Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique: Joints and Fissures 9783593501925

Table of contents :
Contents
Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique: Preface • Sabine Broeck, Carsten Junker
Epistemic Repercussions
Location and Social Thought in the Black: A Testimony to Africana Intellectual Tradition • Kwame Nimako
Race in Translation: The Red, Black, and White Atlantics • Robert Stam, Ella Shohat
The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and “the Coloniality of Our Being” • Rinaldo Walcott
Ethical Reassessments
Legacies of Enslavism and White Abjectorship • Sabine Broeck
Europe’s Colonialism, Decoloniality, and Racism • Marina Gržinić
Countering the Legacies of Colonial Racism: Delinking and the Renewal of Humanism • Ina Kerner
Why the Postsocialist Cannot Speak: On Caucasian Blacks, Imperial Difference, and Decolonial Horizons • Madina Tlostanova
The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement • Frank B. Wilderson III
Disciplinary Reconfigurations
Inequalities Unbound: Transregional Entanglements and the Creolization of Europe • Manuela Boatcă
Social Sciences and North-South-Asymmetries: Towards a Global Sociology • Sérgio Costa
Decolonizing Gender—Gendering Decolonial Theory: Crosscurrents and Archaeologies • Gabriele Dietze
Queering Archives of Race and Slavery—Or, on Being Wilfully Untimely and Unhappy • Beatrice Michaelis, Elahe Haschemi Yekani
Cultural Revisions
The Département Writes Back: On Chamoiseau’s Rewrite of Robinson Crusoe • Kathleen Gyssels
Interrogating the Interview as Genre: Five Cases over Two Hundred Years • Carsten Junker
Decolonizing Gender in the Academy: From Black Power and Black Consciousness to Black Rebellion • Rozena Maart
Rastafari and/as Decoloniality • Annika McPherson
Intersecting Identities and Epistemologies in Rozena Maart’s “No Rosa, No District Six” • Jean-Paul Rocchi
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique

Sabine Broeck is professor for (African-)American Studies, Gender Studies and Black Diaspora Studies at the University of Bremen. Carsten Junker is postdoctoral researcher in English-speaking Cultures/American Studies at the University of Bremen.

Sabine Broeck, Carsten Junker (eds.)

Postcoloniality— Decoloniality— Black Critique Joints and Fissures

Campus Verlag Frankfurt/New York

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de ISBN 978-3-593-50192-5 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Copyright © 2014 Campus Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt-on-Main Cover design: Campus Verlag, Frankfurt-on-Main Printing office and bookbinder: Beltz Bad Langensalza Printed on acid free paper. Printed in Germany This book is also available as an E-Book. www.campus.de www.press.uchicago.edu

Contents

Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique: Preface Sabine Broeck, Carsten Junker ................................................................................... 9

Epistemic Repercussions Further Thoughts on (De)Coloniality Walter D. Mignolo ................................................................................................... 21 Location and Social Thought in the Black: A Testimony to Africana Intellectual Tradition Kwame Nimako ....................................................................................................... 53 Race in Translation: The Red, Black, and White Atlantics Robert Stam, Ella Shohat ........................................................................................ 63 The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and “the Coloniality of Our Being” Rinaldo Walcott........................................................................................................ 93

Ethical Reassessments Legacies of Enslavism and White Abjectorship Sabine Broeck ......................................................................................................... 109

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Europe’s Colonialism, Decoloniality, and Racism Marina Gržinić ...................................................................................................... 129 Countering the Legacies of Colonial Racism: Delinking and the Renewal of Humanism Ina Kerner ..............................................................................................................145 Why the Postsocialist Cannot Speak: On Caucasian Blacks, Imperial Difference, and Decolonial Horizons Madina Tlostanova ................................................................................................. 159 The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement Frank B. Wilderson III.......................................................................................... 175

Disciplinary Reconfigurations Inequalities Unbound: Transregional Entanglements and the Creolization of Europe Manuela Boatcă ........................................................................................................ 211 Social Sciences and North-South-Asymmetries: Towards a Global Sociology Sérgio Costa ............................................................................................................ 231 Decolonizing Gender—Gendering Decolonial Theory: Crosscurrents and Archaeologies Gabriele Dietze.......................................................................................................245 Queering Archives of Race and Slavery— Or, on Being Wilfully Untimely and Unhappy Beatrice Michaelis, Elahe Haschemi Yekani ........................................................... 269

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Cultural Revisions The Département Writes Back: On Chamoiseau’s Rewrite of Robinson Crusoe Kathleen Gyssels ..................................................................................................... 287 Interrogating the Interview as Genre: Five Cases over Two Hundred Years Carsten Junker ....................................................................................................... 311 Decolonizing Gender in the Academy: From Black Power and Black Consciousness to Black Rebellion Rozena Maart ........................................................................................................ 331 Rastafari and/as Decoloniality Annika McPherson ................................................................................................ 353 Intersecting Identities and Epistemologies in Rozena Maart’s “No Rosa, No District Six” Jean-Paul Rocchi ..................................................................................................... 369

Contributors ........................................................................................................ 389 Index ..................................................................................................................... 395

Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique: Preface Sabine Broeck, Carsten Junker

In recent years, monographs and anthologies have presented rather focused interventions of postcolonial or decolonial critique into the landscape of European and transatlantic humanities and social sciences, mainly in the United States and Britain, and we can also register a growing number of publications interested in revitalizing post-Fanonian Black Critique. This collection presents a different approach. Rather than mapping the respective fields and emphasizing the fissures between them,1 we propose to work through and make visible the possible points of dialogue and mutual recognition, that is, the joints between those fields. Accordingly, we do not structure the volume along the lines of any of these recognizable approaches. There is neither a chronological nor a spatial order inherent to them. Since these approaches have always overlapped, we have organized the book along the lines of topical foci: Epistemic Repercussions Ethical Reassessments Disciplinary Reconfigurations Cultural Revisions. The select articles do not claim to be representative of their fields; they are presented here because they share a sense of putting an epistemic critique of coloniality and enslavism respectively at the center of their analyses.2 This does not go to say that the authors and editors do not see possible controversies between these contributions. However, we want to vitalize the

—————— 1 In the German-speaking context, see in particular Castro Varela and Dhawan (2005); Ha et al. (2007); Kilomba (2008); Reuter and Villa (2009); Boatcă and Spohn (2010); Ha (2010); Conrad and Randeria (2012); Kerner (2012); Mignolo (2012); Reuter and Karentzos (2012); Steyerl and Gutiérrez Rodríguez (22012). 2 For the term “enslavism,” see Broeck in this volume.

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productive lines of tension between them and thus rather foreground possible mutually beneficial readings across seemingly clear-cut borders. Accordingly, this transversal impetus is put to work here so that the articles signify within and beyond their own respective (sub)disciplines, as they are in no particular order: Sociology, Literature, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Philosophy, Gender Studies, and History. In the same spirit, this collection assembles perspectives that would traditionally be contained within particular area-studies paradigms such as Asian Studies, American Studies, or European Studies, even though they certainly partake in the debates of those configurations. Thereby we suggest a critique of modernity from a range of perspectives, to avoid exclusionary logics that might constrict the fields and would thus create obstacles to encompassing modes of analysis and critique. Our goal is to tease out the epistemic implications of postcolonial, decolonial, and Black critical lines of investigation. This allows for possibilities of broadening the analytical horizon for a critique of the sociopolitical, cultural, and philosophical legacies of humanism and modernity in our current moment. Contrary to much postmodern intellectual debate that keeps reinstating the teleological, universalist logic of Enlightenment, even when calling critically for a more radical realization of its ideals,3 the contributions in this collection share the assumption that Enlightenment modernity cannot be thought without its “darker side[s]” (Mignolo 2011), that is coloniality and enslavism. In brief: it is white humanism that is the antagonist. The sources of this epistemic endeavor are manifold. As our articles make manifest, they range from a mediation of indigenous knowledges, subaltern studies, third-world liberation movements, and Black struggles. While the interventions in this collection are situated in the wake of the generative paradigm of writing back to Empire from within and beyond metropolitan centers, they acknowledge and warn of the risk of appropriating non-hegemonic positions for postmodern white introspection. The history of the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS) has been the history of critiquing humanism and modernity along those very lines. INPUTS, founded as a cross-disciplinary venture at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the University of Bremen

—————— 3 The debate between Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas is a case in point, with the former consistently critiquing reason and the latter arguing in defense of reason, modernity, and the legacy of European Enlightenment. See Thomassen (2006).

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in 2000, has made its name with an epistemic practice that emphasizes necessary and urgent disciplinary and conceptual crossovers. The book is thus a mirror product of more than ten years of conferences, workshops, and individual scholarship, and—by putting the manifold perspectives that crossed at INPUTS into one collection—it confirms and enriches the prerogatives of the institute. Based on the respective authors’ own summaries of their contributions, what follows is a condensed synopsis of the book’s content.

Epistemic Repercussions Walter Mignolo’s chapter “Further Thoughts on (De)Coloniality” places Decoloniality (decolonial thinking, decolonial options) vis-à-vis Postcoloniality and Black Critique, not with the intention to evaluate which one is preferable (for whom?) but in order to identify differences as well as commonalities in orientation. As Mignolo claims, the three projects walk in the same direction, but through different paths nourished by the differential memories of colonial wounds (racism and genderism—the social classification of sexuality) and, in consequence, different and complementary ways of decolonial healings. In his contribution titled “Location and Social Thought in the Black: A Testimony to Africana Intellectual Tradition,” Kwame Nimako describes and evaluates the distinctive Africana intellectual tradition that flows across Africa and the African diaspora. He argues that the context of this intellectual tradition is corrective and prescriptive; the content, however, is historical, structural, and developmental. This tradition flows from what Nimako refer to as parallel lives and intertwined belongings, which highlights how people who share the same space have different experiences and memories. The common threads that run through this intellectual and political tradition are ‘race,’ humiliation, slavery, colonialism, and memory. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s essay “Race in Translation: The Red, Black, and White Atlantics” draws from the work for their recently published Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic, where the authors argue that the transnational movement of ideas is multidirectional, asymmetrical, and uneven. The authors offer two examples of this movement of ideas, first in terms of the Red Atlantic as referring to the

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pervasive presence of the figure of the Indian as exemplar of freedom for French and American revolutionaries and for Brazilian modernists; secondly, in terms of the travelling debates around multiculturalism, particularly in France and the U.S. The authors note a certain right-left convergence in the dismissal of identity politics first by the French and American right, but also by the left as represented by intellectuals like Pierre Bourdieu and Slavoj Žižek. The essay argues that this convergence arises from a certain blindness to the links between colonialism and racism. Throughout, Shohat and Stam delineate the red-black-white triad forged by colonialism and slavery in order to cast a prismatic light on a shared history both of colonial exploitation and of cultural achievement in the Red, Black, and White Atlantic. This section closes with a contribution by Rinaldo Walcott. Titled “The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and ‘the Coloniality of Our Being,’” the essay addresses the ways in which anti-blackness continually produces Black peoples as out of place and the consequences that result from such out of place-ness. But this essay is also about the ways in which what Walcott has come to call a pure decolonial project remains an impossible project if the deathly production of anti-blackness is not central to future and more hopeful political desires.

Ethical Reassessments In “Legacies of Enslavism and White Abjectorship,” Sabine Broeck addresses the humiliate-ability, the enslave-ability, the rape-ability, the abuseability, and the ship-ability of Black people in the discourses and practices that shape European white collective memory as well as the contemporary repertoire of thinking Blackness in the white European mind. These discourses and practices add up to a longue durée of white abjectorship and un-humanization of Black being dating from the early modern period, through Enlightenment modernity into the postmodern moment. The ‘slave’s’ assumed ‘slavishness,’ that enduring topos in which Blackness has been contained in white philosophy from Hegel to de Beauvoir has blatantly disregarded the histories of Haiti, and other locally and globally important acts, practices, and Black discourses of Black rebellion, and of Black freedom narratives, and has kept negating all forms of Black life. As

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Broeck argues, it persists in contemporary modes of un-humanization of Black being which—like the un-mournability of lost African lives in the Mediterranean—need to be analytically connected to early modern transatlantic trajectories of enslavement. In her text “Europe’s Colonialism, Deoloniality, and Racism,” Marina Gržinić puts forward an analysis of Europee, its colonialism, and present coloniality with reference to Achille Mbembe, a philosopher and public intellectual, who published a provocative book titled Critique de la raison nègre (Critique of Negro Reason) in 2013. Mbembe, one of the key figures of critical Black thought, refers directly to Europe in this book. As formulated by Mbembe, “Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world” (2013, 9, trans. M. G.). Gržinić argues that this downgrade opens new possibilities—but also carries dangers—for critical thinking. As Ina Kerner notes in her contribution “Countering the Legacies of Colonial Racism: Delinking and the Renewal of Humanism,” legacies of colonial racism and strategies of resisting and possibly overcoming these legacies are a prevalent topic within the traditions of postcolonial, decolonial, as well as of black thought. Kerner’s chapter focuses on three select authors—Walter Mignolo, Achille Mbembe, and Paul Gilroy—whose work is of particular importance in this regard. It addresses the ways in which each of them draws on the work of Frantz Fanon and discusses the authors’ respective take on how current, persisting or re-actualized forms of colonial racism might best be countered—by modes of colonial delinking in the case of Walter Mignolo, and by constructing new forms of humanism in the cases of Achille Mbembe and Paul Gilroy. Madina Tlostanova’s article “Why the Postsocialist Cannot Speak: On Caucasian Blacks, Imperial Difference, and Decolonial Horizons” maps thematic, theoretical, and methodological intersections between what she terms the decolonial option, postcolonial theory, and Black critique. These discourses are regarded through the lens of the emerging postsocialist discourse which adapts them to its own local history. The paper focuses on decolonial categories relevant for the conceptualization of the ex-second world in the global geopolitical architecture. Tlostanova demonstrates that the postcolonial critical apparatus is deflected when mechanically applied to the post-Soviet material. Focusing on post-Soviet racial discourses, she examines in detail the exemplary case of the Caucasians—the symbolic Blacks of the Russian/Soviet empire and today’s Russia.

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As Frank B. Wilderson III claims in his chapter titled “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement,” Assata Shakur’s 1973 prison communiqué is exemplary of the paradox immanent in any recourse to the analogical terrain of the Symbolic for the articulation of a Black political position. The violence constitutive of the Black-qua-Slave voids access to ‘transindividual objects’ of prior spatial (e.g. ‘land’) or temporal (e.g. ‘heritage’) plenitude—real or imaginable—that both triangulate intra-Human (non-Black) conflict and fortify their relationality or common subjectivity. Since the narrative structure of political discourse cannot translate gratuitous violence (Real) from ‘violated’ flesh (Imaginary) to its authorized touchstones (Symbolic), it, like the Marxists and postcolonialists who deploy its grammar, is inherently anti-Black.

Disciplinary Reconfigurations Manuela Boatcă opens this section with a chapter titled “Inequalities Unbound: Transregional Entanglements and the Creolization of Europe,” arguing that inequalities have been the result of transnational processes and transregional entanglements between shifting metropolitan and peripheral areas. To this end, it focuses on the historical continuities between “creolization” as a term coined to describe processes specific to the Caribbean and what is being analyzed today under the label of the “transnationalization” of (Western) Europe. In showing how the transregional flows of people, goods, and capital established transnational links between inequality patterns between Europe and the Caribbean as early as the sixteenth century, the paper subsequently posits the linking of colonialism to (post)coloniality as an essential element in of the endeavor of creolizing Europe. Challenging a broadly accepted thesis, according to which Sociology and Postcolonial Studies are separated and irreconcilable fields of study, Sérgio Costa’s contribution “Social Sciences and North-South-Asymmetries: Towards a Global Sociology” discusses how Postcolonial Studies can promote a renewal of sociological knowledge production. This argument is developed in three steps: first, the paper presents some difficulties Sociology has recently faced in order to develop categories to analyze social processes beyond national borders. The second section discusses three differ-

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ent postcolonial programs and their potential contribution for de-provincializing Sociology. Finally, the third section, using a study on homophobia and migration in Germany, illustrates how a postcolonial interference contributes to substantively enlarge analytical possibilities of Sociology. Gabriele Dietze’s article “Decolonizing Gender—Gendering Decolonial Theory: Crosscurrents and Archaeologies” maps the intersections between Gender Studies and Postcolonial Theory, registering persistent fallacies of androcentrism on the postcolonial side and ethnocentrism on the gender side. Nonetheless, the investigation seeks to outline what could be called Postcolonial or Decolonial Feminisms. Emphasis is given to the interventions and innovations that Black, Transnational, and Decolonial Feminists have contributed to the field. A critical spotlight is nonetheless directed on the still unacknowledged Whiteness, occidentality, and heteronormativity of the common Western Gender Studies scholar. The objective of the article is directed at a move toward ‘decolonizing’ Feminist theory. Thereby some traits of an emerging Decolonial Feminism are discussed as possible theoretical tools to subvert the common divide between male-dominated postcolonial thinking and universalist Eurocentric feminist theory. Beatrice Michaelis and Elahe Haschemi Yekani’s essay “Queering Archives of Race and Slavery—Or, on Being Wilfully Untimely and Unhappy” focuses on two specific historical moments in which the archives of race are discussed in contradictory ways. By looking at the celebrations around the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 in Britain and recent discussions around race in the Middle Ages surfacing in Continental European debates on Islam respectively, they offer a queer critique of the temporality of archives. While Britain builds a ‘happy’ archive that desires a continuity with the racialized Others of its past with a ‘multicultural present,’ the German archive is that of disavowal and a libidinal investment in medieval alterity.

Cultural Revisions This fourth section opens with a contribution by Kathleen Gyssels titled “The Département Writes Back: On Chamoiseau’s Rewrite of Robinson Crusoe.” As Gyssels argues, Martinican-born writer Patrick Chamoiseau

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rewrites other canonical texts as well as his own in his novel, L’Empreinte à Crusoé (2012). While Chamoiseau deliberately writes back to Defoe, Tournier, and others, as well as echoing his own L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, the result is little satisfying to Gyssels, as he gives the initial plot two surprising twists. First, the protagonist (whom the reader thinks is Crusoé) turns out to be a Dogon who has been dropped by the captain (the ‘real’ Defoe) on a desert island. Second, the captain shoots this African warrior, who expresses disgust and anger when he discovers slaves in the belly of the ship. Gyssels claims that such an ending distances French-Caribbean literature from (continental) African writing. She argues, furthermore, that with his overloaded baroque style and untranslatable eloquent rhetoric, the author, while pretending to turn away from initial gestures (for instance, as a defender of creolité), and while liberating himself as Édouard Glissant’s spiritual son from the symbolical Father, re/produces the changing same. Carsten Junker’s contribution “Interrogating the Interview as Genre: Five Cases over Two Hundred Years” examines a wide range of published material that is based on interviews predominantly conducted with (formerly) enslaved interlocutors in the U.S. from 1795 to the present. It interrogates the particular ways in which the interview as narrativized form positions its speakers and impacts their discursive authority. Junker claims that the interview can be theorized as a genre in its own right, with repercussions for a theory of genre in general that takes historical specificities and power differentials seriously. Rozena Maart’s chapter is titled “Decolonizing Gender in the Academy: From Black Power and Black Consciousness to Black Rebellion.” It situates the writer in the midst of the decolonial process; at each occasion sharing the circumference of her vision, her field of engagement, drawing in reader, scholar, researcher, and critic into the page, situating you on the tip of her tongue, where words balance the scales of decolonization and offers a Black critique in the moment of its occurrence. Shifting contexts between South Africa and the United States then Colombia, this chapter tackles the unspoken features of decolonization—the fearful, biting moments between Black women, which leaves us with the ambiguity of embarrassment or shame. In a mode of writing that combines the academic and the literary, it proceeds by offering a double reading of the words of two women who were involved in the Black Panther Movement (the United States) and the Black Consciousness Movement (South Africa), as a split page, a split reading, a reading that undermines and disrupts the linear

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reading that colonial languages demand, and through which White Mythology is engraved. Annika McPherson’s contribution on “Rastafari and/as Decoloniality” traces the politics of representation and knowledge production informing discussions of the Rastafari movement. While many studies tend to focus on the movement’s religious or popular culture contexts, the suggested shift in perspective considers it as a distinct culture of decolonization. Such a ‘decolonial’ frame of reference places the movement back into its wider socio-historical and political context of emergence while emphasizing its foundational epistemological decoloniality. McPherson argues that such a ‘decolonial’ perspective refocuses critical attention to anti-(neo-)colonial struggles and to processes of decolonization as societal transformations, as well as to conceptual challenges in the study and representation of Rastafari. Jean-Paul Rocchi’s article “Intersecting Identities and Epistemologies in Rozena Maart’s Rosa’s District Six” closes this section. It focuses on the South African writer Rozena Maart and more particularly on the texts assembled in her collection Rosa’s District 6 (2004) which demonstrate her resistance to the categorization of identities as hierarchized by the apartheid regime. Maart’s writing is also a queer and feminist breach with the black masculinist nationalism of the new South Africa and with the mythification of the colonial moment as a radical break in which only demonstrably-heterosexual South African men would be counted. Drawing on the black consciousness of Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, she describes an intemporal South Africa that challenges the stigmatizing identities of apartheid and reconciles consciousness with desire. As with all such textual compilations, this has been an intricate, challenging, and rewarding process of cooperation between Carsten and Sabine, between us as editors and our contributors, and between editors, writers, and Samira Spatzek, our formatting genius. Special thanks go to her indeed because without her commitment, ad-hoc availability to work late hours, patience, and the technical expertise she brought to this task, we couldn’t have kept even receding deadlines. We are grateful to the University of Bremen for enabling us to put some of our financial resources behind this project, and we want to acknowledge the fact that, whereas most of the labor on this book has been committed in excess of regular work hours, the right to claim time and space for critical research activity is still an academic privilege to enjoy. We thank the colleagues at Campus Verlag

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for kind and swift communication, as well as effective supervision of the project. In closing, we want to also express our gratefulness to the INPUTS collective at the University of Bremen who have, over a long decade, consistently breached the distrust in, indifference to, and ignorance of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the wider German academy, and have thus produced a body of collective counter-memory that has made this book possible in the first place.

Works Cited Boatcă, Manuela, and Willfried Spohn (eds.). (2010). Globale, multiple und postkoloniale Modernen. Mering: Hampp Verlag. Conrad, Sebastian, and Shalini Randeria (eds.). (2012). Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. Castro Varela, María do Mar, and Nikita Dhawan (2005). Postkoloniale Theorie. Eine kritische Einführung. Bielefeld: transcript. Ha, Kien Nghi (2010). Unrein und vermischt. Postkoloniale Grenzgänge durch die Kulturgeschichte der Hybridität und der kolonialen „Rassenbastarde.“ Bielefeld: transcript. Ha, Kien Nghi, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, and Sheila Mysorekar (eds.). (2007). re/visionen. Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland. Münster: Unrast. Kerner, Ina (2012). Postkoloniale Theorien zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Kilomba, Grada (2008). Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism. Münster: Unrast. Mbembe, Achille (2013). Critique de la raison nègre. Paris: Editions la Découverte. Mignolo, Walter (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures and Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press. — (2012). Epistemischer Ungehorsam. Rhetorik der Moderne, Logik der Kolonialität und Grammatik der Dekolonialität. Trans. Jens Kastner and Tom Waibel. Wien: Turia + Kant. Reuter, Julia, and Paula-Irene Villa (eds.). (2009). Postkoloniale Soziologie. Empirische Befunde, theoretische Anschlüsse, politische Intervention. Bielefeld: transcript. Reuter, Julia, and Alexandra Karentzos (eds.). (2012). Schlüsselwerke der Postcolonial Studies. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Steyerl, Hito, and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (eds.). (22012). Spricht die Subalterne Deutsch?: Migration und postkoloniale Kritik. 2003. Münster: Unrast. Thomassen, Lasse (ed.). (2006). The Derrida-Habermas Reader. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Epistemic Repercussions

Further Thoughts on (De)Coloniality Walter D. Mignolo

I Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique is the title under which we were invited to submit our contributions to this volume. I intend to take these three key words simultaneously as ‘connectors’ and as ‘anchors’ of specific universes of meaning. As connectors each word/expression links a series of nodes that invoke a given universe of meaning of a fuzzy domain:1 what an educated person would understand each domain to be. To help you out in understanding what I have in mind, ‘post’ assumes unilinear time—modernity left behind everything and ‘post’ is what comes after modernity in that conception of time. Postcoloniality accordingly suggests an ‘after’ of coloniality. The prefix ‘de’ assumes, instead, many temporalities and it is aware of the imperial dimension of a unilinear concept of time and assumes the pluriversality of local time, including European imperial time, for instance: controlled by the Greenwich Meridian (see Mignolo 2011a, 149–80). Coloniality is still with us: there is no ‘post’ from decolonial perspectives. Similar considerations regarding universes of meaning and fuzzy domains could be made for Black Critique: the expression brings forward the basic parameters of a universe of meaning of a fuzzy domain that the term invokes. Mine are not observations from a detached observer of the three key words in questions (Postcoloniality, Black Critique, and Decoloniality), but as someone engaged in one specific universe of meaning: that of decoloniality. From a decolonial perspective there is no outside of coloniality from where coloniality can be observed.

—————— 1 The concept of fuzzy domains/dominios borrosos has been with me for a long time, shaping my thoughts (Mignolo 1985).

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II The main thrust of my argument is the following: decolonial thinking assumes, contrary to canonical disciplinary formations, that the ‘aboutness’ of what we think, write, talk, and argue does not have an existence independent of the ‘who’—the agency of the enunciation, and of the ‘universes of meaning’ in which our thinking, talking, writing, arguing is framed. The co-relation between the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ was already pointed out by Max Horkheimer (1999, 188–243). Through this correlation he distinguished critical from traditional theory. Traditional theory, in Horkheimer’s formulation, assumes that the object or event (the about) has an existence independently of who is referring, describing, or explaining it. Up to this point, decolonial thinking endorses Horkheimer’s ‘critical theory’ but we depart from it when we consider the universes of meaning in which critical theory and decolonial thinking operate. Horkheimer’s universe of meaning was formed by European history since the Enlightenment, at the cross-roads of scientific epistemology (nomothetic sciences according to Wilhelm Dilthey) and Marxism, while for decoloniality the universes of meaning are formed at the cross-roads of non-European ancestralities and the intervention of European ancestrality imposed in the name and myth of modernity. Decolonial thinking and doing, which means the decolonization of the idea of being, arises and unfolds from disrupted and coerced cultures and civilizations. Now both words, ‘coloniality’ and ‘decoloniality,’ are popular in Western Europe and the U.S., but we should not forget that the point of origination is not inscribed in the Greco-Roman tradition of language, categories of thoughts, skin, and heart. “Decolonization” originated in the Third World and was enacted by actors wanting liberation from Western Europe. Western Europe could not ‘offer’ at once to the rest of the world both oppression and liberation. Neither then, nor now. Coloniality and decoloniality are expressions that emerged from the receiving end of Western imperial formations. Decolonial thinking, doing, and dwelling in decoloniality, to put it pedagogically, is critical theory plus colonial histories. And colonial histories are a consequence of European and the U.S. expansion from 1500 to 2000. In that period of time there are also other complex colonial histories, the colonies of what Madina Tlostanova described as “second-class empire[s]” (2012, 135). However,

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second-class empires and their colonies were already dependent on European colonialism. While the rhetoric of modernity is predicated on the assumption that there is a word out there and a discourse that captures the truth of that word, and that discourse is that of modernity (its philosophy, science, technology, and Christianity), decoloniality disobeys and delinks from those imperatives. Uncoupling discourses from referents has been an orientation of Western philosophy from Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, but also of post-Marxist thinkers like Horkheimer, or later, Rorty (1979). In biology of cognition, Chilean neurophysiologist Humberto Maturana made the same point in the scientific universe of meaning—there may be a need to explain why Maturana’s (2002) theory delinks from Western philosophy and philosophy of science. This is not the place to elaborate on his reasoning, but I would like to introduce some basic notions. Maturana himself tells the story of how he arrived to reverse the held belief, in Western philosophy, that the world is ‘absorbed’ by the eyes (and that philosophy is the mirror of nature, in Rorty’s words, or that there is a substantial link between words and things, as Foucault critically analyzed) and ‘represented’ in the brain. He argues, instead, that it is the brain that ‘converts’ bits of information coming through the eyes into an image of the world: living organisms provided with nervous systems are closed organisms that ‘fabricate’ the words through the bit of energy that enters through our eyes, skin, ears, nose, mouth. But Maturana focuses on the eyes: “In 1960 I asked myself ‘What should happen in the manner of constitution of a system so that I see as a result of its operation a living system?’ This was a strange question in a period in which every scientist knew that to know something about something one should go and look what was already there without interfering with it. I was not making an hypothesis about how the system was. I was proposing that the relation between the internal dynamics of the system and the result of that internal dynamics in the domain in which I observed it, would tell me what the system was. I had to create the system to know it. In 1965 when I was studying color vision in pigeons I realized that I could no longer pretend that one saw the colors as features of an external world, and that I had to abandon the question, ‘how do I see that color?’ and ask instead, ‘what happens in me when I saw that I see such a color?’ To make this change meant abandoning the notion that there was an external independent world to be known by the observer. Instead, I had to accept that knowing has to do with the congruent interactions between entities each of which is a structure determined system—

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that is a system in which all that happens with it and to it is determined at every instant by the way it is made (its structure) at that instant.” (2002, 5)

Now, if we transfer these conclusions to the sphere of philosophy, we can argue that it is from the body and all its sensorial organs that the world (natural and social) is sensed, perceived, smelled, heard and, from that sensorial experience, conceptions of the world arise. Consequently, the imperial conception of the world, today still hegemonic but losing ground rapidly, must be taken, indeed, as a ‘fiction that creates the impression of the real.’ The rhetoric of modernity has been very successful in promoting that belief. If I claim that decolonial thinking, doing, being run parallel to Horkheimer’s critical theory and to Maturana’s structural coupling (the coupling between the autopoietic organism—closed system—that processes bits of energy from a world that is not structured in itself but through and by the organism that knows it) what do I mean, really? I mean, with Horkheimer, that the ‘aboutness’ of our discourses is not an entity independent from the subject but it is created in the process of constituting itself as subject. I claim with Maturana that it is the entire organism (the body) that ‘embodies’ knowledge through the senses in its structural coupling with the world: we wear knowledge, a dictum I will comment upon in the last section. The decolonial option, I argue, parallel to Horkheimer’s option and Maturana’s option, starts from the principle that the world is ‘unformed’ and that it is the subject who makes sense of it through signs and symbols. From a decolonial frame of thoughts and arguments, Western cosmology (Christian theology, secular philosophy and science, religious and secular art), like any other co-existing cosmologies, conceives the world and guides our behavior based on certain principles, concepts, and discursive formulas that are imprinted in the believer (in the skin, the heart, and the brain). The believer (in the frames of religion, sciences, art, common sense) takes the world to be as the cosmology in which she/he operates tells him/her it is. Western cosmology is no different to any co-existing cosmology. It is different only in the differential of power: over the past five hundred years it has intervened with all co-existing cosmologies while no other cosmology has done to Western Civilization what Western Civilization has done to the rest. That differential of power has been articulated through the colonial and imperial difference. Colonial difference was put in place in the degradation of Indians and Africans since the sixteenth century. The imperial difference was put in place and enacted on the Ottoman

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Sultanate in the sixteenth century, Russia in the eighteenth and China in the nineteenth centuries. None of these three have been colonized in the same way that the Americas, India, and the African continent were colonized. But they did not escape the colonial difference.2 But the differential of power does not only pertain (is inscribed in) to co-existing cosmologies (China, Persia, Kingdoms of Africa, India, Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, etcetera) that have been degraded and relegated to the past and provide an archive for decolonial thinking. It is also inscribed in the invention of the Orient, the invention of the South of Europe and the invention of the Third Word that created and sustained the difference— the difference of dwelling in exteriority: exteriority is the outside (for instance, Orientalism, Southernism, Third Worldism) invented in the process of creating the inside (Western Europe, the U.S.). These geo-political inventions have been absorbed into the non-Western cosmologies: the Third World encompassed Asia, Africa, South/Central America, and the Caribbean. And what do I mean by Western cosmology and Western Civilization? During the European Enlightenment the hegemony obtained by Christian theology during the European Renaissance, mutated into secular sciences and philosophy. Both provided the solid architecture of Western cosmology, or the imaginary of Western Civilization. At that point, ‘coloniality of power’ was consolidated as the structural soul and companion of Western imperialism. The triumphal and salvationist rhetoric of modernity was also strengthened and coloniality was justified as the unavoidable necessity to modernize the world and to lift people of the world up from their assumed paganism, barbarism, and underdevelopment. ‘Progress’ was either belief or sold as the ontological unfolding of history. Decolonially, ‘progress’ is a powerful fiction in the narratives of modernity. By the second half of the twentieth century, ‘progress’ mutated into ‘development.’

III ‘Coloniality of power’ (or coloniality for short) is the hidden side of Western cosmology and civilization. It was and continues to be hidden by the

—————— 2 On colonial and imperial differences, see He (2012). On imperial difference, see Tlostanova (2014).

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rhetoric of modernity: salvation, civilization, progress, development, market democracy, etcetera. The task of decolonial thinking is to unveil it, parallel to the ways in which Marx unveiled surplus value and Freud the unconscious. The economy (one dimension of coloniality of power) has been described as ‘capitalism.’ Capitalism names an economic system that is defended by liberals and neoliberals and critiqued by Marxists. Coloniality of power is larger than ‘capitalism,’ and ‘capitalism’ is not synonymous with ‘economy:’ capitalism is the name of the type of economy engrained in the colonial matrix of power. It is not the only option. It is the hegemonic one. There are other economic options that have been shut down and absorbed into capitalism, but have not been killed by it. They are in a state of latency. The idea of modernity is a deity embedded in Western cosmology and civilization. In the name of modernity, delinquent acts and crimes are committed in banks, corporations, and government. Coloniality points toward the consequences of implementing the ideals of modernity. For that reason, coloniality of power is always already a decolonial concept and decolonial thinking, doing, being is always grounded in the experience of the borderlands and of border epistemology. On the other hand, capitalism economic thinking both in its liberal/neo-liberal and Marxist narratives, is always grounded in territorial epistemology: the territoriality built in the narrative of Western Civilization. In decolonial vocabulary Western Civilization is tantamount with Western cosmology. Let us now address ‘decoloniality’ and remind the reader that ‘coloniality of power’ is always already a decolonial concept. Decoloniality in my discourse is taken from two simultaneous routes: on the one hand from the perspective from which I position myself vis-à-vis Black Critique and Postcoloniality. On the other hand, I am not referring to something already fixed but to a constant process of building the very concept of decoloniality, of devising a route of action, of transforming ourselves into decolonial subjects. Seeing the world decolonially, as presented here, builds on historical and contemporary experiences and genealogies of thoughts that were part and parcel of life in the South American Andes in 1990 and consolidated from then on to today. I am not referring only to ‘facts and events’ but to ‘thoughts’ and ‘senses’ as well: facts and events have meaning once they are incorporated into universes of meaning and universes of meaning cross the body. And I am referring also to the meanings of ‘decolonization’ and

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‘decoloniality’ during the Cold War in Asia and Africa, and in particular to how the word was articulated at the Bandung Conference of 1955. This takes us now to ‘decoloniality at large.’ In what follows I draw a picture of decoloniality from one of its manifestations, conceptualizations, and enactments—that of the project known by the formula modernity/(de)coloniality (Mignolo 2011b). The formula has two basic meanings: (a) one is that modernity/coloniality are two sides of the same coin, that there is no modernity without coloniality. While modernity built itself in a triumphal narrative of civilization, progress, and development, it hid its darker side, coloniality. Coloniality is the logic of domination, exploitation, and oppression which makes possible that the triumphal narrative of modernity has something to show; (b) the second is that modernity/coloniality created the conditions for decoloniality. Decoloniality names attitudes, projects, goals, and efforts to delink from the promises of modernity and the un-human conditions created by coloniality. In order to do so it is necessary to delink from the basic theological and secular epistemic and hermeneutic foundations of Western modernity. ‘Coloniality of power’ is the basic concept of decolonial thinking by which we unfold the analytic of coloniality and envision and imagine decolonial futures.

IV Decoloniality had its institutional and historical signature in the Bandung Conference of 1955. It was a state-led project. Today, decoloniality is enacted in the domain of political society. Decolonization was the term already in use to refer to the processes of liberation that erupted in the European colonies in Asia and Africa. The Bandung Conference attempted to unite not the workers of the world but the world of people of color. In fact, this is precisely what Ahmed Sukarno, President of Indonesia and leader of the conference, said at the beginning of his opening address: “This is the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind!” (qtd. in Wright 1956, 136). Later on in his speech he recalls who is there (twenty nine countries from Asia and Africa) and why they are there: “Sisters and Brothers, how terrifically dynamic is our time! I recall that, several years ago, I had occasion to make a public analysis of colonialism, and I drew

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attention to what I called the ‘life line of imperialism.’ This line runs from the Strait of Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Sea of Japan. For most of that enormous distance, the territories on both sides of this life line were colonies, the peoples were unfree, their futures mortgaged to an alien system. Along that life line, that main artery of imperialism, there was pumped the life-blood of colonialism.” (qtd. in Wright 1956, 136–37, emphasis added, W. M.)

The “life line of imperialism” is another expression to make borderlands visible. Richard Wright, the African-American writer from Detroit, tells the story, in his book The Color Curtain, of how he read the information about the conference in Paris, in December of 1954. He did not hesitate a moment and decided he had to attend the conference, and he did. His report is invaluable. His rendering of Sukarno’s speech is a master narrative, and his reading of the meaning of the conference is to the point: “The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the Western world!” (Wright 1956, 12)

The “despised” then, a few years later became the “wretched of the earth” in the prose of Frantz Fanon, something else and much deeper than the “subaltern,” carried later on to India in the formation of the Subaltern Studies project. Bandung left a clear legacy: neither capitalism nor communism but decolonization. And it introduced two elements, race and non-Christian religions, that were cast out in Marxist revolutionary projections. History shows that while Bandung’s message and its orientation were loud and clear, how to exit from both capitalism and communism was not. Or, if the general orientation was meaningful, it was not clear that the solutions were still not caught in the legacies of Western state-formation— the state as a form of governance and the nation as the substance of the state were not questioned. It was relatively easy in Europe to justify the correspondence between one state and one nation. It was not that clear in the colonies and ex-colonies where the upcoming nation-state after independence embraced several nations, an issue that is becoming clear and loud today in the Middle East and Western Asia (Ukraine), and Rwanda remains as a tragic moment of that history. The formation of the state of

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Israel, not by decolonization, but by imperial designs, is the other conflicted outcome of the modern nation/state. The era of decolonization (1945–1990) was simultaneous with the Cold War. Hence, Bandung’s legacies makes us think that there is an open and wide space beyond capitalism or communism and that the future for people of color should be neither capitalism nor communism but decolonization. The vision was timely for that world order. Today, although capitalism was the winner of the last match with communism, communism/socialism remains as an option confronting capitalism in its actual guises, neoliberal in the West and in a diversity of ideologies in East Asia (China), South East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia), South Asia, West Asia (Russia and Turkey), and Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela). The open space between communism and capitalism was the Third World. As any other metaphor in the conflict of interpretations, Third World was a Western concept appropriated by people so designated and converted into a symbol of decolonization—quite simply, decolonization could be neither from the First World nor from the Second World. The first was liberal and capitalist; the second was communist and capitalist. The formation of non-aligned countries, in 1961, was a follow up of the Bandung Conference, although it took away the strong racial connotations of the latter. The orientation that I have been describing as “dewesternization” was already inscribed in the Bandung Conference: from that part of the world, classified as the Orient in the eighteenth century and Third World since the mid nineteen fifties, to decolonize meant also to dewesternize—a proposition that at that time would have been ambiguous if pronounced in Latin America by revolutionary leaders of European descent who did not see themselves as people of color. Hence the absence of racial considerations in the Cuban Revolution and in the Tri-Continental Organization lead by Fidel Castro. Castro’s support of decolonization in Africa was motivated by abstract ideals of liberation from imperialism. Today, dewesternization has taken a clear political and economic turn grounded in a racial undercurrent: the imperial difference, the racial distribution of capital and knowledge. Economic and political dewesternization means, simply, the appropriation of the economy of accumulation on the part of these states for their own national projects, and their maintenance of international relations without being told what they have to do. One example: China and Singapore were able to grow economically because they did not succumb

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to the ‘politics of debt’ that the IMF and the World Bank initiated during the seventies, that were consolidated during the Reagan-Thatcher years, and found its moments of splendors and fall in the Washington Consensus and the Neoliberal Doctrine. The failure of westernization created the conditions for the rise of dewesternization. Although dewesternization would have been unavoidable—for how long can people believe in the promises of modernity while being humiliated and degraded at all levels of society? Certainly, there are plenty of examples of political leaders who took advantage of decolonization for their own benefit. Egypt and Tunisia are two recent examples. But there are many more. You can object and argue, then, that if they are capitalist they cannot be dewesternizing because most likely they will be lead by corrupt dictators. Well, corruption is not only a privilege of dictators. Bankers and corporations’ CEOs belong to the family, and believe me, not only in China. Singapore, by the way, is the least corrupt state in the world. But let us leave that for another occasion. I would reply to such objections by suggesting that being capitalist, but not letting economic gains go to foreign corporations but keeping them in the country, is a fundamental move to consolidate the economy to gain political strength in international relations. Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador have been doing that: Morales, Chavez, and Correa. However, capitalism has other demands and those demands put pressure within nation-states themselves. Dewesternization is more effective, and I shall add, is an inter-state politics rather than a national one. However, capital gains allow dewesternizing nation-states (as much as westernizing and rewesternizing nation-states) to reap benefits in certain sectors of the population at the expenses of others and to be repressive toward dissenting ethnic ‘minorities.’ Dewesternization indirectly unveils the miseries of capitalism in democratic nation-states of Western Europe and the U.S. Thus dewesternization has two sides: at the inter-state level it delinks from the IMF, World Bank, Washington Consensus, and other institutions; within each nation-state it means political confrontation with Western imperial designs and managing national corporations in such a way that foreign economic investments do not deplete states from their natural resources and from the economic benefits of extracting them. It means also that dewesternizing states are endorsing economic coloniality (capitalism), while delinking from Western directives and orienting their own political and cultural projects toward the strength of their economies, be it

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in East Asia, the Gulf States or Brazil in South America. They are not decolonial states. Decoloniality in the twenty-first century is incompatible with nation-state formations. Although significant changes could be attained from dewesternizing states, the vices of capitalism (marginalization of certain sectors of the population, corruption, dogmatism instead of openness), decolonial claims cannot be co-opted by State politics. A state can co-opt the word (the discourse), like in Bolivia, but not the project. If a given state co-ops the project and turns its politics into decoloniality it would no longer be a ‘state’ understood as an imperial formation projected and adapted to and into ex-colonies. A decolonial state today is an oxymoron, and a state cannot be abolished in one week. In that regard, dewesternization is an important step. It could remain as such, or it could open up new venues: neither rewesternization (for instance, president Barack Obama’s international politics since his first term) nor dewesternizaton but decoloniality. In Bolivia the word ‘decolonization’ in state discourse is part of the rhetoric of dewesternizing modernity. Decolonization is being advanced by projects advanced by the political society, not by the state. Curiously enough, the strong non-Western states are a problem for neo-liberalism. Sandwiched from top down (the banks and the corporations) and from bottom up (the politicized civil society and the emerging global political society), the form-state has served to advance projects of dewesternization, be it the democratically elected government of Bolivia, a party-governance like in China or its modified version of Singapore, or dynastic states like the Emirates. Thus sandwiched from top down rewesternizing forces, the non-western states become an instrument for dewestern delinking. Internally the state becomes an instrument to repress the growing manifestations and uprising of the increasingly deteriorating civil society (economically and politically), or to exploit migrant labors, like in the Emirates and Qatar.

V Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality was the triad introduced by Anibal Quijano (1990) that allows many of us to re-conceptualize the legacies of Bandung as well as to revisit the meanings of decolonization struggles and

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thoughts during the Cold War.3 To better comprehend the changes not just in the materiality of the world order but also and mainly in the subjectivities that try to get a sense of these changes, it is helpful to read Amilcar Cabral’s address to the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana, Cuba, in 1966, titled “The Weapon of Theory,” and Anibal Quijano’s “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” (2007). Cabral’s discourse frames the motivations, feelings, and anti-imperialist angers, with the total confidence of the moment of the triumph and invincibility of the Cuban Revolution. When Quijano wrote the article, the struggle for decolonization was over, but the outcome in Asia and Africa was not very promising. In the Caribbean, the Cuban Revolution was under stress. Although Cuba was not a satellite of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, the Soviet Union was a necessary support for a socialist project just about one hundred miles from Florida. The Cuban Revolution had a singular profile in relation to the scenario unfolding in Africa and Asia at the same time. The difference was that the leaders of the Cuban Revolution were not indigenous, like their African and Asian counterparts, but natives of European descent (creoles) and, in that regard, capitalism was the relevant enemy rather than colonialism and racism. It is not that one excludes the other; it is where the emphasis was placed in Asian and African struggles for decolonization (see Sukarno and the Bandung Conference), and were the accent was placed in the Cuban Revolution. Once again, it is not that one is preferable to the other. It is the co-existence of geopolitical struggles that can and should be connected but cannot be subsumed or absorbed into the other. Accepting this principle is the route to pluriversality, the horizon of decoloniality. For Quijano the goal of decoloniality was not to send the colonizers home and take over state administration. Settlers have been out of Latin America since the beginning of the nineteenth century. All states were in the hands of natives-creoles of European descent. So, decoloniality had to be worked out in a different sphere, with different goals and trajectories, in relation to decolonization during the Cold War. Furthermore, the Cold War was over. In that scenario, what Quijano identified was a conceptual deep structure of global power: “coloniality of power” (2007). Accordingly, the critiques and the orientations have to be modified both in relation to history during the Cold War and the struggles for decolonization and to who are the actors of a given decolonizing project. We are no longer faced

—————— 3 The article was originally published in Spanish in 1990. Quijano (2007) is a slightly revised version, translated into English.

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with a question of a singular imperial state-project lead by different Western states (monarchic or bourgeois) from 1500 to 2000, but with something common to many (capitalism), now in the present.

VI The first conceptualizations of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality launched by Quijano focused on economic-political dimensions, the question of knowledge and racism. Here was Quijano’s fundamental departure from Marxism, which he had endorsed in previous years: the historical foundation of capitalism in the sixteenth century made of racism the justification for the expropriation of Indian lands and the commodification of African human beings. Later on, Quijano’s basic theses were extended to explore the coloniality of being and the coloniality of gender (MaldonadoTorres 2007; Lugones 2007), and more recently aesthetic (de)coloniality (Mignolo and Vazquez 2013). Three spheres or domains, based on experiences (sensing) and observations (analytic unpacking) were formulated: de/coloniality of the political (authority) and economic powers de/coloniality of theological and secular epistemic and hermeneutic powers de/coloniality of subjectivity through artistic, literary, and religious powers. However, the analytic aspect is necessary but hardly sufficient, for if we remain at that level only we also remain within the expectations of the analytic disciplines whose goals are to describe and explain (hard Social Sciences and Natural Sciences) and interpret (Humanities). Decolonial thinking is neither the equivalent of disciplinary knowledge nor (for decolonial thinkers) an object of study. Remember what I sad before in relation to Horkheimer and Maturana. Decolonial thinking is neither a discipline nor a method. It is a way of being, thinking, doing, and becoming in the world. Let us call this the potential or prospective aspect. The main difference between disciplinary formations and decolonial thinking and doing (because, for example, doing Sociology means thinking also) is that the analytic of decoloniality is to enact the potential in order to delink from the control

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and management of coloniality. Coloniality includes disciplinary formations in the Natural and Social Sciences, the Humanities and the professional schools. There are dissidents, always, in each discipline. But dissent means that the shots called are not being called by the dissenter but by actors in a hegemonic or dominant position. This is the instance in which decolonial thinking and doing become one and the same: thinking decolonially is already engaging in acts of decolonization, delinking from the matrix; and doing decolonially implies decolonial thinking—there is not much you can do without thinking. It should be clear by now that I am not here referring to ‘doing’ as some kind of physical doing or praxis. I am saying that decolonial thinking is always already praxical (which is not the same as practical). Doing is thinking and thinking is doing; to live is to know and to know is to live. What the analysis of the logic of coloniality (the colonial matrix) reveals to us are the ways in which OUR (all of us in the world) subjectivities are being formed, our own desires are created, how we feel according to the web of words, images, sounds, technology, urbanism, etcetera, that is imposed upon by actors and institutions who have the privilege of deciding by themselves what is good for others: the ‘world’ is not just something that is ‘out there’ but it is always mediated by the imaginary of a given community and the mediation, in the modern/colonial world is controlled by hegemonic and dominant imaginaries. And that imaginary is the consequence of entanglements between local histories and global designs.

VII Moving along these lines, I realized that coloniality of power, in all the three domains mentioned above, works at two different levels: the level of the enunciated and the level of the enunciation. At the level of the enunciated, the rhetoric of modernity builds, invents, construct domains that are to be controlled. If in the West political theory and political economy have a long tradition, it is because the control of the economy and of authority has been created, invented according to the interests of the people that were inventing them. Political theory in the West has been traced back to Greek philosophers but re-articulated in the sixteenth century when Viceroyalties were created in the New World. Political economy was an invention of the

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modern/colonial world, and it emerged in relation to the wealth generated by the Atlantic commercial circuits. If coloniality of power operates in the three domains (coloniality of economy, authority and knowledge/being) mentioned above and at the two levels outlined in the previous paragraph, the power of coloniality resides in the interlocking underlying system that the rhetoric of modernity has continued to obscure. The interlocking underlying system (three spheres and two levels), I have argued, are kept together by the two pillars of coloniality of power: patriarchy and racism. Understanding how these two pillars work, we will understand also why the distinction between the level of the enunciation and of the enunciated is necessary. Thus, the foundation of modernity/coloniality or coloniality of power is founded on three spheres, two levels, and two pillars. Education has a basic role in the process of the creation and transmission of knowledge and subject formation (de/coloniality of being/subjectivity) in the life of future generations, thus dewesternizing and decolonial processes of education are already taking place all over the world in variegated arrays of forms and institutions.4 What does it mean to decolonize X or Y is a crucial question, for it is easy to argue in favor of decolonizing whatever, but more difficult to address what that means and how to do it. The starting point, I believe, is to take X or Y as being oneself. If we are Western subject(ivitie)s of European descent or non-Western subject(ivitie)s, we (whomever “we” are under such conditions) have been somehow westernized. Some of us like it, some do not. If we do not, and want to do something about it like delinking soon, we realize that this is not a physical activity. We are not physically chained. It means to engage in a process of becoming a decolonial rather than a modern/colonial subject(ivity). To do so, it is necessary to understand the mental chains that are holding us: “us” meaning those who engage in the rules of the game. It is becoming a “we/us” sharing the colonial wound. I am not trying to ‘represent’ anyone. I am just describing an option, an option I endorse but you may not. I have mentioned two basic tasks of decolonial thinking and doing: the analytic of coloniality (for instance, the constant work of showing the work of coloniality of power) and building communities based on a vision of a society that delinks from coloniality. I have also addressed education, and I

—————— 4 This is happening at different fronts. See for example, Harling (2005); Walsh (2011); Bâ and Higbee (2012); Abdi (2012).

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do not mean education in schools and the university only, but education in whatever project we engage in. Decolonizing X or Z means to engage in theoretical and analytical work while at the same time engaging in advocacy and creating institutions. Decolonization today could hardly be imagined as ‘claiming the state,’ which was the vision during the Cold War, for if you do that, there is not much you could do today when coloniality of power is global and connects at the same time that it divides, the U.S. and the EU with BRICS countries and other emerging economies, like Indonesia and Turkey. Decoloniality is at work in the emerging global political society at the margin of the states, the corporations, and the banks; and, of course, the cartels.

VIII My next step is to walk you through three cases of decolonial, analytic and prospective, thinking and doing. Three cases that have forcefully inserted decolonial thinking and doing (for example, decolonial option(s)) into the world. I could have selected three cases of ‘social movements.’ However, I think the equivalent in the public sphere and in higher education is to work with thinkers whose work is not ‘disciplinary’ in either canonical disciplines or the most recent version of ‘X Studies,’ but a full-fledged engagement with thinking and doing, epistemically, politically, and ethically. All three thinkers went through higher education but they did not remain there. As for myself, what follows is not ‘a study’ of them. I am not studying but thinking through and with them. The first is Frantz Fanon, Afro-Martinican; the second is Gloria Anzaldúa, Lesbian and Chicana; the third is Leanne Simpson, Nishnaabeg-Canadian writer and activist.

VIII.I Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967a) and The Wretched of the Earth (1967b) are clear and loud cases that help to understand that decolonization starts from your own self. If you see yourself as a leader who will help others to decolonize, you would be taking the first wrong step. You would act like a missionary or a vanguard intellectual. You would be acting

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like a modern subject, like a savior in charge of saving those who do not know what they should do. Decolonization is a communal and collective work grounded in the self-awareness of decolonial subjects. Fanon’s self-decolonization is a reference point, which does not mean that he is the ‘perfect’ model and we all have to do what he did and say what he said. If we were to proceed in such a manner this would be for decolonization what Jesus became in the hands of institutional Christianity. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon’s radical step toward decolonizing racism was turning to his own experience and subjectivity. It was reflecting from this experience that he came up with the concept of sociogenesis as the logic and modus operandi of racism in the modern/colonial world. He certainly knew Darwin and Freud, and it was in relation to that limited frame that he needed to introduce a concept that was not used by Darwin and Freud. They had other problems to solve. Darwin was confronted with the Christian myth of creation; Freud with the ‘nature of (hu)man.’ The concept of sociogenesis allows Fanon to capture an experience that is engrained in many, an experience that was unnamed and could have hardly been named by someone whose life is framed in the privilege of Western Christianity, secular philosophy, and whiteness. If you have been located in the colonial matrix through these three frames, you would be blind to sociogenesis. It would take close to a miracle for a white person to have come up with such a fundamental decolonial concept, a concept that came up from experience and not from previous theories. The two Western theories that Fanon was working with were Darwinism (phylogenesis) and psychoanalysis (ontogenesis). Neither of them was adequate to express what he was sensing. A white person does not have to endure the gaze of someone who he knows and senses is ‘above’ him. Enslaved Africans were not white. Slave traders were. True, there were Africans who participated in the slave trade by capturing and selling their own people. And of course, there are many white people well aware that this is the case. But knowing and understanding what is the case, does not put you in the shoes of Africans for whom their ancestors were human beings treated as slaves. Sociogenesis is a fundamental concept that allows to unravel the racial foundations and consequences of slavery. Thus, decolonizing “my/your/our” subjectivities starts from building a vocabulary and a discourse that disavows, invalidates, devalues the hegemony of the rhetoric of modernity that made “me/you/us” colonial subjects. Decolonizing our own selves is the hard and long process of shaking off

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sociogenetic effects. This is a collective and communal task of decolonial healing. It is only once that process starts that we could really think of decolonizing X and Y. Decolonizing the self and dis-identifying with the ego is not only a communal but also a generational process. Mutating from colonial into decolonial subjects is not only a psychological march but an epistemic and praxical one. It is living otherwise. Decolonial healing is different from psychoanalytic cure. Decolonial healing does not require a psychoanalyst but a community in process and in progress; it cannot be measured in ‘sections’ or ‘hours’ but can be conceived as a generational enterprise. Decolonial healing requires shaking off a sense of ‘reality’ that narratives of modernity enforced through racism and patriarchal masculinity: a sense of reality constituted by the hierarchical ranking of human beings, according to patriarchal and racial standards: once the narratives of modernity and modernity as narrative (not as historical period) are established as true, the degraded part of the world falls into the domain of coloniality. Coloniality, in the last analysis, operates as a razor that cuts through whatever does not fit the ontology of the world established by a fictional narrative that created a powerful character: modernity. As far as modernity is a fiction and not an ontological unfolding, to decolonize means to work toward disavowal, devaluation, and disobedience at the same time that it involves inscribing an ontology that corresponds with the experience of the victims of patriarchal masculinity and racism—building and rebuilding worlds not based on economic success and heroic leadership, but on communal and decolonial love rather than liberal social solidarity. It is hard to imagine such a world precisely today when the degradation propelled by modernity is reaching the point of no return. However, decoloniality does not mean taking over the IMF, the World Bank, the EU Central Bank and converting them into decolonial institutions. Such a task is not only improbable but also meaningless: taking over such institutions would result in the transformation of the subjects into the norms of the institutions rather than changing institutions to pursue decolonial goals. A more modest task is working toward the disavowal of the hegemonic discourse, planted in the pillar of patriarchal masculinity and racism that creates a fiction through which we inhabit the world. Decolonial healing and communal building through decolonial love is a starting point. For this reason, decolonial thinking is always decolonial doing, and doing decolonially is tantamount to thinking decolonially.

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Fanon was writing at the heart of the world order between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989: It was a world divided in three—First, Second, and Third Worlds. The racialization of people went, from the very beginning, hand in hand with the racialization of regions. The ‘New World’ was already such a categorization, new meant ‘young’ over against the maturity of the Old World. The story continued until the tripartite division of the world, the Third World defined by development and the First and the Second considered as developed. The First was democratic and the second authoritarian. That was the enunciated, the ‘content’ that distributed the field of forces. The ‘invention’ of the tripartite division was not proposed by actors and institutions located in the Third and Second Worlds; and the classification was not inscribed in the histories of the Second and the Third but of the First. The former division between ‘New World’ and ‘Old World’ of the sixteenth century went through a series of transformations. However, the locus of enunciation remained in the hands of Europeans and their categories of knowledges, languages, actors, and institutions. How do you respond to the tripartite division if you are a black man from Martinique, who lived in France for a while and ended up in Algeria in the middle of the physical, visual, and discursive struggle for decolonization? For decolonization was not just a matter of armed battles, but of a discursive battle, and of images at war as well, that spread from the world in flames in Asia and Africa, to the metropolis where migrants, refugees, and local intellectuals were debating the reasons of the colonizer and the reasons of those struggling for liberation, in all its dimensions: political, economic, religious, and above all subjective. Political and economic decolonization failed, as evinced by the turmoil in North Africa and the relevant regions of the Middle East. But this is another problem. What I want to emphasize here is the enunciation rather than the enunciated (the tripartite division). How do you respond, then, if you are a black man from Martinique in Algeria, who spent some years in France? Two options: you join the Liberation Army or you combat the set of principles upon which an imaginary that justified colonization was built. And by doing so you imagine ways of world making based on decolonial principles and beliefs. Coloniality of knowledge cannot be dismantled with bombs, it has to be disavowed, devalued, eroded in its arrogance by categories of thought and arguments built on the experiences of the rest (the wretched) of modernity. And that is what Fanon forcefully did in The Wretched of the

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Earth. Here, Fanon enacted a different argumentative strategy in relation to Black Skin, White Masks. In Black Skin, White Masks he argued body-politically, which is summarized in the prayer with which he closes the book: “Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions!” (1967a, 232). In the later book, he accepted the tripartite division imposed upon him and, as Jean Paul-Sartre points out to his French readers, Fanon’s book “is not written for us” (1967b, 12). Fanon has turned his back to the First World and addresses the people of the Third World. And, once again, he closes his arguments at the end, not with a prayer, but with a manifesto, a clear and loud call to communal decolonization of subjectivity, a collective decolonial healing. Fanon was a psychiatrist; he knew Freud and the first of Jacques Lacan’s publications. But he took another route: “Come, then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent and resolute. We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.” (1967b, 251)

Once again, decolonial thinking and doing means working on both dismantling the ontology built by the rhetoric of modernity (for example, ‘representing’ the world) and showing the irrationality of the narrative that built it. It consists in networking and building categories of thought and narratives that empower the wretched. To do so, it is imperative to start by arguing and advocating that ‘our’ humanity was denied ‘them’ and showing the un-humanity of a structure of enunciation (institutions, categories of thought and languages) that built for itself an image of ‘humanity’ which allowed to disqualify what did not fit its imaginary. Tearing down the fiction that certain human beings are superior to others by showing that the fiction has been built by individuals and institutions to place them at the top of the hierarchy. This hierarchy is not ontological but epistemic: it is an epistemic fiction built and sustained by actors and institutions managing knowledge.

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VIII.II I have underlined two complementary dimensions of Fanon’s contributions to the disavowal of the racial imaginary of modernity upon which coloniality was erected: the racialization of bodies and the racialization of regions. Body- and geo-politics of knowing, sensing, and believing are the discursive battlefield where decolonial thinking is doing: building ‘an-other’ rationality that confronts the rationality ‘of the other’: the imperial discourse of modernity. You may not understand at first glance what I am saying: I am referring to a state when ‘the other’ thinks it is no longer the other, and the irrationality of the other is located in the racial and patriarchal discourse of modernity. The two dimensions I would like to bring up and emphasize, in closing, are the patriarchal and the communal that Fanon did not address. Of course this is not a critique of Fanon’s shortcoming. I am saying that it is a good thing that you cannot find the ‘total solution’ in one person, one book, one ideology (system of ideas). Similar to Fanon’s foundational decolonial thinking (equivalent in significance to Immanuel Kant’s contribution to the foundation of the second modernity) is the contribution of Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). I would translate borderland into borderline. The latter doesn’t deny or supersede the former. On the contrary, it enlarges its scope from an argument grounded in the borderland Mexico/U.S. to the very historical foundation of the modern/colonial world: a world built upon dividing lines of the planet always designed and enforced by Western imperial states in the process of building themselves as centers of the world. Once again, this was not a physical operation in which armies and airplanes and tanks and weapons went ‘out there’ and built a physical center of the world. No, it was built by the force of maps, narratives (Hegel), and international law from the School of Salamanca to today. Furthermore, the ‘legal’ tracing of borderlines corresponded to other ‘lines’ dividing people not only racially and by regions (New World, Third World), but also by gender and sexual preferences: “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague

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and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” (Anzaldúa 1999, 25, original emphasis)

Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness parallels Fanon’s sociogenesis. They are not the same concept but they refer to comparable experiences and to one type of phenomena: human beings responding to the un-human belief that certain people are lesser than others. Thinking in/on your own terms is crucial for you cannot tear down the fiction with the same concepts with which the fiction was constructed. Or, as Audre Lorde’s dictum goes, one cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. Fanon argues from the senses of a black male body and Anzaldúa from the senses of a brown, lesbian, female body. They are parallel in that both are creating concepts that allow them to argue and show the irrationality of racial and patriarchal assumptions. Anzaldúa connects body-politics with the geopolitical conceptualization of the border: “Her first step is to take inventory. Despojando, destranando, quitando paja. Just what did she inherit from her ancestors? This weight on her back—which is the baggage from the Indian mother; which the baggage from the Spanish father; which the baggage from the Anglo?” (1999, 105, original emphasis)

La conciencia de la mestiza (new mestiza consciousness) is not a question of blood but of imaginaries—images, sounds, smells, food, songs, landscape, words, discourses, etcetera—inscribed in your body, it does not matter what your DNA is. Perhaps we in the Humanities should invent another referent called DAM (Deep Ancestral Memory) that would allow us to ‘discover your ethnicity,’ according to DNA public information (see “Ancestry”). Concepts such as la conciencia de la mestizo and sociogenesis are starting points for decolonizing subjectivity. When you reach that point, you have reached the ground, and you can start building on the pillars of sociogenesis and conciencia de la mestiza to delink from the modern and imperial imaginary of patriarchy and racism.

VIII.III Allow me a third case before closing the argument. I draw here from Leanne Simpson, a Nishnaabeg-Canadian scholar, activist, poet, singer, and essayist. From her I take a few concepts parallel to those from Fanon and Anzaldúa. These are: re-creation, resurgence, and new emergence.

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Simpson’s struggle, as that of many Canadian First Nations and U.S. Native Americans, digs deep in the ancestral memories that have never died in spite of genocide, violence, and marginalization by British, French, and the Canadian nation-states. The efforts to teach Aristotle or Saint Thomas Aquinas were futile. Teaching The Bible had some effect, but never supplanted First Nation Creation Narratives. And Christ was incorporated into indigenous Spirituality, disobeying the dogmas of the Christian Church.5 There are similarities of course with Pueblos Originarios in South and Central America, but there are significant differences as well. The differences shall not be found in the common cosmologies that one encounters in the Mapuche, Aymara, Quechuas and Chiquitanos, Kichuas and Guambianos, Totziles and Maya-Quiches, but mainly in divisions created by European imperial states. There is much more in common between Canadian First nations, in French and British ex-colonial territories, than there is between the former and Pueblos Originarios in the South. I repeat, the differences are not among themselves; they very well understand each other as ‘indigenous peoples of the Americas.’ The differences can be perceived when we ask who colonized whom (French, British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese?) (see Toensing 2014). What they have in common is the need to re-emerge, to re-surge, to re-exist. Let me give a couple of quotes from Simpson’s book Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011). In a crucial chapter titled “Theorizing Resurgence from Within Nishnaabeg Thoughts,” Simpson lays out the resurgence program by appropriating the word “theory” from Western cosmology and inserting it in Nishnaabeg’s cosmology; I could anticipate progressive intellectuals objecting that “within” is an illusion for there cannot be an ‘authentic within.’ Needless to say, ‘authentic’ is not a question here, for Simpson just says “within.” But the objector could follow up, if “within” is not authentic then what is? (Simpson 2011, 40) It is border thinking, border epistemology (to appropriate another Greek word of heavy weight in Western cosmology). It means that Nishnaabeg’s cosmology has been disrupted but not destroyed by Western cosmology. This is the point of resurgence and reemergence. And it is not just a book or a person, but the book (Dancing…) and the person (Simpson) that are the tips of a conglomerate of icebergs around the world. Resurgence and reemergence means working

—————— 5 See Tinker (2004). Tinker is a theologian of liberation and his political theology comes from Indigenous ancestral thoughts in the Americas rather than from Indigenous European ancestral thoughts, like in Carl Schmitt.

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toward regrouping and re-existing in two complementary directions. One is in-house and the task is rebuilding communities; the other is out-bound, politically engaging with the Canadian government and civil society. That engagement cannot simply be protesting and complaining: there is an urgent need to theorize resurgence in order to strengthen advocacy. Let us read Simpson (I am parsing the paragraph to emphasize the points she is making): “1) Western theory, whether based on postcolonial, critical, or even liberating strains of thought, have been exceptional at diagnosing, revealing and even interrogating colonialism, and many would argue that this body of theory holds the greatest promises for shifting the Canadian politics because it speaks to that audience in a language they can understand, if not hear. 2) Yet Western theories of liberation had for the most part failed to resonate with the vast majority of Indigenous People, scholars or artist. In particularly, Western based social movement theories failed to recognize the broader contextualization of resistance within Indigenous thoughts, while also ignoring the contestation of colonialism as a starting point. 3) While I believe liberatory politics and theory are always valuable, Indigenous thoughts has the ability to resonate with Indigenous people of all ages. It not only maps a way out of colonial thinking by confirming Indigenous life ways or alternative ways of being in the world. Ultimately indigenous theory seeks to dismantle colonialism while simultaneously building a renaissance of mino bimaadiziwin.” (Simpson 2011, 31–32, emphasis added, W. M.)

Let me call your attention first to mino bimaadiziwin. It could be translated as ‘the way to a healthy life,’ a life in harmony and in plenitude. In the South American Andes, Bolivia and Ecuador, Suma Qamaña in Aymara and Sumak Kawsay in Quichua. In Mandarin there is also a concept He which means to live in harmony and plenitude. And I am sure that most nonWestern Civilizations have a similar concept. Western Civilization silenced them with the repressive concepts of Christian salvation, secular progress, and civilizing mission, and the economic myth of development. Basically, Simpson points out that Indigenous People are thinking people, and not people to be thought about by Western scholars. In order to do so, it is not enough to say: ‘Hey, we Nishnaabeg also think.’ What I understand Simpson is implying is something like this: ‘We have thinking people like your Descartes or your Heidegger but we operate in a different way, and we have not been in a world-dominant position (on the contrary) and we do not derive our thoughts from Greece. And we were basically oral-thinking people. But now we have appropriated you alphabet and your concept of theory, among other things, to regroup and reemerge after your

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violent disruption of our way of life. We are not pretending to be like we were before you came, but you can no longer live your life pretending that we do not exist. We do exist, and are reemerging.’ Simpson quotes a dictum among Nishnaabeg people: “we wear our Creation Story” (2011, 39). And she follows up with this consideration: “The starting point within indigenous theoretical framework then is different from that within Western theories: the spiritual world is alive and influencing, colonialism is contesting and story telling or narrative imagination is a tool to envision other existences outside of the current ones by critiquing and analyzing the current state of affairs, but also dreaming and visioning other realities.” (2011, 40, emphasis added, W. M.)

Simpson emphasizes the meaning of “inserting ourselves in those stories” (wearing our stories), because our theory is “personal” (2011, 43). In more detail: “Interpreting Creation Stories within a cultural inherent framework provides several insights into Nishnaabeg thought. First, it is highly personal. All Nishnaabeg people are theorists in the sense that they hold responsibilities for making meaning for their own creation and their own life […] Theory is collectivized through the telling of our stories and the performance of our ceremonies. We begin to teach theory to our children immediately and they began to teach us theory immediately.” (2011, 43, original emphasis)

Learning is based on mutual experiences, and as Simpson argues in the last two chapters of the book devoted to theorizing her experience of motherhood, teaching is not a set of prohibitions (which had already been remarked by Quechua and Aymara intellectuals) but underlines the positive: do things well, instead of prohibiting to sin; love life of animals, plants, and people instead of prohibiting to kill. Prohibition puts limits and creates both defensive and curious attitudes and the desire to transgress the prohibition. Positive attitudes encourage love and doing well, rather than becoming defensive and making enemies. “Resurgence” presupposes to affirm what modernity negated, to value what has been devalued, and to engage in communal love rather than in competitions among ‘self’ and among ‘states’: “In terms of resurgence, our Creation Stories tell us that collectively we have access to all the knowledge we need to untangle ourselves from the near destruction that we are draped in, Gzhwe Mnidoo (The Great Mystery, The Creator [the energy that engenders life, W.M.]) transferred all of his/her thoughts into our full bodies. It tells us that each of us should live in a good and balanced way physically, intellec-

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tually, emotionally and spiritually [mino bimaadiziwin, addition and emphasis, W.M], in order to access this knowledge.” (Simpson 2011, 43–44, original emphasis)

That is why knowledge is embodied and personal, and that is why harmony means that each person embodies the knowledge that comes through being a living organism, a body: energy, life, through which to understand the meaning of mino bimaadiziwin: do well, live well, live in harmony. Instead, do not kill and do not take what is not yours (do not be a delinquent) are principles of prohibition that reinforce the isolation of a person from transcendent life and the desire to do well. The unbalance that all of us on the planet are witnessing and experiencing (the imbalance of the natural world, the imbalance in social organization, the imbalance in family relations, the imbalance in friendship and community), is the result and the consequence of a cosmology that placed human beings as ‘representatives’ of God on earth, established Him as judge, enunciated prohibitions, and created walls to stop the enemies that He himself invented.

IX We, you and me, dear reader, have arrived at the next stop. Let me summarize my argument. My goal was to provide you with a profile of a particular way of thinking decolonially. The word ‘decoloniality’ is used in many contexts today, so that it would be helpful and advisable to know who is using it and in what context of meaning. In my case, when I said “decoloniality” or equivalents (decolonial thinking and doing, a decolonial conception of the world, etcetera), it is always in relation to the colonial matrix of power. That is my universe of meaning. If someone argues and uses the concept of ‘surplus value,’ the universe of meaning is Marxism, and if someone uses the words ‘free market and globalization,’ the universe of meaning is neoliberalism. And if someone uses ‘sin, hell, and heaven’ the universe of meaning is Christianity, and so on and so forth. There is no ‘real world’ that has its own universe of meaning. The ‘real world’ today appears to be that of promises of happiness and encouragement to increase wealth for the wealthy, and dismiss those who do not have the means to consume; and of promises of ‘democracy’ in the war against terrorism. ‘Reality’ is the common sense invented by the sustained rhetoric of modernity, modernization and development.

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The decolonial sense of and perspective on the world I am outlining here is a ‘Third World perspective.’ The concept of coloniality came from the sensibilities and local histories of political thinkers in Latin America, during the Cold War, involved in the debates of dependency theory. None of the implicated, as far as I know, was either of African or Indian descent, and no one grounded arguments in African and Indigenous ancestral epistemology. The ancestral epistemology of dependency theory, in Latin America, was Western European, particularly since the Enlightenment. With an important twist, of course: all the actors implicated in dependency theory were of European descent or mestizos, which means they were mostly of brown skin and ‘wore’ the European Spirit. However, the very idea of ‘dependency’ made them/us off-Europeans and off-whites. That is, ‘Third World consciousness’ nourished the most potent political thinking of the time, next to philosophy and theology of liberation. Nevertheless, ‘Third World consciousness’ among ‘Latin’ Americans was caught within the bounds of their/our European ancestors’ memories, in the family, at the school, at the university. ‘Third World consciousness’ was different among indigenous Africans, Asians, as well as among indigenous and African-descendent people in the Americas: in general, they ‘wear’ Indigenous and African Spirit and memories. It was different simply because of the diversity of local histories and ancestral memories not grounded in Greece and Rome. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was translated into English in 1963, but his influence in the English-speaking world, at that time, was limited. Dependency and liberation (theological, philosophical) was the main concern of the intellectual ‘Latin’ American (that is, of European descent in blood, spirit, and knowledge). Of course the struggles for decolonization were known and commented. More so that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were helping decolonial struggles in Angola and South Africa.6 Nonetheless, the reason for Castro and Guevara was ‘socialism,’ for African fighters it was ‘colonialism and racism.’ Castro and Guevara operated under the skin of ‘Latin’ Americans of European descent—in other words, they were acting as ‘Latin’ American natives or creoles. African freedom fighters were indigenously African with a different skin (and I am not referring to the color but to memories imprinted in the body, wisdom and knowledge of the body ruled out by the colonial European mind and rea-

—————— 6 On Fidel Castro’s contribution to the struggle for decolonization in Africa, see the magnificent documentary Cuba, An African Odyssey, directed by Jihan el Tahri.

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son, blocking the body), and with different ancestral memories. These memories, if and when connected with Greece directly, as in the case of Muslim Arab philosophy, or tangentially, when imposed through coloniality of knowledge over non-Europeans ancestralities, were not connected to the Greece of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. Muslim translators of Greek philosophy took it in their own direction, and Greece was never the founding moment of Islamic Civilization. I belong to the genealogy of ‘Latin’ in the Americas, both in South America and in the South of the U.S. That is, of European descent. More specifically, I am neither mestizo nor creole, but an immigrant, of Italian grandparents and parents. I blended with the existing population of European descent in Argentina and in South and Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean Islands. Other demographic components in the Americas are ‘French European Latin’ in some Caribbean Islands and Canada; there are ‘Anglo Europeans’ in the Americas, in the U.S., Canada, and some Caribbean Islands. But the blending was not without cost—the cost of the colonial wound that, when I became aware, put me in the rout of doing research and arguing decolonially. ‘Latinos’ in Spanish and Luso America (and of course in Anglo America) have all been educated and soaked in European ancestrality that was sold to us as modernity. But, there was something coming from the deep history of colonial history that, alien to European ancestrality, was crucial—in different ways—for all of us in the Americas. Pueblos Originarios, communities of African descent and of European descent, we have all coexisted since the sixteenth century. That is the deep colonial memory in the Americas, these are the legacies that coloniality of knowledge and of being have left. It was only recently (the past half century) that the strong intellectual and political presence of Indigenous and African-American thoughts began to intervene in the public sphere dominated by secondhand European thoughts in politics, the economy, religion, philosophy, sciences, and the like. That is to say, ‘decoloniality’ is a common denominator that connects Third World decolonial thinkers with Indigenous and African-American decolonial thinkers throughout the Americas. My contribution profiles the immigrant consciousness embodied in decoloniality. It allows me to enter into collaborative dialogue with the African diaspora and indigenous decolonial thoughts. None of the decolonial trajectories outlined here are or should be thought of as hegemonic. Decolonial hegemony has been expressed as

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‘pluriversality as universal project.’ That is, in a hegemony of truth in parenthesis there is no longer room for any hegemony of truth without parenthesis. Truth without parenthesis is the blueprint to justify war. Truth in parenthesis is the roads toward decolonial love and communal harmony, instead of liberal solidarity disguising a world based on competition and death to maintain a given truth without parenthesis (See Mignolo 2011, 70–74). If talk of hegemony is still relevant, it could not be of a post-hegemony that only refers to the history of European thought and its manifestations in the ex-colonies. What may post-hegemony mean in China, Russia, or India? Dewesternization is already beyond the European post-, since none of these states formations have been colonized by European singular and linear time. The kind of hegemony that obtains in the sphere of interstate relations already has a name: multipolarity; and multipolarity is simply ‘after’ the Western building of its imperial hegemony, from 1500 to 2000. Decolonial hegemony, pluriversality as universal project, is neither post- nor new: it is just pure and simply decolonial; cutting across space and time and making connections between parallel decolonial projects that have imperial colonial/legacies in common and that are singular in their local histories that conform the actors, senses, sentiments, and thoughts of decolonial actors. Decolonial hegemony is simply not ‘post’ because its roots go back and deep into the sixteenth century: modernity/coloniality engendered decoloniality, as I have been arguing elsewhere. Decolonial time means plurality of times entangled with a Western unilinear idea of time which any ‘post’ reproduces in its imperiality.

Works Cited Abdi, Ali A. (2012). Decolonizing Philosophies of Education. Rotterdam: Springer. “Ancestry DNA.” dna.ancestry.com, Ancestry DNA. n. d. http://dna.ancestry.com. 14 July 2014. Anzaldúa, Gloria (1999). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1987. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Bâ, Saër Maty, and Will Higbee (eds.). (2012). Dewesternizing Film Studies. London: Routledge.

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Cuba, An African Odyssey (2008). Dir. Jihan el Tahri. Temps Noir and ITVS International. www.itvs.org. Independent Television Service, n. d. http://www.itvs.or g/films/cuba-an-african-odyssey. 14 July 2014. Fanon, Frantz (1967a). Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. — (1967b). The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. London: Penguin. Harling, Mack (2005). “De-Westernizing Doctrine and Developing Appropriate Theology in Mission.” International Journal of Frontiers Mission, 22.6: 159–166. He, Weihua (2012). “The Prospect of Harmony and the Decolonial View of the World: Weihua He Interviews Walter Mignolo.” criticallegalthinking.com. Critical Legal Thinking—Law & the Political, Jan.–July 2012. http://criticallegalthinkin g.com/2014/06/12/prospect-harmony-decolonial-view-mignolo/. 14 July 2014. Horkheimer, Max (1999). “Traditional and Critical Theory.” In Max Horkheimer. Critical Theory. Selected Essays, 188–243. 1937. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company. Lorde, Audre (1984). “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Audre Lorde. Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 110–13. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Lugones, Maria (2007). “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia, 22.1: 186–209. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson (2007). “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” Cultural Studies, 21.2/3: 240–270. Maturana, Humberto (2002). “Autopoiesis, Structural Coupling and Cognition.” Cybernetics and Human Knowledge, 9.3/4: 3–34. Mignolo, Walter (1985) “Dominios borrosos y dominios teóricos. Ensayo de elucidación conceptual.” Filologia, XX.I: 21–40. Reprinted in Walter Mignolo (2011). De la hermenéutica y la semiosos colonial al pensar descolonial. Quito: Abya Yala. — (2011a). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press. — (2011b). Modernity and Decoloniality. oxfordbibliographies.com. Oxford Bibliography Online, 2011. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo97 80199766581/obo9780199766581-0017.xml. 15 July 2014. Mignolo, Walter, and Rolando Vázquez (eds.). (2013). The Decolonial AestheSis Dossier. socialtextjournal.org. Social Text: Periscope, 15 July 2013. http://socialtext journal.org/periscope_article/the-decolonial-aesthesis-dossier/. 15 July 2014. Quijano, Aníbal (2007). “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.“ Globalization and the De-Colonial Option. Spec. issue of Cultural Studies, 21.2/3: 168–178. Rorty, Richard (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Simpson, Leanne (2011). Dancing on Our Turtle´s Back. Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and New Emergence. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Arbeiter Ring Publisher. Tinker, George (2004). Spirit and Resistance. Native American Political Theology. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress.

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Tlostanova, Madina (2014). “Towards a Decolonization of Thinking and Knowledge: A Few Reflections from the World of Imperial Difference.” antville. org. http://antville.org/static/m1/files/madina_tlostanova_decolonia_ thinking.pdf. 15 July 2014. — (2012). “Post-socialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2: 130–42. Toensing, Gale Courey (2014). “A World Conference on Indigenous Peoples With No Indigenous?” www.indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com. Indian Country, 03 Feb. 2014. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/02/03/worldconference-indigenous-peoples-no-indigenous-153383. 14 July 2014. Walsh, Catherine (2011). “Fanon y la pedagogía decolonial.” Nueva América, 122. http://www.novamerica.org.br/revista_digital/L0122/rev_opiniao.asp. 14 July 2014. Wright, Richard (1956). The Color Curtain. New York: World Publishing.

Location and Social Thought in the Black: A Testimony to Africana Intellectual Tradition Kwame Nimako

Contextual Introduction If the general assumption made about humanity is that knowledge production flows from experiences, then this should be expected of Africans too. To this effect I have stated elsewhere that there is a distinctive Africana intellectual tradition across Africa and the African diaspora (Nimako 2011). The problem is how to identify the distinctive features of Africana knowledge production, and how to make meaningful statements about it. The African diaspora in the context of this paper refers to those whose ancestors suffered the dramatic and drastic events of chattel slavery, including their dispersal in the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe; how they continue to confront the legacies of these events; and how they use the memory of these events to give meanings to their lives and to construct their identity. The context of the intellectual tradition that flows from this history is descriptive, corrective, and prescriptive; the content, however, is historical, structural, and developmental. All of which flow from what I refer to as parallel lives and intertwined belongings, of which more below. For the moment suffice it to say that Africana intellectuals do not only draw resources from each other but also they have travelled and lived in different locations Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe. Some prominent figures among them are: Maya Angelou, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, and Sylvia Wynter. Let us start with the Black issue, followed by location and social thought.

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The Black and Dignitarianism The common thread that ran through the intellectual and political tradition I have just mentioned is ‘race,’ humiliation, slavery, colonialism, and memory. The underlying schema is the same but the geographic location that shapes Africana social thought can be different, hence location and social thought in the Black. Specifically this implies that being Black in much of Africa is not the same as being Black in Europe or the United States. For instance, in the central and western part of Africa, where the majority of the population is Black, the marker of identity is not Black; ethnic background, language, and religion tend to serve as a marker of identity. The Black is also relational and located in social and racial formations. In Europe, the Black is a marker of subordination and resistance; but the concept of Black has also been narrowed to define only people of African descent whereas the concept of the African diaspora has been broadened to include people who were previously excluded from this category. The issue of ‘race,’ which defines the Black issue, was initially imposed on Africans, but was later claimed and asserted by them. The dynamics of imposition and embrace were fundamentally different. Imposition of a common racial identity on diverse Africans was designed by Europeans to define, exploit and dominate. The embrace of a Black identity by these same groups was designed to unite, uplift and liberate. The schema of imposition has been described and analyzed by Lewis Gordon in the following words: “Although Africans as an ascription of people from the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea downward was used in the Middle Ages, the African as black emerged in the modern world, and with that the logic of the difference from those who designated the black as such and the correlated, continental difference of European and white.” (Gordon, qtd. in Nimako 2011, 43–44)

Gordon goes on to state that: “The move from Christendom and the land of heathens resulted in those of Europe and whites versus the African and the blacks, and then the Indians and the Asiatics. Along the way, many of the South Pacific Peoples and those in the islands of the Indian Ocean were also brought into the schema, although with a separation of black from African. Thus we have it: the emergence of the black, a being mostly associated with the African but not necessarily such since also associated with, for example, the Australian Aboriginal. And there is the African, which mostly means

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the black, although by the fifteenth century fall of the Moors there were many descendants from the northern other side of the Mediterranean, whether by slavery or earlier Greek and Roman colonial rule, whose identity became African but certainly not black. These developments offered, as well, practices of justification and legitimation with their own naturalism culminating in what we could call modern naturalistic anthropology.” (Gordon, qtd. in Nimako 2011, 43–44).

In this regard, ‘race’ is central to the issue of the Atlantic ‘slave’ trade and slavery, its legal abolition, and the struggle for emancipation. This is because ‘race’ was one of the major, if not the foremost, organizing principle of the ‘slave’ trade and slavery. Africa was the location for enslavement; the idea of ‘race’— based largely on African ancestry and skin colour—were the putatively objective criteria for identifying the enslaved (Banton 1977). The ‘race’ question is relational and the Black was framed and labeled as a ‘problem’ in relation to white. This led W. E. B. Du Bois to lamentably formulate his thesis of the ‘Black problem,’ namely, when a people with some problems become ‘the problem people.’ The common experience that underpins Africana social thought has been broadly formulated by Ali Mazrui in the following terms: “The African people may not be the most brutalized people in modern history, but they are almost certainly the most humiliated. The most brutalized people in modern history include the indigenous people of the Americas and those of Australia, who were subjected to genocidal attacks by white invaders. Also among the most brutalized in modern times were the Jews and the Gypsies in the Nazi Holocaust. On the other hand, no other groups were subjected to such large-scale indignities of enslavement for several centuries in their millions as the Africans were. [After the legal abolition of slavery] No other groups experienced to the same extent such indignities as lynching, systematic segregation, and well-planned apartheid as the Africans were. It is against this background that Africa’s dignitarian impulse was stimulated. A deep-seated African rebellion against humiliation was aroused. It has been a misnomer to call this rebellion “nationalism.” This has not been an African quest for nationhood. At best nationhood has been just the means to an end. The deepseated African struggle has been a quest for dignity—human and racial.” (Mazrui 2001, 107, original emphasis)

There are dozens of cases to illustrate the dignitarian tradition but for the moment let us restrict it to the recent online announcement of the death of Nelson Mandela on Thursday, 5 December 2013, by the New York Times: “Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation of South Africa from white minority rule and served as his country’s first black president, becoming an international

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emblem of dignity and forbearance, died Thursday. He was 95.” (Keller 2013, n pag.)

The other side of the rebellion coin is that of the inferiority complex of the Black person arising from the history of humiliation. At least this is how I read Fanon’s project on Black Skin, White Masks (1952), in a narrow context. Fanon left the broader context out of his Black Skin, White Masks project. Though less referenced we read this introduction to his familiar project: “Before opening the proceedings, we would like to say a few things. The analysis we are undertaking is psychological. It remains, nevertheless, evident that for us the true disalienation of the black man implies a brutal awareness of the social and economic realities. The inferiority complex can be ascribed to a double process: First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority.” (Fanon 2008, xiv–xv, emphasis added, K. N.)

My reading of this quotation is that the social and economic realities should be the broader framework to probe the Africana condition even if that does not appear to be the primary focus of inquiry. It appears that Fanon picked up the social and economic realities later in his work on The Wretched of the Earth (1961). However I am aware that Nkrumah made social and economic realities a central concern. But Nkrumah’s approach has to be put in the context of his time and location, namely, regaining African sovereignty.

Location and Social Thought The schema underpinning Africana social thought could be the same, namely, race and humiliation, but the location from which Africana intellectuals theorize and struggle could be different. They also share resources and can be testified in the following formulation by Nkrumah: “PAN-AFRICANISM has its beginnings in the liberation struggle of AfricanAmericans, expressing the aspirations of Africans and peoples of African descent. From the first Pan-African Conference, held in London in 1900, until the fifth and last Pan-African Conference held in Manchester in 1945, African-Americans provided the main driving power of the movement. Pan-Africanism then moved to Africa, its true home, with the holding of the First Conference of Independent

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African States in Accra in April 1958, and the All-African Peoples’ Conference in December the same year.” (Nkrumah, qtd. in Nimako 2010, 54).

Nkrumah went on to note that: “The work of the early pioneers of Pan-Africanism such as H. Sylvester Williams, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and George Padmore, none of whom were born in Africa, has become the treasured part of Africa’s history. It is significant that two of them, Dr. Du Bois and George Padmore, came to live in Ghana at my invitation. Dr. Du Bois died, as he wished, on African soil, while working on the Encyclopedia Africana. George Padmore became my Adviser on African Affairs, and spent the last years of his life in Ghana, helping in the revolutionary struggle for African unity and socialism.” (Nkrumah, qtd. in Nimako 2010, 54)

It is important to note that just as the colonization of Africa was designed at a conference in Berlin (Germany) by major European states in 1884–85, so was the decolonization of Africa planned at conferences. Five times in the first half of the twentieth century outstanding people of African descent sat down to plan the reordering of Africa and the African diaspora. Pan-African conferences took place in major European cities, and in New York between 1900 and 1945. The focus of the Fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester in 1945 was the decolonization of Africa and H. Sylvester Williams, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, and C. L. R. James were there. By that time Kwame Nkrumah had relocated from the United States to England, and he was there too. When Nkrumah returned to Ghana in December 1947 he engaged in the difficult task of undoing colonial indoctrination and violence. His message varied, depending on the circumstances, but the element of a wake-up call remained. For example, at a rally in the north of the country on 5 March 1949 he stated: “This country is ours. This land is ours. It belongs to our chiefs and people. It does not belong to foreigners, but we don’t say that all foreigners should pack up and go. They can stay as traders, and work with us not us masters and rulers […].” (Nkrumah, qtd. in Nimako 2010, 60)

At that point in time the challenge was to wake-up Ghanaians into action while not also awakening colonial violence. To achieve this he added: “The age of politics of words is gone. This is the age of politics of action. We don’t have guns. We don’t have ammunition to fight anybody. We have a great spirit, a great national soul which is manifest in our unity […]. Wherefore my advice is ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things will be added unto you.’” (Nkrumah, qtd. in Nimako 2010, 60, original emphasis)

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We have emphasized the words guns and unity because colonial rule rested on violence and divide and rule tactics. In plain language what he meant by seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things will be added unto you was that the economic development of Ghana required Ghanaian agency, and in the colonial context it meant self-determination and political independence. Let us delineate the three central elements of the above speech. The first is the object of opposition; British colonial rule, founded on violence and humiliation, was the object of opposition. The second is a strong belief in equal opportunity and social transformation as an alternative to inequality embedded in racism. The third was mass education as the basis of political mobilization and as a strategy to undo colonial indoctrination. Undertaking intense political mobilization, in less than three years after his return to Ghana, Nkrumah compelled the British colonial administration to negotiate with his political party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP), to share administrative authority in 1951, and grant formal political independence to Ghana, under Nkrumah’s leadership on 6 March 1957. Though taking place in a different location and time, the issues of guns and unity was at the back of the minds of Civil Rights leaders in the U.S. in the nineteen fifties and elsewhere, hence the tendency to emphasize nonviolence and mass mobilization as a short term strategy of Black liberation at a given point in time. Equally important to note is that much of the sharing of diasporic knowledge has been both institutionalized and internationalized. For instance as the first President of newly independent Ghana Nkrumah institutionalized many of his ideas. He adopted Marcus Garvey’s concept of the Black Star, deploying it as a symbol in the national flag; Ghana’s Coat of Arms; as the name of the Ghana national shipping line, the Black Star Line; and as the name of the national Football club, the Black Stars. The Black Star become prevalent as a symbol for Africa and was also adopted as an element of the national flags by many African countries that still fly that flag in the twenty-first century. With regard to the ‘corrective’ aspect of the Africana intellectual tradition, the following: when he became President Nkrumah changed the name of the country from Gold Coast to Ghana. Haiti had followed this path in 1804 when it dropped the name San Domingue. After Nkrumah, many other African countries followed this tradition when they too became independent. Among them are: Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Botswana, Namibia, and Burkina Faso. All the above examples indicate the

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distinctive Africana intellectual tradition, which is corrective and prescriptive in context, and historical, structural and developmental in content.

Parallel Lives and Intertwined Belongings Let us now turn to the issue of why there is a distinctive Africana intellectual tradition. I have argued elsewhere that this is a consequence of parallel lives and intertwined belongings (Nimako 2011). Parallel lives and intertwined belongings in this context refers to a people who share the same space but have different experiences and memories. These are fundamental questions of power and inequality. With regard to Africa and Europe in relation to the transatlantic ‘slave’ trade we see that the African captives shared the same ship as their European captors (i.e. intertwined belonging) but the histories of how they boarded the ship and conditions on the ship were fundamentally different (i.e. parallel lives); in a similar vein while the enslaved African shared the same space on a plantation or a dwelling with the European enslaver (i.e. intertwined belonging) the histories of how the enslaved and the enslaver ended up on the same space and the imposed division of labor by the later on the former also differed fundamentally (i.e. parallel lives). These parallel histories and intertwined belongings in turn gave rise to different understanding and notions of abolition, emancipation and freedom. The abolition of slavery made citizenship (of a nation in a common space) an intertwined belonging and parallel memories (as opposed to different experiences) parallel histories. This is all the more so because by the time Blacks became legally free they had been represented and misrepresented for centuries either as ‘slaves’ or colonial subjects. Thus it was clear to them, as a corrective measure, to re-define and self-identify themselves. We know a lot more about this process in the United States, from the eighteen sixties, because of the work of Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglas and W. E. B. Du Bois. But it was evident in the British Caribbean in the eighteen thirties, and elsewhere in the Caribbean too. Later on, in Africa, Nkrumah led the way. According to Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism moved to Africa, its true home, with the holding of the First Conference of Independent African States in Accra in April 1958, and the All-African Peoples’ Conference in December the same year. These initiatives gave

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birth to the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now African Union (AU). The philosophical basis for the need for an African Union was formulated in the following words: “With true independence regained […] a new harmony needs to be forged, a harmony that will allow the combined presences of traditional Africa, Islamic Africa and Euro-Christian Africa, so that this presence is in tune with the original humanist principles underlying African society […]. A new emergent ideology is therefore required, an ideology which can solidify in a philosophical statement, but at the same time an ideology which will not abandon the original humanist principle of Africa. Such a philosophical statement will be borne out of the crisis of the African conscience confronted with three strands of present African society. Such a philosophical statement I propose to name philosophical consciencism.” (Nkrumah 1964, 70, original emphasis)

In the African diaspora the fight to end the Atlantic ‘slave’ trade and slavery was superseded by a struggle to collectively remember, and collectively represent, the nature of slavery and the ‘slave’ trade, and the manner in which they were legally abolished. These activities involve groups, organizations, and protests, as well as exhibits, galleries, and museums. And the activities took place in private spaces and in public spaces. As during slavery, that fight has always taken place in a context of inequality and unequal power relations, as Europeans and Americans also remembered and represented slavery to suit their goals. In Europe, too, following the tradition established by Europeans in Africa and the Americas, the notion of Black was initially used by those with power to negatively describe the former colonial subjects of the British Empire who had migrated to Britain. The concept of Black was concurrently appropriated by former colonial subjects as symbols of unity and struggle against racism. Thus in this paper I talk about Black Europeans or Afro-Europeans as people of African descent born or raised in Europe, who do not know any other country than the European countries in which they were born. It should be mentioned that the concept of ‘Black people’ never gained currency in continental Europe until recently. However, the broader classification of a Black community in Britain—which in the nineteen sixties and seventies referred to Africans, Asians and Caribbean from former British colonies—has narrowed. Not only has there been a distinction between the African diaspora, Asians, and others but also the notion of an Asian community has been unpacked since the nineteen eighties. There is now more reference to the Muslim community, Hindu

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community, Sikh community, and others (Nimako and Small 2009). Besides, not only has the concept and definition of diaspora broadened but also the composition of the African diaspora has been diversified. In the past the African diaspora referred predominantly to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Europe, today it includes the continental African diaspora in Europe. This implies that the narrow classification of the African Diaspora, which used to refer to the Caribbean diaspora of African descent, has been broadened to include peoples from postcolonial Africa. In other words, the notion of the African diaspora in Europe has been broadened to include people who were previously excluded. For this reason I speak of an old and new concept of diaspora. The migration trajectory of the old and new is also different. In some cases the old arrived as citizens (or colonial subjects), the new arrived as refugees and undocumented migrants. These developments are a consequence of internal dynamics (including self-identification), official state classifications for political purposes, as well as political, economic, and cultural developments in other parts of the world. But the underpinning schema of the Black in Africana knowledge formation in Europe does not deviate from the concerns of ‘race’ and humiliation.

Conclusion There is a distinctive Africana intellectual tradition that flows from Africa’s history in relation to Europe. This tradition finds its expression differently in different locations, and in different historical periods. Like all intellectual traditions, the Africana intellectual tradition describes phenomena, but unlike other traditions, it is corrective and prescriptive in context and historical, structural, and developmental in content. The common thread that runs through the intellectual and political tradition I have articulated in this paper is ‘race,’ humiliation, slavery, colonialism and memory. And these are phenomena that continue to shape this tradition as we enter further into the twenty-first century.

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Works Cited Banton, Michael (1977). The Idea of Race. London: Tavistock. Fanon, Frantz (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Hine, Darlene Clark, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small (eds.). (2009). Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Keller, Bill. “Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s Liberator as Prisoner and President, Dies at 95.” nytimes.com. The New York Times, 5 Dec. 2013. http://www.nytim es.com/2013/12/06/world/africa/nelsonmandela_obit.html. 14 July 2014. Mazrui, Ali A. (2001). “Ideology and African Political Culture.” In Teodros Kiros (ed.). Explorations in African Political Thought: Identity, Community, Ethic, 97–132. New York: Routledge. Nimako, Kwame (2010). “Nkrumah, African Awakening and Neo-colonialism: How Black America awakened Nkrumah and Nkrumah awakened Black America.” The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, 40.2: 54–70. — (2011) “Reorienting the World: With or Without Africa?” unisa.edu.au, University of South Australia. MnM Working Paper, 5: 1–2. http://www.unisa.edu.au/Docum ents/EASS/MnM/working-papers/nimako-reorienting.pdf. 14 July 2014. Nimako, Kwame, and Glenn Willemsen (2011). The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation. London: Pluto Press. Nkrumah, Kwame (1964). Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution. London: Heinemann. Schalkwijk, Marten, and Stephen Small (eds.). (2012). New Perspectives on Slavery and Colonialism in the Caribbean. The Hague: Amrit Publishers. Van Deburg, William L. (ed.). (1997). Modern Black Nationalism. From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan. New York: New York University Press.

Race in Translation: The Red, Black, and White Atlantics1 Robert Stam, Ella Shohat

This essay is based on our two-part Inaugural Lecture for The Institute of Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS) at the University of Bremen, Germany. One lecture was entitled “The Red Atlantic“ and the other was entitled “Culture Wars in Translation.” This essay combines the two presentations. It is partly taken from but also expands on ideas from our just-published book Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (2012). The book is a discursive history concerning the postwar debates about race and coloniality. It is at once a report from various ‘fronts’ in the race/colonial debates, a mapping of the germane literature in several languages, and an argument about the cross-border flow of ideas between Europe and the Americas. Against the backdrop of an Atlantic space shaped by the conquest of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and massive postcolonial dislocations, we trace a triangular traffic of ‘race’ and coloniality within and between three national zones: the U.S. (and more broadly the Anglophone zone), France (and the Francophone zone), and Brazil (and the Lusophone zone). Our goal is to shed light on

—————— 1 Before the publication of Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic, we presented portions of these materials at the Inaugural Lecture, “Race in Transnational Perspectives,” inaugurating the First International Guest Professorship Denkplatz Bremen, at the Institute of Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS), at the University of Bremen, Germany, June 8, 2009; the keynote address, “The Culture Wars in Translation: A Postcolonial Perspective,” “Europe in Black & White” conference, Centro de Estudos Comparatistas,” The University of Lisbon, Portugal, May 13, 2008; and the lectures on the panel, “The State of Criticism & Theory,” The School of Criticism & Theory, Cornell University, July 27, 2006 and “Tupi or Not Tupi a Tupi Theorist,” a two-part lecture (with Robert Stam), The School of Criticism & Theory, Cornell University, July 17 & July 24, 2006. Parts of this essay are also published in our co-authored Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (2007). We would also like to thank Sabine Broeck for the original invitation to teach in the transcultural studies program at the University of Bremen, and thank both Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker for inviting us to collaborate on this issue.

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the linked analogies between three zones too often viewed in isolation, in order to provoke a salutary confrontation of perspectives concerning shared and discrepantly lived histories. The concepts elaborated in the book include: the discourse of Red Atlantic Indian Radicalism; postcolonial indigeneity; intercolonial narcissism; the perils of the Latin/Anglo-Saxon dichotomy; the uses and abuses of comparison; allegorical crossings of Blacks, Jews, and Muslims; Tropicalia, Hip Hop, and the Rainbow Atlantic; and the right/left convergence on identity politics. Here we will foreground just two of these issues: 1) the Red Atlantic and the discourse of Indian radicalism and 2) the right/left convergence on identity politics—as two examples of our transnational approach. If the first section stresses intersectionality, the second stresses multidirectionality. Rather than subordinate intellectual flows to clear nation-state boundaries, we highlight transnational interconnectedness. The movement of ideas is multidirectional, with diverse points of entry and exit. We point to the dialogical translation and reaccentuation of ideas and discourses as they circulate through various zones within narratives that foreground the inbetween of languages and discourses. At the same time, these translations do not escape the gravitational pull of history; they are shaped within specific geographies and political contexts, shadowed by the architectonics of inequality. The title, Race in Translation, signals the dominant thread that runs through the volume. In a relational frame, we recount how Brazil, France, and the United States have been historically implicated in the dynamics of race and coloniality, and how those dynamics still reverberate in the present in the form of palpably unjust social formations. While the specific demographic ratios and power hierarchies might vary in the three countries, the historical interplay between race and coloniality is constitutive in each national case. The evasion, even the sheer denial of this constitutiveness is what propels the ‘debates.’ The evasion draws on different rhetorics in each case: ‘racial democracy’ in Brazil, ‘republicanism’ in France, and ‘equal opportunity’ in the United States. The crux of the debate, in our view, is between those who acknowledge the shaping presence of race and coloniality as against those who deny it. The new form of racism, many would argue, consists in denying that racism exists, in the right version, or in admitting that racism exists, but denying its fundamental role in constructing global and local power structures—in a certain left version.

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Debates about race and colonialism, in our view, must be seen within the longue durée of a colonizing process that goes at least as far back as 1492 and the Conquest of the Americas. The ‘culture wars,’ in this sense, inherit centuries of discursive struggles. The debates were embryonically present in the early exchanges about Conquest, colonialism, and slavery. They were argued in religious/political language in the sixteenth century when Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas asked whether Indians had souls and as a consequence enjoyed derechos humanos (‘human rights’). The debates were present when indigenous people rebelled against European conquest or resisted Christianization. They were present when enslaved Africans fought against enslavement, or when the U.S. Founding Fathers took positions for and against the inscription of slavery into the Constitution, or when French ‘free men of color’ opposed slavery in the French colonies. The various discursive positions for and against conquest, slavery, racism, and colonialism, in sum, have been ‘available’ for a long time; past and present reverberate together; old debates anticipate and haunt the present.

Part One The Red Atlantic In this section, we will examine a specific strand in the transnational traffic of ideas—to wit the discourses circulating around the figure of the ‘Indian’ in what we will be calling the “Red Atlantic.” Of course, both ‘Indian’ and ‘Red’ are misnomers, the first derived from Columbus’s mistaken impression that he had travelled to India, while the second term forms a trope of color. Both terms form the linguistic remains of the colonialism and transatlantic slavery that completely transformed racial, national, and cultural identities in the Atlantic World. It was colonial conquest that forged the constitutive Red/White/Black demographic triad typical of the Americas by turning an extremely heterogeneous group of indigenous peoples— formerly defined as Tupi, Arawak, Mohawk, and so forth—into generic ‘Reds,’ while turning an equally heterogeneous group of Africans—Bantu, Hausa, Yoruba—into generic ‘Blacks,’ all under the domination of a motley crew of Europeans—Spanish, English, Dutch, French—now turned into generic Whites.

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As tropes of color, the concepts of a ‘Red,’ ‘Black,’ and ‘White’ Atlantic cast a prismatic light on a shared history. While “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993) evokes the Middle Passage and the diasporization of Africans, the “Red Atlantic” calls attention not only to the dispossession of indigenous peoples by Europeans. The settler colonialism that dispossessed the ‘Red’ and the racial slavery that exploited the ‘Black’ were thus the twin machines of racial supremacy. The legal foundation for conquest was the ‘Discovery Doctrine’ that granted Europeans sovereign claim over ‘Red’ lands and peoples. Initially developed by the Roman Catholic Church as part of the Crusades, the Discovery Doctrine was first applied to Muslimdominated ‘infidel lands,’ declared by various popes to lack ‘lawful dominion.’ In the wake of the Conquest of the Americas, various popes asserted a worldwide papal jurisdiction—an early incarnation of the ‘universal’— rooted in the papacy’s divine mandate to care for the entire world. The Discovery Doctrine officially became part of U.S. law with the seminal Johnson v. M’Intosh case in 1823, the legal foundation for the U.S. takeover of Indian lands. Five centuries after Columbus, the ‘Indian’ has not vanished, and the processes inaugurated in 1492 weigh like a nightmare on the collective brain of the present. The question of intellectual property rights exemplifies the historical ‘morphing’ that takes us from Columbus to the CEOs of contemporary corporations. The word ‘patents’ referred in sixteenth-century Europe to the official royal letters by which sovereigns conferred privileges, rights, and land titles on various members of the nobility. In the ‘Age of Discovery,’ these ‘letters’ became associated with the literal conquest of territory; five hundred years later, they are associated with transnational corporations’ conquest of economic rights in the Global South. The Discovery Doctrine that authorized the takeover of native land has given way to World Trade Organization laws that authorize the privatization of cultural knowledges of indigenous peoples.

Indigeneity and the Postcolonial Until recently, postcolonial theory has paid little attention to the Red Atlantic, yet the question of indigeneity troubles some of the basic axioms of postcolonial discourse. Nor is it simply a matter of adding the indigene to the roll call of the oppressed; it is, rather, a matter of unpacking the as-

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sumptions that led to the marginalizing of indigeneity. A number of postcolonial topoi are thrown in doubt by indigenous critique. First, indigenous thinkers often see their situation as colonial rather than postcolonial, or as at once colonial, postcolonial, and paracolonial; second, while postcolonial theory celebrates a cosmopolitan ‘travelling theory,’ indigenous discourse often valorizes a rooted rather than a cosmopolitan existence; third, while postcolonial theory revels in the ‘blurring of borders,’ indigenous communities often seek to affirm borders by demarcating land against encroaching squatters, miners, nation-states, and corporations; fourth, while Derrideaninspired postcolonial theory contests ‘myths of origin,’ indigenous communities try to reconstruct their original languages and their original myths for the sake of their own survival; fifth, while most of the ‘posts’ ‘denaturalize the natural,’ while enclosing ‘nature’ within protective scare quotes, indigenous thinkers have insisted on love of a land regarded as ‘sacred.’ In ecological terms, what Viveiros de Castro calls “indigenous multinaturalism” challenges not only the rhetorical antinaturalism of the “posts,” but also what might be called the primordial othering that separated nature from culture, animals from human beings (2004, 463–484). The postcolonial privileging of ‘hybridity’ is especially fraught for indigenous peoples. On the one hand, indigenous nations have been hybrid for millennia. Native nations were trading and borrowing with one another long before Columbus, a process only accelerated and complicated by the Conquest. Nor were indigenous peoples adverse to new technologies. Setting aside the monumental technical and scientific achievements of the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Incas, the indigenous borrowing of western technology began as early as 1504, when French captain Paulmier de Gonneville brought a young Indian named Essomericq from Brazil to France, where his father, a Carijo chief, wanted him to learn about munitions technologies to help his people in their struggles back home (Forbes 2007). But these transcultural exchanges went beyond technology. In Leyla-Perrone’s account, Essomericq married into a French family and had numerous descendants, one of whom became the ‘Indian priest’ of the Dieppe Cathedral. The French took Brazilian Indians into their families in France; and the Indians took the French into their communities in Brazil. As a result of such transactions, a number of Tupi words, such as toucan mandioca, and Tupinambo came to form part of the French language. The ‘hybridities’ and miscegenations celebrated by postcolonial theory, in this sense, predate

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postcolonial migrations into the metropole; they go all the way back to the very beginnings of contact. If hybridity has on the one hand characterized indigenous life since the Conquest, it has on the other hand also served to disempower indigenous peoples of mixed heritage, dismissed as not ‘real Indians.’ In this sense, biological mixing was used in different ways against indigenous as opposed to enslaved African populations. The one-drop rule in the U.S. for enslaved blacks meant that any quantum of ‘black blood’ made a person socially black—thus generating more slaves—while the same rule worked in an opposite way for native-Americans, where a single drop of ‘white blood’ rendered them part white and therefore undeserving of their land.

The Philosophical Centrality of the Indian The Western response to the indigenous civilizations of the Americas reveals a general pattern of ‘vanishing’ indigenous cultural and intellectual agency. Yet the ‘Indians’ were central to Renaissance and Enlightenment debates, periods when European culture, in Bakhtin’s words, lost its “sealed-off and self-sufficient character,” and became “conscious of itself as only one among other cultures” (1981, 370). The debates about the ‘Indian’ form a quintessential example of ‘traveling theory.’2 Not only did Europeans literally travel toward the Indians (i.e. toward those variously called Native Americans, indigenous, aboriginal, or First Nations), but also Indians traveled to Europe, and both Europeans and Indians reflected on that inherently unequal relationship (Forbes 2007). Questions about the status and social systems of the misnamed ‘Indian’ were disputed by Spanish jurists (Sepúlveda, Francisco de Vitoria), French humanists (Montaigne), British economists (Adam Smith), American statesmen (Jefferson, Franklin), German philosophers (Hegel), and Brazilian writers (from Pêro

—————— 2 There is a question about language. How are indigenous people to be named? Should they be called ‘Indians’ or ‘first peoples’ or ‘fourth world peoples’ or ‘native peoples,’ or should they simply be named according to their own self-designations as Dineh, Ikpeng, and so forth? Should we speak of the ‘Indians of Brazil’—using the possessive genitive to assert a nation-state belonging—or the ‘Indians in Brazil,’ which signifies only location and not nation-state affiliation, especially in the age of demarcated lands? In this paper, we will use ‘Indian’ (in quotes) to refer to the figure of the Indian as constructed by the European and Euro-American imagination, and indigenous or native or Indian (without quotes) to refer to actually existing indigenous people.

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Vaz de Caminha to Viveiros de Castro), as well as by indigenous thinkers themselves. The figure of the Indian got caught up in controversies about religion, property, sovereignty, and culture. Indeed, no in-depth analysis of modernity can bypass the indigenous peoples of the Americas, whether negatively, as the ‘victims of progress,’ or positively, as the catalysts for Western thinking and artistic production, subtly discernible in the work of Thomas More, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Melville, Oswald de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, Jean-Christophe Rufin, and countless others. The phrase “the Red Atlantic” itself is not new. John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin Roosevelt, also spoke of the “Red Atlantic,” but for Collier the phrase referred exclusively to Native cultures in the Americas (see Bordewich 1996, 71), while we are suggesting that the Atlantic world generally, including on its European shores, can be productively seen as “Red” in something like the same sense that the Atlantic world is “Black.” Joseph Roach speaks in Cities of the Dead of a “transoceanic” performance “interculture” pervading Atlantic port cities such as Havana, New Orleans, and Liverpool (1996, 30–31). One might speak, similarly, of a ‘transoceanic Red interculture,’ evidenced, for example, in the fact that many Native American representatives, going back to Paraguacu in Brazil and Pocahontas in North America, were received with honor by diverse European potentates, ranging from Henry II and Catherine de Medici to Queen Victoria and the Kaiser of Germany. An interdisciplinary collection of essays entitled Indians in Europe (Feest 1999) proliferates in such examples: Eskimos (Inuit) in Scotland; Botocudos in London; Sioux in Budapest; Bella Coolas in Germany. Although many of these visits had to do with exploitative showmanship, others had to do with native efforts to win political self-determination. In 1922, the Cayuga chief Deskaheh, for example, traveled to Geneva to prod the League of Nations to recognize Six Nations sovereignty (Feest 1999, 435). The Redness of the Americas is of course indisputable. Long before Columbus, the indigenous peoples named and mapped the continent. As a result, native names designate Brazilian and U.S. American states (Piaui in Brazil; Idaho in the U.S.), cities (Curitiba in Brazil; Chicago in the U.S.), and rivers (Tiete in Brazil; the Potomac in the U.S.). Some of the U.S. Founding Fathers studied Native American languages, and Indian words such as caucus came to enrich English vocabulary. In Brazil, the Tupi-Guarani language was even more deeply woven into the fabric of social life,

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becoming the lingua franca up through the eighteenth century, including among non-Indians, and even today Tupi is experiencing a revival in the Amazon.3 Indian expressions pervade contemporary Brazilian speech and rhetoric; it is no accident, for example, that contemporary Brazilian slang uses Tupiniquim as a synonym for ‘Brazilian,’ or that the first Brazilian TV station, and the recently discovered oil fields, would be called ‘Tupi.’ But these homages to indigenous culture were superficial; they did not prevent TV Tupi from ignoring or stereotyping Indians, nor will the homage prevent the Tupi Oil Fields from soiling the waters once navigated by the Tupi themselves. As avid readers of sometimes sensationalist travel literature, sixteenthcentury Europeans were fascinated by a ‘New World’ culture at once recognizably human and disconcertingly different. While some philosophers projected the native peoples as barbaric savages, others saw Indian societies, especially smaller-scale consensus societies, as offering an alternative social model that nourished radical thought. What interests us here is not the much-critiqued ‘noble savage’ discourse, however, but rather a discourse which stresses the perceived viability of indigenous social arrangements. Our focus is on certain political ideas that were connected, in however mediated a way, to actual indigenous thought and practice, in what might be called the discourse of Indian radicalism. We are shifting attention, then, away from noble savage idealizations toward an emphasis on the Indian-inspired questioning of Eurotropic political and social norms. Debates about the ‘Indian’ are often corralled into fenced off national histories, eliding not only comparabilities across the Americas but also the intellectual affinities between the various forms of indigenous-inspired critique.4 Our focus, in contrast, is on the ways that Indians, both as actual thinking persons and as discursive constructs, have circulated generally across these circum-Atlantic spaces. The image of the free and self-determining Indian formed a key element in national self-definition in both Brazil and the U.S., for example, coming to symbolize the freedom of the colonies to break away from the mother country. In both countries, the romanticization of the native took place, unfortunately, while the actual Indians were

—————— 3 The New York Times reported that “lingua geral” was making a comeback in the Amazon, (Rohter 2005, n. pag.). 4 Wasserman (1994) takes a trilateral Franco-American-Brazilian approach in her in many ways pioneering Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1820–1930.

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being dispossessed. In both, the exaltation of the Indian, expressed in the flamboyant borrowing of indigenous motifs, was dedicated to the very group being subjected to a process of cultural annihilation. European and Euro-American thinkers constantly cited the Indian as an inspiration for social critique and utopian desire. The motif of the Indian as ‘exemplar of liberty’ formed part of the discursive atmosphere of the French Enlightenment, of the American Revolution, and of Brazilian anticolonial nationalism. American Revolutionaries, for example, deployed the Indian as symbol of legitimate national difference, whence the Iroquois symbolism of the Eagle’s quiver of arrows on the dollar bill, and the Indian gracing the Capitol building. In the U.S., the philosophically-inclined Founding Fathers were avid readers of the philo-indigenous French philosophers, but they also ‘read,’ as it were, the Native Americans themselves. While entirely capable of Indianist exoticism and even exterminationism, they had a more direct experience of the Indians and their social and political systems than did the French philosophers. They had diplomatic exchanges with the Indians, traded with them, learned their languages, and were influenced by them, even if, and this point is essential, they ultimately dispossessed them. In Exemplar of Liberty, Native American scholar Donald Grinde, Jr., argued that the authors of the U.S. constitution partially drew the concept of a federal system from the example of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederation. According to John F. Kennedy, “The League of the Iroquois inspired Benjamin Franklin to copy it in planning the federation of States” (qtd. in Stam and Shohat 2012, 9). A decade earlier, legal scholar Felix Cohen had paid tribute to native social theory in the following terms: “Universal suffrage for […] men, the pattern of states that we call federalism, the habit of treating chiefs as servants of the people instead of their masters, the insistence that the community must respect the diversity of men and […] their dreams—all of these things were part of the American way of life before Columbus landed” (1952, 179–80). In making this claim, Cohen was not ‘romanticizing the Indian’; he was simply echoing what many Native American leaders, such as Chief Luther Standing Bear, had said about a ‘native school’ of political thought. A common leitmotif in the writings of some of the American Founding Fathers such as Jefferson was the idea that Indian societies never “submitted themselves to any laws or coercive power” (qtd. in Stam and Shohat 2012, 9). Marx and Engels later picked up on this theme in their readings

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of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, where Morgan lauded the profoundly democratic organization of the Iroquois League. For Marx and Engels, the Iroquois meshed a communal economic system with a democratic political organization, thus offering a model of economic equality achieved without state domination, in a society devoid of nobles, kings, governors, soldiers, and police and where all, including the women, were free and equal. (The Engels essay on the Iroquios is cited at length in Godard’s 1967 Weekend).

Europe and the Indian This social allegorization of the Indian has not been limited to the Americas, however. Various European countries can be said to have their own allegorical Indians. The case of Germany is especially revealing in this regard, since Germans have been publishing books about the Indians since the time of Hans Staden, the German sailor taken captive by the Tupi back in the sixteenth century and author of the rather sensationally titled Brasilien: Die wahrhaftige Historie der wilden, nacken, grimmigen Menschenfresser-Leute [True History] (1557). Many Germans have claimed a special relationship to the Indian as cultural alter ego or benevolent doppelganger of the German people.5 This flirtation with the Indian as a secret sharer of the German soul reached a paroxysm with the novels of Karl May (1842–1912). His Apache hero Winnetou came to incarnate the German reader’s desire to re-enchant the world through a vicarious ‘Native’ experience. The many ‘Indian hobbyists’ who reenact the ‘Indian life style,’ meanwhile, trace their genesis to the cultural frisson engendered by May’s novels as well as by carnivals, Wild West shows, and Hollywood films. (An Indian teepee was visible along the road to the University of Bremen when we taught there in 2009). In political terms, the German Indian could be enlisted in very diverse causes. An October 2008 event in Toronto, entitled “Culture Shock,” showcased a number of films drawn from two collections of post-war German “Westerns”—called Indianer films—featuring Native American characters. Four indigenous artists from Canada (Bonnie Devine, Keesic Douglas, Darryl Nepinak, and Ehren Bear Witness) were then invited to

—————— 5 Some have even argued that the ancient Germans had been the symbolic “Indians” of the Romans, see Feest (1999, 612).

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respond to the German films with art works. According to the Festival participants, the West German films, such as Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi (1966) emphasized the close native contact with nature, while the East German films, such as Die Söhne der großen Bärin (1966) fused the ‘Red’ of Communism with the ‘Red’ of Native American by having the Indians outwit greedy capitalistic settlers. While films from both East and West heroicized the Indians and demonized the Whites, they did so from distinct ideological perspectives.6 France is arguably the ‘reddest’ of the European countries. France provides a particularly vibrant case because of 1) the longevity of the Francoindigenous connection, 2) the relatively pacific nature of the relationship, and 3) the philosophical density of the dialogue. Many of the Red Atlantic debates trace back to the historical encounter of the French, the Portuguese, and the Tupi in France Antartique, the name of the short-lived (1555–1560) French colony in Brazil. The colony generated a writerly matrix of writings that gave birth to a Franco-Brazilian-indigenous dialogue that has lasted for almost five centuries, with no sign of abating. France can be said to be an integral part of the Red Atlantic because: 1) it has a five-century-long tradition of cultural and commercial exchange with the Indians of the Americas, and especially with the Brazilian Indian; 2) Many Brazilian Indians traveled to France. Some Tupi Indians learned French, assimilated, intermarried, and had children with the French; 3) As depicted in films such as Black Robe (1991) and How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971), many French people in both North and South America assimilated into native culture and thus became ‘white Indians,’ a phenomenon that took place throughout the Americas;7 4) French literature, from Rabelais up to the recent bestseller Rouge Bresil (2001), has frequently alluded to the Franco-indigenous encounter; 5) Over the last five centuries, Brazilian Indian leaders have been received by French heads of state, from Henri II and Catherine of Medici, up to Mitterand and Chirac. In the nineteen eighties, the Kayapo leader Raoni, accompanied by the Rock Star Sting, met with Mitterand; 6) Multiple generations of French people have played ‘Cowboys and Indians,’8 but also

—————— 6 An Indianer Inuit: North America Film Festival took place in Stuttgart, Germany in January, 2012. 7 The ‘white Indians’ have been the subject of films from all around the Americas, for example Little Big Man in the U.S. (1970), Jericó in Venezuela (1991), How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman in Brazil (1971), and so forth. 8 This fact is referenced in the “Arizona Jim” character of Renoir’s 1936 film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.

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contemporary Indian Hobbyists, called “les Nouveaux Indiens,” spend their leisure time reenacting the “traditional” Indian lifestyle.9 Finally, the ‘Indian,’ from Montaigne to Deleuze, has played a key symbolic role in French cultural life and even in ‘French theory.’ The French have found the Indian, to coin a phrase, ‘good to think with.’ This transoceanic symposium dates back to the sixteenth century exchanges between two coastal peoples: Breton and Normand merchant-sailors from the North of France and the Tupi who dominated the Southern Coast of Brazil. The French were then trafficking in Brazilwood, used for a red dye in demand by textile makers in France. In Brazil, the merchants relied on interpreters who sometimes lived and traded with the Indians. The historical encounter of the French, the Portuguese, and the Tupi is often summed up in the phrase France Antartique. One of the reasons the colony failed was because of conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, then on the verge of war in Europe itself. Against the backdrop of Tupi cannibalism, the Protestants began to see the French and Spanish Catholics as the true cannibals, both because they ‘ate God’ in the form of the Eucharist and because they were ‘cannibalizing’ Protestants militarily through repression. They regarded the Tupinamba, meanwhile, as merely symbolic and deeply spiritual cannibals like themselves. Our knowledge of this period is largely based on a few crucial sixteenth-century texts, notably Thevet’s Les Singularites de la France Antartique (1557); Jean de Lery’s L’Histoire d’un Voyage a la Terre du Bresil (1578); and the German Hans Staden’s True History (1557). In his Histoire, Jean de Lery recounted being captured by Brazilian Indians and welcomed into the Tupinamba community, while waiting for his own ritual deglutition. Demonstrating an incipient sense of ‘cultural relativism,’ Lery defended some of the gregarious practices and cultural values of his captors. Anticipating Rousseau’s ideas about child rearing, Lery proposes the Tupinamba manner of nursing and caring for children as a practical model for French parents. When Lery explains the European concept of leaving an inheritance for the children, an elderly Tupinamba ridicules the idea, since “the same earth that feeds the parents will feed the children” (1578, n. pag.).10 Claude Lévi-

—————— 9 See Maligne’s (2006) fascinating ethnography of Indianist clubs in France and Quebec. 10 The 1989 documentary The Kayapo: Out of the Forest, which concerns the well-publicized protests of a coalition of indigenous groups against the construction of a hydroelectric dam that would have flooded out the land base of some of these groups, features very similar dialogues between the protestors and the representatives of the energy corpora-

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Strauss called Lery’s history “a masterpiece of anthropological literature” (1973, 83), while Michel de Certeau dubbed it the equivalent of a “primal scene in the construction of ethnological discourse” (1988, 211). In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss expressed wonderment that no film had been made about France Antartique and its strange Tropical quarrels about theology, cannibalism, and the Eucharist, proclaiming ‘What a marvelous film it would make!’ Fortunately, that marvelous film has indeed been made, by Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s in his provocative 1971 film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman. The film’s narrative combines the dramatic story of Staden’s kidnapping with the cultural texture of Jean de Lery’s account. The director opted for a French protagonist, however, to accentuate the colonial dimension, since the French, unlike the Germans, actually tried to colonize Brazil.11 A profoundly subversive film, How Tasty forces its spectators to experience a visceral kind of cultural relativization. First, a non-voyeuristic nudity becomes the norm throughout the film. Second, all the characters, including the Frenchman, speak Tupi, a language unknown even to most Brazilian spectators. More important, the film subverts the conventional identification with the European protagonist of the captivity narrative. The titular pronoun—How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman—asserts identification with the Tupi point of view, and specifically that of the Frenchman’s wife Sebiopepe, who is shown in close-up, in the penultimate shot of the film, nibbling on her delicious French husband. Instead of the standard Indianist narrative of the native woman who assimilates into European culture, here it is the European ‘white Indian’ who learns Tupi, adopts native dress, and participates in the ritual of his own sacrifice.

—————— tion Eletronote. While one group talks about “energy” and “environmental impact reports,” the indigenous protestors answer, in effect, “what is your energy? For us energy is the fish that our mothers fed us, and if the river is polluted or diverted, there is not energy left to sustain us” (n. pag.). The eloquence of the Kayapo leader, Raoni, is reminiscent of that of many native leaders in North America. 11 All this has been endlessly analyzed, beginning with the innumerable interviews given by the director already in the nineteen seventies, many of them cited in Helena Salem’s Nelson Pereira dos Santos: O Sonho Possivel do Cinema Brasileiro (1987). For some of the literature in English, see Richard Pena (1995). See also Stam (1997). For a very thorough discussion that refers to France Antartique, see Sadlier (2003, 58–74).

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To be or Not to be a Tupi Theorist After Jean de Lery, the pro-indigenist strain of thought entered the European Renaissance more directly with Montaigne. The French philosopher met three Tupinamba in 1562, at the court of King Charles IX, where the Tupinamba asked provocative questions about French society; they wondered, for example, why some people ate well and others ate barely at all, and why the starving did not strangle the well-fed. Montaigne’s unnamed Tupi interlocutors catalyzed his own thinking not by asking corrosive questions based on their own axiomatic assumptions about what constitutes a good society—their own. In “Des Cannibales,” Montaigne practiced a rhetoric of civilizational reversals by arguing that the violence of Tupinamba cannibalism paled in comparison to that triggered by religious wars in Europe. With a few irreverent questions, the Tupinamba demolished the prestige of the hereditary monarchy and the class system. But one wonders about the place of these Tupinamba in the history of philosophy. Were they not theorizing pre-revolutionary France as much as Montaigne was theorizing pre- and post-conquest America? The slogan “Tupi or not Tupi” comes from Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto: “Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question.” In a recombinant version of the most famous phrase from Hamlet, Oswald asks whether Brazilian artists should be proud Tupi ‘Indians’ or be servile mimics parroting metropolitan culture. Cultural ‘anthropophagy’ became a way to devour the techniques of the super-developed countries to avoid being swallowed up by them, thus turning the imposed culture back, transformed, against the colonizer. De Andrade linked the subversive laughter of the Brazilian Indian to the Enlightenment and to Marxism, by calling for a revolution infinitely “greater than the French revolution”—the “Carib revolution,” without which “Europe wouldn’t even have its meager declaration of the rights of man” (de Andrade and Bary 1991, 39).12 In the “Manifesto,” de Andrade explicitly asserts the continuity of the transtextual chain linking back to France Antartique: “Filiation. The contact with Caraiba Brazil. The place where Villegagnon landed [a reference to the head of France Antartique] The Natural Man. Rousseau. From the French revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik revolution, to the Surrealist revolution, to the technicized barbarian” (Bary 1991, 34). Radicalizing the

—————— 12 For an English version of the “Cannibalist Manifesto,” see Leslie Bary’s (1991) excellent introduction to and translation of the poem.

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Enlightenment valorization of indigenous freedom, de Andrade also highlighted aboriginal matriarchy and communalism as a utopian model and the basis for an anthropological critique of the dominant civilization. In The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy (1950), he contrasted patriarchal societies, seen as authoritarian, capitalistic, monogamous, and statist, with matriarchal societies, characterized by collective ownership of the land, open social and sexual relations, and the enjoyment of leisure. While de Andrade’s Indianism, like his feminism, remained abstract, without connection to actually existing women or Indians, at the same time, he deserves credit for replacing the nostalgic, allochronic, doomed-to-disappear Indian in favor of the political Indian, the devouring, rebellious, high-tech Indian. A decade after the modernist manifestoes of the nineteen twenties, Brazilian historian Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco argued in his 1937 book The Brazilian Indian and the French Revolution that ideas about the native Brazilian, especially the theory of natural goodness, developed by the European Enlightenment but based on the Brazilian Indian, helped generate the French revolution. Lévi-Strauss, who first worked in Brazil in the period of Melo Franco’s book, later delineated a similar intellectual trajectory as Melo Franco but from a political, disciplinary, and pedagogical perspective: “It was the accounts of these travelers [such as Jean de Lery] that began the anthropological awareness of modern times; it was their unintentional influence which set the political and moral philosophy of the Renaissance on the road that was to lead to the French revolution” (Lévi-Strauss 1973, 335). In a passage from Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss speaks admiringly of the Indian “survivors,” the Hurons, Iroquois, Caribs, and Tupi whose example, through Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, who enriched the substance of what I was taught at school” (1973, 77). LéviStrauss’s bricolage utopianism points to the existence of a philosophical Red Atlantic, where the ideas and practices of North American Indians mingle with those of South American Indians, all enriching and interrogating the Enlightened education of a budding French anthropologist. Four decades after Lévi-Strauss’s research in Matto Grosso, French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, basing his judgments on both historical information and his own fieldwork with the Guarani, the Guayaki, and the Yanomami, spoke again in terms reminiscent of Montaigne, Rousseau, the Modernists, and Lévi-Strauss. In Society against the State, Clastres argued that indigenous societies did not eschew coercion because they were incapable of developing state structures or capitalism, but rather because they had a

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passionate desire not to have them (2004, 86). Echoing Montaigne while also relaying his own anarchist beliefs, Clastres claimed that the function of Indian leaders was not to wield power or gain wealth but rather to represent the social will toward equality and cohesion. Within a collective intentionality, their purpose was to conjure away social inequality in any form. Subsequent to Clastres’s work, the Franco-Indigenous philosophical dialogue has been prolonged by Michel de Certeau’s writings about Jean de Lery, by Alfred Metraux’s work on the anthropology of ritual sacrifice, by Rene Girard’s use of Tupinamba cannibalism as the key to all religions, and by Gilles Deleuze, who suggested in What is Philosophy? that the philosopher must become Indian (1994, 224). At the same time, French historians (Frank Lestringant) and novelists (Jean-Christophe Rufin) have rediscovered the fascination of the long-forgotten episode of France Antartique. It would be wrong to think of contemporary indigenous peoples only in terms of victimization. Native peoples are struggling for power, often successfully. Both Brazil and the U.S. are “multi-nation states” where native “nations” exercise some autonomy within the larger configuration of the nation state. In June 2002, the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government signed Decree No. 143, which recognized the right of Indians not only to define themselves individually—Indians are those who choose to self-identify as Indian—but also the right to be recognized as peoples, i.e. as differentiated collectivities distinct from the Brazilian nation in general. Increasingly, some so-called mestizos from the interior are choosing to self-identify as Indian, so the Indians are increasing in demographic terms (Warren 2001). Since the nineteen eighties, Indian activism has expanded exponentially. Indian leaders such as Davi Kopenawa, Luiz Gomes Lana, Ailton Krenak, and many others are more and more articulating Indian political positions, often in public ways that can be accessed on the internet. The high-tech Indians conceptualized by de Andrade are now lawyers with laptops fighting for Indian rights. Viveiros de Castro poses a provocative question: what does anthropology owe intellectually to the peoples that it studies? The “most interesting concepts and problems introduced by anthropological theory,” he suggests, “find their source in the imaginative power of the societies (or peoples, or collectives) that the anthropologists propose to explain” (2009, 5). He reports on a symposium in Manchester, England, where an audience member (who turned out to be Stuart Hall) remarked about his talk on “Indian philosophy” that “your Indians seem to have studied in Paris.” By

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his own account, de Castro responded to Hall’s boutade with a boutade of his own: “No, in fact exactly the opposite occurred: the Parisians went to study with the Indians” (2002, 152). We have tried to show here that westerners have been “study[ing] with the Indians” ever since Europeans were welcomed as strangers on Caribbean shores. Over the five centuries since Columbus and Cabral, the unending (and uneven) interchange between European and indigenous thought has lent support to a wide array of radical causes from Jacobin and socialist revolutions to ecology and alter-globalization. While many Eurocentric commentators see Indians as vanished and ‘behind the times,’ one can also see them as ‘ahead of the curve.’ Indigenous people and their non-indigenous interlocutors have posed probing questions about culture, property, power, energy, wealth, and equality, throwing up challenges to the nostrums of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. It is time we took those challenges seriously.

Part Two Identity Politics and the Left/Right Convergence If many left intellectuals have been blind to the central role of indigeneity, they have also been blind to the historical centrality of race. The Atlantic world has been shaped not only by the Conquista but also by the ambiguous heritage of Enlightenment republicanism, as expressed politically in the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, the Haitian Revolution in 1791, as well as in the Brazilian independence movements of the eighteenth century and in the Brazilian Republic in 1889. A clear historical thread thus leads out from the Enlightenment debates to the contemporary ‘culture wars.’ Often this continuum is quite literal. Contemporary debates about multicultural identity politics, for example, literally invoke the heritage of Republican revolutions. In France, both right and left invoke ‘Enlightenment values’ to articulate their views of ‘identity politics,’ whether seen as a praiseworthy expansion of Jacobin equality or as a particularist departure from Republican ‘universality.’ In the U.S., both liberals and conservatives invoke the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence; Obama appeals to the ‘more perfect union’ of the Preamble, while Tea Party Republicans interpret the Constitution as endorsing fundamentalist Christianity and right-wing libertarianism.

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If the right has almost invariably been openly hostile to multicultural identity politics—to conflate the two terms in which the debate was conducted in the media—liberals and some on the left were critical as well. Some feminists, such as Susan Moller Okin, called multiculturalism “bad for women” (1999). Some Marxists, meanwhile, saw identity politics as ‘dividing the left’ through a cultural detour that distracted from ‘real’ struggles over class and power. In the U.S., those who would press critical race issues were caught between the ‘dividing-America’ arguments from the right, the ‘dividing the left’ arguments from the left, and the ‘dividing the feminist movement’ from (usually white) liberal feminists. We find a recent illustration of a partial convergence of left and right on these issues in two February 2011 denunciations of ‘multiculturalism,’ one by the conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron, the other by ‘radical leftist’ Slavoj Žižek. Claiming that multiculturalism had failed, Cameron called for a return to western liberal values and pride in British identity. For Cameron (and other conservative leaders like Sarkozy and Merkel), multiculturalism—and not discrimination—creates separate communities. Žižek, meanwhile, in an interview about the Arab Spring, denounced putative multiculturalists (unnamed as usual) who according to Žižek believe that “Egypt has a separate culture and does not need democracy” (qtd. in Stam and Shohat 2012, 96). Both Cameron and Žižek touched on the right-wing theme of a supposed separatism within all identity politics. Both were speaking up for western Enlightenment values, although Cameron was channeling Adam Smith and John Locke, while Žižek was channeling Hegel and Marx (see Stam and Shohat 2012, 96). What is surprising, then, is not the right’s hostility to identity politics but rather that of some on the left, notably such figures as Tod Gitlin, Walter Benn Michaels, Pierre Bourdieu/Loïc Wacquant, and Žižek. Many of the critics of identity politics get hung up on one horn of the Enlightenment antinomy of the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular,’ opting only for the universal rather than seeing the mutual imbrication of the two categories. For Žižek, for example, true politics is predicated on ‘universality,’ as opposed to “identifying the specific problems of each group and subgroup, not only homosexuals but African-American lesbians, African-American lesbian mothers, African-American single unemployed lesbian mothers etc.” (Žižek 1998, 1001, 1008). But what makes certain struggles particular and others universal? Referring to political movements in the former Yugoslavia, Žižek applauds their appeal to specific demands that at the same time invoked uni-

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versality. Yet other activist ‘specificities,’ that just happen to be those of women of color, get immediately beaten down with the police truncheon of the universal. An isomorphism operates between the hierarchy of real-world social domination, on the one hand, and the hierarchy of the universal/particular asserted in Žižek’s writing on the other. Unemployed-blacklesbian-single-mothers, one of the most abused segments of any population, also happen to be the most abused in Žižek’s prose. Their travails simply do not register within Žižek’s view of political/emotional economy—they are merely the butt of his jokes. In this sense, Žižek incarnates what Adrienne Rich called “white solipsism,” that is, the “tunnel vision which simply does not see nonwhite (and we would add non-male) experience or existence as precious or significant” (Rich 1979, 306). One expects mockery of socially-induced human pain from the Social Darwinist right, but not from a leftist. Indeed, the situation of unemployed-black-lesbian-single-mothers can be seen as condensing a series of socio-economic disadvantages, those of African-Americans, those of women, those of the unemployed, of lesbians, and of single mothers. Subjects dwelling on multiple margins, as simultaneous victims of multiple prejudices, of sexism, racism, and homophobia one would think, might also possess the epistemological advantage of being aware of the oppressive aspects of many borders and hierarchies. Multiple subalternizations in terms of class (unemployment), race (as blacks), sexuality (as lesbians) and marital status (single), one might think, would grant this social category more, rather than less, claim on the universal, once the universal is conceived not as an abstract, unified neo-Platonic ideal but rather as a mottled profusion of intersecting particularities. For Žižek, the idea that unemployed-black-lesbiansingle-mothers might make intellectual claims or political demands with universal implications is simply ridiculous on its face. Union activists, meanwhile, are something else entirely. But why assume that such women are not activists in Unions or critics of global capitalism? Thus Žižek reproduces not only the classic Marxist class-over-race paradigm, but also the class-overgender/sexuality paradigm, along with the hierarchy of white over black, heterosexual males over lesbian females, and the west over the rest. Žižek dismisses feminism, multiculturalism, reparations, Affirmative Action as mere detours and diversions from real politics into the dead end of identity, yet all these projects could be seen as an integral part of a progressive left coalitionary politics. Perhaps lurking behind this dismissal are the vestiges of a Base/Superstructure model, combined with reminiscences of a

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gendered tropology that favors real, hard politics over soft cultural matters, where a post-Marxist cultural politics does not even enter the picture. Nor does Žižek see that gender and sexuality also have an economic dimension in terms of glass ceilings, unequal pay, and tax code discrimination against gay couples. Extrapolating the same dismissive logic to working class activism, one might just as easily condemn workers for practicing the “politics of the particular” by insisting on their pensions and health benefits. Alert to the overtones of the universal in some protests, Žižek becomes deaf to the universal in the cries of “unemployed-black-lesbian-single-mothers,” relegated to an amusing particularity. Some identities remain locked up in the solitary cells of their specificity, while others ‘open up’ toward the bright skies of the universal. Some left critics expressed legitimate apprehension about the neglect of political economy. Yet while political economy is absolutely essential to any substantive left critique, it is also important to articulate culture and economy together, to conceive them as existing in and through each other. In the post-Fordist era of globalization, culture has become a privileged site for the articulation (and sometimes the disarticulation) of the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Here many have questioned forms of Marxism that exalt class struggle while belittling struggles revolving around other modalities of social inequality. Critics like Žižek and Bourdieu tend to focus only on the more journalistic concepts of identity politics and multiculturalism as synecdochic of the entire debates. They thus ignore the vast archive of adversarial scholarship that we call the “decolonizing corpus” that includes Feminist theory, standpoint theory, postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, queer theory, coloniality/modernity theory, critical whiteness studies, transnational feminism, and indigeneity theory, all of which offer conceptual instruments relevant to multiple, historically sedimented forms of inequality. Rather than replace class struggle, these projects complicate it, seeing multiaxial forms of oppression as calling for similarly multi-axial forms of resistance and struggle, shaping new social actors, new vocabularies and strategies. Frankly privileging class over all other axes of social domination, Žižek rejects what he calls “the postmodern mantra: gender, ethnic struggle, gender whatever, and then class. Class is not just one of the series” (Žižek and Daly 2004, 147). (The adolescent shrug of ‘whatever’ here downgrades gender and ethnic struggle as opposed to class). In a move reminiscent of Althusser’s “the economy in the last instance,” Žižek accords the economy a “prototran-

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scendental status” (147). And while political economy is absolutely essential, and while we would be critical of any analysis that did not see class as crucially important, that does not mean that we can simply “return” to exclusively class-based analyses. An understanding of capitalism, moreover, must pass ‘through’ colonialism, empire, slavery, and race. In an intersectional perspective, all of the axes of stratification work in concert and mutually inflect one another. It is not clear why Angela Davis’s work on class, race, gender, and sexuality, within an overall Marxist and feminist grid, should be any less universal than Žižek’s own work. One could easily argue precisely the opposite, that her multiply intersectional prisms engender a more inclusive universal, one rich in conflictual particularities, a universal in the Shakespearean concrete universal sense, rather than an abstract Racinian universal, cleansed of the vulgar materialities of existence.13 Moving to the France of the nineteen nineties, a large swath of the French political spectrum denounced multicultural identity politics in a manner similar to that of Žižek, with the difference that the French critics laid more emphasis on the supposed ‘Americanness’ of multicultural identity politics. (For us, in contrast, these movements are profoundly transnational, rooted in the seismic shift of cultural decolonization that shook the entire world. Journalists began to describe the United States as a frighteningly politically correct place. This united front led to bizarre alignments and strange bedfellows. Appealing to the same tropes of imminent ‘Balkanization’ and ‘Lebanonization’ deployed by the U.S. right, the French left, as incarnated in Les Temps Modernes, Esprit, and Liberation, portrayed multiculturalism as inherently divisive. Some even linked the ‘cult of difference’ to fascism, much as Rush Limbaugh spoke of “femiNazis” and totalitarian “thought-control” (qtd. in Stam and Shohat 2012, 139). Politically diverse figures converged in their rejection; Touraine, Bourdieu, Todorov, Jospin, Le Pen, Chirac, and Finkielkraut were not closely aligned politically, yet they all shared a common hostility to multicultural identity politics. Indeed, the paroxysm of this transatlantic short circuit came when the originally ‘leftist’ (later centrist) newspaper Liberation turned for an account of identity politics to none other than Dinesh D’Souza, the neo-conservative whose book The End of Racism argues, to put it crudely, that slavery wasn’t so bad (and anyway Africans did it too), that segregation was well-

—————— 13 We refer here to Erich Auerbach’s (2003) famous comparison of Racine and Shakespeare.

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intended, and that racial discrimination could be “rational” (D’Souza 2010, 94).14 In the nineteen nineties in France, as in the U.S. and Brazil, animosity toward multicultural identity politics sometimes became linked to an animus toward the ‘excesses’ of feminism. Sliding into the standard litany about the harassment of male professors due to trumped-up “sexual harassment” charges, Todorov complained that while “men and whites used to be privileged, now it is women and blacks” (1995, 98). Todorov, like many of his male colleagues elsewhere, symptomatically slides from ‘identity politics’ to ‘sexual harassment,’ recycling the right’s anecdotal claims about ‘tragic’ situations where perfectly innocent (male) professors lose their jobs due to unfair accusations by hysterical females. What is it about male intellectuals (of diverse national origins), one wonders, that makes them hypersensitive to something as statistically rare as ‘trumped-up charges’ of harassment even when sexual harassment is not the theme under discussion? What is seen as a paranoid obsession with sexual harassment sometimes gets linked in French anti-identity and anti-feminist discourse to the stereotype of ‘puritanical’ Anglo-Saxon women,15 as when journalist Francoise Giroud ridiculed feminism as an anti-male movement with castrating tendencies. Unlike American women, Giroud declared, “French women love men” (qtd. in Stam and Shohat 2012, 141). Nacira Guenif-Souilamas, for her part, speaks of another attack on identity politics, this time from the pseudo-feminists who aim to ‘rescue’ Muslim women from their Muslim male captors (2006). Even feminism is wielded against a generic Arab/Muslim other. For Islamophobes, she points out, only one (Islamic) faith is stigmatized as inherently sexist. Guenif-Souilamas mocks the ‘patriarchal feminism’ of the white male French critics of Islam, who pose as chivalric defenders of Muslim women against Muslim men—inevitably reminding us of Spivak’s pithy formula

—————— 14 Following up on his earlier argument that African Americans had reintroduced “barbarism” into the midst of Western civilization, D’Souza has recently argued that Obama “channels” the anticolonialism of his Kenyan father so that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s” (2010, 94). Reflective of the right’s capacity to place the preternaturally calm Obama within the ‘angry black man’ paradigm, D’Souza’s 2010 book is The Roots of Obama’s Rage. 15 The word ‘hysteria,’ as feminists have long pointed out, traces back etymologically to ‘womb’ in Greek and thus blames women themselves for their medical problem.

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“white men rescuing brown women from brown men.”16 Sometimes white feminists join in the condemnations, as when Elisabeth Badinter, in a kind of secular fundamentalism, calls veiled Muslim women “very sick” (qtd. in Mbembe 2011, 95). What is in the end only a religiously-connoted choice of dress becomes the pathologizing trigger for a paranoid analysis. For Badinter, the veil worn by millions of women, symbolizes only one thing: the “categorical refusal to come into contact with the other […] a triple pleasure over the other: the pleasure of nonreciprocity, the pleasure of exhibitionism, and a voyeuristic pleasure” (qtd. in Mbembe 2011, 94–95). A common deep-structural impulse fueled the hostility to both feminism and multicultural identity politics in France. Since they could not be denounced as ‘egalitarian’—given that ‘equality’ forms part of the French creed—they were denounced as ‘identitarian,’ ‘separatist,’ and ‘communitarian.’ We have a fairly good idea why the right hates identity politics; it is too black, too foreign, too Muslim, too activist. But it is less clear why are some on the left also dislike identity politics. Usually, they dismiss it as ‘essentialist,’ ‘binarist,’ ‘Manichean,’ and if they are French (right or left), they call it ‘identitaire,’ ‘commmunitairiste,’ and “Anglo-Saxon.’ In France, François Durpaire points out, it is “always easy to say that one is not opposed to blacks or Arabs, but only to ‘black communitarianism’ and ‘Arab communitarianism’” (2006, 43). In other words, the actual people discriminated against on the basis of their visible or audible difference disappear into the mists of stigmatized abstractions. While it is easy to mock a caricatural ‘identity politics’—the right does it all the time—millions of people such as blacks and Latinos in American cities, immigrant ‘racaille’ in the banlieues of France, favela ‘marginals’ in Brazil—are daily profiled, brutalized, and even killed for what is projected as their identity. The right forbids us to speak of race because to speak of race is to be racist; a certain left, meanwhile, warns us not to speak of identity politics because it is supposedly philosophically unsophisticated; both disarm us in the struggle against identity-based oppressions.

—————— 16 Guénif-Souilamas spoke of “patriarchal feminists” in a talk given at La Maison Française, New York University, in November 2009. In the United States, meanwhile, the term has often been used in the context of critiquing white or Eurocentric feminist discourse of white women rescuing brown women from brown men (cf. Shohat 1998). The formulation “white men are saving brown women from brown men” is from Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988).

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The nineteen nineties onslaught on multicultural identity politics was not very prescient. Despite the complete hostility of the right, and the hostile skepticism from some on the left, such the last 15 years have seen a veritable explosion of studies of race, coloniality, Islamophobia, and discrimination in France in the twenty-first century, and especially after 2005. Subsequent to the mid-nineteen nineties demonizations of multiculturalism, and to the initial antipathy to postcolonialism, the French academic scene has changed substantially. This is not the place to characterize this work in depth as we do in the book, but we can delineate some of the major genres of such work, while acknowledging that the genres never come pure or unalloyed. In terms of basic trends, first, a large body of current work focuses on the hidden history of French colonialism and the contradictions inherent in ‘republican colonialism’: Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe’s White Ferocity (2001); Yves Benot’s Colonial Massacres (2001); Marc Ferro’s edited volume The Black Book of Colonialism (2003) can serve as a few examples of a much wider field. Second, another body of work treats colonial/ imperial popular culture as consumed by the French populace within the hexagon: Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire’s Colonial Culture: France Conquered by its Empire, 1871–1931 (2003) and Imperial Culture: the Colonies at the Heart of the Republic, 1931–1961 (2004); Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire’s The Colonial Fracture: French Society seen through the Prism of its Colonial Heritage (2005). Third, some work explores the ‘war of memories’ spiraling around colonialism, like Benjamin Stora’s The War of Memories: France faces its Colonial Past (2007). Fourth, postcolonial texts treat the history and memory of slavery: Françoise Vergès’s Chained Memory: Questions about Slavery (2006); Édouard Glissant’s Memories of Slaveries (2007). Fifth, some work probes the colonial dimension of dominant French thought. Scholars such as Yves Benot and later Sola-Molin have examined the ways that the Enlightenment philosophers give voice to both colonialist and anti-colonialist opinion. Other books, such as Odile Tobner’s On French Racism: Four Centuries of Negrophobia (2007), and Alain Ruscio and Albert Memmi’s The White Man’s Credo (1995), explore what might be called the sottisier colonialiste or the anatomy of colonial stupidities and prejudices. Sixth, there is work on postcolonial literary studies: JeanMarc Moura’s Francophone Literatures and Postcolonial Theory (1999) and Jacqueline Bardolph’s Postcolonial Studies and Literature (2002).

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In the twenty-first century, ‘race’ and racism and discrimination have emerged as legitimate analytical categories within French academic work, including in the form of a foundational text for Black Studies à la Française: Pap Ndiaye’s La condition noire: Essai sur un minorité française (2008). The work on race takes various generic forms such as, first, work on immigration and the racial question in France, for example Michel Wieviorka and Philippe Bataille’s Racist France (1992); Veronique de Rudder, Christian Poiret, and Francois Vourch’s Racist Inequality: Republican Universality Put to the Test (2000); Dominique Vidal and Karim Bourtel’s The Arab Malaise: Children of Colonization (2005); Jean-Michel Blier and Solenn de Royer’s Racial Discrimination: How to End It (2001), and Nacira Guenif-Souilamas’s edited The French Republic Unveiled by its Immigrants (2006). Secondly, it takes the form of witness (témoignage) texts concerning everyday racial discrimination, for example Frederique Mouzer and Charles Onana’s A French Racism (2007); Mongo Beti’s Africans, If You Could Speak (2005); Francois Durpaire’s White France, Black Anger (2006); and Jean-Baptiste Onana’s Be a Nigger and Shut Up (2007).17 In their anthology De la question social à la question raciale? Representer la Société Française [From the Social Question to the Racial Question] (2006), Didier Fassin and Éric Fassin and their collaborators take up Balibar’s challenge, in the Actuel Marx dossier, to ‘think racism after race,’ in a situation where race does not exist, where it is known to be constructed, yet where racism remains a tangible, brutal reality. Attempting to delineate new articulations of race and class, the contributors appeal to a cross-cultural comparative method. While the multicultural and critical race projects in the U.S. tend to be oriented around the idea of an equal recognition of formerly stigmatized identities, the struggle in France, according to some contributors, has less to do with identities per se than with the recognition of the reality of discrimination. In any case, probing questions about race and postcoloniality are now being asked in contemporary France, posed both along a spatial axis— concerning whether colonialism is internal or external to French history— and along a temporal axis, as to whether colonialism still shapes contemporary French and many other histories.

—————— 17 The titles of these works are listed in their original French version in the Works Cited list.

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Works Cited Andrade, Oswald de (1928). Anthropophagic Manifesto. São Paulo: Revista de Antropofagia. — (1950). The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy. Sao Paulo: Empresa Grafica da “Revista dos Tribunais.” de Andrade, Oswald, and Leslie Bary (1991). “Cannibalist Manifesto.” Latin American Literary Review, 19.38: 38–47. Auerbach, Erich (2003). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1953. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The Dialogical Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bardolph, Jacqueline (2002). Etudes postcoloniales et littérature. Paris: Champion. Bary, Leslie (1991). “Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’.” Latin American Literary Review, 19.38: 35–37. Beti, Mongo (2005). Africains si vous parliez. Paris: Homnisphères. Benot, Yves (2001). Massacres coloniaux: 1944–1950, la IVe République et la mise au pas des colonies françaises. Paris: Éd. la Découverte. Black Robe (1991). Dir. Bruce Beresford. Perf. Lothaire Bluteau, Aden Young, Sandrine Holt. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. Blanchard, Pascal, and Sandrine Lemaire (2003). Culture coloniale: la France conquise par son empire, 1871–1931. Paris: Autrement. — (2004). Culture impériale: les colonies au coeur de la République, 1931–1961. Paris: Autrement. Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire (2005). La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l'héritage colonial. Paris: La Découverte. Blier, Jean-Michel, and Solenn de Royer (2001). Discriminations raciales, pour en finir. Paris: Éditions Jacob-Duvernet. Bordewich, Fergus M. (1996). Killing the White Man’s Indian. New York: Anchor Books. Certeau, Michel de (1988). The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Clastres, Pierre (2004). Arqueologie da Violencia: Pesquisas de Antopologia Politica. Trans. Paulo Neves. Sao Paulo: Cosac and Naify. Cohen, Felix (1952). “Americanizing the White Man.” American Scholar, 21.2: 188– 91. Deleuze, Giles, and Felix Guattari (1991). Qu’est-ce que la philopsophie? Paris: Minuit. Trans. as What is Philosophy? (1994). Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Ghraham Burchell. New York: Verso. Die Söhne der großen Bärin (1966). Dir. Josef Mach. Perf. Gojko Mitic, Jirí Vrstála, Rolf Römer. VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb. D’Souza, Dinesh. “Obama’s Problems with Business.” Forbes 27 Sep. 2010: 94. — (2010). The Roots of Obama’s Rage. Washington: Regnery Publishing.

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Durpaire, François (2006). France Blanche, Colère Noire. Paris: Odile Jacob. Fassin, Didier, and Éric Fassin (2006). De la question social à la question raciale? Representer la Société Française. Paris: La Découverte. Feest, Christian F. (1999). Indians and Europe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ferro, Marc (2003). Le livre noir du colonialisme. Paris: R. Laffont. Forbes, Jack D. (2007). The American Discovery of Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glissant, Édouard (2007). Mémoires des esclavages: la fondation d'un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions. Paris: Gallimard. Grinde, Donald A. (1991). Exemplar of Liberty. Native America and the Evolution of Democracy. Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center. Guenif-Souilamas, Nacira (ed.). (2006). The French Republic Unveiled by its Immigrants. Paris: La Fabrique. How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971). Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Perf. Adriano Colassanti, Ana Maria Magalhães, Eduardo Imbassahy Filho. Regina Films. Jericó (1990). Dir. Luis Alberto Lamata. Perf. Wilfredo Cisneros, Cosme Cortázar, Doris Díaz. Oviri Films. The Kayapo: Out of the Forest. (1989). Disappearing World series. Dir. Michael Beckham. Granada Television. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936). Dir. Jean Renoir. Perf. René Lefèvre, Florelle, Jules Berry. Brandon Films. Lery, Jean de (1578). L’Histoire d’un Voyage a la Terre du Bresil. Cambridge, MA: Omnisys. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1973). Tristes Tropiques. New York: Penguin. Little Big Man (1970). Dir. Arthur Penn. Perf. Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Chief Dan George. Paramount. Maligne, Olivier (2006). Les Nouveaux Indiens: Une Ethnographie du Mouvement Indianophile. L’Universite Laval: CELAT. Mbembe, Achille (2011). “Provincializing France?” Public Culture 23.1: 85–119. Melo Franco, Afonso Arinos de (1937). O indio brasileiro e a revolução francesa. Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio. Morgan, Lewis Henry (1864). Ancient Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Moura, Jean-Marc (1999). Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Mouzer, Frederique, and Charles Onana (2007). Un racisme français: le communautarisme blanc menace la République. Paris: Éditions Duboiris. Ndiaye, Pap (2008). La condition noire: essai sur une minorité française. Paris: CalmannLévy.

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Okin, Susan Moller, Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.). (1999). Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Onana, Jean-Baptiste (2007). Sois nègre et tais-toi! Nantes: Éditions du Temps. Pena, Richard (1995). “How Tasty was my Little Frenchman.” In Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (eds.). Brazilian Cinema, 191–199. New York: Columbia University Press. Plumelle-Uribe, Rosa Amelia (2001). La férocité blanche: des non-Blancs aux non-Aryens: génocides occultés de 1492 à nos jours. Paris: A. Michel. Rich, Adrienne (1979). On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. New York: Norton. Roach, Joseph (1996). Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Rohter, Larry (2005). “Language Born of Colonialism Thrives Again in Amazon.” nytimes.com. The New York Times, 28 August 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2005/08/28/international/americas/28amazon.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=all &_r=0. 18 July 2014. Rudder, Veronique de, Christian Poiret, and Francois Vourch (eds.). (2000). L’inégalité raciste: l’universalité républicaine à l’épreuve. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Rufin, Jean-Christophe (2001). Rouge Bresil. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Ruscio, Alain, and Albert Memmi (1995). Le credo de l'homme blanc: regards coloniaux français, XIXe-XXe siècles. Brussels and Paris: Éd. Complexe. Sadlier, Darlene J. (2003). Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Salem, Helena (1987). Nelson Pereira dos Santos: O Sonho Possivel do Cinema Brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Shohat, Ella (ed.). (1998). Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge: MIT Press. Spivak, Gayatri (1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271–313. London: Macmillan. Staden, Hans (1984). Die wahrhaftige Historie der wilden, nacken, grimmigen Menschenfresser-Leute. 1557. Stuttgart: Thienemann, Edition Erdmann. Stam, Robert (1997). Tropical Multiculturalism. A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Stam, Robert, and Ella Shohat (2007). Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism. New York: Routledge. — (2012). Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic. New York: New York University Press. Stora, Benjamin. 2007. La guerre des mémoires: la France face à son passé colonial (entretiens avec Thierry Leclere). La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube.

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Thevet, André (1557). Les Singularites de la France Antartique. Paris: Maisonneuve & Cie. Tobner, Odile (2007). Du racisme français. Paris: Arènes. Todorov, Tzvetan (1995). “The Cult of Difference and the Sacralization of the Victim.” Esprit 212: 98. Vergès, Françoise (2006). La mémoire enchaînée: questions sur l'esclavage. Paris: Albin Michel. Vidal, Dominique, and Karim Bourtel (2005). Le mal-être arabe: enfants de la colonisation. Marseille: Agone. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo Batalha (2002). “Etnologia Brasileira.” In Sergio Miceli (ed.). O Que Ler na Ciencia Social Brasileira, 1970–1995, 109–223. Sao Paulo: Anpocs. — (2004). “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies” Common Knowledge, 10.3: 463–484. — (2009). Métaphysiques Cannibales. Paris: PUF. Wasserman, Renata R. Mautner (1994). Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1820–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Warren, Jonathan W. (2001). Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press. Week End (1967). Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, JeanPierre Kalfon. Athos Films. Wieviorka, Michel, and Philippe Bataille (1992). La France raciste. Paris: Seuil. Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi (1996). Dir. Harald Philipp. Perf. Lex Barker, Pierre Brice, Götz George. Constantin Film. Žižek, Slavoj (1998). “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.’” Critical Inquiry, 24.4: 988– 1009. Žižek, Slavoj, and Glyn Daly (2004). Conversations with Žižek. Cambridge: Polity Press.

The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and “the Coloniality of Our Being” Rinaldo Walcott

Introduction What it means to be Human is continually defined against Black people and Blackness. The very basic terms of social Human engagement are shaped by anti-Black logics so deeply embedded in various normativities that they resist intelligibility as modes of thought and yet we must attempt to think them. The profound consequences of having Humanness defined against Black being means that the project of colonialism and the ongoing workings of coloniality have produced for Black people a perverse relationship to the category of the Human in which our existence as human beings remains constantly in question and mostly outside the category of a life, remains an existence marked as social death.1 This global anti-black condition produced in the post-Columbus era, still and again manifests itself in numerous ways that have significantly limited how Black people might lay claim to human-ness and therefore on how Black people might impact on what it means to be Human in a post-Columbus world.2 This essay is about the ways in which anti-blackness continually produces Black people as out of place in (post)colonial locations and about the consequences that entail from such out-of-place-ness. But it is also about the ways in which what I call a pure decolonial project remains an impossible project as long as attention to the deathly production of anti-blackness will not become to future political desires.3 Only by positioning anti-blackness

—————— 1 See the work of Jared Sexton (2010; 2011) as he re-engages Orlando Patterson’s term social death as it relates to plantation slavery. 2 I capitalize Human when referring to its post-Columbus orientation. When seeking to express human in terms broader than Europe’s idea of what it is, I use lower-case. 3 I am adapting the idea of a pure decolonial project in this essay from Derrida’s notion of a pure hospitality. Indeed I am inspired by Derrida’s (2000) insistence on modes of being for which we cannot predict their outcomes in advance of the ‘event’ as he proposes in Of Hospitality as a method for thinking about a future decolonial ‘event.’

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as central to the ways in which European modernity has cemented its global rein, and thus taking on the predicament of Black social death as the instantiation of modernity’s project of unfreedom, as will movements to interrupt and indeed to bring to a conclusion Europe’s and now the West’s, horrific global rein be successful. It is precisely by engaging the conditions of the invention of blackness, the ways in which its invention produces the conditions of unfreedom and the question of how those conditions produce various genres of the Human, genres that are continually defined against blackness, that any attempt to engage a decolonial project may avoid its own demise. Taking seriously the insights of the philosopher of the Americas Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) claim that the Human is always hybrid—that it is bios and logos—we might begin to more carefully glean how Black peoples’ insistence on their humanness alters and changes the genre of the Human continually—as Wynter would put it. In the realm of the post-Columbian colonial project and its resulting global “coloniality of being” (Wynter 2003) Black people have been its most phantasmagoric creation. While it is clear that slavery and other forms of captivity existed prior to transatlantic slavery, the unique ways in which transatlantic slavery became a central plank of the European colonial project as well as of its Enlightenment narrative of the Human as not a slave, as one of the single most important ideological frames of coloniality, continually require careful reconsideration. Snyder (2010) suggests in her study that if we do not adequately understand other forms of captivity, especially as those forms of captivity which sometimes promised kinship only to be transformed into chattel slavery, it is impossible to fully grasp the ways in which racial slavery is fundamentally different. Consequently, Frank B. Wilderson, working out of an intellectual tradition that recognizes the uniqueness of modern racial slavery points out: “But African, or more precisely Blackness, refers to an individual who is by definition always already void of relationality. Thus modernity marks the emergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race appears, people who, a priori, that is prior to the contingency of the ‘transgressive act’ (such as losing a war or being convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world. This, I will argue, is as true for those who were herded onto the slave ships as it is for those who had no knowledge whatsoever of the coffles.” (2010, 18, original emphasis).

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Wilderson narrates Black coming-into-being and thus Black being. It is my contention that Black ontology needs to be central to a radical or new humanism as Frantz Fanon (1967) articulated it, in these times of paradoxical and contradictory planetary human intimacies.4 The post-Columbus colonial frames for experiencing Humanness and the absence thereof for Black bodies continue to overdetermine postmodern conversations so that the possibilities for creating significant and lasting cross-racial and indeed cross-human solidarities seem to remain out of reach of our desire to bring to a close the dreadful duration of Human organization and life. Resolving the multiple ways in which anti-Black coloniality frames our Human present is central to achieving a possible decolonial future. Wilderson’s idea of the “void of relationality” (2010, 18) helps us to make sense of the ongoing stability of anti-Blackness. This essay will also employ Sylvia Wynter’s articulation of the coloniality of being to engage contemporary debates in and on settler colonialism in North America, and more specifically the nation of Canada. It is precisely in the context of antiBlackness that the language of settler colonialism reaches its limits of usefulness and precision. In particular, my essay probes the ways in which the enforced Black being in the world, indeed the very invention of Black people as art and parcel of European colonial expansion has aided the practice of settler colonial societies but simultaneously undermined them by producing a new kinds of indigeneity of the West. The invention of Black people troubles understandings of land, place, indigeneity, and belonging because the brutal rupture that produced Blackness has severed Black being from all those claims now used to mark resistance to modernity’s unequal distribution of its various accumulations. We might thus have to think of indigeneity as more a flexible process of critique and resistance to modernity rather than an organic identity; and I further suggest that to invoke it as ‘other’ identity is already to accede to Europe’s Enlightenment and modernist anthropological project of categorizing Humanness on its terms and logics. Some contemporary arguments against the ongoing colonization of indigenous people in North America do not adequately sustain a thoroughgoing critique of colonialist capitalism, because such a critique would recognize the non-Human status of the Black and the ways in which Black people’s legacy as a commodity has thus been haunting the very status of

—————— 4 Black Skin, White Masks (1967) is where Fanon calls for a new humanism.

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the Human and indigeneity in the present. Bypassing such an engagement, those arguments and discourses find themselves—even if involuntarily— embedded in anti-Black thought. As commodities of the colonial project, Black people have remained outside modernity’s various progressive and/or libertarian re-inventions of the Human (in terms of gender, sexuality, disability, or trans-practices) and have always remained overdetermined by racist epistemology. I must point out that I am not attempting to produce some kind of competitive oppression exceptionalism. Rather, my aim is to point to the profound ways in which Black being is directly implicated by negation and devaluation, as a negative foil, that is, in the ongoing production of diversity of what Wynter calls the “genres of being human” (2003, 331).

No Happy Story: Modernity’s Humans are Not Black The colonial history that gave rise to contemporary life in the West haunts our present, it is not yet behind us despite our best desires. Every Attawapiskat, every riot in London, every police shooting in local neighborhoods, every deportation, every dead child in Haiti, could be looked at as the fruits of the violence seeded in collective colonial encounters and their aftermath.5 The ways in which those diverse but interconnected colonial trajectories continue to frame our relationships to the ‘happy story’ of an egalitarian, democratic West and its unfolding possibilities of assumed rights and identities must continually be called into question. Any social, political and cultural proximity to the ‘good life’ in the West still and again largely depends on our historical relationship to the hierarchal practices of colonial ordering and management, and on the ongoing purge of the Black from the category of the Human. An administrative system of rule founded on ‘indigenous’ genocide, and on the making of Blackness as social death, and of Black people as the ultimate anti-Human others, frames our social relations, our intimacies and remains the immediate ground of living life in our present. Crucial to this ordering and manage-

—————— 5 In 2011 a housing crisis, both materially and otherwise, in the Aboriginal community of and at Attawapiskat brought to light significant neglect of Canadian governmental policy action concerning Aboriginal peoples. Attawapiskat became a symbol of the ongoing colonial conditions in Canada for Aboriginal peoples.

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ment is production of what Wynter calls “behavior-directing signs” (1990, 449) by and in colonial histories and their ongoing legacies, even in a putatively post-civil rights and postcolonial world. Since I write from within the geo-political borders of Canada my thinking is influenced by witnessing the Canadian state’s production of forms of being it deems less than Human. As a response to those practices, there has recently been, a push by conservative indigenous movements to align themselves with neo-liberalism, instead of seeking a radical intimacy against colonialism and anti-Blackness. The political urgency for this project remains unmet. One of the central conceits to remove Black people from Humanness is that Black people are constantly understood to be outof-place. This out-of-place-ness especially of poor Black people, is one which has profound life and death consequences; it becomes highlighted in the extreme by the carceral state of the USA (see Gilmore 2007) but also by practices like the enormously disproportionate stop and frisk and ‘carding’ measures used against young Black men across the North Atlantic zones (New York City, Toronto, London), as well as the state practice of deportation and restriction of labor options for Black men labor to imperial armies, prisons and the informal sector called the drug trade—dangerous and deadly labor all of it. These are the profound anti-Black conditions of our global past and present. The oppressive technologies of modern and postmodern capitalism have adapted and renewed themselves in inventive ways, so as to reproduce a global neo-coloniality to which there is no outside for anyone. However, there has been a pervasive silence vis-à-vis individual ‘ethnic’ neoliberals in debates on settler colonialism (Lawrence and Dua 2005; Amadahy and Lawrence 2009), as for example on Canada’s Aboriginal Conservatives (Leona Aglukkaq (Parliamentarian in the Conservative government), Patrick Brazeau appointed Senator by the Conservative government) and others, Shawn Atleo (Chief of The Assembly of First Nations, the leading organization that negotiates with the government and considered to close to the Conservative government) roles in the current government and extra-governmental organizations, that have attempted to bypass and ignore the issue of coloniality. Given, the ways in which Aboriginal abjection is shaped by the ongoing colonial project of the Canadian nation-state, the language for considering Aboriginal coloniality of being in contemporary debates remains at this time fairly inchoate and/or not possible. And yet, a push for Aboriginal capitalism, alongside the attempt to

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produce continually wasted populations of ‘non-resourced’ Aboriginal communities is an important example of the ongoing adaptability of late modern capitalism as neoliberal incorporation. But, most importantly, resistances to these practices and incorporations call for relational political logics, if resistances might begin to undo the coloniality of our being(s). Indeed our studies of marginality remain silent on these relations because so much of our political discourse remains locked in demonstrating our subaltern realities and committed to inclusion in a paradigm of expansion, which sits at the core of the colonial and neoliberal capitalist project. Everybody can produce a perverse desire to belong to that, which does not guarantee life. A significant element of the contemporary debate has shifted to making indigenous claims that reproduce Euro-centered nativism, expressing a desire for an emancipation, the terms of which can only result in continued and new forms of unfreedom for Black people (Sexton 2010). One of the significant problems of the contemporary debate in and on settler colonialism is the conceptual assumption that assumes everyone—individuals and groups—to belong and be entitled to some kind of original homeland, to have their own place somewhere. Such a claim does not work in the context of post-enslavement, and post-Enlightenment epistemic anti-Blackness, violent displacement and the rupture of Black kinship (Amadahy and Lawrence 2009). One of the central and complicated dynamics of geo-political spaces like Canada or the U.S. is how to think through the complicated challenge of a coloniality which has been maintained within new neo-liberal modes of individualism, citizenship, identity and belonging, producing a global space of competition and overlapping strategies of disadvantaged and disposed groups. To use an example from the United States, the Cherokee Nation’s attempts to evict the descendants of Black Freedmen from the tribe shows how coloniality functions to produce Black people as continually out-of-place, even in indigenous contexts. The Black and ‘mixed raced’ descendants of freed Cherokee slaves had long held citizenship in the Cherokee nation, until 2007 when a vote was taken to deny them their citizenship. This ‘battle’ over who is a Cherokee or put differently who belongs, who is in place, who has claim, highlights the way in which the asymmetries of contemporary neoliberal economy, politics and culture work in our time (see Nieves 2007; Stremlau 2011). The distribution of resources, in terms of access and ownership, and its concomitant multiple forms of dispossession produce relationships to

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capital that force, but also allow white and non-white groups to act within the historical legacies of colonial racial ordering, a practice which extends beyond internal Canadian space. Accordingly, one of the shortcomings of scholarship on settler colonialism is to assume that Canada’s colonial practices end at the geographical border of the modern nation-state. The work of Peter James Hudson (2010) on the history of Canada’s banking system, vaunted post-2008, amply demonstrates that Canada’s colonial project stretches far beyond the geo-politics of the ‘entity’ we now call Canada. Thus articulating Canada’s role exclusively as a former settler colony in North American does not adequately address its various colonial trajectories. Hudson’s work on the Canadian banking system and its exploitation of the Caribbean region reminds us that Canadian colonialism has not only meant the occupation of indigenous North American land and territories, not only the management and curtailment of peoples rights and the exploitation of the land and its resources on the North American continent. To address Canada’s role must also entail a discussion of its economic, political, and cultural activities, which move beyond the traditional markers of its historical colonial geographies to produce forms of life in the global realm that are distinguished by a white capitalist assigned value and nonvalue (Barrett, 1999). A number of major Canadian banks (Royal Bank of Canada, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of Nova Scotia) have long occupied the financial landscape of the so-called archipelago of poverty in the Caribbean basin. These Canadian financial institutions have not sought to service nor to invest in the region, but rather to extract ‘resources’ back to the nation of Canada. This kind of ‘overseas’ neo-colonialism coupled with an ‘at home’ colonial project produces some very complicated conceptual dilemmas for thinking about the culture and politics of coloniality in Canada. That such practices of Canada’s colonial project go beyond its geo-political borders as a nation, means that how different non-white bodies are placed within and/or arrive at the borders of the contemporary Canadian nation-state is a complex story of placemaking or the denial thereof, of arrival and becoming or of constantly being made to exist out-of-place.6

—————— 6 The work of Lawrence and Dua (2005) fails to adequately recognize these dynamics. Sharma and Wright’s (2008) response is an excellent rejoinder in an attempt to point to various moments of migration to complicate the argument that Lawrence and Dua fail to make. Sexton’s (2010) work also allows us to further complicate these concerns as well.

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A critical engagement with coloniality therefore demands that we see the mutual imprint and the overlap between the ‘reservation,’ the ‘housing project,’ and ‘the priority neighborhood’ (the latter is the name given to the archipelagoes of poverty in Toronto), the project of deportation and the dispossession of people beyond Canada’s borders. In each case the very terminology delineates a specific, if limited space and an out-of-place-ness for those marked as abject and waste within the boundaries of the nationstate of Canada. Such range of abjection has become possible because of the capitalist and constantly flexible dynamics of coloniality, which also produces permanent leaks in the interconnected forms of ordering the disposable bodies between and across the various sites. Progressive scholarly discourses that refuse to acknowledge these leaks remain embedded in the very terms of Human life that they seek to over-turn (Lawrence and Dua, 2005; Amadahy and Lawrence 2009). So for example Amadahy and Lawrence write that: “From Indigenous perspectivies, the true horror of slavery was that it has created generations of ‘de-culturalized’ Africans, denied knowledge of language, clan, family, and land base, denied even knowledge of who their nations are” (2009, 127). Such thought fails to comprehend the inventive being of Blackness as only possible in the context of the terrible upheavals of which this essay has been addressing and the simultaneous reliance on an anthropologic discourse of origins lost. Critical articulation of settler colonialism needs to engage the conditions and ideas of the plantation, the reservation, the ghetto, and neo-colonial dispossession, revealing the particular euphemisms of those discursive and violent material constructions, but also their linked and shared realities as the result of the logic and practice of anti-Blackness and thus a wider reach of coloniality. Only this relational logic can address the project of Canada which has skillfully produced these sites as non-related entities with separate dynamics so that ‘priority neighborhoods’ have nothing to do with banlieues and neither of those have anything to do with European colonial practices in Canada’s past on the reservation, nor the economic and cultural backyards in the Caribbean. Against this logic which reproduces exclusive frames of Human value, and Black un-value, we need a pedagogy to work through the challenge of Black being which coloniality configured employed as its most significant and foundational Human project of racist management and order. Consequently, the Black body is not the most abject body in a competition of abjection and oppression, but the Black body is the template of how the abjection by which the Human was

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produced. Even though oppressions and the seductions of capitalism in late postmodernity do not simply replicate colonialism’s “Red, White and Black” past (Wynter 1995; Wilderson 2010)—after all, a Black man reigns in the White House and in the Canadian nation state Aboriginal people participate—all non-white bodies are mastered into a project of disposability. One cannot stress enough capitalism’s foundation as well as its constant and continuous trajectory of a production of death.

I Really Want to Hope Significantly, at a gathering in part produced by the visuality of ongoing colonialism at Attawapiskat, and compounded by the excesses of coloniality elsewhere, a call for a meeting and a meeting between Aboriginal leaders and the Canadian government occurred in Ottawa in 2012. The conservative government framed the conversation at the meeting as one of access to capitalism and its many resources, with a constant refrain of bring Aboriginal peoples ‘in.’ In fact, a cynical reading would be that an invitation to participate more fully in capitalism was offered as a form of justice by the colonial state. A participation in colonialist exploitation becomes justice, but only if and when resources on territories or territories themselves are needed for capitalism’s expansion. Indeed, former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has set up a foundation to make sure that First Nations/Aboriginal peoples can be more intimately tied to contemporary Canadian capitalism. Martin’s foundation, with support from the banking industry (Scotia Bank) teaches Aboriginal students how to produce business plans, as an educational program, among a range of other ‘skills’ meant to alleviate their ‘outsider’ status within the nation. These programs are driven both by Aboriginal demographics and by a white desire to secure the future of capitalism by incorporating a previously ignored population into late modern capitalism by way of the lure of small rewards. However, to achieve the kinds of justice Aboriginal communities required if their forms of life were to be fully acknowledged would mean to create a significant opposition to capitalism in all its present forms, and therefore also needed to align indigenous claims with radical Black demands. What we might call “Black freedom” is only possible in distinct opposition to capitalism, historically and presently. Given that the Black body was indeed

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an instrument of capital, as well as a significant producer of it—that it was both commodity and labor—the question of freedom and capital is a particularly knotty one for Black being. Thus, given the intimate crossing of Blackness and capitalism, “Black freedom” as a claim, as a possibility, challenges us to imagine and to produce new modes of life that might be in accord with some of the most radical global ‘indigenous’ calls for a different kind of world. It is precisely in the moment that Black being can enjoy full human (the small h for human here signal Wynter’s concerns for a humanism beyond Euro-American articulations) status, in the sense that its being is counter-hegemonic to that of Euro-American articulation that new indigenisms enter the world. Engaging the epistemological formations of anti-Blackness is not and cannot be merely one among other modes of thought, because only engaging anti-Blackness as foundational limit to our collective livability makes visible the overarching racial capitalist ordering of neo-colonial peoples, indigenous people, and Blacks. Thinking through anti-Blackness gives and activists a lens to see the Human radically differently, to see that its present incarnation has been contingent on the production of other beings’ unHuman-ness and un-freedom. The site of liberalism’s compromise by way of induction and seduction of selected Black and Aboriginal individuals and/or groups only shores up as a complementary feature to violent intrusion and the production of disposability which is why those Black and Aboriginal politicians mentioned above may be engaged in the destruction of their own collectives. At this late stage of capitalist modernity the Canadian nation-state’s flexible conceptions of sovereignty, of nation, and of self-determination are meant to ensure capitalist longevity so that the stakes need to be secured through incorporation. In the case of places like Attawapiskat, no such flexibility is evident in the face of an absence of desirable resources. Attawapiskat is an interesting case for many reasons. As a territory lacking in natural resources and a site not needed for the transportation of those resources, its appeals to the national government are treated with disdain. This disdain is for me the evidence that those territories that possess the resources to continue to aid in the production of capital can find a place in the late capitalist modern nation regardless of racial history, and those without resources cannot. The point is that capitalism continually modifies and ‘includes’ on its own terms and gives way to ‘old’ designations if those designations can now fuel its engines. Attawapiskat cannot fuel its engines

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thus it must be managed. Radical discourses and practices that seek to overcome coloniality might want to refuse the logic of belonging to place in the sense of past ownership of land, and instead forge a relational logic with Fanon’s (1963) landless “damned of the earth.” Such a claim is not to ignore that human beings need to belong, but rather it is to position belonging outside its historical, naturalized, quasi-organic trajectory and to create another form of sociability not premised on a history of racist social, political, and cultural gradations and exclusion. The ongoing disposability of Black bodies in Canadian society has created Black severance and as a consequence, estrangement from the geopolitics of nationhood, no matter how broadly or inclusively defined nation might appear in the multicultural Canadian sense. We can conceive of antiBlack racism as the crucially important element of the production of nationalist coloniality in which the Black subject is never able to occupy the site of incorporation into the nation-state, because Blackness was deemed as fundamentally disjunct with the idea of a nation of free subjects. The fundamental out-of-place-ness for Black bodies persists, even if ambivalently attenuated by partial inductions to in late capitalism as it seeks new bodies in its constant crises. But the more fulsome social reality is that those inductions of the select few do not outweigh by any means the social, cultural and political excorporations on a mass scale. A pure decolonial project thus gives up the politics of organic ‘identity’ in favor of a mobile ‘politics of thought.’ This ‘politics of thought’ will be able to critique coloniality’s most profound epistemic operations, which have produced knowledges of bodies ‘in’ and ‘out-of-place,’ and its economic and material practices which have resulted in death-worlds for Black people. To acknowledge these death worlds is an urgency: from that radical vantage point it becomes possible to conceive of forms of relationality and intimacy, of new modes of humanness beyond capitalist (post)modernity. In a post-communist world, and a neoliberal globe, thinking, articulating, and moving towards different and new modes of human life is our present challenge. A pure decolonial project works to produce new modes of relational logics and conditions in which the racially structured intimacies that European colonial expansion produced for us might be refashioned. These new modes call for moving beyond and may be even against the ‘happy story’ of progressive liberation of indigeneity in the ‘native land,’ against the illusion of a move into the bounty of rights and freedoms. To refuse such a ‘happy story’ is to account for the ways in which history

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might offer us a better calculation of how to alter the human yet again in our time (Walcott 2011b). Such an alternative will require the production of “new indigenisms” of our globe and those new indigenisms will require of us conversations, debates, politics, and policies that are centered in the “catastrophic culture” (Brathwaite 2006, n. pag.) that has brought us together. Kamau Brathwaite in a lecture, articulates what he calls “the literature of catastrophe” as the by-product of European colonial expansion (2006, n. pag.). Brathwaite points out that this catastrophe of colonialism produces death, racism, environmental degradation and so on but it also produces jazz, Caribbean, African American, and Indigenous literatures, and other cultural forms and practices that have reshaped the globe and human life. I adapt his term to articulate a culture of catastrophe, which draws on his insights. Such a catastrophe has the potential, however, to shape profound human possibilities and potentialities, as Brathwaite also points out. A pure decolonial project works the ruins of catastrophe to shape an other human intimacy based on what I call the “politics of thought” and thus on mobile association, not on pre-ordained belongings to place and gradated identities.

Works Cited Amadahy, Zainab, and Bonita Lawrence (2009). “Indigenous Peoples and Black People in Canada: Settlers or Allies?” In Arlo Kempf (ed.). Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-colonialism in the US and Canada, 105–136. Dordrecht: Springer. Barrett, Lindon (1999). Blackness and Value: Seeing Double. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2004). Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Oxford: Polity. Brathwaite, Kamu (2006). Middle Passages: A Lecture. [Audio CD]. Toronto: Sandberry Press. Byrd, Jodi A. (2011). The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle (2000). Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fanon, Frantz (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. — (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

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Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (2007). Golden Gulag: Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hudson, Peter James (2010). “Imperial Designs: The Royal Bank of Canada in the Caribbean.” Race and Class: A Journal on Racism, Empire and Globalization, 52.1: 33–48. Lawrence, Bonita, and Enakshi Dua (2005). “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Social Justice, 32.4: 120–143. Nieves, Evelyn (2007). “Putting to a Vote the Question ‘Who Is Cherokee?’” nytimes.com. The New York Times, 3 March 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2007/03/03/us/03cherokee.html?_r=3&. 30 May 2012. Scott, David (1999). Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sexton, Jared (2010). “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.” Social Text 103, 28.2: 31–56. — (2011). “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” InTensions Journal, 5:1–47. Sharma, Nandita, and Cynthia Wright (2008). “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States.” Social Justice, 35.3: 120–138. Snyder, Christina (2010). Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stremlau, John (2011). “Black Cherokees Exercise Hard-won Right to Vote.” edition.cnn.com, Cable News Network. 19 Oct. 2011. http://edition.cnn.com/20 11/10/19/opinion/stremlau-cherokee-vote/index.html. 30 May 2012. Walcott, Rinaldo (2011a). “Into the Ranks of Man: Vicious Modernism and the Politics of Reconciliation.” Ashok Mathur, Jonathan Dewar, and Mike DeGagne (eds.). Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation Through the Lens of Cultural Diversity, 341–350. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation. — (2011b). “Disgraceful: Intellectual Dishonesty, White Anxieties, and Multicultural Critique Thirty-six Years Later.” May Chazan, Lisa Helps, Anna Stanley, and Sonali Thakkar (eds.). Home and Native Land: Unsettling Multiculturalism in Canada, 15–30. Toronto: Between The Lines Press. Wilderson, Frank B. III (2010). Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. Wynter, Sylvia (1990). “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond.” In Abdul R. Jan Mohamed and David Lloyd (eds.). The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, 432–469. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (1995). “1492: A New World View.” In Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (eds.). Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the Americas: A New World View, 5– 57. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. — (2003). “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.3: 257–337.

Ethical Reassessments

Legacies of Enslavism and White Abjectorship Sabine Broeck

My article addresses the humiliate-ability, the enslave-ability, the rape-ability, the abuse-ability, and the ship-ability of Black people in the discourses and practices that shape European white collective memory as well as in the contemporary repertoire of thinking Blackness in the white European mind. These discourses and practices add up to a longue durée of white abjectorship and un-humanization of Black being dating from the early modern period, through Enlightenment modernity into the postmodern moment. The ‘slave’s’ assumed ‘slavishness,’ that persistent topos in which Blackness has been contained in white philosophy from Hegel to de Beauvoir has blatantly disregarded the histories of Haiti, and other local and globally important acts, practices, and Black discourses of Black rebellion, and of Black freedom narratives, and has kept negating all forms of Black life. It has been fixed most enduringly in white intellectual and popular thought in Germany, by Nietzsche’s pertinent musings on so-called ‘slave morality’ in his On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 2013). The topos’s ubiquity and its lasting racist value ensured the same structural positionality for post-enslaved diasporic Black life forms, as Rinaldo Walcott has phrased it,1 until today. My point here will be to argue for the recognition of a continuity between the enslavist white Euro-American abjectorship of the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and contemporary practices of anti-Black racism on both sides of the Atlantic. I suggest that the white notion of the ‘slave’s’ so-called ‘slavishness’ resulted in a legacy of Black un-humanization that finds instantiation in an array of more or less explicit manifold anti-Black discourses and practices across European and New World territories. The most aggressive paradigmatic version unearthed in the historical archives of enslavement history is the emblematic Jamaican plantation owner

—————— 1 See Walcott’s contribution given in discussion at the conference The Futures of Black Studies at the University of Bremen, 24–26 April 2014, see also Walcott in this collection.

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Thomas Thistlewood, the white dealer, owner, and self-entitled user of Black flesh—an embodiment of the white abjectorship Saidiya Hartman dissects so poignantly in her two books Scenes of Subjection (1997) and Lose Your Mother (2007). Even though legal ownership of Black flesh was abolished as a result of long and hard radical anti-slavery struggles, practices of anti-Black abjection have morphed and could thus continue into the lasting afterlife of enslavement. These practices range on a continuum from pejorative media, through ritualistic forms of Black debasement in advertisement, through aggressive exoticisms and ridicule in popular customs such as the Netherland’s Zwarte Piet, or the return of the Sarotti Mohr in German chocolate consumer culture, through what amounts to an overall denial of anti-racist change in institutions of higher education, to massive and indeed murderous forms of violence within and outside of the state apparatus, to criminal fascist attacks on Black people and to the anonymous death of migrants from the African continent in the Mediterranean, watched over by the FRONTEX regime. It is necessary for my argument to go beyond reminding us of the thousands of cases of catastrophic death in the Mediterranean sea and to foreground the point that in keeping with widespread European callous indifference towards the centuries-long and intense involvement in and profiteering from enslavism, the African migrants drowning in the Mediterranean have not been recognized as individual dead and lost human beings, let alone mourned as somebody’s lost sons, daughters, husbands, uncles, aunts, mothers, fathers, friends, or lovers. ‘More than 1500 deaths,’ as the media will report in cases of exorbitant death: the numbers always remain estimates, and to my knowledge, there have been the scantest efforts at best to pay the dead the respect of recognizing that they had names, countries of origins, places that they could trace their personal trajectories in and to, social spaces that they inhabited, beliefs, and affiliations. And even though a number of radical grassroots organizations in European countries have been active to create a web public, local community support and political commitments on the Left in solidarity with the survivors of what might be called a Middle Passage in reverse, and their struggles, the overall mainstream media and institutions in European countries have remained unfazed in their indifference and political rejection of any move towards open borders to the African continent. With the exception of the most recent and growing attention given to war refugees from Syria, all and any reasons individuals from various Afri-

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can countries might have to leave their home behind for uncertain futures, remain answered with anti-Black contempt. A historical reminder: in 2011, when I began working on these questions, it had just transpired to the press that the German Landeskriminalamt and the Verfassungsschutz (like FBI and Secret Service) had watched (and maybe even aided and abetted) the activities of a militant Nazi cell for year which, as it turns out, was responsible for at least twelve killings of Turkish and other foreign born German citizens. This was presumably the tip of an iceberg. The number of documented non-white, non-Christian victims of lethal neo-Nazi violence in Germany between the re-unification of Germany and 2011 was a staggering 182, most of them un-mourned and un-mediated, as my local newspaper, the Weser Kurier told me on November 19, 2011. At the time of writing now, on July 7, 2014, the German radio station Funkhaus Europa, reports on a recent documentary film (Revision, by Philip Scheffner) which records cases of racist violence and their bureaucratic cover-ups in and by the German legal system, estimated to have risen by over twenty percent in frequency over the year 2013.2 The press and the liberal German public appear appalled, but the rhetoric never goes beyond complaints or protest against ‘negligence’ and ‘blindness’ in the state apparatus against fascist terror to ask the real interesting question: to what extent might the so-called negligence of the state apparatus be based on the fact that parts of this structure are not blind, but willing to support Nazi cells, because they share, or at least do not object to fascist provocative agendas, in organized or not yet organized fashion? Who, at this point, knows how many killing lists are being prepared of socalled asylum centers, Turkish restaurants, Indian grocery stores, and African hair shops, or clubs frequented by Afro-German, and immigrant youth? Who knows, at this point, what level of anti-Black violence to anticipate if and when the surge of fascist populist parties in the European political systems continues unabated? The gist of this article, then, will be to connect two points that, within the contexts of European philosophical, cultural, and social discourses have been deliberately and with agnotological innocence, kept apart: the question of the constitutive but un-remembered legacy of white abjectorship in the practices of Black enslavement in the hundreds of years of transatlantic enslavement trade on the one hand, and the question of con-

—————— 2 For the report announcement, see Tornabene (2014).

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temporary Black migration to Europe, reacted to with a vengeance, on the other hand. These two phenomena need to be connected because the overall European intellectual and political denial of the constitutive role of transatlantic enslavement for modern Europe as we know it, plays a crucial role in the mainstream acceptance of border politics against the continent of Africa, most massively bodied forth in the creation of FRONTEX. It surfaces in the lingering mainstream, but also in the liberal and leftist sense of Europe as a haven of universal rights, which have to be guarded and defended by being bordered to the outside. In real life, the edifice of Europe is crumbling, and the hitherto privileged white middle classes of Europe who have been smugly content and contained within their more or less functioning welfare states, have seen their entitlements (and many of their understood rights!) slowly but irrevocably eroded. European political and intellectual elites, however, have largely refused to enter into de-colonial conversations and negotiations, which might take their prompt from Aimé Césaire’s nineteen-fifties’ admonition that “Europe is spiritually and morally indefensible” (Césaire 2001, 32). One of the implications of my argument, on the contrary, is that before going into forward defense, and rallying around the ‘idea of Europe’ as a model of universalist democracy, the minor faults of which will disappear with time and goodwill, we should step back to learn our history lessons. This paper comes out of a sustained effort to let myself be addressed by Black epistemology, to become a “spoken-to,” as it were. It is possible because of the work of contemporary thinkers, most important among them for my work Orlando Patterson, Toni Morrison, Paul Gilroy, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Lewis Gordon, Charles Mills, Fred Moten, Frank Wilderson, Sylvia Wynter, Kwame Nimako, Egbert Martina, Grada Kilomba, Françoise Vergès, Stephanie Smallwood, Nell Painter, Jared Sexton and Christina Sharpe,3 and as earlier presences, Fanon and Césaire. As with Ian Baucom’s magisterial study on the constitutive role enslavement and the system of trading with enslaved Africans played for the foundation and development of modern transatlantic societies (Baucom 2005), my work could not be articulated without interaction with decades of Black intellectual and epistemic labor antecedent to it, and generative of it.

—————— 3 Selected texts by are these thinkers are included in the bibliography.

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I am suggesting to spend critical attention to the question of how the legacy of the white European early modern production of Black social death, to use Orlando Patterson’s by now notorious phrasing (Patterson 1985), and the philosophical disappearance of the white European role in modern transatlantic enslavism have created a kind of perverted frame for the discourses of Black diasporic migrations to and within Europe. Europe is, in those contemporary discourses, constituted as a white homogeneous borderland of post Enlightenment democracy within which racism, if it happens, is considered as a response to contradictions, differences, and an overwhelming Black impact from without—as the metaphorics of the assumed ‘streams of African refugees’ and similar images amply demonstrate. It is not perceived as a social, cultural, physical, and virtual space for which enslavism and colonialism have been constitutive and that thus needs be considered as always already saturated with its proper anti-Blackness. Beyond suggesting this theoretical perspective, I also offer some thoughts on the urgency of decolonial, de-enslavist transdisciplinary research and institutional pedagogy, because the abjection of Blackness is closely tied—in political, cultural, social, and philosophical terms—to the European politics of white identity, of which the European academic landscape is one of the remaining bastions. This means that—in our institutions which regularly draw rather uneven numbers of only some eager Black European students to instruction but mostly attract more or less naive white European students, a research oriented pedagogy needs to be put in place that in order to counter anti-Blackness will have to work by way of teaching white humans to live with the unaccustomed and unexpected urgency of loss, or surrender, of European white entitlement— beginning with their ownership of History, Culture, and Philosophy— which needs to be the prerequisite for transcultural, anti-racist, and decolonial discourses on and in Europe, and its academies.

A Hermeneutics of Absence and a Pedagogy of the Trace Black Diaspora Studies have produced a wealth of historiography of EuroAmerican modernity with respect to the productive function the transatlantic enslavement trade and New World slavery took on in its constitution, development, and constant economic, social, cultural, and philo-

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sophical (re)articulation. This relatively recent critical discourse has only of late slowly trickled into adjacent humanities’ disciplines and—to a surprisingly hesitant degree—into European philosophy, and critical theory. Thus, even though New World enslavement as an object of historiography has become one of among the best-researched phenomena of the Western world, other disciplines have been largely resistant to engage the connection between enslavement, modernity’s Enlightenment, and its transatlantic history. By way of carefully maintained disciplinary boundaries, an examination of this connection has hardly reached beyond scattered admissions of modernity’s so-called paradox. A transdisciplinary field able to address the manifold political, cultural, and epistemic questions arising from an observation of this intricate interdependency, beyond national canons and boundaries marked by Area Studies and their linguistic limitations, still awaits its realization. Moreover, in order to critique the durable nexus of transatlantic enslavement practices and discourses, and not keep ‘slavery’ safely entombed in the Humanities’ archives as deplorable events in the past, we need a term. A term that puts theoretical-critical thinking about modernity as a regime of slavery (to turn Saidiya Hartman upside down, who amply discusses slavery as a regime of modernity in Lose Your Mother) on an ‘equal footing’ with established generalizing critical terms as Semitism, racism, colonialism that allow us to see structures, patterns, and power systems, instead of singular and isolated events. That kind of term, and I suggest here to say enslavism, will make it possible to criticize a practice the legacies of which are ongoing. It is a telling fact that humanist education, including recent so-called avant-garde theory, has so utterly abjected modern transatlantic enslavement from its purview to not even have a generalizable term for it. Slavery, as a term descriptive of a limited temporal and spatial sequence, at best, relegates the practice of enslavement to the realm of a phenomenological particular which may or may not be included in versions of History. If retrievable at all, then it functions again only as event, as come and gone, not as a structure-generative systematic practice, including its theorizable genealogical function; as object of historiography that is, which is by definition, as a string of particulars, not able to generate meta-critical, epistemic potential. We have the concept of militarism, so we can theorize wars. Without that frame which then points research to generalizable insight into patterns of imperial designs, capital investments, technological destruction, psychology of war, and other components of war-making, particular instances

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of war, say, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, would not be theorizable. We have been able to theorize colonialism as a practice of subjection, exploitation, and dominance in the modern arsenal of European power, beyond its various particular instantiations in and by respective countries, because we have a term, even though it had to be re-appropriated from imperial historiography critically and agonistically. Slavery, by contrast, exists in the Western intellectual critical imaginary only as an isolated event, since our very language has axed it from our inner and outer worlds of critical thought. The ‘event’ can be described, and historiography, at this point, fills libraries, but it does not translate into a cause for and lever of theorization, and that is not happenstance, but has method, and purpose. The humanist white subject has been supposed to remember, address, articulate, empathize with, rejoice in, question the brutality, and elicit other particularly emotional responses to the specific situation, to the imagined ‘event’ of being a slave in slavery. The image of slavery as traumatic occurrence, situated often beyond the frame of human rational understanding, that limit event—in an act of perverse theft—has given metaphorical heft to modern and postmodern protest against white human suffering and bondage. The idea of slavery as ‘event,’ and of the slave as a generic, naturalized term for the being held in slavery, however, has never put the white subject’s practice of forcing Black being into enslavement and/or of parasitically profiting on any conceivable level from Black abjection, sustained for centuries, on the agenda. On the contrary, the enlightened outrage at the event of slavery has served to screen perpetual white practices of enslavement off from view. Accordingly, in the German language, we have the term Sklaverei, which is the state of ‘slaves,’ it is the history, the event, the phenomenon without an agent, but not Versklaverei. In English it is very similar: we use slavery, but have not said enslavism, the term I am suggesting to use; in French the term is esclavage, but not esclavagisme (or whatever French theory could have come up with). There is a second severe problem with non-generalizability: the event may elicit only affect vis-à-vis the victimized—as ad hoc white pity, terror, or revulsion—meaning white responses to slavery are all and still in the realm of Christian emotions, have never passed beyond the abolitionist empathy Marcus Wood has so adroitly deconstructed (Wood 2002). Moreover, the event of slavery, as such, always remains the isolated disembodied entity apart from, outside the white subject’s abjectivizing agency on and against Black being, that which does not and cannot speak about the white subject’s active role in the very produc-

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tion of abjection. In Western white modes of thinking, the making of slavery into an event has thus successfully preempted theoretical cognition, as well as epistemic leverage. Enslavism as a term, as a horizon of common reference from disciplines as varied as History, Philosophy, Modern Literatures, Cultural Anthropology, Law, and Social and Political Sciences, could also facilitate the necessary transdisciplinary research and pedagogy we urgently have to put in place. This is particularly urgent for the European academy, still a bastion of white subjectivity, where the humanities have been drained towards remaining atoms of individual de-colonial, de-enslavist scholars working away in isolation at their institutes, never commanding enough critical mass to garner attention and possible support of the national and supranational research funding apparatuses, and not willing to dilute their own research to the point of non-recognizability in research networks with positivist, presentist, philological, or other idealist multi-, inter-, and even some transcultural agendas. Such transdisciplinarity would require a shared hermeneutics of absence, and a pedagogy of the trace (see Broeck 2013). In my own work (coming out of African-American Studies) I have addressed the impact of modern enslavism in those areas that more classical transatlantic ‘slave’-trade and New World slavery historiography has either not extensively addressed, or which has been silenced. Beginning with my very first questions, just for example, of John Locke’s philosophy, the history of gardening, the implication of gender, as a concept, in enslavism, or the overall denial of interracial contact in Europe, going through the regimes of modern enslavism suppressed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of liberation, and ending up, literally, in the German hinterland of enslavism, in a project to assess the impact of enslavement and the ‘slave’-trade on the city of Bremen, this hermeneutics-of-absence has brought me up against the confines of established methodologies, research, and dissemination. The on-going constraint of disciplinarity and narrow focus within the academy’s subdivided humanities serve to prevent the creation and pursuit of research questions and teaching curricula which lie outside the realms of national, and/or disciplinary purviews. This is particularly true with respect to producing an overdue durable epistemology of enslavement even though in very recent years individual scholars have, as renegades to their disciplines, made advances towards more interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies. However, the results of research on modern enslavement in (cultural) his-

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toriography, metropolitan ethnography, historical sociology, philosophy, or other pertinent disciplines oftentimes fall entirely outside the teachable agendas and remain all too marginal to the canons the academy has created. This, then, becomes a massive problem for the dissemination of knowledge, and thus for a necessary generalization and pedagogical availability of this epistemology of enslavism. Heavily indebted to Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, I argue therefore for practices of reading and argumentation, which necessarily run counter to the canonical positivism of the disciplinary archive.

Modernity as a Regime of Enslavism (Turning Saidiya Hartman Upside Down) European modernity as an empowering fiction, and the free and bordered European subject as humanist telos, rose to prominence in early modernity as a tool of political and epistemic self-empowerment of European white men and eventually also white women. This process itself was structurally contingent on transatlantic enslavism which constituted African populations, under that European subject’s reign, as a fundamental category of thingbeings categorized as un-human, which existed outside the victorious European humanist scheme of sociability. Enslavism, that is, provided the grounds which enabled the white European subject to “invent the n----,” as James Baldwin so aptly phrased it in an interview documented in the 1963 film Take this Hammer. That “n----”—in a valid one-for-all signification of abjection—has figured for the human as that state of sentient being which the human has kept struggling successfully not to become, to never to be turned into, or to distance oneself from. The breakthrough of poststructuralist skepticism in academia, and the ensuing academic discourse about the subject as constituted in social practices, as an effect of interpellation and as ‘always out of step with itself’ notwithstanding, the European subject’s universalist reign keeps re-surfacing, for instance, in much of the recent feuilleton and academic discourse about Europe and its legacy of Enlightenment as a haven of freedom, entitled subjectivity, and human rights. This enduringly proactive discourse has been kept alive not only in the face of hundreds of years of enslavism and colonialism, but also in our presence of European civilization’s massive neo-liberal and global capitalist

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erosion, as in contemporary Italy, Spain, Greece, or Great Britain, for that matter. Thus, respected European intellectuals like Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida have made it their prerogative to post and defend the idea of Europe as the, however flawed, space of free and human Vergesellschaftung, of a sociability which needs every progressive intellectual’s affective response and political and theoretical bolstering (see Habermas and Derrida 2003). Critical theory’s affective and epistemic liaison with post-Enlightenment theory resulted in an avoidance of a radical historiography of Europe’s and the Enlightenment’s splitting of the world into humans and Black/‘slaves,’ and of its own historical position on the side of white abjectorship, of enslavism, within this split. The assumption of freedom, that is, the creation of a European human subject as the owner of an individual right to freedom and agency, was the self-authorizing gesture of modernity par excellence, just as it provided the philosophical foundations for emancipatory ethical-political intellectual authorities such as critical theory, Marxism, and/or white feminism. Yet this assumption required a massive break within cultural memory. It required a self-inscription, a collective memory, of European modern subjects as not-enslaved and, by automatic and unexamined extension, as opponents to enslavement at a historical juncture at which white modernity was in most profitable ways, on all kinds of cultural, social, and of course economical levels, articulated with enslavism in intimate and effective ways. To come into being, the European subject needed its underside, as it were: the crucially integral but invisible part of the human has been his/her abject, created in the European mind by way of racialized thingification: the African enslaved, an un-humaned species tied by property rights to the emerging subject so tightly that they could—structurally speaking—never occupy the position of the dialectical Hegelian object as other, has thus remained therefore outside the dynamics of the human. Hegel’s idea of the struggle between self/master and other/slave, when travelled through the transatlantic realm, and particularly in its post-Marxist Kojevean reception in white philosophy, allegorized slavery into a seductive model of ongoing mental hold over European cultures, by idealizing the opposition, by severing the signifier from any New World referent (Kojeve 1980). Thus, it celebrated the modern European subject as ‘former Knecht/ slave’ who has overtaken his master (that is, feudalism), who has mastered mastery, as it were. This argument eschews the fact—detectable only from

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a Black post-enslavement angle—that the previous ‘Knechte,’ as modern free subjects, had enabled themselves to become masterful subjects not only by their successful struggle for ‘liberté, egalité, and fraternité’ in Europe, but also by way of the colonialist regimes of enslavism abroad. As the popular English hymn has it: Brittania rule the waves, we Englishmen never shall be slaves—the fact that in order to rule the waves, owning slaves became an instrumental, useful, and productive way of ordering affairs, has become covered over by the enduring legacy of the Hegelian master allegory. The free human citizen of Europe gained this very freedom, this ‘mastery’ of his (and eventually her) destiny by the creation of a mental, physical, political, and social border around the free human, which was marked and maintained by the existence of the Black/‘slave,’ by the free human subject’s ‘n----.’ In an entirely undialectical relation to the free subject, this thing species was structurally severed from human subjectivity, forcefully submitted to white use and benefit as laboring commodity, and abjected into what Patterson famously called the state of social death (see Patterson 1985; Vergès 2011; Wynter 2003). Possession (of self, and other) was the sine-qua-non for human freedom; which meant that the ones who found themselves possessed, could by reverse definition not access free European subjectivity nor Europe as their proper realm. Thus, the Enlightenment, with its impetus for individual self-ownership, self-responsibility, subjective and objective rights to freedom, and productive self-realization, learned to operate within a system of a large-scale racist parasitism. Seen from a post-enslavement perspective, from the position of the enslaved, that is, the modern European subject is as much the subject of bourgeois revolution, as it is the product and motor of enslavism; the regime of enslavism was essential to the formation of modernity, not its somehow paradoxical excess, not an unwanted, shameful, and disowned by-product. In that sense, Hartman’s paradigmatic discussion of slavery as a regime of modernity (Hartman 2007) may indeed be turned upside down to great epistemic effect: modernity has become visible as a regime of enslavism. The enlightened dis-ownment of enslavism has reached far into contemporary theory, and here I want to give but one example. One needs to maintain that the enslavist ship, and the plantation. As McKittrick has recently argued so poignantly (2014), the plantation, and as I would add, the enslavist ship must stand as emblematic for constitutive in- and excorporating practices of modernity which prefigured the Lager (camp) as the

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prototypical modern paradigm in that both, the enslavement trade and the plantation empowered the white human subject to enjoy an a priori affordability of unchecked gratuitous abjective violence. From this angle, it becomes a theoretical problem that Agamben’s influential refusal to engage the early modern history of enslavism in his work effectively hides the Black/‘slave’ from view. Thus, in a lecture based on his groundbreaking Homo Sacer (Agamben 1998) delivered at the European Graduate School in Florence a few years back, Agamben describes the eclipse that politics has undergone in the state of exception. Instead of leaving a space between law and life, the space where human action is possible, the space that used to constitute politics, he argues, politics has “contaminated itself with law” (2003, n. pag.). Because “only human action is able to cut the relationship between violence and law,” it becomes increasingly difficult within the state of exception for humans to act against the state (2003, n. pag.). From the point of view of the Black/’slave’ this constellation does only describe the human predicament: the situation of being contained by the forces of law sliding into the state of exception which does not interpellate the human but produces “bare life” leaves no room for politics in the “space between law and life,” and aggressively diminishes the cracks of political possibility, of human sociability (2003, n. pag.). Thus the metaphor of “bare life” can be recognized philosophically as description of a threat to, an endangering of human life, so that speaking of an eclipse for human existence in the late modern world becomes a valid critical move. By contrast, however, the sentient as well as profitable thing-being of the modern Black/‘slave’ has entered neither zoe, nor bios—since as shippable item, the Black/‘slave’ is embodied in fungibility and accumulation, as Hartman argues in Scenes of Subjection (1997). Fundamentally not and never human, Blackness becomes the sign of the very structural possibility of legitimate consumption by the oikos, which categorically excludes any possibility of relation to (positive: belonging, or negative: marginalization or destruction) to the oikos. Thus, the notion of transgression against the Black ‘it,’ that is, the use of proper property as abuse, does not exist in the modern register of human honor, laws, or of the oikos in general. For the Black sentient being, the absence of even a possibility of rights—that which might mark a relation to and within human sociability—has been its constitutive mode, and not the shock of an eclipse. In their basic denial of the generative impact of transatlantic enslavism, critical philosophies of (post)modernity have been marked by repetitive

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configurations of split white consciousness, and ethical avoidance. Social critique has used the ‘slave’-trade and enslavement only in metaphorical ways. In the abstract, slavery as a term provided the modern symbolic with an intricate apparatus for the formulation of privilege, liminality, and abjection. But critical theory has avoided searching for the traces of its own historical rootedness within this philosophical and political regime of European freedom of and as ownership, and of anti-Black abjection. It entered an exclusive dialogue with the cultural history and philosophy of European (post)-Enlightenment, rather than with critical approaches generated by Black knowledges not always posing as ‘theory’—ranging from eighteenthcentury slave narratives to contemporary Black literary and cultural interventions—which have questioned the naturalized universality of the European subject’s epistemic reign, by way of putting enslavism at the center of their investigation of modern Europe (see Hesse 2009). Neither Marxism, psychoanalysis, nor Foucauldian theory, nor the Frankfurt School, nor poststructuralism and white gender theory have extensively addressed the genealogy of Europe and its subjects created within human practices of enslavism. To understand the intricate psychic, social, and intellectual mechanics of European modernity’s culture of self as ownership, of abjectorship, and the role the human European subject has played in its articulation and (re)production, thus becomes the aim of much needed thick description. An archival textuality of the suppressed and dis-remembered controversies in (early) modern societies, dating back to the early seventeenth century, organized around the question of who could emerge as a European human subject will have to be recuperated. This task is urgently necessary in order to extend existing protocols in various disciplines of how European freedom has been articulated as white self-possession, agency, and anti-Blackness (Walcott in this collection) and in order to position an ethics of bearing witness over and against critical theory’s white narcissism. How to re-think freedom and human articulation in terms other than as ‘bordered in’ by self-possession, undeservedly read as a universal opposition to possession of life? This has become urgently important now that the Enlightenment has become vivified within the discourses of European superiority, no matter how ‘weak’ that alleged superiority seems to have become. Theory itself needs to account for its own groundedness in the narcissistic white mode of Enlightenment thinking. Even a radically critical self-reflection of a modernity, however much shaken to its foundations by

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twentieth-century fascism, has mostly chosen to ignore the silenced subtext of its own history, the access to which was laid open most obviously in the moment of the Haitian revolution—which is tellingly the one moment that has gone missing from European memory of Enlightenment. The absence of this moment in European white self-critical reflection dominates even postmodern critique and still binds white European thinking to taking recourse to an innocent modernity, as it were. By contrast, we need a reading practice, particularly with the next generation of European students, which enables them to understand the constitutive, pervasive, and ongoing European trajectory of abjection of Black being, which precisely keeps affording the accumulation of rights and agency for the white European subject. I want to think about early modern enslavism as that which—if one could do something like a socio-psycho-gram of white capitalist empowerment—needs to be analyzed as the major propeller of modern capitalist mental and psychic constituencies. If commodification and propertization, the learning, grasping, and materializing of the world as ownable have been generally acknowledged as the characteristics of (post)modern capitalist society, then the white abjection of Blackness, the violent making of ‘thingbeings,’ of package-able, shippable, transportable, and possess-able and as such usable, itemizable, and fungible bodily entities was its constitutive practice. As the primary site of financial networking, crediting, speculation, insuring, of profit and calculation—as we know most graphically from Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic (2005)—the practice of enslavism must also be considered as the primary psychosocial and cultural, collective, and individual training site for capitalist white human sociability. To learn—directly and indirectly—how to commodify an always already resistant being needs to be considered the primary threshold exercise for the modern human to become, to empower him/herself as subject. If a human society could achieve that kind of transport and handling (in the physical and metaphorical sense) of more than ten million sentient beings as things, and then could manage to abject this practice successfully from a collective memory of the history of human freedom, it must have passed the test of its own emerging system’s demands in the most generic way, and nothing could stop that sociability from further world commodification. This must be considered as the founding practice of the human subject: the global transactioning of a shippable sentient species. It—pace Patterson—differs fundamentally from other traditions of human bondage; it not only created

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social death, but also the globally negotiable, transferable and competitive profitability, for the human, of Black social death in a generative way. The crucial difference between, say, warlords that kept prisoners as slaves on their grounds, and the transatlantic modern production of social death was the achievement of an abstraction of non-personalized property, item mobility and thus global marketization, and the capitalist inheritability of social death. One could, as a human, inherit social death as capital—financially and otherwise, directly and indirectly—as one could inherit other forms of wealth, which of course entailed a constant and structural reproduce-ability of Black socially dead sentient beings. I am interested in finding out what capacities the human, as a group, trained him/herself to exert, to be able to carry out such historically crucial endeavor. What needs to be stressed in this context is the structural impasse of comparison, the impossibility of analogy, between modern enslavement and forms of colonial, and/or patriarchal and classist subjugation, domination, or conquest of ‘the Other’ by which the a priori humanity of population groups was called into question, and suppressed (see also Wilderson 2010). That impasse lies in the purposeful and concerted production of accumulation and fungibility to use Hartman’s terms again (1997), of Blackness as something which categorically lay outside the realm of the human, without land, without gender, without a position within the nexus of free labor and capital, an enforced state of sentience next to the human world without a relation to and within it. It lies in practices of abstract and concrete marketable creation of Black serviceable flesh, as Spillers has argued (Spillers 1987). That impasse worked in enslavement, as well as it has been working in its afterlife. If one acknowledges enslavism as a white supra-individual practice, what has it meant for white European empowerment, not just in the economic, political, or social sense, but also in the psycho-cultural, and psycho-historical sense? The problem is how to figure that out in retrospect, particularly, if it has functioned as one of the best kept inner sanctums of white (postmodern) consciousness. What we need is a psychoanalysis of the meaning of abjectification (in the sense of the race-fiction based itemization, and the absenting of human relationality for Black sentient beings) for the white European subject who has used the very results of those practices of abjectification, perversely, as the threatening border of his/her own entitlement to self-possession. Thus the most ubiquitous European post Enlightenment liberation metaphors: “We don’t want to be slaves!” or “I

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am not your n----!” mark that white horizon precisely. What I mean to get at is the challenge to think about white self-possession as learned, trained, acquired, and (ac)knowledged not only in a process of defense and advance against feudal interpellation by the powers of the aristocracy and church rule, that is as a cluster of ideologies emblematizing the European subject’s liberation from overwhelming and restrictive powers—which translates in the nineteenth and twentieth century into further rebellions against subjectivation by the state, the factory, patriarchal power, and the tyranny of the symbolic. Instead, from an anti-enslavist perspective, these discourses and practices become visible as learned, trained, acquired, and (ac)knowledged in the collective direct and indirect production of sentient Black social death.

Contemporary Borderlands of Death From here I want to move back to the contemporary Black social and civil death that has been produced by the European subject as a late consequence of this kind of abjectorship. Active mainstream ideology these days, ranging in its proclamations from so-called leftists, as the former 1968 intellectuals in France, through many factions in European white feminism to the advocates of the far right, hinges on the imperative to defend Europeanness—culturally, socially, economically, politically, and by various means of war fare—against the perceived threats of Blackness. My point, on the contrary, requires learning to read Europe as the afterlife of enslavism, and thus its internal fictions and practices as always already rotten to the core. The production of movable thingness re-occurs in the Mediterranean today: a new, necro-political entity has been put, in the most literal sense, into circulation: crucially NOT a recognized Other to the European self, the ‘it,’ the drowned Black, is entirely abjected by the categories of European white subjectivity: a transportable, politically and economically usable, but also dispose-able self-generative item. The African fugitive, both in the metropolises and in the hinterlands, has been denied any dwelling in the realm of ‘difference,’ and ‘otherness’ (postcolonialism’s key signifiers) but has become registered only as abandon-able item-ness. We need a language to talk about the material, political, and cultural interests of the postmodern European subject in this white production and circulation

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of the Black ‘fugitive’s’ social and civil death: to interrupt the white gaze on pitiful suffering, even to disturb the waves of spectacular white media empathy, washing up when things get all too obviously horrible for Black so-called illegal fugitives as in the shock and surprise registered in German media at the time of this writing, geared towards the gratuitous brutalization of homeless African migrants by the state apparatus in German cities. Instead, it will be necessary to listen to the radical critique of white abjectorship that political communities of Black diasopric communities have articulated in various venues, without substantial echo in the critical academy. The various Black manifestos and catalogues of demands, and reports of struggle like Ohlauer Straße, or like Lampedusa in Hamburg (see Ohlauer 2014; Lampedusa 2014), like the recently published Catalogue of Demands by People of African Descent and Black Europeans to the Brussels parliament (see “Demand” 2014)—beyond being responses to particular constraints, violent abuses and discriminations—all rally against the fundamental momentum of white anti-Blackness: the un-humanization of Black being. Hearing that critique could, as Spillers (1987) has phrased it, lead to the production of protocols of self-examination within the academic world, to submit to a Black gaze on the white European practices of re-abjection of Black life: mechanized, propelled, and organized by state apparatuses, institutions like the university, and the mainstream media. An attention needs to be directed to anti-racist, anti-fascist investigations into the discourses and practices of a white continuum, which could connect seemingly far extreme ends of a spectrum. That attention needs to address the dangerous political mainstream populism raging across European metropolitan cities, and the only seemingly random mob and state violence, oftentimes lethal, against dark-skinned migrants all across Europe, including lynch murders in Southern Italian villages, street violence in Moscow, no-go areas for Black Europeans in Berlin or Kopenhagen, with the FRONTEX policies of Fortress Europe designed and carried out with high and prioritized budgets, military cooperation arrangements on the highest level of command, and a keen media savvy to promote Europe’s sanctity against the socalled waves of intrusion from poor and Black countries. In my reading of the situation, without an analysis, and a naming of white abjectorship, the structural European violence against Black being cannot become fully cognitive. And again, let me stress once more that I would like to turn away from an ethnographic documentation of those incidences from the point of view

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of benevolent, almost proto-abolitionist feeling for the victims of such violence towards a Black critique of the white subject’s position whose well-being has been conditioned, and for some people, staked, on just such practices of abjection. We need to learn how to go beyond ethnographic benevolence, as white European teachers, students, intellectuals, and how to practice disloyalty to white abjectorship and its ongoing power.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. — (2003). “The State of Exception: Der Ausnahmezustand.” egs.edu. The European Graduate School, 2003. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/vi deos/the-state-of-exception-der-ausnahmezustand/. 21 July 2014. Baucom, Ian (2005). Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press. Broeck, Sabine (2013). “Lessons for A-Disciplinarity: Some Notes On What Happens to an Americanist When She Takes Slavery Seriously.” In Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier (eds.). Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines, 349–357. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Césaire, Aimé (2001). Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. “Demand Catalogue by People of African Descent & Black Europeans” (2014). isdonline.de. Initiative Schwarzer Menschen in Deutschland e.V., 13–16 Feb. 2014. http://isdonline.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Demand-Catalog-PA D-BE_full-length.pdf. 21 July 2014. Gilroy, Paul (1995). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gordon, Lewis (2007). Disciplinary Decadence. Living Thought in Trying Times. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida (2003). “Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 May 2003. Hartman, Saidiya (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (2007). Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hesse, Barnor (2009). “Afterword: Black Europe’s Undecidability.” In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds.). Black Europe and the African Diaspora, 291–304. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Kilomba, Grada (2008). Plantation Memories. Berlin: Unrast Verlag.

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Kojeve, Alexandre (1980). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom. Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lampedusa in Hamburg (2014). www.lampedusa-in-hamburg.org. Lampedusa in Hamburg—Refugee Protest, n. d. http://www.lampedusa-in-hamburg.org. 21 July 2014. Martina, Egbert Alejandro (2014). Processed Life. processedlives.word.press.com. Processed Life Blog, n. d. http://processedlives.wordpress.com. 21 July 2014. McKittrick, Katherine (2013). “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe, 17.3/42: 1–15. Mills, Charles (1999). The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Morrison, Toni (1993). Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Moten, Fred (2003). In the Break. The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2013). On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Michael A. Scarpitti. London: Penguin. Nimako, Kwame (2011). The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation. London: Pluto Press. Ohlauer Infopoint (2014). ohlauerinfopoint.wordpress.com. @OhlauerInfo. Informationen rund um die geplante Räumung der GHS, n. d. http://ohlauerinfopoint.word press.com. 21 July 2014. Painter, Nell (1995). Soul Murder and Slavery. Waco: Baylor University Press Patterson, Orlando (1985). Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Revision (2012). Dir. Philip Scheffner. Perf. Jürgen Siegmann, Bernd Meiners, Philip Scheffner. Deckert Distribution GmbH. Sexton, Jared (2008). Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sharpe, Christina (2010). Monstrous Intimacies. Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press. Smallwood, Stephanie (2009). Saltwater Slavery. A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spillers, Hortense (1987). “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 17:2, 64–81. Take this Hammer (1963). Dir. Richard O. Moore. Perf. James Balwin. youtube.com. YouTube, n. d. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0L5fciA6AU. 31 July 2014. Tornabene, Francesco (2014). “Filmische Revision eines Kriminalfalls.” funkhauseuropa.de. Funkhaus Europa, 07 July 2014. http://www.funkhauseuropa.de/them en/filme/sueperdvd/revision106_akk-a1-5.html. 21 July 2014. Vergès, Françoise (2011). L’homme predateur: Ce que nous enseigne l’esclavage sur notre temps. Paris: Edition Albin Michel.

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Walcott, Rinaldo (2014). “No Future: After Black Studies, Intellectual Sovereignty, Towards a Project for a New Human.” Keynote Lecture. The Futures of Black Studies—Historicity, Objectives and Methodologies, Ethics. University of Bremen. 24–26 April 2014. Wilderson, Frank B. III (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. Wood, Marcus (2002). Slavery, Empathy and Pornography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wynter, Sylvia (2003). “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation—an Argument.” CR: the New Centennial Review, 3.3: 257–337.

Europe’s Colonialism, Decoloniality, and Racism Marina Gržinić

Introduction The focus of the following text is on Europe. My concern is to contribute to the topic of decoloniality from Europe, as much as from the nonexistent territory of former Eastern Europe. Why talk about Europe? From my point of view, that of a former Eastern European position, Europe is a castrated space—a space where thousands of refugees have been imprisoned, and a space that lives by producing control, with legislation that supports only what Europe is today, and this is the European Union and its establishment of Fortress Europe. On the one hand, there is the old colonialism characterized by the extraction of wealth, millions of enslaved Africans, and the Atlantic trading of Black humans (deprived of their humanity in order to become a commodity). On the other, there is the present system of coloniality that is not only connecting militarism, local wars, and accumulation through dispossession of whole global regions but that also works hand in hand with multinationals and local rapacious political elites and their forms of old and new power structures. In this text, I put forward an analysis of Europe and its colonialism and present coloniality with reference to Achille Mbembe, one of the most important theoreticians from Africa who published a provocative book titled Critique de la raison nègre (Critique of Negro Reason) in 2013. Mbembe, one of the key figures of critical Black thought, a philosopher, and a public intellectual who teaches at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, refers directly to Europe in this book (still in French language only). As formulated by Mbembe, “Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world” (Mbembe 2013a, 9, trans. M. G.), and this downgrade opens new possibilities—but also carries dangers—for critical thinking.

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The other strong thesis of the book deals with what the author calls “the becoming Negro of the world.” From his point of view, “the Negro name no longer refers only to the condition against people of African origin in the era of early capitalism” (Mbembe 2013a, 16, trans. M. G.). The theme of racial difference is explored in such a context to the point of its ultimate consequences. He actually postulates a thesis of Europe being a provincial territory that is imbued with proper, non-reflected colonialism and therefore (re)produces coloniality and its acts of racism even more. In this space, the paradigmatic position of the Black position has now come to be occupied by a wider range of dispossessed groups from inside and beyond Europe. Mbembe makes reference to French theory, specifically Gilles Deleuze, and reuses the famous concept of ‘becoming’ cited by Deleuze, proposing a paradoxical universalization of what Mbembe terms the ‘Negro reason.’ Mbembe argues that if the ‘Negro’ is considered, historically and because of colonialism, a category below humanity, then the situation in present neoliberal global capitalism, which is something of a universal condition for the contemporary world, can also be captured by what he identifies as “becoming Negro of the world.” The “Negro reason,” or the “Negro” discourse, is historically an outcome of three events: colonialism, enslavement, and apartheid (Mbembe 2013a, 119, trans. M. G.). These are historical sequences that likewise do not only present a prison, but also processes of dehumanization with the Negro becoming a commodity, a subalternity, and marginality (2013a, 119), thus questioning humanity as such. He addresses conditions of deprivation and dehumanization of the ‘Negro’ in relation to these three events and also conditions of deprivation, dispossession, and racialization in today’s global capitalist world that are no longer specific to Africa but present in the world at large. His thesis is that, at the present time, there is a category of dispensable bodies that are completely abandoned, traded, and left dying or being pushed below the Western capitalist minimal standards of living. Even more, this means that the becoming ‘Negro’ of the world and the ‘Negro’ reason cannot be thought outside capitalism and neoliberalism. In the final consequence, the universalization of the ‘Negro’ position forces us to ask who the ‘Negroes’ of today really are. One of the answers to this question is the conceptualization of the condition of being a refugee in Europe, in the European Union, in this day and age.

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I claim that European provincialism, and its Eurocentric thinking that transforms Europe into a provincial fortress, has its emblematic becoming ‘Negro’ of the world, and these are not the millions of immiserated people who form the new precariat (especially after the 2008 global economic crisis), but refugees and asylum seekers. Present-day Europe, which has become equivalent to the European Union (in short: EU) with its brutal politics against refugees that have escalated in the last decade (after September 11, 2001), reproduces the becoming ‘Negro’ of the world in the form of secluding refugees and massively rejecting asylum seekers. Evident here are procedures of a kind of migration triage to determine who will be allowed to enter the EU as qualified labor force from other parts of the world. But the rejection is just as evident in the aggressive repulsion politics against thousands of refugees coming to Europe without anything to offer other than their lives being robbed of any human rights. This socalled refugee crisis we have witnessed heavily after 2001 and even more so after 2003, with the U.S. and NATO war named “Operation Enduring Freedom,” put to work by the U.S. military machine and supported by all of the major former colonial Western countries. Meanwhile, we have seen new actors, most prominently China, India, Turkey, and Brazil, trying to play a role in the ongoing colonial and imperial geopolitical reconfigurations of the world. Old and more recent lines of confrontations have been coming into conflict by, for instance, the engagement of China in Africa. But even if the imperial politics of Russia, as one of the old superpowers, have come to be talked about in mainstream discourses as driven by an outdated imperialist script, it remains obvious that the old Cold War differentiation between democracy and totalitarianism is still and again powerful, and has returned in the assumption that there would be a valid ethical distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ imperialism. It must be clear that the piecemeal but steady abandonment of the protection of human rights by the West (having been a crucial Western European topos for exposing its democratic and civilized attitude after WWII) evolved after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was as if, in that moment, the impediment to neoliberal global capitalism had fallen down (the Berlin Wall)—the ensuing gain in freedom pertained exclusively to the inhibition of capital to trespass borders and obstacles. This strengthened mobility of capital has also opened the doors to a massive interior and

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exterior re-colonization in and from Europe. To look at Europe itself through a decolonial lens, therefore, becomes an inevitable and urgent task. In the following, the conceptualization of decoloniality will be elaborated through Mbembe. This perspective has two main moments of critique: first, the demand to de-link from the colonial matrix of power in the fields of education, sexuality, labor, etcetera; and second, the critical assessment of the intensive processes of racialization, on the one hand, and of geopolitical processes of dispossession, on the other. What is challenging is that Mbembe stands in certain opposition to some key thinkers of decoloniality who are epistemically opposed to any Western knowledge constructions. Mbembe uses such constructions abundantly; he cites many different sources and also reuses the Western matrix of knowledge found in Europe. This approximates my theoretical work which likewise centers on the thesis that the radical critique of colonialism, coloniality, and racism has to also take into account the multiplicity of different regimes of knowledge, while reusing and critiquing them as well (Gržinić and Tatlić, 2014). Further, it claims that an anti-capitalist analysis of neoliberal globalization is indispensable for decoloniality. In this text focused on Europe, refugees in Europe, neoliberalism, and racism, I will try to propose that the only way to de-link from the provinciality of Europe is to turn toward possibilities of analysis and critical thought elsewhere. Furthermore, the only way to open up possibilities for white Eastern European thought is, rather than fully embracing the old Western matrix of knowledge that is an outcome of colonialism, to try to rethink our conditions of potentiality together with those whose thoughts were marginalized for far too long. Colonialism and present forms of coloniality have not only dispossessed millions of lives and made them commodities but have also incarcerated their thoughts and discursivity. If Europe, that is, as a fortress Europe, the old Western world, is a provincial territory today, then the thoughts and the intellectual repertoire that it can produce are provincial as well. This extends beyond the borders of the former EU: former Eastern European writers—now part of the big Western, or better, Occidental, world family of thoughts—are just parroting what was already developed in the Western European context and they maybe find themselves accepted only if they can work this repetition with some ‘Balkan’ charm. The fact remains that Western Europe has incorporated into its fundament the two most brutal genocidal logics: enslavement

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and the Holocaust. We know today that the incarceration, marginalization, and rejection of thoughts outside the Occidental (Western) regime represent one approach catering to the steady, discriminative, racist view of the West (Europe) in relation to what it calls ‘the others.’ It is now time, as proposed by decolonial and postcolonial thought, to learn from these epistemological, critical positions ‘elsewhere’ in order to elaborate possibilities ‘here’ for the future and to understand what the state of things presently is.

The State of Things From this angle, we see that although Europe is changing its appearances (forms and modes of ‘being,’ bearing today only one name: Europe), it presents only a Fortress Europe. The Fortress Europe after 2001—and specifically after the biggest enlargement of the European Union in 2004, when ten former Eastern European countries joined the EU that had initially been constituted as a trading alliance for Western Europe established after the WWII—is an aggressive regime of border control and border protection. It works with constant seclusion of those not wanted in the EU (thousands of refugees from Africa and the Middle East), and as such we can state that Europe is continuing its colonialism with other means, developing new colonial relationships for the future. The EU, with its Schengen border system (including a number of geopolitical agencies that multiply daily, like Frontex or Eurosur) that has established regimes of zoning, boundaries, and visas, presents a condition of Europe that resembles a fortress. Fortress Europe has also developed an internal administrative system of tight processes of discrimination and racialization, that is, a set of procedures that materializes not only in forms of direct imprisonment but also through a process of segmentation which reflects brutal class and racial differentiation on levels of education, labor markets, health and social security systems, and so forth—all of which are systems of racialization. We can speak of racialized labor markets, education, public health systems, and social security systems. This means that Fortress Europe, or Europe as the European Union, maintains and (re)produces a constant form of colonial relationships, especially with Africa and other former colonies in the

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Middle East and also Latin America. One of the theses developed by Kwame Nimako and recently by Achille Mbembe (a thesis I have put forward in the past as being axiomatic for the space of Europe) is that we all see and participate in what might be called “Europe psychosis,” aimed at keeping Africans from coming to Europe (Gržinić and Tatlić, 2014). This is now reaching the point that Europe is transforming itself into a prison which incarcerates thousands of refugees and, while doing so, imprisons the ‘citizens’ of the EU as well, for the practices to ‘dispense’ with (get rid of) refugees to prevent them from entering the EU are also implemented in other situations—for instance to ‘calm down’ those on the street against the brutal austerity measures imposed on EU citizens (Greece, Spain, etcetera) after the crisis in 2008. It is also important to note that the reconfigurations fostered by colonialism and reinforced by the coloniality matrix of power have effected a violent rewriting of our vocabularies. We talk of dispensing of humans, collateral damages, etcetera, and such coinages are becoming a normalized rhetorical approach to describing the state of things. The outcome of this situation is, to cite the words of Achille Mbembe that Fortress European Union (EU) is an outdated provincial formation. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Mbembe states: “We cannot afford wasting our precious energies dealing with the kind of mental illness that Europe has caused in Africa and elsewhere. So Europe will have to deal with its own mental illnesses, racism being the first of these. What I was saying is that the African agenda in the world that is shaping up in front of us, a world in which China is emerging as a very major player, a world in which the only proposition coming from the dying American empire is more militarism, a world in which the only idea coming from Europe is a retraction and building a fortress around oneself. What Africa needs to pursue is becoming its own center, and putting its people to work for this. As I was saying, re-imagining a new policy of mobility which implies internal migrations, formations of new diasporas, linkages with old ones, and a redirection of energies in order to tap into energies coming from other places in the world, such as Brazil, India, and China. All of that seems to me more exhilarating than the old and failed attempt at bringing Europe to see itself more than just a province of a broader planet.” (Mbembe 2013b, n. pag.).

Nevertheless, the EU is a place in denial of history that constantly hides its proper policy of racism and anti-Semitism, constructing a colonial capture on human mobility, self-expression and agency. At the core of these processes are what must be called the colonial division and the colonial matrix of power, together with the racist geopolitics of knowledge. Europe is a

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Fortress of brutality, evidenced by measures of structural racism and pervasive racialization, systematic inequalities crammed with a systematically silenced history of colonialism and coloniality. Against this Europe, Mbembe proposes the marginalization of the old continent and the strengthening of connections between emerging countries in a world of global neoliberal times, to achieve what he calls “a world free of the burden of race and resentment and revenge called for by any situation of racism.” He exposes that “Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world” (Mbembe 2013a, 9, trans. M. G.), corresponding to the thesis developed by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his 2000 book Provincializing Europe: Post Colonial Thought and Historical Difference. Mbembe asserts that Europe—and I would be very precise about this: Western Europe—demonstrates thought rooted in colonialism which cannot conceive of the world, as he states, “in terms of mutual belonging (co-belonging),” across difference (Mbembe 2013a, 10, trans. M. G.) but only through the relationship of sameness. The same is actually going on in relation to former Eastern Europe, which is being reproduced, re-formed, or, better, re-civilized according to the West, with the aim of ultimately becoming the same. Mbembe takes the phrasing coined by Gilles Deleuze of constantly changing as ‘becoming’ (and not ‘being’), of becoming in the sense of emphasizing the primacy of desire over power, and suggests a radical turnover, namely, that of ‘the becoming Negro of the world.’ He proposes to universalize the dehumanization of the ‘Negro’ and to take it as the human condition produced by present neoliberalism. This is a gesture of negative universalization, of taking that which figured as the product of the systematic colonial exploitation of millions of Africans, into the main logic of neoliberalism in the era of global capitalism. Mbembe states that the condition of Atlantic colonialism which transformed the Black African Body into an object of merchandise, literally into something to be traded and made dispensable, today is a condition of humanity in neoliberalism. The significance of this elaboration is fundamental. It has been conceptualized in some previous works by Mbembe (Mbembe 2001; 2003), although it attains its central place in his Critique de la raison nègre (2013a). Mbembe tackles the idea of otherness and difference which became crucial levers to better justify the relations of domination and exploitation that culminated in the slave trade, colonization, slavery, and apartheid—a vision that he compares to a “delirium,” having led to many disasters in the recent history of Europe. The term “Negro Reason” in his writings refers to

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“figures of knowledge, a paradigm of subjugation, and a model and predation”—in short, to “a large cage that frames race, or it is also the place of European fantasies” (Mbembe 2013a, 23, trans. M. G.). Mbembe challenges one of the foundations of the Western world and specifically the invention of the word and concept of ‘Negro,’ the way it figures in the European imagination. The ‘Negro,’ in Mbembe’s view, is a subject having undergone a process of transformation through destruction. This is even clearer when Mbembe quotes Deleuze—“there is always a Negro, a Jew, a Chinese, a Great Mogul, an Aryan in delirium” (Deleuze 2003, 25, qtd. in Mbembe 2013a, 11, trans. M. G.). He states that: “The word ‘Negro’ refers as well to a kind of fiction, one that demands to be translated into reality by way of dreams, desire, or violence and cruelty. But above all, it is a concept that refers to the impossibility of control, including the control of those who have been enslaved by it, subjugated to extreme dehumanizing conditions: slaves. From this fact, it is a name that refers to the possibility—always present within history—of a radical uprising.” (Mbembe 2013b, n. pag.)

The consequences are that: “Starting in the 15th century, capitalism has always needed racial subsidies for expanding its reproduction both in time and space. The invention of the Negro operates within a context of transnationalization. What I call the first capitalism was that which was inaugurated on the Atlantic rim. In this triangular commerce that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas, both goods and slaves were circulated. We witness here the emergence and consolidation of certain technologies, the invention of insurances.” (Mbembe 2013b, n. pag.).

Mbembe deploys an enlightening reflection on alterity, on the genealogy of the concept of “race,” which is not possible to divide from the development of capitalism, and from what he names “the becoming Negro of the world.” For capitalist modernity, as he says, “Race is too ‘useful’ to be the object of an erasing. In the contemporary context, it has become more and more difficult for us to state with clarity the reasons for which we constitute a common world. These reasons are no longer obvious at all, and instead of patiently reconstructing the reasons for living together, we create a situation in which what is important is to go looking for the things that separate us. In this context, race becomes an operator because it allows us to separate those that are ‘us’ from those that are not. The mobilization of the racial signifier allows us to split up humanity into those who should live and those who can be endangered with indifference, those belonging to the class of the superfluous.” (Mbembe 2013b, n. pag.).

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In a utopian countermove, Mbembe then points to a horizon of emancipation, that of a ‘rising of humanity’ in a world that has self-critically shouldered the burden of the infected, perverse, hysterical, obsessive language of race. This is fundamental for the recuperation of memory and criticism on the dehumanization that is today visible at its fullest in the socalled European Union refugee crisis. I suggest that we employ Mbembe’s image of Blackness as the ‘ghost of modernity’ to apply it to the present moment with regard to the so-called refugee crisis in the EU.

The ‘Refugees Crisis’ in the European Union Since May 2012, refugee strikes have occurred in Germany, Denmark, Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, France, the Netherlands, and Austria. The protests in Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria have formed, in effect, a network of united forces. The refugee protest in Vienna that started in November 2012 has made visible a scary reality. Indeed, although Austria has a larger percentage of foreign-born citizens than the United States, it does not see itself as an immigrant country, and certainly not as a country with a refugee crisis. As if in response to the statement by the refugee protest movement in Vienna—“our movement is all we have, and we are here to stay”—which started in November 2012 in Austria (and some months before in Germany), we see a violent and disturbing legal and material deprivation of refugees and asylum seekers in the developed Western capitalist countries (Gržinić 2013, n. pag.). What was long considered the brand of democracy in capitalism—protection of human rights—has changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and most especially after September 11, 2001. Policy has shifted to abandon the refugees to bare life, to seclusion, and rightlessness for refugees and asylum seekers. The progressive criminalization of the refugees by the repressive Austrian state apparatuses enacts the hypocrisy of European Union politics. This hypocrisy is evident in EU talks about equal opportunities and freedom of movement on the one hand, while on the other, it effects brutal seclusions of refugees and asylum seekers and insists on an extensive politics of deportation. The movement in 2012 made the situation visible and showed a power of self-mobilization and self-articulation. This self-organized refugee pro-

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test movement, which was supported immediately by many activists and the civil society and students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, was, however, instantly put under harsh pressure and subjected to criminalization procedures. A strong line of alliances exists: artists and groups of refugee background are active in Austria, such as Maiz in Linz, the Research Group on Black Austrian History/Pamoja in Vienna, and many more. Maiz, Linz, and the Black Diaspora in Austria—all show that activists and social and cultural workers have opened the most neuralgic points in contemporary global societies, and specifically Austrian society. Yet these histories, which are as well connected with the new structures of knowledge, representation, and studies, and last but not least with the status of agency and subjectivities, are not recognized as such. Joris Leverink, an Istanbul-based freelance writer and an editor for ROAR Magazine, reported in July 2014 that for eight days a small group of about forty refugees from different but mostly African countries were occupying the roof of a vacant school building in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood. The vacant school building (formerly Gerhart Hauptmann School) on Ohlauer Straße in Berlin had been home to more than two hundred people since October 2012, ever since a nationwide wave of refugee protests culminated in a six-hundred-kilometer-long protest march from the Bavarian town of Würzburg to Berlin. The refugees first set up camp at the central Oranienplatz and later moved on to occupy the vacant school building, where they were holed up and awaiting the slow processing of their asylum applications. As Joris Leverink states: “In the last week of June 2014 a police force of about 900 strong evicted the majority of the two hundred refugees who had sought shelter in the occupied school, but a group of between forty and eighty refugees and fellow-activists refused to leave the building, instead moving onto to the roof to resist their forced eviction. Some of the refugees have threatened to jump if the police moves in on the building. In the words of 32-year old Adam from Sudan: ‘There are some people here who have been waiting in centers around Europe for years only to have their asylum request rejected. They stand to lose everything—they’d rather jump off the building than get caught.’ Under the slogan ‘You can’t evict a movement,’ the refugees have been demanding the closure of Germany’s refugee camps, a halt to forced deportations, and the abolition of the mandatory residence permits that inhibit their freedom of movement. Refugees, immigrants and asylum-seekers coming to Europe are faced with increased threats and hostility from governments and society alike. Through populist media and right-wing political discourse they are depicted as parasites and bloodsuckers free-riding on ‘our’ national wealth, without contributing anything. This

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kind of racist rhetoric is unfortunately characteristic of and inherent to a global economic system where capital and commodities move freely across borders; while new walls are being erected everywhere to halt the resulting flows of human beings. In times of crisis the ‘Other within’ is an all too easy scapegoat for those who try to divert attention away from the real causes of the problems at hand. Europe’s racist and antagonistic attitude towards the pleas of those who flee war zones, torture and execution, or towards those who are simply in search of a better life elsewhere, has become so widespread and generally accepted that even those political parties that originated from the Left are now actively partaking in 1 the witch hunt against everyone who looks or sounds foreign.” (Leverink 2014)

That it is possible and necessary to talk about these questions as a global phenomenon is indicated by the fact that, in 2014 in the U.S., we have what is termed ‘the Central American child and family migrant crisis,’ and most of those kids ‘will end up being sent back to their home countries.’ This is an extremely pessimistic assessment, for the most official source available, a report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, estimates that nearly 60 percent of children arriving in the U.S. from Central America would qualify for legal status on humanitarian grounds (UNHCR 2001). In its Issue 1 (2014), the journal North American Dialogue published an article that, in its introduction, features an analysis stating: “As of the writing of this paper, the U.S. Senate passed a hotly debated, deeply partisan, and long overdue immigration reform bill currently stalled in the House of Representatives. Whether Congress passes it and in what form remains to be seen, but while the main sticking point is the ‘pathway to citizenship’ for the approximately 11 million unauthorized migrants, dramatic increases in policing and militarized enforcement are certain— the bill as it currently stands includes 25–30 billion dollars for border security, 20,000 more Border Patrol agents, and an additional 700 miles of border fence. In the two decades running up to this attempt at reform, what emerged was a punitive approach to immigration enforcement that many have called a ‘deportation regime’ (De Genova and Peutz 2010) focusing on

—————— 1 The point here is not to take recourse to sociological trajectories of migration, refugees, and asylum seekers, but to expose the most acute related moments, where race and class with gender take the central stage of discussion (the Black Atlantic; citizenship and slavery). In order to understand the situation, it is necessary to include discourses on social construction employed by dominant imperial groups to indicate the forced situation of “(non-)belonging,” the diasporas living within Europe, Islamophobia, and the role of the dominant (White) paradigm of colonial power. Paul Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) precisely addresses such concepts of diaspora and a post-national model of belonging, sharing history and experiences.

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the criminalizing of unauthorized migration using federal, state, and local resources to ‘govern immigration through crime’ (Dowling and Inda 2013).” (Alexander and Fernandez 2014, 13)

Martina Tazzioli, in her text “Arab Springs Making Space: Territoriality and Moral Geographies for Asylum Seekers in Italy” (2013), highlights the contested encounter between governmental practices in managing asylum seekers and the embodied experiences of mobility. Her analysis focuses on the situation of refugees from Libya and Tunisia to Italy in 2011–12. She exposes rationalities (asylum seekers versus irregular migrants, country of birth versus country of refuge) and spatialities (processing centers and ‘humanitarian emergency zones’). Tazzioli also underlines that the refugee is the alter ego figure of the citizen. The most palpable sign of this crisis is the refugee situation that has reached catastrophic dimensions in Italy (Lampedusa).

Neoliberalism This analysis is important since it shows that neoliberalism destroyed time, space, and agency. The explanation of neoliberalism given by George Caffentzis is very precise in his “Neoliberalism in Africa: Apocalyptic Failures and Business as Usual Practices,” where he states: “neoliberal theory is the elaboration of a simple assumption: all human activity is always already a commodity and the best way (leading to the greatest satisfaction possible) is to organize these activities through a market. Some activities are already recognized as commodities (waged labor), but the theorists of neoliberalism argue that much activity that had previously been considered ‘inalienable’—like childbearing, lovemaking, health care decisions concerning organ transplants, learning and research, voting, and artistic work—are really actions that are (in a hidden way), and should be considered to be, income-bearing activities. The True, the Good, the Just, the Beautiful and all other capitalized ideals become, in the neoliberal gaze, the many-veiled form of the Commodity. That is why opponents of neoliberalism have justly summarized their position in the slogan: ‘This World Is Not for Sale!’” (Caffentzis 2002, n. pag.).

Connecting anti-neoliberalims to decoloniality, Mbembe argues with reference to Joseph Vogl’s book on the “specters of capital” that “all events and all aspects of the world of life [may] be with a market value” (Vogl 2013, 152, qtd. in Mbembe 2013a, 13, trans. M. G.). Beyond that, he ex-

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poses another feature. If yesterday was about the drama of being exploited by capital, then today, for many, the tragedy is to not be used at all, to be in a condition of “superfluous humanity.” Along with this a new form of psychic life backed by artificial and digital memory and cognitive models within neuroscience and neuroeconomics is emerging (Mbembe 2013a, 13, trans. M. G.). Conditioned by neoliberalism, the dimension that is given to the ‘Negro’ and to all of us is that of a neuroeconomic subject absorbed by the exclusive dual concern of the (biological reproduction of his life and its thinghood. Man-thing, man-machine, man-code, or man-flow—this subject seeks above all to regulate his conduct by the standards of the market, hardly hesitant to self-exploitation and to exploiting others to maximize his share of enjoyment. Sentenced to lifelong learning, flexibility, the reign of the short term, he must embrace his condition of a soluble fungible subject to respond to the injunction that is constantly made—becoming another (Mbembe 2013a, 14, trans. M. G.). Mbembe therefore questions the category of the subject as such. Based on his take on the South African philosophy of Ubuntu, he argues that from the process of becoming a person, the possibility arises to not couple the subject with a subject identity, as metaphysical category in a Western sense, but to see it as a process of constant becoming, as a relation which re/makes the subject in a different interaction with what or who is not the ‘self’. Mbembe states: “that the other is not outside of myself, I am my own other to a certain extent. So there are a whole set of areas where Africa’s contribution to the world of ideas and praxis can be highlighted for the benefit for the world with implications for all sorts of things: theories of exchange, theories of democracy, theories of human rights, and the rights of other species, including natural species, in this age of ecological crisis. It is work that has not been done, but it is time that we are doing it.” (Mbembe 2013c, n. pag.).

Mbembe asserts that it is not possible to separate the object from the subject. He develops the following trajectory: “Western, critical theory, emancipation consists fundamentally in the making of a clear distinction between the human subject and the object, on the one hand, and the human and the animal, on the other hand. The idea being that the human subject is the master, both of himself, and of the natural and animal world. The natural and the animal worlds, he subjects to his use. And that freedom is really the result of that capacity to master oneself and to master the universe and to act rationally. So the argument I was making was that in an age when capitalism has become somewhat of a religion—a religion of objects, a religion that believes in

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objects having become animated, having a soul of which we partake through the operations of consumption which means that capitalism has become a form of animism. In such an age the old division between subject and object is no longer as clear as it used to be and that in fact, if we look carefully at the operations of consumption world-wide today, we might observe that, many people want to become objects, or be treated as such, if only because becoming an object one might end up being treated better than as a human. All of this creates a terrible crisis in the foundational theories of emancipation we used to rely on in order to further a kind of politics of openness and equality. So that was the point I was making and my thoughts on this issue have not gone further.” (Mbembe 2013c, n. pag.)

This opens a possibility to think differently about agency and subjectivity itself in that he argues for the urgency to free life from the constraints of the market logic of aggressive commodification which relies on sameness and exchangeability. He states: “We are in a moment today where the money-form usurps the functions of creation and redemption that were once attributed to God. It is the moment we what we call Mammon in the Bible, or the principle of money, pushes aside the principle of the divine and takes its place. From the moment when the principle of money takes the place of the principle of God, the principle of money becomes the first and last relay of all significations and institutes itself as a cult of idolatry whose dogma consists of confusing everything, mixing up everything: what comes from the human, what comes from the thing, what comes from commercial goods. All this no longer matters.” (Mbembe 2013b, n. pag.).

Conclusion This new path of thinking, as Mbembe hopes, would be open to all and not only limited to the outline of a new ‘Black’ identity. But to follow this path with Mbembe requires a liberation from epistemic coloniality which has insisted on capturing Blackness and Black people in the prison of ‘Negro Reason,’ seen as deviant from and subjugated to human reason. In this logic, I have tried to radicalize a critique of Fortress Europe, to assess the changed status of refugees and asylum seekers in contemporary Europe, who have long been the subject of Western European humanitarian help and who have become the objects of EU abandonment today. This implies thinking about time, history, and agency differently. If we stay in and with Europe epistemically, the old Eurocentric reason of coloniality is endlessly repeated; however, a turn to thinking from outside Europe, like Mbembe’s,

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enables us to re-describe not only the ‘refugee crisis’ as a crisis of provincialized Europe and its violences, but to begin thinking beyond human dispensability.

Works Cited Alexander, William L., and Magdalena Fernandez (2014). “Immigration Policing and Medical Care for Farmworkers: Uncertainties and Anxieties in the East Coast Migrant Stream.” North American Dialogue, 17.1: 13–30. Caffentzis, George (2002). “Neoliberalism in Africa, Apocalyptic Failures and Business as Usual Practices.” Alternatives. Turkish Journal for International Relations, 1.3: n. pag. http://www.alternativesjournal.net/volume1/number3/georgecaff entzis.htm. 23 July 2014. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Post Colonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. De Genova, Nicholas, and Nathalie Peutz (2010). The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2003). Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995. Paris: Minuit. Dowling, Julie A., and Jonathan Xavier Inda (eds.). (2013). Governing Immigration through Crime: A Reader. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gržinić, Marina (2013). “A Refugee Protest Camp in Vienna And the European Union’s Processes of Racialization, Seclusion, and Discrimination.” e-flux journal, 43: n. pag. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/a-refugee-protest-camp-in-vie nna-and-the-european-union%E2%80%99s-processes-of-racialization-seclusio n-and-discrimination/. July 14 Jul 2014. Gržinić, Marina, and Šefik Tatlić (2014). Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life. Lanham: Lexington Books. Leverink, Joris (2014). “‘We want our freedom!’ Refugees resist in Berlin.” roarmag.org. Roarmag.org. reflections on a revolution, 2 July 2014. http://roarmag. org/2014/07/berlin-refugees-occupied-school/. 14 July 2014. Mbembe, Achille (2001). On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. — (2003). “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, 15.1: 11–40. — (2013a). Critique de la raison nègre. Paris: Editions la Découverte. — (2013b). “The Negro, Figure of Human Emancipation.” Interview by Rosa Moussaoui. Trans. Drew Burk and Andrew Baird, Global Center for Advanced Studies. esjrr.org. Reality report, 2013. http://www.esjrr.org/2013/12/achillembembe-negro-figure-of-human.html. 14 July. 2014.

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— (2013c). “Africa and the Future.” Interview by Thomas M. Blaser. africasacountry.com. Africa is a country, 20 Nov. 2013. http://africasacountry.com/africaand-the-future-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/comment-page-1/. 14 July 2014. Tazzioli, Martina (2013). “Arab Springs Making Space: Territoriality and Moral Geographies for Asylum Seekers in Italy.” academia.edu. Academia.edu. Share research, n. d. https://www.academia.edu/4922307/Arab_Springs_Making_S pace_Territoriality_and_Moral_Geographies_for_Asylum_Seekers_in_Italy_F orthcoming_in_Environment_and_Planning. 23 July 2013. UNHCR (2001). unhcr.org. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. http: //www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c2.html. 23 July 2014. Vogl, Joseph (2013). Le Spectre du capital. [Das Gespenst des Kapitals]. 2010. Zürich: Diaphanes.

Countering the Legacies of Colonial Racism: Delinking and the Renewal of Humanism Ina Kerner

Authors writing in the traditions of postcolonial, decolonial, and black thought usually share the assumption that legacies of colonial racism are prevalent and therefore in need of being critically addressed and undone.1 What adherents of these strands of thought do not always agree upon, though, is the best way of fulfilling this task—even though they at least partly draw on the same theoretical sources. In what follows, I will trace major elements of this disagreement and discuss some of their theoretical and political implications. To this end, I will focus on the work of three select authors: Walter Mignolo, who explicitly argues from a Latin American, decolonial perspective, on the one hand; and Achille Mbembe and Paul Gilroy, who write with a particular interest in African postcolonies (Mbembe) and the transregion of the Black Atlantic as well as Great Britain (Gilroy), on the other hand. All three authors decidedly draw on the work of Frantz Fanon when thinking about countering the legacies of colonial racism. As I will show, their respective interpretations of his work

—————— 1 What is the relation of postcolonial, decolonial, and black thought? Drawing a clear distinction between these traditions seems somewhat arbitrary, and elsewhere (Kerner 2012) I have both drawn on canonical African American theorists as postcolonial theorists and introduced decolonial thought as one among various strands of postcolonial studies, in this case from Latin America; the editors of the influential compilation Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Moraña 2008) have, as the subtitle of their book indicates, taken a similar decision. Walter Mignolo, by contrast, who is currently among the most prolific—or maybe the most prolific—proponent of decolonial thought, claims a clear distinction. According to him, postcolonial thought refers to the former British Empire only and, furthermore, theoretically draws most of all on poststructuralism and postmodernism, which he holds to be Eurocentric and therefore unsuitable for decoloniality (Mignolo 2011, xxvi). This depiction of postcolonial thought differs considerably from the decidedly broader one that is predominant within postcolonial studies. See, among many other publications that could be referenced in this regard, Ashcroft et al. (1995); Bartolovich and Lazarus (2002); and Bancel et al. (2010).

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differ as much as their take on how current, persisting or re-actualized forms of colonial racism might best be fought or even overcome.

1. Fanon on Colonial Racism and Anti-Colonial Struggle Frantz Fanon’s first monograph, Black Skin, White Masks, decidedly addresses the psychological effects of racism—both with regard to everyday life in the French colonies of the Caribbean and to black Antillean migrants’ experiences in the French metropole. Fanon diagnoses passiveness and aggression, feelings of inferiority and overcompensation among the possible effects of racist experiences. According to him, the basic situation of blacks in the French empire was characterized by alienation, the feeling of being locked in one’s blackness. Whites were locked in their whiteness, too; but they, by contrast, would often consider themselves as superior, and therefore functioned as a yardstick for black people’s aspirations and actions. This, again, would lead to an “internalization or rather epidermalization” of inferiority (Fanon 2008, xv), and further to a split of consciousness, that led blacks to constant struggles against their own image (Fanon 2008, 170). Concerning racism’s modes and mechanisms, Fanon decidedly offers a systemic rather than a mere actor-centered view, as he deliberately stresses the importance of epistemic aspects, the realm of knowledge and the cultural. In the colonies, language and education are of particular relevance in this regard; according to Fanon, to speak a particular language means “assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization” (Fanon 2008, 2). And he holds that all colonized people, or “people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave,” position themselves in relation to the “civilizing language” (Fanon 2008, 2) and attempt assimilation to the cultural values of the metropole. Within the metropoles, by contrast, racism operates precisely by denying assimilation to colonial migrants. Metropolitan racism, according to Fanon, works by classifying and essentializing, by imprisoning the colonized in their own visible appearance, an appearance that is associated with cultural inferiority (2008, 15, 18). Metropolitan racism therefore works by complete disregard of individuality, of an individual’s aspirations and iden-

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tifications. According to Fanon, such discursive strategies lead to personal misrecognition as well as the misrecognition of black culture, civilization and history (Fanon 2008, 17). It is noteworthy that Fanon’s vision for overcoming such epistemic aspects of colonial racism and the alienation it induces is decidedly existentialist. It thus differs substantially from standpoint-oriented, identity-politics approaches to anti-racism.2 In fact, Fanon is rather wary of attempts at deducing one’s destiny from one’s history. According to him, black as much as white people could overcome their alienation only when they refused “to let themselves be locked in the substantialized ‘tower of the past’” (Fanon 2008, 201). Racism as Fanon conceptualizes it is not restricted to epistemic aspects, though. The other crucial component is economic. Overcoming the alienation of blacks therefore required the combination of subjective endeavors on an individual basis with material struggles (Fanon 2008, xv). What was needed was nothing less than “restructuring the world” and “a change in social structure” (Fanon 2008, 63, 66). As is widely known, a few years after the publication of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon joined the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria; his writings also focused more and more on economic and political aspects of colonial and postcolonial constellations. This is certainly true for The Wretched of the Earth, a substantial part of which is an ardent critique of colonialism. Fanon characterizes the colonial situation as “exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer”, the colonial world as a compartmentalized world, divided in two, Manichaean and petrified (Fanon 2004, 3, 15). Colonial exploitation and segregation are achieved by openly displayed police and army violence (Fanon 2004, 4) as well as by racism. “This compartmentalized world […] is inhabited by different species,” Fanon describes the effects of such racism, namely the association of group membership and social status: “You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich” (2004, 5). To the colonizers, the colonized symbolize the

—————— 2 The fact that Fanon was rather skeptical about identity politics, including black political and cultural movements, didn’t hinder political activists, for instance of the Black Power movement, to rely on him in such a regard (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967, xi–xii). For a discussion of Fanon’s take on identity politics, see Kruks (1996), for his complicated relationship to anticolonial nationalism and his existentialism, Lazarus (1999); for a discussion of his “postcolonial cosmopolitanism,” emerging from colonialism’s contradictions and therefore “a part of Europe’s history as much as the history of the colonized,” see Go (2012, 221).

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absence or even the negation of values. Taken to its extreme, this logic leads to acts of dehumanization, of reducing the colonized to an animallike state (Fanon 2004, 6–8). Therefore, Fanon characterizes colonialism as “a systemized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity” (2004, 182). True decolonization therefore required the overcoming of colonial differentiations, a complete destruction of the Manichaean colonial world—an “agenda for total disorder” including “the creation of new men” (Fanon 2004, 2).

2. Colonial Divisions, Decolonial Delinking: Walter Mignolo Decolonial thought, particularly the work of authors engaged in the modernidad/colonialidad project, is characterized by a decidedly critical stance towards Western epistemology, which in this tradition is held to be inseparable from its colonial and thus racist underside. Walter Mignolo characterizes the effects of this darker side of Western epistemology as highly damaging, as having inflicted what he calls the “colonial wound” (2005, 8). Developing this notion, he refers to the thought of Frantz Fanon—namely the damnés, the wretched of the earth, as “the wounded of the imperial/colonial world order” (Mignolo 2005, 108). According to Mignolo, coloniality names “the experiences and views of the world and history of those whom Fanon calls les damnés de la terre (‘the wretched of the earth,’ those who have been, and continue to be, subjected to the standards of modernity). The wretched are defined by the colonial wound, and the colonial wound, physical and/or psychological, is a consequence of racism, the hegemonic discourse that questions the humanity of all those who do not belong to the locus of enunciation (and the geo-politics of knowledge) of those who assign the standards of classification and assign to themselves the right to classify.” (2005, 8, original emphasis)

As this quote demonstrates, colonial racism, as Mignolo defines it, hinges on discourse, namely on Western discourse. With this conceptual decision, Mignolo deliberately parts from Fanon’s own claim that there is an interlink between ‘race’ and social status or class in the colonial world. The “damnés in the sense of humiliating people racially (the colonial epistemic and ontological differences) transcend class,” Mignolo states (2011, 121);

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for Jens Kastner and Tom Waibel, this in fact marks an elimination of Marxism from decolonial theory (Kastner and Waibel 2012, 37). And there is another aspect in which Mignolo parts from Fanon; he considerably broadens the notion of the wretched of the earth. For Mignolo, this notion does not name all those who are subjected to practices of European colonialism, like in Fanon, but all those who are subjected to the racist standards of modernity, which in fact transcend European colonialism. Accordingly, the decolonial project or option implies no less than the disruption of the discursive forms of coloniality and thus of Western modernity. This is to be achieved by challenging Eurocentric and modernist perspectives—which Mignolo holds to be the hegemonic mode of thought on a global scale—with recourse to critical perspectives that take the colonial wound seriously and use it as a starting point for imagining a different, a pluralized world (2005, 156). Mignolo finds the intellectual resources for such an alternative epistemology in what he calls border thinking, the work of theorists and social movements connected to the wretched.3 He sketches such border thinking as inherently non-metropolitan, and in fact as an inevitable effect of the modern/colonial expansion—for the colonized had no choice but to critically reflect on their mode of life and on their master’s way of thought (2005, 9). To Mignolo, border thinking entails and combines two major elements. First, acts of conceptual reclaiming and resignification, which are to counter the epistemic violence that modern/colonial knowledge has produced; an example is the work of Afro-Andean scholars, like Juan García Salazar or Edizon León, who stress concepts of “ancestry” and “lo propio,” one’s own, against Eurocentric models of history (Mignolo 2005, 112–114). The second aspect is interculturalidad in the sense of epistemic plurality, which in many countries of Latin America implies the recognition of indigenous knowledge systems. Mignolo attributes an inherent value to what he calls a “pluriversality” (2011, 222) of knowledge and values, since it counters the hegemony of modern/colonial thought; and he holds that it does so independently of the respective contents of the differing forms of knowledge he wants to see as co-existing. His prime example for setting into work interculturalidad are projects of bilingual, intercultural education,

—————— 3 One of Mignolo’s prime models of border thinking is the writing of Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, who in her bilingual and multiple genre book Borderlands/La Frontera portrays the U.S.-Mexican border as an open wound, as “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3).

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for instance the Universidad Intercultural de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas Amawtay Wasi, an institution of higher education in Ecuador that is closely linked with indigenous movements and in its teaching combines Spanish and Quechua knowledge systems (2005, 117–128); or the thought of the Mexican Zapatistas that links Marxist categories and indigenous cosmology (2000, 140).4 Mignolo is interested in border thinking and indigenous knowledge in the sense of what Michel Foucault in a lecture from 1976 has called an “insurrection of subjugated knowledges”—as a return of buried historical contents and as a re-emergence of local “popular knowledge” that at some point had been disqualified as insufficiently elaborated, but that now, with its re-emergence, could become the basis of a locally grounded new form of social critique (Foucault 2003, 6–9; Mignolo 2000, 19–20).5 In this sense, Mignolo sees, in the perspective of those who have been silenced in the course of the making of Latin America, the possibility for “breaking the Western code” (2011, 225) and thus for radical change (2005, xv). He calls embracing such perspectives “epistemic disobedience” and “delinking” (Mignolo 2011, 122, 224). Such delinking marks the stepping out of the hegemonic epistemic regime, the modern/colonial system, in order to create alternative visions and practices in the fields of economy, politics, ethics, philosophy, technology, and society (2012, 54, 81). It is a practice that according to Mignolo must necessarily be exercised from below, from civil and political society—or rather from those segments of it which are constituted by subjects who have been marginalized and dehumanized by the modern/colonial order and the racism it entails (2012, 188–189). Therefore, Mignolo’s vision for overcoming colonial racism is, in the first place, a vision for those negatively affected by colonial racism. It is only here, within the communities of the wounded and the silenced, that he sees alternatives in the making, alternatives that have the power to disrupt the hegemonic discursive order. As we will see, this vision differs considerably from conceptions proposed by Achille Mbembe and by Paul Gilroy.

—————— 4 It might seem contradictory that at this point, Marx is again on the horizon of Mignolo’s thought. But it comes up in his presentation of an alternative mode of thought, of border thinking. Mignolo’s own critical analysis of colonial racism concentrates on epistemic matters alone. 5 For a harsh critique of Foucault’s attempt to resurrect popular knowledge, as this endeavor would disregard both the effects of ideology and the power relation between intellectuals and the people, see Spivak (1988).

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3. Conceptualizing a Renewed Humanism: Achille Mbembe and Paul Gilroy Whereas Walter Mignolo suggests epistemic delinking for counteracting modern epistemology and the racism it entails, both Achille Mbembe and Paul Gilroy argue for the overcoming of racial differentiations and for inclusive modes of community and conviviality. While Mignolo takes up Fanon’s diagnosis of the colonial Manichaeism, the division or compartmentalization of the world, and claims its continued relevance in current, post-independence times, Mbembe and Gilroy rather draw on Fanon’s plea for a new, critical humanism and on his conviction that a better world requires the destruction of colonial divisions—and they call for acts of such destruction in the present. For Achille Mbembe, the way to proceed in this sense is via the formation of ethical communities that transcend colonial lines of differentiation, and thereby have the potential to finally undoing them. In his seminal work On the Postcolony, originally published in 2000, he had focused on the epistemic, or discursive dimension of colonial practices and their effects—primarily those racist difference constructions that European colonial powers used to render Africa as Europe’s Other and that negated its peoples the status of full humanity. Mbembe characterized such difference constructions as a form of power inherently connected to violence. For this, he referred to their content, on the one hand: according to him, the reduction to physicality, ascriptions of irrationality and the animalization and bestialization that characterized colonial imaginations of the African population had brutalizing effects (Mbembe 2001, 14). On the other hand, such images of Africans did not only circulate in the sphere of the cultural, but were institutionalized in the course of the slave trade and colonialism; they were materialized in various ways. According to Mbembe, this made violence infuse economy, the private, language and consciousness; it became a cultural practice and constituted a spirit of violence with far reaching subjectivation effects (2001, 175). It is now precisely against this backdrop that in his more current writing, including in his comments on the work of Frantz Fanon, Mbembe suggests the strengthening of the idea of a common human nature, an idea that for a long time posed—and maybe still poses—“a problem for Western consciousness” (Mbembe 2001, 2). Mbembe argues that Fanon’s revolutionary theory should be interpreted within the context of a more general theory of the rise in humanity, montée en humanité, when he writes:

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“The colonized has to propel himself, by his own force, to a level above the one to which he has been consigned as a result of racism and subjugation. […] In this way, he restores the possibility, for him personally and for humanity as a whole, starting with his executioners, of new and open dialogue between two equal human subjects where, previously, there had been opposition between a man (the colonialist) and his object (the colonized). From then on there is no more black and white. There is only a world finally rid of the burden of race, a world to which everyone has a right.” (2012, 24)

As this quote should make clear, when Mbembe speaks of a common human nature or the rise in humanity, he does not refer to Western humanism and universalism in an unbroken way. For not unlike Mignolo, he holds that postcolonial critique should uncover the racist underside that the Western tradition of thought has produced in order to be able to restrict its assertive claims to people of European descent (Mbembe 2009, 34). To Mbembe, what is needed for not reproducing the effects of the colonial order in the present is precisely a political culture that makes it possible for every person to regain subject status, to be recognized as a fellow human and to engage in person-to-person dialogue. Only such a culture of mutuality and the common would enable the disruption of violent colonial hierarchies, on the one hand, and anti-colonial counter violence and revenge on the other (Mbembe 2009, 35). What I would like to stress as noteworthy is that for Mbembe, this vision for the future implies both sides of the former colonial split.6 Different from Mignolo, who advocates acts of delinking and for whom hopes for a better future are restricted to contexts that search for alternatives to modern/colonial logics, Mbembe’s aim is to establish ethical communities precisely in those contexts that were characterized by colonial differentiations and hierarchies before. This demands a recognition of “black people’s capacity for self-making, self-reference and self-expression” as well as “versions of whiteness that are […] constituted […] around an ethics of

—————— 6 In his monograph Sortir de la Grande Nuit, Mbembe draws on both Jean-Luc Nancy and Frantz Fanon to develop a notion of “déclosion du monde et montée en humanité” (2010, 55). He refers to Fanon’s reference to a zone of non-being, which is also employed in decolonial thought, for instance by Ramón Grosfoguel (2011). But while for Grosfoguel this zone is synonymous with a social position of those oppressed (see Grosfoguel 2011, 99), Mbembe interprets Fanon’s zone of non-being as race itself: “cette zone de non-être qu’est, à ses yeux, la race,” he writes (2010, 69, original emphasis). The déclosion he is advocating for is precisely the breaking out of that zone: “sortir de l’enclos de la race,” leaving ‘race’ behind (2010, 69, original emphasis).

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mutuality and human solidarity” (Mbembe 2009, 36). This means that while Mignolo renounces the European tradition and argues for processes of delinking from it, Mbembe rather holds it accountable; according to the latter, postcolonial thought “calls upon Europe to live what it declares to be its origins, its future and its promise, and to live all of that responsibly (Mbembe 2009, 38). Mbembe’s drawing on Fanon to gain a notion of a “new form of critical humanism” (2009, 38) is compatible with the work of Paul Gilroy. Already in his book Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line, the basic driving force is a post-racial notion of the human, a “radically nonracial humanism” (Gilroy 2000, 15). With this notion, Gilroy particularly criticizes current forms of black culture and community which he holds to be based too much on quasi-biological models of solidarity and which he therefore characterizes as being depoliticized. In After Empire, which was published four years later, Gilroy follows up on this criticism and shifts his perspective on British society in general. Here, he refers to the notion of conviviality to sketch out a positive political vision. This vision draws on the daily interactions in the heterogeneous reality of postcolonial cities; it thereby transcends multicultural affirmations of ‘racial’ and cultural differences. But like Mbembe, Gilroy formulates requirements that must be met before this scenario has an actual chance of realization. To him, the conviviality he envisions requires the former empire to deal with its colonial past, and to particularly acknowledge that current social conflict in connection to migration and integration stem from this past and can only be understood and solved within this horizon (Gilroy 2004, 2–3). The establishment of a postcolonial political culture therefore requires precise analyses of the connections that in the course of history were constructed between notions of ‘race,’ culture, civilization and nation, as well as the will to substantially revise these notions. Furthermore, what is needed, according to Gilroy, is the realization of a worthwhile liberalism— a liberalism that reflects on its colonial sedimentations and implications and that counteracts ‘racial,’ ethnic and national boundaries. Racism and antiracism would have to be treated as political issues and to be freed from their societal shadow existence as matters of personal preference or choice; the constitutive entanglements between European modernity and colonial and imperial experiences would have to be acknowledged, and the influence of black literature, culture, art and music on European life would have to be stressed, including the important role that a turn to African American

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cultures played for the cultural reconstitution of Europe after fascism (Gilroy 2004, 162). Gilroy holds that the most important element of this program is anti-racism—not in the sense of an acknowledgment of cultural diversity, but rather as an engagement against the reification of ‘racial’ differentiation of any kind (2004, 167). To him, the strongest forces that oppose a culture of conviviality are racism and nationalism (2004, 112). The point that I would like to stress here is that Gilroy, like Mbembe, but unlike Mignolo who pleads for acts of epistemic delinking and intellectual independence, believes in inclusive solutions; not ‘only’ for postcolonies, but also for the metropoles. He does, like Mbembe, stress that such solutions require the metropoles to change: to him, modern self-perceptions that do not acknowledge the long history of global interdependencies, colonial legacies of racism, and the need for deliberate acts of fighting it render an actualization of a culture of conviviality unlikely. But it is crucial that Gilroy, when thinking about ways of countering colonial racism, explicitly addresses the metropoles, formulating a catalogue of concrete demands for them to fulfill. It is crucial because this means that like Mbembe, he holds them accountable. He would probably not be inclined to raise this demand did he not have at least a slight bit of hope that they can, and might, change for the better.

4. End The writings of Frantz Fanon have inspired a broad variety of interpretations.7 As I have attempted to show, such interpretative diversity also holds for the work of Mignolo, Mbembe, and Gilroy. All three authors take up specific ideas of Fanon to use them in their own theorizing on the legacies of colonial racism. Nevertheless, the ways in which they do this are quite distinct. Mignolo takes up Fanon’s notion of the colonial division as shorthand for describing power relations in our current world, which according to him still awaits decolonization. Furthermore, he uses Fanon’s expression of the wretched of the earth to give a unifying but formal, non-substantializing and non-essentializing name to the subjects of border thinking, the core term of his own thoughts on how to overcome the legacies of colonial

—————— 7 For an overview, see the essays in Alessandrini (1999) and in Gordon et al. (1996).

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racism. Mbembe and Gilroy, on the other hand, rather take up a core element of Fanon’s ethical-political concerns, his plea for a new form of humanism, and think about what would be needed to translate it into our current times. All three authors share Fanon’s conviction that overcoming colonial racism requires considerable renewal. But they noticeably differ with regard to the question of who the agents of such renewal might be, and where the epicenters of such renewal are likely to be located. Mignolo clearly favors delinking from Western epistemology; it is border thinkers that he pins his hopes on. Interestingly, in his latest book, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Mignolo claims that decoloniality, namely “‘long term processes involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic, and psychological divesting of colonial power,’ […] should lead to the ‘new humanity’ claimed by Frantz Fanon” (2011, 52). He does not suggest how such processes might be realized beyond communities of border thinkers themselves, though. His claim for an epistemic pluriversality pretty much resembles a plea for a form of global multiculturalism, a system where all communities are free to flourish in accordance with their tradition, convictions, and beliefs. It remains unclear in his thinking if, and how, he imagines border thinking to transcend the context it stems from, how exactly it might help divest colonial power outside of the communities of those engaged in forms of decolonial thought. At this precise point, both Mbembe and Gilroy considerably differ from Mignolo. For both of them, the plea for a new humanism involves everyone—including the former colonialists. Therefore, Mbembe as well as Gilroy do not exclusively address and direct their hopes and demands towards the former colonized or those communities that suffer from racism, like black communities. Rather, they deliberately argue in an encompassing way. They hold everybody accountable for the task of overcoming racism—this includes, in a particular way, white people, Europe, the metropoles. For both authors, colonial racism is a crucial, yet infamous, element of European history; but they can at least theoretically imagine a Europe, as well as former European colonies, combating and overcoming colonial racism. Mignolo, by contrast, treats racism as inevitable as long as, and wherever, Western epistemology is hegemonic. Within the realm of the West itself, he seems to see no way out. This skepticism somehow resonates with his disinterest in possible hierarchizing or excluding elements in the non-Western epistemologies that

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he embraces; the racism that Mignolo is interested in critiquing is modern/colonial racism in its pure form only. In this respect he diverges particularly from Gilroy, who has put great effort into his critical analyses of the politics of Black movements, which, despite his principle sympathy for such movements, he is far from approving on a general basis.8 While for Gilroy, potential actors and loci of anti-racism can in principle be found everywhere, at least within every nation and in every ethnically or racially defined group, he does not assume that in any group or location a politics of overcoming the legacies of colonial racism will necessarily be actualized. For both Gilroy and Mbembe, the vision of a new, critical humanism entails transcending the divisions colonialism relied upon. Neither of them claims this to be an easy task, and in fact both authors provide lists of requirements for it to seem achievable. For Mignolo, who proposes delinking, such transcendence seems unimaginable—at least in the near future. So while his decolonial option at first sight may seem considerably more radical than the scenarios Mbembe and Gilroy sketch out, in the end it proves to be the more pessimistic.

Works Cited Alessandrini, Anthony C. (1999). Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Anzaldúa, Gloria (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds.). (1995). The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Bancel, Nicolas, Florence Bernault, Pascal Blanchard, and Ahmed Boubeke (eds.). (2010). Ruptures postcoloniales. Les nouveaux visages de la société française. Paris: La Découverte. Bartolovich, Crystal, and Neil Lazarus (eds.). (2002). Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton (1967). Black Power. The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage Books. Fanon, Frantz (2004). The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

—————— 8 In this, Mignolo also differs considerably from Fanon, who, next to harshly denouncing colonial racism, warned of tribalism and the possible “racism of the young national bourgeoisie” after decolonization as well (Fanon 2004, 110).

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— (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Foucault, Michel (2003). “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. New York: Picador. Gilroy, Paul (2000). Against Race. Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univerity Press. — (2004). After Empire. Melancholia or convivial culture? London: Routledge. Go, Julian (2012). “Fanon’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism.” European Journal of Social Theory, 16: 208–225. Gordon, Lewis R., T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White (eds.). (1996). Fanon: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Grosfoguel, Ramon (2011). “La Descolonización del Conocimiento: Diálogo Crítico entre la Visión Descolonial de Frantz Fanon y la Sociología Descolonial de Boaventura de Sousa Santos.” In VV.AA. (eds.). Formas-Otras. Saber, Nombrar, Narrar, Hacer. IV Training Seminar de Jóvenes Investigadores en Dinámicas Interculturales, 97–108. Barcelona: CIDOB. Kastner, Jens, and Tom Waibel (2012). “Dekoloniale Optionen. Argumentationen, Begriffe und Kontexte dekolonialer Theoriebildung.” In Walter Mignolo. Epistemischer Ungehorsam. Rhetorik der Moderne, Logik der Kolonialität und Grammatik der Dekolonialität, 7–42. Wien: Turia + Kant. Kerner, Ina (2012). Postkoloniale Theorien zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Kruks, Sonia (1996). “Fanon, Sartre, and Identity Politics.” In Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White (eds.). Fanon: A Critical Reader, 122–133. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Lazarus, Neil (1999). “Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Question of Representation in Postcolonial Theory.” In Anthony C. Alessandrini (ed.). Frantz Fanon. Critical Perspectives, 161–194. New York: Routledge. Mbembe, Achille (2001). On the Postcolony. Berkeley: UC Press. — (2009). “Postcolonial Thought Explained to the French.” The Johannesburg Salon, 1: 34–39. jwtc.org.zw. JWTC, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, 24 Jan. 2014. http://www.jwtc.org.za/the_salon/volume_1/achille_mbembe. htm. 14 July 2014. — (2010). Sortir de la Grande Nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée. Paris: Découverte. — (2012). “Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon.” African Studies, 71:19–28. Mignolo, Walter (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (2005). The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell. — (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke Univertiy Press. — (2012). Epistemischer Ungehorsam. Rhetorik der Moderne, Logik der Kolonialität und Grammatik der Dekolonialität. Wien: Turia + Kant.

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Moraña, Mabel, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (2008). Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Durham: Duke University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 272– 313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Why the Postsocialist Cannot Speak: On Caucasian Blacks, Imperial Difference, and Decolonial Horizons Madina Tlostanova

The title alludes to Gayatri Spivak’s well-known formulation of the subaltern who cannot speak (1988) and to Jennifer Suchland’s less known and more recent idea of the postsocialist who also cannot speak (2011a) and has not been able to start speaking during the last two decades. Why this parallel? Is it just a matter of a catchy rhetorical trope, a postcolonial metaphor applied to a different context, or is there some inherent similarity between the racialized other of Western modernity and homo post-sovieticus— a strange agent disturbing the dichotomous scheme of the West/vs. the East or rather the North/vs. the South, an agent who cannot fully occupy either of the familiar binary positions (the colonizer or the colonized, the world proletariat or world capital) and generates instead oxymoronic categories such as the poor North which refuses to be equated with the poor South and which, in addition, has its own South and East (Tlostanova 2011a)? For Suchland it is useful to turn to the idea of postcolonialism to articulate a separate postsocialist critique which would consciously avoid reproducing the geographic ideologies of Cold War knowledge production. She singles out several versions of this new tendency—from the position of Central and Eastern European states viewing “their present in postcolonial terms which helps them to make sense of decades long experiences with hegemonic powers in the heart of Europe” (2011b, 109), to so-called internal colonization—a concept recently revamped among post-Soviet scholars not marked by racial/religious or cultural difference and neglecting the Russian/Soviet postcolonial situations per se. Here the example of A. Etkind (2007) as cited by Suchland should be noted alongside Alexey Penzin’s (2008) more recent effort to present the post-Soviet subject as the new subaltern of the global world erasing the difference between the imperial and colonial realms altogether. Suchland praises Sharad Chari’s and Katherine Verdery’s call for thinking between the posts (2009) in order to

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rethink contemporary imperialism. I also find this effort to destabilize the easy and clear confinement of postcoloniality to the third world and postsocialism to the second world to be a necessary step which allows foreseeing the darker colonial side of Soviet and, more broadly, Socialist modernity with a possible projection in the direction of a global coloniality through which all of the worlds within the outdated tripartite scheme have been going. It allows for an analysis of a consistent cultivation and maintaining of ontological, economic, social, racial, epistemic ‘bondage’ of Western modernity, determining a single norm of humanity and classifying all other people as deviations, dismissed or subject to various changes with the goal of bringing them closer to the Western ideal—‘organic’ as in the case of Western Europe as such or borrowed, as in the case of Russia/the USSR which has been trying to pass for Europe. This tendency also equates indigenous people in the New World with the ‘enemies of the people’ in the Soviet Union or ‘Muslim terrorists’ today. In all cases, modernity justifies violence and the inversion of human rights (Hinkelammert 2004) of those who are branded as not quite human (that is, not quite European, not quite Soviet, not quite Christian, not quite White, etcetera.). On the one hand, the postcolonial subaltern shares with the postsocialist other such features as multiple dependences and the “paradigms of subjection, subalternity and peripheralization” (Kolodziejczyk and Sandru 2012, 116), mental if not economic and social subordination, invisibility to the wider world, and the continued forms of silencing and trivialization by the dominant discourses, the growing dispensability of his/her life, the intricate colonization of the spheres of being, of thinking, of perception by the norms and tastes of Western modernity which continue after political decolonization and flourish after formal desovietization. On the other hand, this general observation does not take into account the enormous notional, structural, and disciplinarian differences in the local histories and concrete manifestations of postcolonial and postsocialist constraints that, in the long run, would prevent a conscientious scholar from simply equating the two intersecting discourses. It should still be possible to theorize these similarities in difference and eventually learn to see the same yet different categories, concepts, and terms, echoing psychological, existential, and epistemic phenomena shaded by different local histories. For one thing, the postsocialist is a much less homogenous entity than even the diverse and contradictory postcolonial realm which has also been criticized when used as an umbrella term. The reason is that the post-

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socialist category uses the outdated marker of ideology to replace a much more complex variety of phenomena inter-related in a hierarchical way and grounded not in simplified ideology alone but in other much more fundamental terms that have to do with ontological and epistemic racism, existential self-negation, the peculiar redoubling of xenophobic discourses, etcetera, which modern Western ideologies such as liberalism or communism are unable to explain. The tag “postsocialist” is also unable to successfully glue together the multiplicity of countries, people, cultures, religions, and sensibilities that came under Soviet auspices for several decades in the twentieth century and then dispersed again, joining remaining power vectors of various kinds. The first officially sanctioned Western reaction to the collapse of the Socialist world was that of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” discourse (1992), after which came a typical Western understanding of the post-Soviet in a temporal rather than spatial sense, rendering irrelevant millions of people who still struggle with their existence in the territories to the East of the West. In this new historical narrative, the defeated Socialist enemy had to follow the familiar structural pattern and obediently disappear after the heroic epic of capitalism/vs. socialism was over. Symptomatically this was true of the postcolonial theorists as well, demonstrating their inherent indebtedness to the temporal-spatial conceptual model of Western modernity (Spivak 1999). Alluding to W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous phrase, Jane Anna and Lewis Gordon point out that racism and colonialism generated people “marked as the continued sign of ill fate and ruin. Problem people” (2010, 28). The rapidly vanishing Second World and particularly its post-Soviet part came to be a problematic region in such a post-Duboisean collective sense of people with delayed or questionable humanity and no place in the new architecture of the world. But the problem was that it was not a clearly racialized division, it was a poorly representable semi-alterity. Russians and, more broadly, Eastern Europeans have become the off-White Blacks of the new global world after 1989, not in Norman Mailer’s sense of the hipsters or “wiggers” (1957) but in the sense of looking and behaving too similar to the same, yet remaining essentially others. The inhabitants of the post-Soviet space who, for the last twenty years, have been universally regarded as the annoying remnants of the collapsed system unwelcome in any part of the world to which they have been trying to escape, remain the essential outlaws of the new world with no future;

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even if after 9/11, the emphasis of othering has shifted to the Muslim others as the new global emblematic fiends and lately to whole countries, particularly in the South of Europe (Dainotto 2000), seriously touched by the systemic crisis of modernity. Anyone today can become such a victimmonster symbolizing and signalizing a state of crisis and annoying those who are still precariously afloat. Yet the post-Soviet case is particularly doomed. The postsocialist and post-Soviet world has continued to vacillate between the position of the subject and the object in the last two decades. We were supposed either to reform ourselves and become modern and Western subjects in some distant future, to join the refurbished global South when applicable, or to simply vanish. At the peak of the postcolonial fashion and in the absence of any meaningful overall theoretical paradigms to discuss the postsocialist condition—which the old Western Sovietology could not explain any more in its cold-war area studies terms and manner or in a more modernized version of Eurasian studies today, which still tends to rehearse the cold war discourses of dissent, as Suchland correctly points out (2011b, 105)—it was the easiest step to apply postcolonial theory to postsocialist reality. The first examples were quick to emerge, such as David Chioni Moore’s article in the influential PMLA (2001). It was a step forward in comparison with Fukuyama’s erasing discourse, as it did at least not refuse to see living people in Eurasia, even if it tended to pack their lives into convenient foreign theoretical models. Yet there were inherent problems with applying the postcolonial theory to postsocialist reality. It was not possible to lump together Eastern and South-Eastern European countries and the USSR without taking into account the complex interplay of colonial and imperial differences and intersecting experiences of various subaltern empires and their internal and external others. Moore never attempted to properly conceptualize the Socialist brand of modernity from its colonial/imperial side, approaching it from below, providing an analysis of concrete imperialcolonial configurations marked by a specific understanding of ethnicity, race, nation, religion, multiculturality, gender, etcetera in their intersection with various ideological forms including resistance—specific for state socialist and quasi socialist societies, bound by past and present colonial and imperial asymmetries and conflicts. It was the aberrant methodological operation of applying ready-made and (Western) made (postcolonial) theory to the postsocialist world instead of attempting to create a separate discourse to analyze this particular local

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history or at least set the grounds for the emergence of such a discourse in the future. In the next decade nothing of the kind happened. There were sporadic interesting works applying or questioning the postcolonial approach in the interpretation of ex-Soviet satellites or colonial subalterns, mostly written by Western scholars, but also by several thinkers from the ex-socialist countries and even former Soviet republics which considered themselves closer to the West than the former ‘Asiatic metropolis’ (such as Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic countries) (Chernetsky 2007; Bobkov 2005; Korek 2007). But still there was and is no separate postsocialist discourse with its own critical language, neither in the West nor in the non-West. So the guest editors of the 2012 special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing—On Colonialism, Communism and East-Central Europe, Dorota Kolodziejczyk and Cristina Sandru, had to admit in their introduction that “the intersections between” postcolonial and postsocialist (or post-dependence as they prefer to call them) studies “continue to be of marginal significance. Not only is the present debate peripheral to the discipline, it is also symptomatically belated” (2012, 113). Kolodziejczyk and Sandru explain this through political and disciplinary terms, claiming that anticommunist dissidence in Eastern Europe was seen in the West (including postcolonial theorists of the West) as a right-wing movement which, according to these authors, was far from reality, and also that postcolonial theory was grounded in what they call post-structural culturalism and therefore did not accept other approaches (2012, 114). If this is true of the relations between Western-based, mostly postMarxist postcolonial theory and the postsocialist world in its (peripheral) European frames, it is certainly not true in a wider horizon. I here refer to less Western varieties of postcolonial discourse produced by third world intellectuals, and also to a postsocialist discourse that encompasses more than Eastern Europe, which is doubtlessly more difficult to conceptualize in the multiplicity of its structural forms and which is important to consider in its ultimately failed, questionable, pluriversal totality and understood in its own terms. Postcolonial theory has traditionally concentrated on the analysis of the modern colonial history of the (ex)colonies of the first-class capitalist empires of secular modernity, that is mainly Great Britain and to a lesser extent France. Moreover, it has been formulated based on the experience of these empires and their colonies and therefore could not possibly work verbatim in other locales. For all their postmodernist bent, Postcolonial

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Studies are still marked by a clear subject/object division (into the subject who is studying and the object which is studied), seldom questioning the matrix of knowledge and disciplinary spheres established in and by Western modernity. The history of colonialism and the present of neocolonialism is studied here by (ex)representatives of the third world using postmodernist tools or building their own categories always deeply grounded in Western theoretical constructs and therefore interpreting the other through the concepts of the same. What remains untouched is the fundamental logic of modernity and its disciplines, and the Western monopoly of knowledge or, in decolonial terms, the coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2007). The second, intermediary world—that was itself a stray outgrowth of Western modernity (its aberrant version) and simply replaced liberalism with socialism but retained such well-known vices of modernity as progressivism, developmentalism, a rhetoric of salvation, newness, Orientalism, Eurocentrism, various forms of enforced modernization, etcetera— has been beyond the reach of postcolonial theory for complex reasons which need to be understood and analyzed. Kolodziejczyk and Sandru tend to turn the discussion in the direction of blaming parochial Postcolonial Studies for overlooking postsocialist anti-imperialist tendencies and refusing to let them in the postcolonial realm (2012, 114). But after all, the postsocialist countries of Eastern and/or Central Europe have always remained second-class Europeans or in more recent terms, New Europeans, or non-core Europeans. So in their case, the struggle is, first of all, for claiming their right to be considered European with no pejorative prefixes and adjectives and, figuratively speaking, to finally be let into the living room of Europe instead of always being kept in the entrance hall as a poor distant relative. There is no major ontologized racial or religious difference in their case, and their main drive, which resembles some of the postcolonial discourses on the surface, essentially differs from them. It is the drive to finally become the same, identical with Europe, to make obvious their essential ‘European-ness’ and not to claim their right to be different and equal at the same time, as in most attractive postcolonial and especially decolonial discourses. So, as a rule, the Eastern/Central European efforts to apply postcolonial theory to postsocialist reality are grounded in a peculiar self-victimization and a competition for who can claim to be considered more European and who suffered more from the excesses of the colonization by such second-class

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empires as Russia or the Ottoman Sultanate. Yet, paradoxically, being rejected by the core of Europe today, they recycle the same distorted postcolonial discourse; this time in relation to Europe that refused to accept them as its legitimate children and put them in the neocolonial condition after 1989. What motivates this contradictory drive is not a postcolonial impulse in a strict sense but an unconscious secondary Eurocentrism as an integral part of Western modernity with its hidden logic of coloniality. In this particular case it is expressed through the mechanics of imperial difference—internal and external, that is a difference between the imperial winners of modernity and the imperial losers who were intellectually, epistemically, or culturally colonized by the winners. Therefore Eastern European efforts to appropriate postcolonial discourse are not particularly persuasive for me. In the minds of many postcolonial or leftist Western scholars, the USSR remained an “affirmative action empire” (Martin 2001), a Czardom of proletarian internationalism. They could not possibly make an equation between colonialism and socialism, between the second and third worlds. Their mistake was similar to the better known delusion of universalizing the Occident and the Orient as homogenous and stable constructs. In the minds of many scholars, a highly generalized image of socialism or totalitarian communism (depending on their attitude) was shaped. They seldom stopped to think of possible nuances and differentiations within it and refused to realize that communism as such may have little to do with colonialism but its real practices, especially in relation to racialized others, clearly fall into the category of imperial domination and suppression. At the same time, the postcolonial and third world intellectuals correctly sensed that a liberation of the White Catholic Poles from the Russian/ Soviet yoke—if only to be shrunk to a new proverbial negative stereotype of Western Europe—is still not the same as the decolonization of Algerians or Namibians—people who were racially, religiously, civilizationally coded as absolutely different. Therefore, Postcolonial Studies that ignored the ex-second world were rather insightful in their realization of a difference between power matrixes and critical analyses based on a racial (ethnic, gender, religious, and particularly their dynamic intersection) differential and on other grounds such as class and social and economic inequality, and of the unjustified translation of the ideology of the lighter side of modernity into that of the darker side—that is socialism into colonialism. Neil Lazarus commented on this

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peculiar blurring in the following words: “The full implications of the fact that liberation from “actually existing” socialism has been liberation into the world-system of “actually existing” capitalism are now having to be confronted” (2012, 121). In my view what can still allow us to align the postcolonial and the postsocialist is not a historical concept of colonialism linked with Postcolonial Studies but rather the global coloniality of power, of being, of gender, of knowledge, of perception, etcetera. The disappointment of the third world in Socialist modernity which did not cope with its mission is a paradoxical sensibility. The postcolonial is largely post-Marxist or neo-Marxist (however unorthodox this Marxism may be), while the postsocialist mostly regards Marxism and communism as a target of its harsh criticism. The collapse of the Socialist world was catastrophic not only for its inhabitants but also for those who used it as a role model. In a number of third world discourses today there is a tendency to keep their monopoly at victimization and suffering and avoid the quest for possible intersections and dialogues with other ‘others’ including the postsocialist world. This negative rivalry is a direct result of thoughtlessly following the logic of modernity with its typical agonistic approach, making any dialogue impossible. If the former third world quickly turned to different role models, the Western post-left found themselves in a more difficult situation of yet another revisionist and highly utopian turn which so far has not resulted in anything promising. In the context of the crisis of left ideologies, Alexei Penzin (2008) correctly points out the asymmetry of the post-Soviet vis-àvis the postcolonial and the post-Fordist constellation. He explains that the Soviet was indeed first regarded in the West and in the third world as a salvation from Fordism and colonialism. Penzin reflects on a peculiar trans-coding of the postcolonial discourse in the post-Soviet space. Russian people today are indeed becoming the new subalterns suffering from the unconscious complex of the lost battle and forfeited grandeur of the vanished Soviet modernity, which is counterbalanced only by the dubious rhetoric of geographical extension. Penzin interprets this sensibility by analogy with the postcolonial, whereas I prefer to see it as a post-imperial consciousness, even though with an important correction of the specific status of the Janus-faced empire. The post-Soviet subject indeed goes through a distorted postcolonial complex finding himself/herself under the immediate pressure of a global coloniality which does not need colonialism any more, and which acquires an increasingly virtual nature but does not

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stop to be totalizing or repressive. In this context, a specific problem of a number of post-Soviet intellectuals, which is linked among other things with the excesses of the external imperial difference, is their blindness towards the darker side of modernity—coloniality. Hence they tend to code the imperial difference as postcoloniality. This is not fair because then we stop seeing the difference in the power hierarchy between the same and the other, and turn the same into a victim, a false subaltern, erasing altogether the (‘real’ postcolonial) other, conveniently rubbing out the guilt and the responsibility of the same—voluntarily and/or involuntarily. In the ex-second world those who could in fact regard themselves within the broadly interpreted postcolonial paradigm—the non-European, non-Christian populations of the Russian (ex)colonies—mostly remain silent or confine their decolonial sensibility to the non-academic spheres of art and untraditional social movements, particularly of ecosophic persuasion, intersecting ecological, religious, and wider indigenous cultural and spiritual agendas such as the Baikal Ecological Wave, The White Faith, or Ak Jang—an Altai Burkhanist religious movement (a creolized form of Buddhism and local Shamanistic elements), Ahmsta Kebzeh—an art of living an abundant life, which has originated in the Caucasus and has been maintained by the Circassian Diaspora abroad. If decolonial phenomenology deals with a Duboisean question of what does it mean to be a problem (Du Bois 1903), decolonial aesthetics linking reason and imagination through epistemology focuses not on Caliban’s reason but on Caliban’s art. When a racialized other turns from an object, a decoration highlighting the sublime of nature, into a subject with his or her own aesthesis, the connection between the beautiful, the sublime, and particular phenomena, actions, and events signifying them, takes a different meaning—an object acquires a voice, an ability to experience humiliation, and eventually to build an alternative world out of this misery and tenacity, and to react to this experience through aesthetic means. Such decolonial art in the world of imperial difference and its secondary colonial difference, represented by Taus Makhacheva, Saule Suleymenova, Zorikto Dorzhiev, Magomed Dibirov, Said Atabekov (Tlostanova 2011b) among others, is very complex due to the multiplicity and contradictoriness of the colonizing agents, impulses, and influences in this locale. Some of the artists had a dissident political and aesthetic experience in the late Soviet époque which acquires new overtones today in either a forced existence in the conditions of new national and religious fundamentalism, a diasporic

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mode, or a border, in-between, double-critique sensibility which is capable of seeing more than would be possible in the West or in the East alone. Behind the lack of understanding among the previous first, second, and third worlds looms the global coloniality that manifests itself in different forms yet retains certain stable characteristics such as unconscious Eurocentrism, often of a secondary-mimicking and self-negating kind. The consequence is an uncritical acceptance of the existing hierarchy of the world where everyone is assigned a specific fixed place. People unhappy with this place (as in the case of many postsocialist Eastern European countries) are still scared to even think of losing it and being associated with those who are assigned a position still lower in the hierarchy of humanity. This syndrome has marked postsocialist subjects of all kinds who are uncollectable under this questionable umbrella term. Being postsocialist technically, some of them are also postcolonial and others are not. They have different local histories and different understanding of their situation, goals, and prospects for the future. Some of them can hope to eventually join modernity, even if not in the capacity they would like to (such as the non-core Europeans). Others are destined to disappear and never be given a chance to speak, to step onboard modernity by way of being disqualified as the global South (such is the case of the non-European Russian/Soviet ex-colonies that, from being honorary second world, now rapidly descend to the third or even fourth world). Still others would reach a critical border understanding and decide to radically delink from modernity. It is high time to work out a more complex, theoretically intersecting and properly differentiated approach for the interpretation of postsocialist realities and subjectivities, to avoid studying them as an object from some presumably disembodied position and ghettoing the ex-second world in its intellectual isolation from the topical discussions in social theory and criticism. This would require a pluritopic, that is a multi-spatial hermeneutics as a major tool and an “imparative” approach (Panikkar 1988, 127) of an endless mutual process of learning-unlearning-relearning in an atmosphere of plurality. Along with historically and spatially bound (if properly institutionalized) discourses, such as postcolonial critique, a dialogue with other critical approaches focusing on modernity and its “underside” (Dussel 1996), such as the decolonial option would be helpful in conceptualizing the postsocialist condition. Then, instead of “liberal assimilation” and “postcolonial analogizing” in Suchland’s formulation (2011b, 110), we would have to see

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the ex-second world as a diverse, contradictory, non-homogenous semialterity with its unique intersectionality. In the case of Russia/the Soviet Union and its colonies, in my view, it will be a narrative of a Janus-faced empire which always felt itself like a colony in the presence of the West, as the imperial difference generated Russia’s secondary status in European eyes and, consequently, an open or hidden orientalization. It compensated this inferiority complex in regard to the non-Western colonies by projecting the image of the Russian/Soviet colonizer as a true European and a champion of civilization, modernity, socialism, etcetera. This positioning was marked by external imperial difference, secondary Orientalism and Eurocentrism, a catching-up logic, a whole array of schizophrenic collective complexes, ideologies of the besieged camp or, alternatively, victory in defeat, and in the case of the postSoviet postcolonial others—self-orientalization, self-racializing, multiple inferiority complexes, mimicry, tricksterism, etcetera. In short, it is a specific configuration, one that nevertheless clearly answers to the logic of coloniality in the form of the (post)socialist brand of modernity (Tlostanova 2010a). This coloniality is mutant in the sense that race and racism as universal classifications in modernity/coloniality have been masked here by class or ideology, sometimes ethnicity and/or even religion.1 But the principle of “misanthropic skepticism” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 245–246) stayed intact, taking humanity away from humans and rendering their lives dispensable. The psychology of colonial complexes thoroughly analyzed by Frantz Fanon (1967) acquires additional overtones in the postsocialist case when the colonized and the politically repressed react identically by projecting

—————— 1 Space limitations do not allow me to analyze in detail here such important issues as the manifestations of anti-black and other forms of transferred racism in Russia which are not directly linked to its own imperial-colonial history. The Russian empire had to satisfy its expansionistic appetites not in Africa but in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Therefore today’s millions of guest-workers from these ex-colonies in Moscow or Saint-Petersburg are seen as much more threatening by many increasingly racist Russians than very sporadic exoticized Africans who are generally considered as part of someone else’s history except by extremist neo-Nazis mostly responsible for the murders of Black students. Yet even they see Central Asians and Caucasians today as the primary targets of their racist attacks. Another important issue that I also have to leave out here but address in more detail in my book on gender (2010a) and my article on Russian Islamophobia (2010b) is the intersection of gender and sexuality with ethnic-racial and religious markers of discrimination flourishing in contemporary Russia in the increasingly repressive policies of the Orthodox church inosculating with the police state.

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their humiliation onto those who are still weaker and more dependent— for example women and children. The opposite side of this is a dehumanizing fear that makes people erase their identities and invent new ones in order to survive the millstones of the Soviet/colonial system. Double consciousness and the phenomenon of passing for Russian or for communist have been consistently expressed in changing religions, names, appearance, or in taking whiter/more advanced/more politically appropriate sexual partner (Tlostanova 2010a). Race functioned in the Soviet Union in transmuted forms because class and ideological overtones were translated into racial and ethnic ones. In the Czarist empire it was mainly religion that was translated into racial/ethnic categories, for instance Muslim first became Tatar (nineteenth century), then bourgeois nationalist (USSR) and today—simply ‘Black.’ Racializing thus had one face in the metropolis (when ‘enemies of the people’ of any ethnic and religious belonging were rendered subhuman), and a different face in the colonies where the discourses of the civilizing mission, development, progressivism and Soviet Orientalism clearly demonstrated their links with Western colonialist macro-narrative. An interesting example in this respect is that of the Caucasians whose very name presents a semantic riddle as it means two opposite things in the West and in today’s xenophobic Russia. For lack of space it will suffice to mention here that Russian discriminating constructs of the Caucasian others changed from treating them as military and political allies and equals in humanity in the first modernity, to racializing them in the second modernity during the conquest, the Circassian genocide, and Black Sea transit. Here Islamophobic discourses gradually acquired an increasing racial/racist face, and Caucasians were taxonomized as “inorodtsy”—“aliens” or literally as those who were born others; belonging to inorodtsy was determined by ethnic origin and the degree of civilization, and never by religion as such (Tlostanova 2010b, 174). Therefore adopting Christianity for the ‘Oriental’ inorodtsy could not save them from their non-White status. The Soviet treatment of the Caucasians as internal others culminated in the mass deportations of several of the Caucasus ‘enemy-nationalities’ by Stalin during the Second World War. Contemporary Russia practices their total othering and dehumanizing (for instance in the infamous Chechen ‘campaigns’). Caucasians, that is, the people who literally originated from the Caucasus and were considered the epitome of Whiteness in J. F. Blumenbach’s quasi scientific theory (1865), even giving a name to the well-known racial

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category still in use in the U.S.—which did not prevent Westerners from excessively exoticizing and commodifying the real Caucasians as the noble savages from the South of Europe—ended up as the ‘Blacks’ in today’s Russia—the internal racialized others with Russian citizenship yet without rights. Revamped biological racism does not see religion, or translates it into race so that all dark-eyed brunets regardless of their linguistic, religious or cultural belonging become ‘Blacks’ and are regarded as Muslim. To sum up, there are reasons to speak of both considerable differences and intersections between Postcolonial Studies, Black Critique, and still amorphous and undertheorized postsocialist discourse—if we look at them through the decolonial prism which can serve as a bridge between these theories. It is an urgent task to develop decolonial “communities of sense,” to paraphrase J. Ranciere (2009, 31), at all levels in order to create an open, fluid, and pluritopic conceptual realm with a nomadic mode of thinking that rejects linearity and causality, marked by creative “creolization” (Lionnet and Shih 2011) and a wide enough and shifting vocabulary which allows for a meaningful dialogue of these porous critical discourses. Neither of them can claim a universal status yet no one’s knowledge would be excluded or appropriated any more, and each of them would be able to add valuable insights to the pluriversal critical exchange about the crucial questions of agency, subjectivity, emancipation of thinking, of knowledge, of being, of gender, of perception in today’s global trans-modern context.

Works Cited Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich (1865). The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa. 1795. Ed. and trans. Thomas Bendyshe. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green. Bobkov, Igor (2005). EtikaPogranichya. TranskulturnostkakBelarusskyOpyt [The ethics of borderlands. Transculturality as a Belorussian experience]. Perekrestky, 3/4: 127–36. Chernetsky, Vitaly (2007). Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Dainotto, Roberto (2000). “A South with a View: Europe and Its Other.” Nepantla, 1.2: 375–390. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1999). The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver. New York: Norton.

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Dussel, Enrique (1996). The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books. Etkind, Alexander (2007). Orientalism Reversed: Russian Literature in the Times of Empires. Modern Intellectual History, 4.3: 617–28. Fanon, Frantz (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Ch. Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Fukuyama, Francis (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Gordon, Jane Anna, and Lewis Ricardo (2010). Of Divine Warning. Reading Disaster in the Modern Age. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Hinkelammert, Franz J. (2004). “The Hidden Logic of Modernity: Locke and the Inversion of Human Rights.” globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu. Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. A Web Dossier. Vol. 1.1, Fall 2004. https://globalstudies. trinity.duke.edu/wpcontent/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v1d1_Hinkelamm ertF.pdf. 14 July 2014. Kolodziejczyk, Dorota, and Cristina Sandru (2012). “Introduction: On Colonialism, Communism, and East-Central Europe—Some Reflections.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2: 113–16. Korek, Janusz (ed.). (2007). From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective. Södertörn Academic Studies 32. Huddinge: Södertörnshögskola. Lazarus, Neil (2012). “Spectres Haunting: Postcommunism and Postcolonialism.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.2: 117–29. Lionnet, Francoise, and Shu-mei Shih (eds.). (2011). The Creolization of Theory. Durham: Duke University Press. Mailer, Norman (1957). “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” dissentmagazine.org. Dissent. A Quarterly of Politics and Culture, n. d. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1353950503Mailer_W hiteNegro.pdf. 14 July 2014. Maldonado Torres, Nelson (2007). “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” Cultural Studies, 21.2/3: 240–70. Martin, Terry (2001). Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mignolo, Walter, and Madina Tlostanova (2007). “The Logic of Coloniality and the Limits of Postcoloniality.” In Revathy Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley (eds.). The Postcolonial and the Global: Connections, Conflicts, Complicities, 109–123. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moore, David Chioni (2001). “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique.” PMLA, 116.1: 111–28. Panikkar, Raimon (1988). “What is comparative philosophy comparing?” In Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch (eds.). Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy, 116–136. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Penzin, Alexey (2008). “Post-Soviet Singularity and Codes of Cultural Translation.” old.lcca.lv. The Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, n. d. http://old.lcca.lv/etexts/17/. 14 July 2014. Rancière, Jacques (2009). “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics.” In Rancière. Communities of Sense. Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, 31–50. Durham: Duke University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271– 313. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. — (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. New Heaven: Harvard University Press. Suchland, Jennifer (2011a). “Is Postsocialism Transnational?” Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36.4: 837–862. — (2011b). “Is there a Postsocialist Critique?” Lichnost, Kultura, Obschestvo [Personality, Culture, Society], XIII.3.65/66: 97–109, XIII.4.67/68: 103–114. Tlostanova, Madina (2010a). Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. — (2010b).“A Short Genealogy of Russian Islamophobia.” In Salman Sayyid and AbdoolkarimVakil (eds.). Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives, 165– 184. London: Hurst and Co. — (2011a). “The South of the Poor North: Caucasus Subjectivity and the Complex of Secondary ‘Australism.’” The Global South and World Dis/Order. Spec. issue of The Global South, 5.1: 66–84. — (2011b).“La aesthesis trans-moderna en la zonafronterizaeurasiatica y el antisublime decolonial.” CALLE 14, 5.6: 10–31. Verderey, Katherine, and Sharad Chari (2009). “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War.” Comparative Studies in Societies and History, 511: 6–34.

The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement1 Frank B. Wilderson III

A Break in the Arc of Authorization On October 22, 1970, the Black Liberation Army (BLA) detonated a timed-release antipersonnel bomb at the funeral of a San Francisco police officer. This, according to the Justice Department and BLA sanctioned literature, was the first of their forty to sixty paramilitary actions launched between 1969 and 1981.2 Even though they probably never numbered more than four hundred insurgents, nationwide, working in small, often unconnected cells, their armed response to the violence that enmeshes Black life was probably the most consistent and politically legible response since the slave revolts that occurred between 1800 and 1840. Twenty years after the Black Liberation Army launched its first attack on the state, Toni Morrison, appearing on Bill Moyers’s PBS talk show A World of Ideas, was queried about the moral ground which Sethe stood on when she killed her child, Beloved, in order to save her from slavery. What right, in other words, did she have to offer her child death as a sanctuary from bondage? Herein lies the paradox of political engagement when the subject of politics is the slave. “It was the right thing to do,” Toni Morrison said, “but she had no right to do it” (n. pag.).

—————— 1 Special thanks to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the resources it provided me in the form of an Experience Researcher Fellowship which contributed to the research and writing of this article. 2 The Justice Department-LEAA Task Force report on BLA activity records sixty BLA actions between 1970 and 1976. In the past, this report has been reproduced on BLA sanctioned websites and, most recently, in a book of essays by Jalil Muntaqim, a Black Liberation Army prisoner of war (2010, 29–34). The University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD) puts the number at thirty-six. Whereas the GTD includes BLA bank expropriations, it does not, unlike the BLA-reproduced Justice Department report, include prison escapes (successful and unsuccessful).

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The analogy between on the one hand, Sethe and Beloved, and, on the other hand, insurgents from The Black Liberation Army is a structural analogy which highlights how both the BLA insurgents and Toni Morrison’s characters (Toni Morrison herself!) are void of relationality. In such a void, death is a synonym for sanctuary. When death is a synonym for sanctuary, political engagement is, to say the least, a paradoxical undertaking. The political communiqué is that text which the revolutionary offers the world in order to make her/his thought and actions legible to all, if acceptable only to some. The political communiqué attends to the legitimacy of tactics (“the right thing to do”), and it attends to the ethics of strategy (“the right to do it”). It can only succeed if its author has a ‘right’ to authorization. But Blacks do not have a right to authorization because our status as beings who are sentient but socially dead means that our “everyday practices […] occur in the default of the political, in the absence of the rights of man or the assurances of the self-possessed individual, and perhaps even with a ‘person,’ in the usual meaning of the term” (Hartman 1997, 65). This means that our existence is not our existence, but is embedded in “the master’s prerogative” (Hartman and Wilderson 2003, 188). To the extent that the arrangement of domination in the antebellum south (and in the one-thousand-three-hundred-year enslavement of people who, through slavery, became known as Africans (Anderson 1995) is to be thought of as history, it should be thought of as “a history of the present” (Hartman and Wilderson 2003, 190); as a schematization of Black life which changes in important but ultimately inessential ways.3 Literary and

—————— 3 Blackness, then, predates the Middle Passage and reconceptualizes enslavement history to include the Arab slave trade. In other words, the time of Blackness is the time of the paradigm; it is not a temporality that can be grasped with the epistemological tools at our disposal. The time of Blackness is no time at all, because one cannot know a plenitude of Blackness distinct from Slaveness. “Historical time is the time of the worker, the time of the Indian, and the time of the woman—the time of analysis. But whereas historical time marks stasis and change within a paradigm, it does not mark the time of the paradigm, the time of time itself; the time by which the Slave’s dramatic clock is set. For the Slave, historical time is no more viable a temporality of emancipation than biographical time—the time of empathy. Thus, neither the analytic aesthetic nor the empathetic aesthetic can accompany a theory of change that restores Black people to relationality. The social and political time of emancipation proclamations should not be confused with the ontological and epistemological time of modernity itself, in which Blackness and Slaveness are imbricated ab initio” (Wilderson 2010, 339–340). My argument, below, is that one kind of sentient being (the worker and the postcolonial) experiences

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cultural theorist and historian Saidiya Hartman writes, “If slave status was the primary determinant of racial identity in the antebellum period, with ‘free’ being equivalent to ‘white’ and slave status defining blackness, how does the production and valuation of race change in the context of freedom and equality?” (1997, 118). The question, of course, is rhetorical; its purpose is to alert us to the blind spots which critical theorists have when thinking relations of power through the figure of the Black, the Slave: the end of the chattel technologies of slavery is often transposed as the end of slavery itself; which, in turn, permits the facile drawing of political analogies between Blacks and workers, and between Blacks and postcolonial subjects. She goes on to highlight the theoretical pitfalls which result from this ruse of analogy. Legal liberalism as well as critical race theory, has examined issues of race, racism, and equality by focusing on the exclusion and marginalization of those subjects and bodies marked as different and/or inferior. The disadvantage of this approach is that the proposed remedies and correctives to the problem—inclusion, protection, and greater access to opportunity—do not ultimately challenge the economy of racial production or its truth claims or interrogate the exclusion constitutive of the norm but instead seek to gain equality, liberation, and redress within its confines (Hartman 1997, 234). This explains why the Slave’s political communiqué raises a specter of something far more portentous than the call to arms of a revolutionary Marxist or postcolonial political communiqué. In this essay, I argue that Marxist and postcolonial armed struggle, though radically destabilizing of the status quo, are also endeavors which, through their narrative capacity to assimilate ‘universal’ frameworks of liberation and redress, unwittingly work to reconstitute the paradigms they seek to destroy. They interrogate and attack the violence which constitutes bourgeois modes of authorization in the hopes of instantiating analytic modes of authorization. A Black Liberation Army political communiqué becomes symptomatic of an undertaking that threatens authorization itself.

—————— violence within historical time (a temporality that can be known as temporality); whereas another kind of sentient being, the Black-qua-Slave, is constituted ontologically by violence. One should be alive to the oxymoronic, indeed, paradoxical nature of this claim— a violence that makes for ontological is like no ontology at all. The Black is constituted by a “violence that separates ontological time (the time of the paradigm) from historical time (the time in the paradigm)” (Wilderson 2010, 340).

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The arc of an emancipatory progression which ends in either equality, liberation, or redress, in other words, a narrative of liberation, is marked by the three generic moments that one finds in any narrative: a progression from equilibrium (the spatial-temporal point prior to oppression), disequilibrium (capitalist political economy or the arrival and residence taking of the settler), and equilibrium restored/reorganized/or reimagined (the dictatorship of the proletariat or the settler’s removal from one’s land).4 But this generic progression, which positions the Human subject within a dynamic, dialogical context (a terrain pregnant with uncertainty and multiplicities of outcomes, a terrain on which one is not merely an object of uncertainty but a subject of it) fortifies and extends the Slave’s “carceral continuum,”5 the time of no time at all. This is why the Black insurgent’s communiqué is a torturous clash between, on the one hand, an unconscious realization that structural violence has elaborated Blacks so as to make our existence void of analogy and, on the other hand, a plaintive yearning to be recognized and incorporated by analogy nonetheless. Black Lib-

—————— 4 What distinguishes the bourgeois narrative from the Marxist narrative is the decision regarding to whom and how causal agency is to be ascribed; the ‘because’ principle of why things happen. “A particularly strong feature of the classical [bourgeois] narrative,” says Wayne, “is the way it locates causal agency […] at the level of individual characters. The characters with the most strongly defined goals are the characters who are charged with the causal principle of making things happen, of pushing the narrative along” (Wayne 1997, 152). The revolutionary writer would locate causal agency at the sites of collectivities in revolt and antagonisms at the site of institutional forces rather than interpersonal encounters with lovers, villains, and foes. But the story of love lost and found again, and the story of a social formation in revolt rely on the same tripartite progression. 5 “Soon the black ghetto, converted into an instrument of naked exclusion by the concurrent retrenchment of wage labour and social protection, and further destabilized by the increasing penetration of the penal arm of the state, became bound to the jail and prison system by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology and cultural syncretism, such that they now constitute a single carceral continuum which entraps a redundant population of younger black men (and increasingly women) who circulate in closed circuit between its two poles in a self-perpetuating cycle of social and legal marginality with devastating personal and social consequences” (Wacquant 2002, 52– 53). Wacquant’s definition of the carceral continuum is helpful, even though his explanation of its generative mechanism is weighted heavily within the logic of political economy. By weighting my analysis of the Black condition on an interrogation of political discourse and the Symbolic Order, I am arguing that the carceral continuum describes the essential nature of a Black person’s life whether she is in the ghetto or the White House.

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eration Army member Assata Shakur’s “To My People” communiqué is illustrative of this paradox. Assata Shakur was captured on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973, during a shootout with state troopers that left one BLA paramilitary dead and one police officer dead. She was shot in the chest and then dragged into the roadside and kicked and punched by police officers who demanded to know in which direction her comrade Sundiata Acoli had fled. She spent four years in and out of court on trumped-up charges for a series of socalled crimes, such as bank expropriation. She was acquitted on all charges except for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper. Forensic evidence showed that she could not have fired a gun that evening; and the trajectory of bullets that are, to this day, still lodged in her chest indicated that when the police shot her, her hands were in the air in a universally recognized sign of surrender (Shakur 1987, 3–4, xix, xi–xviii). Assata spent her first month in the Middlesex County Workhouse hammering out a communiqué intended to counter the police and press campaigns portraying her as a common criminal “going around,” she wrote, “shooting down cops for the hell of it. I had to make a statement” (Shakur 1987, 49). Her attorney, Evelyn Williams, who was also Assata’s aunt, smuggled a tape recorder into the prison; and, on 4 July 1973, America’s Day of Independence, her communiqué was broadcast on many radio stations. It begins like this: “Black brothers, Black sisters, i want you to know that i love you and i hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me. My name is Assata Shakur (slave name joane chesimard), and i am a revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied. I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless robots who protect them and their property. I am a Black revolutionary, and, as such, i am a victim of all the wrath, hatred, and slander that amerika is capable of. Like all other Black revolutionaries, amerika is trying to lynch me. I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspa-

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pers. They have offered over fifty thousand dollars in rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill. I am a Black revolutionary, and, by definition, that makes me part of the Black Liberation Army. The pigs have used their newspapers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals. They have called us gangsters and gun molls and have compared us to such characters as john dillinger and ma barker. It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the criminals.” (1987, 49–50)

The conscious declarations of Assata’s communiqué—its Marxist/ postcolonial intention6—struggle to assert something within Blackness that is prior to the devastation that defines Blackness (Judy 1993, 88–107); but the force of the repetition compulsion with which the communiqué lists, illustrates, and returns to this devastation is vertiginous. “i am a victim of all the wrath, hatred, and slander that amerika is capable of […] amerika is trying to lynch me […] The pigs have used their newspapers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals” (Shakur 1987, 49–50). The communiqué contains few narrative fragments which can be cobbled together with enough muscle to check this devastation, to act on it in a contrapuntal way: This is not a case of the “compulsion to repeat,” which Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, whereby the repetition is “something that seems […] more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides” (Freud 1955, 23).7 Assata Shakur’s communiqué contains no political strategy or therapeutic agency through which the violence which engulfs her flesh can be separated from the text’s compulsion to repeat that violence. In a ‘normal’ situation, a therapeutic and/or political intervention could be made to, in the case of therapy, help the subject become aware of a distinction between the violence she may indeed encounter from the state and a range of psychic alternatives to letting that violence consume her

—————— 6 Primary texts which show how the BLA adapted Marxism and Postcolonial logic to a Black American context include: Black Liberation Army Political Dictionary; Muntaqim; and Anonymous—a handbook on revolutionary armed struggle written by an anonymous Black Liberation Army soldier in the nineteen seventies. 7 “[T]he compulsion to repeat is an ungovernable process originating in the unconscious. As a result of its action, the subject deliberately places himself in distressing situations, thereby repeating an old experience, but he does not recall this prototype; on the contrary, he has the strong impression that the situation is fully determined by the circumstances of the moment” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 78).

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unconscious; and, in the case of politics, the vision elaborated by a movement could help the subject imagine a new day, and thus imbue state violence with a temporal finitude (“our day will come,” as Irish Republicans used to say, and, so it did), even if the subject doesn’t live to experience that finitude. But recourse to political and therapeutic resources presumes a potential for separating skeins of unconscious compulsion (the compulsion to repeat) from the violence whose incursions are being compulsively repeated. This presumption only works for Human subjects, subjects whose relationship to violence is contingent upon their transgressions. The Slave’s relationship to violence is not contingent, it is gratuitous—it bleeds out beyond the grasp of narration, from the Symbolic to the Real, where therapy and politics have no purchase.8 In declaring “i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied,” she claims, for herself and for Black people, in general, a gendered integrity which the unconscious symptoms of her text (the violent swirl) indicate are not recognized by the world in which she lives. It is as though, by positing these horrific sexual violations in a manner which is properly gendered, one which relegates castration to Black men and rape to Black women, the communiqué offers her (and her Black readers) the protection of a sanctuary that they otherwise might not have. It is not, of course, sanctuary from actual rapes and castration but the sanctuary of gendered recognition and incorporation which emplotment in a narrative continuum provides: the event of gender (equilibrium) is now being violated, by rape or castration (disequilibrium), and this turn of events is the essence of agency, through which equilibrium can be restored. But “if the definition of the crime of rape,” as Hartman argues: “relies upon the capacity to give consent or exercise will, then how does one make legible the sexual violation of the enslaved when that which would constitute evidence of intentionality, and thus evidence of the crime—the state of consent or willingness of the assailed—opens up a Pandora’s box in which the subject formation and object constitution of the enslaved female are no less ponderous than

—————— 8 But I should make it clear that this does not mean that the Black has no inner life and that psychoanalysis is of no use to us in thinking about that inner life. It just means that such a journey involves both a symptomatic analysis of the text anal (and, by extension, the Black’s inner life), as well as an epistemological critique of psychoanalysis itself— which does not involve a wholesale rejection of it. This dual intervention has been the focus of David Marriott’s work and, of course, of Frantz Fanon’s work as well. See Marriott’s “Frantz Fanon’s War,” in On Black Men (2000, 66–95).

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the crime itself or when the legal definition of the enslaved negates the very idea of ‘reasonable resistance’?” (1997, 80)

We might also consider whether the wanton and indiscriminate uses of the captive body can be made sense of within the heteronormative framing of sexual violation as rape (Hartman 1997, 74). By parceling rape out to women, castration to men, the political communiqué offers the Black author and the Black reader a sense that their political agency is something more than mere “borrowed institutionality.”9 And it saves the Black insurgent from the realization that the dust up is not between the workers and the bosses, not between settler and the native, not between the queer and the straight, but between the living and the dead. If we look closely we also see that gender itself cannot be reconciled with a slave’s genealogical isolation; that, for the Slave, there is no surplus value to be restored to the time of labor; that no treaties between Blacks and Humans are in Washington waiting to be signed and ratified; and that, unlike the Settler in the Native American political imagination, there is no place like Europe to which the Slave can return Human beings.

Death and Dialogue Assata Shakur begins her communiqué by declaring her love for Black people; but there’s a note of uncertainty as to their love for her: “i hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me.” This is an early example of something that troubles the communiqué from beginning to end: that there is no third term, no “mediating objects” which can be called upon as third-term semiotic markers in self-representation (Raggatt 2010, 401). In, for example, her explanation of the change of her name from joanne chesimard to Assata Shakur, the third-term semiotic marker, the mediating object, is slavery, which is to say the abyss of social death, as opposed to a site of culture or economic plenitude, like a lost nation. In other words, the signifier that mediates this aspect of a presumed relation to a presumed people is really the absence of signification, rather than an event—or a place within signification. It is a “trace […] of memory [which] function[s] in a manner akin to a phantom limb, in that what is felt is no

—————— 9 Jared Sexton, private conversation.

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longer there. It is a sentient recollection of connectedness experienced at the site of rupture, where the very consciousness of disconnectedness acts as a mode of testimony”; and as such it cannot function as a catalyst for a “return to an originary plenitude” (Hartman 1997, 74). Nor, as we scale up the ladder of abstraction, do we find the plenitude of mediating objects which most postcolonial and Marxist paramilitaries would take for granted. In “The Dialogical Self and Thirdness: A Semiotic Approach to Positioning Using Dialogical Triads,” Peter Raggatt reminds us of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic deployment of the idea of “‘Thirdness’ as the influence of one subject on a second mediated by a third.” “Third-term mediators are distinctive,” Raggatt argues “because they have a doubled quality, defining both similarities and differences between opposing positions” (2010, 401). Land, labor-power, and culture artifacts (such as language and customs) are often the third-term mediator as we move up the scale of abstraction in paramilitary political communiqués. The Black Liberation Army did, in fact, take positions on the land question, in which they demanded that most of the Southeastern United States, what’s known as “The Black Belt,” be given to the descendants of slaves to form an independent country called New Afrika.10 I want to bracket the objection that this land belongs to the Cherokee and other so-called Civilized Tribes, and it wasn’t the BLA’s land to claim or reclaim. While one can only agree with that argument, I think it misses the point. The point is that social death is a condition, void, not of land, but of a capacity to secure relational status through transindividual objects—be those objects elaborated by land, labor, or love. My argument is not that the BLA’s politics were ethical or unethical, but that the genome of political discourse is inherently antiBlack. The inherent anti-Blackness of political discourse can be discerned by discovering the anti-Blackness of narrative itself, by examining how the ontology of basic elements which constitute narrative are themselves constituted by the violence of slavery and how and why the narrative elements cannot be assimilated by genealogical isolates.

—————— 10 The late Safiya Bukhari, a Black Panther turned BLA paramilitary writes, “The Republic of New Afrika was founded in the right of self-determination of Black people in the United States. Its name refers to the five states in the South (Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina) that Black people developed and enriched with their labor and where they have lived for more than four hundred years. Because of this history, these states form the land base of an independent nation for whose liberation Black people fight” (Bukhari 2010, 42).

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In a postcolonial political communiqué (a communiqué written by an insurgent who is not Black), Assata’s phrase, “I have declared war,” would typically function as a chronotope, a spatial-temporal fragment. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin writes: “We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are […] expressed in literature. [In the chronotope, time] thickens, takes on flesh, becomes […] visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the chronotope.” (Bakhtin 1981, 84)

The Bakhtinian chronotope is one narrative element whose ontological status is ruptured when it is deployed as an element in the Slave’s narrative. When the Slave is the primary figure in narrative (such as the discourse of liberation), a thirteen-hundred-year carceral continuum incarcerates and suppresses the elements which are deployed to produce what Bakhtin called the dialogic imagination. Reciprocation, reversals, hybrid amalgamations—all this becomes unsustainable when the figure in the narrative is Black. We should note, however, that before the chronotope is manifest in discourse, and before it is refashioned and deployed in the narrative of liberation, its assumptive logic comes to us with capacities the Slave does not possess: the capacity to transpose time into event, and the capacity to transpose space into place. Assata’s communiqué is not a postcolonial or Marxist political communiqué, even though its narrative intent aspires to recognition and incorporation by way of its assumptive logics. We see that even though the chronotope of ‘resistance time’ is repeated several times, it cannot establish a relay between itself and a mediating object (such as land or labor power) which can be recognized and incorporated as an object of loss. For Bakhtin, the integrity of the chronotope depends on its being delinked from certainty. ‘Resistance time’ should not be embedded with the certainty of victory but with an uncertainty which rests upon the labors of Human agency. Its life force is not contained in the realization that the postcolonial subject will get her land back eventually, but in the realization that the outcome of the conflict is up for grabs. The guaranteed return of the land is not what imbues a people with their collective sense of futurity. On the contrary, it is the knowledge that the outcome is not known. This heightens their sense of urgency, intensifies their experience of themselves as beings who are alive, whose agency might fail or succeed in their efforts

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to remake the world. Bakhtin writes, “nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future” (1981, 166). In “The Chronotopes of Humanness: Bakhtin and Dostoevsky,” Gary Saul Morson amplifies Bakhtin’s assertion that the dialogical situation does not “follow any preset path”; it “does not ‘unfold,’ it ‘becomes’”; because “[t]he same conversational starting point can always lead to multiple continuations” (2010, 94). “For life to be meaningful,” Morson continues: “[t]he world must really be uncertain in this sense and we must experience it as such. Determinism destroys uncertainty, while capital punishment destroys the sense of uncertainty. The horror of absolute certainty explains the remarkable image of a man begging for mercy even after his throat has been cut: the victim may know that he is sure to die, but so unacceptable is that knowledge, that he acts as if his throat were only just about to be cut. He manufactures suspense.” (2010, 104–105, original emphasis)

David Marriott is a critical theorist whose psychoanalytic explanations of the role mutilated, dying or dead Black men play in the psychic life of culture clashes with the idea that all lives can be made meaningful, as Morson’s vignette of a dying man suggests. There are profound ways in which Marriot agrees with Morson: Marriott would concur that determinism destroys uncertainty; and that capital punishment destroys the sense of uncertainty. But Marriott would choose a different image to illustrate what Morson calls the horror of absolute certainty. Instead of borrowing Morson’s image of a man whose throat had been slit, Marriott borrows Assata Shakur’s image of castration. Once this happens the analogy breaks down; the ontological implications of the two men bleeding to death cannot be reconciled. Compare Morson’s dying man…“The horror of absolute certainty explains the remarkable image of a man begging for mercy even after his throat has been cut: the victim may know that he is sure to die, but so unacceptable is that knowledge, that he acts as if his throat were only just about to be cut. He manufactures suspense” (2010, 105)… to Marriott’s dying man. Marriott begins by quoting from a 1934 book titled The Lynching of Claude Neal: “‘After taking the nigger to the woods […] they cut off his penis. He was made to eat it. Then they cut off his testicles and made him eat them and say he liked it’” (qtd. in Marriott 2000, 6). These are the words of a White man who was there and probably partook in the ‘festivities.’ Marriott continues:

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“The act of forcing a man to ‘fuck’ himself to death with his own excised genitals, to feed and gorge himself on his own violating (violated) pleasure, may well have been hugely satisfying to those assembled—especially when the man got to confess his own (seeming) enjoyment. To hear him desire his own death—and so turn their terrible pleasure into his own violent wish—was to construct a vision of a castrated black man as one actively seeking the pleasures of castration.” (Marriott 2000, 6, 9)

The determinism that Morson laments in his cautionary tale about how life goes askew when conditions necessary for Bakhtinian dialogue are corrupted is a determinism which is situated in the realm of experience. We know this because even as the man with the slit throat is dying he still has a hand in the tyranny of closure that will end his life and, also, end his sense of life. Morson calls the injunction that prevents a dialogical situation “capital punishment” (2010, 115); in other words, we have arrived at this moment of the slit throat because the victim has transgressed some code, some law, for which he is being punished. But the lynching victim in Marriott’s example is not being punished. Even if the lynchers claim the he is. Marriott implies that punishment is a ruse, a secondary consideration at best. What the scene is really about is the lynchers’ ritual of self-making; through this ritual they fashion themselves as selves. The man being lynched has “no ontological resistance” (Fanon 2008, 110) in their eyes; which may explain why he, unlike Morson’s victim, doesn’t waste his last precious moments manufacturing suspense. Morson’s victim finds the knowledge of his certain death, the determined end to a life of uncertainty, to be “unacceptable” (Morson 2010, 105). Marriott’s man knows that such a posture reeks of agency, reeks of entitlement, reeks of a man who may be dying but who will carry his unconscious to the grave with him. In contradistinction, the lynching ritual demands of its victim much more than death. The violence is all around this victim, but it is inside him as well. His psychic capacity to manufacture suspense, to possess, that is, his own desire has been usurped by the desire of his lynchers. No executioner makes such demands on behalf of the state. As Marriott writes, “he must turn [the lyncher’s] terrible pleasure into his own violent wish” (2000, 6). In his dying moments he must pursue White pleasure through his own castration. Something more profound and ineffable than ‘determinism’ is at work here. Determinism implies a temporary injunction against narrative sequencing, and by extension against political activity; an injunction against what Bakhtin describes as a dialogical situation (Feldman 1991, 12; Bakhtin 1981, 401). What Marriott is describing is a permanent injunction against

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ontology—whether that ontology is experienced as the determinism of capital punishment or as the uncertainty of the dialogical situation. The sentient being in Morson’s cautionary tale enters the event of capital punishment as a subject, and he takes his Human inheritance with him to the grave; his neurotic machinations are proof of this. The sentient being in Marriott’s example—the slave, the Black—cannot even savor some form of neurotic pleasure in his own annihilation. The photographs of Assata that she writes about in her political communiqué—or of some Black women who may or may not have looked like her—are photographs which graced post offices, airports, hotels and banks, and labor like the photographs of lynching victims which became post cards to be circulated well beyond the time and place of the ghastly event. The photographs of Assata were not photographs whose main purpose was to catch a so-called political terrorist. That would be too simple; that would be too Human. They were photographs in which she, like the lynched man above, became a ‘figure in a public event’; a figure whose political agenda and motive will was never under consideration; a figure who is always already an implement to help the Human (and I need to be clear here: by Human I mean not only Whites, but Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and non-Black women of color—Whites and their junior partners) fashion selfhood, to help them secure the integration and closure of their bodily schemas; to help them facilitate the identification with their fellow citizens whom they may never meet: nonetheless these dead implements and the images of them which circulate in all their mutilated splendor are the genetic material of civil society, the DNA of Human life.

A Gated Community Postcolonial and Marxist paramilitaries are assimilated by a range of transindividual icons, images, and concepts which secure their communiqués’ coherence. Consider Seán Mac Stíofáin’s (first chief of staff of the Provisional IRA) message printed in Hands Off Ireland! “[T]he nationally minded, the Irish-minded people of the North know that the IRA is their army, is the revolutionary army of the Irish people, and they know that many IRA volunteers have died fighting in defence of their areas. They know they will never be able to lead a normal, peaceful and happy life until the British imperialist

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presence has been removed from this country.” (O’Boyle 2002, 32, original emphasis)

Land, as a transindividual third term, mediates a dialogical situation, one which implies a rich field of semiotic play at a level of abstraction which is higher than Assata Shakur’s level of abstraction. Mac Stíofáin’s communiqué enables him to enter the lists of similarities and differences more indicative of the Symbolic push and pull of hegemonic struggle, over, for example, the status of national identity, the value of political martyrdom, and the restoration of civil society; all of which grounds his discourse in a kind of political sanity which is indicative of how well the Symbolic push and pull protects him from the Imaginary’s collisions of murder and absolute identification found throughout Assata Shakur’s communiqué. His communiqué can enter into the realm of politics, a world of surprise endings and possibilities; the narrative will not fold in on itself—it can escape the loop of repetition; a loop that would otherwise crowd out politics because it crowds out agency. The political agency resides in the uncertain outcome of the struggle over transindividual objects—transindividual because they secure political ontology for the British and the Republicans alike. The question Mac Stíofáin’s communiqué poses is who will prevail at a conceptual level, not the question of who is alive and who is dead, as in the case of the Human and the Slave. Assata Shakur’s political communiqué starts much closer to the body than the IRA or Red Army Faction communiqué (below). When she says she hopes that her people love her, she is intimating something deeper than a question of affection—there is a paradigmatic, ontological, question here as well. There is no need for Seán Mac Stíofáin to solicit Catholic working class affection because the question of love has already been mediated through/by the concept of land. In other words, it is not a question of Mac Stíofáin’s subjectivity which is at stake. Affection is not so mimetic in his situation as to make it an all or nothing proposition. Land acts as a third term, a grounding wire which shifts the affect from one of immediacy to one of mediacy; it takes the neurotic charge out of the question of love, it makes love a symbolic, and therefore negotiated, endeavor, one which has a range of possible outcomes and interpretations, rather than a precursor to the confirmation or denial of his existence. Mac Stíofáin, the paramilitary author of the communiqué, has no need for the reader to recognize and incorporate his psychic presence through a declaration of love, because his psychic presence has been secured, a priori, by his—and his readers (be

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they friend or foe!)—shared capacity to inhabit and transform meaningless space into meaningful place. Mac Stíofáin is a person, and the Irish are his people because they are always already cartographically located; even at the time of the communiqué’s release (when their land is occupied by invaders). And this is where temporality and spatiality cross: there was a time of place, even though it was almost a thousand years ago; therefore, there can be a time of place again, when the British are driven away. Equilibrium. Disequilibrium. Equilibrium restored. Peter Raggatt’s third-term mediators facilitate narrative progression, even when they do not bear the tactile solidity of spatial metaphors. The narrative arc of equilibrium, disequilibrium, equilibrium restored still maintains its moorings in the realm of the Symbolic; that is to say, it and its author are protected from the ravages of the Imaginary even though the event of equilibrium restored promises the restoration of an abstraction whose referent is hard to concretize. (The olive tree is a common symbol of a Palestinian third-term mediator but no two artists would paint the same portrait of lost labor time or labor time restored.) Ulrike Meinhof’s Red Army Faction communiqué of third-term mediators is able to work temporally, without, to a large extent, the tactile solidity of spatial metaphors. Three years before Assata Shakur’s “To My People,” Ulrike Meinhof issued one of the first Red Army Faction (RAF) communiqués, in which, on behalf of RAF paramilitaries, she argued that urban guerrilla warfare represents “the only revolutionary method of intervention available to what are on the whole weak revolutionary forces.” “To this extent the urban guerrilla is the logical consequence of the negation of parliamentary democracy long since perpetuated by its very own representatives; the only and inevitable response to emergency laws and the rule of the hand grenade; the readiness to fight with those same means the system has chosen to use in trying to eliminate its opponents. The urban guerrilla is based on a recognition of the facts instead of an apologia of the facts. The urban guerrilla can concretize verbal internationalism as the requisition of guns and money. He can blunt the state’s weapon of a ban on communists by organizing an underground beyond the reach of the police. The urban guerrilla is a weapon in the class war. The urban guerrilla signifies armed struggle, necessary to the extent that it is the police which makes indiscriminate use of firearms, exonerating class justice from guilt and burying our comrades alive unless we prevent them […]. The urban guerrilla’s aim is to attack the state’s apparatus of control at certain points and put them out of action, to destroy the myth of the system’s omnipresence and invulnerability.” (Attributed to Meinhof, “The Concept Urban Guerrilla” (1971), qtd. in O’Boyle 2002, 32–33, emphasis added, F. W.).

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Meinhof’s political communiqué asserts the ethical necessity of urban guerilla activism as though there was consensus on this point within the West German Left. But the fact that not everyone on the West German Left supports RAF tactics, and that the West German Right has an economic analysis which cannot be reconciled with hers, does not throw into crisis the temporal logic, the Human community’s assimilation of the communiqué’s third-term mediators. A common orientation to a call to arms is not what secures and stabilizes the coherence of a political communiqué. The communiqué’s coherence is secured and stabilized because Ulrike Meinhof and her readers are assimilated by the event—not by this or that event but by event as a formal instantiation of Human endeavors. It must be re-emphasized that the event is not in service to political agreement; it is in service to symbolic exchange, to the elaboration of dialogic context. Where the transindividual modalities of cartography labored to this end in Seán Mac Stíofáin’s political communiqué, Ulrike Meinhof’s communiqué is anchored by its transindividual inheritance and heritage. The working day swans throughout Meinhof’s text without needing to be named. The character of the working day is what the RAF and the capitalist struggle over—not the coherence of labor-time itself. To be sure, this is a high-stakes struggle (as the violence of the state and Meinhof’s counter violence indicate) over the character and ownership of labor time (will it be exploited by those who consume or will it be exploited by those who work); but it is not a struggle over the narrative coherence of labortime itself. Though the RAF and the capitalist are locked in mortal combat over economic supremacy and symbolic hegemony, this combat is not a struggle between species. They both belong to the Human race. The transindividuated nature of the working day as a third-term mediator secures the political integrity of their species, just as the more generic capacity to produce, distribute and consume (or be assimilated by) third term mediators secures the integrity of their mutual Humanity. It also—and this is key—is what separates them from the dead (that is, Assata, the BLA, and Black people at large). Political agreement is secondary to species consolidation; in fact, we could say that the political disagreement might consolidate the Human species more effectively than political agreement. The temporal shifts in class relations which Meinhof’s communiqué reports on, i.e., the “negation of parliamentary democracy” which led to “emergency laws and the rule of the hand grenade” are not, as Meinhof and other Marxist and postcolonial

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writers aver, indicators of temporal shifts in species relations (Feldman 1991, 17–21). Put differently, the violence which enables and maintains these shifts cannot be analogized with the violence which enables and maintains Assata Shakur’s subjugation. Class warfare marks important shifts in intra-species relations, not essential shifts in relations between antagonists. Meinhof is wrong: the bosses are not her antagonists. Mac Stíofáin is wrong: the British are not his antagonists. They and their oppressors have a common antagonist, the Black. The mediating objects of cartography and the event, which Meinhof and Mac Stíofáin possess not as a result of their labors but which are, rather, bequeathed them as Human inheritance, stabilize the political communiqué in those moments when they must legitimize political violence. Mac Stíofáin asserts the goal is to remove British ‘presence’ from Ireland and to die, if necessary, in the process. The imposition of a British cartography inhibits the restoration of Irish territorial integrity—from the corporeal to the nation. But the corporeal and the national are not threatened as schemas; symbolic resonance remains intact. Ulrike Meinhof extends Mac Stíofáin’s cartographic mediation by invoking the temporality of narrative itself: revolutionary violence will “destroy the myth of the system’s omnipresence and invulnerability” and “exonerate[] class justice from guilt.” In other words, RAF violence is in service to a project which infuses chronology with ethics; a violence which enables a pilgrim’s progress from mystification to clarification. This makes urban guerrilla warfare something very different for Meinhof and Mac Stíofáin than it is for Assata Shakur. What Meinhof’s communiqué is saying is that urban guerrilla warfare is that force which contributes to the unmasking of capitalist social relations. The crisis in civil society which this brings about will catalyze a more essential unmasking of the commodity form’s circuit of displacement, substitution, and signification. Meinhof and Mac Stíofáin think they will undo the world in this way and bring about a new paradigm, but by leaving the violence of Black revolt out of the equation, their proletariat and postcolonial violence “destroy[s] the myth” of a capitalist or colonizing “omnipresence and invulnerability” (Meinhof, qtd. in O’Boyle 2002, 32–33), while it simultaneously reinvigorates the generative mechanisms of Human life (i.e., the Symbolic Order), mechanisms which are not available to the Slave. Revolutionary strategies which unmask the hypostasized form that value (i.e., the commodity) takes as it masks both its differential and social

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relations, experience the humiliation of their explanatory power when confronted with the Black. For the Black has no social relation(s) to be either masked or unmasked—not, that is, in a structural sense. Social relations depend on various pretenses to the contrary; therefore, what gets masked by Meinhof’s and Mac Stíofáin’s revolutionary violence is, as we will see, the matrix of violence that makes Black relationality an oxymoron. To relate, socially, one must enter a social drama’s mise-en-scène with spatial and temporal coherence—in other words, with human capacity. Shakur is not so much the antithesis of human capacity (for that might imply a dialectic potential in the Slave’s encounter with the world) as she is the absence of Human capacity. There is no shortness of breath, no unmoored flights of impressionism in Meinhof’s11 and Mac Stíofáin’s legitimation of terror, not because they are brave and committed but because, compared to Assata Shakur, the spatial-temporal context from which they espouse terror is not so terrifying. Everywhere you look, the terror they describe and the terror they unleash has symbolic resonance and legitimation. Therefore terrorism, as a way of characterizing IRA violence against the British, or RAF violence against the West German upper class, loses its universal horror and is made relative by how one Human lives her symbolic presence with, through, and against the symbolic presence of another Human. This shared context of symbolic resonance and legitimation, a dialogic context, continues to exist once the state has quashed non-Black paramilitaries. Dennis A. Pluchinsky, an analyst who, in 1993, worked for the U.S. Department of State, Office of Intelligence and Threat Analysis, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, characterized the final communiqués of the RAF as documents “that reflect the RAF's ideological fatigue, strategic confusion, and organizational isolation” (Pluchinsky 1993, 136), but his gloating obituary of the RAF also reveals the degree to which the RAF existed in a dialogic context with the state it sought to destroy, as evinced in prison reforms and prisoner releases which came about as a result of armed assaults against the state and as a result of discussions between the RAF and the government, reflected in the Kinkel Initiative, named after Klaus Kinkel, the then-Minister of Justice in West Germany.

—————— 11 This is also true of the later communiqués, such as the April 1992 RAF communiqué which announced a ceasefire in exchange for the release of prisoners and the easing of draconian living conditions for those who would remain behind bars.

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Government sanctioned intellectuals like Pluchinsky see the demobilization of groups like the RAF as a failure of political discourse when, in point of fact, the ability of a handful of paramilitaries to “occup[y] the European stage for over 22 years” (Pluchinsky 1993, 136), bring one of the strongest police states in the Western world to the negotiating table, secure better conditions for some of their comrades and, from 1992 to 2011, the release of virtually all of their comrades (Moghadam 2012, 172–173) could just as readily be characterized as the success of RAF political discourse, and of a certain amount of “ideological fatigue, strategic confusion, and organizational isolation” (Pluchinsky 1993, 136) on the part of the government. The most important intervention to be made here is not, I am arguing, one which takes the form of a corrective to the neoliberal agenda of state sanctioned intellectuals like Pluchinsky and Moghadam who denounce armed struggle on the left and characterize its aftereffects as political failures. Nor is my project one of shoring-up the revolutionary backbone of more left-leaning intellectuals who misconstrue tactics for strategy, and thereby produce scholarship which anguishes over questions such as “how to judge [sixties- and seventies-era left wing violence] in political and moral terms” (Varon 2008a, 29) and, as soon as they ask the question, turn around and answer it with a lament that left wing political violence of the era “irrespective of [its] grandiose goals of advancing ‘revolution,’ contributed to a domestic climate of chaos that imposed a political limit on the length and intensity of the Vietnam War” (Varon 2008a, 33–34)12. Both projects, though at opposite ends of a political spectrum, are enmeshed in the same project of civic (Human) stability and monumentalization. The left liberal Weltschmerz over tactics is, perhaps, the most pernicious because, compared to the straight-ahead condemnation of political violence from scholars like Pluchinsky and Moghadam, it more successfully reproduces networks of “connections, transfers and displacements” (Miller and Rose 1994, 31), in short, articulations, between members of the Human family (articulations which, I am also arguing are both necessary for Human renewal and for the ontological isolation of the Slave). Varon’s epilogue to an anthology on the RAF’s cultural impact is a case in point. He writes:

—————— 12 Jeremy Varon’s work is characteristic of a uniquely American way of raising tactics to the level of a principled concern. He is also amongst the most prolific, see Varon (2004).

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“States combating terrorism typically claim to defend not simply their legitimacy and the well-being of their political community, but the values of the civilised world—civilisation itself—against a resolutely evil foe. The ‘terrorists,’ by contrast, declare the wholesale illegitimacy of the power they oppose. Claiming the mantle of freedom fighters, agents of liberation, or holy warriors, they see their violence not simply as a grim political necessity but as virtuous and even, in many cases, explicitly sacred service to some grand narrative of emancipation or moral cleansing. The public—the vital ‘third term’ within terrorism—is drawn not only into the material drama of strike and counter-strike, but into a larger discursive battle of the conflict itself and the broader social realities.” (Varon 2008b, 303)

Here, the paramilitaries and the state exist in a macabre exaggeration of the Lacanian Imaginary, a neurotic and deadly dyad of mirror images which impoverish the collective psyche of the Human family. But “the public,” as a third-term mediating object, stands as that entity which triangulates the exchange and provides the Humans with a path from the Imaginary to the Symbolic: “the fusion of structures of representation and institutional structures, as in Levi-Strauss’s linguistic model of kinship systems” (Feldman 1991, 289). Though Varon’s assessment is moral, intended to labor in the realm of experience, it unintentionally demonstrates how Human capacity functions and is authorized in its more formal dimensions, thereby giving us insight into the divergence between Human ontology and the Blacks ontological void. It allows us to segue into an explanation as to how intra-Human violence functions as the rebar of relationality rather than the wrecking ball of relationality, as both the liberal left and the neo-liberal right would have us believe. The pageantry of ‘strike/counter-strike’ intensified White Germans’ proclivity to imagine political conflict, which is to say ‘affilial’ struggles, through filial frames. Throughout the critical and journalistic literature, the ‘Good German’ dilemma raised by the strike/counter-strike violence, questions of citizenship and state power which would ordinarily be categorized as affilial dilemmas involving “transpersonal forms of authority […] such as […] class […] and hegemony,” are displaced onto the good wife dilemma (to be or not to be), the dilemma of the good daughter, the good son, the good father or the good mother, questions which would ordinarily be categorized as filial, involving “natural forms of authority […] involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict” (Said 1984, 20). The violence wove a tapestry of articulations, “connections, transfers and displacements” (Miller and Rose 1994, 31), between affilial frames of reference and filial frames of reference (some were rational and level-headed,

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others quite bizarre) in which the filial frame was, primarily, hegemonic, for the simple reason that it orients and grounds the scholarship and journalism in the manner of a faith-based initiative: without the need for justifications or explanations of its deployment. The three phases of RAF armed insurgency are referred to as “generations” regardless of whether the writer is hostile to the groups or in some way sympathetic. What the framing allows for is a deeper, more unconscious saturation of Human authority because this framing naturalizes state authority as family authority. “[C]haracteristics of the family environment are projected onto the social environment” in such a way as to allow for “no disproportion between family life and the life of the nation” (Fanon 2008, 121–122). Generational framing consolidates the orientation of criticism,13 and it overdetermines the way visual representations of the RAF-era are curated: “The most striking example of this is the use of a pram as memory object at the permanent exhibition of the German History Museum […] Germany’s controversial terrorist past is represented by an object associated with woman’s cultural role […] reduced to a pram carrying weapons […] blamed on phallic women […] and ‘effeminate’ men such as Baader who allow such women to dominate.” (Bielby 2010, 137, 138, 147)

One of the more bizarre examples of what I am describing is to be found in the visual artist Jutta Brückner’s comments about her video installation, Bräute des Nichts: Der weibliche Terror: Magda Goebbels und Ulrike Meinhof [Brides of Nothing: Female Terrorism: Magda Goebbels and Ulrike Meinhof], in which she asserts an “unprecedented connection between Magda Goebbels and Ulrike Meinhof”; a connection which “allows a different, female story of modern times to be told. […] I understand Magda Goebbels and Ulrike

—————— 13 See, for example, Ascherson (1972); Kligerman (2008); Colvin (2008); Koenen (2008); Preece (2010). A notable exception to the interpretive frame which exhibits an ease of transfers and connections between filiation and affiliation culminating in the subordination of the latter to the former, is Wright (1991). It is a book of the early nineteen nineties, not of the twenty-first century. So it does not ooze with affect and melancholia which typifies someone looking back on their youth (or the youth of their parents). However, the last section of the book, titled “Propaganda,” Wright inevitably fortifies and extends the authority of the Symbolic Order, by way of a triangulation between The Uncommitted Audience, the Sympathetic Audience, and the Active Audience, which has strong resonances with Jeremy Varon’s state, terrorist, and public triangulation. Even though her points of attention diverge from Varon’s, authorization is still vouchsafed via third term mediation. See Wright (1991, 73–173).

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Meinhof as women who, each in their own way fought out the battle between old and new forms of politics through the medium of their bodies.” These assertions are crowned by the declaration: “Magda Goebbels could have been the mother of Ulrike Meinhof” (qtd. in Bielby 2010, 145–46). A less peculiar but no less instructive example of filial authorization manifest as the foundation for state authorization—resultant from the pageantry of RAF and government violence—occurred in the West German state of Bremen when, during the 2007 parliamentary elections, it was discovered that Susanne Albrecht, a former RAF paramilitary who participated in the July 1977 attempted kidnapping and subsequent slaying of Dresdner Bank chief Jürgen Ponto, was teaching English in a local public school. The Christian Democrats (CDU) said they didn’t want terrorists teaching children. The Social Democrats (SPD) argued Albrecht had served her time and renounced terror and was no longer a threat, but a citizen with rights like everyone else. The parents weighed in, issuing a statement saying, “They were outraged that Albrecht’s past was being used as a campaign issue in the Bremen elections. Albrecht ‘should continue her very successful work with the children of our school’” (Deutsche Welle staff/DPA (tt) 2007, n. pag.). The heat this exchange is not to be found in the disagreement over the safety of ‘our’ children; but rather in the unspoken consensus of the status of ‘our’ children. Again, intra-Human political violence has such a disruptive effect in the realm of experience (people are injured and many die) that it can harden political and social attitudes for years; but it is also a balm, a means of relational therapy which elaborates strategies for Human renewal, and these strategies are themselves the effects of the fusion of symbolic resonances through which relationality and subjectivity, as formal entities, are constituted. The thing to bear in mind here is how profoundly unmarked a Black paramilitary’s plight is by this messy and contrariness of civic recognition, incorporation, and renewal. The pageantry of ‘strike and counter-strike’ between the BLA and the state never elaborated—never could have elaborated—such a renewal of Human kinship; at least not one in which the Black paramilitaries in particular and Black people in general could be imagined as members of the Human family. It did not promote civic debate about the affilial isolation of Black people with respect to civil society and political economy; nor did it facilitate a reimaging of Black people as people, as Human kin.

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Sundiata Acoli, Assata Shakur’s co-defendant in the New Jersey Turnpike shootout, had been a computer programmer for NASA prior to joining the BLA. He was an accomplished mathematician who wrote software for the USA’s first lunar landing. This aspect of his biography does nothing for him when he comes up for parole. He cannot be re-construed as former contributing member of society who helped put a man on the moon. Instead, he has been denied parole at least nine times in forty years. In 2010, at the age of seventy-three, the parole board gave him a ten year hit which means he must serve an additional six years. He will be seventy-nine years old when (if) he gets out. In 2012 Assata Shakur, a sixty-five year old grandmother and political exile living in Cuba with three bullets in her chest, a member of a routed paramilitary organization, someone who is so isolated that she often has to go underground in Cuba to evade bounty hunters who slink from Key West to Cuba in light sea crafts in hopes of capturing her and cashing in on the now two million dollar reward, became the first woman to be added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list.14 American civil society has not argued over her fitness as a mother, her rebirth as an educator, or whether her femininity should be compared with fascists or saints. And William Rosenau, a government sanctioned analyst like Pluchinsky and Moghadam, consoles his readers by claiming that today the USA faces no clear and present danger of another Black American paramilitary offensive which occurred in the nineteen seventies.15 Per capita, more young Black men

—————— 14 In addition to being the first woman named as a Most Wanted Terrorist, Assata Shakur is only the second domestic terrorist to be added to the list, see “New Most Wanted Terrorist” (n. pag.). 15 Rosenau is an analyst for the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a federally funded research and development center which has served the Navy and U.S. intelligence agencies since its founding in 1942. He works in CNA’s Strategic Studies division where all of the analysts are American citizens and have security clearance. On the one hand, Rosenau’s article “‘Our Backs Are Against the Wall’: The Black Liberation Army and Domestic Terrorism in 1970s America,” labors as an obituary of what he describes as “a once-notorious but now largely forgotten terrorist group” (2013, 177)—à la Pluchinsky’s obituary of the RAF. But it also labors as a cautionary tale, imploring law enforcement not become so fixated on Islamic fundamentalist that they take their eyes off of Black folks here at home. To this end, he reminds his readers that “the BLA was directly responsible for at least 20 fatalities, making it far more lethal than the WUO [Weather Underground Organization] or SLA [Symbionese Liberation Army]. Among the most notorious BLA’s actions were the 1973 killing of a New Jersey state trooper and the prison escape in 1979 of BLA leader Joanne Chesimard (also known as Assata Shakur)

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and women are in chains and cages than at the height of chattel slavery. Government assisted drug trafficking has decimated the Black urban landscape. Fewer Blacks are enrolled in tertiary educational institutions than there were prior to the advent of affirmative action. And the White American radical ‘allies’ who in the nineteen sixties and seventies wanted to change the world, succumbed to ennui and changed their minds. At whatever scale of abstraction one might want to consider the FBI’s adding of Assata Shakur to its list of Most Wanted Terrorists it would be hard to see the logic in it. That’s because it is not logical, it is prelogical; prelogical in the sense that, the collective unconscious of law enforcement, as an integral part of the collective unconscious of the socius, understands that Assata is a symbolic threat, but not in the same way that Ulrike Meinhof is a symbolic threat. Meinhof is a threat to stable arrangements of symbolism: both filial, the wayward daughter with a gun who threatens to unhinge The Name of the Father; and affilial, the wrathful anti-imperialist with a gun who threatens to unhinge capitalist hegemony. Assata, on the other hand (and the gun she used to wield) threatens not symbolic arrangements—she is not recognized and incorporated by such arrangements—but the Symbolic Order itself. A workers’ revolution blows the lid off the economy. A postcolonial revolution blows the lid of the colony. A Slave revolt blows the lid of the unconscious. The slave does not threaten capitalism with a new economic order, or filiation with a new nonpatriarchal order. The Slave threatens Order itself, whether manifest as an economic struggle between the capitalist and worker, or as a generational struggle between parent and child. Assata is a threat to the symbolic legibility and psychic coherence of Humanity writ large. Though Klaus Kinkel and Margaret Thatcher might never have admitted it, the common relationship to symbolic presence, which they share with their RAF and IRA paramilitaries, takes the terror out of terrorism by restoring relational logic to terror, thereby ratcheting the scale of abstraction downward from terror to fear. The so-called terror of the communist, the postcolonialist, and even the jihadist labor as modes of articulation with the terror of the state; their terror constructs and conserves: it guards a gated community known as the Symbolic Order; gated because it keeps the Slave from entering; community because it secures a spatial-temporal context which allows for “relational positioning and articulation of identities

—————— who had been convicted of the murder and today remains a fugitive in Cuba” (2013, 177).

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between subjects and between subjects and objects […]. The symbolic order is the representational limit formed by institutionalized closure that allows codes to operate, relationality to take place, and commensurations to be stabilized” (Feldman 1991, 289). “[T]he symbolic order is formed by the convergence between linguistic and social symbolism […] that is, the fusion of structures of representation and institutional structures, as in Levi-Strauss’s linguistic model of kinship systems” (Feldman 1991, 289). “The homologous character of linguistic symbolism and social symbolism derives from the fact that both are structures of oppositional elements capable of being combined, that both establish the possibility of recognition between subjects, and, finally, that both necessitate the passage from immediate “dual” relationship to a mediate relationship through the intervention of a third term: the concept of language, and the Ancestor, the Sacred cause, the God or Law in Society.” (Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (1977), qtd. in Feldman 1991, 289, original emphasis).

What Feldman is describing by way of Lemaire is a matrix for relational status of which a genealogical isolate like Assata Shakur cannot avail herself. She is an object of “structures of representation” and “institutional structures,” but she cannot be a subject of them, whether filial or affilial.16

—————— 16 Filial: any community one is born into: nation, religion, ethnicity, family. Affilial: a voluntary association, a community one chooses to enter. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Edward Said describes affiliation as “the transition from a failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory order that, whether it is a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision, provides men and women with a new form of relationship, which I have been calling affiliation but which is also a new system. Now whether we look at this new affiliative mode of relationship as it is to be found among conservative writers like Eliot or among progressive writers like Lukacs and, in his own special way, Freud, we will find the deliberately explicitly goal of using that new order to reinstate vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order. This, finally, is the third part of the pattern. Freud’s psychoanalytic guild and Lukacs’s notion of the vanguard party are no less providers of what we might call a restored authority. The new hierarchy or, if it is less a hierarchy than a community, the new community is greater than the individual adherent or member, just as the father is greater by virtue of seniority than the sons and daughters; the ideas, values, and the systematic totalizing world-view validated by the new affiliative order are all bearers of authority too, with the result that something resembling a cultural system is established. Thus if a filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority—involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict—the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms [for our purposes, mediating objects]—such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class and the hegemony of a dominant culture. The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of ‘life,’ whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society” (Said 1984, 19–20).

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Her communiqué cannot “mediate relationship[s] through the intervention of a third term,” and thereby establish “recognition between subjects.” The violence which elaborates and sustains her haunted presence (if presence is the right word) allows for no “passage from [an] immediate ‘dual’ relationship to a mediate relationship.” The textual heat of Assata Shakur’s communiqué is not cathected by transindividual concepts like land and labor power, but instead is dispersed throughout an array of bodily violations, horrifying images indexical of a structural rupture of her capacity to lay claim to transindividual concepts, to mediating objects. In Assata Shakur’s communiqué, we do not get a picture of someone whose native land has been stolen, whose labor power has been usurped, or whose culture has been quashed and corrupted. Instead, we get a picture of someone whose condition of possibility is elaborated by violence too comprehensive to comprehend: violence without analogy, violence so totalizing it prevents the closure of her bodily schema. This comes through most poignantly in the repetition and intensity with which she invokes rapes, murders and castrations that she and her people have experienced—the violence that prohibits the closure of her bodily schema. In the one of the few places where she invokes politically coherent transgressions committed against her and her people, “the rich who prosper on our property” (Shakur 1987, 50), we find that the cathexis is not located in the idea of capitalist accumulation (à la Meinhof) but in images of capitalist physiognomy: the faces, hearts, and minds of the rich and powerful—images of sentient being rather than the drama of value which that being dominates and controls. At the lowest scale of abstraction she cannot lay claim to a proper noun, a form of unique conceptualization; nor, moving up the scale, can she lay claim to a common noun, a form of conceptualization which is collective. Therefore, her ‘political’ violence, the armed struggle which Black Liberation Army paramilitaries embarked upon, is characteristic not of noun-possessed subjects who use violence to change the conceptual context in which they are named, i.e. political, national, and economic status, but of a nameless object fighting for the status of subjectivity itself;17

—————— 17 This may seem paradoxical given my earlier assertions that the slave is barred from subjectivity. I am not going back on that here, but it must be remembered that though the slave stands in no dialectical relation to the Human subject, s/he facilitates, makes possible, the legibility of that very subjectivity from which s/he is barred. As Hartman writes, “The slave is the object or the ground that makes possible the existence of the

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which is what makes the threat of Black armed insurrection terrifying in a way that Marxist or postcolonial and IRA insurrection could never be. This is why civil society is so genuinely terrified by the prospect of Black paramilitary terror. Everyone knows (if only instinctively) how all-encompassing and timeless the terror which subsumes Blackness is. When civil society is stable, this knowledge can be a comfort, for it helps non-Black people fashion self-hood (David Marriott’s lynchers) by way of a comparative calculus which reveals to them that they are safe on the shore of contingent violence rather than adrift in a sea of gratuitous violence; that even when ‘terror’ engulfs them violence can still “mediate relationship[s] through the intervention of a third term” (Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (1977), qtd. in Feldman 1991, 289), and can harvest symbols which restore their lives to relational logic. But when the Black paramilitary picks up the gun, the crisis on the horizon is not one of a radical shift in the temporal drama of value (as Meinhof would have it) nor one which portends a new and disorienting map (new for Mac Stíofáin, disorienting for Thatcher). It is not a crisis which looms, what looms is a catastrophe of symbolic capacity, for no symbols can represent what Black violence portends. No rational assessment of the objective conditions can soothe the nerves. This is what the phrase, “fear of a Black planet” really means: the fear of no planet at all, the fear of living one’s life like a Black. A life in which there is no civic, no society, in which death is a synonym for sanctuary. Throughout Assata’s communiqué there is a stark collapse between what Antonio Gramsci calls political society (“the pigs”) and civil society (newspapers, TV, hotels, subways, airports) (Gramsci 1971). The pigs have used their newspapers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as “vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals” (Shakur 1987, 50)—as though it would be unimaginable for her to have had an experience in the domain of respite, civil society, that is qualitatively different from the violence she experiences in prison, political society. This absorption of civil society by political society resembles a violent totality that Allen Feldman describes in Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. He argues that violence has become “a dialogical situation” unto

—————— bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty, citizenship, and the enclosures of the social body” (1997, 62). And, the political and interpersonal striving for that very subjectivity which is unattainable characterizes the conscious intentionality of the Black political communiqué (as well as of Black love songs) even though (or perhaps because) a Hegelian outcome is impossible.

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itself (Feldman 1991, 6–7, 12, 15, 21–22, 28–31). Violence is no longer an effect of a prior, originary narrative. Feldman’s study of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland from 1969 through the nineteen eighties provides us with an important corrective to the cognitive map of postcolonial studies. His aim is to help us view paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland as a “political technology of the body connected to paramilitary practice both inside and outside the prison”; and to analyze violent episodes “within the general framework of the cultural construction of violence in Northern Ireland” (1991, 231). He urges us to think of violence itself as a cultural construction, rather than thinking of violence as an effect of, or in contingent relation to, cultural (meaning ideological) constructions. Violence, Feldman argues, begets its own semiotic structure, it is not the product of a (non-violent) semiotic arrangement; in other words, it is not an effect of ideological imposition. He argues that the postindustrial context of economic relations, otherwise known as globalization, has subsumed all of civil society by the command modality of capital. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin provides Feldman with the theoretical license he needs to argue that violence is not a subtracted effect from an originary mise-en-scene (Britain’s ideology of domination): in a postindustrial world, where all of civil society, to echo Hardt and Negri,18 has been subsumed by command, violence has become a dialogical situation in its own right. “The dialogical situation,” which violence itself can now constitute, without the aid of narrative, Feldman writes: “is one in which two or more conflictual heterogeneous, or polarized social codes are present in the same set of signifiers. These composite signs trace a history of desemantization: their incomplete detachment from prior references and their realignment with new meanings and inferences.” (1991, 284)

Now that the global economy has been unhinged from production and from the gold standard, Feldman argues, violence has been unhinged from its discursive moorings. Violence forms a dialogical situation all its own; it has its own grammar, and its own heterogeneous and conflictual codes, and though this postindustrial violence bears the traces of prior references (i.e. the trace of ideology). What is equally important to our understanding

—————— 18 For a critique of Hardt and Negri’s notion of the withering away of civil society, from a Black perspective, see my Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S Antagonisms (2010, 247–284).

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violence on its own terms, to our theorizing it as a dialogical situation, is the radical implications of this detachments from those prior references: the realignment of its codes through new meanings and inferences means that political logic which underwrote Meinhof’s and Mac Stíofáin’s political communiqués has lost a great deal of its explanatory power, as the condition of the subjects on whose behalf they wrote has radically changed for the worse. Though for Feldman’s Northern Irish men and women, topos has now been subsumed by violence, the same is not true for Assata and Black people on whose behalf she fights and writes. The subsumption of their topography by violence is the very condition of Black emergence, it was not contingent upon shifts in global economic relations, and it did not start when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. We cannot even say “it goes back” to the Arab slave trade which started in 625 (Anderson 1995; Lewis 1990) because this would imply that there was a figure called the Black or the African who was enslaved first by the Arabs and then by the Europeans. In other words, the idea of ‘going back’ imbues Black suffering with a temporality that it doesn’t have; emplots the slave in the arc of equilibrium, disequilibrium, equilibrium restored; when, in point of fact, Blackness and Slaveness are coterminous. The total subsumption of civil society by the violent command modalities of capital rob the Irish and the working class of the narrative coherence that Meinhof’s and Mac Stíofáin’s political communiqués take for granted—a totalizing violence that delivers their revolutionary heirs (for example, the third generation of RAF fighters and the IRA Hunger Strikers led by Bobby Sands) into what might be called a context of terror. Because the third-term symbolic mediators of this new dispensation have been so deracinated by new formations of violence, it appears as though the worker and the postcolonial have been repositioned as beings upon whom violence acts in accordance with its own necessity, a world in which violence is not contingent upon narrative acts, a world very much like the Slave’s. It would be tempting to end here, link arms and sing Kumbaya. If not for the fact that even this tectonic shift, this shift from the supremacy of narrative to the supremacy of violence on its own terms is predicated on a narrative progression. Again, Blackness cannot be disimbricated from slavery, in the way that Irishness can be disimbricated from colonial rule or in the way that labor can be delinked from capital. The violence which subsumes the Irish has

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temporal limits (the time of the Troubles, from the late nineteen sixties to the “Good Friday” Agreement of 1998) as well as spatial limits (the urban North). Not only is there no punctuation in the temporality of the violence that subsumes Assata, but furthermore, no cartography of violence can be mapped, for that would imply the prospect for a map of non-violent space. To the contrary, Assata Shakur’s political communiqué demonstrates that she and other Black people are in the throes of what historian David Eltis calls “violence beyond the limit” (1993, 1423), by which he means (a) in the libidinal economy there are no forms of violence so excessive that they would be considered too cruel to inflict upon Blacks; and (b) in political economy there are no rational explanations for this limitless theatre of cruelty, no explanations which would make political or economic sense of the violence she describes (as, for example, Ulrike Meinhof does). Whereas the Human’s relationship to violence is always contingent, triggered by her transgressions against the regulatory prohibitions of the Symbolic Order or by macro-economic shifts in her social context, the Slave’s relationship to violence is open ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint, triggered by prelogical catalysts which are unmoored from her transgressions and unaccountable to historical shifts. In short, the violence of Assata Shakur’s communiqué is not the effect of symbolic transgressions, nor is it the result (as Allen Feldman would have it) of a new, global shift in political economy—it is simply an extension of the master’s prerogative.

Works Cited Anderson, S. E. (1995). Black Holocaust for Beginners. Danbury, CT: Writers & Readers Publishing. Anonymous (2002). Revolutionary Armed Struggle. [A handbook on revolutionary armed struggle written by an anonymous Black Liberation Army soldier in the 1970s. It details strategies and tactics for urban and rural guerilla warfare.] Montreal: Abraham Guillen Press/Arm the Spirit. Ascherson, Neal (1972). “The Wife Who Became Public Enemy No. 1.” theguardian.com. 17 June 1972. http://www.theguardian.com/world/1972/jun/18/ germany.terrorism. 12 July 2014. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bielby, Clare (2010). “Remembering the Red Army Faction.” Memory Studies, 3.2: 137–150.

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Black Liberation Army Political Dictionary (2005). Black Liberation Army Co-ordinating Committee (eds.). Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing. Bukhari, Safiya (2010). The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY. Colvin, Sarah (2008). “Ulrike Meinhof as Woman and Terrorist: Cultural Discourses of Violence and Virtue.” In Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (eds). Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, 83–101. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press. Deutsche Welle staff/DPA (tt) (2007). “Ex-Terrorist Becomes an Issue in German State Poll.” dw.de. Deutsche Welle, 12 May 2007. http://www.dw.de/ex-terror ist-becomes-an-issue-in-german-state-poll/a-2510817-1. 12 July 2014. Eltis, David. (1993) “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation.” The American Historical Review, 98.5: 1339–1423. Fanon, Frantz (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Feldman, Allen (1991). Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Siegmund (1955). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 1–64. 1920. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Global Terrorism Database (2012). National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). The University of Maryland, College Park. http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?search=Black+Libe ration+Army&sa.x=35&sa.y=13&sa=Search. 3 August 2013. Gramsci, Antonio. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds. and trans). New York: International Publishers. Hartman, Saidiya (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartman, Saidiya V., and Frank B. Wilderson III (2003). “The Position of the Unthought: An Interview with Saidiya V. Hartman; Conducted by Frank B. Wilderson III.” Qui Parle, 13.2: 183–201. Judy, R. A. T. (1993) (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kligerman, Eric (2008) “Transgenerational Hauntings: Screening the Holocaust in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 Paintings.” In Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (eds). Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, 41–63. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press. Koenen, Gerd (2008). “Armed Innocence, or ‘Hitler’s Children’ Revisited.” In Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (eds). Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, 23–38. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press.

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Laplanche, J., and J.B. Pontalis (1973). “The Language of Psycho-Analysis.” Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. The International Psycho-Analytical Library, 94: 1–497. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Lewis, Bernard (1990). Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marriott, David (2000). On Black Men. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Miller, Peter, and Nikolas Rose (1994). “On Therapeutic Authority: Psychoanalytical Expertise Under Advanced Liberalism.” History of Sciences, 7.3: 29–64. Moghadam, Assaf (2012). “Failure and Disengagement in the Red Army Faction.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 35: 156–181. Morrison, Toni (1990). “Toni Morrison: Part 1—On Love and Writing.” Bill Moyers A World of Ideas. billmoyers.com, Moyers&Company. 11 March 1990. http://billmoyers.com/content/toni-morrison-part-1/. 18 July 2013. Morson, Gary Saul (2010). “The Chronotopes of Humanness: Bakhtin and Dostoevsky.” In Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, and Michel De Dobbeleer (eds). Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspective, 93– 110. Gent: Academia Press. Muntaqim, Jalil (2002). On the Black Liberation Army. 1979. Montreal: Abraham Guillen Press/Arm the Spirit. — (2010). We Are Our Own Liberators: Selected Prison Writings. 2000. Montreal: Arissa Media Group. “New Most Wanted Terrorist: Joanne Chesimard First Woman Added to List” (2013). fbi.gov. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 02 May 2013. http://www. fbi.gov/news/stories/2013/may/joanne-chesimard-first-woman-named-mostwanted-terrorists-list. 3 August 2013. O'Boyle, G. (2002). “Theories of Justification and Political Violence: Examples from Four Groups.” Terrorism and Political Violence, 14.2: 2–46. Pluchinsky, Dennis A. (1993). “Germany’s Red Army Faction: An Obituary.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 16.2: 135–157. Preece, Julian (2010). “The Lives of the RAF Revisited: The Biographical Turn.” Memory Studies, 3.2: 151–163. Raggatt, Peter T. F. (2010). “The Dialogical Self and Thirdness: A Semiotic Approach to Positioning Using Dialogical Triads.” Theory & Psychology, 20.3: 400– 419. Rosenau, William (2013). “‘Our Backs Are against the Wall’: The Black Liberation Army and Domestic Terrorism in 1970s America.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 36:2, 176–192. Said, Edward (1984). The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Faber and Faber. Shakur, Assata (1987). Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Varon, Jeremy (2004). Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley: The University of California Press.

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— (2008a). “Refusing to be ‘Good Germans’: New Left Violence as a Global Phenomenon.” German Historical Institute Bulletin, 43: 21–43. — (2008b). “Stammheim Forever and the Ghosts of Guantanamo: Cultural Memory and the Politics of Incarceration.” In Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (eds). Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German LeftWing Terrorism, 303–325. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press. Wacquant, Loïc (2002). “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the US.” New Left Review, 13: 41–60. Wayne, Mike (1997). Theorising Video Practice. London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd. Wilderson, Frank B. III (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. Wright, Joanne (1991). Terrorist Propaganda: The Red Army Faction and the Provisional IRA, 1968–86. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Disciplinary Reconfigurations

Inequalities Unbound: Transregional Entanglements and the Creolization of Europe1 Manuela Boatcă “A casual traveler to the Caribbean region would notice […] the variegated appearance of the people, and the rainbow spectrum of ‘nonwhiteness’ among them. European and American cities have now taken on some of that once startling variety and color. But in the Caribbean, it is the way people have looked for a very long time.” Sidney Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies

1. The Transnationalization of Europe? The widespread notion that processes of creolization have historically been characteristic of non-European regions more generally, and of the Caribbean in particular, has so far tended to rule out references to Europe as a creole or creolizing continent. On the contrary: the emergence of nationstates beginning in seventeenth century Europe with the Treaty of Westphalia was usually viewed as the gradual overcoming of multinational political organizations and multiethnic empires and thus as the starting point of processes of ethnic homogenization in most parts of Europe (Therborn 1995). Recent approaches instead view transnationalization as a major way in which the larger process of globalization affects what is being conceived as a post-Westphalian Europe with increasingly porous national borders. From this point of view, transnational flows of people, goods, and capital appear as a relatively new trend, and the growing influx of migrants as an unprecedented effect of transnational processes on a formerly relatively homogeneous European context (Berger and Weiß 2008; Pries 2008). The result is described as “Europeanization”—of political institutions, social structures, or cultural patterns—and as the realization of old cosmopolitan

—————— 1 Research for this paper was made possible by funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for my fellowship at the research network desiguALdades.net (see Boatcă 2011). I am grateful for valuable exchanges with members of the network during that time. I also thank Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Ann Tate for detailed feedback and insightful comments on previous drafts of this chapter and the editors of the present volume for further helpful suggestions.

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aspirations toward overcoming nationalism, acknowledging difference, and achieving world citizenship (Delanty and Rumford 2005, 193). In turn, the present chapter argues that Europe has to be understood as a creolized space by virtue of its very colonial entanglements with regions such as the Caribbean, in the creolization of which it itself played an essential role. Against this background, transborder processes can be shown to have shaped inequalities within Europe as well as between Europe and other world regions for more than five centuries. At least since the European expansion into the Americas, transregional migration, the Atlantic slave trade, and the unequal economic exchange between shifting metropolitan and peripheral areas have provided economic, cultural, and political entanglements that decisively shaped the inequality structures of both the former colonizing and the former colonized regions. In order to show the historical continuities between “creolization” as a term originally coined to describe processes specific to the Caribbean and what is being analyzed today under the label of the “transnationalization” of (Western) Europe, the example of the Caribbean as “Europe’s first colonial backyard” (Mintz 1998, 127) is used in the following as a paradigmatic case. It is argued that viewing the transnationalization of Europe as a new phenomenon today and creolization as its outcome requires erasing the transnational experiences of non-European, non-Western, and nonWhite regions such as the Caribbean from social theory as well as disregarding the multiple entanglements between Europe and its colonies throughout the centuries. The project of creolizing Europe is therefore contingent upon creolizing social theory so as to account for the racial, ethnic, and cultural heterogeneity that these transregional entanglements produced both within and outside Europe. In showing how the transregional flows of people, goods, and capital established early transborder links among inequality patterns between Europe and its colonies in the Caribbean as early as the sixteenth century, the paper thus claims that theorizing the continuum of structures of power linking colonialism to (post)coloniality is an essential element in the joint endeavor of creolizing Europe and creolizing theory. Examples from throughout the Americas are subsequently used to make this case.

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2. The Caribbean as Creolized Transborder Space Seldom taken into account in mainstream social theory, which generalized from the experience of Europe, the Caribbean, which instead counted as a historically particular case, was constructed as Europe’s antithesis. As both scholars of and from the Caribbean have repeatedly pointed out, transborder connections, culture flows, and the transnational movement of people and capital have characterized the region from the moment of its conquest and up to the present day (Glick Schiller 2009; Grosfoguel et al. 2009; Mintz 1998).2 As the first region to be colonized by Europe in the sixteenth century and the last one to be (incompletely) decolonized in the twentieth, the Caribbean was shaped by the worldwide demand and supply of colonial labor throughout the entire history of the capitalist worldeconomy: despite its modest geographical size, it received between onethird and a half of all the enslaved Africans shipped to the New World between 1492 and the end of the eighteenth century (see Fig. 1), significant numbers of indentured and contracted European laborers during much of the same period, as well as indentured Indian and Chinese workers after the formal abolition of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century (Rediker 2007; Grosfoguel et al. 2009; Mintz 2010).

—————— 2 The use of the term ‘transnational’ is of course anachronistic in the context of the sixteenth century. Therefore, when referring to any time period before the emergence of Western European nation-states, I use the term ‘trans-border’ instead, but employ ‘transnational’ in order to make visible the parallels with the discourse of transnationalization in sociology and anthropology today.

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Fig. 1. Volume and Direction of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from all African to all American regions. (Source: David Eltis and David Richardson (2010). Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press, reproduced with the permission of Yale University Press.)

In turn, the first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a circuit of intra-regional migration of cheap labor force to the larger Caribbean islands where U.S.-led corporations operated; after World War II, when cheap labor from the non-independent territories of the Caribbean was explicitly and massively recruited to work in Western Europe and the United States, the entire region turned into a source of transcontinental emigration (Grosfoguel et al. 2009). The Caribbean has therefore been repeatedly theorized in terms of transculturation, creolization, and hybridity, while concepts such as “remittance societies,” “circular migration,” or “diaspora,” now widely used within the growing field of transnational studies, have first been coined in relation with the Caribbean region (Mintz 1998; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001; Glick Schiller 2009). As long as methodological nationalism reigned supreme in both area studies and the social sciences more generally, however, such trans-border phenomena were conceived as anomalies and the Caribbean itself was treated as a deviant case, the reality of which was irrelevant for anthropological theorybuilding (Glick Schiller 2009, 22). For sociology and political economy, whose emphasis until very recently lay on modern industrial societies, the Car-

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ibbean instead served for a long time as a paradigmatic example of the contrast between slavery and free labor and the respective connotations of backwardness, inefficiency, underdevelopment, and non-white labor characterizing New World slavery as a particular form of agricultural organization. As such, they constituted the opposite of the freedom, the modern character, and the high productivity of the white European wage-workers—which supposedly lay at the root of the development of industrial capitalist ‘economies.’ Indeed, as a continent of mass emigration, which, alongside nationbuilding processes, expulsions, and waves of ethnic cleansing, had produced exceptionally high levels of ethnic homogenization, Europe appeared to be, until the mid-twentieth century, the opposite of the racially and ethnically diverse Caribbean. Especially, but not only during the nineteenth century, all Western European states but France were countries of transcontinental emigration—mainly to the Americas. Intracontinental migration, in turn, was negligible. In 1950, the non-White population in the UK was estimated at 0.4 percent, while the ‘foreign’ population amounted to less than 5 percent throughout Western Europe except Switzerland.3 It was only with the post-war recruitment of migrant labor and the aftermath of the administrative decolonization in the early nineteen sixties that Europe as a continent became “more of an arrival hall than a departure lounge for intercontinental migration” (Therborn 1995, 41). All Western European states4 became recipients of large migrant populations: first, from recently decolonized African states and from ever more dictatorial states in Latin America; subsequently, several waves of unskilled labor migrants contracted by government policies of postwar economic reconstruction from adjacent or formerly colonized countries; and, after 1990, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European war refugees. If creoliza-

—————— 3 Therborn (1995, 49) rightly points out that the OECD data quoted here was not collected having the foreign-born population in mind (which would alter the estimate of ethnic heterogeneity in Europe), nor did the category ‘ethnic minorities’ for the UK explicitly differentiate between white and non-white populations. A conceptualization based solely on citizenship of course fails to account, among other things, for the presence of (non-White) colonial subjects possessing metropolitan citizenship on European soil. However, as detailed in the following, their numbers can reasonably be assumed to have been very low before the nineteen sixties. 4 Except Ireland. France experienced a first wave of immigration in the eighteen thirties, followed by an influx of colonial immigrants from North Africa, especially Algeria; Switzerland actively recruited foreign labor in the late nineteenth century, as did Belgium after World War I (see Therborn 1995, 41, 51).

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tion—a geographically and historically specific process related to the mass movement of people and goods from Europe and Africa to the Americas and the creation of new cultures and peoples in the plantation contact zones—has acquired currency in the context of transnationalism and Globalization Studies, this is, according to Sidney Mintz, because “the world has now become a macrocosm of what the Caribbean region was in the 16th century” (Mintz 1998, 120). Far from being an instance of historical particularism concerning one specific world region and one unique socioeconomic context, the Caribbean merely encompassed many transborder processes and transregional entanglements at a “theoretically inconvenient time” (Mintz 1998, 124). To this day, inequality patterns in both Western Europe and the Caribbean can be traced back to the historical entanglements between the two regions since colonial times, and thus have to be understood as relational—rather than diverging or contrasting—inequality structures. Their mainstream conceptualization throughout the twentieth century as “modern industrial society” in the case of Europe and “non-modern, pre-industrial society” in the case of the Caribbean and other non-European, nonWhite regions however results in their treatment as disconnected contexts of social inequality, to be explained and analyzed primarily in terms of class on the one hand and of ethnicity/race on the other (Boatcă 2010, 45). In turn, highlighting the severely undertheorized notion that European modernity was emigrant, i.e., extra-European emigrant (Therborn 1995, 50) and incorporating its colonial counterpart into an inequality concept at the level of the modern/colonial world-system reveals a different picture: As markers of the Others’ position in the division of labor—in which the term Other simultaneously or alternatively denotes the non-European, nonindustrial and non-modern—ethnicity and race do not represent ‘new’ categories to be taken into account in the European context, but ones that have recently gained more sociological visibility on account of having become significant in the geopolitical core of the discipline—Western Europe.5 Creolizing Europe therefore entails the creolization of theory through incorporating the Caribbean experience of an extractive slave economy based on transatlantic trade and interregional migration as central to, and inseparable from, the history of modern industrial Europe. The

—————— 5 For a detailed analysis of the divergent treatment of class vs. ethnicity/race and their relationship to mainstream conceptualizations of modernity and social inequality, see Boatcă (2010).

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same is true of further ex-metropolitan and ex-colonized regions in which colonial power structures have endured well into postcolonial times, as explored in the next section.

3. Relational Inequalities and Global Processes Today, the Caribbean is, together with Latin America, the region with the highest inequality worldwide (UNDP 2011). For both policy-makers and mainstream inequality theory, the underlying causes are to be sought at the level of national policies or regional economic patterns, such that Latin America’s and the Caribbean’s persistent inequality is usually traced back to a lag in the implementation of efficient industrial production, economic liberalism, free labor, and democratic structures that are seen to promote economic redistribution. Thus, high inequality in poor countries that relied for a long time on agriculture and mining under coerced forms of labor (i.e., slavery, but also serfdom or debt peonage) and allowed access to political rights to only a small minority of the population is viewed either as a consequence of traditional structures or as the legacy of colonialism. The inequality patterns of today’s wealthy European countries, featuring universal franchise, mass education, and a welfare state on the one hand, and of poor (Latin American) countries, historically characterized by limited access to public education, a long tradition of restricted franchise, and land policies favoring white elites on the other hand are therefore presented as having emerged independently of each other (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009, 42). At best, the differential impact of colonialism on Latin America and the Caribbean is interpreted as a “reversal of fortune” (Acemoglu et al. 2002)—of previously poor regions becoming rich after the Europeans introduced ‘good institutions’ encouraging investment, and of previously rich regions becoming poor and more unequal as a result of slavery and economic exploitation by the colonizers. These conceptualizations thus rely on an uncreolized notion of Europe: an autonomous, institutionally self-sustaining, and, at least since ‘the age of industry,’ economically and politically self-contained region, always a step ahead of its American colonies, but unrelated to, and essentially unlike them. The progression from an agrarian to an industrial and finally to a service economy has, however, occurred in Europe alone and as such cannot

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be generalized to the rest of the world—or even to post-Communist Eastern Europe, for that matter, where processes of re-agrarianization took place on a considerable scale (Therborn 2000). At the same time, the persistent focus on slavery and coerced work as labor forms characteristic of ‘traditional,’ highly polarized, non-European—as opposed to modern European—democratic structures and inequality patterns disregards the essential role of the European slave trade and transatlantic labor migration in setting up slave economies in the Americas and downplays the importance of the ethnic and racial components of inequality in the relationship between Europe and its colonies: On the one hand, European overseas settlement and conquest prompted massive emigration out of Europe from around 1500 until World War II, and thereby eased both the pressures on income distribution and social conflicts within the continent. At the same time, outbound migration reinforced the inner-European ethnic homogeneity that successive waves of ethnic leveling occurring throughout Europe until midtwentieth century had succeeded to create (Therborn 1995, 39-42). Class organization and identification thus gained preponderance over ethnic allegiance. With the reversal of the migration trend in the latter half of the twentieth century toward large-scale immigration from Europe’s ex-colonies into the metropole, and—to a lesser extent—with the breakdown of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, ethnic conflict came to the fore as a largely extra-European problem that increasingly poses a threat to Europe. On the other hand, the European-led construction of ethnic hierarchies accompanying the setting up of extractive export economies in the Americas went hand in hand with the colonial division of labor: Black Africans were incorporated into slavery, Native Americans into various forms of coerced cash-crop labor, White European working class members into indentured labor (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). Changing labor patterns throughout history and regional variations of this distribution did not fundamentally alter the underlying racial logic according to which non-White labor was essentially unfree and poorly—or not at all—remunerated.6 The

—————— 6 After independence, too, the racial and ethnic inequality patterns of the former American colonies remained markedly different. In the United States and in most countries of the Southern Cone (except Brazil), Indian servants and Black slaves represented demographic minorities, while wage laborers and independent producers accounted for the bulk of the local economic production after decolonization; in turn, in most other Ibero-

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various migration processes enabling this racial/ethnic hierarchy were, however, very differently visible in the theorization of inequality patterns of the region. While the flows of people from the colonial metropole to the conquered periphery have been seen as part of European social history and have been theorizable in terms of overseas class formation (but not with respect to their impact on the Native American population), the slave trade responsible for the emergence of the Black African labor force remains absent from social theory more generally and the sociology of social inequality in particular. The contribution of a creolized theory of social inequality would in this case consist primarily in a shift of perspective: Instead of seeing the impact of colonialism as a ‘reversal of fortune,’ as proposed by economic historians today, the gradual impoverishment of previously rich colonies in the Americas has been alternatively analyzed as ‘the development of underdevelopment’ of the periphery by the metropole (Frank 1972) or as “the paradox of American development“ (Bergquist 1996, 9) in a global capitalist system: while the resource-richest American colonies initially thrived on the exports of primary commodities produced under slave or indentured labor, as did Upper Peru and Bolivia on silver mining until the end of the seventeenth century, Saint Domingue/Haiti on sugar and South Carolina on rice until the end of the eighteenth, all are currently among the poorest and/or least industrialized; at the same time, Britain’s New England colonies, which started out as the poorest in the Americas, had by the end of the colonial period become the richest and had set the standards against which the industrialization processes of other regions had subsequently been measured (Bergquist 1996, 15). Relational approaches such as those proposed within dependency and world-systems perspectives reject the culturalist logic behind the conventional explanation, which traces such divergent developments back to the character of British (or French) colonial institutions as against Spanish and Portuguese ones and the different cultural legacies they imprinted on their respective colonies: the Protestant work ethic favoring the emergence of modern capitalism in North America (except Mexico) on the one hand, the Catholic feudal institutions shaping the development of Latin America on the other. In particular, as Bergquist points out, the influence of British culture and institutions, as well as the ethnic composition of the colonizers had

—————— American societies, serfdom was the social condition of the majority of the indios, who made up the largest segment of the population in Mexico, Central America, and the Andes, whereas Blacks predominated in Brazil and the Caribbean (Quijano 2006, 201, 203).

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been the same in the case of both southern and northern British colonies in the New World; therefore, the reasons for the widely differing developments rather lie in the natural resources, labor supplies, as well as the labor systems developed according to these conditions in each particular location. The organization of labor around wage-work and production for the domestic market in the New England and the mid-Atlantic British colonies, as opposed to the slave-based economies of the U.S. South and the British Caribbean, geared toward export of raw materials to Europe, had consequently been a matter of strategic location in the existing trade system as well as of natural and human resources (Bergquist 1996, 24). In contrast to the internal division of labor between the industrial U.S. North and its slaveholding South, Bergquist therefore points out that the different trajectory of the former British and Spanish American colonies in the post-independence era could best be grasped by remarking that, unlike the U.S. South, Latin America and the Caribbean had ‘no North,’ that is, no region where a free labor system dating back to the colonial era had produced a relatively egalitarian, rapidly industrializing society as a basis for liberal political ideas (Bergquist 1996, 36). Instead, they themselves became the ‘South’ providing luxury commodities and raw materials to Western Europe and, later, the U.S., which could thus develop into an increasingly industrial, egalitarian, and democratic ‘North’ within the international division of labor of global capitalism. Unlike in the Western European case, the homogenization of Latin American and Caribbean societies had entailed the extermination or exclusion of the indigenous population and the political exclusion of Blacks and mestizos, and as such could not have led to nationalization or democracy. Instead, “the construction of the nation, and above all the central state, has been conceptualized and deployed against American Indians, blacks, and mestizos” (Quijano 2000a, 567). The highly polarized, undemocratic system based on the exploitation of unfree labor thus created was a response to this particular set of geographic and socioeconomic factors, rather than of any cultural or institutional legacy. Or, in Bergquist’s cogent formulation: “These societies failed to develop in the post-independence era in the way their once-poor, predominantly white, northern neighbors did not because they had too many blacks, but because they had too many slaves” (1996, 33), i.e., it was the impact of slavery, rather than any racial essence that accounted for the persistent inequality patterns. To this day, the gap between rich and poor is smaller in those Caribbean countries where no

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large indigenous population survived the European invasion and no slave plantation economy was set up, such as Costa Rica. The same holds true for other parts of Latin America in which both middle and lower classes were primarily of European origin, with lower inequality levels in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and the Brazilian South (Hein and Huhn 2009). Conversely, the overwhelmingly white population of Western European metropoles was not in itself a precondition for the emergence of modern nation-states or industrial economies. Instead, due to the very existence of overseas colonies to which many poor Europeans emigrated as indentured servants and to the region’s inadequacy for large-scale export economies, it constituted a racially less stratified basis for free labor economies. Incorporating the economic history of the Americas as a crucial factor enabling Western European and North American industrial development thus ‘creolizes’ mainstream European and Eurocentric sociological theory by making transregional entanglements between Europe and its colonies an essential part of the explanation of ‘the rise of the West’ itself.

4. The Creolization of What? Inequalities and the Unit of Analysis The conclusion Bergquist reaches pursuing an historical line of argument in turn constitutes the point of departure of a world-historical analysis of how the economic legacy of colonialism relates to the differences between today’s inequality patterns. On the basis of the Gini coefficients of ninetysix countries, Korzeniewicz and Moran (2009) argue that national inequality patterns can be grouped into two distinct and relatively stable clusters, characterized by high or low levels of inequality, respectively. Not surprisingly, the high inequality cluster (above a Gini coefficient of 0.502) contains the prominent examples of inequality research, South Africa and Brazil, but also the bulk of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, whereas Australia, Japan, Canada, the whole of Western Europe, and parts of Eastern Europe fall into the low inequality cluster (below 0.329) (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009, 20). The high-inequality pattern has been characterized by systematic exclusion on the basis of ascriptive criteria such as race, ethnicity, and gender in order to limit access to economic, social and political opportunity. In turn,

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the low-inequality pattern has involved widespread relative inclusion through the extension of property and political rights increasingly derived from achieved (rather than ascribed) characteristics, such as one’s education level, and the development of welfare states—which further buttressed patterns of democratic inclusion. Korzeniewicz and Moran find that membership in both clusters can be traced back in time to the eighteenth century, which prompts them to coin the term “inequality equilibria” for both cases (2009, 23). While there has been movement in and out of each cluster at several points in time, and countries such as Argentina, Venezuela, or Uruguay, but also the U.S. since about the year 2000 occupy an in-between position today, the most striking result is that virtually no country has been able to shift from the high to the low inequality cluster. At the same time, the origins of the institutional arrangements typical of the low inequality equilibrium (LIE) are less apparent than those characterizing the high inequality equilibrium (HIE), which clearly go back to colonial slavery (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009, 31). Against the state-centered view of most inequality studies as well as the modernization paradigm, both of which focused on national policies for reducing inequality, the authors consequently advance a perspective considering the world-system in the long-term. This particular shift in the unit of analysis and in the temporal scope of prevailing inequality structures reveals that high-inequality equilibria historically constituted ‘innovations’ in the world-economy, while low-inequality equilibria represented relative comparative advantages over these as well as over earlier arrangements. Far from the archaic and backward forms of labor and market organization for which they are usually held, the various forms of coerced labor in general and slavery in particular had instead been highly profitable ones. Their implementation in Latin America and the Caribbean, i.e., the areas with the highest income inequality today, had rapidly turned the region into the world epicenter for the creation and accumulation of wealth from the period following European colonization until well into the eighteenth century (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009, 44). During the same time, Europe and the North American colonies—today’s low inequality havens— although relying on manufacturing and a free-labor system, were marginal, unprofitable and largely dependent on imports for meeting their economic needs. Rather than assuming a simple correlation between equity and economic growth, as postulated by modernization theory, the authors there-

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fore suggest that the relationship between the two has changed over time. From high inequality generating more wealth under innovative extractive institutions such as plantation slavery in the New World, the relationship shifted to low inequality contexts gaining a comparative advantage over the former by means of different institutional or political practices such as tax or wage-setting policies, extended access to education, or the regulation of international migration. What Bergquist had treated as the paradox of American development, Korzeniewicz and Moran thus analyze using Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction of innovation practices, interpreted as a “constant drive toward inequality”: The emergence of extractive institutions of high-inequality contexts such as plantation slavery and coerced cash-crop labor are analyzed as significant innovations that provided competitive advantages to colonial and settler elites and allowed for an extraordinary accumulation of wealth and power in the area (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009, 55). In such contexts, it was social hierarchies based on ascribed characteristics—chiefly, race—which allowed for the high degree of polarization of the emerging labor structure along the lines of white supremacy vs. non-white subordination. Conversely, areas such as the New England colonies, in which the native labor force was scarce, but the amount of land available for cultivation abundant, encouraged the spread of private property across the adult male population. The latter areas thus maintained a pattern of relatively low inequality, which, in its turn, gained a comparative advantage over the high-inequality pattern after the onset of large-scale industrialization. Although the low levels of inequality in such regions gradually came to be perceived as structured around achieved characteristics such as one’s level of education or professional position, their long-term stability had nevertheless been safeguarded by restricting physical access to these regions on the basis of ascribed categories, especially national identity and citizenship, through the control of immigration flows. What appears as a pattern of relative inclusion of the population through redistributive state policies, democratic participation, and widespread access to education in low inequality contexts when taking the nation-state as a unit of analysis is thus revealed to entail the selective exclusion from the same rights of large sectors of the population located outside national borders, once the analytical frame shifts to the world-economy (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009, 78). The maintenance of national low inequality patterns of relative inclusion consequently requires the enforcement of selective

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exclusion on the state border, and thus the (re-)production of high inequality patterns between nations. According to Korzeniewicz and Moran, this has especially been the case for the borders of nation-states since the nineteenth century, making the nation-state itself the main criterion for social stratification on a global scale ever since. Thus, late nineteenth-century mass migration across national borders led to significant convergence of wage rates between core and semiperipheral countries—mainly Europe and the so-called settler colonies of North America, Australia, and New Zealand—but also tended to raise the competition for resources and employment opportunities within receiving countries, often located in the New World. The result was an increase in inequality in some national contexts, in which the large inflow of unskilled labor caused rising wage differentials relative to skilled labor, and a decrease of inequality in others—i.e., in the sending countries, where the income differential between skilled and unskilled workers declined and overall wages rose.7 In the case of Europe, migration to the New World provided a poverty outlet to some fifty million Europeans or twelve percent of the continent’s population between 1850 and 1930 (Therborn 1995, 40). While almost all European states during this period were primarily sending countries, some experienced outmigration flows as high as fifty percent of the national population (in the case of the British Isles) or one-third of it (in the case of Italy), to the point of causing debates as to the rights of states to restrict emigration. Large-scale emigration and the high level of ethnic homogeneity attained by the nineteen fifties had ensured that processes of collective organization and social stratification within Europe occurred in terms of class interests and class conflict rather than ethnic or racial allegiance.8 Labor unrest, the rise of scientific racism by the end of World War I, and social and economic protectionist measures in the wake of the Great Depression gradually made restrictions on immigration across metropolitan countries necessary, while strengthening notions of citizenship as a basis for entitlement to social and

—————— 7 Since the constitution of formal labor markets tended to exclude the participation of women, the overwhelming majority of the population accounting for the mass labor migration of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was male (Korzeniewicz et al. 2003, 24). 8 Although ‘whiteness’ constituted the underlying common denominator of processes of collective identification within Europe, and low class positions correlated with nonwhiteness, racial and ethnic belonging were far less useful indicators of an individual’s position in the social structure of European societies than in the rigid racial hierarchies Europeans had imposed in the colonies.

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political rights (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009, 84). With the decisive reversal of the European migration trend in the nineteen sixties, the ethnic and racial conflicts that accompanied the rise in immigration in the form of ex-colonial subjects, guest workers (turned permanent), and (allegedly) incessant flows of labor migrants and refugees appeared to be—and were often discussed as—forms of (ethnic and/or racial) stratification foreign to the class structure otherwise characterizing Western Europe.9 The contribution of European colonial expansion and decolonization to the changed circumstances did not enter into the explanation except, at most, as an analogy with inner-European territorial conflicts over ethnicity and religion, i.e., as internal colonialism. When exogenous factors were taken into account, they were only supposed to explain the coexistence of class and ethnic stratification in colonial societies as a result of intervention by the metropole, not, however, the social structure of the metropole itself, paradoxically seen as having developed—and stratified—endogenously (e.g. Hechter 1971). However, when approaching the issue of inequality patterns from a relational perspective encompassing both metropoles and peripheries, the ascribed characteristics of nationhood and citizenship are revealed to be as important for global stratification as class, usually considered to depend on levels of achievement. Yet, while class membership has regulated the differential access to resources at the level of national populations, citizenship—i.e., nation-state membership—has restricted or undercut both the mobility and the access to resources of the poorest segments of the world population for much of the twentieth century. Shifting the unit of analysis to the worldsystem thus shows that ascriptive criteria remain the fundamental basis of stratification and inequality and that national identity has been the most salient among them (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009, 88). In other words, the long-term maintenance of low inequality havens in the world’s well-off polities has been contingent upon the institutionalization of exclusive citi-

—————— 9 For the United States, Korzeniewicz and Moran (2008, 10) show a parallel first trend toward declining income inequality as restrictions on immigration increased in the beginning of the twentieth century. In turn, the 1965 reform of the U.S. immigration policy, itself tailored to the active recruitment of labor migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean in response to the rising demand for unskilled labor throughout the worldeconomy, resulted in a sharp rise in income inequality (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2008, 24). As in the case of Europe, the increase in inequality seemed to be a foreign-induced phenomenon directly linked to the inflow of (mostly uneducated) immigrants, thus prompting anti-immigrant sentiment and policies in response.

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zenship rights, most frequently barring the non-White, non-Western, or non-European from entry or full inclusion. Initially characteristic of the Western European context alone, citizenship entitlements subsequently became an effective mechanism of state resistance to creolization throughout the Western world. The issue of citizenship is thereby revealed to have been relevant not only for the relative social and political inclusion of the populations of Western European nation-states, but just as much for the selective exclusion of the colonized and/or non-European populations from the same social and political rights throughout recent history. As has been documented for the postcolonial migration flows between several Western European countries and their former colonies, as well as for the U.S. and its ‘protectorates,’ the possession of the citizenship of the former metropole remains to this day a crucial factor deciding the timing and the destination of ex-colonial subjects’ emigration as well as the struggle for independence in the remaining colonial possessions: While people in today’s occupied territories are more likely to migrate to the metropole whose citizenship rights they hold as long as the colonial relationship allows it, relinquishing such rights by claiming statehood lowers the occupied territories’ incentives for achieving independence. Thus, fear of losing Dutch citizenship and the privileges it incurs has led to a dramatic increase in Surinamese emigration to the Netherlands in the years preceding Surinam’s independence from the ‘motherland’ (1974/75) and remains the main reason behind the lack of political pressure for independence in the Dutch Antilles and Aruba today (van Amersfoort and van Niekerk 2006). Analogously, the extension of United States citizenship rights to the populations of all Caribbean colonies after World War II triggered a massive transfer of labor migrants from the Caribbean to the U.S. Migrants from non-independent territories such as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands could thus enjoy both the welfare and the social rights (though not the political rights) that went with U.S. citizenship, which constituted a strong incentive for migration across the lower social strata in their home countries. In turn, only the more educated, middle sectors of the working class from formally independent Caribbean states like Jamaica, Barbados, and St. Vincent, who did not possess metropolitan citizenship, chose to migrate to the U.S. (Cervantes-Rodríguez et al. 2009).

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Creolizing Europe as Creolizing Theory The shift of perspective towards a relational concept of space, viewed as capable of accounting for transnational inequality structures, has featured prominently among the solutions for overcoming methodological nationalism that various authors have advanced in recent years. Quite often, the plea for replacing nation-state centered “container concepts” with transnational or cosmopolitan “relational concepts” of space entails the explicit shift in the unit of analysis from individual societies to the world-economy proposed within the world-systems approach (Weiß 2005; Beck 2007). However, its proponents view the shift from methodological nationalism to methodological cosmopolitanism as a necessary adjustment to the qualitative change that twentieth century globalization has operated in structures of inequality, but as irrelevant for the assessment of earlier or ‘classical’ inequality contexts—for which the nation-state framework is still considered appropriate. Instead, this chapter has used the example of the transnational processes and transregional entanglements characterizing Latin America and the Caribbean since the sixteenth century in order to reveal the extent to which mainstream analyses of social inequality rely on an overgeneralization of the Western European experience as well as on the erasure of nonWestern, non-White experiences from sociological theory-building. The twin fallacies of overgeneralization and erasure were made possible by two interrelated tendencies of Eurocentric sociological production: first, the historical indebtedness of core categories of the sociology of social inequality, especially class, to the socioeconomic context of Western European industrial society and to the rise of the nation-state rendered class conflict, proletarianization, and social mobility within industrial nations more visible than colonialism, the slave trade, and European emigration into the New World. Second, this differential visibility made for the disproportionate representation of the former processes in mainstream sociological theory as opposed to the latter. Disregarding the massive dislocation of people triggered by the European expansion into the Americas since the sixteenth century, as well as the impact which subsequent migration processes have had on the ethnic homogenization of core areas on the one hand and on processes of racialization and ethnicization in peripheral and semiperipheral ones on the other were essential in reproducing a Eurocentric/Occidentalist perspective. The establishment and maintaining of

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a sociology of migration devoid of colonizers as well as of colonial subjects and a sociology of inequality and stratification devoid of race and ethnicity until well into the twentieth century were the consequence (Boatcă 2010). Instead of heralding transnationalization as a new phenomenon, it would therefore be both analytically and politically helpful to adopt creolization as a shift of perspective. In order to account for the present of Europe as not racially exclusively white, not ethnically or culturally homogeneous, and not socially stratified according to achieved characteristics in enclosed national containers, what is needed is an adequate un-erasure of the history of the non-White, non-European or non-Western regions from social scientific theory-building. It was with these regions that Europe was militarily, economically and culturally entangled for centuries and without which it would not have become hybrid, creole, or transcultural. The unerasure of the non-European from mainstream social theory would not only reveal a far more creolized history of Europe than the one we are accustomed to reading, but would also result in creolized theory—one that does not overgeneralize from the particular history of its own geopolitical location, but that accounts for the continuum of structures of power linking geopolitical locations to colonial through postcolonial times.

Works Cited Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson (2002). “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117: 1231–1294. Amersfoort, Hans van, and Mies van Niekerk (2006). “Immigration as a Colonial Inheritance. Post-Colonial Immigrants in the Netherlands, 1945–2002.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32: 323–346. Beck, Ulrich (2007). “Beyond Class and Nation: Reframing Social Inequalities in a Globalizing World.” British Journal of Sociology, 58.4: 679–705. Berger, Peter A., and Anja Weiß (eds.). (2008). Transnationalisierung sozialer Ungleichheit. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Bergquist, Charles (1996). Labor and the Course of American Democracy: US History in Latin American Perspective. New York: Verso. Boatcă, Manuela (2010). “Class vs. Other as Analytic Categories. The Selective Incorporation of Migrants into Theory.” In Terry-Ann Jones and Eric Mielants (eds.). Mass Migration in the World-System: Past, Present, and Future, 38–54. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

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— (2011). “Global Inequalities. Transnational Processes and Transregional Entanglements.” desiguALdades.net. Working Paper No. 11, 11 October 2013. http://www.desigualdades.net/bilder/Working_Paper/WP_Boatca_Online.pd f?1380102531. 12 July 2014. Cervantes-Rodríguez, Margarita, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants (eds.). (2009). Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States. Essays on Incorporation, Identity, and Citizenship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Delanty, Gerard, and Chris Rumford (2005). Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. London: Routledge. David Eltis, and David Richardson (2010). Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press. Frank, André Gunder (1972). Lumpenbourgeoisie: Lumpendevelopment. Dependence, Class and Politics in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Glick Schiller, Nina (2009). “Theorizing About and Beyond Transnational Processes.” In Ramón Grosfoguel, Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez and Eric Mielants (eds.). Caribbean Migrations to Western Europe and the United States, 18–40. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Georges E. Fouron (2001). Georges Woke Up Laughing. Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home. Durham: Duke University Press. Grosfoguel, Ramón, Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, and Eric Mielants (2009). “Introduction. Caribbean Migrations to Western Europe and the United States.” In Ramón Grosfoguel, Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez and Eric Mielants (eds.). Caribbean Migrations to Western Europe and the United States, 1–17. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hechter, Michael (1971). “Towards a Theory of Ethnic Change.” Politics & Society, 2.1: 21–45 Hein, Wolfgang, and Sebastian Huhn (2008). “Entwicklungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.” www.bpd.de. Informationen zur politischen Bildung (Heft 300), Lateinamerika, 14 Nov. 2008. http://www.bpb.de/publikationen/OI86A1,1,0,En twicklungen_im_19_und_20_Jahrhundert.html. 12 July 2014. Korzeniewicz, Roberto Patricio, and Timothy Patrick Moran (2009). Unveiling Inequality. A World-Historical Perspective. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Korzeniewicz, Roberto Patricio, Timothy Patrick, and Angela Stach (2003). “Trends in Inequality: Towards a World-Systems Analysis.” In Raymond Breton and Jeffrey G. Reitz (eds.). Globalization and Society. Processes of Differentiation Examined, 13–36. Westport: Greenwood Press. McMichael, Philip (1991). “Slavery in Capitalism. The Rise and Demise of the U.S. Ante-Bellum Cotton Culture.” Theory and Society, 20.3: 321–349. Mintz, Sidney (1986). Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin. — (1998). “The Localization of Anthropological Practice. From Area Studies to Transnationalism.” Critique of Anthropology, 18.2: 117–133.

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— (2010). Three Ancient Colonies. Caribbean Themes and Variation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pries, Ludger (2008). “Transnationalisierung und soziale Ungleichheit. Konzeptionelle Überlegungen und empirische Befunde aus der Migrationsforschung.“ In Peter A. Berger and Anja Weiß (eds.). Transnationalisierung sozialer Ungleichheit, 41–64. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Quijano, Aníbal (2006). “El ‘Movimiento Indígena’ y las Cuestiones Pendientes en América Latina.” Review. Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, 29.2: 189–220. Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein (1992). “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Journal of the Social Sciences, 134: 549–557. Rediker, Marcus (2007). The Slave Ship. New York: Viking. Schachar, Ayelet (2009). The Birthright Lottery. Citizenship and Global Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Therborn, Göran (1995). European Modernity and Beyond. The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000. London: Sage. Tomich, Dale (2004). Through the Prism of Slavery. Labor, Capital, and the World Economy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. UNDP (2011). “UNDP Chief: We must tackle inequality in Latin America.” www.undp.org. United Nations Development Programme, 7 July 2011. http://content.undp.org/go/newsroom/2011/may/undp-chief--we-must-tack le-inequality-in-latin-america.en?categoryID=349463. 13 July 2014. Weiß, Anja (2005). “The Transnationalization of Social Inequality: Conceptualizing Social Position on a World Scale.” Current Sociology, 53.4: 707–728. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller (2002). “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond. Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences.” Global Networks, 2.4: 301–334.

Social Sciences and North-SouthAsymmetries: Towards a Global Sociology1 Sérgio Costa

During the presentation of the book Decolonizing European Sociology (Rodríguez et al. 2010) at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2010, a former doctoral student with a special interest in Luhmann’s system theory posed—partly out of curiosity, partly out of skepticism—an intriguing question. His doubts were along the following lines: “Is there more to be expected from the combination of Sociology and Postcolonial Studies than its contribution to the sociology of knowledge, which I keep encountering in so-called postcolonial sociology?” This is indeed a crucial question, given that limiting postcolonial contributions to epistemological issues, regardless of how radically they criticize the Social Sciences, will lead them to effectively be categorized as a sub-discipline within Sociology, namely the Sociology of Knowledge. In this paper, I aim to defend the thesis that the influences of Postcolonial Studies can and must have consequences for the whole of Sociology. This will only happen, however, if these studies reach well beyond the deconstruction of the disciplinary division of labor and of the Eurocentric core of Sociology. That is to say, it must provide the analytical tools to do Sociology differently, or to create a different Sociology. Postcolonial Sociology has been hitherto dominated by epistemological, external criticism, which is, of course, important, but its task has already been accomplished. The goal now is a postcolonial production of sociological knowledge, not limited only to ‘non-Western societies,’ but valid for different societies. In this paper, the Latin American variations of postcolonialism, known in the international debates as Decolonial Studies (see Escobar (2007) and

—————— 1 A preliminary version in German of this paper was delivered at the conference Postkoloniale Gesellschaftswissenschaften. Eine Zwischenbilanz [Postcolonial Social Sciences. A Provisional Appraisal], Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 17–18 June 2011. The English translation was provided by Puo-An Wu Fu.

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Ina Kerner’s contribution to this volume), will not be dealt with separately. Rather, they are subsumed under the label Postcolonial Studies without obscuring the particularities of this subdivision. Especially pertinent here is the demarcation of the emergence of modernity, which, in Decolonial Studies, reaches back to the conquest of the Americas. As a consequence Spain and Portugal are considered to be pioneers in modern history (see Quijano 2000), yet the importance of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the constitution of modernity is often neglected in Postcolonial Studies (for example Bhabha 1994), which primarily focuses on British colonialism. Nevertheless, the differences between Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies do not bear a significant impact on the present discussion of the contributions of Postcolonial (and Decolonial) Studies towards the renovation of Sociology. Ultimately, the goal here is to identify the conditions necessary to develop a global Sociology, one that is compatible with all the varying time-lines of modernity in different world regions. I would like to develop my argument in three steps. Step one provides a general description of certain dilemmas Sociology currently faces. In the second section, I present three models from Postcolonial Studies to approach the Social Sciences and Humanities. Finally, the third section shows by example what the desired interference of Postcolonial Studies in Sociology, or perhaps even a combination of the two, can look like.

1. Sociology2 More than one hundred years ago, mathematician Henry Poincaré is believed to have said that Sociology is “the science with the greatest number of methods, but the smallest number of results” (according to Braun and Ganser 2011, 151). “Sociology is like politics, but without people and consequences,” I heard a computer science student say in 2010; at the time, islamophobic opinions monopolized public discussion in Germany, with sociologists saying very little about it. Such allegations say much about the current state of Sociology. The discipline has suffered from a chronic lack of legitimacy. Since its emergence, Sociology has always had to prove that its results are useful and different from those of neighboring disciplines.

—————— 2 This section draws on Costa (2013).

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As per its self-definition, the ability to examine social processes according to their context of origin and, at the same time, the meanings that actors ascribe to these phenomena is characteristic of Sociology. The guardians of the discipline struggle against attempts to break apart this double and indivisible research strategy. On the one hand, this stems from reactions against the “economization of the categories of perception and analysis,” as Soeffner (2009, 2) pointed out, in reference to M. R. Lepsius’s original formulation. The counter argument is that the scope of Sociology would be off-target if it concentrated solely on context and, more specifically, on economic structures. Therefore, the sociologist must also ask how social actors interpret their actions within the framework of these structures. The opposite option, that is, solely investigating the symbolic dimension of social processes, would strike an equally fatal blow to Sociology. According to the Frankfurt sociologist Lichtblau, this would mean “establishing sociology altogether as a science of culture” (2010, 282). In such a case, the central object of Sociology, namely society, would be lost out of sight. Torn apart between tendencies of economization and culturalization, Sociology faces the challenge of grasping the contemporary (world) society, which hardly resembles the model of modern society envisioned by postworld war sociologists. Modernity in Sociology corresponds to a world whose order rests upon secure borders and stable identities. Sociology believes it knows what Western and non-Western is, as with woman and man, native and foreign, heterosexual and homosexual, modern and traditional, German, Turkish, and German-Turkish. Sociology is missing the instruments with which to grasp a world-society that is more than the sum of national societies. In addition, the fact that modernity is not significantly shaped by ‘Western powers’ (any longer) is problematic for the discipline. Western dominance is intrinsic to the concept of modernity in Sociology, according to which it was neither envisioned, nor is it comprehensible, that South America could advance to the periphery of China; that the interpolations between Bollywood, Hollywood, and Latin American soap operas (telenovelas) would shape twentyfirst century romanticism, or that attributes like gender, ethnicity, and race would remain central factors in explaining social inequalities in modern capitalism.3

—————— 3 According to modernization theory, which has dominated theory production in postwar Sociology worldwide, the relevance of ascribed properties such as race and ethnicity

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And even when Sociology establishes uncertainties and boundaries as its central points of interest, its findings thus far have become unconvincing. Generally, these attempts are solely concerned with the rash and blind application of categories of national sociologies to the rest of the unknown world. Thus, society is replaced with world society (e.g. Stichweh 2000), civil society with global civil society (Habermas 1998)4, risk society with world risk society (Beck 2008), modernization with globalization. These new concepts, however, retain their strictly national characteristics, albeit on a new scale, the result being a lack of genuinely novel findings. Another important reaction consists of various efforts to reconstruct the multifaceted character of modernity based on an analysis of “civilization” (Eisenstadt 2000; Wagner 2011). As promising as this approach is, current studies are mostly characterized by a blatant lack of sociological knowledge. It is often the case that authors compare ‘civilizations’ only after reading three or four books in English on the ‘other’ societies. With very few exceptions, the researchers in the field of comparative civilization analysis are simply unlearned and unfamiliar with the relevant sociological knowledge about the societies in the ‘global South’ they supposedly compare. This is not to idealize Southern sociologies. They were constructed as a reflection of the U.S. American and European disciplines and are no less Eurocentric than their Western models.5 It is therefore obvious that after fifty to one hundred years of this research tradition, comparative sociology can no longer overlook, as it has thus far, the relevant findings published by these sociologies.

—————— in the definition of social positions would be characteristic for traditional, non-modern societies. Accordingly, such ascriptions tend to disappear during modernization, since in modern, class societies social positions would be established exclusively by achievement and personal merit (for a powerful critic, see Knöbl 2001). 4 The concept coined by Habermas as a functional equivalent for a virtuous national civil society is actually Weltbürgergesellschaft, roughly meaning cosmopolitan society (for a critique of this concept, see Costa 2005). 5 An example for the relevance of “Western” sociologies for “Southern” sociologies is found in a study about quotation practices in leading Brazilian and Mexican journals for Social Sciences: the “Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais” and the “Revista Mexicana de Sociología.” Among the ten most quoted authors by Brazilian social scientists between 1998 and 2009, four are German, three are French, one is British and two are Brazilian male authors. In Mexico, among the ten most quoted authors in the same period, four are German, three are French, one is British, one is American, one is Spanish. There is no single female social scientist among the ten most quoted scholars in both countries (see Costa 2013).

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This short overview of some trends and developments visibly present in current Sociology is perhaps enough to hint at the virtually never-ending task of postcolonial critique within Sociology. In order to show how postcolonialism affects Sociology, I would like to first outline three postcolonial strategies to deal with the Humanities and Social Sciences, and then justify my own preference of a specific program.

2. Postcolonial Alternatives6 The key points of the postcolonial critique towards the scientific working process are certainly well known by readers of the present volume. According to this critique, the hegemonic form of the scientific production of knowledge contributes to the propagation of the internal logic of colonialism through its persistence in viewing the experiences of minorities and transformative processes in ‘non-Western’ societies within the context of their functional relations, or of their similarities and differences with the so-called modern centers of world society. Hence, the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’ does not simply mean ‘after’ in the sense of linear time; it is rather about a discursive reconfiguration that construes hierarchical relationships. The colonial, in turn, exceeds colonialism; it refers to various relationships of domination, whether between genders, ethnicities or strata (Patel 2006; Costa 2007; Boatcă and Costa 2010). Armed with their militant concept of ‘geopolitics of knowledge,’ postcolonial authors try to denounce and change the existing asymmetry between different regions of the world and social groups in modern knowledge production. According to this interpretation, certain forms of relevant knowledge (e.g. indigenous, ‘local’ knowledge) are repudiated ex ante by established sciences, simply for the reason that they cannot be evaluated within the conceptual framework of modern disciplines (Mignolo 2000; Walsh 2002; Santos 2005; Keim 2011). I want to present three programs as examples of the postcolonial approach to the Social Sciences and Humanities. They stand for different concepts of how postcolonialism and the Humanitites and Social Sciences relate to one another, which is why at this point I would like to talk about

—————— 6 Some arguments presented in this section are developed more extensively in Costa (2011).

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three different strategies: the first is distance, the second nostalgia, the third is interference. Those who argue for distance see the sciences as a mere machinery for the legitimation of existing power structures. They assert that scientific methods and highly-regarded claims of objectivity are no more than a ritual and a staged process that conceals personal and institutional power strategies. The field of science is allegedly a space totally colonized by power politics: all claims of validity expressed in this social space are pre-contaminated and only contribute to legitimizing established social hierarchies. Hence, these authors criticize science as such and pursue knowledge “beyond theory” (Bhabha 1994, 19). They question any systematization of knowledge in scientific form, because the assume that the scientific discourse freezes and arrests dynamic social and cultural processes, and thereby fails to comprehend them (McLennan 2000, 70). As inspiring as this critique may be for several feminist and minority movements, its contributions for a re-thinking of Sociology are, in my opinion, rather weak. The strategy of distance excludes itself from the debate of reforming the Social Sciences precisely by rejecting not a specific form, but science as such. The nostalgia program traces a genealogy of the modern sciences, revealing the entanglements between the emergence and development of current scientific disciplines and European colonial rule. This position is typically represented by a few authors from Decolonial Studies, especially Walter Mignolo (2000; 2007). According to them, the differentiation that is still applicable today between disciplines like History, Political Science, and Sociology, which supposedly specialize in modern societies, and ethnology, which deals with ‘pre-modern cultures,’ can only be comprehended as having a function within the framework of colonial rule, since such a differentiation would be heuristically senseless. Ventura’s description of this division of labor is particularly elucidating: “The unit of history—in which natural, moral, and political history have thus far coexisted—dissolves and separates into a historical discourse of the modern type (which regards historical societies) and an ethnological discourse (which studies the so-called savage societies). This separation between history and anthropology excludes the ‘savage’ peoples from the field of historians. This is a precondition for the formation of a ‘general science of humanity,’ as well as for the emergence of disciplines such as ethnology and anthropology, which investigate non-occidental societies.” (Ventura 1987, 148, my translation)

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This is about a structural interdependency between colonialism and the modern Humanities and Social Sciences: on the one hand, colonial rule constitutes the platform for the recognition of the monopoly of science as the only valid form of knowledge. On the other hand, science generates the knowledge necessary to politically legitimize colonial powers and to provide socio-technological resources, such as new methods of administration and social control. This refers to the successful efforts of the sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century in allegedly proving the superiority of Europe and the respective intellectual inferiority of non-European peoples and societies. Only through the obtained conclusions could colonialism, modern slavery, and the extinction of indigenous people in the Americas coexist with claims of human rights and equality in Europe (see Mignolo 2007). Up to this point one can easily accept this version of postcolonialism, which I here call nostalgia. However, the consequences authors derive from this diagnosis are problematic. Due to the colonial influence of modern science, the nostalgia authors search for uncolonized subaltern forms of knowledge, which are proclaimed as ‘border thinking’: “If the theo-politics and ego-politics of knowledge and understanding are the hegemonic frame of Western modernity in its internal diversity, they are also the constraints of the ‘pensée unique’ (i.e., monotopic thinking), the process of delinking needs a different epistemic grounding that I describe here as the geo-politics and body-politics of knowledge and understanding. These are epistemologies of the exteriority and of the borders. If there is no outside of capitalism and Western modernity today, there are many instances of exteriority: that is, the outside created by the rhetoric of modernity (Arabic language, Islamic religion, Aymara language, Indigenous concepts of social and economic organization, et cetera.” (Mignolo 2007, 462)

The project of re-evaluating non-scientific forms of knowledge, most of all in formerly colonized regions, is surely well deserved. The expectation, however, that this is intrinsically linked to a postcolonial or decolonial grammar, appears implausible to me. We know at least since Spivak’s (1988) famous essay that there is a heterogeneity of subalterns which do not possess any kind of authentic pre- or postcolonial consciousness. Rather, there are fragmented subjectivities that have emerged in the process of epistemic violence. Each colonial domination represents a particular act of semantic deprivation, one that silences the language of the subaltern by disqualifying it. There is no space for speech that has either remained pro-

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tected in or could construct an external locus of enunciation to colonial modernity. Every indigenous, subaltern, or ‘traditional’ form of knowledge is permeated with modern/colonial power relations. Contrary to what the nostalgia program seems to believe, these subaltern forms of knowledge are not safe epistemological harbors from which a non-colonized knowledge can emerge. Such forms of knowledge should—and may—also be the object of a critical deconstruction—at least by social scientists.7 Finally, the program of interference is still left to be commented upon. The matter at hand is a critique that neither rejects science nor seeks to replace forms of knowledge but rather attempts to achieve a reconfiguration of science from the inside. This process implies the deconstruction of the hegemonic structure of categories by describing the relationship between the “West” and the “rest” (Hall 1992). In this process it becomes clear, that these concepts are imaginary constructs that have no immediate empirical epistemic value. This is not a rejection of universalism but its radicalization, as it exposes that rationality, the sciences, human rights, etc. are not characteristic of European culture. Rather, they are elements of a global history in which the West has conquered the monopoly over the definition of modernity, paradoxically with the direct participation of the non-Western world (Chakrabarty 2000; Randeria 2005). Accordingly, nonEuropean national sociologies become stories about the construction of institutions like citizenship, civil society, et cetera that can only make sense as projections of a “hyperreal Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000, 45). To cite Chakrabarty, the European epos of modernization is thus created “through those histories, which both imperialism and nationalism have told the colonized” (Chakrabarty 2002, 302, my translation). In view of the previously discussed postcolonial forms of approaching the Social Sciences, the different implications for Sociology should be clear. The program of distance questions the legitimacy of science as a form of knowledge because it reproduces a colonial model with its systems, classifications, and categories; it furthermore tries to encapsulate cultural processes that only develop their meanings as free floating flows. The program of nostalgia sorts through social topographies for a postcolonial (or decolonial) locus of speech. Lastly, the program of interference tries to transform the truth-regime of science from the inside by exposing

—————— 7 For a persuasive sociological critique of Mignolo’s epistemic conceptions see Domingues (2009).

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inaccessible methods and cognitive blind spots in hegemonic Social Sciences. Only the last variant, in my opinion, is a promising starting point for the renewal of Sociology. Regardless of how radical their performance is, postcolonial approaches compete within the Humanities and Social Sciences with other currents for resources and reputation. Thus, postcolonialism remains at the mercy of the evaluation criteria of the respective discipline as well. There are no in-between spaces in the sciences and no given space for border thinking either. Those who are not in agreement with the dominating validation criteria of the sciences can only change them by subjecting themselves to the internal power struggles for the definition of said criteria. A social scientist should not find it particularly helpful to claim that her or his analytical categories are better because they reflect a subaltern perspective. She or he has to convince her or his peers that the theories, methods, and categories that she or he use shed light upon certain dimensions that remain hidden from conventional approaches. I now come to the concluding section, in which I will attempt to show through a successful example how productive interference of Postcolonial Studies can contribute to overcoming some of the previously described dilemmas that Sociology faces in order to produce global sociological knowledge.

3. Performing Interference In the essay “Wounded Subjects,” Jin Haritaworn (2010) deals with homophobia among youths with migrant backgrounds from a postcolonial perspective. In addition to reviewing theoretical literature, the essay predominantly analyzes Kiel psychologist Bernd Simon’s influential study “Attitudes towards Homosexuality,” as well as the material published by liberal leftist newspapers about the study and about violence against homosexuals and ‘queer’ people in Kreuzberg, a ‘multicultural’ district of Berlin, Germany. The reality constructed in Simon’s study and in the media appeared to be well-rounded and coherent. Simon’s study shows, after all, that youths with Turkish migration backgrounds display a distinct ‘antihomosexual attitude.’ Moreover, demonstrations of violence belong to their norms of masculinity. Ergo: they are ready to attack ‘homosexuals.’

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Haritaworn comes to another conclusion in the investigation. First, the essay discusses how knowledge about ‘homophobia in youths with migration backgrounds’ shown in Simon’s study and in the newspapers is based on fragile evidence. This is predominantly demonstrated by the definitions of German/non-German in Simon’s study, which, according to Haritaworn, are more reminiscent of Nuremberg Nazi laws than of current citizenship legislation. What is more, Haritaworn reconstructs the participation of organizations such as the Lesbian and Gay Association in Germany (Lesben- und Schwulenverband in Deutschland, LSVD) in the production of knowledge about ‘homophobic immigrant youth.’ The LSVD directly supported Simon’s study. Haritaworn also demonstrates how Sociology, the gay movement, newspapers and politics converge by proclaiming the acceptance of same-sex love as a core value of the German nation in a henceforth self-reflecting Europe. In the process, children with migrant backgrounds are racialized and orientalized: “Migrants, particularly working-class migrants, appear as fixed and motionless. They do not change, do not assimilate, do not move up. They stay down. When they do move—as in migration—this movement is pathological: it is turned backwards, locked and frozen by bad experiences in the recipient culture, melancholically attached to the rural culture (which is itself backward).” (Haritaworn 2010, 145)

Permit me to highlight a few elements of Haritaworn’s approach, which in my estimation embody some of the central contributions that Postcolonial Studies can offer to the renewal of Sociology: Unit of analysis: Haritaworn’s contribution sets a very good example for the development of a relational—in the sense of non-spatial and nonadministrative—unit of analysis. The analytical unit is neither the district of Kreuzberg, nor Germany, nor Europe, nor any diffuse transnational unit. Thus, an analysis of Club SO36 in Kreuzberg can depart from the imperial war on terror to German domestic issues or communal politics without losing its stringency and consistency. This is an instructive approach for the Social Sciences, given that Sociology’s preconditioned fixation on its analytical units (the nation-state and its subnational units) causes it to fail precisely when investigating translocal and transnational interrelations. Method: Haritaworn consistently deconstructs instances of essentialism. The author takes apart all alleged homogeneous identities, whether it be nation, migrants, gays, or queer people, in order to show how the opinions involved are not pre-politically defined through national origin,

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culture, sexual options, or religion, but rather construct and reconstruct themselves in political struggles. There is therefore no space for expression, no actors, and also no discourse that is emancipatory ex ante. Therefore, sociological research should not concentrate on pre-established social groups or sets of values, it should rather be directed at how spaces, actors, and discourses take effect in the complex interplay between power and difference. Haritaworn’s approach uncovers the deficits of a Sociology that still clings to the concept of identity. It is at the same time a good argument against the aforementioned nostalgic postcolonialism, since it proves the implausibility of a preexisting social space for emancipatory ‘border thinking.’ Scientific program: Haritaworn does not avoid Sociology; according to the author’s own definition, the presented work is situated within Sociology, and therefore moves between the poles of the double research strategy mentioned above. Hence, the analysis is directed, on the one hand, at the structures, in this case the power structures from which knowledge about ‘homophobe migrants’ is produced. On the other hand, Haritaworn’s work deals with the meanings the examined subjects ascribe to these structures and to their own actions as constitutive of social reality. It thereby becomes clear that Sociology and postcolonialism are not mutually exclusive, but rather can complement each other. We can only hope that this kind of productive intermingling of postcolonial perspectives and Sociology will spread. The goal should not be to establish a new field of Sociology, but to decolonize and/or postcolonize the whole of the discipline in order to effectively develop a global Sociology.

Works Cited Beck, Ulrich (2008). Weltrisikogesellschaft: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Sicherheit. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Bhabha, Homi (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boatcă, Manuela, and Sérgio Costa (2010). “Postcolonial Sociology: A Research Agenda.” In Rodríguez, Encarnación G., Manuela Boatcă, and Sérgio Costa (eds.). Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches, 13–32. Surrey: Ashgate.

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Braun, Norman, and Christian Ganser (2011). “Fundamentale Erkenntnisse der Soziologie?” Soziologie, 40.2: 151–174. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (2002). “Europa provinzialisieren. Postkolonialität und die Kritik der Geschichte.“ In Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria (eds.). Jenseits des Eurozentrismus, 283–312. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. Costa, Sérgio (2005). “Cosmopolitan Democracy: Conceptual Deficits and Political Errors.” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais. Special edition in English I. 31 March 2014. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/pdf/s_rbcsoc/v1nse/scs_a04.pd f. 12 July 2014. — (2007). “Deprovincializing Sociology: The Postcolonial Contribution.” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais. Special edition in English III. 31 March 2014. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/pdf/s_rbcsoc/v3nse/scs_a09.pdf. 12 July 2014. — (2011). “Founding in Networking? Geisteswissenschaften in der neuen Geopolitik des Wissens [Founding in Networking? The Humanities in the New Geopolitics of Knowledge].” In René, Dietrich, Daniel Smilovski, and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). Lost or Found in Translation? Interkulturelle/Internationale Perspektiven der Geisteswissenschaften, 39–52. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. — (2013). “Die Geopolitik der soziologischen Wissensproduktion: soziale Erfahrung und Theoriebildung in Lateinamerika.” In Markus Hochmüller, Anne Huffschmid, Teresa Orozco Martínez, Stephanie Schütze, and Martha Zapata Galindo (eds.). Politik in verflochtenen Räumen. Festschrift für Marianne Braig, 106–120. Berlin: Tranvia. Domingues, J. Maurício (2009). “Global Modernization, ‘Coloniality,’ and a Critical Sociology for Contemporary Latin America.” Theory, Culture & Society, 26.1: 112–33. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (2000). “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus, 129: 1–29. Escobar, Arturo (2007). “Worlds and Knowledge Otherwise. The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program.” Cultural Studies, 21.2: 179–210. Habermas, Jürgen (1998). Die postnationale Konstellation. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Hall, Stuart (1992). “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (eds.). Formations of Modernity, 275–331. Cambridge: Polity. Haritaworn, Jin (2010). “Wounded Subjects: Sexual Exceptionalism and the Moral Panic on ‘Migrant Homophobia’ in Germany.” In Encarnación G. Rodríguez, Manuela Boatcă, and Sérgio Costa (eds.). Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches, 135–152. Surrey: Ashgate. Keim, Wiebke (2011). “Counterhegemonic Currents and Internationalization of Sociology. Theoretical Reflections and One Empirical Example.” International Sociology, 26.1: 123–145. Lichtblau, Klaus (2010). “Die Stellung der Soziologie innerhalb der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen.” Soziologie, 39.3: 279–285.

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McLennan, Gregor (2000). “Sociology’s Eurocentrism and the Rise of the West Revisited.” European Journal for Social Theory, 3.3: 275–292. Mignolo, Walter (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (2007). “DELINKING. The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the Grammar of De-coloniality.” Cultural Studies, 21.2: 449–514. Patel, Sujata (2006). “Beyond Binaries: A Case for Self-Reflexive Sociologies.” Current Sociology, 54.3: 381–395. Quijano, Anibal (2000). “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology, 15.2: 215–232. Randeria, Shalini (2005). “Verwobene Moderne: Zivilgesellschaft, Kastenbindungen und nicht staatliches Familienrecht im (post)kolonialen Indien.” In Hauke Brunkhorst and Sérgio Costa (eds.). Jenseits von Zentrum und Peripherie. Zur Verfassung der fragmentierten Weltgesellschaft, 168–197. Mering: Rainer Hampp Verlag. Rodríguez, Encarnación G., Manuela Boatcă, and Sérgio Costa (eds.). (2010). Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches. Surrey: Ashgate. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2005). “Vom Postmodernen zum Postkolonialen. Und über beides hinaus.” In Hauke Brunkhorst and Sérgio Costa (eds.). Jenseits von Zentrum und Peripherie. Zur Verfassung der fragmentierten Weltgesellschaft, 197–220. Mering: Rainer Hampp Verlag. Simon, Bernd (2008). “Einstellungen zur Homosexualität: Ausprägungen und psychologische Korrelate bei Jugendlichen mit und ohne Migrationshintergrund (ehemalige UdSSR und Türkei). [Attitudes towards Homosexuality].” Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspsychologie und Pädagogische Psychologie, 40: 87–99. Söffner, Hans-Georg (2009). “Die Kritik der soziologischen Vernunft.” Soziologie, 38.1: 66–71. Stichweh, Rudolf (2000). Weltgesellschaft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Ventura, Roberto (1987). “Estilo Tropical: a Natureza Como Pátria.” Ideologies & Literature New Series, 2.2: 145–158. Wagner, Peter (2011). “From Interpretation to Civilization—and Back: Analyzing the Trajectories of Non-European Modernities.” European Journal of Social Theory, 14.1: 89–106. Walsh, Catherine (2002). “The (Re)Articulation of Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador. Reflections on Capitalism and the Geopolitics of Knowledge.” Neplanta: Views from South, 3.1: 61–97.

Decolonizing Gender—Gendering Decolonial Theory: Crosscurrents and Archaeologies1 Gabriele Dietze

Decoloniality: Setting the Field Arturo Escobar, a contributor to the Modernity/Colonialism Research Group describes the program of Decolonial Theory as “another way of thinking that runs counter to the great modernist narratives (Christianity, Liberalism, Marxism); it locates its own inquiry in the very borders of systems of thought and reaches towards the possibility of non-Eurocentric modes of thinking” (2007, 180). From his point of view, a new understanding of modernity is needed, based on the premise that modernity is unconceivable without colonialism. Escobar maintains that Eurocentrism as a regime of knowledge is “a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center” (2007, 184). The underside of modernity is that it is convinced of a supposed European civilizational superiority, which must be established in other parts of the world, in their best interests, and by force if necessary. Ernesto Dussel calls this point of view a “developmentalist fallacy” (2000, 473). Theoreticians of decolonial thought such as Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, and Ernesto Dussel declare that this orientation provides “another space for the production of knowledge […], the very possibility of talking about the ‘worlds of knowledges otherwise’” (Escobar 2007, 180). This is a very ambitious program, but it is also a convincing one, one that takes up the challenges of ‘Decentering Europe’ differently from philosophical methods such as deconstruction. The latter analyzes the production of hegemony (colonial, white, national, masculine, heteronormative), and its processes of self-affirmation. However, in this process, othered people become phantasms of discourses of power, who—thus consid-

—————— 1 I have to thank Julia Roth for helpful commentaries.

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ered—cannot have their own knowledge.2 Since decolonial theory claims being an agency-oriented paradigm, gender researchers also ask whether there are female decolonial theorists, and if use has been made of gender knowledge. Or, in other words, does decolonial theory, like many critical paradigms of the last decades, need to be retrospectively gendered, in order to subsequently produce another one of the many hyphenated feminisms? Indeed, there are decolonial theorists who, and this is, alas, not at all self-evident, put gender questions at the center of their work, as will be presented in the course of this essay, discussed especially through the work of the philosopher Maria Lugones. The question of representation is, however, far less decisive than the question of which kind of ‘knowledge’ is (or is not) incorporated into the paradigms being discussed. Does political feminism, do Gender Studies have a considerable impact on decolonial theory? Unexpectedly, this is indeed the case and we will come back to this question in the second half of this essay. The aim of this inquiry is thus twofold. On the one hand, a general archaeology of the intersections and conflicts between Gender Studies and different critiques of colonialism will be reconstructed. In doing so, the criticisms of white feminism expressed from those inhabiting racialized/ethnicized positions will be the prerequisite for this investigation. On the other hand, sources of friction between Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies as an inroad to decolonial thinking will be discussed. And finally, the potential of the decolonial intervention in Gender Studies will be looked into, and suggestions will be made as to how decolonizing gender may be translated and put into use for European immigrant societies.

—————— 2 This deadlock between deconstruction and political agency has accompanied feminist theory from its early days (Benhabib et al. 1993). African American feminist Barbara Christian asks in her essay “The Race for Theory” (1987) why particularly in the nineteen eighties, in times of growing political awareness of discrimination, an academic flowering of High Theory (deconstruction and discourse analysis) gained ground that explicitly dismissed political theory from the point of view of those affected as identity politics or as essentialist.

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Political Genealogies3 I will start out by juxtaposing Gender and Postcolonial Studies, two fields that developed from two different political movements. Gender Studies, via Women’s Studies, are academic children of Second Wave Feminism. And Postcolonial Theory consists of formations of knowledge, ensuing from the histories of resistance against colonialism, racism experienced by the diaspora of formerly colonized regions in the metropolises of the North-West, and the ordeals of the ‘postcolony,’ as Achille Mbembe, for instance, describes South Africa, as the successor state of a formerly colonized area (2001, 746). Although it seems obvious that both movements and spheres of knowledge ought to be entangled with each other, the interaction has been fraught with conflict and antagonism. Initially only implicit as such, conceptually ‘white’ feminism has only falteringly opened itself up to challenges from the Global South and has only hesitantly provincialized itself (Chakrabarty 2000). And Postcolonial Studies, often inspired by Marxist critiques of imperialism, have considered the question of women and the many interventions of Gender Studies as mere ‘side contradictions.’ Without wanting to characterize this development as causally determined or chronologically leading to a ‘better’ politics and awareness, several overlapping movements are easily identified: the precedent being set by critiques by women of color about whiteness not considered, heteronormativity, and hegemony. Subsequent feminist critiques addressed the androcentrism not considered by a large portion of postcolonial theory, postcolonial critiques confronted the geopolitical blindness of Gender Studies, and finally ‘decolonial’ criticism turned to gender itself as a problematic analytical category. On another level, the following investigation deals with what Marx calls the Die Kritik der kritischen Kritik (Critique of Critical Criticism).4 He had refuted Bruno Bauer’s idealistic ‘pure criticism’ in the tradition of Hegel, its absent materialism and political inactivity. Applied to

—————— 3 The first part of the essay uses excerpts of two recent and comprehensive Germanlanguage publications of this author, namely an updated version of the essay “Postcolonial Studies und Gender, Geschichte einer problematischen Beziehung” (Dietze 2013b), and the introduction to the monograph Weiße Frauen in Bewegung. Genealogien und Konkurrenzen von Race und Genderpolitiken (Dietze 2013a). 4 “Critique of Critical Criticism” is the subtitle of Marx’s paper “The Holy Family” (Marx 1957).

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the following inquiry, it is less the critiques of Gender and/or Postcolonialism that are in focus, but rather an analysis of deficiencies in both political bodies of knowledge. Important for this analysis will be the consideration of the particular historicity of the ‘critical criticisms’ and its meanderings between new horizons and the awareness that these will produce new exclusions, which will in turn be rectified by newer, more inclusive lines of theory and practice. The reconstruction of the histories of criticisms will serve as the basis for, as indicated by the title ‘Decolonizing Gender,’ the challenge of foundational claims of both knowledge formations, namely the understanding of gender as a “useful category” (Scott 1986) and the understanding of postcolonialism as an adequate description of an epoch after Colonialism.

A—Gender Studies Before Second Wave Feminism was so vigorously challenged by differences within, it was itself the challenger. It began with the critique of the dominance of men, or patriarchy. This took place in the political arena of the Second Wave Women’s Movement, demonstrations on the streets for the right to abortion, fights against sexism at home and in the workplace et cetera. In academia and universities, this meant a long march through the institutions and fights on many frontiers. On the one hand, these were about representation, how to increase the ludicrously low quotas for female professors. But it was (and still is) also about content: Where is the figure of the female in academic historical scholarship? Are the social and cultural sciences interested in female modes of existence, are they concerned about how masculinity is constructed, or how the default person remains male in most disciplines? And how could androcentrism be combatted politically and scientifically as false universalism? The diagnosis of a ‘false universalism’ quickly brought about an internal conflict lead by women of color and lesbian women, who highlighted whiteness and/or heteronormativity respectively as ‘tacit norms.’ The debates are familiar, and have been documented in critical synopses by now.5

—————— 5 For a German language summary of the local and international challenges to white feminism see Walgenbach et al. (2010). See Wiegman (2012) for a current, English language discussion of different ‘identity knowledges’ and their conflicts.

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Nevertheless, certain parts of the debate must be reconstructed, in order to illustrate the relationship of critical criticisms and the demand for a decolonization of gender. This subchapter begins with political conflicts within feminism along the intersections of race/ethnicity versus gender, as discussed by African American and Afro-German feminism. Secondly, (self-) criticisms of hegemony (Dietze 2008) such as Critical Whiteness Theory and critiques of Occidentalism will be sketched. Finally, the ellipsis of criticism of queer theory will be traced to the field of (hetero)normativity, and its possible connections to postcolonialism. The interventions of Black Feminist Theory and Lesbian and Queer Theory’s decentering of heteronormativity are very well known by know, but I will nonetheless trace a few lines of thinking in these fields to set the stage for the project of decolonizing gender.

Intervention 1: Feminism of Color In the nineteen eighties, African American feminists in the U.S. criticized white feminists for raising the critique of patriarchy to a universal principle without considering their specific experiences of oppression, for example, being more impacted by white racism than by patriarchy. Additionally, black men were also impacted by racism, and black women saw themselves in solidarity with them, rather than seeing them as sexist patriarchs. Furthermore the most important point for white feminism, the entitlement to equal treatment in the workplace, was not their problem; they had always had to work, and very often for white women, looking after their households or their children. The claim of white women to speak for all women was accordingly seen as a hegemonic (as well as racist) self-deception (Davis 1981; hooks 1981; Giddings 1984).6 This political criticism was complemented by Black Feminist Standpoint Theory, which developed a ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins 2004), namely that—based on the factors of poverty, profession, accommodation,

—————— 6 In Germany, this debate was raised much later by Afro-German women in the anthology Farbe bekennen. Afrodeutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Oguntoye et al. 1986); however, the anthology was largely ignored. It was only during the racism debates in the nineteen nineties, on the heels of German reunification around 2005 that it was discussed anew and first time more sustainably.

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race, sexuality, gender (single motherhood)—people encounter different forms of discrimination: “Her gender may become more prominent when she is a mother, her race when she searches for housing, her social class when she applies for credit, her sexual orientation when she is walking with her lover, and her citizenship status when she is applying for a job.” (Collins 2000, 274)

Another important theoretical development emerging alongside Black Feminist Standpoint Theory was ‘intersectionality.’ It was clear that the racial emancipation struggles were conceived as black/male, and the women’s emancipation struggles as white/female. In the exceedingly ubiquitous rhetoric that women and blacks must be liberated, there was no mention of black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw calls this the intersectional position of black women, which makes it impossible in legal proceedings in work-related court cases to differentiate sexualized racism from racist sexism (Crenshaw 1991). The first important anthology of black feminism was thus called All Men are Black, All Women are White, Some of us are Brave (Hull et al. 1982). Theories of intersectionality articulate the insight that people in general and women in particular experience “manifold, simultaneous, and interlocking oppression” (Combahee 1981, 210). I speak here about ‘scenes of inequality,’ in order to emphasis the co-presence of different ‘intersectionalities’ in differently multiple and changing identities, on different temporal and/or topographic axes, similar to Ella Shohat’s formulation of the necessity of “investigating multichronotopic links” (Shohat 2006, 3).

Intervention 2: Self-reflection—Whiteness—Occidentalism The paths and detours of Critical Whiteness Theory are of particular interest for the task set in this article, ‘Decolonizing Gender.’ Though Critical Whiteness Theory was initially seen as an adequate response to mainstream feminism’s “White Amnesia” (Broeck 1999), it was soon after criticized as a solipsistic mechanism for white self-mirroring (Wiegman 1999). For segments of feminism hitherto considered universal, the most important realization that came in the course of this critique was that whiteness could be perceived as an identity, membership to a group, and a particular interest group, and not as the ‘norm.’ And this whiteness as particular interest could then also be perceived as conferring privileges not just to white men

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but to white women as well, when it came to the categories of class, job, accommodation, and credit.7 Of course hegemonic (self-)critical white feminists were not the only and definitely not the first ones to develop this insight. It was developed by intellectuals of color who were affected themselves by white racism: W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Toni Morrison, who described the specificity of this apparently invisible, tacit norm. To the credit of early critics of whiteness, they attempted to bring these realizations to a feminist anti-racism.8 It is no mere coincidence that I say “attempted to” because the Whiteness Paradigm also imposed limitations on their political agency. There was a tendency to set up this ‘specific feminist anti-racism’ for self-referred whiteness as “essential something” (Ahmed 2007, 149), from which all accusations of racism could be levied at the not-enlightened, perpetuating a kind of self-absorption, inescapable guilt of existence, which defined every type of white engagement with ‘Others’ as a violation. Especially problematic are the consequences of such self-positionings when it is a matter of political alliances. In an article called “Decolorise It,” a group of German migrant intellectuals criticized the Identitätsolympiade (Identity Olympics) (Karakayali et al. 2012, 1) of whiteness-awareness, where each person can only speak as an “expert on himself/herself” (5).9 Whereas the authors of “Decolorise It” are concerned with a left-wing variant of the dangers of a “possessive investment” in whiteness (Lipsitz 1998), Robin Wiegman in “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity” examines the dangers of a right-wing claim of ‘whiteness’ as a particular identity, among many other possible identities, using the example of a Ku Klux Klan Museum which successfully sued for the right to sell ‘White Pride’ T-Shirts: “The political project for the study of whiteness entails not simply rendering whiteness particular, but engaging with the ways of whiteness rendering particular will not divest whiteness of its uni-

—————— 7 The philosopher Marilyn Frye (1983) and the psychologist Ruth Frankenberg (1993) are examples of white U.S. American pioneers of a Critical Whiteness Perspective; German pioneers in this field were Wachendorfer (2001), Walgenbach (2002, 2003). For an overview, see Tißberger et al. (2006). 8 For a genealogical examination of the boundaries of understanding between Critical Whiteness Feminism and Feminism of Color, see Ortega (2006). 9 The ‘possessive investment in whiteness’ can go so far, that the subject ‘racism’ is monopolized by discourses of ‘white guilt,’ as illustrative during a protest conference in 2012 against racist migrant regimes, where those actually affected by racism were not represented in the panels about racism.

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versalizing power” (Wiegman 1999, 159). Wiegman indicates the dangers that can arise when a hegemony and self-critical perspective morphs into a right wing, identity-based positionality. Since the U.S. American discussion of whiteness is only partially applicable to European and especially German resentment against immigration and to islamophobia, I have—as developed in detail elsewhere10—suggested talking about anti-migrant racism that fixates on Muslim immigration as ‘occidentalism.’ In the tradition of feminist Critical Whiteness Theory, in an occidentalist feminist perspective the sexual-political dimensions of this pattern of cultural superiority are foregrounded, namely that of the characterization of ostensibly oppressed Muslim women and oriental patriarchs, the ‘ethnicizing of sexism,’ (Jäger 1996) paints a secular, sexually liberated Occident in contrast to a supposedly backward Orient. This intervention is also a part of the tradition of ‘critical criticism’ taking innerfeminist conflicts as starting points, as it attacks the islamophobic rhetoric of German origin mainstream feminists such as Alice Schwarzer (Marx, D. 2009).

Intervention 3: Heteronormativity The second political and theoretical challenge for the women’s movement came from lesbian women, of whom some identified themselves as women of color, as the above-mentioned Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, or Cherríe Moraga (Moraga and Bambara 1983). They chastised the women’s movement for uncritically assuming the heterosexuality of its members. These challenges lead to the development of the term heteronormativity (heterosexuality as false universalism). Judith Butler pursued these thoughts further in the question she posed in Gender Trouble: “Who is the subject of feminism?” Her response was that what is understood by ‘woman’ needs to be reconsidered. So far ‘woman’ implied that body-shape (primary and secondary sexual attributes), the ability and desire to have children, and sexual attraction to the opposite sex (heterosexuality) were not to be considered separately.

—————— 10 See the anthology Kritik des Okzidentalismus. Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu (Neo-)Orientalismus und Geschlecht (Dietze et al. 2009). For an English version of the research approach see (Dietze 2010).

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Lesbian women are living contradictions of this triangular ‘heterosexual matrix’ (not attracted to the opposite sex, perhaps no children). Deconstructive feminism foregrounds a shift of emphasis that is connected with the term heteronormativity. The term has less to do with criticizing a devalued positionality or ‘identity’ such as ‘being black’ or ‘being lesbian’ and more to do with a criticism of the processes of normalization and binarizations such as male versus female, heterosexuality versus homosexuality, that reproduce hegemony via the production of ‘constitutive others.’ (Feminist) queer theory follows this route. Sara Ahmed writes: “The normalization of sexuality as an orientation toward ‘the other sex,’ can be redescribed in terms of the requirement to follow a straight line” (Ahmed 2006, 70).11 Additionally Queer theory raises the question of whether ‘sexuality’ may be considered on the same level as race, class, gender, nation/locality. Sexuality does not describe positionality or identity, just as queer theory is not a theory of identity, as pointedly summarized in the foreword of a queer theory anthology: “It was a strategy, not an identity. Put differently, the message of queer activism was that politics could be queer, but folk could not.” (Morland and Willox 2005, 2). Queer activism deals, so to say, more with potentiality than with positionality. Despite this epistemological distinctiveness, queer theory has greatly enriched intersectional questions, for example Queering the Colorline (Somerville 2000), which considers race and the ‘discovery of homosexuality’ in terms such as miscegenation and mongrelization. New areas of research, such as Queer of Color Critique, draw explicitly from intersectionality. Aberrations in Black. Toward a Queer of Color Critic (Ferguson 2004) or Disidentifications. Queers of Color in the Performance of Politics (Muñoz 1997) are examples which aim more for a criticism of norms, rather than multiple positionalities. To this extent, one may speak of a critical subgenre called ‘Queer Intersectionality,’ in order to emphasize the epistemic exceptionality and the differently anchored perspectives of knowledge of queer points of view. Queer intersectionality contributes to the intersectionality model and ‘cuts across’ it at the same time, becoming a ‘corrective methodology’ (Haschemi et al. 2010). Both approaches could be thresholds for each other, in order to keep track of both normalization processes (queer) and the compoundedness of ‘identities’ (intersectionality). Queering and Passing

—————— 11 For an overview of the new developments in feminist queer theory, see the introduction of the special edition of feministische studien entitled “The Queerness of Things not Queer” (Michaelis et al. 2012).

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refer to the imitative, quoting, parodistic or masking possibilities of action. Strategies of disidentification, resignification, and of re- and disarticulation destabilize and undermine labels. Here then, is an opportunity for connecting to the decolonial imperative of ‘knowledges otherwise.’12

B—Postcolonial Studies The term postcolonial has chronological as well as epistemological dimensions. Postcolonial refers to the period after the end of colonialism. It is defined by two epochal caesurae: the Enlightenment, and with it the assertion of universalist thinking, making a European term of progress a lens through which to view the world; and secondly, the industrial revolution, giving Europe a technological boost, and enabling it, during the ‘Age of Imperialism’ in the second half of the nineteenth century, to reach “a formal colonization of almost the entire surface of the globe” (Conrad and Randeria 2002, 24). On the epistemic level, the ‘post’ in postcolonial refers to a thinking beyond colonialism, beyond the scope of colonialism, but considers it nevertheless as a “Laboratory of the Modern” (Stoler 1997, 24). Postcolonialism describes colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial linkages of colonizing societies with the economic, cultural, and territorial aspects of the formerly colonized populations. The United States of America as well, as a former colony of England, a community of settlers, a post-slavery society, and as an imperial power is associated with the term postcolonial (Singh and Schmidt 2000). For Gender Studies, the postcolonial challenge or the postcolonial turn, brought a new category in the list of intersectionalities, namely locality. The oppression based on race/ethnicity is intersectionally related to geopolitical positionings, and thus bound up with the history of colonialism, modern slavery and postcolonialism. In Anglo-American white feminism, an attempt was made to react to this criticism. The poet and essayist Adrienne Rich was one of the first white feminists to criticize the Eurocentrism of white feminism in 1984. Socio-historically diverse spaces could only be understood when one attempted a Politics of Location. Rich turned against every form of generalization of the position of women and prefaced all

—————— 12 Compare Escobar (2007, 195); for ‘Queering’ and ‘Passing’ see Butler (1983, 167–186); and for ‘Disidentification’ see Muñoz (1997).

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deliberations with the opening question: “Where, when and under what conditions have women acted and been acted on as women?” (Rich 2003, 31).13 Intersectional studies with a postcolonial perspective have shown that the structural oppression of white women by white men during colonialism—or, for that matter, in Western metropolitan cities when speaking about Muslim diasporas—is offset by their white privilege (McClintock 1995)14 through what I call an okzidentalistische Dividende (‘occidental dividend’) (Dietze 2009, 35). The incorporation of postcolonial questions in Gender Studies gave feminist theorists hope to be able to disengage themselves from restrictive identity politics. In 1991, Teresa De Lauretis wrote optimistically: “Now I want to suggest, that feminist theory came to its own, or became possible as such […] in a postcolonial mode […] with the understanding of the interrelatedness of discourses and social practices, and of the multiplicity of positionalities concurrently available in a social field seen as field of forces: not a single system of power dominating the powerless but a tangle of distinct, variable relations of power and points of resistance.” (De Lauretis 2007, 157)

Thinking in terms of local postcolonialisms makes it possible to see how the same person might be considered ‘of color’ in one place and ‘white’ in another. For example, through the U.S. American ‘One-Drop-Rule,’ someone might have a ‘black’ status legally speaking, but might ‘pass’ (be considered white) as white in her surroundings. These observations were central to the argument for the concept of race as a social construction.

Intervention 1: Postcolonial Feminist Criticism of Gender Studies The critical and self-critical approaches of white Gender Studies-informed perspectives do not, however, respond fundamentally to postcolonial interventions and their demand for decentering and the problematization of uncritical perspectives on ‘cultural difference.’ It was mainly feminists from the postcolonial spectrum who pointed out that despite the self-reflective gesture, a new ‘cultural essentialism’ (Narayan 2000) was being produced, one that in no way undercuts the colonial hierarchy, as the occidental pre-

—————— 13 See Kaplan (1997) for a more recent criticism of the feminist politics of location as reproducing the center-periphery model. 14 This phenomenon has been examined in the history of German colonialism by Walgenbach (2005) and Dietrich (2007).

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sumption of superiority over the global South had not thoroughly been comprehended. Postcolonial criticism of so-called ‘hegemonic feminist theory’ began in 1984 with the objections raised by Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar. In their book Challenging Imperial Feminism (1984), they objected to the exclusive claim of white middle-class feminists to be the representatives of all women. In principle, postcolonial feminism carried the above outlined critique by women of color concerning white feminism to a different level. This time, it was less concerned with unauthorized universalizations (white feminists = black feminists), but about an unsolicited ‘vicarious speaking’ and a basic civilizing devaluation of women from the global South. Likewise, in her 1984 article “Under Western Eyes,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty, one of the most important postcolonial feminists, describes feminist ‘racism’ as a set of assumptions and prejudices about women from the third world. She shows how from the belief that ‘sexual difference’ and ‘patriarchy’ are transculturally transferable, a picture of ‘the normal woman from the third world’ emerged that does not consider the specificities of race, ethnicity, class, as well as the realities of specific local situations. Following the lines of postcolonial feminist criticism, what it means to be a woman is reduced by hegemonic feminism to sexual oppression and confined to the male-female binary (Chow 1991, 83). ‘Third world’ implies in this connection ignorant, poor, uneducated, bound to local traditions, family oriented, and victimized (Mohanty 2000, 305). This ‘ethnocentric universalism’ is based on Eurocentric assumptions of a ‘Global Sisterhood,’ as white feminist Robin Morgan declared (1984). Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty describe this manner of thinking as a center-periphery model (1997, 497). They stress that women from the third world do not want to embody the ‘burden of difference’ anymore. A ‘politics of difference’ reaches boundaries when it equates differences with a totalizing inclusion. The white feminist discourse should be refuted as a master discourse (Ang 2001), or as Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani formulate it, as a “mistress narrative of gender domination” (2001, 488). The falsities diagnosed here lead back to the injustice of the assumption that all women occupy the same sociohistorical space (Chow 1991, 93).

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C—Decolonial Theory Considering the above-mentioned criticism of ‘hegemonic’ gender theory, one cannot really be surprised at the question of whether it is the right time to decolonize gender. In order to understand the radicalness of this project, one should be clear, however, that it is not about whether Gender Studies should incorporate new challenges productively, but rather about whether its subject, or more accurately, the relations which produce the subject matter gender are not in themselves a problem. To capture the scope of a project of ‘decolonizing gender,’ it is necessary and useful to briefly sketch some important points concerning the critical distance of the decolonial intervention towards postcolonial thought. Decolonial theory criticizes postcolonial theory as interwoven with European High Theory (postmodern deconstruction, the neo-marxist world-system analysis). Decolonial theory differentiates between a problematic Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism (such as that by Derrida) from a critique of Eurocentrism that is rooted in “colonial difference,” which Mignolo calls “post-occidentalism” or “post-occidental reason” (2000, 37). Mignolo seeks to work against the “subalternization of knowledges” (2000, 11). Decolonial theory avoids Western points of reference in the manner in which it foregrounds the dual nature of modernity in its thought. Modernity has in one single movement created, on the one hand, Enlightenment, bringing with it human rights, freedom, private property, and, on the other hand, it has simultaneously subjected the ‘rest of the world’15 to colonialism and modern slavery. In the wake of ‘modernity’ humankind was distributed in “humanitas,” which was molded by these new values; while “anthropos,” non-‘human’ racialized and gendered subjects, were studied, enslaved, governed, and thought of in terms of nature/childhood/animality.16 During the late modern migration of formerly colonized people to Europe, the entities of humanitas and anthropos, namely the locals and those classified as ‘backward’ on the axis of time, came into contact with each other, previously having been separated. It became obvious that those considered to belong to Anthropos were also people, albeit not desired

—————— 15 See Stuart Hall’s telling essay title “The West and the Rest” (Hall 1992). 16 For the influential juxtaposition of “anthropos” and “humanitas” see Mignolo (2011, 93). Hereby Mignolo refers to the Jamaican author and philosopher Sylvia Wynter.

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ones.17 Walter Mignolo counters Enlightenment philosophy—which in its formulation of the Humanitas-Anthropos binary of the colonial project is tied up in its epistemic violence—with so-called epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2009). He makes the case for searching for the alternative epistemologies that were silenced by colonialism and for reviving their relevance. Through this, a ‘border-thinking’ or a ‘border-knowledge’ will develop, allowing one to think beyond the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000), and thus enable the recognition of new actors and forms of action.

D—Decolonizing Gender The Argentinian-American philosopher Maria Lugones situates her project “Decolonizing Gender” (Lugones 2010, 746)—or, the “coloniality of gender”—with reference to Quijones’s “coloniality of power” (2010, 745) in this framework. Her main thesis is that the concept of polarized gender identities—masculinity and femininity—were imported and forced on colonized peoples through colonialism. Analogous to the humanitas-anthropos hypothesis, she opens up for examination a colonialistic discourse along the lines of a man/beast divide, which considers the colonized as animals. Furthermore, the ‘savage’ was understood to be a sexless being. A development towards being a person was seen as dependent on how strongly developed a dimorphous gender system was. Thus the degree of ‘civilization’ was completely tied to the degree of gender dimorphism (Lugones 2010, 743). Lugones’s central point is that the structuring of indigenous societies as per gender binaries led to a new or first-time subjugation of peoples whose ‘sex’ was female, from which, in a manner complicit with colonizers, those people whose ‘sex’ was male profited (Lugones 2007, 197). Lugones’s premise is that in the (gender) dichotomized cosmology of Eurocentric modernity everyone is racialized and gendered, whereas in other parts of the world, race and gender are not the central axes through

—————— 17 Populist, right wing anti-black forms of racism question the humanity of immigrants from the global South. Most recently the neo-socialdarwinist Thilo Sarrazin was very successful with such a stance in Germany (Sarrazin 2010).

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which dominance can be exerted.18 Lugones supports her claims with studies by African and Latin American anthropologists, such as Oyéronké Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women (1997), which shows that before colonization, gender was not a principle of social organization, or Paula Allen Gunn who, in the reconstruction of different Native American cultures, shows that in the process of colonizing and ‘civilizing,’ ‘gynocratic egalitarianism’ was destroyed, through the implementation of gendered family hierarchies (1986). Lugones comes to the conclusion: “race is no more mythical and fictional than gender—both are powerful fictions” (2007, 202). In an initial consideration, this claim might merely seem to be the repetition of a widely established fact. After all, we have learned to assume the construction of femaleness from the outset (de Beauvoir, Irigaray, up until Butler’s negation of the woman as the subject of feminism). All these concepts were nevertheless about a denaturalization of femaleness. They focused on the epistemic function that the construction ‘woman’ has for the construction ‘man’ and on the performative character of femininity, that is, on a continuous subjectification via the interpellation of femininity as nonmasculinity. Lugones’s objection is that occidental gender-theorems might deconstruct gender, but have universalized the function of gender difference as a power structure, that is, they have assumed the same for all conceivable societies. In view of this, she identifies imperial gestures of ‘colonial feminism,’ as well as the facet that makes the colonized male complicit in the implementation of a till then unknown, imported European-style patriarchy. Like critics who take the perspective of ‘Decolonial Border Thinking,’ she pleads against an occidental universalism with reference to militant “pluriversalism” (Grossvoguel 2010, 36). Despite her fundamental critique of Western feminisms that in her view likewise deal with the (colonial) universalization of the gender dichotomy, she makes, with reference to womenof-color feminism and ‘feminist border-thinking,’ the case for a “Decolonial Feminism” (Lugones 2010, 746), in which she includes Gloria

—————— 18 This is not to say that these societies are free of hegemony, only that other defining differences have impacted the community structure much more. It is established, for instance, that in many African and Asian societies, seniority is the central feature of social structure, or that in occidental history, for example, in Greek antiquity, the binary of free versus unfree (Slave-Freeman) had a much deeper impact than the binary of female versus male.

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Anzaldúa’s concept of a ‘New Mestiza.’ Decolonizing gender is hence “necessarily a praxical task. It is to enact a critique of racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression as a lived transformation of the social” (Lugones 2010, 746).

European Ramifications The above outline of a decolonial feminism introduces a decentering strategy of problematizing gender and coloniality on a global level. In the United States, which has a large Hispanic population, a significant diaspora of Central and South American intellectuals in the academy and beyond, a history of economic imperialism, and a current interest in Latin America, decolonial theory resonates quite well in local contexts. Decolonial Feminism can build on a local U.S. American tradition, such as ‘Chicana’ feminism. As mentioned above, theorist Gloria Anzaldùa, in her programmatic book Borderlands. La Frontera (1987), developed the figuration of the ‘New Mestiza,’ a pioneering idea in the theory of ‘Third Spaces’ and ‘Border Thinking,’ that was vigorously taken up by decolonial theory.19 But does decolonial feminism travel well to North Western Europe, or as Mignolo would say, to our ‘local histories’? Certainly there are points of contact with the critiques of German/European politics concerning Africa, or possibilities for interventions in the impasses and deadlocks in NGOdiscourses. However, there are areas literally closer, where the assumption of ‘backward’ gender-binaries plays a decisive role for asymmetric power relations. This concerns, for instance, Eastern Europe as the ‘balkanized’ (Todorova 2009) border, which cannot be considered to belong to either the enlightened Occident or the Global South. Millions of (mostly) undocumented female migrants relieve Western Europeans of domestic work and care of the elderly. A supposedly female inclination to domestic work and care is presumed (also under the auspices of post-socialism), and for this work, cheap, ‘natural’ investment in emotional care of western Euro-

—————— 19 See the anthology This Bridge We Call Home (Anzaldùa and Keating 2002). See also the much discussed work of Cherie Moraga (1994), which examines the tensions between migrants’ often necessary orientation towards the family, Latino machismo, and heteronormativity. For important decolonial theory references to Chicana Feminism see Grossvoguel (2007, 213), Escobar (2007, 192) and Mignolo (2000, 84).

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pean children and the elderly, is judged as cultural capital.20 The thus achievable ‘emancipation’ of Western European women from the oppression of a gendered division of labor is directly connected with the gendering of ‘other women.’ In this process, a movement very similar in structure to the phenomenon that Lugones calls the ‘coloniality of gender’ can be observed. A connection to decolonial feminism can be productive for critiques of occidentalism as well. The functionalization of ‘women’s emancipation in the West’ (and presumed ‘enlightened’ tolerance of homosexuality) as an integration test especially against Muslim migrants, could also be understood in terms of a similar constitutional connection as the above described co-presence of Enlightenment (as hegemonic model) and colonization/dehumanization.21 Two discourses intersect here. The ‘Orientals’ are accused of an enormous gender differentiation through the figures of the ‘veiled woman’ and the ‘orientalist patriarch,’ and Western female sexual agency and gender equality are posited as an ‘enlightened’ model against these. This implies that Muslim gender segregation and the practice of veiling are considered backward and Western mobility and transparency progressive. A project of decolonizing gender in occidental discourse would mean exposing the functionalization of the occidental, emancipated woman as an ideological weapon in islamophobic cultural wars. Thus ‘enlightened gender relationships’ come to be perceptible as occidental norms. However, the complicity between occidental and oriental masculinities which Lugones identifies in colonial models does not come to bear here. To the contrary, the characterization of male Muslim migrants as potential terrorists, preachers of hate, violent fathers, criminal and/or homophobic youth, abusers of social security, is an important element in the new construction of European occidentalism, especially after the old guiding difference of Western European superiority, namely freedom versus socialism,

—————— 20 For a discussion of capitalist exploitation of the allegedly affective quality of migrants’ domestic work, see Guitiérrez-Rodríguez (2010). 21 Saba Mahmood points to an epistemic weakness, which many deconstructive and decentralizing Western intellectuals fail to see, when the occasion of the cultural wars precipitated by the Mohammed-caricatures, posed the question “Is critique secular?,” and deconstructed the unquestioned connection between secularity and progress as occidental assumptions (2009).

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was lost with the end of the cold war.22 The anthropos-humanitas dichotomy, as a ‘hierarchy of civilizations,’ comes to be transcribed in terms of ‘cultural racism’ as a ‘hierarchy of cultures.’ * The shortcomings of theory and political practice discussed above create a need for a refined feminist perspective, which has been purged through the critique of critical criticism from women of color, whiteness awareness, postcolonial and decolonial interventions, in order to recognize (and fight) the production of cultural hierarchies, which both serves and coopts the figure of the ‘emancipated Western woman.’ Equally, there is a need for decolonial theory informed by feminist interventions. If decolonial theory does not break from the never-ending story of every progressive paradigm being first and foremost conceptualized for the male half of humanity (under the pretense of speaking for all). There is some hope for the latter. Some decolonial master texts reference Chicana feminism, women of color and feminist standpoint theory, transnational and postcolonial feminism as central sources of their theorizing. Arturo Escobar asks for “an engagement with the sophisticated and politically minded debates on feminist epistemology and positionality,” which is not just claimed, but actually celebrated (Escobar 2007, 194). In this line of political thinking the coloniality of power and the coloniality of gender could be confronted in the much sought after ‘integrated approach’ of race and gender discrimination paradigms. Yet it is a long shot still. Gendering decolonial theory nonetheless is one of the very few projects besides queer intersectionality in which feminist epistemology is not seen as a particularist perspective which has to be forced into progressive theory by battlesome women against defensive men. Regardless of locality and gender, ‘Border Thinking’ allows short or long-term participants in the decolonial project to act simultaneously inside and outside of identities and positionalities.

—————— 22 For a more exact explication of this displacement and the European claims of cultural superiority, see Schulze (2007), and Dietze (2009, 24) for the connection to occidentalism.

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— (2010). “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia, 25.4: 742–760. Mamood, Saba (2009). “Religious Reason and Secular Affect. An Incommensurable Divide.” In Talal Asad, Brown Wendy, Judith Butler, and Saba Mamood (eds.). Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, 64–101. Berkeley: University of California Press. Manalansan IV, Martin F. (2006). “Queer Intersections: Sexuality and Gender in Migration Studies.” International Migration Review, 40.1: 224–249. Marx, Karl (1957). Die Heilige Familie. Zur Kritik der Kritischen Kritik. 1845. In Karl Marx (ed.). MEW 2, 3–232. Berlin: Dietz. Marx, Daniela (2009). “Feministische Gegenstimmen? Aushandlung westlich abendländischer Identität in Auseinandersetzung mit dem ‘Islam.’” In Gabriele Dietze, Claudia Brunner, and Edith Wenzel (eds.). Kritik des Okzidentalismus. Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu (Neo-)Orientalismus und Geschlecht, 101–117. Bielefeld: transcript. Mbembe, Achille (2001). On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. McClintock, Anne (1995). Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds.). (1997). Dangerous Liaisons. Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Michaelis, Beatrice, Gabriele Dietze, and Elahe Haschemi-Yekani (2012). “The Queerness of Things not Queer. Entgrenzungen—Affekte und Materialitäten—Interventionen.” feministische studien, 30.2: 184–197. Mignolo, Walter (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (2009). “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom.” Theory, Culture & Society, 26.7/8: 1–23. — (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures and Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2000). “‘Under Western Eyes’: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” In Les Back and John Solomos (eds.). Theories of Race and Racism, 302–323. London: Routledge. Moraga, Cherríe (1994). “From a Long Line of Vendidas. Chicanas and Feminism.” In Anne C. Herrmann and Abigail J. Stewart (eds.). Theorizing Feminism. Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Science, 34–48. Boulder: Westview Press. Moraga, Cherríe, and Toni Cade Bambara (eds.). (1983). This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table. Morgan, Robin (ed.). (1984). Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Muñoz, Jose Esteban (1997). Disidentifications. Queers of Colors and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Narayan, Uma (2000). “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism.” In Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding (eds.) Decentering the Center. Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, 80–101. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Oguntoye, Katharina, May Opitz [Ayim], and Dagmar Schultz (eds.). (1986). Farbe Bekennen. Afrodeutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenbuch Verlag. Ortega, Marina (2006). “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Woman of Color.” Hypatia, 21.3: 56–74. Oyewumi, Oyeronke (1997). The Invention of Women. Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Quijano, Anibal (2000). “The Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South, 1.3: 533–580. Rich, Adrienne (1979). On Lies, Secrets, and Silences: Selected Prose 1966–1978. New York: Norton & Company. — (2003). “Notes Towards a Politics of Location.” In Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (eds.). Feminist Postcolonial Theory. A Reader, 29–43. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Sarrazin, Thilo (2010). Deutschland schafft sich ab. Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen. München: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. Schulze, Reinhard (2007). “Orientalismus. Zum Diskurs zwischen Orient und Okzident.” In Iman Attia (ed.). Orient- und Islambilder Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu Orientalismus und antimuslimischem Rassismus, 45–71. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Scott, Joan (1986). “Gender as a Useful Category in Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review, 91.5: 1053–1075. Shohat, Ella (2006). “Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge: Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.” In Ella Shohat (ed.). Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, 1–16. Durham: Duke University Press. Singh, Amritjit, and Peter Schmidt (2002). Postcolonial Theory and the United States. Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Somerville, Siobhan B. (2000). Queering the Color Line. Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Stoler, Laura Ann, and Frederick Cooper (1997). “Between Metropole and Colony. Rethinking a Research Agenda.” In Laura Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper (eds.). Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, 1–56. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tißberger, Martina, Gabriele Dietze, Daniela Hrzán, and Jana Husmann-Kastein (eds.). (2006). Weiß—Weissein—Whiteness. Kritische Studien zu Gender und Rassismus. Berlin: Peter Lang. Todorova, Maria (2009). Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Wachendorfer, Ursula (2001). “Weiß-Sein in Deutschland. Zur Unsichtbarkeit einer herrschenden Normalität.” In Susan Arndt (ed.). Afrikabilder. Studien zum Rassismus in Deutschland, 87–102. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Walgenbach, Katharina (2002). “Weiße Dominanz—Zwischen struktureller Unsichtbarkeit, Diskursiver Selbstaffirmation und Kollektivem Handeln.” In Sylke Bartman, Karin Gille, and Sebastian Haunss (eds.). Kollektives Handeln, Politische Mobilisierung zwischen Struktur und Identität, 123–137. Düsseldorf: Edition Böckler Stiftung. — (2005). “Die weiße Frau als Trägerin deutscher Kultur.” Koloniale Diskurse über Geschlecht, “Rasse” und Klasse im Kaiserreich. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. Walgenbach, Katharina, Gabriele Dietze, Antje Hornscheidt, Daniela Hrzán, and Kerstin Palm (2010). Gender als interdependente Kategorie. Neue Perspektiven auf Intersektionalität, Diversität und Heterogenität. Opladen: Budrich. Wiegman, Robyn (1999). “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity.” Boundary 2, 26.3: 115–150. — (2012). Object Lessons. Durham: Duke University Press.

Queering Archives of Race and Slavery— Or, on Being Wilfully Untimely and Unhappy Beatrice Michaelis, Elahe Haschemi Yekani

Archives are formations of power that tend to keep a bad track of their emergence but are highly useful for those who control them. What can be found in archives might often be precisely those texts and objects documenting or being instrumental in the oppression of subjects racialized, sexualized and gendered as the Other. This can induce feelings of historical disconnection and depression. Therefore, queer theory recently has drawn our attention to the implications of hegemonic temporalities and historiographies including negative or ‘bad feelings’ that archival work can entail, especially when we enquire into modes of oppression and of being silenced. Articulating this queer take on temporality, Heather Love (resonating with work by Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, and Sianne Ngai to name but a few) “traces a tradition of backwardness in queer representation and experience.” For her, backwardness—meaning “shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame”—is “a queer historical structure of feeling” and “a model for queer historiography” (Love 2009, 146). Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds—Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), challenging the focus on loss and trauma in queer theory, emphasizes the intertwinement of temporal and sexual dissonance to opt for the use of queer (as) asynchrony (2010, 19). This counterintuitive affect for the bad, the ugly and the untimely can resonate widely, traversing gender, sexual, racial Otherness, and inform new modes of political engagement. While models of questioning the grand narratives, including all too happy archives of violent pasts, and ‘writing back’ are seen as resistant, what do the ‘unhappy’ archives of the past, of race and slavery, tell us that might be relevant for thinking the politics of race today? And what can queer theory teach us about temporalities and archives in that regard? Sa-

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rah Ahmed describes these ‘unhappy archives’—as results of the ‘unhappying’ of happy archives—as the traditional starting point for activism: “To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. Even if we are struggling for different things, even if we have different worlds we want to create, we might share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus unhappy archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of ‘the happy housewife;’ Black critiques of the myth of ‘the happy slave’; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as ‘domestic bliss.’ The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon.” (2010, n. pag.)

Consequently, rather than attempting to consolidate hegemonic archives of race in the past with a version of ‘positive diversity’ in the present, we would like to enquire into contemporary efforts to make ‘race’ speak differently to us today. In the following, we will discuss the ‘untimeliness of race’ in Germany and the ‘happy archive’ of slavery in Britain. In this way, we want to highlight two specific historical moments in which the archives of race and slavery are discussed in rather contradictory ways. By looking at the celebrations around the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 in Britain and recent discussions of race in the Middle Ages surfacing in Continental European debates on Islam respectively, we aim to offer a queer critique of the temporality of archives. In doing so, we will not focus on the texts of the early Black Atlantic or the German Middle Ages in detail here. This is a task both of us engage with in individual larger on-going projects. Rather, in this essay we want to reflect on how these archives come into play today, in Germany and Britain. What kind of politics of the archive is this, and in what ways could a queer intervention into these politics of ‘archiving’ race be productive also for Black critique? In other words, both the imputed anachronicity of a postcolonial critique with its untimely use of the category of race for the medieval past and the unremembering of racial violence will come under critical review in order to unearth the work they are summoned to perform for contemporary politics of the archive.

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The Untimeliness of Race in the Middle Ages To think about untimeliness, we first turn to forgetting. In the Middle High German heroic epic Kudrun, written probably around the middle of the thirteenth century, the reader is introduced to powerful king Siegfried of Moorland who courts Kudrun. While Kudrun is quite smitten with him despite the “dirty” skin color all over his body (2000, 583,33), Siegfried does not stand a chance with her father Hetel. However, the text does not expound upon the reasons. Understandably, Siegfried becomes very angry at this rejection and threatens to demolish Hetel’s country. As Herwig receives Kudrun as a bride in the meantime, Siegfried goes for his kingdom instead. Herwig and his allies prove too strong, and so Siegfried strikes up an unusual alliance with them. Eventually, after a successful war against their joint enemies, towards the end of the narrative Siegfried is offered another bride. But something is different. While his knights standing around him still display the “dirty” skin color, his complexion has changed: »Sîn vater und sîn muoter diu wâren niht enein. sîn varwe kristenlîche an dem helde schein. sîn hâr lag ûf dem houbte als ein golt gespunnen« (2000, 1664,1–3). The text explains that his parents were of different origin, thus a Christian color now shines on his body and his hair lies like golden threads on his head. Apparently, the text has completely ‘forgotten’ about its earlier description of Siegfried’s exterior and skin color when telling the audience of Siegfried’s wedding with a Christian princess. Yet, this change is not narrativized, neither as conversion nor as potential mutability of skin color. We will return to this question of (im)mutability. Before we do, let us turn towards untimeliness. The degree of evasiveness in Medieval German Studies on the Kudrun epic which addresses this episode is astounding: The editor of the Middle High German text equates Christian with White without further ado. The translator for the modern German edition at least adds a footnote stating that Siegfried’s is a ‘mixed’ skin color completely in agreement with contemporary beauty ideals. Yet, the text itself speaks of a Christian, not a ‘mixed’ skin color of Siegfried. Despite his parents’ different origin, Siegfried only shows his father’s color. Another reading proposes that Siegfried is simply lighter than his companions but still darker than Hetel, Kudrun, and the others (see Grenzler 1992). Seemingly, readers are confused, but still reluctant to explore the issue further. Those reading this narrative conception as racial discourse are still a minority. Kudrun is but one exam-

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ple of texts potentially provoking a much broader debate on race and racism in the Middle Ages and consequently in Medieval German Studies as well. Parzival, Willehalm, and Apollonius von Tyrland are equally interesting texts in this respect—and the list could go on. Alas, in German research this debate is barely happening. More often than not, the German reaction to such a suggestion is that of disavowal or at least high degrees of caution: there was no such ‘thing’ as race in the Middle Ages and if there was, it worked entirely differently and we should not use modern concepts to distort historical constellations (see Peters 2010). These reactions must sound familiar to those working in postcolonial and decolonial studies with concepts such as orientalism, hybridity, or the third space. Entering the terms ‘race’ and ‘Rasse’ into the International Medieval Bibliography provides telling results: “race” produces 69 hits since the early nineteen nineties, for “Rasse” there is only one entry. There are, of course, scholars in Germany and German-speaking countries who have addressed questions of race and racism (Ebenbauer 1984; Schausten 2006; Groebner 2007). But again, it is very revealing to look at the linguistic manoeuvers in Schausten’s study for instance. While offering a much nuanced reading of the racialized gender differences in Parzival and Apollonius, she nevertheless repeatedly acknowledges medievalists’ concerns about the use of race as analytical rather than biological category. Moreover, she remains skeptical whether we can distance ourselves sufficiently from modern conceptions of race as to not distort the medieval texts. Still, she concludes that “also in the Middle Ages racist elements are inscribed into the discourse on differences in skin color” (2006, 98; our translation). While we do agree that research should be sensitive to the specific conceptualizations of race in different historical contexts (including the Middle Ages but also European Antiquity, for instance), for us it does not follow from those differences in conceptualization to jettison the term race. As Geraldine Heng puts it: “Not to use the term race would be to sustain the reproduction of a certain kind of past, while keeping the door shut to tools, analyses, and resources that can name the past differently. Studies of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ in the Middle Ages— which are now increasingly frequent—must then continue to dance around words they dare not use; concepts, tools, and resources that are closed off; and meanings that only exist as lacunae.” (2011a, 322–23)

Rather than shoring up more evidence for racializing discourses in the Middle Ages, we want to investigate these maneuvers and the atmosphere

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that capitalizes on the notion of untimeliness. Taking the disjuncture between international debates and discussions in Medieval German Studies as our starting point, we want to speculate on some of the affective investments articulated in these disavowing voices. While questions on race in the Middle Ages have surfaced in recent Continental European debates on Islam (Lisa Lampert-Weissig’s book on Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2010) summarizes them aptly), interestingly there are more academic contributions to these discussions from Anglo-American theory and other international collaborations than from European or German ones, most importantly the 2001 special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on race and ethnicity and the collection The Origins of Racism in the West (2009). Medieval Studies in Britain and the United States has increasingly been investigating these genealogies of race. Medieval German Studies, however, has been resistant to attempts that trace racializing constructions within medieval culture. Inquiries into race do not only look into how race has come to matter in the Middle Ages (cf. the upcoming issue of the ‘present-minded’ journal postmedieval), they also address the consequences these questions have for conceptions of temporality. How is medieval culture related to the present, how does the present affect notions of the past? Some of the resistances towards putting race on the research map can be traced through the lens of critical temporality studies and queer medieval studies. One of the most valuable contributions to this growing field is the volume on the Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000), edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. In his introduction to the collection Cohen urges us to rethink our concepts and terms, among them race, within an epistemological framework that insists on the inadequacy of progressive teleological history, mere seriality and flat chronology for thinking about the meanings and trauma of the past and its embeddedness in present and future. Instead we should be interested in “more complicated narratives of heterogeneity, overlap, sedimentation, and multiplicity” so that time itself becomes the problem in our inquiries (2000, 2– 3). In this sense, Cohen offers a queer critique of the temporality of archives and demonstrates how these archives come into play in the present. This archival work does differ of course with regard to national philologies. That is why simultaneously with these approaches in critical temporality and race studies the German archive of its medieval past can largely remain one of disavowal—a disavowal that is upheld by a libidinal invest-

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ment in medieval alterity, that is to say a past without any racialized difference that might be genealogically linked to modern racializing discourses. In other words, the imputation of anachronicity of a postcolonial/ decolonial critique with its untimely use of the category of race for the medieval past and the concomitant unremembering of racialized violence need to come under more critical review in order to unearth the work they are summoned to perform for contemporary politics of the archive. What are in fact the libidinal investments in an ‘innocent’ Middle Ages that posit race as an untimely category in it? How could queer temporality pervert these affective relations with the past? Rather than claiming race and racism as that which is always already there, we are interested in the transformations and contiguities of what might analytically be called racializing formations or discourses. Therefore, our focus is not on a history of the term raz (or gens or natio that perform a similar kind of work), but rather on processes avant la lettre which we have only now come to read as racialized. That is to say, we use race in analyses of medieval texts not as an ontological but rather an analytical category. In this respect, it is to be aligned with gender as a category of critical inquiry. Interestingly enough, however, gender has not evinced the same kind of continued skepticism. Consequently, this chapter navigates the problem of the untimeliness of race on two different levels: First, by beginning with an example from medieval literature and some comments on medieval racializing discourses, we have argued that there is a difference to how difference works, but that it is difference all the same—namely racialized difference. Second, by alluding to resistances within German medieval research against analyzing these discourses under the rubric of race, we have put forth a critique of research agendas that seem to be in line with specific libidinal investments in an ‘innocent’ past. The crucial point here is not really whether there is a non-biology-based concept of race—an argument often put forth in order to prevent discussions of race prior to early modernity and the age of enlightenment with its scientific racism. Rather, we suggest focusing on the discursive intersections from which race and racism emerge at specific historical junctures. Moreover, literature enables the interfacing of various discourses of knowledge forming its own insights and perspectives. Of course, this also accounts for the strong differences between authors and texts which we find in medieval literature. It is also the reason to be wary of any linear narrative of an increasing tolerance.

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One of the central aspects around race and racism has been—and was already in the Middle Ages—the question of the (im)mutability of somatic features. To quote the editors of The Origins of Racism in the West: “Ideas and behaviours implying the immutability of Jews and Jewishness as well as of Saracens, originating in religious thought and not from biological distinctiveness, could hint at a powerful proto-racist sentiment current at that time [thirteenth century].” (Eliav-Feldon et al. 2009, 20)

This peculiar interaction between the religious and the physiological continues through the Middle Ages and also finds expression in medieval literature. However, especially secular literature, such as courtly romances or heroic epics like the quoted Kudrun, imagines different dynamics for the encounter between Self and Other. They also interact with theological and natural philosophical discourses, but, in addition or more decisively, they posit courtly culture—knighthood, courtly love, French as a common language of communication—as moments of convergence between Christian and pagan knights. Thus, they organize these encounters around what we would call commensurability. This commensurability comes at a high price for the non-occidentals, though. Not only is it the Other who has to become commensurate with the occidental Self, but this process also comes at the cost of the loss of its proprium as Other. Curiously, postcolonial theory often fails to engage with the Middle Ages directly. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam trace the history of the current “culture wars,” “which inherit centuries of discursive struggles going back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and their antecedents, going back to the Conquest of the Americas and even to the Crusades” (2012, 1, our emphasis). The Middle Ages feature again as that past which is important, but which is not incorporated in the analytical framework in the book that starts with 1492. Their reasoning is informed by the constant reference to ‘Enlightenment values’ that shape debates of racialized classifications. But if we focus more specifically on Germany and its current (anti-Semitic and xenophobic) struggles around its foundational ‘Christian’ tradition for a moment, do we not have to look back further indeed? Do we not have to look closer at the foundational influences of Muslim and Jewish knowledge on the occident during the medieval renaissance in the twelfth century, at the entanglement of proto-capitalist trade with transatlantic slavery, colonialism and other forms of violence well before the high time of (British) imperialism and the very erasure of these struggles by

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truncating history as a before and after European Modernity? It is the very emergence of Europeanness as entangled that is significant. Given these heterogeneous discourses and formations of racialized Othering, let us pose the question of the specific politics of the archive in German medievalist research once more. Answers coming from queer medieval/temporality studies can elucidate the kind of queer work wilful anachronicity and untimeliness can do. They can, for instance, intervene in linear narratives of either an increasing decay of mores or a growth of knowledge, enlightenment and secularism. We have to reckon with transformations in the relationship between the sciences and theology, between secularism and religion but the differences between medieval uses of racializing discourses and modern ones are in degree, not in substance. Wilfully, queerly, desiring anachronicity and untimeliness might resignify them as analytical tools for examining medieval and medievalist discourses on race.

Happy Archives of Slavery? So far, we have argued for an untimely attention to race. When dealing with the phenomenon of slavery, however, the modern reader has a hard time to dissociate it from race and racializing discourses. Hence, if we look at the medieval origins of the word ‘slave,’ it might come as a surprise that, in fact, race (as a set of immutable somatic differences) was not—at least not initially—the only dividing line when it came to freedom and servitude. Saidiya Hartman explains: “The very term ‘slavery’ derived from the word ‘Slav,’ because Eastern Europeans were the slaves of the medieval world. At the beginning of modernity, slavery declined in Europe as it expanded in Africa, although as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was still possible to purchase ‘white’ slaves—English, Spanish, and Portuguese captives in the Mediterranean ports of North Africa. […] It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the line between the slave and the free separated Africans and Europeans and hardened into a color line.” (2008, 5)

This influences the archive of slavery considerably. In English literary studies, especially postcolonial literary studies the rewriting and reimaging of slavery in works by authors such as David Dabydeen, Caryl Phillips, and

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Andrea Levy has attracted critical attention as well as, of course the ‘neoslave narratives’ of Toni Morrison and others (see Eckstein 2006).1 Authors of the African diaspora today struggle to remember, tell, retell and reinvent stories of the lacking voices of the past. Ann Cvetkovich speaks of an “absent archive of slavery” and the attempts “to bring slavery (and its ghosts) to life again, especially affectively, in order to demonstrate its persistent effect on the present” (2012, 136). In this context, the postcolonial paradigm of ‘writing back’ has by now come under scrutiny (most prominently associated with the volume The Empire Writes Back by Ashcroft et al. 2002). Writing back strongly relies on a model of challenging the center from the periphery. Thus, despite the double focus of postcolonial theory as a temporal after colonialism and an epistemological beyond colonialism, postcolonial literary theory for a long time has privileged this model of writing back to the center, a challenging of Eurocentrism only after the fact of European modernity and imperialism. In this way, one fails to take into consideration the simultaneous entanglement of various (emerging) literary voices during the rise of European modernity in the eighteenth and the age of empire in the nineteenth century. The decentering of the hegemonic story of ‘English literature’ is not disrupted by adding a framework of English Literatures (all over the world) or adding a section on multicultural or transcultural literature (preferably for the twentieth century). Edward Said’s “contrapuntal reading” (1994, 18) might be called well-trodden territory in postcolonial studies, but one that if taken seriously alters histories of modernity, and this path, we argue, has not yet been explored in all its consequences with reference to the emergence of the modern British canon. We are now looking at the materiality of English Literatures across the globe and at the same time witness a return to canonical sources with regard to English Literature in Britain. We want to emphasize the need to apply this globalized lens to English Literature in Britain as well. This would be a perspective that does not only state the addition of Black British writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century as a curious fact, but one that acknowledges their presence as indeed formative for the construction of Britishness which we now imagine

—————— 1 In her article “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic” (2008), Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley explores queer relationships during the Middle Passage and presents a queer reading of Gilroy’s dictum of the Black Atlantic (1993) in her analysis of contemporary Caribbean writing, specifically Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt (2006) and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return (2001).

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to have become a challenged identity only under the auspices of twentiethcentury migration. Indeed, the debates on the abolition of slavery have been central to the very formation of the British enlightenment and the emergence of the British middle-class, especially with its focus on feeling and empathy as the feeling for Others. This also shaped the emerging novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and how it set the ideal of the middle-class family household. The act of reading as empathetic identification with Others—accelerated by the technical revolutions and increased literacy at the time—becomes the principal means of emotional access to this middle-class identity. Modernity in this understanding is also a product of affective relationality. Consequently, the writing of the ‘early Black Atlantic’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, especially in its relationship to Britain (see Gerzina 1995), has attracted more interest in the context of the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade (with Vincent Carretta 1998 and 2005 remaining the editorial authority in the field; see also Carey 2005; Gikandi 2011). Interestingly, however, up to this day, authors such as Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, and Mary Seacole are read less it seems for their literary merit but more because of their extraordinary archival status, as ‘early/the first Black voices.’ Regarding the memory cultures in Britain, Equiano is now considered a self-made British man (and here we can detect national rivalries in including him in a specific Black British canon of authors in contrast to the Americas and his earlier categorization as an African American author) who was able to write an autobiography under the conditions of slavery and buy his freedom to live in England. And he famously proclaims himself “almost an Englishman” (Equiano 2003, 77). Ignatius Sancho, sold to be a servant in an affluent British family, is eventually set free and opens a grocery store in Westminster. Sancho’s surviving letters were edited by Frances Crewe and published posthumously in 1782 (Sancho 1998). His other publications, a Theory of Music and two plays are lost. However, in addition to fashioning himself an African man of letters, Sancho was also very likely the first man of African descent to have voted in the parliamentary elections of 1774 and 1780 given his status as a householder in Westminster (see Carretta 2004) and is now prominently commemorated as such.2 He fervently supported the monarchy and British forces in the American Revolutionary War. The

—————— 2 Sancho is mentioned prominently as making history as the first Black voter in the educational pack Find your Way published by the British government.

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freewoman and Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole, who travelled to the Crimea to take care of British soldiers, now rivals Winston Churchill as war hero in becoming Britain’s “Greatest Black Briton” in 2004;3 this poll came in response to the BBC’s Great Britons debate, which had been won by Churchill but had no Black people in the top one hundred (“Nurse” 2004; Rupprecht 2006, 202–03). Seacole faced financial ruin after the war and published her autobiography as Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands in 1857, strongly supported by military leaders of the time. In the writings of all three authors England plays a crucial affective role. Seacole is most out-spoken in her love for the ‘mother country.’ She was prepared to serve the British army once more during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 but these plans never panned out for reasons not entirely known to us today. This affirmative attitude extended to British colonial interests causes unease in the way these Black subjects can be read today in a ‘postcolonial’ literary framework. Sandra Pouchet Paquet mentions critically: “Seacole seeks English recognition and courts English approval” (1992, 652). A framework of resistance versus subversion, however, seems to limit our understanding of these authors. Writing of the early Black Atlantic must be understood as standing in a more conflicted relationship to Britishness than being reduced to the (binary) periphery of empire whose subjects aspired to be included into the national community of British privilege. During the late eighteenth century the abolitionist movement enabled the British to imagine themselves as modern and progressive in their response to slavery, especially in contrast to the United States which abolished slavery only in 1865 with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment. This construction of a British exceptionalism gave subjects like Equiano, Sancho, and Seacole the opportunity to become modern subjects not after the fact of modernity but as part of modernity. In fact, these Black British voices are constitutive of the very modern foundation of what British Enlightenment is capable of. While the history of the U.S. and the impact of slavery for the construction of U.S. American families has been at the core of heated debates for a long time, it is only more recently in the wake of the bicentennial that Britain is beginning to address this past more seriously as part of a national

—————— 3 For a more detailed reading of Mary Seacole and her Wonderful Adventures, see Haschemi Yekani (2012), which also includes an earlier version of some of the arguments stated here.

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(and shameful) heritage (see Gohrisch et al. 2009; Korte and Pirker 2011). Slavery enabled much of Britain’s financial wealth, the rise of its banks, especially in port cities like Liverpool, London and Bristol. What exactly led to the successful abolition of slavery in Britain is disputed among historians today. James Walvin, for instance, links the success of the British abolition campaign to the rise of free trade rather than a purely moral success of the abolitionists (2007, 99). However, the roles and accomplishments of Black British subjects are increasingly highlighted in this memorial culture.4 Thereby it caters to a politics of feelings built on a ‘happy’ multicultural past which threatens to unremember or overwrite the lives lost precisely by emphasizing the achievements of those revolutionary modern Black subjects whose testimonies have survived to this day. Consequently, this contemporary appropriation of early Black Britons seems to function as a retrospective reconstruction of Britishness as ‘always already multicultural’ and inclusive thereby resorting to an all too happy archive. The Indian Rebellion of 1857, the ‘race riots’ in the twentieth century and the entire discourse around Muslim fundamentalism have not made it into this happy multicultural archive of what constitutes Britishness today. A postcolonial interest in the literature of the early Black Atlantic must resist urges to highlight the extraordinary accomplishment of these authors and rather aim to understand the entanglement of voices from the multiple peripheries and centers.

Concluding Remarks Contesting the hegemony of cultural meanings has always been linked to the politics of the archive in academic research. Struggle over archives has been central to Black, feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, and queer challenges to the literary canon, to the writing of history books as well as the material preservation of artefacts and the concomitant pedagogy in museum spaces and ethnographic collections. In this chapter we focused on two different but interconnected national politics of archives offering a queer intervention into their formation: While Britain builds a ‘happy archive’ desiring continuity with the racialized Others of its past with a ‘mul-

—————— 4 The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool has a “Black Achievers Wall” that includes all three authors mentioned here.

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ticultural present,’ celebrating the contributions of early Black Britons to the abolitionist campaign and embracing historical figures like Olaudah Equiano next to the more famous White abolitionists such as William Wilberforce or positioning Mary Seacole next to Florence Nightingale, in the German context race, especially in a historical dimension that extends to the Middle Ages is denied its impact. A queer critique of the temporal politics of these archival practices shows that in specific contexts it might make sense to criticize the lack of engagement with an early version of ‘multiculture’ and racialized difference while in others the mere celebration of the spectacular early Black presence can also produce problematically happy archives of race and slavery.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara (2010). “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects).” S&F Online, 8.3: n. pag. 22 February 2012. http://barnard.edu/sfonline/polyphonic/ah med_01.htm. 12 July 2013. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds.). (2002). The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. “Black Achievers Wall.” liverpoolmuseums.org.uk. n. d. http://www.liverpoolmuseums .org.uk/ism/collections/legacies/blackachieverswall/index.aspx. 12 July 2014. Cadden, Joan (1993). Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages. Medicine, Science, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carey, Brycchan (2005). British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carretta, Vincent (1998). “Three West Indian Writers of the 1780s Revisited and Revised.” Research in African Literatures, 29.4: 73–85. — (2004). “Sancho, (Charles) Ignatius (1729?–1780).” oxforddnb.com. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 24609. 12 July 2014. — (2005). Equiano, the African. Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (ed.). (2001). The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave. Cvetkovich, Ann (2012). “Depression is Ordinary: Public Feelings and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother.” Feminist Theory, 13.2: 131–46.

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Ebenbauer, Alfred (1984). “Es gibt ain mörynne vil dick susse mynne. Belakanes Landsleute in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 113.1: 16–41. Eckstein, Lars (2006). Re-Membering the Black Atlantic. On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Benjamin H. Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (eds.). (2009). The Origins of Racism in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Equiano, Olaudah (2003). The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. 1789. Ed. Vincent Carretta. London: Penguin. Find your Way. parliament.uk. n. d. http://www.parliament.uk/documents/educa tion/online-resources/printedresources/KS5_Find_Your_Way_resource.pdf. 28 May 2014. Frakes, Jerold (1997). “Race, Representation and Metamorphosis in Middle High German Literature.” NOWELE, 31/32: 119–33. Freccero, Carla (2006). Queer/Early/Modern. Durham: Duke University Press. Freeman, Elizabeth (2007). “Introduction. Queer Temporalities.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13.2/3: 159–76. — (2010). Time Binds. Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press. Gerzina, Gretchen (1995). Black London. Life Before Emancipation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Gikandi, Simon (2011). Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gohrisch, Jana, Bernd-Peter Lange, and Irmgard Maassen (eds.). (2009). “Slavery and the British.” Spec. issue of Hard Times, 85. Grenzler, Thomas (1992). Erotisierte Politik—Politisierte Erotik. Die politisch-ständische Begründung der Ehe-Minne in Wolframs “Willehalm,” im “Nibelungenlied” und in der “Kudrun.” Göppingen: Kümmerle. Groebner, Valentin (2007). “Mit dem Feind schlafen. Nachdenken über Hautfarben, Sex und ‘Rasse’ im spätmittelalterlichen Europa.” Historische Anthropologie, 15: 327–38. Groos, Arthur (2004). “Orientalizing the Medieval Orient. The East in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ‘Parzival.’” In Arthur Groos and Hans-Jochen Schiewer (eds.). Kulturen des Manuskriptzeitalters, 61–86. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hartman, Saidiya (2008). Lose Your Mother. A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Haschemi Yekani, Elahe (2012). “(M)Other Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures: The Politics of Imagining the British Family.” In Monika Fludernik and Benjamin Kohlmann (eds.). Anglistentag 2011: Freiburg. Proceedings, 339–51. Trier: WVT.

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Heng, Geraldine (2011a). “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages.” Literature Compass, 8.5: 315–31. — (2011b). “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race.” Literature Compass, 8.5: 332–50. Korte, Barbara, and Eva Ulrike Pirker (2011). Black History—White History: Britain’s Historical Programme between Windrush and Wilberforce. Bielefeld: transcript. Kudrun. (2000). Ed. Karl Stackmann. Based on the ed. by Karl Bartsch. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Lampert-Weissig, Lisa (2010). Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Love, Heather (2007). Feeling Backward. Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “Nurse Named Greatest Black Briton.” news.bbc.co.uk, BBC News. 10 Feb. 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3475445.stm. 14 July 2014. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet (1992). “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” African American Review, 26.4: 651–63. Peters, Ursula (2010). “Postkoloniale Mediävistik? Überlegungen zu einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Spielart der Mittelalter-Philologie.” Scientia Poetica, 14: 205– 37. Rupprecht, Anita (2006). “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857): Colonial Identity and the Geographical Imagination.” In David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds.). Colonial Lives across the British Empire. Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, 176–203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward W. (1994). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Sancho, Ignatius (1998). Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. 1782. Ed. Vincent Carretta. London: Penguin. Schausten, Monika (2006). Suche nach Identität: Das ‘Eigene’ und das ‘Andere’ in Romanen des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Köln: Böhlau. Seacole, Mary (2005). Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. 1857. Ed. Sara Salih. London: Penguin. Stam, Robert, and Ella Shohat (eds.). (2012). Race in Translation. Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic. New York: New York University Press. Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha (2008). “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14.2/3: 191–215. Walvin, James (2007). Britain’s Slave Empire. Stroud: Tempus.

Cultural Revisions

The Département Writes Back: On Chamoiseau’s Rewrite of Robinson Crusoe Kathleen Gyssels

Introduction In his famous Nobel Laureate Speech, Derek Walcott calls the shipwreck the Caribbean writer’s heaven: “The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Rozack, the ship that carried the first indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane fields of Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle. And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city, Port of Spain, the sum of history, Trollope’s ‘non-people.’ A downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer’s heaven.” (1992, n. pag., original emphasis)

It is clear that the Martinican Goncourt prize winner Patrick Chamoiseau not only knows this famous assertion by heart, but that he applies it in his last novel to date, L’Empreinte à Crusoé (2012). By rewriting Defoe’s classic, the spiritual son of Édouard Glissant tries to match, as it were, the Nobel laureate who, reciprocally, praised Texaco (1992) in What the Twilight Says (1998). Chamoiseau sets the standard high by inscribing himself in a series of Caribbean writers (mostly Anglophone) who have focused their attention on rewriting canonized novels from the center. Yet the author also derives references from the original source text in many, and moreover troubling ways. I will question in which way his rewrite diverges from the classical examples by which postcolonial authors intended to fill in the gap of the Eurocentric, hegemonic, even racist original, to complete the model novel (Jane Eyre) with the ‘subaltern’ voice (Wide Sargasso Sea), to counter

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the canon formation in the center by widening it from the Caribbean margins. The fundamental question I address is if the Martinican rewrite is postcolonial, if the author had that ambition at all, considering postmodern statements like: “writing is no longer about telling histories.”1 Against the backdrop of bestselling novelist Salmon Rushdie’s famous “Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance” (1982), one can wonder indeed what happens when the Departément (Martinique) writes back. Chamoiseau, the author of Ecrire en pays dominé (1997a), pretended to write under the auspices of the dominant European canon, heavily paying tribute to cult texts and the Western canon in this new baroque and sophisticated narrative that is L’Empreinte à Crusoé. Moreover, this novel, while clearly a rewrite of Defoe’s masterpiece, is full of surprises for the narratee, since the narrator not only turns out not to be what we think he was, but also because of an unhappy ending for the avatar of his ‘robinsonade.’ Especially the language, replete with new and modern words, apart from unfitting ones in the seventeenth and eighteenth century like “microclimat” (2012, 61), risks to tire the reader. Mixing high and low registers, verbs that are to the point of “argot” (“zieuter,” 2012, 68) and endless invocations of “seigneur” (with lower case), Chamoiseau once more falls back in his privileged and favorite mode of overwrought bellettrie. However, no style should be a substitute for a story, and Chamoiseau’s decorative language hides the lack of plot. True, one has lately seen more Unnatural Voices, to quote Richardson’s (2006) apt title.2 Like his earlier L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (The Old Man and the Mastiff), already partly robinsonade, this text offers, paragraph by paragraph, a carefully wrought and often exquisite book but leaves the reader with embarrassment. I would agree with postcolonial critic Amy Wilentz’s online review of Rushdie’s 2008 The Enchantress of Florence: “‘Enchantress’ is

—————— 1 “Nous allons d’ailleurs de plus en plus vers des organismes narratifs infiniment complexes. De toute manière, l’objet de la littérature n’est plus de raconter des histoires, mais d’essayer d’opérer des saisies de perceptions, des explorations de situations existentielles, qui nous confrontent à l’indicible, à l’incertain, à l’obscur. Nous devons apprendre à fixer l’impensable et nous débarrasser de toutes ces béquilles que nous avons déployées via l’esprit magique ou le religieux. L’objet de la littérature, ça n’est plus cette conception illusoire qui voudrait organiser le monde par un récit ou une narration, avec un début, un milieu et une fin.” Chamoiseau, qtd. in Liger 2012. 2 In his chapter “Transgressing Self and Voice” Richardson deals with postcolonial fiction, illustrating his point with “Noutéka des mornes” from Texaco and Glissant’s novels (2006).

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all artifice and diversion. Its decorative beauty disguises truth, or avoids it, and keeps the reader pointlessly mystified”; she concludes that this “can make the work seem less like great literature and, at moments, more like automatic scribbling” (n. pag.).

The Word Scratcher’s Radical Turn As Chamoiseau declared in 2012 on the French channel TV5 Monde, on the occasion of his new novel launched at the “Salon du Livre”: “Je relève de la Martinique, je suis indépendantiste, je suis donc le creuset de plusieurs cultures et de plusieurs civilisations” (“Entretien” 2012, n. pag.).3 As a refrain endlessly repeated, the place of origin, a French Caribbean island, determines, in the words of the celebrated author, his opinions and actions (against the status of D.O.M., the departmentalization voted on in 1946 by the populations from La Réunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guyane), and his identity as multicultural. As a prominent French-speaking Caribbean author, Chamoiseau reminds his audience that he is the product of mestizaje, métissage, mixed identity, and créolisation (the product of different civilizations). This identity claim needs nuance as everyone has a hybrid identity, and if it is true that Martinicans or Guadeloupeans, Guyanese or Cubans can vindicate more obviously the ‘mixing’ of different ethnicities and cultures, the literature produced by the same authors has aligned itself with the metropolitan model. In Lettres créoles, Chamoiseau and Confiant condemned firmly this mimicry (decalcomania or pulsion mimétique) of the first generation of writers after the abolition of slavery (1848) whom they called “regionalists” and “doudouistes” (1999, 48, 118). All were modeling their writing on authors from Paris or elsewhere in Europe, and their political commitment was flawed by their “lactification” (Fanon 1952, 38). Still on the same television program, Chamoiseau dwelled on the intricate relationship between the political and the poetical: when he firmly stated that he defends Jean-Luc Mélanchon in the run as presidential candidate, he openly disavowed the opponent, François Hollande. Some months later, Hollande, elected as the new French president, opened an international conference at the Sorbonne to honor Édouard Glissant,

—————— 3 “I come from Martinique, I am independent; hence, I am the mixture of different cultures and civilizations” (translation K.G.).

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alongside two other poets Glissant has often been associated with, SaintJohn Perse and Aimé Césaire. This conference confirmed the prominent place of Chamoiseau in the post-Glissantian period as both the heir and central theorist of the French-Caribbean canon. Allegiances apparently tend to change overnight. A second example of some versatility in the commitment of the author is his declaration that, in contrast to the Négritude authors or even to their precursor René Maran (the first to win the Goncourt in 1921), he does not contest colonial power or attack French values (see Peterson 1997, 122–25). This is easy to say today, but back in the post-war years, the urge of militant poetry and strong words were inevitable for the (French) Caribbean authors. Such and many other paradoxical if not contradictory public statements undermine the postcolonial agenda Chamoiseau and Glissant have defended for more than two decades. In fact, L’Empreinte à Crusoé surprisingly reveals a new Chamoiseau at first sight, one who no longer is the word scratcher, recuperating the Creole oral tradition, criticizing the ‘savage’ urbanization with which he and his fellow writer Confiant have been preoccupied in earlier novels.4 What Chamoiseau had been doing up to Texaco, namely paying tribute to strong female characters (Gyssels 1995), is now abandoned in the ambitious postcolonial rewrite. Triggered by the St. Lucian author of Omeros (another rewrite, see Gyssels 2003), Chamoiseau might well take literally the assumption that the Caribbean writer is first of all the inventor of magnificent stories out of debris washed upon the shores of Martinique. Recycling over and over again the ‘traces’ of existing and earlier stories (his own and those of many others, Gyssels 2002) erased by time or displacement. As a matter of fact, this first task has been overshadowed by the palimpsestuous ‘recording’ of timeless classics with universal truths.

—————— 4 All his previous writing was anchored in griottisme (the conteur or storytelling tradition which was championed by the créolité authors Bernabe, Chamoiseau, and Confiant). Orality is no longer restricted to a baroque use of Creole words, expressions, speech, but extended to loose punctuation, absence of chapters, and subtitles. Again, this is not new given the fact that many Caribbean authors (think of Maximin’s 1987 Soufrières or Fignolé’s 2001 Aube tranquille) have done so.

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(Another) Postcolonial Rewrite It is clear from the title, L’Empreinte à Crusoé (Crusoe’s Imprint), that Chamoiseau revises and rewrites Defoe, adding yet another rewrite to an already long list. Rewritings are common in postcolonial literature. They have enriched ‘World Literature’ with some notorious bestselling novels from the ex-colonies. Many examples of Caribbean, African, Indian, and Canadian rewrites show the narrow-mindedness of the European author (and reader), the false superiority of the “West” over the “Rest” (Hall 1992), the alienating effects of colonization. Postcolonial writers react to the absence or the limited representation of the native land, the homelands (of Africa, or Asia) in the settlers colonies (such as Canada) or still in the plantation universe (the Caribbean) in the literary canon. This absence was, according to Bhabha, created around “the turn of the [twentieth century[;] there emerge[d] a mythic, masterful silence in the narratives of empire,” followed by discourses in which “an archaic colonial ‘otherness’” is attributed to the colonies (1994, 175–176). Famous postcolonial rewrites are, for example, Jean Rhys’s prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and the numerous rewrites of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), first rewritten in Martinique as Une tempête (1963) by Aimé Césaire, in Barbados by George Lamming with Water with Berries (1971), and in St. Lucia by Derek Walcott’s Pantomine (1978). Australian Marina Warner in turn rewrote the narrative of the conflict between Prospero, his daughter, allegedly raped by Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax, in Indigo. Mapping out the Waters (1992) from a feminist, postcolonial perspective.5 While male authors limit their scope and focus to Caliban, female authors focus on the Sycorax character (Winter 1992). South-African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s is another example of which Chamoiseau was apparently not aware, while talking to Breyten Breytenbach in Cape Town the year L’Empreinte à Crusoé came out (see Zvomuya 2012, n. pag.). Yet Foe (1986) is particularly relevant from a postcolonial and gender-balanced viewpoint since it simultaneously provides a woman’s narration and resolutely refuses the narrator to speak for the African character, Friday. So pretending to have the weight of this enormous library on his shoulders, a sentimenthèque so heavy that the author’s own imagination gets strangled, Chamoiseau has some significant omissions (Foe) and fails to recognize his debts to authors of both intra

—————— 5 For a discussion of this rewrite, see Sparrow (2002); D’haen (1997).

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(Caribbean) and extra (trans-Caribbean) muros. Such an occultation is the important imprint of Caryl Phillips’s novels. Not only does he write back to the Eurocentrism that subtended the initial colonial venture, but he also reverses the distribution of roles in the narrative puzzle, revising the roles of oppressor and oppressed, no longer privileging racial oppression over sexual oppression. Phillips restores the hidden voices and paves the way to a de-ghettoization of victimized groups.6 His Nature of Blood (as well as Cambridge and The Nature of Blood) intermingles historical sources and fiction, real testimonies written by emancipated slaves and material from archives (see O’Callaghan 1993; Ledent 2002; Eckstein 2006).7 Crossing the River might have caught Chamoiseau’s attention because of the striking deployment of voice, perspective, and narration alongside daring auctorial experiments and playful imagination. The novel, composed of four novellas separated in time and space, displays the suppressed narrative of the African father who sells his children to the European slaver who sails to Africa, as well as the children themselves who survive in the New World (Richardson 2006, 13). Likewise, Chamoiseau will juxtapose in L’Empreinte a pseudo-historical record (the captain’s archive or logbook) and blend it with the castaway’s thoughts. Changing from third person narrative (in the original Crusoe) to first person narrative, Chamoiseau further adds a third part to the two monologues. His “Atelier de l’Empreinte” is non-fiction and reveals in fact many echoes to previous novels. The “Atelier” is like the artist’s scrapbook, like Joyce and many other famous writers have rendered public to scholarship. It offers a key to understanding the aims of his complex endeavor. At this point, Chamoiseau’s ‘mutant,’ his metamorphosed text derives from his manifold models. Consider for instance Phillips’s stunning mix of African oral testimonies and British archives, inventing a polyphonic choral

—————— 6 Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1998) reads as a history of ‘the others’ in Europe, seen through their own eyes. Black people, Jewish people and women all have served as ‘others’ in the course of European history, but Phillips makes them all intradiegetic narrators in a polyphonic ‘choral.’ By doing so, Phillips shows the effects of the mechanics of ‘othering’ on these characters, whom the reader might recognize as a ‘stereotype’ (the Jew) or simply as a key-literary character (Othello). It becomes clear immediately that the rewrite is one of the strategies Phillips uses to render the voices of the oppressed and to rehabilitate their obliterated memories and hidden histories. 7 L’Empreinte à Crusoé aims to rewrite Defoe’s masterpiece alongside Tournier’s Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1972), as he admits in his last section called “L’Atelier de l’Empreinte.” Yet many more imprints are displayed in a strategy borrowed from the Anglo-Caribbean postcolonial canon.

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of voices in which especially the ‘unaccounted’ ones receive attention. Likewise, Chamoiseau opens his rewrite with a section from Journal du capitaine (‘the captain’s logbook’): “22 juillet en l’an de grâce 1659 Ces voyages vers le nouveau monde n’en finissent pas de me surprendre, et la divinité8 sait combien j’en ai mené durant ces vingt dernières années. Aux premières lueurs du jour, nous avons abordé une mer d’algues bleues, scintillantes, avec des reflets roses qui se répercutaient sur le ciel et la matière des bas nuages. Après la tempête nous entrions dans un monde de féerie légère où le réel se mettait à trembler légèrement.” (Chamoiseau 2012, 15)

Crossing the River presents the same ‘crossing’ of voices and space and time lags. The captain (colonizer and voyager) gives us insight in his thoughts, just as the silenced black fe/male on board of the ship is not only represented but voiced, and this through the very descendants in the Americas. The same pattern of interconnected voices, time, and space is at stake here. However, and this is a first flaw in the rewrite of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719),9 the quest for the Other presence on the island, the wild

—————— 8 This word surprises me since the captain of the vessel is supposed to be Christian or at least of Judeo-Christian confession. The yet unnamed character who is left behind on the island reads the footprint on the beach as a good omen, the right being associated since Biblical times to Good, the left to Evil. Some pages further on, the narrator is so surprised by the flamboyant Nature he cries out “hosanna”: “chaque arbre ancestral […] chaque paysage somptueux ou dérisoire constituant un hosanna de corrélations vivaces” (Chamoiseau 2012, 157). Further in the narrative the reader learns that the character is instructed into the Koran and that he is a member of the Dogon tribe (2012, 227). In other words, Chamoiseau’s “Crusoe” (character and narrator) is baptized by the (French or English) colonizer and secretly pays tribute to the lord on many occasions. At the end of the narrative, the reader learns his true identity: “un moussaillon dogon du nom Ogomtemmêli” (2012, 227). 9 In Phillips’s novel Cambridge (1991), the enslaved character (correspondent to Dimanche in Chamoiseau’s novel) accounts for his first days of bondage, his later freedom in England, and the incident which resulted in his being sold into slavery. But opposite of Chamoiseau, Cambridge neither reconciles the ‘races’ nor the ‘genders,’ and has a provocative ending: Phillips explores a nineteenth-century setting, the African slave trade, and life on the Caribbean plantations, while Chamoiseau reduces the polyphonic narrative to a two-voice monologue. Cambridge follows Emily’s journal, in which her impressions of the voyage and plantation life are described in genteel, Austenian prose, to intermingle in the second part with the imaginative discourse (interior monologue) of Cambridge and finally a ‘newspaper’ article reporting the hanging of Cambridge who murdered the overseer, Mr. Brown. Elements of Gothic mystery unfold through her eyes, around the puzzling presence in the Great House of a slave woman, Christiana, who dabbles in

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expectation of meeting the stranger whose footprint has been discovered, turns out to be fruitless. The enigmatic author of the imprint is no longer the Other, neither the non-European (savage and primitive islander) nor the European castaway of the opposite sex with whom the uprooted castaway could dream about founding a new couple, and eventually a family. While Crossing the River (as well as Cambridge and The Nature of Blood) give voice to the slavers and enslaved, Chamoiseau will not resurrect Friday by rendering him a semi-authentic voice. As a matter of fact, the imprint is socalled Crusoe’s own, a mirror of the author and consequently a symbol of his own private aspiration to no longer be ‘enslaved’ to the World Literature’s symbolic capital and to finally obtain a total identity between source text and copy. The captain who notices in his journal how many slaves are sick and dying, how many of his African cargo have to be thrown overboard because they died of yellow fever or another disease, of exhaustion and suicide,10 only plays a tiny role at the end. Chamoisau maintains only bits of the sailor’s account, infusing the main part with the Robinson-character. Avoiding any neo-slave-narrative pattern,11 he turns the original inside out as the imagined ‘narrative’ of the castaway (the main part of the novel) turns out to be an implausible account of the years spent on the island by a loyal African slave, vilified and betrayed by his white master. This is where the Martinican author dangerously dissociates himself from Caribbean master-narratives in which the master-slave dialectic stands center-stage. His castaway, the reader is asked to believe, forgot everything due to an accident on board of the vessel, but actually learns very rapidly to read and write again. Assuming he is Robinson Crusoe, the first-person narrator speaks, thinks, and writes as any well-educated gentlemen of the European elite would do back in Defoe’s time, and even better as he seems to be aware of our own contemporary vocabulary and world vision. Departing from Phillips’s Cambridge (to which Chamoiseau vaguely refers in

—————— obeah, and the repeated chastisement of Cambridge, a literate, Christian slave, by the enigmatic overseer, Mr. Brown. 10 Words like ‘scorbut’ are echoing the source text, see Gyssels (2003). 11 Neither Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón (1966) nor The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or, Gustavus Vassa, the African—Written by Himself (1789) surface. In the first example, it strikes us that Barnet adds an afterword to the narrative of Esteban Montejo, entitled “The Alchemy of Memory.” Here he explains how he conceived of the reconstruction of his informant’s daring life. In the same vein, Chamoiseau adds “L’Atelier de l’Empreinte” which looks like his notebook documenting us on the genesis of the novel.

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Ecrire en pays dominé (1997a, 255–256), his imagined protagonist and narrator has indeed no memories of the lost motherland, that is the African continent, nor of his tribal ancestry or local culture, but finds solace in Greek philosophers. There is no trace in Chamoiseau’s rewrite which resembles the slave narrative tradition or any other oral testimony of Africans ‘transported’ to the New World. On the contrary, the narrator masters (in spite of suffering from amnesia) a way of ordening the world that is definitely Western: “mes ajoupas officiels: Bureau de police, service de douane, Cabinet de poids et mesures” (2012, 49, original emphasis), or references to “Jupiter, Niger, Joli pony” (2012, 88) account for a European education.

Who is Chamoiseau’s Robinson and Where is Friday? The most important modification in Chamoiseau’s rewrite is the identity of the assumed “Robinson”: given the familiarity of the reader with the original, the reader starts the novel assuming the first-person narrator is Crusoe. As a matter of fact, the narratee is ‘victim’ of false allegiances as he thinks this first-person character is a white, male European who survived the shipwreck and who will meet Friday and make him his ‘slave.’ In Spivak’s theory,12 this Friday is the ‘Other’ (people from outside of Europe), and we are given the (false) impression that the ‘Idiot’ (subtitle used by the narrator) is a ‘Caucasian’ who lives in wild expectation of meeting a creature totally different from himself. Robinson does indeed find the imprint of a foot one day and first scares the Other, then aspires to meet this ‘stranger,’ ‘cannibal,’ or ‘savage’ enemy. The identity of “Robinson,” it turns out, is a young boy of Dogon origin whose head has been hurt by a rope (Chamoiseau 2012, 227), and who lost his memory.13 This is where the plot evolves in another strange direction: the captain, devoured by guilt, sails back to the island to recuperate his former slave, and finds a wise old man who tells him about the years spent on the island but who, all of a sudden, becomes mad again when he is confronted with

—————— 12 See Spivak (1990); “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) remains the most famous article by which the Indian critic positioned herself together with Bhabha and Said as the holy trinity of Postcolonial Studies. 13 Ogotemmêli made his appearance in Ecrire en pays dominé: “Etre sans parole? La nudité terrible” (1997a, 197).

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the human merchandise on board. It is at this particular moment that the captain fires his ‘slave’ and kills him in front of the crew (Chamoiseau 2012, 227). What are we to make of such a strange and brutal ending? Not only is it a serious modification of the original, but it also spurs more arguments in the ongoing contentious dispute between Antillean and African writers.14 Especially fellow writer Raphaël Confiant has been notorious for his disinterest in African matters and literary misrepresentations of African reminiscences (Etilé 2003, 136). To an African audience, this brutal elimination risks to cause upheaval as it may be considered the ‘outcome’ of an Antillean fiction dealing with the unequal relationship between master and slave, between ‘slave trader’ (Crusoe) and his ‘property.’ Indeed, the initial supremacy, domination, and simply power are firmly demonstrated as the European kills without any sanction an African he has come to rescue from the prison he had put him into. Thirdly, this African ‘survives’ on two Greek philosophers whose reading appears to be of great relief. The male narrator whom the reader follows in his daily battle against the violent nature, the loneliness, the amnesia finds solace from reading two little fragments discovered in the belly of the ruined ship: “Une petite chose noirâtre, fripée, couverte de fragments à moitié effacés, d’une langue ancienne” (Chamoiseau 2012, 229). One is to believe that the unfortunate victim of deportation is finally relying not so much on the Bible (in spite of the apostrophe “seigneur” on nearly each page) but on pre-Socratic philosophers who save him from despair and from returning to the original state of savagery. Next to Heraclitus’s famous ‘panta rei,’ the narrator relies on Parmenides’s philosophy (‘nothing really changes’): those fundamental truths help the castaway to endure the terrible long years of isolation (the supposedly twenty years in fact being twelve years).15 Reading aloud from Parmenides’s guidance, the assumed Crusoe overcomes his burden:

—————— 14 Critics have noted the impasses between the successive movements of négritude, antillanité, and créolité. See Khalfa (2006); Burton (1997); Bongie (2010); Hallward (2001). Some inconsistencies in Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s so-called revolutionary call for “Tout-monde” and “diversalité” have come under pressure as their fellow novelist Raphaël Confiant attacked African writers (Serge Bilé, for instance) resident in Martinique. Particularly Confiant is proud to disconnect Martinique from the African continent. 15 Both Chamoiseau’s Ecrire en pays dominé (“Chercher toujours l’harmonie invisible au désordre des contraires, seule dynamique de vie—et l’Unité, sa loi secrète,” (1997a, 246)

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“L’être comme puissance ‘impotente.’ Dommage, cette connotation négative pour tant de plénitude. J’ai fréquenté “impavide” mais ce n’est pas vraiment mieux. Le ‘il y a’ de Parménide est encore ce qu’il y a de mieux: indéfinie neutralité.” (Chamoiseau 2012, 244)

For contemplative and stoic as these lines may be, the reader doubts the artificiality and implausibility of the impact given the décor and conditions. The same goes for the natural elements, which at the same time are the most ferocious enemy and a source of constant émerveillement (delight) which Chamoiseau’s former fictional doubles have enjoyed. While clearly from tropical latitudes, the fauna and flora might as well refer to a nonCaribbean setting. By washing out Caribbean fauna and flora, the narrative gains allegorical character. The questions raised by the novel, such as “Where are we? What is happening?” remain in fact partially unresolved. Another missed opportunity, and one that is quite deranging, given the omnipresence of this animal character in Chamoiseau’s earlier writings, is the dog. When Crusoe gets shipwrecked on the island, he is desolate and miserable. Deprived of human company, he finds comfort and companionship with two dogs he rescues from the shipwreck, next to a parrot and a couple of cats. In Chamoiseau’s rewrite, he forgets the animal thanks to whom the unfortunate man still succeeds in making some surrogate ‘company.’ Bringing solace in the supreme solitude of his hero,16 the dog does not rescue the old castaway (as he did in L’Esclave Vieil homme et le molosse): “[L’Esclave Vieil homme] retrouve dans le molosse la catastrophe qui l’habite. […] Mais dans l’impressionnante férocité de l’animal, cette catastrophe a pris convergence: elle s’est transformée en une foi aveugle capable de maîtriser ce troublé né du bateau. Le vieil homme esclave ne se souvient pas du bateau, mais il est pour ainsi dire resté dans la cale du bateau. Sa tête s’est peuplée de cette haute misère. Il a le goût de la mer sur les lèvres. Il entend même en plein jour le museau dramatique des requins contre la coque.” (Chamoiseau 1997b, 51–51)

One single quote from his novella convinces us of the importance of the dog (hunting the fugitive) and sharing with the old runaway (a kind of Friday) the vague memories of the Middle Passage and crossing of the Atlantic. While the antagonism master/slave, dog/human is transcended in the end, it is nonetheless important in the original text:

—————— and Glissant’s Anthologie de la Poésie du Tout-monde (2010) refer to those philosophers who recommend the search for invisible harmony out of chaos and disorder. 16 Texaco has errant dogs invading the “En-Ville” (Milne 2006; Campbell 2010).

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“Le molosse […] dispose d’une masse d’instincts qui l’illusionne d’un sens à tout cela. Et ce sens s’est mêlé au goût des charnelleries sanglantes que le Maître lui inculque comme principe d’existence. Il est l’âme désemparée du Maître. Il est le double souffrant de l’esclave. […] Le monstre y perçoit sans doute un charroi de possibles. Il se voit relié à ce vieil homme esclave d’où n’émane aucune onde, rien que la densité brute d’une matière insondable, gorgée de moiteurs et de soleils bridés.” (Chamoiseau 1997b, 51)

Omnipresent in plantation literature, and especially in Chamoiseau’s oeuvre (Tarica 2010), the animal is blocked out in L’Empreinte à Crusoé.17 Not until halfway through the novel, the loyal friend suddenly makes his appearance, but the author seems to forget how in Tournier’s Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, the company of the dog is of uttermost importance: the dog literally saves Robinson from madness, despair, death. Before meeting Friday, the dog literally is Robinson’s partner, the surrogate female companion. While Tournier imagines the island as a feminine presence, a nourishing principle,18 Chamoiseau’s assumes that his Crusoe makes love to the fauna and flora of his prison island. Again, like in L’Esclave vieil homme (1997a, 83), a daring masturbation scene occurs, proving that sexual pleasure can always be obtained in supreme solitude and deprivation. In this transgressive scene, Robinson candidly describes his orgasm amidst giant turtles: “Je m’appliquai à zieuter [les tortues] de la même manière; mon dos dut sans doute s’arrondir et se couvrir d’écailles…; je faisais ventouse de tout mon corps sur chacune des tortues, éprouvant alors une curieuse sensation, vraiment charnelle, qui se répandait sur ma peau, en frissons, et repeuplait mon ventre de lancinements perdus…; mon sexe dut se dresser, éclater en saccades, se défaire, et je me mis à les lécher, ce qui me remplit d’une saveur d’algues, de sel décomposé et de coquillages morts…” (2012, 119)

It may be surprising that the eroticism here implicates turtles, which are not the first animals evocative of sensuality or eroticism; the scene, how-

—————— 17 Apart from “Guinée” (2012, 241) and “le mapian nègre de plantation” (2012, 220), no reference is made to the slave trade or to the horrors of servitude on the sugarcane plantations. Unbelievable and implausible, the dual narrative maps out other issues (pirating the vast library of World Literature), but constantly reinvests spatial and temporal markers. It is this duality that unsettles and weakens the project as a whole. 18 Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique rewrites the original to add a mythical character, and to reinvent time and space. The protagonist acquires a knowledge permitting him to transcend the human condition after a series of initiations.

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ever, is analogous to the scene of mating turtles in chapter nine of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987, 15).19 Let us finally turn to the mysterious imprint of the foot which gives Chamoiseau’s rewrite the title: Defoe portrays his hero puzzled (not by the invasion but) by the suspicion of a stranger living on the island, a ‘savage’ who moreover could be a ‘carnivore.’ There is no “contact zone” here (Pratt 1992). Where Defoe gives way to the supposed cannibalism of the colonized subject, Chamoiseau eliminates the alleged indigenous subject. This and other deviations from the original problematize the rewrite. Indeed, the question of language, of uttermost importance, is relegated to the margins of the plotline: the marqueur de paroles no longer takes interest in mixing and melting languages and registers, leaving only room for his own belletristic endeavor. On the contrary, the narrator’s inventaire du réel (‘inventory of reality’) results in a thoroughly abstract book, the relative unreadability of which is precisely the point.20 And while L’Empreinte à Crusoé first stages the anguish of meeting a savage or, even worse, a cannibal on the island, the reader is expected to believe that this panic totally vanishes when Crusoe finds the footprint not of some ferocious enemy but only his own on the beach. In other words, the intrigue or suspense disappears when Robinson discovers that he himself is the ‘author’ of the imprint. Of course Chamoiseau plays allegorically with the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1973) by imprinting on the shore the conformed copy of the dessein-dessin-writing of a stranger, or just the opposite, his own. The Martinican’s footprint, however, shows “une république enlisée,” to use Taguieff’s apt title (2005).

—————— 19 Beloved is another major imprint on the Martinican novelist which the “masked author” (Chikhi 2008) disguises. 20 As Ravindranathan writes: “Language here serves paradoxically not to name and order but to restore the volatility and thickness of perception. […] If Defoe’s novel was all about account-keeping, and a methodical rationalising of hostile, inchoate forces into means of production and preservation, Chamoiseau proceeds to turn the tale inside out, digging deeply into all the places where Crusoe’s certitudes might have brushed up against unknown, unaccountable regions of sensation and being” (2012, n. pag.).

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Third World Movies and Chamoiseau’s Voice-Over In their manifesto In Praise of Creoleness, Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant (1989) lamented the fact that back home they had no readership and that Antillean literary production was indeed oriented towards the métropole. This paradox has remained rather unresolved since. The gap between theory (Bernabé et al. 1989) and practice continues. Martinicans aim to represent the composite nature of the Antillean population but complain that (with Glissant) the readership is still to come (Bernabé et al. 1989, 27– 28). Their work very often remains unknown outside France and ‘inside’ the archipelago of French Overseas Departments (Guyane, Guadeloupe), it is a “production écrite sans audience chez elle” (Bernabé et al. 1989, 14). This gap between theory and practice repeats itself in another artistic field in which Patrick Chamoiseau has been active: cinema. Having imagined adapting Robinson Crusoe for the screen, Chamoiseau realized several movies with Martinican Guy Deslauriers that have, in spite of the media and traditional publicity channels, disappeared rapidly from the movie theaters. From his first movie Biguine, through Passage du milieu21 and finally Aliker, there is a repetitive ‘paradigm’ characterizing all of Chamoiseau’s movies scripts: the voice over. Instead of having the subaltern characters come alive and speak up for themselves, Chamoiseau and Deslauriers produce strangely silent movies in which the characters seem zombielike mute creatures. They retain a third-person narrative that relates what is going on in the minds of the actors/characters and describe in long sequences what landscape or décor the spectator has to bear in mind. One has the impression of a reading session, instead of watching a movie. We are listening to a text read aloud, and actions and dialogues are restricted to a minimum. Martinique, in spite of its heavily sponsored cultural productions by France, remains far behind other postcolonial cinema from the Maghreb (Algeria) or Africa.22 Since Euzhan Palcy’s adaptation of Jozef Zobel’s best-selling and classic coming-of-age novel La Rue Case-Nègres (1983) for the screen, there has not been a single Martinican film that can stand the

—————— 21 There are strong polarities between different reviews, see, for instance, “La traite négrière (mal) expliquée aux enfants” (2011) and the review by Barlet (2001). 22 In her apt chapter on Indochinese cinema, Lam quotes Glissant (2012, 108) without asking, however, why there is a blatant absence of French Caribbean movies. More than fifty years after the independence of Algeria (1962), postcolonial Algerian cinema has boosted. See also Rosello (2012).

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test. Deslauriers and Chamoiseau miss the point in “Third World movies,”23 namely to let the subaltern speak and stay out of their discourse. Neither Latin-American Fernando Solanas’s manifestoes nor movies (consider Las horas de las hornos!) seem familiar to Antillean moviemakers who limit their view to French cinema. Why has French Caribbean cinema not been as successful as, for instance, Algerian cinema? Let us consider Chamoiseau’s and Deslauriers’s biopic Aliker, the life of slain reporter André Aliker (1900–1934). As an icon of militant anti-colonialism, Aliker gave rise to several plays and novels.24 As if they were the first to take interest in the brother of Aimé Césaire’s close friend, Pierre Aliker, Chamoiseau and Deslauriers realize a movie about the tragic death by murder of this politician who barely speaks in his own voice during the entire scenario. Overall, this movie, like the previous ones, was so disappointing that almost no reviews are to be found. While acclaimed in a rare review in Le Monde for its pedagogical values (Sotinel 2009, n. pag.), an English reviewer finds it strange that no Creole is spoken amongst the main characters and is puzzled by the excessive stylization of the “historical reconstruction”: “The film is somewhat hampered as a film […] by the very ‘force de conviction’ and wealth of historical information, which detracts from its aesthetic impact. […] The film’s historical reconstruction seems excessively stylized. The dialogues, for example, presented in unaccented French, do not reflect the cultural and linguistic reality of Martinique. The actors […] play their characters more like effigies than incarnations.” (“Film” 2009, n. pag.)

What is there to conclude from the failed project of a Martinican rewrite and postcolonial cinema? Bearing in mind with Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser that the individual is not only the creator of discourse, language, and ideology, but actually the product of these things, it seems as if the Martinican intellectual Chamoiseau does not free himself of the colonizer’s view. Like Fanon, he is affected, malgré lui, by the very hegemony he thinks to fight against. Colonized peoples develop “capacities to resist the conditions of their domination” (Ashcroft et al. 1998, 8, 219–220), but the ques-

—————— 23 See, for instance, Shohat and Stam (2003). 24 Martinican playwright Vincent Placoly has adapted to the stage the life of this independentist as well. Together with militant writer Leon Damas, Placoly is overlooked by the triumvirat of créolité, keeping their eyes on America and the commonalities they share with Blacks in the U.S.

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tion arises how free they actually are as agents.25 Given the impasses on the political level, given the long-lasting effects and sequels of French colonization on the Martinican mind, given the intense ‘mimicking’ at work in the French Caribbean society and the ‘factors’ which in the literary field assure success (publishing with Gallimard, participating in the debates, affiliating oneself with prestigious literary or academic institutions), Chamoiseau reduplicates the very mechanisms that maintain the difference between center (Paris) and margins, between Culture with capital ‘C’ and culture/s without. A good measure of overcoming this departmentalization of the mind (one part resisting the so called mère-trop-pôle, another one aspiring to gain recognition by aligning one’s imagination and creative work with the metropolitan model) is literature in Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean that gained its independence in 1968, where conflicts of ethnicity and dependence on its former colonizers (England as well as France) do not seem at stake.

Coda: Create Dangerously?26 “[J]e n’avais rien trouvé de mieux que de m’inventer ma propre histoire, de m’ensourcer dans une légende; je me l’écrivais sur les pages délavées de quelques épais registres sauvés de la frégate, avec le sentiment de la serrer en moi, à portée d’un vouloir; sans doute jaillissait-elle d’un ou de deux grands livres restés enfouis dans mon esprit; des livres déjà écrits par d’autres mais que je n’avais qu’à réécrire, à désécrire, dont je n’avais qu’à élargir l’espace entre les phrases, entre les mots et leurs réalités, pour les remplir de ce que je devenais sans vraiment le savoir, et que j’aspirais à devenir sans être pour autant capable de l’énoncer […].” (Chamoiseau 2012, 33)

When the ‘real’ captain Crusoe, out of remorse, sails back to save the African on the island, he will (simply) shoot him for loudly protesting the latter’s dreadful discovery of the human cargo in the belly of the ship. This

—————— 25 This has been a difficult question in postcolonial theory, but many theorists agree that it is not impossible for subjects to “escape the effects of those forces that ‘construct’ them” (Ashcroft et al. 1998, 8–9). 26 I here refer to the title of an essay collection by the Haitian-American icon of Francophone postcolonial literature, Edwidge Danticat (2010). Wilentz (2010) reviews it as a particularly strong commitment to Haitians suffering multifold threats, both on the island and in the diaspora.

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bad ending (in French) echoes the mal-fini, the bird which caused havoc in Chamoiseau’s 2009 Les Neuf Consciences du malfini (Cornille 2014). In other words, the Friday who himself originated from the African continent, who grew up to become a masterfully skilled seaman in a first life, and a maroon in a second (original meaning of marronner, being shipwrecked), finally becomes the rebel who stands firmly against the practice of human trade by his own rescuer, Robinson Crusoe. In sharp contrast with Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and other ex-slaves who relate their own stories of emancipation, the narrator cannot double the author, nor can the latter resemble the original Friday character, therefore renaming the expected stranger ‘Sunday.’ Killing the symbolic ancestral Father, Chamoiseau shows his runaway act in front of models and values he adores and cannot ‘emancipate from.’27 Author, narrator, character, the ‘trio’ ultimately relies once more upon the (white, superior) European values and voices which the postcolonial resists and reframes. The sailor who, after his risky travels, will bring the adventures on the tropical islands to the attention of his public, is a murderer of one of his most loyal servants. Leaning on canonic examples (Defoe and Tournier), the novelist moves away from earlier preoccupations. Beautifully and poetically written as it may be, this new tale imprints a moral lesson on the reader: the individual must find retreat in his own Self, helped by Heraclitus’s and Parmenides’s philosophies. Yet the implausible ending, the highly baroque language, the aesthetically overloaded descriptions risk to confirm what sociologists and anthropologists (Richard and Sally Price 1997) have observed to be at work in the field of Martinican art (and literature) since decades. A widening gap between the theories proclaimed by Martinican intellectuals (that is, their praise of tolerance and openness towards the Other), and the narrowminded ‘communitarianism’ of daily life in Fort-de-France and Pointe-àPitre. Like Salman Rushdie in some of his latest novels (The Enchantress of Florence), Martinican fiction has fallen prey to a new doudouism and bellettrie, by rewriting classical themes and classics, while eliding the potential postcolonial frictions in it.

—————— 27 See Cornille’s parallel reading of L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse in Chamoiseau… fils (2013, 74–75).

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ard-glissant-homme-de-genie-negmarron-de-linsoumission-poetique-et-politiqu e. 14 March 2012. Fauconnier, Bernard (2012). “L’Empreinte à Crusoé.” magazine-litteraire.com. Magazine Littéraire, 23 April 2012. http://www.magazine-litteraire.com/content/rss/arti cle?id=21641. 14 March 2014. Ferguson, James (2006). “Boy Days: Patrick Chamoiseau.” caribbean-beat.com. Caribbean Beat, 13 Aug. 2013. http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-80/boy-days-patrick-chamoiseau#axzz. 14 March 2014. Fignolé, Jean-Claude (2001). Aube tranquille. Paris: Seuil. “Film on Martinican hero André Aliker premieres in Paris” (2009). repeatingislands.com. Repeating Islands. News and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature, and the arts, 5 June 2009. http://repeatingislands.com/2009/06/05/fil m-on-martinican-hero-andre-aliker-premieres-in-paris/. 14 March 2014. Frindéthié, Martial K. (2008). The Black Renaissance. Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Jefferson: McFarland. Glissant, Édouard (1956). L’Intention poétique. Paris: Seuil. — (1995). Faulkner, Mississippi, Paris: Gallimard. — (1981). Le Discours antillais. Paris: Seuil. — (2005). Mémoire des esclavages. Paris: Gallimard. Grosfoguel, Ramón (2003). Colonizing Subjects. Puerto-Ricans in a Global Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gyssels, Kathleen (1995). “Du titre au roman: ‘Texaco’ de Patrick Chamoiseau.” Romans 50/90, 20: 121–132. — (2002). “Du paratexte pictural dans ‘Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes’ (André et Simone Schwarz-Bart) au paratexte sériel dans ‘Ecrire en pays dominé’ (Patrick Chamoiseau).” French Literature Series, 29: 197–213. — (2004). “Homer in ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea’: Omeros (Walcott) and Tout-monde (Glissant).” Pharos, 12: 159–179. — (2007). “Histoire de femme et de chien cannibales: réécritures et intertextualités inaperçues ou inavouées (Condé, Chamoiseau).” In Lieven D’hulst, Jean-Marc Moura, Liesbeth De Bleeker, and Nadia Lie (eds.). Caribbean Interfaces, 297–321. Amsterdam: Rodopi. — (2010). Passes et impasses dans le comparatisme postcolonial caribéen: cinq traverses. Paris: Champion. — (2012). “‘Littérature-monde’: une vignette pour défranciser la littérature du XXIième siècle?” In Kristian Van Haesendonck (ed.). Going Caribbean! New Perspectives on Literature and Art, 113–135. Lisbon: Humus. — (2013). “Glissant et la théorie postcoloniale.” In Collectif Writes Back (eds.). Mode d’emploi du postcolonial. Usages du postcolonial, 469–504. Lyon: PUL. Hall, Stuart (1992). “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (eds.). Formations of Modernity, 275–331. Cambridge: Polity. Hemingway, Ernest (1952). The Old Man and the Sea. New York. New York: Charles Scribners.

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Kassab-Charfi, Samia (2012). Patrick Chamoiseau. Paris: Gallimard. Khalfa, Jean (2006). “Ontologie et subjectivité chez Césaire.” In Michael Brophy and Mary Gallagher (eds.). Sens et présence du sujet poétique, La poésie de la France et du monde francophone depuis 1980, 191–201. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Knepper, Wendy (2012). Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. “La traite négrière (mal) expliquée aux enfants” (2011). slateafrique.com. Slate Afrique, 25 Feb. 2011. http://www.slateafrique.com/553/esclavage-polemiqueusa-ecole. 14 March 2012. Lam, Mariam B. (2012). “The Postcolonial Condition of Indochinese Cinema from Viêt-Nam, Cambodia, and Laos.” In Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller (eds.). Postcolonial Cinema Studies, 107–125. London: Routledge. Le Bris, Michel, and Jean Rouaud (eds.). (2007). Pour une littérature-monde. Paris: Gallimard. Ledent, Bénédicte (2002). Caryl Phillips. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Liger, Baptiste (2012). “Patrick Chamoiseau: l’objet de la littérature n’est plus de raconter des histoires.” lexpress.fr. L’Express, 6 March 2012. http://www. lexpress.fr/culture/livre/patrick-chamoiseau-l-objet-de-la-litterature-nest-plusde-raconter-des-histoires_1089728.html. 14 March 2012. Marivaux (2000). L’Ile des esclaves. Henri Coulet (ed.). 1725. Paris: Gallimard. Maximin, Daniel (1987). Soufrières. Paris: Seuil. McCuster, Maeve (2007). Patrick Chamoiseau. Recovering Memory. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Milne, Lorna (2006). Patrick Chamoiseau. Espaces d’une écriture antillaise. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Morrison, Toni (1987). Beloved. New York: Knopf. O’Callaghan, Evelyn (1993). “Historical Fiction and Fictional Writing: Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 29.2: 34–47. Paravisini, Lisa (2009). “Film on Martinican Hero André Aliker premieres in Paris.” repeatingislands.com. Repeating Islands Blog, 5 June 2009. http://repeatin gislands.com/2009/06/05/film-on-martinican-hero-andre-aliker-premieres-inparis/. 14 March 2012. Passage du milieu (2000). Dir. Guy Deslauriers. Script Claude Chonville, Patrick Chamoiseau, Walter Mosley. Perf. Djimon Hounsou, Maka Kotto. Les Films du Raphia. Peterson, Michel (1997). “L’imaginaire de la diversité: Entretien avec P. Chamoiseau.” Nuit blanche, le magazine du livre, 69: 122–25. http://www.erudit.org/ culture/nb1073421/nb1115563/21079ac.pdf. 14 March 2012. Phillips, Caryl (1993). Crossing the River. London: Bloomsbury. — (1995) La traversée du fleuve. Trans. Pierre Furlan. Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier. — (1998). The Nature of Blood. 1997. New York: Vintage. — (2008). Cambridge. 1991. London: Vintage.

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Pratt, Mary Louise (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Price, Richard, and Sally (1997). “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove.” Cultural Anthropology, 12.1: 3–36. Ravindranathan, Thangam (2012). “Under the castaway’s spell.” thehindu.com. The Hindu Books, 7 Oct. 2012. http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/under-the-castaways-spell/article3973501.ece. 25 June 2014. Rhys, Jean (1982). Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. New York: Norton & Company. Richardson, Brian (2006). Unnatural Voices. Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. Rosello, Mireille (2012). “Postcolonial Relationalities in P. Faucon’s Dans la vie.” In Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller (eds.). Postcolonial Cinema Studies, 93– 106. London: Routledge. Rue cases nègres (1983). Dir. Euzhan Palcy. Perf. Garry Cadenat, Darling Légitimus, Douta Seck. Nouvelles Éditions de Films (NEF). Rushdie, Salman (1982). “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” The Times, 3 July 2008: 8. — (2008). The Enchantress of Florence. London: Random House. Sarnecki-Holland, Judith (2000). “Mastering the Masters: Aimé Césaire’s Creolization of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” French Review, 74.2: 276–286. Shakespeare, William, Alden T. Vaughan, and Virginia Mason Vaughan (2000). The Tempest. 1611. 3rd ed., Revised. London: Arden Shakespeare. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam (eds.). (2003). Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Sotinel, Thomas (2009). “‘Aliker’: sortir un héros de l’obscurité.” lemonde.fr. Le Monde, 2 June 2009. http://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2009/06/02/alik er-sortir-un-heros-de-l-obscurite_1201077_3476.html . 14 March 2012. Sparrow, Jennifer (2002). “Strategic Créolité: Caliban and Miranda after Empire.” In Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks (eds.). Literature and Racial Ambiguity, 117– 135. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271– 316. London: Macmillan. — (1990). “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana.” English in Africa 17.2: 1–23. Taguieff, Pierre-André (2005). La République enlisée. Paris: Ed Syrtes. Tarica, Estelle (2010). “Patrick Chamoiseau’s Creole Conteur and the Ethics of Survival.” IJFS, 13.1: 39–56. Tournier, Michel (1972). Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. Paris: Gallimard. Walcott, Derek (1965). The Castaway. London: Faber and Faber. — (1992). “The Antilles, Fragments of Epic Memory.” nobelprize.org. Nobel Prize.org—The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize, 7 Dec. 1992.

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http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-le cture.html. 4 July 2012. — (1998). What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Warner, Marina (1992). Indigo. Mapping out the Waters. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wilentz, Amy (2008). “The Enchantress of Florence by Salmon Rushdie.” latimes.com. The Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2008. http://www.latimes.com/style/la-bkwilentz1-2008jun01-story.html#page=1. 14 March 2012. — (2010). “The Other Side of the Water: Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat.” nytimes.com. The New York Times, 8 Oct. 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/201 0/10/10/books/review/Wilentz-t.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print. 14 March 2012. Wynter, Sylvia (1992). “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Woman.” In Carole B. Davis and Elaine Savory Fido (eds.). Out of the Kumbla, Caribbean Women and Literature, 355–371. Trenton: Africa World Press. Zobel, Joseph (1983). La Rue Cases-Nègres. Paris: Presence Africaine. Zvomuya, Percy (2012). “The Refuge for the Wretched.” mg.co.za. Mail&Guardian. Africa’s Best Read, http://mg.co.za/article/2012-08-24-refuge-for-the-wretch ed. 14 March 2012.

Interrogating the Interview as Genre: Five Cases over Two Hundred Years Carsten Junker

Picture this: An interview with Michelle and Barack Obama from 1996 that was published in January 2009, weeks before Obama’s election as President of the United States, in which they speak about the compatibility of family life and political work. // Interviews with people born into enslavement around the mid-nineteenth century, conducted in the nineteen thirties, decades after the interviewees had legally been manumitted. // A book titled Who Speaks for the Negro? from 1965, written by white Southern writer Robert Penn Warren, based on interviews with outstanding personalities of the Civil Rights Movement. // A best-selling novel titled The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) which would win its author William Styron the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and, at the same time, create an uproar among Black writers and intellectuals who criticized it for distorting the fictionalized portrayal of a figure they considered a heroic resistance fighter against the enslavement regime in the first half of the nineteenth century. The novel springs from a historical document based on an interview that Nat Turner gave his white court-appointed lawyer Thomas Gray in 1831. // Late eighteenth-century pamphlets giving interview-based accounts of enslaved men’s life courses and the crimes they allegedly committed, for which they were to be executed, as well as their confessions and voluntary conversion to Christianity, so that they might be redeemed from their sins in life after death. Covering a wide spectrum of epochs and text types, from the sentimental and personal story of a married couple in the wake of their ascendancy to the U.S. presidency to spectacular broadsheets covering confessions and conversions of fugitive enslaved men before their public execution in the late eighteenth-century, we might ask: what do these seemingly disjointed texts have in common? These texts and this is my concern here, are all based on interviews. This small-scale collection of texts may sub-

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stantiate and lend itself to a diachronic reading of a discourse of race—a reading which might emphasize a historical trajectory from transatlantic enslavement and the U.S. plantation system and resistance to it all the way up to twenty-first century global Black leadership. I will, however, bypass such a (teleological) narrative. My reading is instead prompted by questions these texts raise with reference to the shared communicative structure on which they are based. The body of texts assembled here thus sets an agenda for a systematic interrogation of the epistemology of the interview as genre, of which central research questions, framed in general terms, are: What constitutes an interview? Who is being interviewed? Who is the interviewer? What impact does the interview have on the position of the interlocutors? What is the impact of power differentials in the interview setting on the interview? How and where is the interview published? At whom is the interview directed? To develop a theory of the interview as genre—which has not been done to date—it becomes necessary to speak about historically and culturally specific dynamics and effects of the interview as genre, and, more specifically, about the functions of the interview in positioning its speakers in particular ways and investing or divesting them with authority to speak. Such dynamics become particularly visible in the material examined here which, however disparate, is based on interviews conducted in the United States from 1795 to 1996, in which speakers who are racialized as Black are positioned as interviewees, and which are largely conducted, edited, and published by speakers racialized as white. The material could be read for its documentary evidence, for the ways in which it provides a platform for interviewees to articulate themselves, as it seems to give voice to them, heaving them into speech by providing them with speaking positions from which they can give accounts of themselves. It may also be read—and this makes the picture more composite—for the ways in which its interviewers interrogate their interviewees and frame their articulations, speaking for them and appropriating their life accounts for their own interests. The texts examined here do not merely serve as starting points for a proposed agenda of an epistemology of the interview as genre, but they may also alter an understanding of genre theory in general. When I pro-

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pose to develop a theory of the interview as genre, I suggest that genre theory—which is oftentimes discussed as if it were universally applicable— be read for the specific temporal and spatial uses to which a genre is put; in other words, that it be particularized and, in that sense, politicized. At the same time, genre theory allows for a discussion of the material under investigation from new angles and in terms that highlight what might otherwise be overlooked. Genre theory helps to conceptualize the communicative dynamics at play in interview-based texts as well as their effects on audiences. If we assume that “genres actively shape knowledge of the world [and] create effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility” (Frow 2006, 2), we move away from supposedly objective accounts of genre classifications which, in themselves, have always already involved mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and their concomitant modes of (de)valorization. Genre theory may allow for examining “the kind of speaking position that is constructed for me and you by [a] genre, and the kinds of effect of knowledge and truth it generates” (Frow 2006, 2). As the following examples will show, interviews may indeed create such powerful effects. In January 2009, the French newspaper Le Monde published the interview with Michelle and Barack Obama that had been conducted by U.S. American photographer Mariana Cook in 1996, for a volume of photographic and essayistic portraits of married couples that would be published under the title of Couples: Speaking from the Heart (2000). In the interview, Michelle und Barack Obama disclose how they met, how their family backgrounds have shaped them, and what they are aiming at in their respective careers. Barack Obama ran for, and won, a seat in the Illinois Senate during the year of the interview. Michelle Obama, noticeably, speaks emphatically and critically about the difficulties of making the demands of her husband’s future work in public office compatible with private aspects of their lives—friends, children, travel. Barack Obama tones down this concern, and summarizes his political agenda by using a rhetoric that reconciles questions concerning the private and the public on the basis of shared values: “My priority is to return social values to public debate, because we are all one big family, transcending racial or class differences. We have obligations and responsibilities towards one another” (“Sacre Bleu,” n. pag.). Barack Obama was already stressing an ethos of mutual responsibility thirteen years before he would be inaugurated into presidential office. He extends the image of the family to a “we” that encompasses

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the whole U.S. nation, seeking to transcend boundaries of race and class. Obama thus anticipates debates on a post-racial U.S. society whose proponents would consider his election crucial evidence for their arguments.1 The Obama interview had not been included in Cook’s coffee table book; it was published in Le Monde for the first time, with The New Yorker following suit and publishing excerpts from Cook’s interview a day prior to Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 (Cook 2009, n. pag.). Not only is this a conspicuous date, but what seems more noteworthy are the ways in which the magazine turns the interview with the presidential couple-to-be into a home story.2 Under the heading “A Couple in Chicago,” the magazine only prints those passages in which the Obamas speak about the mutual respect for their families and the admiration for each other. One could say that The New Yorker, in landing this timely journalistic coup, provides the candidate and his wife with a public platform and lends them an ear. But this also comes at the expense of domesticating and sentimentalizing the image of the couple; by reducing them to their private sphere, the edited interview dis(re)members the political dimensions of the initial, more politically charged interview. This observation points to general questions pertaining to the dynamics at play in such published interviews as generic framework—dynamics that unfold at the moment of interaction between interview partners and that extend to practices of publication. Throughout this process, interviewees vie for control over the interpretation of social realities and personal experiences in their interest. This process is staged, however. I propose to read such a text as an instantiation of a genre that structures communication along the lines of a particular dialogic structure, akin to other dialogic genres such as speech, sermon, pamphlet, or essay.3 Approaching interviews as genre, that is considering them as generic frames makes it possible for us to analyze how they provide speakers with positions to speak in particular structures of address within a text and in relation to an imagined audience beyond it, including processes of publication and acts of reading. If Cook’s interview with the Obamas points to the ways in which the speaking posi-

—————— 1 For an analysis of the observation that “Barack Obama’s ascent has amplified a national mythology of racial progress in the US multiculturalist age,” and a critical discussion of the “racial logic [that] remains at play in the moment of a ‘post-civil rights’ Black presidency” see, for instance, Rodriguez (2011, 17). 2 “Home story” is a term used in German to refer to journalistic contributions that portray famous persons in their private homes. 3 For a study on the epistemology of the dialogic structure of the essay, see Junker (2010).

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tions of the participants of the interview (including that of the interviewer) are marked by the workings of race and gender, the politics of publication also speak to the racialized and gendered conceptions of Barack Obama’s body politic between the poles of the private and the public. The interview between Cook and the Obamas shows that those interviewed have to be well-known or have to have achieved public significance to qualify as interviewees. At the same time, an interview may also change the position and enhance the public relevance of an interviewee (and interviewer). It may be the interview that authorizes the interlocutors and assigns them importance. The position of the interviewer may also valorize the interview. As a frame, the interview ascribes meaning to the interlocutors, providing positions of enunciation and roles of conduct that make the interlocutors actors in a staged and structured mode of communication. Examining interviews as their own genre thus raises questions of narrative authority: how does the genre provide or refuse speaking positions for those who do not necessarily have access to such positions and allow them to authorize their speaking; how, for instance, do we assess the logic of the authenticity of someone’s voice if we are to assume that any reference to this authenticity, based on an “authority of experience” (Diamond and Edwards 1977), is a staged strategy of authorization validated and consummated through readerly expectations?4 In the following, I examine the interview as a genre in its own right with a special focus on cases of interviews that were conducted and given, to use Saidiya V. Hartman’s words, in the “afterlife of slavery” (2007, 6). They span three historical time periods: the later half of the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, the nineteen thirties, and the decades around the year 1800.

—————— 4 Appeals to “the authority of experience” served (white) second-wave feminists to “validate women’s actual lives and perceptions over against masculinist constructions thereof” (Berubé 2005, 122). Joan W. Scott challenged such appeals to “experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation,” arguing that this would foreclose attempts at “exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world,” thus at investigating the sets of discursive conditions that shape perceptions of experience in the first place (1991, 777).

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The Interview during and after Enslavement Around the year 1937, formerly enslaved men and women gave more than two thousand and three hundred interviews in the context of the Federal Writer’s Project (FWP), a scheme of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that was expected to lower the unemployment rate and boost the national U.S. economy. As one of the “Works Progress Administration” (WPA) programs, the FWP had been administered to create jobs for unemployed writers and journalists. But the high rate of unemployment alone was not enough reason for the interest in interviewing people who were born into enslavement and had largely reached an age of above eighty by the time they were interviewed. Black writers in particular had an interest in collecting autobiographical testimonies by former slaves. It was in Florida that a group of Black writers joined to form a FWP group. The famous anthropologist, essayist, and novelist Zora Neale Hurston also belonged to this group.5 The interviews they conducted provided them with an opportunity to map out a distinct and singular notion of Black Culture, and they also served to assist in the reconstruction of a past that was useful for an understanding of the present. This early mode of oral history writing could help revise images of slavery from the perspective of the formerly enslaved, in order to contest the persistent racist myth of the docile, grateful slave—a myth perpetuated by the dominant historiography of the nineteen thirties,6 and which Black historians and sociologists such as Charles S. Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois challenged.7 The majority of interviewers, however, where white and oftentimes direct descendants of former plantation owners. Perhaps they had ethnographic interests, or they sought to distance themselves from the enslavement regime that their ancestors had upheld. Many interviews were conducted in states where regional FWP units were directed by white women, which is reminiscent of the strong position of white women in mid-nineteenth-century abolition.8 Whatever the motives of the interviewers, it is

—————— 5 For a collection of Hurston’s material from this period, see Hurston (1999). 6 For a monograph symptomatic of this dominant strand of historiography, see Phillips (1918). 7 For background information in this paragraph and the following, I have drawn on Yetman’s (2001) concise introduction to the WPA slave narrative collection. 8 The “achievement of the Arkansas Project—whose Director, Bernice Babcock, had a special interest in the ex-slave narratives—exceeded that of any other state […] the nearly seven hundred Arkansas narratives constitute almost one-third of the entire col-

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clear that the interests they brought to the setting as well as their racial positioning had an impact on the course and outcome of the interview: “The relative absence of black interviewers introduced an important source of bias, for the interviewer’s race was a significant factor in eliciting responses from the former slaves” (Yetman 2001, n. pag.). This is verified by historian Paul Escott: “As might be expected, the black interviewers obtained information that white workers could not get. There was more honesty in the all-black interviews and less obeisance to social rituals. In most Federal Writers’ Project narratives, even those who were harshly critical of their former masters often found something complimentary to say about them first. Racial etiquette required that the former slaves express gratitude and respect for their white folks.” (Escott 1979, 9)

26 percent of all interviewees responding to white interviewers gave unfavorable and very unfavorable accounts of their former owners compared to almost 39 percent of unfavorable responses by those interlocutors who responded to Black interviewers (Escott 1979, 11). What resounds here is a strategy that author Charles Weldon Johnson had noted as a dilemma of “double audience” for Black writers. In variation of the Du Boisian concept of “double consciousness” (Du Bois 1999, 11), Johnson refers to strategies of appropriately addressing Black and white audiences, respectively: “The moment a Negro writer takes up his pen or sits down to his typewriter he is immediately called upon to solve, consciously or unconsciously, this problem […]. To whom shall he address himself, to his own black group or to white America?” (Johnson 1928, 477).

The collection of WPA interview-based slave narratives largely disappeared in the archives of the Library of Congress after the late nineteen thirties, until they were republished from 1972 onwards.9 The renewed interest they garnered in the early nineteen seventies may be ascribed to the fact that they answered to a demand generated by the Black Power Movement for a writing of history from the perspectives of the formerly enslaved and for a critical analysis of the historical causes for prevailing social inequalities.

—————— lection” (Yetman 2001, n. pag.). The overall project was coordinated by John Lomax, a white Southerner, who instructed local and state units in April 1937 with systematically conducting the interviews. 9 See George Rawick (1972); Rawick et al. (1977; 1979). The collection of the slave narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project is digitized today and can be accessed online (Born in Slavery 2001).

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Considering differences among the interviewees in terms of age, gender, geographical location, as well as working and living conditions, this large body of interviews also provoked historians into debating how representative they might be for the reconstruction of enslavement, but this would of course assume that any such objective reconstruction would indeed be possible or desirable. Rather than considering these interviews to be reliable and factual documents, they should be considered narrative accounts from specific viewpoints, generated in particular through hierarchical communicative contexts and shaped by those who recorded them. Hartman has identified a set of problems inherent in these interviews that concern, among others, “the ability of those interviewed to recall what had happened sixty years earlier, the use of white interviewers who were sometimes the sons and daughters of former owners in gathering the testimony, [the] construction of black voice by mostly white interviewers through the grotesque representation of what they imagined as black speech, the questions that shaped these interviews, and the artifice of direct reported speech when, in fact, these interviews were transcribed non verbatim accounts […].” (Hartman 1997, 11)

Given these difficulties, Hartman answers the question of “how does one use these sources?” in the following way: “At best with the awareness that a totalizing of history cannot be reconstructed from these interested, selective, and fragmentary accounts and with an acknowledgment of the interventionist role of the interpreter, the equally interested labor of historical revision, and the impossibility of reconstituting the past free from the disfigurements of present concerns.” (Hartman 1997, 11)

The historiographical interest in these autobiographical interviews—an interest that should also focus on the interviewers—corresponded to a concurrent attentiveness in Literary Studies toward those slave narratives which had been written, edited, and published in the antebellum period to propel formal abolition. As noted above, power differentials between Black writers and white editors, publishers, and audiences are at work in these late eighteenth and nineteenth-century testimonies as well, and this overdetermining discursive framework has became a central object of literary inquiry in the scholarship on these texts. The resurgent interest both in the WPA interviews as well as the previously written accounts has thus sought to give answers to the question of representation in the twofold meaning of the term: who may speak for whom, and how.

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This question was raised with great clarity by a white Southern writer in the mid-nineteen sixties, and this brings me to a further instantiation of interview-based texts. In 1965, Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989),10 the threefold Pulitzer Prize awardee, published a book under the title: Who Speaks for the Negro? It is the cover of the book—featuring its inquisitive title on top and the author’s name below it—which gives away an answer to this very question: it is Warren itself who acts as mouthpiece, taking on the role of spokesman. Indeed, the volume teaches its readers to know better than not to judge the book by its cover. Who Speaks for the Negro? is a collection of transcribed and edited interviews that Warren had conducted with influential authors and political leaders of the Civil Rights Movement “whose influence is from the periphery” (blurb on the backside cover), and whose voices he intends to make accessible to a broader audience. The tacit assumption that his audience is white may not least be inferred from Warren’s descriptions of his interlocutors. Warren, for instance, laboriously enlightens his readers that they should not be surprised to find the president of a historically Black college, Dr. Felton Grandison Clark of Southern University, suave and worldly: “Dr. Clark is tall and carries himself well, is extremely well-groomed—with small touches of elegance like the discreetly turned-back cuffs of the sleeves of his gray suit—speaks in a voice of fine natural modulation, has poise and self-command, and is charming,” which, as Warren notes, could by all means be expected: “In fact, I have yet to meet the president of a Negro college or university who is not charming” (1965, 5). This paternalistic tone runs like a thread through the whole volume, in which the direct quotes from Warren’s interviewees are embedded in his own reflections on sociopolitical concerns. In one passage, he ponders his own discomfort at his former favorable attitude toward segregation: “Back in the winter of 1929–30, […] I had written an essay on the Negro in the South. […] In fact, while writing it, I had experience some vague discomfort, like the discomfort you feel when your poem doesn’t quite come off […]. The essay was a cogent and humane defense of segregation” (1965, 10–11).11 While the passage is selfcritical, it also reads too light-heartedly; Warren’s unease about his prior

—————— 10 Warren received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947 for his novel All the King's Men, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979, respectively. 11 The essay is titled “The Briar Patch,” see Warren (2006).

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errors shows him confronting his shame in a somewhat too self-absorbed way. Warren also holds the upper hand in structuring the entire volume. Not only has he “chosen the sections which seem to [him] most significant and exciting” (Foreword, n. pag.); he also has the final editorial-typographical say when cutting off transcribed passages of his interviewees half-way through a sentence to comment on keywords directly and inserting his own ruminations about a subject matter. Again, the interview with Clark serves as an example: “WARREN: Let’s turn to another topic. Why should the Negro Revolution occur now—and not , say, thirty years ago? CLARK: It’s part of a world movement for freedom, for a sense of identity— I seize the word identity. It is a keyword. You hear it over and over again. On this word will focus, around this word will coagulate, a dozen issues, shifting, shading into each other. […] But Dr. Clark is continuing: CLARK: … and we see that there are other people who feel as we do. […]” (Warren 1965, 16–17)

The structure of the book, the attitude of Warren’s editor-author-narratorinterviewer-protagonist, and his positioning within the discursive field of the mid-sixties raise crucial questions that pertain to an assessment of the functions and effects of his “Speak[ing] for the Negro.” Years ago, Linda Alcoff addressed what she calls “the problem of speaking for others” (1991–1992). This problem of speaking for others—of vicarious speaking—results from a recognition that a speaker’s location is “epistemically salient” and that certain privileged locations are “discursively dangerous” (Alcoff 1991–1992, 7). Speaking as a privileged subject for or on behalf of less-privileged speakers potentially results in increasing or reinforcing their oppression, not least because it may draw a problematic distinction and homogenize those spoken for into an undifferentiated group. It potentially results in reproducing power differentials, “in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for,” and such acts may exercise and “practice a kind of discursive coercion and even a violence” (Alcoff 1991– 1992, 6–7).12 This prompts a reassessment of the dynamics at play in War-

—————— 12 Alcoff notes that a speaker’s social location “has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker’s claim and can serve either to authorize or disauthorize one’s speech. The creation of women’s studies and African-American studies departments was founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must come to

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ren’s volume: does he appropriate the perspectives of his interviewees to capitalize on them; does he incorporate their vantage points and knowledge to claim leadership in forming public opinion, because he would otherwise lose control? Against the backdrop of these questions, I propose a reading of the book that considers it a response to the highly audible voices of Civil Rights and Black Power protagonists included in the book, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Who Speaks for the Negro? seems Warren’s investment in defending his racialized white speaking position in the arena of pubic debate. It becomes the result of a tremendous effort to buttress and solidify his powerful discursive pervasiveness—a position of discursive dominance apparently not stable per se. By staging himself as a mouthpiece for Black politicians and intellectuals, Warren implicitly makes invisible that they had already spoken for themselves, and had claimed this as their right for decades. The struggle for discursive self-determination had been well under way. In 2008, forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. a symposium at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University made a loaded riposte under the telling title “We Speak for Ourselves” (2014).13 According to Ashraf Rushdy, the debate over The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1967) marks one crucial moment in which a new discursive formation on slavery gets mobilized by an “emergent post-civil rights era black intelligentsia [that] rallied itself around […] interrelated issues of historical and cultural representation” (1999, 54–55). The publication of this novel by white Southern writer Styron aroused indignation among Black intellectuals and provoked the publication of a volume of literary criticism in 1968, edited by John Henrik Clarke, that was subtitled Ten Black Writers Respond. The contributors of this collection contested Styron’s first-person literary portrayal of the historical figure of Nat Turner, who had led a revolt against slavery in 1831 Virginia, as being a distorted image of a fanatic which thus reinforced racist stereotypes. Styron’s critics saw the favorable reception of the novel on the part of estab-

—————— be done principally by the oppressed themselves” (1991–1992, 7). Black feminist writers and theorists famously pointed out that analogizing women’s studies and AfricanAmerican studies, by default, coded the former as white and the latter as male, see Hull et al. (1982). 13 This is also the title of a study in the field of environmental justice, addressing environmental racism by analyzing the disproportionately high exposure of racialized communities to environmental pollution (Bullard and Alston 1990).

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lished critics as a response to prevalent fears of contemporary Black Power leaders. Clarke thus asks: “Have they failed to see Nat Turner as a hero and revolutionist out of fear that they might have to see H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael the same way?” (viii–ix). For Styron’s critics, moreover, the novel was “part of a social project in which African American culture is both appropriated and denied its history” (Rushdy 1999, 55). As in the case of Warren, the debate over Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner centered around questions pertaining to the twofold meaning of representation, and as Rushdy notes, neither “the issue of who is empowered to speak for a cultural tradition has […] yet been resolved, nor has the issue of artistic license in a multiethnic society” (1999, 55). What is of interest in this amply documented debate is the fact that Styron’s novel builds on an interview that Nat Turner gave his white courtappointed lawyer Thomas Gray in 1831.14 Gray conducted the interview before Turner’s execution and had it published shortly after.15 The critics of the novel do not merely address the ways in which Styron may have manipulated this historical document; they also ponder how the original interview setting may have elicited a particular version of the truth that is based on the blatant power differential between Gray and Turner. In a contribution titled “Nat’s Last White Man,” Ebony Magazine senior editor Lerone Bennett, Jr., sets the record of Turner’s image as fanatic straight, as it were, when he returns the gaze from Turner back to Gray: “Nat Turner, his deed done, is sitting in a prison cell regarding Thomas Gray, a treacherous and unctuously condescending white man who is trying to worm his way into the black psyche for purposes of white aggrandizement. Nat regards this specimen with distaste and repulsion” (Bennett 1968, 3). The interview setting must indeed have been far from neutral, but rather than aiming at a reconstruction of historical facts,16 Bennett’s perspective is a reminder that the interview itself as well as its reception constitute nothing more or less than a bundle of accounts of historical ‘facts,’ framed, originally, by a white lawyer, and followed by numerous mediations of this account by various interested parties.

—————— 14 See Rushdy (1999), who dedicates a whole chapter of his monograph on neo-slave narratives to the debate. 15 The Turner-Gray interview is reproduced in the appendix of Clarke’s edited volume (1968, 92–117). 16 For instance, with reference to historiographical work undertaken by Henry Irving Tragle (1970), Rushdy discusses the possibility that Gray had broken Turner’s enslaved wife under torture to obtain Turner’s papers (Rushdy 1999, 60; Tragle 1970, 145–46).

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In her short story aptly titled “Mediations on History,” Shirley Anne Williams (1995) takes up the praxis of the interview to show how the powerful position of a male white interviewer results in a shamelessly willful misreading of his Black female interviewee, who awaits a death sentence for her involvement in what the law reads as a slave insurrection and what, from her perspective, constitutes an act of survival. In the story, a writer conducts the interview not only to extract a confession about his interviewee’s involvement in the events, but also to capitalize on her story; he plans to write a book under the sensational title The Roots of Rebellion and the Means of Eradicating Them (Williams 1995, 69). Williams’s fictionalized staging of the interview itself can be considered part of a larger structure of writing back, showing that the white interviewer does not listen and willingly fails to recognize the perspective of the enslaved woman.17 Gray’s 1831 Confessions of Nat Turner were preceded by earlier confessional narratives from the late eighteenth century of Black men sentenced to death on accounts of allegations of minor and capital crimes. Awaiting the execution of their death sentences, these so-called dying speeches relate Black men confessing the crimes they allegedly committed, including passages, moreover, in which the confessants declare their conversion to Christianity for the sake of their redemption.18 Based on interviews just like the one given by Turner, these texts are highly over-determined by the editorial and publishing framework of their white interviewers. Consider, for example, an interview from 1795, in which a white interlocutor called Jonathan Plummer conducted with a fugitive of whom we only know the name of Pomp. Like the fictional protagonist in William’s story, Plummer also provides the narrative framework for Pomp’s narrative; he is “one of the first authors to try to earn a living with his pen in the years following the American Revolution” (Hutchins 2004, n. pag.). Plummer states clearly that there is no authentic material of Pomp’s own making; he notes that he as not only recorded the runaway’s confession but has also edited the interview and, in a palimpsestic mode, over-written the enslaved man’s words: “I […] have taken the liberty to arrange the matter in my own way, […] to word his thoughts more elegantly […] than he was able to express them” (Pomp and Plummer 1795, n. pag.). A white writer and printer here claims to be speaking for an enslaved man under sentence of death, but in fact appropriates that man’s voice for his own purposes,

—————— 17 My thanks go to Marie-Luise Löffler for alluding me to Williams’s story. 18 For a thorough study of these dying speeches, see Junker (forthcoming).

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one of which is selling the broadside on which the dying speech is printed. The selling point of such interview-based narratives as Pomp’s are to be found no less in the criminal offences of which the interviewees are charged and convicted than in the violent spectacle of the executions which await the interviewees. The interview-based confessions of Turner and Pomp may be read as building blocks that thwart their articulations. Turner and Pomp thus become “impossible witness[es]” (McBride 2001, 142) to their own enslavement because they are not able to articulate their own voices in unmediated ways during their lifetimes and beyond. McBride speaks about “impossible witnesses” with reference to racialized speaking positions in the context of the genre of slave narratives—constituted by texts that scandalize slavery by way of narrating the life trajectories of those who were born into enslavement and could escape into freedom. While the protagonists of slave narratives achieve formal freedom, unlike those of the dying speeches, the newly freed nonetheless remain caught in a pervasive narrative framework that forfeits their narrative agency: “We see that slave testimonies are being framed all the time by the context of their presentation” (McBride 2001, 5). McBride’s assessment of this “overdeterminacy of the slave’s testimony” (2001, 5) had already been anticipated by John Sekora, who, in the context of theorizing generic questions of slave narratives, had coined the phrase of “black messages sealed within a white envelope” (1988, 501). An assessment of the discursive effects of their interviews may thus also be framed through current theoretical conceptualizations of what Wilderson and others have subsumed under the moniker of Afro-pessimism: “Afro-pessimism explores the meaning of Blackness […] as a structural position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions” (2010, 58). In the sense of writing over and eliding the speaking positions of its interviewees, Turner’s and Pomp’s interviews in particular seem to instantiate the kind of “noncommunicability” that Wilderson addresses (2010, 58). To varying degrees, these different interview-based texts may be read as cultural instantiations that stage and thus take part in overwriting the voices of those speaking subjects racialized as Black, binding them to a history of enslavement and inscribing and entombing them in the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2007, 6; Sexton 2010, 31). As these texts engage the topic of the deaths of enslaved men proper, they may be construed as allegorical enactments of the Social Death (Patterson) of the enslaved in

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general. The assumption that an enslaved person is socially dead is to assume that “the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality” (Wilderson 2010, 11). One might object here that dying speeches do establish a kind of relationality by relating the enslaved to the judicial logic of criminal conviction and the Christian logic of redemption. But these discourses take hold of the enslaved as they inscribe them into these discourses only as dead beings. It is the white discursive frameworks which let the enslaved die, which amounts to making the free live, to paraphrase Foucault,19 generating white narrative authority at the expense of the literal and symbolic death of their Black interviewees, and this carries all the more weight considering that they seem to give voice to their Black speakers.

Towards a Theory of the Interview as Genre In the cases of the interviews conducted by Warren, Gray, and Plummer, the interviewers do not merely coordinate the dialogue with Clark, Turner, and Pomp; they orchestrate and control the interview and its subsequent publication to different degrees, subjecting their interviewees to their command. To develop a theory of interlocution with respect to the (fictional/non-fictional, literary, narrative) genre of interview, an interview will have to be differentiated from a conversation. Both are forms of dialogue but may provide distinct dialogic frameworks: while a conversation may be invested with power that can be negotiated, an interview may posit power differentials more clearly and endow its interlocutors with different degrees of authority. As an object of literary study and cultural historiography, the interview as genre will also have to be juxtaposed with and differentiated from approaches to interviews in other fields of research: what differentiates an interview in a narrative text from a journalistic interview, a judicial hearing or examination, a job interview, or from public testimonies in public hearings such as those of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), to name but one example.

—————— 19 “The fact that you let more die will allow you to live more” (Foucault 2004, 255).

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Furthermore, crucial epistemological and methodological questions have been raised in the fields of Social Sciences, Anthropology, and Linguistics. Significant examples here are reflections on ethnographical participant observation or the sociolinguistic observer’s paradox and its repercussions for an interview setting: “the aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain this data by systematic observation” (Labov 1972, 209). This prompts the question of what makes an interview as genre different from an interview as method. Furthermore, what may the methodological work in social research on structured, semistructure, unstructured interviews, and on guided, informal, personal interviews as methods contribute to a conceptualization of the interview as genre? The term interview, in historical perspective, derives from the early sixteenth century, and goes back to the French term entrevue, which means to see or have a glimpse at each other. While the term interview no longer signifies a face-to-face meeting between persons of the same rank such as popes or kings, the visual dimensions which an etymological perspective on the term affords, provides useful prospects for further investigations of the politics of looking relations that are at play in the force field of an interview. A diachronic perspective also serves as a reminder that a theorization of the interview as genre—as well as genre theory in general—takes place against a Eurocentric background; Western genre theory goes back to the poetics of Plato and Aristotle. Taking the above interview-based texts as starting points, practitioners of a theory of interview may have to account for the potential gestures of appropriation that inhere in such an undertaking. It is the material, however, that can modify the theory, marking the presumably white default location of the latter, if not decentering it. My proposed inquiry goes in several directions: what does the form of the interview do to those who participate in it; how does the interview as genre impact on interviewees’ and interviewers’ narrative authority; how does it invest or divest speakers (interview-protagonists, narrators, and authors) with discursive agency and power? Moreover, how do narrated interrogations contribute to an understanding of these texts as part of a genre of interview; what do interview-based narratives contribute to an analysis of the interview as genre? What can a particular interview tell us about the interview as form? How do the ways in which the interview as

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narrative practice and generic framework is put to use in texts impact an assessment of the functions of this genre? Answers to these questions hold possibilities for working out an analytic of interview as genre, which in return allows for revisiting, rereading, and revisioning canonized and uncanonized texts, as well as reconsidering the dynamics of their theorization. The interviews examined here urge us to the task of developing a theory of the interview in particular and to thus contribute to a theory of genre in general that takes historical specificities and power differentials seriously.

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda (1991–1992). “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique, 20: 5–32. Bennett, Lerone Jr. (1968). “Nat’s Last White Man.” In John Henrik Clarke (ed.). William Styron’s Nat Turner. Ten Black Writers Respond, 3–16. Boston: Beacon Press. Bérubé, Michael (2005). “Experience.” In Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris (eds.). New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 121–23. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938 (2001). memory.loc.gov. The Library of Congress, 23 March 2001. http://memory.loc. gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html. 25 June 2014. Bullard, Robert D., and Dana A. Alston (eds.). (1990). We Speak for Ourselves: Social Justice, Race and Environment. Washington: Panos Institute. Clarke, John Henrik (ed.). (1968). William Styron’s Nat Turner. Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston: Beacon Press. Cook, Mariana (2000.) Couples: Speaking from the Heart. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. — (2009). “A Couple in Chicago.” newyorker.com. The New Yorker, 19 Jan. 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/19/090119fa_fact_cook. 24 June 2014. Diamond, Arlyn, and Lee R. Edwards (eds.). (1977). The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1999). The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Terry Hume Oliver. New York: W. W. Norton. Escott, Paul D. (1979). Slavery Remembered. A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Foucault, Michel (2004). Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. London: Penguin. Frow, John (2006). Genre. London: Routledge.

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Hartman, Saidiya V. (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. — (2007). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (eds.). (1982). All the Women are White, all the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Black Women’s Studies. New York: Feminist Press Hurston, Zora Neale (1999). Go Gator and Muddy the Water!: Writigns by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project. Ed. Pamela Bordelon. New York: W. W. Norton. Hutchins, Zachary (2004). “Summary of ‘Dying Confession of Pomp’.” docsouth.unc.edu. Documenting the American South (DocSouth): North American Slave Narratives. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, n. d. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/pomp/summary.html. 25 June 2014. Johnson, James Weldon (Dec 1928). “The Dilemma of the Negro Author.” The American Mercury, 15.60: 477–81. Junker, Carsten (2010). Frames of Friction. Black Genealogies, White Hegemony, and the Essay as Critical Intervention. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. — (forthcoming): “Staging the Scaffold: Criminal Conversion Narratives of the Late Eighteenth Century.” In Violet Showers Johnson, Gundolf Graml and Patricia Williams Lessane (eds.). Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging, and Civil Rights. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Labov, William (1972). Sociolingustic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McBride, Dwight A. (2001). Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolition, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York University Press. Patterson, Orlando (1982). Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Phillips Ulrich B. (1918). American Negro Slavery. New York: Appleton and Company. Pomp, and Jonathan Plummer (1795). “Dying Confession of Pomp, a Negro Man, Who Was Executed at Ipswich, on the 6th August, 1795, for Murdering Capt. Charles Furbush, of Andover, Taken from the Mouth of the Prisoner, and Penned by Jonathan Plummer, Jun. [Newburyport, Ma: Jonathan Plummer; Blunt and March, 1795].” docsouth.unc.edu. Documenting the American South (DocSouth): North American Slave Narratives. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, n. d. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/pomp/pomp.html. 25 June 2014. Rawick, George P. (ed.). (1972). The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. 19 Vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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Rawick, George P., Jan Hillegas, and Ken Lawrence (eds.). (1977). The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement Series 1, 12 Vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood. — (1979). The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement Series 2, 10 Vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Rodríguez, Dylan (2011). “The Black Presidential Non-Slave: Genocide and the Present Tense of Racial Slavery.” Political Power and Social Theory, 22: 17–50. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. (1999). “The Discourse Mobilized. The Debate over William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.” In Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, 54–95. New York: Oxford University Press. “Sacre Bleu! Le Monde Publishes Never-Before-Seen 1996 Interview with Obamas About their Marriage” (2009). abcnews.com. ABC News, 10 Jan. 2009. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/01/sacre-bleu-le-m/. 24 June 2014. Schreier, Daniel (2013). “Collecting Ethnographic and Sociolingistic Data.” In Manfred G. Krug and Julia Schlüter (eds.). Research Methods in Language Variation and Change, 17–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Joan W. (1991). “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry, 17.4: 773–97. Sekora, John (1987). “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative.” Callaloo, 10.3: 482–515. Sexton, Jared (Summer 2010). “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.” Social Text 103, 28.2: 31–56. Styron, William (1967). The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House. Tragle, Henry Irving (1970). “Styron and His Sources.” The Massachusetts Review, 11.1: 134–153. Warren, Robert Penn (1965). Who Speaks for the Negro? New York: Random House. — (2006). “The Briar Patch.” 1930. In Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, 246–64. New York: Harper. “We Speak for Ourselves” (2014). whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu. Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro? An Archival Collection. The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, n. d. http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt. edu/conference. 25 June 2014. Wilderson, Frank B. III (2010). Red, White & Black. Cinema and the Structures of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. Williams, Sherley Anne (1995). “Meditations on History.” 1980. In Gloria Naylor (ed.). Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to Present, 58–99. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Yetman, Norman R. (2001). “An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives.” memory.loc.gov. The Library of Congress, 23 March 2001. http://memory.loc.gov /ammem/snhtml/snintro00.html. 25 June 2014.

Decolonizing Gender in the Academy: From Black Power and Black Consciousness to Black Rebellion Rozena Maart

The lines of reading… the lines of writing… the lines of thinking. Colonialism only has one line—destroy. It has many dots to complete the line… usurp, kill, colonize, criticize, brutalize, ghettoize, tamponize, throttle, squeeze, rob, denigrate, blacken, maim, mute, silent, dead. Repeat. Everywhere. Repeat again. In thought, word and mind [read]: in the text. There is a line… a dividing line… a line that cannot be crossed. For to cross it, overstep it, anger it, is to announce the erasure of history. Writing offers the linear absorption of words, from left to right we follow, guided by the process known as reading, pausing only when instructed by the comma, stopping only when the full stop demands it. The function of grammar forges the functioning of meaning, keeping the Wandering Jew1 outside, the strandloper2 walking to the next coastal port where fishing is

—————— 1 I use the expression here to indicate who is kept out of the main flow, the main text of writing as White Mythology—who is punished. The mythical figure or legend of the doomed Jewish sinner who is forced to wander without the possibility of rest in death until the second coming of Christ has been utilized frequently for centuries, some argue from about the thirteenth century. Some of these depictions include the taunting of Jesus on his way to the crucifixion, the punishment of Cain who is banished from his home after having sinned; he killed his brother Abel. The emphasis here in the text is to draw attention to the perpetual punishment inflicted on those who do no comply with the laws of language. In German the expression ‘Ewige Jude’ means the Eternal Jew. In French and other Romance languages, reference has been made to the ‘wanderings of the Jew,’ as in French ‘le Juif errant,’ and dates back, in some cases, to the Medieval period. I reference it here in German and in French to covey how commonly the expression is used. 2 I evoke the colonial term strandloper [Afrikaans: beach walker] here to indicate the punishment strandlopers received for not complying with Dutch then British law in South Africa. The term strandloper was given to San people, and those with San heritage, who walked and lived on coastal beaches refusing to be stationed and controlled in one confined area after Dutch usurpation of the land. The common denunciation of the lifestyle of the San was often expressed in terms that suggest they walked, talked, danced, got drunk, fornicated, made babies, then went to the next beach to do the same thing. Beach

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allowed, and he can again live off the sea without getting caught by it. In the moment when the pleasure of the text is stifled, held captive by words which dwell in orderly form, then the text fails to clasp the continuity of thoughts that cannot be caught, cannot be brought to bear to live in the lines that writing allows, that computer screens make possible. To think in the present, write in the present, and overlook the years, the months, the days, the hours of brutality who, murdered cannot come to the page in resurrection. The line of division, forces us to cross over. To think outside of the line of the page. To think of the continuous line of colonialism punctuated by the continuity of coloniality. To hear a speaker, is to give her that voice in the text because her sound is denied. Sound is not text; sound is text when transferred as word. Sound becomes the word. Sound is the reading of the voice that echoes through retelling. Sound is the possibility of reading alongside and within, outside of the text yet inside; sound is the disruption of reading… for to read in silence and not hear the gagging gurgle of gross indecency, genocide, germs growing on overgrown patches of ground is to be complicit. Lips sealed in blood. Voices treasured, bones measured, heaped, piled, burnt. The disorder of reason is created when trauma is packaged as knowledge: you read on the white page in linear form in order to dissociate from the day-to-day acts of coloniality. European Reason forces, penetrates, without your knowledge—it is invisible—because your knowledge is not regarded as reason but your genocidal death is reason itself, anemic, no blood, no flesh. The penetration of the land is lost in the civilization of the colonial language… writing it in the straight and narrow, aided and abetted by the grammatology of colonial languages, keeping the weight of the African tongue outside. Punctuation punishes and evades; it demands that writing have structure, form and no weight. No weight. No measurement. No gram. No weight of your tongue—no measurement. No measurement, not even an ounce of the flesh that was spilled can filter through to disrupt the written word otherwise it is not a sentence, a paragraph, a text. What is a text, a decolonial text? Does the decolonial text start with a narrative of freedom? Narratives of freedoms, of self-declaration of the acquisition of freedom from coloniality toward decoloniality. Why is the deconstruction of

—————— walker and beachcomber communities are common in several parts of the world where people subsist on the ocean. An enviable lifestyle in the eyes of some, a dreaded immoral way to live in the eyes of others, for which punishment had to be metered out on a regular basis.

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the subject necessary? Is it not at each occasion as we examine the ways in which the subject is situated that we discover the task we undertake in the process of decolonizing gender? Each moment in history has to undergo its own process of unpeeling the history of each subject in a genealogical way, and examine the ways in which we interact with one another, how that interaction is layered in time, sealed in historical events, interlocked with each day as the perseverance for Empire was executed. Can we, however, connect the subject to the system of domination which sustains her subjectivity, which sustains and asserts her presence and as we do so, do we severe ourselves from the gendered components of her identity that experience a similar patriarchal chastisement that we have been subjected to? For one subject, the woman subject as colonizer, there is support within White Supremacy and Empire, buoyancy, structures are in place to further her agency alongside her father, brother, son; for the woman subject as colonized, there is none. Each will be subjected to the rule of the father; each will be a victim of rape, sexual assault and incest. A Black critique. A critique of being Black and of how that Blackness informs one’s critique. And to do so, to offer it, in the English language, as though it were a gift means the possibility of wrapping it in words usurped from the very depths of coloniality—where words are devised to brutalize Blackness. English words are the currency of the language that I inscribe this critique. Words meant to line itself up in an order that speaks the meaning of its civilization, an order within which the colonized is kept hostage; an order that buries the colonized deep into the sand of the Eastern Cape, Kaffraria3… to bury it deep into Namibia in 1903 by the hands of the Second Reich who pushed the Herero and the Nama people into the depths of the land in the German language, drücken, boundaried by barbed wire… death, genocide, at their hands, as unmarked grave, invisibilized by form and structure, invisible in memory, invisible in writing, unknown to the scholar who accepts White Mythology as history. What is the purpose of decolonization for the scholar, schooled in colonial culture and language in mind, thought and flesh: to deflesh, to decase after the bullet has been buried… to excavate, extract the bullet, examine it, see where it was made, how it was made, peruse the purpose of its poison, extract the venom of its

—————— 3 The word kafir, also spelt kaffir, is said to be derivative of an Arabic word meaning infidel. The word is regarded as a racial slur in South Africa, much like the word nigger in the United States. The word Kaffraria was a descriptive word given to a region in South Africa, the Eastern Cape, which was referred to as ‘the land of the Kaffirs.’

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violence. Date it. Remember never to forget it. To enact Black critique is to bring to bear the brutalities of Black flesh, and in the moment of its inscription, to override the rules of writing that has inscribed its White Mythology into the very text where it is absent. To unwrap the scenes of the crime is to write alongside it. To scoop the narrative of the Black woman into your hands, like water, washing your page, writing it with fluidity, digging into the very lines that erase it, that do not tell its tale… lines that mark boundaries within which live only the beneficiaries of colonialism, colonizing the colon as it regulates the sentence, regulates and sentences the writer who does not obey the rules of the English language, determined that you hold up its civilization,4 its etiquette of eloquent distant speech, keeping your flesh, your subjectivity, as far away from the page inscribing its unspoken White consciousness, holding its nose, scenting it with your silence in case the smell of racism rotten, decayed, fermented, can be detected. Callous in its capacity and formation, bundling itself around your veins and capillaries, its memory carried by your coronary pump until it fails, while the callouses of colonialism erases itself from the scenes of its crime and you lie in bed, ready to be buried, in your own grave, nil by mouth, defeated while the battle rages on. To decolonize gender… to decolonize… to open up the word… to remove the colon. Action: colon removed. To de-ize, to remove the process, the movement, the procedures that decapitated Africa—left it with a body and robbed it of its head, stole its mind. Once having removed the colon de·col·o·nize verb (used with object), de·col·o·nized, de·col·o·niz·ing. 1. to release from the status of a colony. 2. to allow (a colony) to become self-governing or independent. verb (used without object), de·col·o·nized, de·col·o·niz·ing.

—————— 4 I reference Jacques Derrida and Frantz Fanon here to convey a relationship between and among writing, history, language and European reason. I show how their individual contributions merge in my work. Derrida says in “White Mythology,” “What is Metaphysics? A white mythology which assembles and reflects Western culture: the white man takes his own mythology (that is, the Indo-European mythology), his logos—that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that which it is still his inescapable desire to call Reason” (1974, 11, original emphasis). Fanon says Black Skin, White Masks: “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (2008, 1–2).

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3. to free a colony to become self-governing or independent. (“Decolonize,” n. pag.)

To decolonize is to grant independence to the colonized from the colonizer yet still to account to her. To decolonize is to release the colonized, to release the colony from its status as colony, as part of the Empire—to release the colony and prevent revolution. To decolonize is to allow the colony to become independent, to offer it such a possibility in the language of the colonizer so that the colonized cannot take back what is hers in the language with which she fought the colonizer’s usurpation… independent yet without the memory of how the wealth of her country was extracted without the audible sound of her Zulu tongue clicking in protest ngeke abulale me… ngeke abulale me… you will not kill me… you will not kill me. To decolonize is to unpeel and examine each layer of colonialism, each segment that is layered with history, lodged in, hooked, entrenched, in words, sounds, blood, with body parts, with breath drawn from the fermented land… you inhale it, draw it in. To decolonize—is to open the wounds of the word; the word gone flesh from its moment of announcement. Ukuze—decolonize… there is no word in isiZulu for decolonize. To colonize, ikoloni… exists because it has happened. Derived from the English word of the colony. The colony was constructed; its work has not been named. To think of oneself as being colonized, or having been colonized, is to think of oneself as having been taken over, invaded, violated, defiled, raped, all of your blood injected with that of your perpetrator as you watch, become an alibi, observe, fight, accept, reject, lie still, live within it and along side it, forget it, allow it to seep into your soul for without it you have no heartbeat. To decolonize is to recognize that you have been taken over. Inhabited. Occupied. To remove the inhabitants and inhabit one’s own body, completely, one’s own mind, reshape one’s thinking is to rid oneself of part of the self that has attached itself and cannot be severed. To forcibly remove settler colonials from one’s flesh is to expel the blood of your great-grandmother. Her blood. Your blood. Her blood. Your mind. Your tongue. Her tongue. Your vision. Her walk. Your gaze. Her death. Your soul. Your sensibility. Her misfortune.

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It is to ask the colonized—the one who admits, declares, confesses to her helplessness, her savage ignorance, the woman determined and poised to speak as beautiful as her blonde teacher demands—who are you? And do you know who you are? It is to know, to accept, to recognize, that they were here, there, everywhere and within the blood that runs as yours, she lives. She is your great-grandmother, your great-great grandmother, your great-great grandfather who sought refuge in your great-great-grandmother’s bosom, or she in his. It is to recognize that she may have seduced him, like she did with any glass of water if you put it in front of her, and he, drawn into the land as though he was supposed to own it, fell in love despite his resistance. It is the only time, your father tells you, where ‘that old man’ had no choice. To decolonize gender Is to ask: ‘who makes this request?’ The Colonizer? The Colonized? Who makes this demand, this call to decolonize gender? This assertion to separate colonizers on the ground of gender, what is it? What is the purpose of this demand to separate the history of racism— the one that threw its legs around already gendered flesh. To show the woman as colonizer in allegiance with the colonized woman when she sat with her legs crossed, looking up at her grandmother, who made her wishes known to her husband while he was in attendance at the Berlin conference in 1884. ‘Aller et nous apporter le Congo,’ she said. ‘Non, laissez-le nous apporter au Soudan,’ said her sister, as she stitched her colonial request into the cardigan she knitted for him at the fire. To remove the colonial means both the White man and the White woman—the agents, complicit in the colonial project, engaged, engrossed in empire; the beneficiaries who regret the event but reap the benefits of its impact, revel in its rewards even if it means to ‘dress down’ in order to identify with the masses while they remain committed to the undoing of colonialism, therefore decolonial, as though by saying it they have rid themselves of a consciousness they do not wish to have. To decolonize gender—is to undress it, to find the spot, the spot of complicity, the g-spot of its Gross National Product, the c spot of its colonial chatter, the clitoral clatter of colonialism where Black women spoke, where all women, colonizer and colonized, were divided: one was for reproduction, one is for pleasure; one was for reproducing and maintaining

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colonialism, the other for the pleasure of reproducing racial capitalism. To decolonize gender is to separate the colon from the colonial; the intestine by which it digests the degraded, minces the masses, chews then swallows, occasionally spitting out the unsavory ones. To decolonize gender is to look to Black women—your peers, your colleagues, your friends, your foes, your family—and to ask of them what you ask yourself without having to ask them at all. Do you see yourself? Do you see yourself in the White woman’s reflection at whose racist jokes you laughed? Do you see yourself? Do you see yourself in the White woman’s voice you just allowed to instruct the Black women in the room and how to be researchers? Do you see yourself? Do you see yourself in the White woman’s gaze as she looks Black women up and down, commenting on their clothes, knowing that she cannot be part of them, she cannot give her clothes to them like Oxfam handouts whereby, as a reward for her noble gesture she is able to feel superior both in fleshy composition and in political presence? Do you see yourself? Do you see yourself on the White woman’s page, as she writes you into her report, commenting on how agreeable you are, how your Black sisters are angry and aggressive? Do you see yourself? Do you see yourself in the White woman’s shadow, as she parades you in front of her White friends as the ‘good Black’ without having to say it, and where you accept it because your presence alone is her reward. Do you see yourself? Do you see yourself being seen?

Shifting the visual paradigm… shifting the geography of reading There are various moments within the two lengthy segments below—taken from even lengthier interviews—I offer here for examination that warrant in-depth interrogation but only some of which I shall unpack. The words of two Black women, from two different continents, both of the same age and generation, both from the era of Black Consciousness and Black Power, both with histories of being arrested, banned, and on-the-run from

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the police allow for a particular kind of engagement that textual analysis alone does not afford. So few narratives of Black women are available to us through texts other than fiction written by Black women, or the few Black women I can rely on who work in the area of Cultural Studies, Black Studies and/or Critical race theory. Examples drawn from theoretical texts either situate Black women as students, in the position of the learner, or not at all. There is a dearth of knowledge on the construction of Black identity in a number of locations—of this there is no doubt. At the same time, my preference has always been to do interviews as a means of situating Black presence in the text as forcefully as possible without the limitations of research formalities that often urge that interviews either be collated, placed at the back of the text as appendices or summed up, stacked together, massed together, truanting outside of the main text, which is reserved for theorists upon whom rests the privilege of inscribing presence.

Remembering the event… Grace is someone I met in my late teen years. She is the mother of a friend who died several years ago; Grace joined her daughter at the Space theatre for an improvisation session during the nineteen seventies when her daughter and I were in attendance on Saturday afternoons. We were just two young girls, one from the slave quarter and another from the rural area forced to live in a township although both our parents and grandparents were born in the slave quarter. I have stayed in touch with Grace over the years partly because her daughter and I almost shared the same birthday and were born hours apart and

The mastering of presence is the mastering of uncovering absence and situating the subject who has been absent yet present as a consequence of the process of erasure; it is to assert presence within the decolonial text, to shift the dominant paradigm, to shift the location of the subject and to destabilize the word itself—subject—to forge presence when little to none existed; it is to engrave presence from the traces left by those who have written before you. Thus, for the colonized subject to be subject is to be thinghood personified—it is to occupy the space of relevance as determined by you—the colonized—

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telephoned each other every year as young adults until her death, and partly because Grace, now in her late seventies is among the few women I know who insist on dancing at a conference or literary festival—whether there is music on the program or not and someone who speaks her mind whether those in attendance want to listen to what she has to say or not. A few years ago when I was doing book promotion in major cities in South Africa we were in touch on a daily basis for two months. We would chat at night and she would share her dairy writings with me on the phone. She had read my work and I was slowly becoming acquainted with her unpublished, very poetic, diary writings. She would feed me a few pages at a time. On each occasion, I insisted that she should publish her work and she would respond that I should keep my nose out of her affairs as she had celebrated more boyfriends than birthdays, some of whom, still alive and well, she added, were now very high up in the ANC. Grace broke out in a rebellious chuckle each time she added the latter. Since I was doing book promotion around the country, she asked me to give a talk to a group of young people at a small town between King’s William’s town and East London in the Eastern Cape while I was in the region. She asked

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despite the conditions under which you enter it… Bertha Mason, Caliban, Kunta Kinte… if not invisibilized then made present as mad, oversexed, enslaved… The colonized as subject, writer, and critic, meanders between and among the multiple locations of her subjectivity—she has to enter the text without the removal of the colonizer and assert her presence where her absence has flaunted its trace. The presence of the colonized in the text is the presence of a historical trajectory that forges signification despite the signs the hollow graves, the skeletons at the bottom of the ocean, gurgling above the foam of waves—Atlantic, Pacific, Indian—ghosting on white pages. To meet, to come together, through fate or circumstance, is the tale the colonized tell on a regular basis and yet, in the moment when the text needs to become text, when the word has to become flesh, and the flesh has to come to the page to bear witness, the colonized serve the purpose of subtext, not yet text, referenced in refereed journals, an afterthought of the event, an appendix, an insignificant organ because of the diet of colonization. To write with grace, to write and bring to the page the life history of Grace, is to write an event wherein lie the history of the colonized, on her terms, as an account offered to the writer as comrade and friend. Grace is her

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whether she could record the talk. I took the opportunity to ask her whether I could do an interview with her because her life history is interesting in more ways than meets the demands, let alone the limitations, of any research project, and she agreed. Our discussion was focused on her coming to consciousness, her university days, the influence of Black Consciousness in her life, and whether it had altered her way of thinking especially in view of the fact that she trained to be a teacher and started her own school for girls and now had a grand-daughter whose postcolonial reading list she found objectionable, which she articulated to me very strongly and as such it often determined both the direction and the content of our discussions. I shall refer to my interview with her as narrative one. Grace has insisted that I use her second name and not her isiXhosa name.

second name, her name second to the isiXhosa name, her Christian name which the colonizer could pronounce; it is her name wherein lie the history of her Herero ancestry, the history of her grandmother’s escape from South West Africa’s [correction: Namibia] Second Reich. ‘Use my name,’ she said, ‘I will not be a pseudonym. I will claim my place in your writing by my name, my English name, which I carry with Herero isiXhosa grace.’ In the moment when the meeting becomes an event, a moment of realization, a meeting place of generations of the colonized who survived to tell the tale, history is inscribed by the moment when consciousness becomes truth, when truth paves the way for possibility, and the reconstitution of the consciousness of the colonizer—however he or she struggles with such an event. The moment when the colonized is inscribed is not a moment of forgiveness or lament for the White woman as colonizer, it is a moment to recount the crimes of colonization and to come to terms with the burden of decolonizing the colonial within her, who has to mourn the death of domination on the terms that her self-interrogation allow.

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Narrative One I was the only one from my village, let alone my family, who went to High School and to University. Fort Hare was the place to be and when Steve Biko came into our lives everything changed. Steve was from down the road, as we said in those days… from King. You know, Barney Pityana is also from the Eastern Cape? I lived quite a way from Alice. I studied by candlelight and I had candle-wax all over my books for most of my teenage years. I walked to Fort Hare with three young men from my village for almost two hours and then back again every evening. All of what I was studying made me feel as though I would only be filling in the gaps— doing what White people did not want to do. When I went to the SASO meetings, the ones that were open to women to attend, I learnt a lot. It brought home the point of what I hear young people now talk about as critical analysis or postcolonial theory and how to apply it to what we read and the way that we read as it shows how colonial discourse is implanted. This is anticolonial and Black Consciousness stuff, as far as I am concerned. They stole it from us—well the anticolonial stuff anyway. They just say it in high-flying English. My granddaughter is at U. C. T. a place

The decolonization of space is a prerequisite for the decolonization of gender; the decolonization of the land is the first prerogative in the process of decolonization, and claiming it, taking ownership of it, taking it out of its illegality means opening up the possibility of equitable distribution. When the lives of the masses have been determined by the usurpation of land, the masses have to take it back. Gender is both contained and situated, it is both colonial and of the colony, and it lives its formation, construction, mutation, transformation and reproduction in all ways under colonialism and then as the colony permits both through legislation and through instituting its own formation as a consequence of the laws of prohibition. The usurpation of land is the usurpation of the people, the usurpation of the people is the usurpation of the psyche of the people, and the body is the psyche—it is where the psyche stages, performs, acts out, tells its tale. When feet walk thousands of miles because the colonial regime has demanded that it stay within the confinements it prescribes, it inhibits, thwarts and chastises the mobility of the colonized; to defy it is to defy the machinery of the regime and do so in spite of its deter-

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I said I would never go and my children would never go. I am neither proud nor ashamed because it is not for me to say where my granddaughter should study. All I know is that I wish I had her guts. She is fearless. She talks about how she challenges professors and I cringe but as soon as she continues with the story I am no longer afraid for her. ‘Goga but I got this from you,’ she says. How she thinks she got her critical analysis from me still beats me because she has gone so much further. Black Consciousness was the only thing that kept me alive… if you asked my late husband twenty years ago he would have said the same. It is good to hear my granddaughter express her Black Consciousness in however small doses I can detect. I don’t like the way she dresses but then again I love the fact that she is a free spirit and does not care what anyone thinks, not even what I think. Being able to be a teacher… well, a retired teacher, and know what I know now about the importance of fighting with literature, fighting with language, and fighting with Sociology, they are all Eurocentric—where Black people are depicted in textbooks as passive victims or these creatures drawn into history because of Dutch and British colonialism and apartheid, is something I wish I was able to do back then. I

mination to extinguish you as though you were a fire. Grace situates her history of resistance without having to declare it; it is evidenced in her ability to go to school, to go to university, to be aware that Bantu Education was geared towards educating her towards servitude. Grace’s consciousness of self, her self-consciousness, is evidenced in her articulation of how aware she is of her surrounding and her location. Autobiography, biography and narrative have been underestimated in philosophical discourse yet given a particular kind of presence in literary criticism; in psychoanalysis without autobiography there is no unconscious to uncover. Without autobiography psychoanalysis would not have its reason. Hegel insists on the subjective moment, why else would self-consciousness precede consciousness of [the thing], Being or surrounding. Self-consciousness is thus the route, the stepping-stone to reason. Having established her reason, Grace is drawn to the Black Consciousness Movement because it is here where she is able to verbalize her disapproval of coloniality, it is here where consciousness—as Black Consciousness philosophy, politics and movement is first and foremost affirmation, bonding, revelation, nourishment. The decolonization of the consciousness of

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am an English teacher trained to do what English was meant to do in those days—make you a good subject of the British Empire. A good, obedient… [kaffir] grateful for your education, and grateful that you can speak better English than people from your village and that you had the privilege and the benefit of reading Shakespeare. If I could live it all over again I would be a writer and only write in Xhosa. The written word is so powerful and yet I felt powerless as a Xhosa girl because I did not know that I could challenge it—the White man’s language—well, you kids did that in 1976. Don’t get me wrong—I did… but not the way that I have learnt through your generation and my granddaughter’s generation. I thank the world everyday for people like you [points to me] because you make me smile and you give a different perspective of the world of the written word. But let me tell you, back in the day when those White women said they were our comrades in the struggle, they lied to our faces and we did not have the will to tell them to voetsek! Instead they patronized us, calling us ‘mamma this’ and ‘mamma that’ like it was so cool and so ethnic. But hey, they spoke down to us, as though we should be so honored that they were even speaking to us, that we needed them… they spoke

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the emancipated slave is thus first and foremost through the language with which to say it—to speak the slavish consciousness and seek the tools with which to transform it, facilitate its transition from Being to Becoming; it is also the realization that within the decolonial project lies the vicissitude of Being… the acquisition of consciousness in the language that defies the project of the infliction of slavish consciousness. Grace speaks in isiXhosa, the language of her heritage, and within the moment where speech is not accessible to the colonizer, the project to decolonize has already begun. The Ngũgĩan prerogative that Grace embraces is one that meanders through the different stages of her education within the colony under its rule; it is one as a Xhosa woman with a Namibian grandmother where consciousness has crossed boundaries, deserts, and escaped the inevitability of genocide… it is one that moved from dehererofication in Otjiherero to the Kaffrarianisation of the kaffir in isiXhosa. To say the word kaffir, to say it when it is forbidden because it is unspeakable, much like the word nigger, is to say it with trepidation, caution, with reluctance, with anxiety as it stimulates the grinding of the colon that regulates the body and the indigestibility of the intestine, clogged with acts of humilia-

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to us as though we were speaking a language that belonged to them and that we should be grateful that it was taught to us because now we can try to sound like them. Ja, those White women put me in hospital. Isn’t that ultimately the aim of the colonizer and his madam? Then she turns around a few years later and thinks she can be my friend? They drive us mad and get us committed to mental hospitals. This is what Fanon saw. Isn’t this what Fanon experienced? Isn’t this why Biko opened a community health clinic? Even that White woman who was my English teacher at the Christian missionary school I attended; when I told her I was going to varsity, she asked me: ‘why do you want so much? Don’t you have enough already?’ I fought that woman but she ultimately marked my work and I had no defense. I did not know the meaning of critical analysis. I knew how to do it, face-to-face, like our people you know, who tell you off in your face, but I did not know that it was called critical analysis. Now when I read my granddaughters books, I bite my teeth out of frustration because I have to teach her the anti-colonial struggles that came out of Africa, which she knows little about… how struggles in Africa are forgotten but which Europe happily take credit for and calls postcolonial theory. Now we

tion, which as a result spits out the word before it passes through the boundary of your mouth and the air that scents the history of your Being. The decolonization of gender is the decolonization of the words with which to say it—colonial words, words bearing the history of your colonization. The decolonization of gender, is the realization that it is gender’s common denominator, violence, gender-based violence that allows the relationship between the woman as colonizer and the woman as colonized to meet, get together, and perpetuate the Fanonian psychoexistential complex. How does reason, European reason, exist within the context of decolonization, when the colonizer who is an agent of the very system she claims to be against and whose demise she claims to work towards, goes home everyday, after her meeting with the colonized, and continues to enjoy the many privileges afforded to her as a beneficiary of White colonization and domination? In the context of the meeting place where the antiracist White woman meets with the Black woman, the language of sisterhood, the ‘mamma-fication’ Grace speaks of urges the reference to being born of a Black woman. The colonizer uses a language to draw the Black woman close to her, using the language of respect offered to women of a certain age in

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have the postcolonial and the decolonial who make the anti-colonial invisible. I’ll be seventy-six next month and I am only now realizing because of my granddaughter how reading and writing shapes the way that we think of history and shape the present and the future. You know, I have to look away when I tell you this. Not a day goes by when I don’t look at my granddaughter and see the resemblance between her and my grandmother. At least my Herero grandmother lives on in her. My grandmother was lead out of Namibia and crossed the border at a time when she could have been shot and killed but she did it anyway. Here tog! She was a child. A blerry kind. It was better than being starved to death and having barbed wire as your comfort and your escape. What do we have to lose? Nothing. We have nothing to lose anymore and so I say to you and your generation— don’t let the country go back to the colonizers. There’s a lot of work to do. We have to keep our eye on the Whites in this country but really, really, we have to battle our own people, everyday, for the most part, because we have been so deeply, deeply colonized. It’s going to take years, a lot of years, but it has to be done. We cannot let a whole generation be born and be buried with their minds as colonized minds. We

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most African cultures, which the agent of colonization had set out to destroy, which in the language that she converses with Grace, speaks testimony to her success. The colonizer does her pathological bonding in English, working towards an antiapartheid state in the language used to colonize the very woman she speaks to and in which, in the perverse pleasure of her contradictory acts of affinity and distance, the face of the queen of England on one side of the coin, the African elephant shot and maimed on the other, in seeking to be child of the mother she colonized, Grace is placed at the center of the process of politicization and depoliticization. The two faces of the coin, one of empire, one of usurpation, speak precisely to the duplicity and deceit that hospitalized Grace. A Being that is brutalized will seek refuge in the mind; the mechanism of consciousness can only hold it together when it is fed the same diet… not peace and poison. To be politicized and depoliticized simultaneously is to face the abyss—the bottomless pit of your own self-destruction. Grace has to cross a bridge which only exists in the intimacy of madness, a space between acceptance and rejection, the space between facing your colonizer and facing the anti-racist activist, the space between your motherhood and the

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owe it to our foremothers to stand up and continue the fight.

child who claims you birthed her— the White woman who ‘mammas’ you and who has enjoyed three hundred years of your usurpation and your death. The language of decoloniality and anti-racism spoken by both the colonizer and the colonized in the same space is a language of madness—the perpetual double-crossing of words into acts until the moment of colonial orgasm is achieved—the ecstasy of defeat. The language of colonial madness, when performed under the purpose of allegiance building— the anti-apartheid women’s meeting of colonizer and colonized—is the movement of familialism towards the autonomy of experiencing violence on your own. This is the moment when Grace ‘becomes mad’ and she has to be hospitalized, alone, and suffer the violence of her condition without being able to point to the source, without the ability to stop the dosage of her terror, without the possibility of refusing the shock treatment given from those whose kindness kills. The Black Consciousness woman is always punished for her stance—for her refusal to collude with White women in her own destruction. The Black Consciousness woman is always punished by attempts at ostracization, by accusations of madness meant to drive you mad, meant to inflict its purpose of pain

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with the possibility that you will become silent, after the last injection of colonization had been administered—by your own hand. In the aftermath of madness, when the order of survival has been restored, the product—a granddaughter— stands the testimony of time.

The meeting… of minds In 2011 during the time that I was making the transition from Guelph, Canada to Durban, South Africa and attending a conference in the United States prior to my departure, I was fortunate to meet a woman in passing at an airport. Dealing with the stress of having flights cancelled and being rerouted I walked over to a coffee shop and asked for Lactose free milk upon receiving my order. Some people bond over smoking a cigarette, which seems to be forbidden in most public places these days, whilst others bond over food items. I reached out to touch the lactose milk carton the same time another woman did. Apart from the fact that she was tall and striking in appearance (which she credits to being a dancer for most of her life) had dreadlocks, wore pearl earrings, bright red lipstick and jeans, she also wore a Steve Biko t-shirt. Her t-shirt caught my eye and she saw

The Cape, the Western Cape, the city of Cape Town. The Cape, the Eastern Cape, the city of Mossel Bay, the town of Kings William town. The subject as writer and critic scrolls across the page to claim her history and her heritage; her place of birth, the place of her grand-paternal heritage and the source of her Black Consciousness—King William’s town, the town of the colonial British King is also the town where the Black Consciousness revolutionary Stephen Bantu Biko was born. In San Francisco, a meeting between minds takes place as a consequence of signification—a Biko T-shirt that is worn by a Black woman over the age of seventy and is identified. The sign is not overlooked; in the process of signification—the relationship between the signifier and the signified—produces speech that drives the process of decoloniza-

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me smiling. This brought us to a moment of acquaintance. After our casual hellos we chatted for three hours and realized that we had several things in common. Soon after Fatima asked me if she could interview me for a radio show she hosted in the California region that focused on women of color. I agreed and we both whipped out our iPads. I asked her whether I could do an interview with her and she agreed; it would have to be done another time, we muttered almost simultaneously. We wrote to each other for several months, and spoke on skype, each time not quite getting to the interview—not because we were forgetful but because we got carried away talking about all sorts of events that had made the news and after an hour or so got called away by other commitments. I finally conducted the interview with Fatima—three months ago, one and a half years after meeting her—which I am focusing on in this chapter. I refer to it in the text as narrative two.

tion. To share the path of decolonization is to share the burden of colonialism and imperialism; it is to bring the colonized to a moment of learning of the struggles in places with which a history is shared. The history of British colonialism, the history of enslavement and the locations where struggles were sought to counter it—Oakland, California, the Cape in South Africa—forges a relationship of continuity. Decolonization does not have an end; there is no pause button as one takes a vacation from the process—it is always on-going, it is always a process by which, among women where gender is centralized, there are ways of engaging with the process that allow for it to be scrutinized, placed under the microscope of history yet without having to declare it to one another. Decolonization is not achieved through one single gesture, act, moment or event because it is never complete. The decolonization of gender demands dissemination to a younger generation. Every social space has its own history, its own history of usurpation and violence, and within it the colonized is both subject and object. Every act of decolonization needs to seek out another, for in every colonized space where histories of violence live, another is born.

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Narrative two When I was a student at Berkley and a Black Panther, it was unthinkable to challenge White professors about their Whiteness—in all aspects. I am talking about White professors who we saw on the march… those who claimed to fight for civil rights but who in the classroom taught literature, Philosophy and History as though Black people did not matter or worst of all—did not exist. We did not exist in Literature, we did not exist in Philosophy and when we existed in History books it was as enslaved beings. The group of Black women I hung with went to class, went home, cleaned and cooked at home, went to jobs in restaurants and shopping malls, went to meetings, went on protest marches, fed our children or our sister’s children, went home to parents who lived far away from us where we were asked about what we were going to become when we finished studying. There was a goal in sight for our parents—that was education and the possibility of working and living inside the America they suffered through and fought for. Neither my brother nor I once spoke to our family about what we were really going through. My sisters and brothers got jobs the minute they finished school. In some way I think I have failed. I

To decolonize gender is to recognize the role that masculinity played in the long fight to freedom; it is to recognize that as Black women we cannot separate ourselves from the efforts of men, whether symbolic or real, in taking a stand so that we could secure rights above humiliation, denigration, death—so that we could envision lives where freedom and dignity were possible. On a podium in Mexico in 1968 two young Black men—John Carlos and Tommie Smith—accept their medals with bowed heads, each wearing a black leather glove, one on the right hand, the other on the left hand, fisted toward the sky in Black Power salute. It was a time where Martin Luther King had already been assassinated; the disillusionment of the Black masses in the United States matched the disillusionment of the Black masses in South Africa. The Black woman is a multi-layered subject whose subjectivity is composed of many different facets; history demands it of her and her contemporary reality expects it of her. She cannot be an angry Black woman; she has to be the woman who graciously meanders in and out of the reality of White Supremacy—this is the reality that she has to respond to… to make herself better by recognizing

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stopped studying; I stopped living my dream because it was unthinkable to me that I would become a victim of the White thinking that I despised. The life of the Black Panthers is all I lived for until such time when I simply removed myself because I could not cope with so many of our people going to jail, being humiliated, being killed. Not a day goes by without wondering whether I should have fought harder. I knew one thing then: that I was slowly becoming enmeshed into the White thinking that I despised and the political struggles I waged in directly addressing my professors— be this with the grades I got, the analysis they offered, which were inadequate and inaccurate, the view of African American culture they offered because they were the experts—were simply not enough. I know that I am not alone. Whiteness was everywhere in our lives, in our books, in the way that we were taught, just everywhere. So many of us, now in our seventies have Black Power to thank for saving our lives… but many of us wondered whether fighting it in the classroom is not where we should have fought harder… I mean in terms of the analysis, the language, the discourse, as your generation insist on calling it—that is what kept us out. We could not fight off bullets in the street and in the textbooks. I kept

her subservience to it. Fatima is at university learning about White culture, White history, and in the communication process where the agent of colonization packages words as knowledge by situating her authority of its history, the word becomes one, and one becomes embroiled in the word. The educated Black woman subject remains silent on her experience of racism, exclusion—silent to her parents who consider her position within the university as a privilege. The Black woman subject as a Black Panther member, someone who stands up for her right to confront the very system of White domination that continues to hold her hostage. She resists White thinking. Considers her continuation at university as detrimental to her black identity. It wears at her. It will wear down her blackness. It is not enough. The offering of slices of her black life is not enough. Black Power saved her life. The emancipated subject who is subject because she furthers the aims of the British empire as a colonial, safeguarding the colony for the mother country against the colonized. The White woman who protests for civil rights—the professional anti-racist—she does not fight to end White Supremacy, she protests for civil rights to be granted, to amend and transform the ways that White

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up the dancing and worked with one of my cousins in setting up a dance school. Even when we handed the school over to a young couple after twenty years, I kept up the dancing because it was the only area in my life that I did not feel that I had to visualize Whiteness in order to express myself through my body.

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Supremacy pursues itself. In the process the professional protester acquires additional rights; she has the right to protest, ungrateful as she appears to be, she acquires additional rights—the right to claim the freedom of those who were enslaved; those who hang on the strings of her generosity. She gets to take ownership of civil rights; the right to teach American history, the right to construct knowledge because she appears trusted, her heart in the right place, her care and consideration shown as jewels because she is able to chip at White Supremacy even though it continues to benefit her, but of which she is only able to complain sufficiently to still keep it in operation.

Works Cited “Decolonize” (2014). Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, LLC, 2014. http://dictionary. reference.com/browse/Decolonize?s=t. 22 July 2014. Derrida, Jacques, and F. C. T. Moore (1974). “White Mythology.” New Literary History, 6.1: 5–74. Fanon, Frantz (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Rastafari and/as Decoloniality Annika McPherson

In 1960, in response to letters from Jamaican Rastafari to the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) asking for support in the face of the social and political hostility they were facing, Principal William Arthur Lewis decided that a survey be conducted by three UCWI staff members. This survey by Roy Augier, Rex Nettleford, and M. G. Smith, entitled The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, came to be known as the Report and outlined “the growth, doctrines, organisations, aspirations, needs and conditions” of the movement (Augier and Salter 2010, 3). Upon its completion W. A. Lewis urged Premier Norman Manley to discuss its recommendations—primarily those concerning a mission to West Africa in order to assess possibilities for repatriation—with prominent representatives of the movement. The Report influenced not only the public perception of the movement, but also subsequent research.1 In his foreword to the 2010 edition, Roy Augier assesses the effect of the Report as having made “Jamaican society better understand Rastas, and gradually to be less hostile to them. […] The first and second printing of the report were sold out. Rastas bought in bulk […], and it was reported, retailed the report downtown at a price which took account of their enterprise. Arthur Lewis had succeeded in helping the Rastas” (Augier and Salter 2010, ix–x). While an earlier UCWI-sponsored field study by U.S. anthropologist George Eaton Simpson in 1953 had focused on the “thematic treatment of Ras Tafari doctrine, descriptions of street meetings and worship” (Augier and Salter 2010, 3), the Report paid more attention to the history, organiza-

—————— 1 After eight reprints, the Report was republished in 2010 as a special issue of Caribbean Quarterly with the previously unpublished Mission to Africa Majority and Minority Reports (1961)—the latter one compiled by the three Rastafari Filmore Alveranga, Douglas Mack, and Mortimo Planno as a counter-position to the official report of the government-sponsored mission—as well as The Report of the Technical Mission to Africa (1962) and the report on the Settlement of Jamaicans in Ethiopia (1962).

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tion and background of the movement. Like in Simpson’s early study, approaches to the movement mainly through the lens of a religious cult are widespread to the present day. The Report also remains a widely cited reference regarding the movement’s historical development and the specification of its “organizations/houses/mansions/groups” (Afari 2007, 203), although newer research has reassessed specific groups’ historical roles, e.g. regarding the popularization of dreadlocks. The disciplinary backgrounds of Augier, Nettleford, and Smith in History, Politics, and Social Anthropology need to be supplemented by taking their social criticism, engagements in Jamaican and Caribbean cultural and artistic contexts, as well as political spheres of influence into account.2 These trajectories and engagements are important because they demonstrate not only the entanglement of the public and academic reception of the movement, but also the crucial historical phase of political, cultural, and institutional decolonization of Caribbean academia in which the ongoing debate on how to study, represent, and interpret Rastafari was initiated.3 At the same time, the Report has been and continues to be heavily criticized, most prominently by Robert A. Hill, who in Dread History “call[s] into question the semi-canonical status which scholars have conferred” on the Report’s narrative of the historical emergence of the movement (2001, 12). According to Hill, the Report is indicative of “slippage of […] myth into the historical record” (2001, 14), especially a far as the origins of Rastafari and its links to Garveyism are concerned. The endorsement of Hill’s study by Ras Sekou Sankara Tafari’s

—————— 2 M. G. Smith was a widely published poet. Rex Nettleford founded and directed the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica and was artistic director of the UWI University Singers. He also edited Norman Washington Manley and the New Jamaica: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1938–68 (1971). Roy Augier was knighted for his work in education in the Caribbean. All three represent a decisive era in the process of the institutional decolonization of Caribbean culture, education, and knowledge production. 3 UCWI was established in 1948 as a College of the University of London and received independent status in 1962 as the University of the West Indies (UWI). Born in St. Lucia (then British West Indies), William Arthur Lewis received his PhD from the London School of Economics and became its first black faculty member as well as the first black person to hold a chair at a British university. He later became first UCWI principal, then vice chancellor of UWI, and was knighted in 1963 in recognition of his service to the Commonwealth. He also served as economic advisor for international commissions and Caribbean and African governments, including to Kwame Nkrumah shortly after Ghanaian independence. In 1979 he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his research in development economics.

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introduction is furthermore indicative of a shift in academic representational politics of the movement. The different, at times contradictory, and increasingly complex discussions of the movement have thus from the beginning been informed by the politics of representation and knowledge production, although little attention has been paid to this aspect to date. While the Report remains one of the most quoted contributions regarding the movement in the sociopolitical context of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, many studies since have examined Rastafari predominantly either in relation to its religious or its popular culture context, while few consider its contribution to what can be described as a distinct culture of decolonization. In the following I aim to shift the angle of the discussion from the currently dominant global ‘postcolonial’ frame of reference with often generalized and undertheorized examples of Caribbean ‘resistance’ to a ‘decolonial’ one which places the movement back into its wider socio-historical and political context of emergence while emphasizing its epistemological decoloniality.4 I argue that such a ‘decolonial’ lens can be productively engaged to refocus critical attention to anti-(neo-)colonial struggles, to processes of decolonization as societal rather than political transformation, as well as to the conceptual challenges which the study and representation of Rastafari continue to pose.

I. Among the many lenses through which Rastafari has been approached, the dominant disciplinary perspectives are Religious Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, and History, which more recently were joined by Linguistics and Popular Culture Studies as well as transdisciplinary Black Studies or Africana Studies inquiries. Within the respective framework and categorization of Rastafari—e.g. as a religion, sect, cult; a philosophy, ideology, or form

—————— 4 For the notion of coloniality as an analytic introduced by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano and de-coloniality as a programmatic project, see Mignolo (2007, 450–453). It is important to note, however, that the ‘postcolonial’ language and rhetoric is brought to Caribbean cultural production mainly from without the region—an observation which supports the oft cited criticism of postcolonial critique as drawing mainly on European post-structuralism and remaining epistemologically tied to colonialism.

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of Black Nationalism; and/or a socio-political ‘problem’—Rastafari selfdescriptions and interventions receive varying degrees of attention. Yet, as in the background story to the Report, Rastafari have always also been agents in their representation, and have not only endorsed or declined being studied in specific contexts, but have produced and disseminated their own writings, cultural practices, and ways of knowing. One central aspect of the Report which later accounts often fail to address concerns the status of Rastafari truth claims: “Truth has two levels in social affairs. There are actual events, and there are statements about actual events. Statements believed to be true are often sociologically more important than those which are true. What people believe or assert emphatically, represents a social force which cannot be disposed of merely by denial.” (Augier and Salter 2010, 4)

This attitude vis-à-vis Rastafari knowledge production can be seen as an early gesture towards the “de-colonial epistemic shift” which “brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics” (Mignolo 2007, 453)—a shift which allows us to re-conceptualize the origins and dissemination of Rastafari. One dominant narrative of the movement’s emergence points to Alexander Bedward, the Revivalist preacher and healer who was active in Jamaica from the eighteen eighties to the nineteen twenties, convinced his followers that they would fly back to Africa, and whose August Town settlement was close to UCWI (Augier and Salter 2010, 4). He was arrested on charges of sedition for a second time after a 1921 march with his followers on Kingston aiming at the destruction of the racialized social order, and was confined to a mental asylum. Of particular importance for a ‘decolonial’ reading of this historical contextualization are two of Bedward’s frames of reference: One is to Paul Bogle, the leader of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion which had both short and long-term implications for colonial administrative changes, for anti-colonial struggles, and for post-independence nation-building.5 The second, more frequent reference is to

—————— 5 For a detailed account of the Morant Bay Rebellion, see Heumann (1994). Popular history versions of the events emphasize the post-emancipation and post-apprenticeship period’s transition, marked by enduring economic hardship and power inequalities, as well as the dire situation of many farmers after the drought years of 1863–64. Following the detention of a black Jamaican trespassing on an abandoned plantation in 1865, local protest action among the villagers of Stony Gut, St. Thomas, led to more charges of ri-

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Marcus Garvey, who is described as a prophet. As many Bedwardites became Garveyites or Rastafari, the movement became identified as a form of Black Nationalism. Although Garvey upon his return to Jamaica after deportation from the United States met with limited support, his doctrine of racial pride and return to Africa resonated with many of those who had followed Leonard Howell, Robert Hinds, Nathaniel Hibbert or Archibald Dunkley, whose preaching of the divinity of Ras Tafari—crowned Emperor Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah in 1930—spread through various groups and lead to the establishment of different, more and less formalized organizations with varying emphases in doctrine (Augier and Salter 2010, 4–19).6 In Hill’s contestation of the Report’s historicization of the movement, Garveyism in turn is put into the broader perspective of Ethiopianism in general and the influence of Leonard Percival Howell is emphasized instead. Hence, what emerges is a very complex narrative of the spreading of Rastafari consciousness through its most prominent early figures and, of course, those who have since self-identified as Rastafari. To date, among the most frequently listed active organized groups are the Niah Binghi, the Ethiopia-Africa Black International Congress (E.A.B.I.C.,

—————— oting and police assault against the villagers. Baptist deacon Paul Bogle led the protesters to the courthouse in Morant Bay, where militia killed seven protesters and the ensuing riot and rebel occupation of the town resulted in many more deaths, turning into what came to be known as the Morant Bay Rebellion. Governor Edward Eyre responded by sending troops, who brutally reacted to the uprising under Martial Law. Bogle and others, among them House of Assembly member George William Gordon whom Bogle had been affiliated with, were executed, and the Royal Commission inquiry into the Governor’s actions resulted in constitutional and administrative changes, replacing a government that had been marked by increasing friction between the planter elite and the laboring population with legislative and privy councils appointed by the Crown and led to the establishment of District Courts. In the phase of post-independence nationbuilding, Paul Bogle, George Willliam Gordon, and Marcus Mosiah Garvey, as well as Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante were declared Jamaica’s National Heroes in 1969; followed in 1975 by Nanny of the Maroons and Samuel Sharpe, two insurgency leaders under slavery who are also frequently invoked in the island’s historiography of resistance. 6 As Murrell points out, “the black theological tradition […] originated not with Garvey but with Pan-Africanist Dr. Love of Jamaica and U.S. Black Nationalists David Walker, Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, and others” (Murrell and Williams 1998, 330). For the relevance of texts such as Athlyi Rogers’s Holy Piby (1924) and Leonard Howell’s The Promised Key (1934) in the context of Rastafari Biblical hermeneutics, see Murrell (2000).

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also referred to as Bobo Shanti), the 12 Tribes of Israel, the Ethiopian World Federation (E.W.F.), as well as The Rastafari Centralization Organization (R.C.O.), The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and, more recently, the Haile Selassie I School of Vision and Bible Study (Afari 2007, 203–4). Yet, any such list of organizations inevitably entails inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms and implies a power of definition, which is why it is important to pay attention to what Afari calls the “independent intelligentsia” of activists: “artist(es), musicians, writers, students, artisans, craft workers, farmers, entrepreneurs, engineers, technocrats, business people and other professionals” who occupy “a strategic role” regarding Rastafari unity in spite of being independent from formal organizations (Afari 2007, 212). Besides such a unifying role of contemporary activists and/or mediators, however, this wide spectrum also indicates the dissemination of a great variety of Rastafari ways of being, thinking, and knowing—a consideration which should also be extended to the historical development of the movement.7 While one of the main concerns of earlier studies was tracing the origins and spread of the movement, Rastafari is increasingly discussed in a global perspective and beyond singular disciplinary confines (e.g. Zips 2006; Boxill 2008). Many references to the movement, however, function as a generalized and undertheorized signifier of ‘resistance’ within what may be described as the wider “postcolonial t(r)opicalization” of the Caribbean through what I call the invocation of a “Slave-Maroon-Rastafari continuum” which pays little attention to articulations or the historical contex-

—————— 7 In the context of black critique, such ways of being, thinking, and knowing have been articulated in many different ways. Gilroy e.g. distinguishes three complex and interwoven “modes of thinking, being, and seeing” as “racially particularistic,” “nationalistic,” and “diasporic or hemispheric, sometimes global and occasionally universalist” modes in the context of DuBois’s articulation of double consciousness (1993, 127) and across the countercultural sphere of the Black Atlantic. Bogues in turn traces “black radical intellectual production” through the historical “critical points of rupture” with the aim of “understanding […] new categories when they are thrown up” (2003, 3). In my reading, the emergence and effect of Rastafari constitutes such a rupture in which modes of being, thinking, and knowing are equally interwoven and cannot be separated. In decolonial thinking, this has been articulated in relation to Frantz Fanon’s influence on AfroCaribbean philosophy through the notion of sociogeny as “one aspect of languaging and knowing” in relation to Sylvia Wynter’s quest for “decolonization of being” (Mignolo 2011, 110).

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tualization of specific events, acts of resistance, and their interconnections and different interpretations.8

II. Unlike the Morant Bay Rebellion mentioned above, which constitutes a popular historical signifier of an uprising of the people against colonial power relations in the ‘Slave-Maroon-Rastafari continuum’, the strikes and upheavals in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean of 1937–1938 are marked by a notable absence of references to Rastafari. As Anthony Bogues has shown, these rebellions “have been widely interpreted as the dawn of political modernity for the region” in that they contributed to the formation of the first recognized labor union and shaped the development of party politics in Jamaica, yet a close reading of their historiography reveals a neglect of the political ideas of popular movements (2011, 66). The strikes and protests across various islands constitute “a regional mass uprising […] which shook the British colonial system” (Bogues 2011, 67n1). In Jamaica, “[f]or creole nationalists, 1938 was the birth of the anticolonial movement, and for the political Left it marked the most massive resistance to colonial domination and a singular event which demonstrated working-class activity and capacity for mass action that could potentially transform a society.” (Bogues 2011, 67)

In spite of Rastafari “not play[ing] a central role in the rebellion,” Horace Campbell explicitly connects the very possibility for such a workers’ revolt to “the ideas of black consciousness which were taught by Garvey and carried forward by the Rastas” (2007, 81). Similarly, Robert A. Hill—albeit with an emphasis on the millenarianism of Rastafari “ideology” which Campbell links to Pan-African forms of protest (Campbell 2007, 69)—assesses it very likely that Rastafari “functioned as an active catalyst in the developing popular consciousness that led to the labor uprisings of 1938 by virtue of its radical vision of black dominion” (Hill 2001, 33). Given the trajectory of the intellectual, political, and cultural transformations of the era outlined above, it is significant that the notion of a “workers’ revolt” was coined by Arthur Lewis in his 1939 Labour in the West

—————— 8 In order to emphasize the commodification that results from such postcolonial exoticism (Huggan 2001), I also suggest the spelling “t®opicalization.”

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Indies: The Birth of a Workers’ Movement, after which “both nationalists and radicals would return to the 1938 events as the touchstone for different currents of Jamaican politics” (Bogues 2011, 67–68, emphasis in original). The commonly neglected activist historiography in turn, which Bogues points to in his call for a “critical subaltern historiography which pays attention to political thought and the frames in which they may be expressed” (Bogues 2011, 66), includes historian, politician, and trade unionist Richard Hart’s observation that “at mass political meetings he received rapt attention whenever he referred to episodes of Jamaican history in which slaves, ex-slaves or ordinary people rebelled” (Bogues 2011, 68). Hart’s 1952 publication The Origin and Development of the People of Jamaica became widely used in union contexts, so that the “story of struggle and resistance to slavery and colonial domination [was furnished] within a narrative that folded slave resistance into worker rebellions and trade union organizations” and made “heroic resistance against racial slavery” the central feature of Jamaican popular history and constituted “a tradition in which radical political practice becomes inseparable from the writing of history” (Bogues 2011, 68–69). In this tradition, nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies popular history, such as Ken Post’s writings for the radical newspaper Abeng, “attempted to mobilize around issues of unemployment, police brutality, workers’ rights and corruption in the Jamaican neocolonial state” (Bogues 2011, 70). Bogues illustrates how Post shifts the discourse on 1938 from ‘worker rebellion’ to ‘mass uprising’ in the context of Marxist revolutionary theory. Yet, and this is decisive for the Rastafari context, in spite of his awareness of the influence of Garveyism and Ethiopianism, Post claims to “know of only one instance of explicit Rastafarian participation in the events of May–June 1938” (cited in Bogues 2011, 71). To Bogues, Post in his structurally Marxist perspective fails to see the broader framework of the Jamaican Ethiopianist strand of black consciousness as anything but “false consciousness” and thus “reduces the most important Afro-Jamaican politico-religious practices to emerge in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Jamaica to lower-level irrational musings unable to come to grips with the island’s class structure” (Bogues 2011, 72). In spite of being a history from below, the Marxist narrative “still remains wedded to a voiceless subaltern” and fails to pay sufficient attention to Rastafari in the context of 1938, while Bogues emphasizes “the ways in which counterhegemonic blocs are formed” and “how political language functions, how

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similar words come to mean different things to different social groups” (Bogues 2011, 72). The main question, then, relates to whether “Ethiopianism was not a counter-consciousness with a different set of values than those of the colonial order” (Bogues 2011, 73). It is in this context that a ‘decolonial’ reading of Rastafari can be positioned, since a “de-colonial epistemic shift” as outlined by Walter Mignolo through “delinking” performs a foregrounding of “other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding” in the face of the “body- and geopolitics” of racist classification and the third-worldization of the recently re-branded Global South (2007, 453). While Bogues addresses the “need for a historiographic practice organized around subaltern speech and practice” (2011, 74) via Sylvia Wynter and Walter Rodney in terms of a cultural history that outlines the prevalent ideas which enabled and contributed to uprisings such as 1938 similarly to Hill (2001) and Campbell (2007), his conceptualization of “Dread history” allows for a broader perspective on Rastafari as a ‘decolonial’ option: “First, Dread history is an attempt both to grapple with the lived experiences of the Afro-Caribbean masses and to link these experiences to quests for emancipation and philosophies of hope. Second, Dread history attempts to excavate from the practices and ideas of the subaltern resistance movements in the Caribbean a worldview in which hope is rooted in a conception of the bourgeois colonial world turned upside down and in radical desire. Third and most obviously, Dread history draws from elements of the Rastafari worldview, to which it has a semantic relationship. Fourth, Dread history collapses standard historical time to understand patterns of oppression and speaks to the silences in the dominant productions of historical knowledge. Fifth, Dread history is redemptive and utopian. Sixth, Dread history speaks in what Kamau Brathwaite has called ‘the Jamaican Nation language’ and in forms of syllabic intelligence. Finally, Dread history is a profound radical ontological claim at two levels. The first level is what Heidegger calls the ‘whoness’—the claim of who am I. The second level is the claim about historical knowledge—the conditions under which we construct the past, and how narrative and collective memory function.” (Bogues 2003, 179, original emphasis)

Bogues’s notion of “Dread history” allows us to understand the political and cultural aspects of rebellious practices as a specific form of historical knowledge which “carries the meanings of past events forward into the present,” e.g. in “the ways in which the memory of slavery is narrated in Rastafari thought” as an “experience” rather than an “image” of the past (2003, 180–181). What is at stake here is the very notion of the historical in

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Rastafari practices, which constitutes a countering of and an alternative to colonial narratives and concepts. For any interpretation of historical events connected to (or, as is the case with ‘1938,’ insufficiently connected to) the movement, including the police raid on Howell’s Pinnacle settlement in 1954 on charges of largescale ganja growing operations and Howell’s preaching of violence, or the increased numbers of ‘dreadlocks’ associated with different parts of the movement throughout and beyond Kingston, the respective broader social and political developments need to also be taken into account. In the nineteen fifties these included large-scale emigration, the (relative) decline of Revivalism as a religious movement which had spread since the eighteen sixties, political party formation activities as well as increasing pressure towards political and cultural decolonization in the wider Caribbean and the African regions with whom Caribbean intellectuals maintained a vivid, often explicitly Pan-African South-South dialogue. Rastafari arguably formed part of that wider dialogue in that they spearheaded ‘decolonial’ options of thinking, knowing, and being.

III. The great variety of linguistic, body-political, and epistemic practices of individual and collective Rastafari “identity transformation” (Price 2009), including notions of “Dread history” (Bogues 2003), should be seen as intricate parts of the movement’s decoloniality. ‘Word, Sound and Power’ as a linguistic practice has effects way beyond the immediate Rastafari context in which it is often invoked (Nettleford 1960; 1979; Alleyne 1988; Pulis 1999). In ‘Dread Talk,’ the use of language as a site of struggle and transformation constitutes an epistemic shift. Rather than placing such a shift in terms of “the postmodern interest in the ideological effects of discourse” or in a “postmodern/postcolonial” framework (Bucknor 2011, 261, 263), a decolonial approach highlights the divesting of colonial—in this case linguistic and cultural—power. At the heart of ‘Word, Sound and Power’ is the assumption that one can actively ‘un-learn’ colonialist ways of perception. The power of the spoken word implies the power to represent. Hence attempts at a correspondence between sound and meaning in Rastafari linguistic practices aim at overturning colonialist power structures —

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and as such the sounds express and phonically embody, as it were, resistance to categorization. ‘Word, Sound and Power’ in Rastafari speech acts and music as well as in (dub and other sound) poetry has shaped and continues to produce ‘decolonial’ culture. Similarly, ‘Ital livity’ as a way of life and culture of spirituality, including Rastafari “culinary identity” (Afari 2007, 144) in their explanation, reasoning and diverse dietary practices exceed clear-cut religious rules and rather partake in the wider decolonial culture that is Rastafari (McPherson 2014). The “prism” (Forsythe 1980) of Rastafari can thus highlight patterns and principles of decolonial thinking and being which position Rastafari epistemology as a decolonial alternative to postcolonial and/or postmodern theorizing of the ‘Caribbean’ (e.g. Benítez-Rojo 1996). Yet, Rastafari also became invested with symbolic power and sanctioned as a signifier of commodifiable ‘Caribbeanness’ by the tourist industry and even the government insofar as it has come to be seen as a “ubiquitous presence in Jamaica’s popular culture” or as a “bearer” of Jamaican “national culture” (Edmonds 2003), often portrayed through a generalized musical lens. Among the many cultural facets of the movement, music has arguably emerged as one of the strongest forces of ‘postcolonial’ generalizations of Rastafari ‘resistance.’ At the same time, however, Rastafari represent themselves in the media (increasingly also on the Internet) and within academia (e.g. Niaah 2009; 2010). More dialogical approaches have gradually shifted the focus away from categorization and lessened the epistemological violence of many texts on Rastafari. While a distinction between individual (self-)representation and teachings/reasonings on the one hand and that of specific groups, collectives, or the movement as a whole on the other hand can be useful and at times necessary, these cannot always be separated from each other. Similarly, the practice of reasoning often follows an inward and outward direction, so that (self-)representation is at times inextricably entwined with affirmatively being and teaching (about) Rastafari. Many materials and utterances thus serve a dual function, which needs to be taken into account when drawing generalized conclusions about the movement based on such statements. The spread and ‘globalization’ of Rastafari has further diversified practices and notions well beyond the frequently invoked binary positions of ‘radical fundamentalists’ at the one end and ‘fashion dreads’ at the other end of the very wide spectrum including the “independent intelligentsia” (Afari 2007, 212) that characterizes the

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movement today. Rastafari women’s interventions and counter-narratives (e.g. Yawney 1994; Rowe 1998; Tafari-Ama 1998; Collins 2000) furthermore have displaced some of the male-centered narratives of the movement’s emergence and patriarchal structure, while gender relations and expressions of homophobia remain controversial and contentious aspects.

IV. Of particular importance in a ‘decolonial’ reading of Rastafari are the multiple timelines and trajectories of the Black Atlantic and especially the South-South dynamics of Pan-Africanism, Black Nationalism, and the era of decolonization, including the comparative development of Ethiopianism as a religious movement in sub-Saharan Africa and its aspirations not only towards religious, but also political freedom. From the eighteen eighties onwards, the cultural and the political spheres here, too, became conjoined in the religious one. In spite of the colonial entanglements of Christianity to which it remained tied, Ethiopianism in its move away from mission-led practices strove towards religious, cultural and political liberation. The nationalist and Pan-Africanist dimensions of Ethiopianist movements across Western and Southern Africa of course also included associations with black churches and radicals in the Americas. The importance of Caribbean and especially Jamaican contributions to this broader South-South narrative across the religious, political, and cultural spheres remains overlooked when movements like Rastafari are referred to only in religious terms or in popular culture perspectives. Historiographical blind spots such as Rastafari participation in ‘1938’ need to be addressed in order to counter the dominant narrative of the secularization and channeling of anti-colonial political activity into party and trade union politics. Although recent scholarship on Rastafari has begun to pay more attention to the aspect of epistemology (e.g. Barnett 2012), the broader political dimensions and implications of Rastafari ‘decolonial’ knowledge constructions, articulations, and embodiments remain to be fully explored. As Bogues has pointed out, however, such an enterprise might have to entail a rethinking of “the very category of the political and the issues which circle around human beings’ attempt to reformulate the grounds of an associative community” (2011, 76). By reading ‘1938’ outside of the conventional framework of “the be-

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ginnings of Jamaican political modernity,” Bogues has opened up a new interpretive lens which in its call for “new archives” (2011, 76) resounds with a ‘decolonial’ agenda and cautions against generalized ‘postcolonial’ invocations of ‘resistance’. An understanding of Rastafari as a culture of decolonization as outlined above allows us to reconsider both the movement’s origins, multiple temporal as well as spatial trajectories, and its impact far beyond ‘postcolonial’ analyses of globalized Jamaican popular culture. Its decolonial impetus is constituted by linguistic practices such as ‘Word, Sound and Power,’ bodypolitical practices of ‘Ital livity’ and individual identity transformation within a reconceptualised historicity of ‘Dread history,’ all of which constitute alternatives to the colonially inflected knowledge production and were decisively formed in the middle years of the twentieth century. An emphasis on the movement’s cultural and epistemic de-coloniality thus also provides a different view on and timeline of anti-(neo-)colonial struggle and political decolonization—a timeline which extends simultaneously beyond the fiftieth anniversary of Jamaica’s independence in 1962 and back to the eighteen hundreds, yet has to be carefully contextualized at every turn.

Works Cited Afari, Yasus (2007). Overstanding Rastafari: “Jamaica’s Gift to the World.” Jamaica: Senya-Cum. Alleyne, Mervyn C. (1988). Roots of Jamaican Culture. London: Pluto Press. Augier, Roy, and Veronica Salter (eds.). (2010). Rastafari: The Reports, 1958–1962. Kingston: University of the West Indies. Barnett, Michael (ed.). (2012). Rastafari in the New Millennium: A Rastafari Reader. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Barrett, Leonard E. (1997). The Rastafarians. 1988. Boston: Beacon Press. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio (1996). The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. 1989. Durham: Duke University Press. Bogues, Anthony (2003). Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals. New York: Routledge. — (2011). “History, Decolonization and the Making of Revolution: Reflections on Writing the Popular History of the Jamaican Events of 1938.” In Shalini Puri (ed.). The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics, 66–77. London: Routledge. Boxill, Ian (ed.). (2008). The Globalization of Rastafari. Ideaz 7. Kingston: Arawak.

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Bucknor, Michael A. (2011). “Dub Poetry as a Postmodern Art Form Self-Conscious of Critical Reception.” In Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 255–263. London: Routledge. Campbell, Horace (2007). Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. 1985. London: Hansib. Chevannes, Barry (1994). Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Collins, Loretta (2000). “Daughters of Jah: The Impact of Rastafarian Womanhood in the Caribbean, the United States, Britain and Canada.” In Hemchand Gossai and Nathaniel Samuel Murrell (eds.). Religion, Culture and Tradition in the Caribbean, 227–256. New York: St. Martin’s. Edmonds, Ennis Barrington (2003). Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forsythe, Dennis (1980). “West Indian Culture through the Prism of Rastafarianism.” Caribbean Quarterly, 26.4: 62–81. Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heumann, Gad (1994). “The Killing Time”: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. London: Macmillan. Hill, Robert A. (2001). Dread History: Leonard P. Howell and Millenarian Visions in the Early Rastafarian Religion. Kingston: Miguel Lorne. Huggan, Graham (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York: Routledge. McPherson, Annika (2014). “‘De food dem produus me naa go iit it’: Rastafarian ‘Culinary Identity’.” In Wiebke Beushausen, Anne Brüske, Ana-Sofia Commichau, Patrick Helber, and Sinah Kloß (eds.). Caribbean Food Cultures: Culinary Practices and Consumption in the Caribbean and Its Diasporas, 279–298. Bielefeld: transcript. Mignolo, Walter (2007). “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality.” Cultural Studies, 21.2/3: 449– 514. — (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press. Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel (2000). “Holy Piby: Black Man’s Bible and Garveyite Ethiopianist Epic with Commentary.” In Hemchand Gossai and Nathaniel Samuel Murrell (eds.). Religion, Culture and Tradition in the Caribbean, 271–306. New York: St. Martin’s. Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel, and Lewin Williams (1998). “The Black Biblical Hermeneutics of Rastafari.” In Nathaniel Samuel, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane (eds.). Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader, 326–348. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Nettleford, Rex M. (1960). Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica. Kingston: William Collins and Sangster. — (1979). Caribbean Cultural Identity: The Case of Jamaica. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Niaah, Jahlani (2009). “‘Jah Dash a Fire pon di Bleacha Dem’: Rastafari Affirming the Royal African Presence.” JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies. 30 May 2013 http://www.africaknowledgeproject.org/index.php/ jenda/article/view/531. 11 July 2014. — (2010). “Towards a New Map of Africa through Rastafari ‘Works.’” Africa Development, 35.1/2: 177–199. Price, Charles (2009). Becoming Rasta: Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica. New York: New York University Press. Pulis, John W. (1999). “‘Citing [Sighting]-Up’: Words, Sounds, and Reading Scripture in Jamaica.” In John W. Pulis (ed.). Religion, Diaspora, and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean, 357–377. New York: Adelphi University. Rowe, Maureen (1998). “Gender and Family Relations in RastafarI: A Personal Perspective.” In Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane (eds.). Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader, 72–88. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Simpson, G. E. (1955a). “Political Cultism in West Kingston.” Social and Economic Studies, 4.2: 133–149. — (1955b). “The Ras Tafari Movement in Jamaica: A Study of Race and Class Conflict.” Social Forces, 34.2: 167–71. Tafari-Ama, Imani M. (1998). “Rastawoman as Rebel: Case Studies in Jamaica.” In Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane (eds.). Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader, 89–106. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wynter, Sylvia (2003). “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.3: 257–337. Yawney, Carole D. (1994). “Rasta Mek a Trod: Symbolic Ambiguity in a Globalizing Religion.” In Terisa E. Turner (ed.). Arise Ye Mighty People! Gender, Class and Race in Popular Struggles, 75–83. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Zips, Werner (2006). Rastafari: A Universal Philosophy in the Third Millennium. Kingston: Ian Randle.

Intersecting Identities and Epistemologies in Rozena Maart’s “No Rosa, No District Six”1 Jean-Paul Rocchi

Postcoloniality and Post-identity Up until the nineteen sixties and seventies, self-image in the black literature of post-slavery and postcolonial societies was used more as a pretext to underscore the caesura between the self and the Other than as an occasion to examine more closely the recreation of separateness and its underlying psycho-social and historical motivations. For the new generation of black writers of the nineteen nineties, the literary aim is not to represent a selfimage that, like the negative of a photograph, inversely reflects the image of the postulated Other it was before the political changes of AfricanAmerican desegregation, the decolonization of Africa, the advent of negritude and créolité or, even more recently, South African liberation. For these writers, this consists of making the text and its signification into the mirror of a self rendered continually fissionable by the energy of sexual desire. Not that the fission of a black self is absent from the works of Baldwin, Lorde, Morrison, or Walker, to only cite African-American authors, but the desire at work in their texts—though central to their project of the diffraction and complexifying of self-image, most notably through female and homosexual prisms—are contained within the framework of identity in its familial, communal and national declensions, which form a system of reference through which desire signifies. Emerging from the dying ideologies, paradigms, and certainties of the twentieth century this new generation of black writers has a marked defi-

—————— 1 A longer version of this chapter has been originally published in 2006 under the title “Walls as Words as Weapons as Womb as ‘Woooooow’; Fente murale, fente t/ex(t)u[elle], fondu identitaire: Jouir/Ecrire ou la post-identité dans ‘No Rosa, No District Six’ de Rozena Maart.” In Patricia Donatien-Yssa (ed.). Images de soi dans les sociétés postcoloniales, 179–215. Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit. Translated from the French for this volume by Joëlle Theubet and reviewed by the author.

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ance towards any predetermined identity—including those fixed by the theoretical-cultural literature of psychoanalytical, sociological, and historical inspiration that represents all or a part of their intellectual training. They make sexual desire and its literary metaphorization into the active principle of excess: rather than having desire included in identity the point is now to overflow its boundaries. The self thus erupts from the image and by the fission dynamizing it, regenerates, transforms, and expands over multiplied spaces like so many contiguous territories adding on to themselves. Whether specializing in gender, sexualities, or geographical-cultural spheres, these novelists, short-story writers, poets, and artists—such as, among others, Sapphire, Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, Randall Kenan, Melvin Dixon, Adrian Stanford, Assotto Saint, Norman G. Kester, or Rozena Maart to whom this chapter is specifically dedicated—are the writers of the regeneration of the ‘after’ through desire. Conceived as both an act of the imagination and a carnal encounter between the reader and the text, their writing, which one could qualify as of ‘post-identity,’ follows the deterritorializations, the circumvolutions, and the transformations of consciousness tied to desire, freed from historical determinism, territorial confines, and societal injunctions. The weight of the post in the post-slavery or postcolonial heritage is thus lightened and the very idea of chronological rupture, of spatial disjunction, or of the schize of the subject thus becomes obsolete. Intended as a new self-image, postidentity does not in as much signify a desertion of political territory but rather its reconfiguration around the subject, singled out by his/her lifestyle choices, singular in his/her esthetic options. At the heart of this reconfiguration of the subject, whose identity crisis reflects those of the social and political bodies, exists a free and multiple identification in opposition to those which would continue to prescribe or proscribe allegiances to race, nation, gender, and sexuality. These allegiances are indeed problematic in as much they absorb both the subject and his/her subjectivity to the detriment of other options of identity. The subject is entirely engulfed in an impulse towards a singular idea of him/herself—an impulse that is all the more powerful as it stems from the trauma of a rupture. This rupture is catastrophic for Paul Gilroy when he defines the unitary space of the black diasporic diversity through the common experience of slavery (Gilroy 1993, 187–197). It is fantasmatic, and no less traumatizing, for Freud when he makes heterosexuality out to be the

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univocal and culturally logical expression of masculinity under the constant menace of castration (Rocchi 2003). From the viewpoint of postcolonial studies or traditional psychoanalytical discourse on the subject, and beyond their scientific and/or disciplinary expectations, the rupture works paradoxically in the same way for the continuity of values that it induces: there is in fine only a rupture in the changing of paradigms and not in the justification of their axiology. The post here is pretext: it circumscribes nothing more than what was already postulated about the becoming of the subject. No matter what prevails from an epistemological rupture—which is, in fact, illusory—these discourses consequently come back to an unmistakably essentialist conception, marginalizing the multiple identifications through which the subject identifies him/herself, for example, as both male and homosexual, black and queer, South-African and lesbian. Studying black and queer literature thus offers possibilities for theoretical and political deconstruction, not only because the authors’ complex subjectivities reveal the blind spots of the doxas about the subject but also because the literary position, the bringing into play—the play of desire—of plural, dissimilar, contradictory identifications, accepted or rejected in the course of reading, create a mise-en-abîme on the identifications underlying the construction of individual and collective identities that the theories of the subject strive to synthesize and simplify to rein in and put in place (see Rocchi 2006b). Here the post is political. By the term ‘writers of post-identity,’ one therefore does not so much designate those who come after the generation of affirmed identity—as implied in ‘postcolonial’—but, in a primordial manner, the authors and intellectuals who strongly deny the nature of the political role given to post and to the mirage of the monolithic definition of the subject, his/her identifications and his/her identities; and where writing about desire is just as political. Influenced by queer culture, Deleuze’s identity theory, feminine and feminist writing, Baldwin’s anatomy of the subject’s multi-positionality, Glissant’s rhizomes, and Derridian deconstruction, post-identity is a practice exploring in-betweeness, indetermination and intersectionality, while challenging the subject’s enclosure in historicity and in teleological designs. It also calls into question the imposed and refuted cultural identifications that make identity into an invariable state and the subject into the subject of an ‘after,’ of the melancholy-of-the-too-late—his/her gaze fixed on the individual and collective past by whose yardstick he/she never ceases to measure itself and die. As the driving force of this challenge, sexual desire

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also takes on the color of black consciousness. This places these writers at the exact confluence of, on the one hand, black texts remaining under the dictates of identity—and even those preoccupied by the representation of sex—and, on the other hand, of contemporary Western literature in tune with the lesbian, gay, transgender, bi, and queer social movements but ignorant and/or unconscious of the existential and transnational dimension of the present-day black being. Making their lives and their works the place for connection in which there is neither a before nor an after, neither a rupture between the political and the esthetic, nor a hiatus between the becoming of the subject and the future of the community, between the black being and sexual desire, post-identity writers question the construction of identity and the excessive role that ‘the after’ plays in it. Forming a wall upon which the free and multiple identification of the subject hits a stumbling block, ‘the after’ and the caesura that open the field of identities become, through the text, the opening for the rebirth of the self. A desiring self, the same as everyone else, like the text in which desire signifies the possibility of many concomitant and complementary identifications, where one’s self-image is always displaced and indeterminate, an identity freed from predetermination, liberated from the genitive tyranny of the ‘of’ that cuts, links, and binds the self to the image and its social introjections. The text of desire as the location of a metaphorical self. South African writer Rozena Maart is an example of this ethic and this esthetic: black, sexual, political, and continually plural.

“No Rosa, No District Six”: Post-identity as Writing Project In the short story “No Rosa, No District Six,” for which she won the Canadian Journey Prize in 1991, the South African writer Rozena Maart describes the awakening of a black female consciousness through the witnessing of a lesbian primal scene. Through the coalescence of the discovery of desire and the rediscovery of the South African nation the “e mag e nation” of the child Maart was under the apartheid regime in the Cape Town neighborhood of District Six is channeled through the writing of the adult she has become (1992, 118). Through old stigmas of memory, now transformed into textual interstices, the child’s imagination and the adult’s

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writing project a new image; from the white traces of dislocation, the nation of apartheid is recomposed by imagination/“e mag e nation” of the writer and the child, reunited (1992, 118). A fictional self portrait, the story opens with an uninterrupted flow of words from “the female-child” (1992, 122) whose fertile and dissident imagination cannot be contained by familial and institutional authorities. Rosa’s imagination resembles her speech. A phonetic mix of English, Afrikaans, and a ‘patois,’ whose unique rhythmic accentual chain imposes its surging parataxis on the text, unpunctuated until the final period that closes the long first sentence in which the little girl’s entire discourse is contained: “Mummy and mamma always say dat I make tings up and dat I have a lively e mag e nation and dat I’m like der people in der olden days dat jus used to tell stories about udder people before dem and dats why mummy and mamma orways tear my papers up and trow it away but tis not true I never make tings up I orways tell mamma what happened and mamma doan believe me and I tell mummy and mummy doan believe me too and den I write it on a paper or on der wall or behind Ospavat building or in der sand at der park and Mr Franks at school he don’t believe me too cos he says dat I orways cause trouble wi der teachers and I talk too much and I jump too much and I doan sit still too much […].” (1992, 118)2

Prescriptive vectors of censure and, at the same time, passers of memory, the ambivalent figures of the mother and the grandmother place Rosa in a matrilineal relationship and the fruits of her “e mag e nation” in the myriad popular stories that compose the collective South African history of District Six. This setting is reflected moreover in the structure of the collection Rosa’s District 6 (2004) in which each story develops a particular narrative depicting different inhabitants whose stories and destinies are nevertheless unified by Rosa’s viewpoint and words, which first introduced them in “No Rosa, No District Six,” the opening text in the collection. In their

—————— 2 “No Rosa, No District Six” was first published in Fireweed: Feminist Journal (Toronto: Spring 1991) then in The Journey Prize Anthology 4 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992) before once again being published in the short story collection Rosa’s District 6 (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2004). In the present article, we will use the version published in The Journey Prize Anthology 4, whose typography conforms more closely to the original version and to the author’s intentions. All references to the stories other than “No Rosa, No District Six” come from the collection published by TSAR in 2004. Rozena Maart offers a meta-reading of “No Rosa, No District Six” and of the politics of consciousness writing unfolds in Michlin and Rocchi (2013, 21–33).

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ambivalence, the mother and grandmother are trigger elements and a point of departure towards which the childish logorrhea returns. This circularity combines two heretofore distinct temporal spheres: first, the present of the little girl’s narration that anchors her story and creative imagination and, second, the sphere of her story-told including the vexing reprimands of the George Golding Primary School teacher, Mr Henson, who teaches the official history of European colonization in a white, male perspective soon subverted by the little girl’s off-centered rereading: “[…] and today Mr Henson ga me four cuts cos he says dat I was dis o be dient and dat I cause trouble in der class but tis not true cos you see last week we celebrated Van Riebeeck’s day on der sixt of April wit der flag […] and four weeks ago Mr Henson toal us dat Van Riebeeck made Cape Town built a fort and erecticated a half way station for food and supplies for der Dutch people and der European people […] and den Mr Henson also toal us dat Van Riebeeck’s wife was Maria de la Quelerie […] and den Mari der big girl in my class, she has her periods oready she toal us she wondered where Maria de la Quelerie put her cotton clot wi blood on it in der ship from Holland cos Mari’s mummy toal her not to tell her daddy her broder or her uncles about her periods cos men mus never see or know dees tings […] and Mr Henson ga me four cuts on my hand cos I drew a picture of Maria and not Jan and Mr Henson say der assignment was about Van Riebeeck and not Maria and I say is der same ting cos it was all part of der same history lesson and Mr Henson screamed at me to shut up […].” (1992, 119)

Represented by the drawing of “Maria and not Jan,” Rosa’s rewriting of history associates European colonization with male power. Marked into the South African landscape by the transformation of the fortified city of Cape Town and in Rosa’s flesh, bruised by her beating at the hands of her history teacher, the double violence of colonization and male dominance becomes the source of a female and feminist reappropriation through the motif of menstrual blood. Menstruation is such an object of fascination for Rosa and her friends that her classmate Mari, who already has her period, wonders if Maria de la Quelerie could have hidden hers from the curious males who had embarked with her on her transcontinental voyage. An inter-generational and trans-racial secret shared by Rosa, her classmates, and Maria de la Quelerie, brought back from the past by the historical-comical fabulation of children, menses are the point of the overlapping of individual and collective history, spheres of the past and present, the creative imagination and historiographical determinism. It is from this red blood, symbol of violence

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suffered and the indelible trace of femininity, that Maart defines a series of displacements, which are themselves subsumed by the merging of the double autobiographical ‘I,’ the surpassing of an identity fixed by the ‘after,’ the birth of a self-consciousness in the process of becoming: the child as female, the female as child, the child and the female as female-child. The inner workings of the mise en scène of consciousness, these displacements are deployed on spatial-temporal, historiographical and feminine textual terrains.

District Six: the Location of “E mag e nation” The first displacement is geographical and historical. It concerns the passage of colonists from European ports to South African shores and is mirrored locally by the deportation of 60,000 essentially black and mixedrace persons, forced to leave District Six between 1966 and the early nineteen eighties. An inner neighborhood of Cape Town, where the harmonious cosmopolitanism, the spirit of brotherhood and the opposition to the apartheid regime defied the fascism and ideological racism of the Nationalist Party, District Six was declared a white zone by the promulgation of the Group Areas Act in 1966.3 This is the context in which the story is placed, as indicated by the date that closes Rosa’s first-person narrative (“r. 29 April, 1970,” 1992, 120) as well as by the other stories in the collection, all taking place in 1970. Reviving the trauma of colonization, the deportation of the inhabitants of

—————— 3 Even before its alteration by the deportation of the black and mixed-race population of District Six, the ethnic and religious mix of the neighborhood was nevertheless limited by a racial, spatial and social border. The “uppersiders,” whose sufficiently light skin allowed them to pretend to many of the same privileges as Whites, lived on the upperside of DeVilliers Street, at the edge of the more working-class District Six. As the narrator of the short story “The Bracelet” states, and contrarily to the racist ideology of apartheid, it is not one’s skin pigmentation that is a sign of belonging to District Six but rather one’s posture, manners and speech (2004, 164). This strict association between speech and body language is inspired by Fanon: it places the body at the center of a process of developing consciousness and makes black consciousness an affair of positioning rather than of a determinism in which skin color is prescriptive of identity. This conception of black consciousness as positioning, choice, and mental attitude, is also shared by the intellectual and militant South African Steve Biko who, in I Write What I Like, writes: “Being Black is not a matter of skin pigmentation—being black is a reflection of mental attitude” (Biko 1978, 48, qtd. in Maart 1993, 134).

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District Six nevertheless opens up a space for transcendence; from the location of her new life in Canada, a chosen displacement, the writer reestablishes the memory of her childhood in District Six, topos of the “e mag e nation” (1992, 118), a fictional nation unfettered by boundaries and rules. In the writer’s memory and in Rosa’s vision, the child, after skipping school, immerges into the heart Cape Town; the city is vibrant, full of noise, sounds, and rhythms that Maart attaches to women, children, and men in their daily lives and most mundane moments. Cape Town is recreated by the imagination, brought back from the writer’s past and offered to the eyes of the little girl, making a memory into an active and subjective place of historical significance, frontally opposed to the alienating commemoration of colonization. The city suspends time outside of itself in a memory that is not stalled in the past but is oriented towards transformation, a memory nourished by the past but freed from its laws and its univocal sense. Confined to the space-time of colonization, Cape Town enters, liberated, into the consciousness. From the first description of the city, a living body, it is this dimension that jumps out at us and unfolds once again in a very long sentence: “The shuffling of feet, the racing of pulses, the screams of little children being bathed by older sisters and brothers in the backyard, the green hose pipe curling itself up among the plants, the sound of several litres of urine being flushed down the toilet in the backyard, where its circular swashing motion competed with bundles of early morning hair awaiting its disposal, the sound of creaking floors as boys and men raised themselves from their place of sleep, the smell of fire as the stove brewed its first round of morning tea, the ravenous chirps of gulls circling the street for morning bread crumbs, the sound of peanut butter jars being emptied by eager hands clenching sharp knives […] the disgruntled noises of dockyard men walking the charcoaled streets, their feet removing chips of wood and cigarette butts from the previous nights fire, their eyes looking ahead matching their place of work—the sea, with the sky above the heads—and spotless Table Mountain—grey with not a speckle of white on its top—these formed the backdrop of this early morning Black experience.” (1992, 122)

Reinforced by the anaphoric value of the final demonstration that also constitutes the intention of the sentence, the use of topicalization here pulls the text towards the past, but is in conflict with its object: the long enumeration of nominal phrases and gerunds that render the past present. The syntax plays with temporal categories and with the semantics that they generate, the images of the past give way to vision of the consciousness, where the reminiscence is a means of taking up the past in order to change

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it, to give it another meaning. It is not the memory of colonization that runs through the alleys and streets of Cape Town, but the intemporal meaning that Rosa/Rozena’s consciousness gives to it.

Walls as Words as Weapons as Womb: Displacement & Transformation Transgressive, the second displacement is historiographical in nature. By refocusing the point of view on Maria de la Quelerie, women rejoin the national history from which they are held apart (“it was all part of der same history lesson”; 1992, 119); this marks a gendered separation of the history-making that also refuses to consider the fight against apartheid as exclusively masculine.4 Thus, with the pretext that she writes on the walls of the house, Rosa’s mother, fighting against injustice, succeeds in having her daughter reintegrate the school after her expulsion (1992, 120). From this return back to the place of imposed knowledge, the desire is awakened in the little girl to render to women what they had given her: a black and feminine consciousness that reinvents the self just as the words written on the walls of would-be fortresses can rattle their very foundations. Personal and collective, black female consciousness is passed through education and a matrilineal transmission of knowledge that come, nevertheless, essentially from the familial sphere and not from the institutional space of the school, as Mamma Zila, Rosa’s grandmother, recalls in “The Bracelet” (2004, 183). A surface for dissident writings, the walls in “No Rosa, No District Six” are Rosa’s friends, as the third-person narrator immediately explains when taking over the second part of the story: “Her sticky fingers cupped

—————— 4 The criticism of masculinism in South African nationalism operates also through the fact that Maria de la Quelerie, dominated in her position as a woman, is also in a dominating position in her role as a white colonizer. She also penetrates and colonizes South Africa by the small opening of the Cape. Thus feminized, the patriarchal appanage of penetration—of the colonial and/or sexual variety—loses its self-sufficiency and with it the myth of nationalist rhetoric that makes liberation and the entrance in postcoloniality into the masculine response to an offense made to men, thus justifying the subordination of women and persons of LGBTQ orientation (Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/ Queer) in this fight. Rozena Maart responded to this in her poem “Women’s Oppression, The Struggle Still Continues,” published in Talk About It!, From District Six to Lavender Hill (2000, 48–49).

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the flesh around her cheeks as she eagerly observed the friendly wall upon which her writing spoke her truths” (1992, 120). Before Rosa stands the wall overlooking the George Golding Primary School, the surrounding wall where one commemorates the humiliation of colonization (“last week we celebrated Van Riebeeck’s day”; 1992, 119) and where one teaches alienation by recalling the so-called benefits of colonization for the local population. On the wall, a dominant erection of colonial power, the symbol of a national story whose stones and cement are white, Rosa, through her writing, speaks her truths. This polymorphic rewriting of history makes women into its principal object, prefers graffiti on a wall to institutional formatting and makes the studied object into the subject living her own knowledge: an ensemble of truths made fluid by speech and implicitly opposed to scientific truth—whether historiographical or anthropological—that by its racial taxonomy fixes, typifies, and underlies the apartheid regime. Compared by her mother and her grandmother to the elder members of the community who never stop gossiping about their neighbors, Rosa’s written truths retain the power of speech: the creation of a network of signification as an experience of plurality. Because the ambivalence of the wall and its historiographical symbolism do not only allow the dominated subject to reappropriate her history, by passing through the place of the alienated Other to that of the liberated Other, transcendent and ready to make the Same eat dust: however European she may be, Maria de la Quelerie is an integral part of the little girl’s rewritten history.5 The wall represents rather a changing of worth, a displacement in

—————— 5 In the story “The Bracelet,” Rosa reappropriates Maria de la Quelerie, an historical figure held in disdain, by dressing up as her (2004, 172). By parading herself in fancydress in the middle of Cape Town and outside of the institutional or conventional dramaturgical space, the little girl not only offers a presentification of a global history detached from the artifices and the ideological orientations of her unique commemoration but she also constructs her own subjectivity. As an actor in the theater, Rosa’s performance inverses the norm-dissidence relationship at the historiographical level. As a social actor, this same performance and her dissident or marginal posture makes the norm lose its naturalizing character and reveal itself as the political construction that the subject has resolved herself against. We find another example of this double movement in the same story, through the character of Nathaniel’s lover whose publicly flaunted femininity in Cape Town (2004, 206–207) extracts him from a history of genders based on the separation of men-women and also makes this division appear as an eminently political and relative social hypocrisy. As is the case in Peau noire, masques blancs where Frantz Fanon affirms being able to “take up his past, valorize it or condemn it by his choices” (1952, 184–185; translated from the French), this is not a break with but a resignification of historical determinism—on the colonial, gender and sexual fronts—by

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the operation of meaning: the Same is no longer opposed to the Other; it is identified to the Other as the possibility of multiple identities. The Same is no longer the truth; it is the Other’s truths. The gap between the official truth of colonial history and Rosa’s experience becomes the space for a polyphonic rewriting of history where Rosa, her friends, Maria de la Quelerie, Mummy and Mamma Zila, and all of Cape Town have their place. Moreover, the historiographical rewriting gives another meaning to history. The break represented by postcoloniality and its shadowy promise of an after-colonization identity, triumphant but confined to itself, are in fact now the slit through which meaning is regenerated, the possibility of a plural-signification transcending the arbitrariness of the sign. It is also, by anticipation, the birth of a South African nation liberated from apartheid that makes the diversity of its communities its credo. Reaching farther than the walls of the George Golding Primary School, a symbol of state oppression, the dream of individual and national liberation is not realized through destruction but through transformation: that of a postcoloniality open to the cosmopolitanism and diversity incarnated by District Six before its destruction, and which Rosa, at least in the diegetic reality, is on the point of discovering and recognizing. The space of the ‘after-wall’ represents then the resistance to both apartheid and the black South African nationalism in whose waters the New South Africa risks foundering. A metaphor for the black South Africans left in the shadows of the national narrative, the crevices between the stones allow little Rosa to climb and pass over the wall with the agility of a grasshopper, to rejoin the lively and multi-colored world of Cape Town where her adventures continue. As in its geographic-historical dimension, the historiography and the synecdoche of the wall have consciential implications. The resubjectivization of the dominated subject, the reappropriation of a unique identity, is not then a freeze frame of an image, the image of the liberation from the tyranny of the Other, or from a self-sufficient and insular after, but rather an opening of the singular onto multiple possibilities. A program of political philosophy that blends into the very esthetic of the texts that incarnate it. On the linguistic front, Rosa’s manner of expressing herself is a form of multilingualism that gives the little girl’s testimony a plural singularity by embedding within it both the national South African narrative and the female consciousness developed in the second part of the story through

—————— means of worldly action that also allows the subject influence the social space in which he lives.

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the motif of the sexual awakening. The white/space that underscores Rosa’s first-person testimony and separates it from the third-person narrative of the rebellious little girl’s adventures is not the wall of the textual ‘after’ that imprisons her in a new identity—“Rosa,” “she,” or “the femalechild”—whose force would be so alienating that she would be unable to verbalize it. On the contrary, the ‘after-text’ is not only dedicated to plural identities; it also keeps the memory of its before and the singular signification that Rosa gives to it. Here the ‘after-text’ becomes the pretext for exposing the chimera of the before and for denouncing the rupture and discontinuity in the text that become the base for the reconstruction of identity. Thus, when the narrator confides that the conflict opposing Rosa and Mr Henson is only one episode in a long history of such confrontations—including the clash between the professor and Mamma Zila, who was ready to come to fisticuffs to reintegrate her grand-daughter into the school—it links the third-person narrative to Rosa’s previous account of the threat of expulsion weighing on her. The first and second part of the story are not a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ that the ‘I’ and ‘she’ signify on a horizontal and chronological axe in a textual order, itself a carbon copy of the colonial political order and its official historiography, but rather the two sides of the same coin: the consciousness of self and the conscientization, active principle and process by which consciousness comes to the self. In this order, superior to time and space, as we saw with the representation of Cape Town, the self happens by and as becoming: the before and after are meaningless. All that matters is the interaction and the concomitance between the consciousness of self and the process that brings it into being. As the active principle of the text, the third person narrative actualizes the ‘I’ of the first part of the story, renders it reflexive by echoing the ‘I’ in its own narrative, whose words, moreover, would not resonate if they had not already been said. The third-person narrative is then the gap, the textual slit in the text, the narrative passage that makes Rosa’s testimony into the performance of a polymorphic narrative in which she is the actress and, in an ultimate example of reflexivity by which the action becomes testimony and creates the story, she plays the role of witness. Through the gap in the wall, through the slit in the text, flows an ‘I’— black and female—that reassembles the multiplicity of identities and narratives through the motif of blood, and more particularly, menstrual blood. The blood is, by the “e mag e nation” (1992, 118), the object of a third displacement. After having been spatial-temporal, historiographical, and

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feminine, this third displacement is sexual, lesbian, and feminist. If, after mentioning her friend Mari’s historical speculations about Maria’s period, Rosa wonders about the possible filiations between Van Riebeeck and Maria, the little girl then quickly discovers that menses announce not only the capacity to engender but also the advent of adult femininity and with it the promise of sexual fulfillment whose spectacle is worth the displacement. Put into images through the medium of a Sapphic love scene, the intrinsic irregularity of sex curbed by the normative discourses of which it is the object, like the relationship between history and historiography of colonization, is not in itself exceptional. Homosexuality is neither over invested with nor emptied of meaning here; it simply is. It is an epiphany in Rosa’s eyes, the consciousness of entering into the community of women that seals, by the pleasure that it conceals and the love of a self that is the same as all others that it represents, the female South African body. Feminine and feminist, homosexual and black, it is simply a South African experience that “No Rosa, No District Six” describes, in the same way that, in “The Bracelet,” male homosexuality crosses all social categories to the point of losing all its intrinsic particularities in them, with the exception of the desire to signify South Africa through the culture of District Six.

Writing & Climaxing: the Imagined Nation of South African Femininity It is at this point of cultural, consciential, and political entanglement that the third displacement of the story overlaps the two precedent displacements in order to denounce the dismemberment and the partition of the national consciousnesses along ethno-racial, sexual, and gender lines. The first sign of this denunciation—and more precisely the denunciation of a certain European and American LGBTQ academic intellectual colonialism—is the absence of the distinctive qualifier ‘lesbian,’ which is never used in reference to Auntie Flowers or Mrs Hood, the female couple caught in the act of lovemaking by Rosa and who, moreover, all District Sixers identify as cousins. However, this absence of communal nomination does not mean that their homosexual acts exclude them from the patriarchal and heteronormative criticism of South African society, as demonstrated in the second part of the short story, which mentions the con-

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straints and frustrations imposed by marriage. By leaving the act and its identification unnamed, the field of identities remains open: the place reserved for South African cultural specificities of lesbian desire is thus preserved. In “No Rosa, No District Six,” one may cite among these cultural specificities the relationship “mummy-baby,” metaphorized by the sexualization of nutrition, and in particular breast-feeding (Gay 1986, qtd. in Spurlin 2001, 192). Male homosexuality also has a dimension particular to South Africa. In the story “The Bracelet,” neither Nathaniel Chambers, his brother-in-law Neville Collingwood, nor Matthew Michaels identify themselves as gay or queer. To designate the social identity that their homosexual practices confer upon them, the men use the term “Moffie,” etymologically linked in the final glossary to “hermaphrodite”: “Moffie: From ‘Hermaphrodite,’ thus ‘Hermaffie,’ which then became ‘Maffie,’ and later ‘Moffie’” (2004, 231). Although stigmatized during and after apartheid, notably by the Black Nationalist discourse making the African identity of the renaissance into an essence incompatible with homosexuality—which was seen as a Western importation—the “Moffies” are an integral part of South African social life (Gevisser and Cameron 1995; Krouse 1993). This is true in particular in Cape Town where their feminization of the male gender is rejected less than it is in Europe or North America. In South Africa, the masculine-feminine division in effect leaves a larger intermediate space for gender negotiation than in the West where, since the Second World War, heteronormativity assigns people to one gender identity rather than to another, and does this much more so than during the first half of the century when sexual practices and gender identities had a less coercive, mutually defining relationship. In fact, the specificity of male South African homosexuality depends on the combination of racial and social hierarchies. The racist ideology of the apartheid, its social expression that links social ascension to the privileged classes to clarity of skin color, and the bourgeois morality that condemns any corruption of these rules, come up against the reality of Cape Town and above all of District Six: a racial and social mixity, a space of intersection and exchange that favors a form of sexual liberty. This relative fluidity of the sexual expression6—which does not equate at all an absence of homophobia—does not mean, however, that Mrs

—————— 6 The time frame of our analysis is not that of South African post-apartheid culture where anti-LGBTQ violence is intense and widespread. The diegesis of the short stories is situated in the nineteen seventies. To refer to the relative fluidity of the sexual expression is

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Hood and Auntie Flower’s sexual play in the bath tub in “No Rosa, No District Six” can be practiced outside the private and protected space of the domestic sphere. But there is no doubt that, in regards to the colonial and postcolonial situation, in the racial and racialist setting of the division of social classes and the interaction of the ensemble of these parameters, the signification of homosexuality requires a specifically South African interpretive framework, capable of decentering the Euro-American perspective of LGBTQ studies by revealing the sexual and gendered blind spots of postcolonial approaches (Spurlin 2001, 199–200). It is also this avant-garde7 displacement that Maart makes Rosa first accomplish empirically, through experience and sensation. Finding herself in the already agitated early morning of Cape Town, Rosa searches for a place to hide from Mamma Zila’s certain punishment and chooses the home of Mrs. Hood and Auntie Flowers, who were supposed to have gone shopping. When the two women return home earlier than expected, Rosa is forced to slide under Mrs Hood’s bed, a space all the more confining as it is saturated with the pestilential odor of her urine emanating from a chamber pot. The smell of the urine is so acrid that Rosa can only breathe through her open mouth, thus giving vision primacy over

—————— therefore accurate only for a specific time period and a specific place—the Cape Town of the nineteen seventies. The theorization on post-identity which opens this chapter is precisely fuelled by this experience. It is meant to proffer a counterpoint to the presentday situation and the post-apartheid culture characterized by a gender polorization and a reinforced heteronormativity corollary to the rise of nationalism and the advent of a socalled ‘African’ essentialism. For more on anti-LGBTQ violence in contemporary and post-apartheid South Africa, see Gunkel (2008) and Schuhmann (2013). 7 Maart’s political writing is avant-garde in more than one way. On the one hand, her Derridian approach to deconstruction, combined with the South African experience of black consciousness as defined by Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, allow her to cross identities, to reveal the political dynamics informing their construction, such as the importance of the empire on the concept of the South Africa of postcoloniality and white and Western colonialism, which are always used in the study of genders, sexuality and their socio-political dynamics. On the other hand, the texts united in the collection Rosa’s District 6 testify to the fact that the resistance to the categorization of identities in a monolithic system and organized hierarchically by the apartheid regime did not wait for the post-apartheid era to organize itself, to be effective and to remain an essential element of social and political transformation. This writing is a feminist and queer foothold in the black male South African nationalism of the new South Africa and in the mythification of the postcolonial moment as a radical break belonging to only ostensibly heterosexual South Africans. A re-reading of history favored, moreover, by the constant marginalization of queer South African literature, relegated to a subalternate position in anthologies and critical studies (on this point, see Spurlin 2001, 191–192).

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speech; however, the urine later proves useful in drowning a little spider who threatens to reveal her hiding place. From her place under the bed, Rosa observes a fascinating spectacle that begins with Auntie Flowers removing the bobby pins one-by-one from her hair, followed by the caresses and kisses exchanged by the two women as they fill the metal bathtub with hot water and flower petals and slowly immerge themselves, singular and together in their nudity: “Auntie Flowers unbuttoned her dress and there, nakedly, the two women faced one another, each with her own shape. Each put her left foot into the bath at the far side of it, allowing for some space for the right foot. Auntie Flowers was standing at the back of Mrs Hood, who had her arms round both of them so as to embrace Mrs Hood. As both women placed themselves in the bath, splashes of water fell to the floor and small lavender petals stuck to the outside of the bath. The two women remained locked together for quite a while, their silence perturbing Rosa greatly. Mrs Hood lifted her head backwards and placed it gently on Auntie Flowers shoulders. Her clavicles made their appearance and her long grey hair made big circles on the nape of her neck, sculpturing her clavicles in a somewhat vivacious manner. The room was silent. Both women were breathing deeply. The release of their breaths shook the room. ‘Woooooow,’ they both breathed out repeatedly.” (1992, 129–130)

The dance of the bodies entangling to the rhythm of the lovers’ breath leads to another silent exchange, this time of fluids. First, saliva: “Auntie Flowers stroked Mrs Hood’s hair and made rings with it, placing water on the already curly bits. Some of the droplets nestled themselves onto Mrs Hood’s lips. The two women put each’s finger in the other’s mouth. Rosa thought it was exciting to see grown women exchange spit.” (1992, 130)

Then blood: “The rays of sunlight shone brightly on Auntie Flowers’s face and enhanced the sharpness of her clavicles, its wetness bronzed like a medal, waiting patiently to be touched and admired. Mrs Hood’s teeth met the temptation, sucking dearly at its warmth until blood filled the gaps between her teeth.” (1992, 131–132)

Just as the slit in the wall and in the text transform the writing of the story and the story of the writing, the opening of Mrs Hood’s mouth, reduced to the space between the teeth filled by Auntie Flower’s blood, transforms the cultural myths of vampirization and transubstantiation that give the body the signification of repressed desire and disembodied spirituality:

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“[Mrs Hood’s] kiss planted a red glowing print on Auntie Flower’s face and the woman’s sparkling eyes made Dracula seem like a hopeless case for seduction against the wishes of frightened, chaste women. Both women ate graciously from the blood, their tongues curling with lust and their palates seeping with its nutritious contents. There was passion, love, admiration, an exchange of caring moments, stolen from the heavy load which the constraints of marriage bore. No body of blood of Jesus Christ could fulfill the spirituality of body, of being, that these women felt and allowed themselves to indulge in.” (1992, 132)

Wet and glistening, the scarlet letter of Mrs Hood’s kiss on Auntie Flowers’s face is not the signifier of male law, Mr Henson’s corporal education, Dracula’s blood-stained and gloryless seduction, the transubstantiation of Christ that only transforms himself as suggested by the chain of genitives that concludes with the name of the Son, and reduced to nothingness by the ‘no[/]body’ that generates it. Silent, the mark of the red lips is a barrier to the rule of men and the rule of their words. It is the mark of the body that opens itself to female consciousness and that, in doing so, incorporates it: “[…] the spirituality of body, of being, that these two women felt and allowed themselves to indulge in” (1992, 132). The spirit is in the body, the body is in the spirit and the lips do not breathe out the Word, but kisses of saliva and lovers’ blood, exchanged together and at the same time, literally incarnated. A form of sexual initiation, where the combination of cannibalism and sensual pleasure fill the bodies, the spectacle of Auntie Flower’s mouth on Mrs Hood’s breasts, of her legs twined around her lover, of her fingers clenched on the edge of the bathtub, is for Rosa a very different lesson than those taught by Mr Henson. While his lessons commanded silence, this lesson, like Rosa’s truths written on the walls, tells the secret of sex (“‘It’s a secret and noborry knows anyting,’ [Rosa] uttered,” 1992, 135). The separation between those who know and those who remain ignorant of this secret is filled by the profound breath of sexual pleasure, which comes from the stomach, inflated with pleasure or inflated by the air that gives voice, that holds a note or makes an unpunctuated logorrhea speech, as Rosa does at the beginning of the story. The women’s grunting retrospectively gives breath to Rosa’s speech; they animate it and make the little girl’s voice part of the concert of the community of black South African women. In this same way, the breath of sexual pleasure becomes retrospectively, and between the two parts of the story, the third-person narrative authority of Rosa’s ‘I’ and is now the active principle of her conscientization. It allows the voice of the conscience to enter on the path of the

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consciousness of self, a self conceived—reborn rather than engendered because it had been created—from the image of other black women: “Heavy breathing like a voice lesson, Rosa thought again, was the medium through which these two women communicated their desire […] Auntie Flowers’s feet, crossed one over the other, made the shape of a bow. Is this what Auntie Spider spoke about when she referred to white women being scared of Black women’s powers and how our women can wrap men up like Christmas presents? […] [Rosa] recognized the visual image implanted in her mind, one created by the words of Auntie Spider, also known as Auntie Legs, who regularly told stories about Black women’s sexuality to girls in the neighbourhood, preparing them for their approaching womanhood. Is this like sex? the female child asked herself, having been told that it being when a woman allows a man into her vagina.” (1992, 132–133)

Embracing the religion of black femininity and of a multiform sexuality, Rosa baptizes herself with the same water used by her elders. In the water reddened by the blood of their pleasure, poured into the courtyard by Mrs Hood and Auntie Flowers as they are about to leave for Hanover Street, Rosa, like the two lovers before her, wets her foot and becomes conscious of her inclusion in a community. The blood that the little girl makes flow from her finger after having stuck it with a splinter seals this entrance into the black female and feminist South African community. This childish form of sealing a secret also returns her consciousness of self on her like the retrospective and interiorized gaze whose circularity enchains the child, the adult and the writer. This journey transformed colonization, historiography, male and heterosexual power into the writing of a black climax, the imagined nation of South African femininity on which the walls of District Six open, and upon which Rosa, this time, will not write her new secret, will not affix her bloody signature: “It had dawned upon her to speak to one of her many walls—her companions— and this event needed to be recorded […] Having pricked her finger, as she usually did when writing on walls and implanting her print, she swore to secrecy and vowed never to talk about the events she had witnessed […] Touching her nipples and remembering the fullness of Mrs Hood’s breasts, she climbed over the wall and rested herself among the wooden logs in Mrs Benjamin’s backyard. There was nobody home and she could climb all the walls to the end of the street […].” (1992, 136)

In a successive order, the walls that little Rosa gets ready to scale to return home are the images of her identities, captured in the cinematic cross fade of her consciousness. They split the horizon of the text on the historical

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reality of the text’s present: 1989, the year in which the story was written, one year before the wall of apartheid begins to crumble. The moment and the momentum that rendered all the returns to District Six—proscribed by the double negation of the title, dreamed up by the very “e mag e nation,” only possible in ‘writing’ and ‘climaxing’—can now be realized.

Works Cited Biko, Steve (1978). I Write What I Like. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Fanon, Frantz (1952). Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Gay, Judith (1986). “‘Mummies and Babies’ and Friends and Lovers in Lesotho.” Journal of Homosexuality, 11: 3–4. Gevisser, Mark, and Edwin Cameron (eds.). (1995). Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. New York: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gunkel, Henriette (2008). “‘What Do We See When We Look at Ourselves’— Visual Dissidence towards (Post)Colonial Sex/Gender Organizations within Post-Apartheid South African Culture.” In Jean-Paul Rocchi (ed.). Dissidence et identités plurielles, 160–185. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy. Kester, Norman G. (2000). From here to district six, a south african memoir with new poetry, prose and other writings. Toronto: District Six Press. — (2002). Liquid Love and Other Longings, Selected Poems. Toronto: District Six Press. Krouse, Matthew (ed.). (1993). The Invisible Ghetto: Lesbian and Gay Writing from South Africa. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers (COSAW). Maart, Rozena (1992). “No Rosa, No District Six.” 1991. The Journey Prize Anthology 4. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. — (1993). “Consciousness, Knowledge and Morality: The Absence of the Knowledge of White Consciousness in Contemporary Feminist Theory.” In Debra Shogan (ed.). A Reader in Feminist Ethics, 129–68. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. — (2000). Talk About It! From District Six to Lavender Hill. 1991. Toronto: Awomandla! Publishers. — (2004). Rosa’s District 6. Toronto: TSAR Publications. — (2013). “Writing and the Relation: From Textual Coloniality to South African Black Consciousness.” In Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi (eds.). Black Intersectionalities—A Critique for the 21st Century, 21–33. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Rocchi, Jean-Paul (2003). “Psychanalyse.” In Didier Eribon (ed.). Dictionnaire des cultures gays et lesbiennes, 385–87 Paris: Larousse.

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— (2006a). “‘Walls as Words as Weapons as Womb as ‘Woooooow’; Fente murale, fente t/ex(t)u[elle], fondu identitaire: Jouir/Ecrire ou la post-identité dans ‘No Rosa, No District Six’ de Rozena Maart.” In Patricia Donatien-Yssa (ed.). Images de soi dans les sociétés postcoloniales, 179–215. Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit. — (2006b). “‘The Other Bites the Dust.’ La mort de l’Autre: vers une épistémologie de l’identité.” In Jean-Paul Rocchi (ed.). L’objet identité: épistémologie et transversalité. Cahiers Charles V, 40: 9–46. Schuhmann, Antje (2013). “Postcolonial Backlashes: Transgender in the Public Eye.” In Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi (eds.). Black Intersectionalities—A Critique for the 21st Century, 36–50. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Spurlin, William J. (2001). “Broadening Postcolonial Studies/Decolonizing Queer Studies: Emerging ‘Queer’ Identities and Cultures in Southern Africa.” In John C. Hawley (ed.). Post-Colonial, Queer. Theoretical Intersections, 185–206. Albany, NY: State University Press.

Contributors

Manuela Boatcă is Professor of the Sociology of Global Inequalities and principal investigator of the Research Network desiguALdades.net at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include world-systems analysis, gender and violence research, postcolonialism, and decoloniality, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe and Latin America. She is author of: From Neoevolutionism to WorldSystems Analysis. The Romanian Theory of ‘Forms without Substance’ in Light of Modern Debates on Social Change (Leske+Budrich, 2003) and co-editor with Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez and Sérgio Costa of Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches (Ashgate, 2010), and with Willfried Spohn, Globale, multiple und postkoloniale Modernen. Theoretische und vergleichende Perspektiven (Rainer Hampp, 2010). Sabine Broeck is Professor for (African-)American Studies, Gender Studies, and Black Diaspora Studies at the University of Bremen. Her special focus lies on the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality; her research commitment is to a critique of anti-Blackness and the coloniality of transatlantic modernity, in particular in studies of western modernity as social formations and cultures of (post-)enslavement. She has been a longstanding and active member of the European American and African-American Studies community. She is president of the international Collegium for African American Research and co-founder and speaker of the Institute for Transcultural and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Bremen. Broeck has published widely in journals of American and African American Studies like Amerikastudien/American Studies and Callaloo. Her two previous monographs are Der entkolonisierte Körper: Die Protagonistin in der afro-amerikanischen weiblichen Erzähltradition der 30er bis 80er Jahre (Campus, 1988) and White Amnesia—Black Memory? American Women’s Writing and History (Lang, 1999). She is currently at work on a book-length manuscript entitled Gender and Anti-Blackness (contracted with SUNY Press). Sérgio Costa is Professor of Sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, an associate investigator at CEBRAP (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning in São Paulo, Brazil), as well as one of the chairs of the Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America. Trained in economics and sociology in Brazil and Germany, he has previously held positions at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil and at the Universität Flensburg in Germany. His disci-

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plinary interests are political sociology, comparative sociology, contemporary social theory, and Postcolonial Studies. Main topics of his publications are: democracy, social inequalities and cultural difference, knowledge politics, racism and anti-racism, as well as social movements and transnational politics. Gabriele Dietze teaches Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, as well as in the United States, Austria, and Switzerland. She is currently fellow of the DFG-funded research group “Kulturen des Wahnsinns” (Cultures of Madness) with a project on “Affective Masculinity at the Turn of the Century.” Her research interests include the history of emotion and theories of affect in Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies, Queer Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Visual Culture Studies, and the History of Psychiatry. Most recently: Weiße Frauen in Bewegung: Genealogien und Konkurrenzen von Race- und Genderpolitiken (transcript, 2013); and (co-authored with Beatrice Michaelis and Elahe Haschemi) “‘Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.’ Queer Interdependencies as Corrective Methodologies.” In Y. Tylor, S. Hines, and M. Casey (eds.). Theorizing Intersectionality and Sexuality, 78–98 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Marina Gržinićis a philosopher, artist, and theoretician. She is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is Research Advisor at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia. In the last decade, she published ten books. Gržinić has also been involved in a collaboration with artist Aina Šmid on video art since 1982. Kathleen Gyssels is Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Literatures and of Black and Jewish Diaspora Studies at Antwerp University, Belgium. Her forthcoming publications include: ‘Black-Label’ ou les déboires antillo-guyanais, a monograph on the third man of négritude, L. G. Damas (Ibis Rouge), and a book on the co-authorship of André and Simone Schwarz-Bart: Marrane et Marronne: la coécriture reversible d’André et Simone Schwarz-Bart (Rodopi). Elahe Haschemi Yekani is Junior Professor of English Literature at the University of Flensburg, Germany. Previously she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz and Assistant Professor at the Department of English at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Currently, she works on her second book, in which she traces an entangled literary history of canonical bourgeois novels of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century with the earliest written testimonies of Black British writers. Her research interests include the Anglophone novel, Queer Theory, Postcolonial, and Gender Studies. Publications include The Privilege of Crisis. Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography, and Film (Campus, 2011).

CONTRIBUTORS

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Carsten Junker is postdoctoral researcher in English-speaking Cultures/American Studies and member of the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. He obtained his doctorate in North American Literature and Culture from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009, with a study on the essay as genre of cultural critique. He is currently completing his second book which focuses on the transatlantic discourse of abolition around 1800. For this project, he received the Christoph Daniel Ebeling Fellowship, jointly sponsored by the German Association for American Studies and the American Antiquarian Society. His publications include Frames of Friction: Black Genealogies, White Hegemony, and the Essay as Critical Intervention (Campus, 2010) and, co-authored with Julia Roth, Weiß sehen: Dekoloniale Blickwechsel mit Zora Neale Hurston und Toni Morrison [Seeing White: Decolonial Revisions with Zora Neal Hurston and Toni Morrison] (Helmer, 2010). Ina Kerner is Junior Professor of Diversity Politics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. She has also taught at Freie Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, the New School for Social Research in New York and at Quaid-iAzam University in Islamabad, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, as well as a Fellow at the International Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America (desiguALdades.net) in Berlin. Trained in Political Theory and in Gender Studies, her current work focuses on postcolonial theories as well as on feminist theory and intersectionality. Her book publications include Postkoloniale Theorien zur Einführung (Junius, 2012) and Differenzen und Macht. Zur Anatomie von Rassismus und Sexismus (Campus, 2009). Professor Rozena Maart is the Director of the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity at the University of Kwa Zulu Natal in Durban, South Africa. She works in Political Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Black Consciousness and her work crosses between and among race, gender, sexuality, and identity. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of the Western Cape, her Masters degree at the University of York, United Kingdom, and her doctoral degree at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. She writes both fiction and non-fiction and all three of her fiction books have won awards, made the bestseller list in South Africa and Canada and nominated for prizes. In 1992, she won “The Journey Prize: Best Short Fiction in Canada.” Annika McPherson received her PhD from the University of Bremen, where she studied English, American Studies, and Cultural Studies. Since 2009 she has been teaching British and Global Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany. Her research areas include Postcolonial Studies, cultural diversity in comparative perspective, as well as Caribbean and

392

CONTRIBUTORS

South African literatures in English. Her publications include: White—Female— Postcolonial: Towards a ‘Trans-cultural’ Reading of Marina Warner’s Indigo and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (WVT, 2012). She is currently working on a study of the representation of Rastafari in film, literature, and popular culture as well as a study of contemporary novels on slavery set in the Caribbean, and a collection of sources and resources on Caribbean Literatures in English. Beatrice Michaelis is a postdoctoral researcher and the Head of Research Coordination at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. She teaches German medieval literature at universities in Germany and Austria. She currently works on her second book project investigating the interdependence of color changes and conversion under the rubric of race in German medieval literature. Her research interests include Queer Theory, Gender Studies, Intersectionality and Postcolonial Studies. Publications include: (Dis-)Artikulationen von Begehren. Schweigeeffekte in wissenschaftlichen und literarischen Texten [Dis)Articulations of Desire—Silencing Effects in Scientific and Literary Texts] (De Gruyter, 2011). Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University, United States. Among his recent works is: The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke UP, 2011). His Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality (Routledge, 2007) was translated into Spanish, German, French, Swedish, and is being translated into Rumanian. He co-directs, with Rolando Vazquez, the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School, The Netherlands, that started in 2010. Kwame Nimako is the founder and director of the Summer School on Black Europe in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He holds degrees in Sociology and Economics and has taught race and ethnic relations and international relations at the Universiteit van Amsterdam for more than 25 years. He is currently Visiting Professor in The Department of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches on the political economy of development. Nimako is the author or co-author of thirty books, reports, and guidebooks on economic development, ethnic relations, social policy, urban renewal, and migration. His most recent book is: The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (Pluto, 2011). Jean-Paul Rocchi is Professor at the Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France, where he teaches in American Studies and on African American Literature and Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Studies. A Fellow at the Du Bois Institute (Harvard, Fall 2007), he is the co-director of the research group IMAGER (Paris-Est) and a board member of the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR). He has published several essays on James Baldwin and other contemporary black writers,

CONTRIBUTORS

393

and on race, sexualities, psychoanalysis, and epistemology. He is the author of several edited collections including L’objet identité: épistémologie et transversalité (Université Paris Diderot, 2006). He was the main organizer of the 2011 CAAR Conference “Black States of Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation,” from which he co-edited four collections including Black Intersectionalities—A Critique for the 21st Century (Liverpool UP, 2013) and Understanding Blackness through Performance—Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Ella Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University, United States. She is a recipient of such fellowships as Rockefeller and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where she also taught at The School of Criticism and Theory. She was awarded a Fulbright research/lectureship at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, for studying the cultural intersections between the Middle East and Latin America. Her most recent books include: Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Duke UP, 2006); Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (University of Texas P, 1989, updated edition with a new postscript, I.B. Tauris, 2010); with Robert Stam, Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (NYU Press, 2012); Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2007); Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers UP, 2003); with Evelyn Alsultany, Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (University of Michigan P, 2013). Her writing has been translated into diverse languages, including: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Polish, and Romanian. Shohat has also served on the editorial board of several journals, including: Social Text; Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University, United States, where he has largely taught at the department of Cinema Studies. Winner of Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Regents Fellowship (University of California at Berkeley), NDEA Fellowship, NYU Presidential Fellowship for Junior Faculty, Rockefeller Fellowship, Fulbright Lectureship, and Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent books include: Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality (Rutgers UP, 2006); Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Companion to Literature and Film (Blackwell, 2004); Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000). Coeditor (with Toby Miller) Film and Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2000). With Ella Shohat: Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (NYU P, 2012); Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and AntiAmericanism (Routledge, 2006); Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers UP, 2003); and Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994). His publications have been translated into: French, Spanish,

394

CONTRIBUTORS

German, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Farsi, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Turkish, and Arabic. Madina Tlostanova is Professor of Philosophy at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow). She has authored eight scholarly books and over two hundred articles on contemporary culture and art, social theory, alter-globalism, the decolonial option, many of which were published in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. The most recent are: Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and, co-authored with Walter Mignolo, Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflection from Eurasia and the Americas (Ohio State UP, 2012). Currently she is working on a book on decolonial aesthetics, contemporary art, and the post-socialist imaginary. Rinaldo Walcott is Associate Professor and Director of Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003); he is also the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac, 2000). Walcott is also the co-editor (with Roy Moodley) of Counselling Across and Beyond Cultures: Exploring the Work of Clemment Vontress in Clinical Practice (University of Toronto P, 2010). Black Diaspora Faggotry: Frames Readings Limits is forthcoming from Duke UP. Walcott’s research is centered in Black diaspora politics, gender and sexuality, and decolonial politics. He is also a Research Fellow of the Broadbent Institute. Frank B. Wilderson III is Professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California, Irvine, United States. His books include: Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke UP 2010) and Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press 2008), for which he received the American Book Award, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, and an NEA Literature Fellowship. He has been an activist and university lecturer in apartheid South Africa. In 2013/2014 he lived in Germany where he was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellow.

Index

abjection, 97, 100, 110, 113, 115–17, 121–22, 125–26 affect, 118, 188, 269, 273–74, 277– 79 African diaspora, 48, 53–54, 57, 60– 61, 277 Africana intellectual tradition, 53, 58–59, 61 Afro-pessimism, 324 anachronicity, 270, 274, 276 anti-Blackness, 93, 95, 97–98, 100, 102, 113, 121, 125, 183 archive, 25, 82, 109, 114, 117, 269– 70, 273–74, 276–77, 280–81, 292, 317, 365 asymmetries, north-south, 231 Black Consciousness, 331, 337, 340– 42, 346–47, 359–60, 372 Black Critique, 8, 21, 26, 126, 171, 270, 333–334 Black Europe, 60, 113, 125 Black Liberation Army (BLA), 175– 80, 183, 200–01 blackness, 93–96, 100, 102–03, 109, 113, 119, 122–24, 137, 142, 146, 177, 180, 201, 203, 324, 333, 350 border thinking, 43, 146, 150, 154– 55, 237, 239, 241, 259–60, 262 capitalism, global, 81, 130–31, 135, 220

Caribbean, 25, 32, 48, 53, 59–61, 79, 99–100, 104, 146, 211–17, 220– 22, 226–27, 287–92, 294, 297, 301–02, 354–55, 358–59, 361– 64 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 288–303 child/children, 73–74, 96, 139, 175, 196, 198, 240, 249, 252–53, 261, 292, 313, 342, 345–46, 349, 372– 76, 380, 386 colonial division, 134, 148, 151, 154, 218 colonial differentiation, 148, 152 colonial Manichaeism, 151 colonial wound, 35, 48, 148–49 colonialism, 23, 27–28, 32, 44–45, 47, 54, 61, 65–66, 83, 86–87, 93, 95, 97–101, 104, 113–15, 117, 129–30, 132–35, 147–49, 151, 156, 161, 163–66, 212, 217, 219, 221, 225, 227, 232, 235, 237, 245–48, 254–355, 357–58, 275, 277, 331–332, 334–37, 341, 343, 348, 381 coloniality, 21, 25–27, 30, 33–36, 38–39, 41, 47–48, 63–64, 82, 86, 93–95, 97–101, 103, 129–30, 132, 134–35, 142, 148–49, 160, 164–66, 168–69, 260, 262, 323– 33; of gender, 33, 258, 261–62 conviviality, 151, 153–54 creolization, 171, 211–12, 214–16, 221, 226, 228

396 Critical Whiteness Studies, 82 decolonial healing, 38, 40 decolonial option, 24, 36, 156, 168 Decolonial Studies, 18, 231–32, 236, 272 decolonial thinking, 22, 24–27, 33– 36, 38, 40–41, 46, 246, 363 decoloniality, 21–23, 26–27, 31–33, 36, 38, 46, 48–49, 129, 132, 140, 155, 245, 332, 346, 355, 362 decolonization, 22, 26–32, 34, 36– 37, 39–40, 47, 57, 83, 148, 154, 160, 165, 215, 225, 248–49, 333, 344, 354–55, 362, 364–65, 369 dehumanization, 130, 135, 137, 148, 261 delinking, 30–31, 34–35, 145, 148, 150–56, 237, 361 Dread history, 354, 361–62, 365 dying speeches, 323–25 empire, janus-faced, 166, 169 enslavement, 55, 63, 65, 109–16, 118, 120–21, 123, 130, 132, 176, 311–12, 316, 318, 324, 348 enslavism, 110, 113–24 epistemic disobedience, 150, 258 epistemology, 22, 26, 43, 47, 96, 112, 116–17, 148–49, 151, 155, 167, 262, 312, 363–64 Equiano, Olaudah, 278–79, 281, 303 Ethiopianism, 357, 360–61, 364 Eurocentrism, 164–65, 168–69, 245, 254, 257, 277, 292; Secondary, 165 Europe, Fortress, 125, 129, 131–35, 142; provincializing, 135 Europeans, second-class, 164 Fanon, Frantz, 95, 147–49, 151–55, 169, 186, 195, 251, 289, 301, 344

INDEX

feminism, 77, 81–82, 84–85, 118, 124, 246–50, 252–54, 256, 259– 62 Garveyism, 354, 357, 360 Gay, 82, 240, 372, 382 Gender Studies, 246–48, 254–55, 257 genocide, 43, 96, 170, 332–33 genre, 86, 312–14; of the Human, 94, 96; of interview, 312, 315, 325–27; of robinsonade, 288; of slave narrative, 121, 277, 295, 317–18, 324 Gilroy, Paul, 112, 145, 150–51, 153– 56, 370 heteronormativity, 247–49, 252–53, 382 Holocaust, 55, 133 homosexuality, 82, 239–40, 253, 261, 372, 381–83 humanism, 95, 102, 151–53, 155–56 humanity, 40, 53, 123, 129–30, 135– 37, 141, 148, 151–52, 155, 160– 61, 168–70, 190, 198, 236, 262 identity politics, 64, 79–80, 82–86, 255 imperial difference, external, 167, 169 imperialism, 25, 28–29, 131, 160, 238, 247, 254, 260, 275, 277, 348 indigeneity, 64, 66–67, 79, 82, 95– 96, 103 indigenous knowledge, 10, 149–50 inequality, 58–60, 64, 78, 82, 87, 165, 212, 216–25, 227–28, 250 intersectionality, 64, 250, 253, 262, 371 interview, 80, 117, 311–27, 337–38, 340, 348, genre of, 312, 315, 325–27;

INDEX

Irish Republican Army (IRA), 181, 187–88, 192, 198, 201, 203 knowledge, geopolitics of, 134, 235; production, 53, 159, 235, 355– 56, 365 Kudrun, 271, 275 language, 22, 39–40, 44, 54, 63–65, 67, 69, 71, 95, 100, 115, 137, 146, 151, 183, 199, 237, 275, 288, 299, 301, 332–35, 342–46, 351, 360 lesbian, 36, 42, 80–82, 240, 248–49, 252–53, 371–72, 381–82 Mbembe, Achille, 85, 129–30, 132, 134–37, 140–42, 145, 150–56, 247 memory, 48, 53–54, 61, 86, 109, 118, 122, 137, 141, 182, 195, 278, 295, 333–34, 355, 361, 372– 73, 376–77, 380 migration, 61, 68, 112–13, 131, 134, 139–40, 153, 212, 214–16, 218– 19, 223–27, 239, 257, 278 modernity, 10, 21–27, 30–35, 37–41, 45–46, 48–49, 69, 82, 94–96, 102, 109, 113–14, 117–19, 121– 22, 136–37, 148–49, 153, 155, 159–70, 216, 232–34, 237–38, 245, 257–58, 274, 276–79, 359, 365 Morant Bay Rebellion, 356 multiculturalism, 80–83, 86, 155 narrative authority, 315, 325–26, 385 nationalism, 55, 71, 154, 189, 212, 238, 379; Black, 356–57, 364, 382; methodological, 214, 227 nation/nations, 28–31, 43, 58–59, 64, 67–68, 69–71, 78, 95, 97– 103, 117, 138–39, 153, 156, 162,

397 182, 191, 195, 211, 215, 220– 221, 223–28, 240, 253, 278–80, 314, 316, 356, 361, 370, 372–73, 376, 379, 381, 386 Neoliberalism, 46, 130, 132, 135, 140–41 Obama, Barack, 31, 79, 311, 313–15 occidentalism, 249–50, 252, 257, 261 ontology, 38, 40, 94–95, 183, 187– 88 Orientalism, 25, 164, 169–70, 272 Pan-Africanism, 56–57, 59, 364 political communiqué, 176–77, 182– 84, 187–88, 190–91, 203–04 political discourse, 98, 138, 183, 193 postcolonial rewriting, 290–91 Postcolonial Studies, 86, 163–66, 171, 202, 231–32, 239–40, 246– 47, 254, 273, 277, 371 postcolonialism, 79, 86, 124, 159, 231, 235, 237, 239, 241, 248–49, 254–55 postcoloniality, 87, 160, 167, 369, 379 postsocialist discourse, 163, 171 property, 118, 120, 123, 179, 200, 222–23, 257, 296 queer, 182, 239–40, 249, 253, 280, 371–72, 382; temporality, 274; theory, 82, 249, 253, 269–70, 273, 276, 280–81 race, 79–81, 85–87, 94, 223, 276; burden of, 135, 152, 162, 171, 250, 314–15, 317, 370; and class and gender, 83, 253, 258, 262; and colonialism/coloniality, 63– 65; Critical theory, 177, 338; discourse of, 312; and ethnicity, 216, 221 228, 249; Human, 190;

398 and humiliation, 56; language of, 137; and the Middle Ages, 271– 75, 281; production of, 177 ; and religion, 28; and slavery, 269– 270, 281 racial supremacy, 66 racialization, 39, 41, 130, 132–33, 135, 227 racism, 32–33, 35, 37–38, 47, 58, 60, 64–65, 81, 83, 86–87, 103–04, 109, 113–14, 129–30, 132, 134– 35, 145–48, , 150–56, 161, 169, 171, 177, 224, 247, 249–52, 256, 262, 272–75, 334, 336, 346, 350, 375 Rastafari, 353–65 Red Army Faction (RAF), 192–93, 195–96, 198, 203 Red Atlantic, 63–66, 69, 73, 77 refugees, 39, 61, 110, 113, 129, 131– 34, 137–40, 142, 215, 225 representation, 138, 194–95, 199, 227, 246, 248, 269, 291, 318, 321–22, 355–56, 363, 372, 380 resistance, 44, 54, 82, 95, 98, 162, 182, 184, 186, 226, 247, 255, 273–74, 279, 311–12, 336, 355, 358–61, 363, 365, 379 robinsonade, 288 Sancho, Ignatius, 278–79 Seacole, Mary, 278–79, 281 semi-alterity, 161, 169 Shakur, Assata, 192, 197–201, 204 slave narrative, 121, 277, 295, 317– 18, 324 slavery, 37, 53–55, 60–61, 65–66, 83, 86, 94, 100, 113–16, 118–19, 121, 135, 175–77, 182–83, 198, 203, 213, 215, 217–18, 220, 222–

INDEX

23, 237, 254, 257, 269–70, 275– 81, ; abolition of, 59, 110, 289, 315–16, 321, 324, 360–61, 370 “social death,” 93–94, 96, 113, 119, 123–24, 182–83, 324 sociogenesis, 37, 42 Sociology, 33, 117, 214, 219, 227– 28, 231–36, 238–41; global, 232, 241 Soviet/colonial system, 170 speaking for others, 320 symbolic order, 191, 198–99, 204 theory: Critical race, 177, 338; Critical, 22, 24, 118, 121, 141; social, 71, 168, 212–13, 219, 228 “t(r)opicalization, postcolonial,” 358 transgender, 372 transindividual objects, 183, 188 Transnational Studies, 214 transnationalism, 216 transnationalization, 136, 211–12, 228 unfreedom, 94, 98 violence, political, 191, 193, 196 voice/voices, 86, 167, 273, 277–80, 287–88, 292–94, 300–01, 303, 312, 315, 318–19, 321, 323–25, 332, 337, 360, 385–86 White Mythology, 333–34 whiteness, 37, 146, 152, 170, 247– 52, 262, 349–51; Critical Studies, 82 Wynter, Sylvia, 53, 94–97, 102, 112, 361

Cultural Studies

Babette Bärbel Tischleder The Literary Life of Things Case Studies in American Fiction 2014. Ca. 300 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-50006-5 Laura Bieger, Christian Lammert (eds.) Revisiting the Sixties Interdisciplinary Perspectives on America´s Longest Decade 2013. 343 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39990-4 Clemens Zimmermann (ed.) Industrial Cities History and Future 2013. 368 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39914-0 Susanne Hamscha The Fiction of America Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film 2013. 334 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39872-3 Gertraud Koch, Stefanie Everke Buchanan (eds.) Pathways to Empathy New Studies on Commodification, Emotional Labor, and Time Binds 2013. 213 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39894-5 Nancy Konvalinka Gender, Work and Property An Ethnographic Study of Value in a Spanish Village 2013. 294 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39661-3

Christian Huck, Stefan Bauernschmidt (eds.) Travelling Goods, Travelling Moods Varieties of Cultural Appropriation (1850 – 1950) 2012. 261 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39762-7 Hans Peter Hahn, Karlheinz Cless, Jens Soentgen (eds.) People at the Well Kinds, Usages and Meanings of Water in a Global Perspective 2012. 316 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39610-1 Michael Nentwich, René König Cyberscience 2.0 Research in the Age of Digital Social Networks 2012. 237 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39518-0 Monika Grubbauer, Joanna Kusiak (eds.) Chasing Warsaw Socio-Material Dynamics of Urban Change since 1990 2012. 336 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39778-8 Michi Knecht, Maren Klotz, Stefan Beck (eds.) Reproductive Technologies as Global Form Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters 2012. 386 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39100-7

Political Science

Thomas Stodulka, Birgitt Röttger-Rössler (eds.) Feelings at the Margins Dealing with Violence, Stigma and Isolation in Indonesia 2014. Ca. 240 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-50005-8 Helmut Willke, Eva Becker, Carla Rostásy Systemic Risk The Myth of Rational Finance and the Crisis of Democracy 2013. 282 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39988-1 Gunther Hellmann (ed.) Justice and Peace Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Contested Relationship 2013. 196 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39982-9 Barbara Meier, Arne S. Steinforth (eds.) Spirits in Politics Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies 2013. 265 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39915-7 Sahra Wagenknecht The Limits of Choice Saving Decisions and Basic Needs in Developed Countries 2013. 327 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39916-4

Boy Lüthje, Siqi Luo, Hao Zhang Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl Regimes of Production and Industrial Relations in China 2013. 356 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39890-7 Felix Gerdes Civil War and State Formation The Political Economy of War and Peace in Liberia 2013. 291 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39892-1 Jan Müller Mechanisms of Trust News Media in Democratic and Authoritarian Regimes 2013. 225 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39859-4 Renate Mayntz (ed.) Crisis and Control Institutional Change in Financial Market Regulation 2012. 299 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39671-2 Humayun Ansari, Farid Hafez (eds.) From the Far Right to the Mainstream Islamophobia in Party Politics and the Media 2012. 211 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-39648-4