man to man, we continue to operate as if people of African descent, and various subjugated populations, must demonstrate their worthiness to “superiors” who are nothing more than their suppressors, who are themselves stultified within the hierarchies erected by societies so that power and resources are unequally distributed. The artists whose works I look to for evidence of this alternate form of emancipation do not deny the existence of society but also do they not deny their emancipated minds, recognizing and creating emancipated others with their work so that new signs of modernity and of freedom, of the nature of being can stand openly, untethered to the irrationalities of Euro-American concepts of man, and liberty. The fact that Kant could not see people of African descent as fully human does not alter the fact that the pursuit of freedom remains central to humanity – indeed, the pursuit of

African diasporic autochthonomies  267 freedom from slavery rather clearly counters Kant’s anti-African sentiments. Such declarations simply reified an unequal “racial field,” in which people of African descent became subject to an abject status rather than agents with subjectivity. This is why, in the larger project this article foregrounds, I am interested in texts by people of African descent written outside the nexus of enslavement, which narrate pursuits for freedom and autonomy across cultural, geographical and national boundaries. This is also why, by turn, I  remain invested in Jacques Rancière’s twentieth-century perspective advocating for the “equality of intelligences” and re-thinking what we mean by “emancipation,” or freedom itself. For Rancière, equality is a given, not a goal. If equality is a given, then all definitions of identity and perspective emanating from this reality must be altered accordingly.

Transnational indigeneity Jacques Rancière writes in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, “the problem is not to prove that all intelligences are equal. It is to see what one can do as a consequence of this supposition” (Ranciére, Ignorant 1991: 8). Similarly, then, my interest is to examine texts that proceed from the supposition that all intelligences, including our own, are equal, and what terrain this supposition creates or leads to; in the end, I demonstrate that supposing as much from the outset, from within cultures of African descent, brings us into unfamiliar terrain that is far more productive in its rethinking of both past and future than resistance narratives – however useful they have been in particular periods in time – for they do the work of establishing a context for proceeding that is undetermined by power relations that have created a fictional ground for dispossession then argued for the naturalization of such fictions. The cultural workers I highlight throughout suggest outcomes far different than others who presuppose either the need to disprove theories of unequality (they sidestep such discussions) or that are satisfied with working only within the parameters of unequal social relations as if these are insurmountable or cannot be changed. They do not ignore structured or structural inequality, but suppose that there is an “outside” to these structures where other realities and freedoms reside. In the first iterations of a comprehensive approach to, and understanding of, post-colonial studies, when traced back to the signal text in the field, The Empire Writes Back, by Bill Ashcroft, and Gareth Griffiths, competing definitions of indigeneity emerged. Although not as current today, “[w]hite European settlers in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand faced the problem of establishing their ‘indigeneity’ and distinguishing it from their continuing sense of their European inheritance” (2002: 134). They did so by denying that others had occupied the land settled on behalf European metropoles and supplanting the original indigenous societies of these lands by their own. Eventually, too, these societies created new national narratives that eerily resembled those of their former rulers, perhaps not in their redefinition of democracy and common good, but in their relationship vis-à-vis the former occupants of the land who, if they were not slaughtered in the process of settlement, were either forcibly displaced from their lands or forced into cultural and linguistic submission. The settler colonies and

268  Myriam J. A. Chancy the writers emerging from them produced, at least from the perspective of British scholars who pioneered the field, a “postcolonial” literature in that the writers (in the case of the United States) sought “both to legitimize the American and differentiate it from the European” (135). No one today speaks much of US literature as postcolonial, unless they speak of literature produced within the United States by minority writers of color, or writers from the African, Latin American, or Asian Diasporas. The United States (and Canada), to say nothing of Australia and New Zealand, became “imperial” as they re-instated (or maintained) features of dominant European empires as they forged societies mostly sovereign from European control; while doing so, and while suppressing and subjugating First Nations people whose lands they had acquired, African-descended people who were brought to the Americas in chains and also displaced from their lands, they also co-opted indigeneity as a means to naturalize their claims to land and place. Is it, then, appropriate today to claim indigeneity for groups that are not strictly First Nations in the Americas? Is doing so a continued erasure of First Nations claims to land and origin? In Caribbean ethnographic studies, as well as in some African ones, and in continuing subaltern studies pertaining to South Asia, it has become commonplace to refer to present-day or “native” occupants as autochthones as some of the citations I have utilized above make clear. This usage is not, however, commonplace, and fairly internal to the field. My understanding of the use of this terminology is that it acknowledges both continuous presence on the land for several hundreds of years, and the deep connections forged on and with the land by virtue of having been forced to cultivate the land without being to profit from its fruits but by learning survival strategies otherwise yielded by the land.7 The term is more usually utilized to describe First Nations populations in a variety of geographical locales; in North America, it is commonly reserved from Native, indigenous populations known variably as “First Nations,” or “Native/American or Canadian.” In recent work, however, James Clifford has suggested that tensions between the use of the terms indigenous (signified as “historical” occupants of a territory) and autochthone (signified as “natural” or pre-recorded-history occupants) might be resolved by first identifying how the two terms differ and then applying to them “diasporic” features. He argues that in recent studies, “[d]iasporist and autochthonist histories, the aspirations of migrants and natives, do come into direct political antagonism” (1997: 253) as each group vies for cultural and geographical sovereignty in the same territories. But Clifford also appears to collapse indigeneity with the immigrant/diasporic experience rather than with First Nations identity solely, leading me to believe that indigeneity can be reconfigured for other kinds of “first peoples” and their descendants, even when displaced. In fact, in recent work, Clifford has been pointing out that, like for ethnic minorities related to other diasporas, “first-nation” sovereignty is less a result of being “first” but acquired by “dint of continuous occupancy over an extended period,” noting that “how long it takes to become indigenous is always a political question” (1997: 254). So, if this holds for First Nations peoples who have had to re-articulate indigeneity because of being forced to occupy territories not their

African diasporic autochthonomies  269 own and to have had to cultivate as well as re-invent their disrupted cultures, for post-slavery/indentureship occupants of areas like the Caribbean, where unique syncretic cultures have developed over time, giving inhabitants discrete identities particular to place, Clifford’s emphasis on the process by which indigeneity is achieved speaks both to its inventiveness as a political response to erasure as to its performative features. In fact, to arrive at this conclusion, Clifford liberally borrows from African Diasporic Studies to formulate his idea in the context of First Nations/Native American studies: “diasporist discourses reflect the sense of being part of an ongoing transnational network that includes the homeland not as something simply left behind but as a place of attachment in a contrapuntal modernity” (1997: 256). In his latest work, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, Clifford’s title suggests that North American Indigenous identities are being made, “becoming,” and as such, that they are intricate performances that cannot be located precisely in space or time. They are “in-process.” Although not explicitly stated, Clifford appears to borrow from advances in performance as well as postcolonial theory, to argue (with specific reference to the Hau’ofa of Hawai’i) that: “[i]nterdependence and movement are historical realities that indigenous societies inflect, and partly control. They do this through interactive social processes of articulation, performance, and tradition” (2013: 44). Throughout Returns, Clifford thus argues for the ways in which Indigenous communities in the Americas have re-fashioned or re-articulated themselves, re-invented themselves through negotiations with history, museums, traditions lost and recovered, linguistic signs and nomenclature, performances of rituals, geographical locations and community membership. “Being ‘Native,’ ” he says, “is a way of participating, finding fulfillment, in a regulated diversity” (2013: 302); it is not an essence or immutable, and is an ever-changing, evolving process of identifications and assertions, of laying claim to identities fractured by violence and power. Strikingly, Clifford compares his project to that of the negritude fathers (Senghor, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Damas), arguing for an “indigénitude”  – “a vision of liberation and cultural difference that challenges, or at least redirects, the modernizing agendas of nation-states and transnational capitalism” (2013: 16). Clifford’s indigénitude includes “local traditions . . . national agendas and symbols . . . transnational activism” and “is sustained through media-disseminated images, including a shared symbolic repertoire” to “express a transformative renewal of attachments to culture and place” (2013: 16). It interests me that Clifford finds recourse to elements of négritude to create his compelling model for North American indigenous communities. It compels me to ask why Africandescended populations are not, in themselves, considered “indigenous” – in spite of a widely recognized indigénisme movement  – largely articulated by anthropologist, Jean Price-Mars – which took place in Haiti, in response to the US Occupation, and which is widely acknowledged to be the precursor to négritude owing to its turn to self-definition, folk traditions embedded in local (even if dis-located) space, and to the roots of Africanity itself, that is, indigenous cultures emanating from Africa, transposed onto Caribbean soil. Why are Africans or people of African descent largely not considered “indigenous” to any soil? There are two

270  Myriam J. A. Chancy answers to this question – one has to do with the invention of race as a unit of human identification, the other has to with geopolitics. Indigeneity, on its own, like the term autochthone, refers simply to geographic origin. Over time, the terms indigenous and indigeneity have come to refer only to those ethnic groups native to North and South America, struggling for their rights under settler colonies. Concomitantly, as the slave trade increasingly narrowed the field of Africanity to that of the slave, erroneously conflated with dark pigmentation and henceforth with the designation of black, Africans were presumed to lack origin by virtue of the forced relocation of millions to the grave of the Middle Passage or the “social death” (to cite Orlando Patterson) constituted by enslavement. As slaves are made, removed from their land, and African territories are partitioned and their populations colonized, Africans, as a whole are conceived as losing their status as “of the land”; they are no longer indigenous but displaced from the land. While African territories are consolidated as “nation-states,” first as colonies of Europe, then as independent states through to the mid-century through various resistance movements enacted by Africans themselves, the process of colonization (what Mbembe has called the “indigénat” [2001], which replaced the “local” with a European fabrication of indigeneity in order to control African populations even as they assumed independence from Europe) was understood as the “civilizing” project of Europe. Colonial violence, as Mudimbe explains (1988), was re-read as the process of a missionary vision to “humanize” African “savages”; indigeneity, then, on both sides of the Atlantic, whether attached to First Nations peoples in the Americas, or to those on the African continent, became synonymous with the “uncivilized,” the illiterate, the sub-modern. Those perceived to have “fit in” with the model of modernity imposed by Europe were thus seen as having escaped this categorization. This is implied, it would seem, by the political definition of indigeneity currently provided via the UN recognized World Council of Indigenous People (WCIP) whose delegates, in its meeting in Guyana of 1974, defined indigenous people as follows: The term indigenous people refers to people living in countries which have a population composed of differing ethnic or racial groups who are descendants of the earliest populations living in the area and who do not as a group control the national government of the countries within which they live. (qtd in Rÿser 2012, 213; emphasis mine) This definition would, consequently, exclude the vast majority of populations in Africa. If the definition provides a platform for continued struggles for human rights and sovereignty struggles for First Nations people, it also contributes to the Hegelian notion that Africans are by and large a “lost” people whose origins have been permanently disfigured by the violence of European colonization. At the same time, racialization has served to undermine the humanity of nonEuropeans to such an extent that even our current discourses of ethnic and race studies consistently pursue a course of (necessary) rehabilitation whose purpose is to either reveal the constructionist ideology of colonialism or to counter this

African diasporic autochthonomies 271 ideology with “proof” of non-Europeans’ humanity (that is, proof of their “rationality,” “civility,” etc.). Systematically, however, as useful as these exercises have been, they reinforce the notion that Europe and its cultures are the sine qua non of humanity, the center around which all of Europe’s “others” rotate and other continents, and their cultures, are reduced to appendages, or off-springs, of Europe. The limiting of the term indigenous only to non-African traditional societies in various parts of the world, I would argue, is a by-product of the subject/other split cemented at around the same historical juncture of the colonization/settlement of territories in the “new” world, and the broadening of the slave trade. It is part of the process of limiting the ways in which African people could identify themselves and be codified in a hierarchy in which indigeneity was also a category manipulated in order to dispossess native populations of their lands, exploit their labor and limit their legal rights in the colonial societies. Still, those of African descent were dropped to a lower level on the great chain of being, the ultimate other, in an order in which such oppositions are always antagonistic and thus necessarily need revisioning and redefinition. In the end, then, it is precisely this feature of the “modern” that Clifford suggests bridges diaspora, indigenous and autochthone realities.

Mobile indigenous autochthonies: ethnographic filiations Reversing Clifford’s appropriation from African Diasporic Studies, I suggest by recourse to Indigenous Studies that if indigeneity is about belonging through historical continuity, and autochthony harkens to the origins of origin, then transnationalism liberates both from a sense of static geographic situated-ness. My claim, then, is, further, that African-derived autochthonomies signify mobile indigenous autochthonies defined by the political exigency of a cultural sovereignty unanchored in a particular, local space. This is perhaps more peculiar when utilized to describe Caribbean peoples given the known inter-ethnic mixing in the region; however, in all cases, the term refers to those who best inhabit or work the land. Thus, my appropriation of the term is not to argue for some impossible return to a physical site of origin, nor is it an appeal for the reclamation of origins in the African context, or for reparations for an irrecoverable past, whether geographic or cultural. It is, rather, a claim that, like Native cultures of North America and elsewhere, African cultures have maintained, through their descendants, whether remaining in local space, forcibly dispersed, or willingly relocated, cultural codes and knowledge that bespeak a heritage with indigenous sensibilities associated with sites of origin and “First Nations” cultures of the African continent. These codes and knowledge may be transformed as they traverse geopolitical spaces and time, but they hold resonance for those who can trace some part of their habits, customs, and knowing to these spaces of beginning. My objective is not to argue for the evidence of cultural retention beyond colonialism, the slave trade, the Middle Passage, and partition, but it is to show how indigeneity shows itself or resurfaces despite these in primarily contemporary articulations of identity in the works of a number of texts by individuals of African descent situated in a number

272  Myriam J. A. Chancy of locales beyond the African continent. Further, it is to show that this indigeneity is marked primarily in what I term “intradiasporic” texts, that is, texts in which their authors seek to address more than those who share their own, discreet culture or nationality (for ex. Jamaican, African-American, South African, Rwandan, etc.), but also an other culture of African descent to which they do not summarily belong. As such, such texts perform a symbolic “crossing of cultures,” while also insisting upon an implicit continuity between cultures, making them “intra-” rather than “inter-”cultural. It stands to reason, then, that texts not only perform crossing but mirror it through the trope of travel. The texts I have chosen for this study to explore this ground of exchange and indigeneity, thus focus primarily on travel or are in themselves travel narratives. This allows me, also, to test how mobility comes to form an integral component for transnational African-descended identities, thus suggesting as well that notions of the “nation-state” and appurtenance to the, or “a,” nation remain significant loci of investigation. If anything, “nationality” constitutes a major stumbling block for the constitution of discernible transnational African-descended identities; it may be that “the nation,” as understood in the European sense, following Benedict Anderson’s erudition on the rise and constitution of European nation-states will remain a pivot of negotiation among people of African descent, as it remains for us all, since what constitutes national identity is, as Anderson has so well argued, a sort of suspension of rationality in deference to a loose idea of the “common good” for the maintenance of national order and borders. But what emerges concretely through these imaginative texts of intradiasporic exchange is a fundamental understanding and recognition of the “other,” here, the African (diasporic) other, as an extension of the self or of one’s own culture: an inter-subjectivity is established. It is then maintained through the possibility of “autonomy,” that is of an apprehension and expression of one and the other’s liberty, of culture, of knowledge, of communication, of aesthetics, of subjectivity, and of agency in the process of such engagement. Here, then, as discussed above, I apply Jacques Rancière’s definition of emancipation rather than the historically bounded definition utilized in Black Atlantic Studies to describe decolonial processes in the wake of imperialism’s fall. It is this process that I term an autochthonomy: an inter-subjective, exchange girded by loosely indigenous practices, cultural expressions or beliefs that form the intradiasporic bridge between peoples of African descent, while standing free from, or at least attempting to stand free from, overly simplified national identifications which demand separation and division. Furthermore, I attempt to map in imaginative space the ground for such exchange, akin to Lao-Montes’ “multicentered historical field.” Located in no identifiable geographical space, this imagined locus is composed of the indigenous beliefs and practices, preserved, reformulated or syncretized over time, and often in differing geopolitical spaces, but which still form the basis for communication because of their a priori importance to the identities of those peoples who have continued to practice them, however modified, to subsist and to persist. Largely speaking, then, I am also arguing that beyond the deformations and reconstitutions of “raced” identities, I am taking for granted that, like Europeans, Africans have their own gnosis and epistemes, their own

African diasporic autochthonomies  273 understanding of “being,” and that these understandings of the “nature of man” are transmitted through cultural means that have been preserved through time. I call this ground, “yard” or “lakou” consciousness (referred to as “yard/lakou” hereafter), after a concept taken from my own geographical region and area of study, the Caribbean, a perspective that largely informs the current study,8 as I have come to believe that an energetic, imaginative exchange takes places intradiasporically in such a way that demonstrates the commonalities of perspective that makes such exchange possible. This space is one in which filiation and affiliation are redefined cultural features or markers of association. The difference between the two terms may seem slight, but it is the nuance between the two that I seek to highlight: affiliation is to associate with a group or structure in a subordinate relationship to a larger group identity or governing body (one is affiliated, for instance, to a Church, or to a an institution like a university or hospital), while filiation is to be directly descended from a group or lineage (one is the descendant of a matrilineal caste of shamans originating in Peru, for instance, or the grandchild of Polish émigrés residing in the United States). Affiliation is more or less distant, non-affective, while filiation invokes the affective bonds of blood ties, of heritage. A job or faith may tie us to an affiliation, a tie that can be severed when faith is broken or a job resigned, but a filiation is ruptured by very little, not even death. The “yard” or “lakou,” in Caribbean spaces, originally served to delimit groupings of related individuals, either because they were related by blood (an extended family), or by kinship (ethnicity). Over time, such spaces became looser in their constitution, but belonging to a yard/lakou usually came to mean that one culturally and, more importantly, spiritually belonged to a community of like-minded folk. Thus, in this chapter, I am seeking to redefine affiliation in such a way that brings together the linearity of filiation with the dynamism of affiliation – this is why, in places, I have come to use the term dis(af)filiation to signal a constant flow between the two categories whereby disengagement from either a filiation or an affiliation may take place or a reversal of the form of engagement may take place across formerly distinct spaces or periods in time. In this sense, my understanding of the flexibility of these terms is cognizant of Lorna Burns’ reading of Glissant’s “assertion . . . that being cannot be understood apart from its becoming.” By this, Burns means that Glissant is less interested in filiation because it “depends upon fixed being” (2014: 141), than he is on the fluidity of identity. However, my own approach does not focus on “difference” as the heart of identity (Burns 2014: 141) within postcolonial Manichean dualities. I  am much more invested, as the concept of the “yard/lakou consciousness” connotes, in what Keith Sandiford has marked as a significant departure from both Glissant’s and Gilroy’s conceptions of affiliation in order to ascribe “to myth and traditional epistemic systems an immutable power to shape and determine the cultural imaginary” (Sandiford 2010: 155n25). Doing so means ascribing a certain weight to filiation in ethnographic terms, if not in terms of biology or heredity; the movement and transformation of these forms across the diaspora, however, contributes to the movement and dynamism of affiliation, allowing for a recuperation of identity that is not necessarily defined

274  Myriam J. A. Chancy genetically nor defined solely on the basis of colonial heritage. It is in this respect that my current project attempts to chart new ground. It is not, as one scholar termed Glissant’s important work, a project in which “relation . . . is the project of a cure for unhomeliness” (Gallagher 2008: 269). It does not assume a lost home ground or origin(s) but argues for a constant reconceptualization of “home” from within yard/lakou consciousness. Ritualized patterns of cultural/spiritual retention were rehearsed and repeated in such yards, giving each a particular feature and resonance, but largely speaking, all such yards/lakou shared recognizable African diasporic features that could be translated across yards, through which one could recognize “kin.” In “yard/lakou consciousness,” the space of meeting operates simultaneously as “home ground” (akin to bell hook’s “home space”), meeting place, community space, sacred ground (for meeting with spirits and ancestors), crossroads, and recollection. It is a space of memory, of negotiation between past and present as much as it is a space in which European, African beliefs confront each other and congeal into new, syncretic concepts and rituals. Yet, it serves not as a space of assimilation but as one of reconfiguration in which (African) cultural antecedents are guiding principles and aspiration(s), alongside, rather than in spite of concepts adopted and adapted from dominant cultures within hegemonic colonial systems that remain formative whether in “postcolonial” (in the Americas or Europe) or “postcolony” (in African, after Mbembe 2001) systems.

Conclusion Autochthonomies, then, as a critical approach, functions as an intervention in fields concerned with “raced” identities in a global context, from postcolonial studies to African American studies, engaging contingent fields focusing on identity and subject formation such as philosophy, feminist/women’s studies, political science, anthropology, anchored in the interdisciplinary nexus of Caribbean studies. It becomes clear as one engages such texts that the process is not an easy one, that the dis-identifications produced by difference and their social organization (such as race, gender, class, nation, etc.) are extremely tenacious. Thus, how some texts overcome or negotiate this will serve to demonstrate both the limits and potentialities of yard/lakou consciousness and of the concept of autochthonomy as I engage them here. As such, they provide important testimonies bearing on crucial historical moments in the African diasporic world and for humanity and they also serve to transmit the pitfalls and hopes of overcoming the constraints of national demarcations and their attendant raced realities. I  suggest that the expression and practice of transnationalism these texts engage transmit useful tools of social and political testimony in the process of preserving and reconstituting codes of cultural filiation. Ultimately, my purpose is to focus on the substance of the exchanges the texts perform and to show how they facilitate and cultivate transnational identities in ways that illuminate the subjectivities of Africandescended peoples, and their non-reliance on colonial models for recognition or self-actualization.

African diasporic autochthonomies  275

Notes 1 A shorter version of this chapter was presented at the “Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic Conference,” University of Pittsburgh, Nov. 7, 2015; this longer version is adapted from the introduction to my Guggenheim-supported academic monograph-in-progress: Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony,  & Transmission within the African Diaspora. 2 I thank Susan Z. Andrade for raising questions that have pushed me to elucidate the connection between transnationalism and indigeneity between First Nations and African societies. 3 Definitions taken from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autochtone, accessed June  28, 2013. 4 Self-governance or sovereignty, in the cases in which it has been granted, is, at best, provisional or partial, limited to policing on reservations created by colonial powers, or as in the case of Inuit territory, subordinated to the laws of Canada. Most Indigenous societies are governed by outdated treaty laws while a number are not recognized under either UN laws or laws of the nation states in which they reside. 5 My point is not that we do away with “race” and its effects but that we turn to look beyond the concept and limitation of race to see what else is being produced by those positioned as race’s objects, those positioned as marginal, subaltern etc. In the process of this exploration, I am haunted by the question: why do we feel the need to endlessly have to reproduce the terms of race’s captivity? 6 We might here hear echoes of Mbembe’s analysis of an operative feature of the colonial process, the “commandement” (2001). 7 One can think here of root workers within both First Nations and African cultures who utilized natural remedies found in nature in the absence of access to modernized modes of health care, as well as the ways in which nature was used to forge escape routes – through bayous and forests, for instance, during the days of the Underground Railroad. Also, though one could make a claim for kinship ties through inter-marriage, this would also have been the case for settlers and, as recent DNA analyses have shown, can also lead to both false claims of heritage and inheritance related to culture and land. 8 Since the Caribbean is an agglomeration of differing nation-states, this perspective can not be said to be anchored in any particular nation. A regional or disciplinary perspective does, however, inform this project.

Works cited Aschroft, B. and Griffiths, G. (2002) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London/New York: Routledge. Burns, L. (2014) Contemporary Caribbean Writing & Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-Continental Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel & Translation in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Clifford, J. (2013) Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Boston, MA: Harvard UP. Edwards, B. H. (2003) The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Gallagher, M. (2008) Poetics, Ethics, Globalization. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press. Gilroy, P. (2000) The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Gilroy, P. (2002) Against Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Hartman, S. V. (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

276  Myriam J. A. Chancy Lao-Montes, A. (2007) “Decolonial Moves.” Cultural Studies, 21.2: 309. Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988) The Invention of Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP. Rancière, J. (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP. Rÿser, R. C. (2012) Indigenous Nations and Modern States: The Political Emergence of Nations Challenging State Power. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Sandiford, K. (2010) The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Sheller, M. (2012) Citizenship From Below: Erotic Agency & Caribbean Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke UP. Stephens, M. (2003) “Re-Imaging the Shape and Borders of Black Political Space.” Radical History Review, 87.1: 169–182. Wright, M. M. (2004) Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University. Zeleza, P. T. (2011, 2014) “Pan-Africanism in the Age of Obama: Challenges and Prospects.” Black Scholar, 41.2: 34–44. Sociological Collection. Web. 17.

Index

25 (film) 169 – 170, 178n5 Abdala Júnior, Benjamin 89 Abdullah the Muslim 140 Achebe, Chinua 6, 162n12, 249 – 250, 254 – 256 Adesanmi, Pius 187 Adichie, Chinamanda Ngozi 255 – 256 African Cup of Nations 232, 235n14 African Diasporic Studies 259, 269, 271 – 274 Africanised Paris 183 – 184 Africanization 128, 183 – 184 Agbese, Pita 101 Agualusa, José Eduardo 6, 89, 143, 201, 203, 205 AIDS 99, 213 Ailhaud, Jean-Antoine 134 – 135 Ake, Claude 100 alcohol 60, 71n8 Almeida, Germano 143 Alvarez, Santiago 170, 171, 178, 180n13 Amazonas, Elaine 257n2 Americanization 128, 180n16 Amorim, Celso 87 Anderson, Benedict 272 Anderson, Perry 91n2, 175 Andrade, Susan Z. 106, 197, 275n2 Angola: civil wars 221; MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) 219 – 221; see also Brazil and Angola Animal Farm (Orwell) 207, 211 animal presence 214 – 215; beginnings 203 – 206; immunity and animal 203 – 206; pig in Havana 211 – 214, 214; pig in Luanda 207 – 210; porcine dystopias 207 April Revolution 144, 148, 160 – 161, 179n9

Arab Revolutions 125 Aragon, Louis 119 Aristotle 121, 125 – 126 Armillas-Tiseyra, Magalí 109 Arrighi, Giovanni 97, 102, 104, 128 Ashcroft, Bill 267 assassinations 107, 109, 161, 239, 248 al-‘Atāhiyya, Abu 123 autochthones: present-day or native occupants as 268; term 260, 270 autochthonomy: concept of 274; as disciplinary intervention 261 – 264; mobile indigenous 271 – 274; term 260, 261 autonomy, term 260 Badiou, Alain 132 – 133, 140 Bailyn, Bernard 127, 128 Bakhtin, Mikhail 209 Baldwin, James 6, 246 – 250, 256, 257n5 – 7 Barbery Coast (Berberia) 14 Barrera y Luyando, Ángel 54 – 55, 60 Batista, Fulgencio 254 Bauman, Zygmunt 138 – 140 Beato, Vicente 65 – 66 Beck, Lewis 130 Beliäd, Chokri 140 Bello, Walden 98 – 99, 101, 104 – 105 Bennett, Louise 241 Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885 4, 82 Beyala, Calixthe 183, 196 – 198 Biassou, Georges 135 Biko, Steve 6, 239, 242 – 243 Binet, Alfred 65 Black Atlantic 127 – 134; construct of 11; intellectual challenge 242 – 257; United States and 239 – 241; written word in 20 – 25

278 Index Black Atlantic identity: Ana González 21 – 22; Barbary/Guinea/Africa as origin 13 – 20; Francisca de Jelofe 14 – 16, 25; Juana María 21 – 22, 22; Juan de Morales 22 – 26, 29n26 – 27; Maria de Candelaira 14, 15 – 20, 25, 27n10; Pedro Vidal 21 – 22 Blackburn, Robin 12 black confraternities 39, 41 – 43, 46n25 Black Consciousness Movement 239 Black Count (Juan de Valladolid) 41 Black France 184 Black Madonna 24 Black Paris 184, 187 Black Skins, White Masks (Fanon) 242 blood tests 60 – 63 Bogues, Tony 124, 136 – 137 Bolton, Herbert 128 Bond, Patrick 116 Bourguiba, Habib 122 bozal, term 11 Branch, Adam 113 Brathwaite, Kamu 127 Brazil and Africa (Rodrigues) 76 Brazil and Angola: Brazilian coloniality and lusofonia 81 – 85; coloniality and lusotropicalism 79 – 81; cultural exchanges 85 – 88; history of uneven exchanges 75 – 81; towards a decolonial exchange 90 – 91 Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics 78 Bretton Woods 102, 184 Brief History of Neoliberalism (Harvey) 104 Brown v Board of Education (1954) 239 Bubi island 3, 52, 58 Buck-Morss, Susan 202 Buñuel, Luis 203 Burns, Lorna 273 Cabral, Amilcar 5, 153, 159, 161, 165n35, 179n8 Cabral, Maria Manuela 146 Cahiers du cinéma (magazine) 173 Calling of St. Matthew, The (painting) 32, 33, 36, 39 – 40, 43, 44n1 Cameroon 56, 63, 66, 191 – 192, 194 Canary Islands 1, 11 – 12; conquest of 26n4; Spanish Inquisition and 12 – 13, 25 – 26 Candelaria, Maria de 14, 15 – 20, 25, 27n10 capitalism 75, 81; American 172; Cuba and 215; global 97, 102, 172, 176 – 177; modernisation and 211; modernity

and 70; transmission belt for 137; transnational 269 Cardoso, Fernando Henríque 79 Cardoso, Margarida 180n14 Carducho, Vicente 36 Carnation Revolution 5, 219 Carnival of Victory (Carnaval da Vitória) 209 – 210, 212 carnophallogocentrism 201 Carter, Martin 6, 242 – 243, 256 Casa-cuna (orphanage) 68 Casa Grande & Senzala (Freyre) 78 – 80, 85 Castile, conquest of Canary Islands 25, 26n4 Castillo, Ana Cabeza del 23 Castillo, Clara Inés del 16 – 17, 27n10 Castillo, Juan de 42 Castro, Fidel 121, 202, 254 Castro, Raúl 202, 214 – 215 Castro y Quiñones, Pedro 38 Catholic Church 67 – 68; CounterReformation Church 38; faith 15, 18 – 19, 24, 40; medical missionary 52; Monarchs 41; orthodoxy 14, 40, 204; religion 26, 36 Césaire, Aimé 119 – 122, 124, 165n35, 175, 250 – 252, 254, 263, 269 Césaire, Suzanne 269 Ceán Bermúdez, Agustin 37 Celso, José 169 – 170 Chabal, Patrick 143, 219, 235n5 Chambers, Douglas 127 – 129 Chebbi, Abou el-Kacem 130 Cheru, Fantu 99 Chevrier, Jacques 187 Chomsky, Noam 97 – 98 Christianity 13 – 14, 17, 27n9, 33, 40, 154; non-, 16, 25 Christians: new 33, 35, 40; old 27n11, 33, 35, 40 Christophe, Henri 132, 136 cimarron 214 – 215 Ciné-Geography, concept of 168, 178n1 cinema 168 – 169; counter-lines 177 – 178; lines of circulation 169 – 170; and politics 171 – 173; radical politics through 173 – 177 civil society 100, 130 – 131, 140, 186, 191 Clifford, James 121, 262 – 264, 268 – 269, 271 Coates, Carrol F. 116n6 Coelho, João Paulo Borges 143 Cold War 5, 107 – 108, 110, 112, 114, 174, 176

Index  279 colonialism 1, 146, 158; anti- 169, 172; European 105 – 106, 124, 239, 241, 243; First Nations and African societies 260 – 264; French 183 – 184, 186, 189 – 190; health and 51 – 52, 69; ideology of 270 – 271; modern 153; neo137, 168, 172, 174 – 177; Portuguese 75, 77, 79, 90 – 91, 91n2, 147, 161, 178n4; post- 2, 146, 175; resistance against 203, 220 – 221; ultracolonialism 91n2 coloniality 1 – 3; Brazilian 81 – 85, 90 – 91; concept of 12, 80, 92n4; of power 79, 146 colonial medicine: purpose of 52 – 55; see also leprosy Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 178 Condé, Maryse 121 conscripts 2 Conversos 33 Cooper, Frederick 185 Correas, Gonzalo 43, 46n31 Couto, Mia 88, 160, 165n39, 179n9 CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries) 81 – 83 Craveirinha, José 88, 150 Cuba 6, 24, 251, 253; Angola and 202, 203, 207 – 208; biopolitics of socialism 211 – 212; Che Guevara and 121, 202 – 203; cinema in 170 – 171, 174; culture and civility in 214 – 215; MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and 205, 207 – 208; pig in Havana 211 – 214; US-Cuban relations 254 cultural exchanges: of Brazil and Angola 85 – 88; in literature 88 – 90; see also Brazil and Angola cultural revolution, cinema and politics 171 – 173 Curtis, Mark 99 Danticat, Edwige 255 – 256 Davis, Angela 249 Davis, Mike 99, 116 de Certeau, Michel 173 decolonisation: of Africa 101, 104, 106, 169, 243 – 246; of African and Caribbean communities 240; of Brazil and Angola 90 – 91; in cinema 168, 179n8; of knowledge 2; of Paris 194; of Portugal 144, 150, 161, 219; radical social change in 178n1; term 160 democracy 100, 101, 107, 113, 114, 257n2 Depestre, René 119 – 121, 250, 251 Derrida, Jacques 201, 225 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 131 – 132, 136

Dia Nacional da Consciência Negra (National Black Consciousness Day) 87 Diawara, Manthia 180n18 Dickinson, Margaret 171 Dilla, Haroldo 215 Dobzynski, Charles 119 donsomana 109, 111, 114 – 115 Doval Trueba, Maria del Mar 36, 45n11, 45n13 Drake, Francis 27n14 Dred Scott decision 245 Du Bois, W.E.B. 3, 128, 175, 244, 262 dystopia 204, 216n4; porcine 207, 209, 211; post-revolutionary 212, 214 Edwards, Brent Hayes 261 El Mulato (Sebastián Gómez) 36 emancipation 153, 201 – 202, 210, 213; anti-imperialism 172 – 176; definition of 272; documents of 34; movements 68, 131; political 144 – 145, 147, 150, 190 – 191; proclamation 134; redefining 264 – 267; slaves after 40; term 262 Emancipation Proclamation of 29 August 1793 134 Enlightenment 26, 127, 131 – 132, 137, 261 epiphenomenon 4, 97 equalitarianism 208 Equatorial Guinea 1, 3; alcoholization of population 60; blood tests 60 – 63; Fernando Poo 52 – 60, 61, 62; health and hygiene 55 – 58; health data 65; hygiene feature at Mikomeseng 66 – 70; leper colony in 66 – 68, 70; leper compound 69; leprosy and 63, 66 – 68; malaria 59 – 60; medical interventions 51 – 55; orphanages 65, 68, 70 Eshun, Kodwo 168, 178n1 Espinosa, Julio Garcia 174 Esposito, Roberto 203 Essomba, J. R. 4, 183, 187, 192 – 198 European imperialism 51, 120 Europeanization of African features 39 – 40, 43 Evers, Medgar 239, 248 Eyadéma, Gnassingbé 107, 115 Eze, Emmanuel 262 Fang mainlanders 3, 52, 71n8 Fanon, Frantz 2, 51 – 52, 124, 126, 137, 139, 140, 141n23, 152, 163n20, 242, 251, 254 Ferguson, James 100 Fernández Retamar, Roberto 203, 213, 215

280 Index Fernando Poo: island of 52, 53, 54, 55 – 60; map of 61, 62 Ferrer Piera, Pablo 57 FESTAC (Festival of Black Arts and Culture in Nigeria) 252 – 253 filmic warfare 174 Firmat, Gustavo Pérez 122 First Nations identity/people 259 – 261, 268 – 271, 275n2 First World War see World War I FNAC bookstores 83 Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (FIDES) 185, 192 Fonseca, Celene 257n2 Foucault, Michel 13, 124, 138 Francophonie, concept of 192 freedom 134 – 140; fighting 6; manumission (from slavery) 3, 34 – 35, 37, 43; thinking 6 Frelimo (Mozambican Liberation Front) 5, 145, 158, 165n35, 169, 171, 178n5, 179n13 French Colonial Empire 133 – 134, 136 French Revolution 127, 130, 132, 140, 173, 244 Freyre, Gilberto 4, 78 – 80, 91n1 friedfishism 208, 209, 210 Fuerteventura island, Muslims in 27n11, 27n9 fugitivity 124 Gallagher, Catherine 147 Garvey, Marcus 251, 262 Gaya Nuño, Juan Antonio 36, 45n12 George, Susan 101 Getino, Otavio 174, 176, 177, 181n24 Gil, Gilberto 252 – 253, 257n8 Gilroy, Paul 11 – 12, 261 – 265, 273 Giorgi, Gabriel 202 Gómez, Sebastián 36 Godard, Jean-Luc 172 – 174, 180n18, 180n22 Goitia, José 214 González, Ana 21 – 22 Gonzalo de Mena y Roelas of Seville (Cardinal-Archbishop) 41 governance, term 101 Gray, Ros 168, 169, 178n1, 179n8, 179 – 180n13, 180n14 Griffiths, Gareth 267 Grin Without a Cat (film) 178, 182 Guerra, Ruy 170, 171, 180n13, 180n18

Guessoumi, Mouldi 139 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” 121, 202 – 203, 206 – 207, 215 Guevarism 169 Guillén, Nicolás 254 Guinea-Bissau 81, 169 – 170, 178n2, 179n13, 179n6, 179n8 Gulf of Guinea: biomedical discourse 51 – 52; Spanish Territories of 51, 53 – 56, 60, 64, 65 – 66, 71n9 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás 6, 203 – 205 habitation, definition of 136 Haiti 119 – 120; from Tunisia to 128 – 129 Haitian Revolution 5, 128, 131 – 133, 136, 139, 141n7, 266 Hall, Stuart 263 – 264 Hamilton, Russell 160 Harlan, Thomas 170 Harlan, Veit 170 Harrison, Graham 116 Hartman, Saidiya 261 Hartog, Simon 171 Harvey, David 99, 104 – 105 health: and hygiene 55 – 58; passports 63, 64; health tax stamp 64; see also medicine Herman, Edward 97 – 98 Hernández Sanjuan, Manuel 67 HIV/AIDS 99 Hollywood films/cinema 85, 168, 172, 174, 176 – 177 Holy Office of Inquisition 14, 17, 19, 27n6 Honwana, Luis Bernardo 161 Houellebecz, Michelle 241 Hunt, Nancy Rose 69 Iberian Muslims 35 Iberian Peninsula 1, 12, 33, 78, 131 immunity, concept of 203 imperialism 106 – 107, 115, 133, 145, 159, 171, 179n8, 193, 272; anti- 168, 172; colonialism and 184, 203; European 51, 57, 120; fascist 169; neo-colonialism and 175 – 177; Soviet 146; Western 91n3 indigeneity 6, 260 – 261, 275n2; mobile indigenous autochthonies 271 – 274; term 270; transnational 267 – 271 indigenous, term 270 Indigenous peoples/cultures 198, 203; African Diaspora 250, 256, 259 – 266, 269, 271, 274; African societies 260 – 261, 269, 275n2; Brazilian

Index  281 78 – 79, 92n5; First Nations 259 – 261, 268 – 271, 275n2; Haiti 120, 132; languages 251, 256 innovative dynamism 152 Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC: National Film Institute) 170, 171 International Association of Genocide Scholars 259 internationalism 5, 171 – 172 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2, 98, 100, 105 – 106, 112 – 113; riots 100, 106 Islamic faith 14 – 15 Jacinto, António 220 Jamaica 137 – 138, 240 – 241, 252, 272 James, C.L.R. 12, 128, 161, 175, 257n3 Jameson, Fredric 106, 146 Jelofe, Francisca de 14 – 16, 25 Jim Crow order 239 – 241, 244 – 245, 248 – 249, 254 Jiménez de Cisneros, Francisco 33 Johnson, Lyndon 240 Johnson administration 102 Jorge, Lidia 5, 144 – 152, 157, 161, 165n34 Juana María 21 – 22; commissioned image of Santa Martha 22 Juan de Valladolid (Black Count) 41 Kane, Cheikh Hamidou 4, 183, 187 – 192, 195 – 197, 199 Kant, Immanuel 130 – 132 Kennedy, John F. 239, 248 Kennedy, Robert 239, 248 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 6, 239, 243 – 246, 248, 257n3 – 4 Klay Kieh, George 101 Kourouma, Ahmadou 4, 97, 106 – 109, 112, 115 – 116, 116n6; Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote 97, 106 – 109, 112 Kramer, Robert 170 Kristeva, Julia 19, 24 Kuxa Kanema (film) 171, 180n14 ladinos, term 11, 26n2 La Hora de los Hornos (film) 176 – 177, 182 Lanzarote island 25, 27n11, 27n9 Las bestias (Menéndez) 207, 211 – 214 Lasne, Michel 39 L’aventure Ambiguë (Kane) 4, 183, 187, 190, 192, 193, 197 Laye, Camara 255 Lemos, Virgílio 150

Leninism 208 Le Paradis du Nord (Essomba) 4, 183, 187, 192, 197 leprosy 29n29; Equatorial Guinea and 63, 66 – 68; hospital at leper compound 69; hygiene feature at Mikomeseng 66 – 70; leper colony 66 – 68, 70; tablets for 113 liberalisation 101, 115 Ligero Morote, Armando 52, 63 Lima Blacks 20 Linebaugh, Peter 128 Lippmann, Walter 127 López-Labourdette, Adriana 205, 213 López Saccone Luis 56, 59 loros 41 Lourenço, Eduardo 82 – 83, 148 – 149, 153, 162n5 Louverture, Toussaint 135 – 136, 137 Lucas, Celso 169 – 170 lusofonia: Brazilian coloniality and 81 – 85; idea of 81 – 83, 90; Portuguese term 4, 81, 92n7; rose-coloured map 92n7 Lusophone world 1 Luso-tropical, term 78 Lusotropical ideology, Brazil and Angola 79 – 81 lusotropicalism, Brazilian coloniality and 79 – 81 Lutheranism 16, 27n14 al-Ma‘arrī, Abu al-‘Ala’ 123 McClintock, Anne 57 Maceo, Antonio 202 Machel, Samora 5, 169, 171, 173 malaria 57, 58, 59 – 60, 67 Malcolm X 239, 248 Mamdani, Mahmood 158, 165n35 Mampilly, Zachariah 113 Mandela, Nelson 239 manumission (legal freedom from slavery) 3, 34 – 35, 37, 43 Maoism 169 Mapa-Cor de rosa 4 Marker, Chris 170, 173 – 174, 178, 180n22 Marley, Bob 252 Marron, term 121 Marshall Plans 99, 102, 127 Marx, Karl 102, 137, 178 Marxism 169, 175 – 176, 197, 208; internationalism 5; Marxist-Leninist Party system 208; thinking 2 al-Mas‘adi, Mahmud 122 – 124, 126 Massey, Doreen 184

282 Index Matias de Torres 36, 45n12 Matta, Inocência 218, 219 Mayer, Ruth 51 Mazo, Juan Bautista Martínez del 34, 44n4 Mbembe, Achille 2, 12, 261, 270, 275n6 medicine: blood tests 60 – 63; health and hygiene 55 – 58; health passports 63 – 64; interventions 51; leprosy and 63, 66 – 68; malaria and 59 – 60; purpose of colonial 52 – 55; see also leprosy Medvedkin, Aleksandr 174 Medvedkin Group 170, 173, 179n10 Mehan, Alfred 127 Menéndez, Ronaldo 6, 204 – 205, 207, 211 – 214, 215 Midiohouan, Guy Ossito 192 Miller, Christopher 183 – 185 Mintz, Sidney 12, 127 – 128 Mirandola, Pico 126, 139 – 140 modernity 70; colonial education 65; colonial health 55 Mohammed, Abdul Jan 262 Montaldo, Federico 56 – 58 Morales, Juan de 22 – 26, 29n26 – 27 Moreno, Isidoro 43, 46n22 Moriscos 14, 20, 27n11, 27n7, 27n9, 33, 40 Morrison, Toni 254 – 256, 257n9 Moten, Fred 124 Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO) 5, 145, 158, 165n35, 169, 171, 178n5, 179n13 Mozambique 163n23, 165n35; 25 (documentary) 169 – 170, 178n5; colonial war in 144; conception of liberation 160; Portuguese troops in 1972 158; radical politics through cinema 173 – 177 Mozambique Revolution 179n13, 179n8 – 9, 180n14 MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) 179n6, 205, 207 – 208, 210, 219 – 221 mulatos 12, 20 Murillo, Bartolomé Estéban 36 Muslims 14; Abdullah the Muslim 140; ancestry 27n7; final expulsion from Spain 33, 40; free and 17 – 19, 25; Iberian 35; islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura 27n11, 27n9 al-Mutanabbi 122 – 124 Nabuco, Joaquim 78 Naipaul, Vidia 254 National Black Consciousness Day 87 National Institute of Cinema 5

Ndiaye, Christiane 108 Ndongo Bidyogo, Donato 64 negro libré, term 23 negros 12 Nemser, David 12 neo-colonialism 137, 168, 172, 174 – 177 neoliberalism 5, 80, 97, 104 – 106, 116, 133, 206 Nerín, Gustau 63, 71n8 Nesbitt, Nick 131 – 132 Neto, Agostinho 150, 219 – 220, 222, 235n6 new Christians 33, 35, 40 New International Economic Order (NIEO) 104 – 105 New York Times (newspaper) 214, 214, 215 Nigeria 6, 100, 252 – 253, 255 Nixon, Richard 244 – 245, 257n4 Nixon shock 102 Nkrumah, Kwame 6, 244, 262 Nobel Peace Prize 245 Nobel Prize 253 – 254 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 127 Obama, Barack 215, 241 Odebrecht 84 – 85 Ogé, Vincent 134 old Christians 27n11, 33, 35, 40 Oliver, Kelly 260 Ombela (Rui) 218, 220, 225, 227, 233 Omri, Mohamed-Salah 122 Ong, Walter 20 Onze de Novembro (Rui) 218, 220 Organisaiton internationale de la Francophonie 184, 192 orphanages 65, 68, 70 Ortiz, Fernando 12 Ortiz de Zúñiga, Diego 41 Orwell, George 207, 211 O Semba da Nova Ortografia (Rui) 218, 220, 227 – 231, 234 Ouédraogo, Jean 107 Ouologuem, Yambo 106 Our Lady of Candelaria 21, 24, 29n28 Our Lady of Charity 24 Our Lady of Piety 42 Our Lady of the Angels 42, 43 Our Lady of the Kings 41, 42 Our Lady of the Nativity 42 Our Lady of the Presentation 41 Our Lady of the Rosary 39 Owen, Hillary 147 – 148 Pacheco, Francisco 36, 38 Palach, Jan 146, 162n2

Index  283 Palmer, Robert 128 Palomino de Castro y Velasco, Antonio 34 – 36, 44n4, 44n6 pardos 12, 41 Pareja, Juan de 3, 45n15; The Calling of St. Matthew (painting) 32, 33, 36, 39 – 40, 43, 44n1; The Flight into Egypt (painting) 36, 45n14; as independent visual artist 35 – 44; life story of 3, 33 – 34; relationship with master Velázquez 33 – 35 Patterson, Orlando 270 Pétion, Alexandre 136 Perry, Mary 40 personas de color 12 Philip IV (king) 33 Pilgrim, T. F. 137, 141n24 Pink Map 4 Piot, Charles 107, 115 Pittaluga, Gustavo 60, 61, 62 Pliny the Elder 125 poetry: Angolan 218 – 235; social and constructive poetics 219; see also Rui, Manuel politics: cinema and 171 – 173; thinking radical, through cinema 173 – 177 Polverel, Étienne 134 – 137 Ponz, Antonio 36 Portuguese Inquisition 14, 27n8 postcolony, phenomenon of 2 Prashad, Vijay 98, 105 Price, Richard 127, 128 Price-Mars, Jean 251 – 252, 269 Quijano, Anibal 79 – 80, 84, 91n3 Qur’an 109, 114 race 175 – 176, 202, 261, 262; in Black Atlantic 241 – 242, 244 – 245; in Brazil 78 – 79; as category 13, 24, 26, 264 – 266; concept of 58, 275n5; human 126, 130; identities 272, 274; as marker 52; mixed- in Spain 33, 35 – 36, 38, 41, 43; in Paris 196; Rui’s poetry 221; susceptibility to disease 59; in US-Cuban relations 254 Radical Enlightenment 131 radicalism 102, 137, 212 Rama, Ángel 211, 216n3 Ramadan, Abane 139 Ramalho, Maria Irene 146 Ramón y Cajal, Santiago 60 Rancière, Jacques 181n28, 265 – 267, 272 recolonization 97 – 98, 102, 106 Rediker, Marcus 13, 128

restless flying, phrase 119 Ribeyro, Julio Ramón 211 Roberts, Neil 121 – 122 Rodrigues, José Honório 76 – 77, 86 Rojas y Sandoval, Cristóbal (archbishop of Seville) 41 Rosa, João Guimarães 88 Rouch, Jean 172, 174, 180n18 Rousseff, Dilma 257n2 Rueda, Lope de 25, 30n35 Rui, Manuel 5 – 6, 207 – 209, 211 – 215, 218 – 223, 225 – 229, 232, 234 – 235; as activist 221; biography of 220 – 221; Ombela 218, 220, 225, 227, 233; Onze de Novembro 218, 220; O Semba da Nova Ortografia 218, 220, 227 – 231, 234 Russian Revolution 175 Rwanda 158, 262, 272 Sabino, Álvaro 148, 150, 160 Sagkeeng First Nation 259 – 260 Salmon, John 137, 141n24 Sandiford, Keith 273 Sandoval, Alonso de 38 – 39 San Martin y Montes, Antonio 56 Sansone, Livio 85 – 86 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 144, 161 Santos, José Eduardo dos 219 Saul, John 97 Scott, David 2, 128 – 129 Second World War see World War II Seddon, David 100 self-whitening, process of 39 – 40 Serna Burgaleta, Jesús 65 Seyferth, Giralda 78 Shakespeare, William 247, 248 Sheller, Mimi 137, 261 slavery 1; freedom 134 – 140 slave trade 11; Brazil and Angola 75 – 76, 86; colonialism and 264, 271; Cuba 202 – 203, 207 – 208; modern 13; MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and 207 – 208, 210; terms indigenous and indigeneity 270 – 271; transatlantic 33, 75 – 76, 127, 202 – 203 social death 3, 270 socialism 5 – 6, 146, 201 – 202, 206, 208, 211, 215 Solanas, Fernando 174, 176, 177, 181n24 Sonthonax, Leger-Felicite 134 – 135, 137 Spanish Inquisition: of Canary Islands 12 – 13, 14, 25 – 26; written word in Black Atlantic 20 – 25 Spanish Monarchy 12, 17, 20

284 Index Spanish National Association of Wine Producers 60, 71n8 Spanish Territories: Equatorial Guinea 69 – 70; Gulf of Guinea 51, 53 – 56, 60, 64, 65 – 66, 71n9 Stehrenberger, Cécile 67 Stephens, Michelle 264 Stiglitz, Joseph 98 Stoler, Ann Laura 53, 66, 70 structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) 98 – 99, 112 Surprenant, Chris 130 Tavares, Ana Paula 220, 223, 235n10, 235n13 thingification, principle of 3 Thiongo, Ngugi wa 256 Third World 2 Thomas, Greg 121 Tiffin, Helen 267 Transatlantic Slave Trade 33, 75 – 76, 127, 202 – 203 transculturation 211, 216n3 Trapido, Joe 106 Traverso, Enzo 175, 176 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 126, 131 Tunisian Revolution (2011) 5, 122, 124 – 127, 129 – 130, 132, 138 – 140 Tunisian Riots 130, 132 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 105 Urban VIII (pope) 42 van de Walle, Nicholas 100 Varoufakis, Yanis 103

Vastey, Pompee-Valentin 132 Velázquez, Diego 33 – 39, 42 – 43 Verlinden, Charles 3, 127 Vertov, Dziga 173 – 174, 178, 180n13 Vidal, Pedro 21 – 22 Vieira, Luandino 88 Vietnam war 102, 104, 169 – 170, 176 – 177 Villarino, Ramón 65 – 66 Villar Rubin y Yedra, José 56 Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (Kourouma) 97, 106 – 109, 112 Walcott, Derek 253 – 254 Walton, John 100 Weber, Max 128 Wilder, Gary 185, 186 – 187 Wochay, Fonseca 220 Wolfe, Cary 202 World Bank 2, 98, 100, 101 World Council of Indigenous People (WCIP) 270 World War I 63, 185 World War II 6, 65, 78, 80, 97, 102, 127, 183, 185, 186, 246 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon) 2 Wright, Michelle M. 261 written word in Black Atlantic 20 – 25 Wynter, Sylvia 121 xinguilar 233 – 234, 235n17 Yerkes, Robert 65 Young, Robert 2, 175 Zavala, Silvio 128