Tradition and the Black Atlantic
Page 1
Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
CHAPTER ONE - Enlightenment’s Esau
Prologue: The Wright Stuff?
Enlightenment’s Esau
CHAPTER TWO - Fade to Black: From Cultural Studies to Cultural Politics
Prologue
A Myth of Origins
Fade to Black
Only in England
Looking for Modernism
The Politics of Representation
Reforming Representation
The Marionette Theater of the Political
The New Moralism
CHAPTER THREE - Critical Fanonism
CHAPTER FOUR - Beyond the Culture Wars: Identities in Dialogue
The Culture Wars: The Sequel
The Culture Wars: The Prequel
Politicizing “Politics”
The Free Speech Movement: The Sequel
Cultural Literacy: The Sequel
Multiculturalism: The Sequel
The Limits of Culturalism
Identity Versus Politics
Multiculturalism and Democracy
Multiculturalism Versus Relativism
Pluralism: The Sequel
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Copyright Page
PRAISE FOR Tradition and the Black Atlantic
“Mapping the contested concept of culture in diasporic, post colonial and multicultural spaces, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. conveys far-reaching insights in a piquant style that never fails to stimulate and provoke. What results is a critical cosmopolitanism that puts him at the heart of humanist inquiry in an era of global change.”
—Kobena Mercer, author of Welcome to the Jungle
“Anyone who imagines ‘the Black community’ as a place of un questioning solidarity or groupthink will be awakened from their slumber by Gates’s brilliant exploration of the fault lines in Black discourse and race-thinking. Who remembers that Richard Wright thought the European conquest of Africa was a good thing? Who knew how much Marxist cultural studies owes to arch-conservative Edmund Burke? Who imagined that Patrick Buchanan might be right in characterizing the ‘culture wars’ as a battle for the soul of America? This lively and learned book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the American soul in a glob alizing world.”
—W. J. T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, and editor of Critical Theory
For Stuart Hall
“Black” does not reference a particular group, with fixed characteristics, whose social being or artistic imagination is determined by skin colour, genetic make-up or biological inheritance. It does not invoke an essentialized cultural identity, frozen in time, which is automatically transmitted into the work, and can thus be held to “represent” collectively all those who belong to a particular “race,” ethnic community, or tradition. “Black,” as deployed here, is a politically, historically and culturally constructed category; a contested idea, whose ultimate destination remains unsettled.
STUART HALL AND MARK SEALY, DIFFERENT:
A HISTORICAL CONTEXT, CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHERS,
AND BLACK IDENTITY
Preface
A damaging system of representation can only be dismantled, not by a sudden dose of “the real,” but by another, alternative system of representation, whose form better approximates the complexity of the real relations it seeks to explore and contest.
STUART HALL, “ASSEMBLING THE 1980s:
THE DELUGE—AND AFTER”
My interest in the ways that writers and thinkers in the Anglo-African literary tradition of the eighteenth century (which Robert Farris Thompson defined as “the Trans-Atlantic” tradition and which Paul Gilroy has memorably named the “Black Atlantic” tradition) formally influenced and self-consciously read and revised each other’s texts had its beginnings in my graduate work under Wole Soyinka and Charles T. Davis in the faculties of English at the University of Cambridge and at Yale between 1973 and 1978. That work culminated in a doctoral thesis exploring the role of writing in the larger discourse of race and reason during the Enlightenment and more specifically the critical reception of black writers in England and America between 1750 and 1830. A vastly revised version of that thesis will be published as Black Letters and the Enlightenment.
The four chapters of this book in their original form were written between 1989 and 1992 in an attempt to organize my thinking about the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and the American “culture wars,” which were raging within and about the academy at roughly the same time, especially following the Republican National Convention in 1992. However, the Black Arts Movement in Britain and the culture wars in the United States continued to evolve during the 1990s, so I continued to revise and expand my thinking about both. I seized opportunities to share my thinking about both phenomena to various academic audiences—initially as the Richard Wright Lectures in 1989 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, and three years later, in a much fuller version, as the Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford, and in dozens of lectures throughout the 1990s—taking into account further developments in both.
And what has been the fate of these two cultural movements? The Black Arts Movement in Britain—pronounced to be “over” by some of its key participants as early as 1990 and all but dead by the end of the century—remains, in various novel guises, a live and vibrant cultural force in Britain and has become institutionalized in the American academy through the “cultural studies” criticism of writers such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel V. Carby, and Kobena Mercer, among others, and in the art world through the work of its major visual artists in various media, especially in film, video, photography, and painting. Unfortunately, the culture wars have not diminished in ferocity in this country since the early 1990s debates about the literary canon, and they seem destined to rage on—in forms we could scarcely imagine back then—such as Tea Party debates over the policies of our nation’s first black president. Barack Obama’s occupancy in the White House has profoundly redefined the forms that a “culture war” can assume. As Charles M. Blow put it recently, “The Apostles of Anger in their echo chamber of fallacies have branded him the enemy. This has now become an article of faith. Obama isn’t just the enemy of small government and national solvency. He is the enemy of liberty.”1
Despite the extensive revisions that I have done since delivering those two lecture series, this book retains the intention and spirit of the original lectures. It is, I hope, a modest attempt at beginning to understand the unfolding of two very important cultural movements, one abroad, one at home; some of their key themes and trends; and the implications of both movements on the culture that we create and analyze and in which we live today here in the United States and in Britian.
A full historical account and critical overview of the British Black Arts Movement would be outside of the purview of Tradition and the Black Atlantic, but as we shall see, this radical cultural movement achieved an important and—in the history of black cultural movements—a unique form of institutionalization (at least of a key part of that extraordinary movement) during its third decade in the form of the founding of Rivington Place. This magnificent visual arts center, designed by Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, has been the home since 2007 of Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers) and Iniva, the International Institute of Visual Arts, a project funded by a £5.9 million grant from the Arts Council of England Lottery Capital 2 grant and a £1.1 million grant from Bar
clays Bank. Rivington Place is also the home of the Stuart Hall Library, and it is to Stuart Hall that this book is dedicated.
—HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.,
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, APRIL 15, 2010
CHAPTER ONE
Enlightenment’s Esau
Prologue: The Wright Stuff?
Before Richard Wright sat the third world of theory.
It was Friday evening, September 21, 1956. The occasion was the First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, held at the Sorbonne’s Amphithéâtre Descartes in Paris, now in its third day.
In the audience sat, expectantly, Alioune Diop of Senegal—“tall, very dark, and self-contained,” James Baldwin put it, “and who rather resembles, in his extreme sobriety, an old-time Baptist minister”—the editor of Présence Africaine, the principal organizer of the conference, and the man whom Léopold Senghor would memorialize as “the Black Socrates”; poet Aimé Césaire of Martinique; physicist and historian Cheikh-Anta Diop of Senegal; psychiatrist and political philosopher Dr. Frantz Fanon of Martinique and Algeria; novelist George Lamming of Barbados; Dr. Jean Price-Mars, at eighty the elder statesman of the group and the president of the conference, whom James Baldwin described as “a very old and very handsome man”; novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, like Price-Mars from Haiti; Léopold Sédar Senghor, Césaire’s fellow student at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where they had met and founded the Négritude Movement in 1935, and who almost exactly four years from this evening would be elected the first president of the Republic of Senegal—just to begin a long and glorious roll call. With the conspicuous exception of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, now eighty-eight, who had been denied a passport by the U.S. State Department—“I am not present at your meeting,” Du Bois’s message to the gathering began, “because the U.S. government will not give me a passport,” adding for good measure a jibe at the Americans sitting in the amphitheatre: “Any American Negro traveling abroad today must either not care about Negroes or say what the State Department wishes him to say”1—here was assembled practically every major black critical thinker of the age. Here, gathered in the Amphithéâtre Descartes, itself one of the West’s most sacred and lavishly conspicuous icons of and tributes to the triumph of Reason and the spirit of Enlightenment over the dark worlds of superstition and pagan beliefs, sat the authors of third world liberation, world-historic theorists of colonial resistance, forging new ideologies, new analyses, new “weapons of theory” out of Négritude, Marxism, psychoanalysis, African communalism, you name it. Remember, it was 1956 and these were the heady days of grand theory for the black world. Never had the promise of a genuine politics of culture seemed more real, more realizable.
And before them stood Richard Wright. Two years shy of his fiftieth birthday, he was bespectacled, wearing a three-piece suit and a white shirt, his hair close-cropped. The photograph’s a little fuzzy, but it’s easy to make out the familiar visages of post-colonial iconography. His presence, and his lecture, had been eagerly awaited. After all, Richard Wright was, in 1956, easily the most famous, and most successful, black novelist in the world.
Nor was Wright completely insensible of the burden upon him: “So great a legion of ideological interests is choking the atmosphere of the world today,” he declared, “that I deem it wise to define the terms in which I speak and for whom. All public utterances these days are branded for and against something or somebody.”2
The remarks that followed made his own allegiances quite clear, and you have to admire his courage. For Wright’s chief argument was that colonialism was the best thing that had ever befallen the continent of Africa. However venal the motivation of the European colonizers, he was emphatic that they “could not have done a better job of liberating the masses of Asia and Africa from their age-old traditions.” As he continued, “Today, a knowing black, brown, or yellow man can say: ‘Thank you, Mr. White Man, for freeing me from the rot of my irrational traditions and customs.’”3
Wright had an acute sense of what Gayatri Spivak has dubbed the “epistemic violence” of colonialism, and he applauded it. It made him giddy with a delicious sense of possibility. “In the minds of hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans,” he asserted, “the traditions of their lives have been psychologically condemned beyond recall.” Moreover, he continued, “millions live uneasily with beliefs of which they have been made ashamed. I say, ‘Bravo!’ . . . Not to the motives, mind you. . . . But I do say, ‘Bravo!’ to the consequences of Western plundering, a plundering that created the conditions for the possible rise of rational societies for the greater majority of mankind.4”
It gets better. As Wright explained:The spirit of the Enlightenment, of the Reformation which made Europe great now has a chance to be extended to all mankind! A part of the non-West is now akin to a part of the West. . . . The partial overcoming of the forces of tradition and oppressive religions in Europe resulted, in a roundabout manner, in a partial overcoming of tradition and religion in decisive parts of Asia and Africa. The unspoken assumption in this history has been: WHAT IS GOOD FOR EUROPE IS GOOD FOR ALL MANKIND! I say: So be it.
I agree with what has happened.
Wright regretted not what Europe did, but only that it “could . . . have done what [it] did in a deliberate and intentional manner, could have planned it as a global project,” one performed out of a “sense of lofty responsibility.”5
Talk about lucking out. Happy campers of the third world, Africa, you see, had won the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes of history—the jackpot of Enlightenment rationalism—and was too benighted to appreciate it.
There’s more. In Wright’s eyes, the Western-educated elite in Africa “constitutes islands of free men, the FREEST MEN IN ALL THE WORLD TODAY,” those last seven words printed in all caps. And the task of the West was now to help this cadre of free men in every way to complete the epistemic violence of colonialism and, as he put it, “establish rational areas of living.”6
And because these were the freest men in the world today, it was crucial that they be given their head to use, as Wright recommended, “dictatorial means” (my italics) to set their houses in order. “Let the Africans and Asians whom you have educated in Europe have their freedom,” he said. And the particular freedom he had in mind was—as he was at pains to make clear—the freedom to oppress their own people. How else could they be liberated from the stultifying burden of those superstitions and traditions that had survived colonialism? He concluded with a ringing declaration: “Freedom is indivisible.”7
Irony was, of course, not Richard Wright’s strong suit. But I don’t know if this was ever more painfully displayed than in the words he chose to conclude what was, after all, a blueprint for a neocolonialist police state. Still, we can at least credit him with a fair degree of historical prescience.
Now the story I have been telling is scarcely unknown in African American letters, at least in outline. James Baldwin, in summary fashion, gave an eloquent account in Encounter magazine of his own reactions to the conference. Most memorably, Baldwin noted, with mordant irony, Wright’s statement that “what was good for Europe was good for all mankind” was “a tactless way of phrasing a debatable idea.” Baldwin then went on to say that the idea that these brown and black dictators would voluntarily surrender their “personal power” (Wright’s phrase) “once the new social order had been established” was pure fantasy: “I suppose it would be the second coming.”8 (Senghor, however, bucking a vile trend, would eventually surprise the Continent and do just that.)
And if I may make the sort of confession that, perhaps, a critic should never make, my reading at the age of fifteen of Baldwin’s fascinating account of the conference in Notes of a Native Son is one reason that I’ve always borne a certain ambivalence about the writings of Richard Wright. The other reason is Wright’s own deep ambivalence toward traditional African culture and to the place of Africans in what we might call the “great black chain of being,” as he made clear in 1954
in his book Black Power, about Ghana’s coming independence, ominously subtitled A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. Wright made it clear in this book that he was no champion of Pan-Africanism or black cultural nationalism. And frankly, precisely because of these attitudes expressed in Black Power and at the 1956 Paris conference, I’ve never understood how Wright, of all people, could have become one of the patron saints of the Black Arts Movement in America in the 1960s, a movement not best recalled for its close readings of the black canon.
In fact, I believe that the celebration of Wright by black arts critics such as Addison Gayle as the summit of radical black nationalism in the African American canon had everything to do with the fact that Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Wright’s best-selling Native Son, accidentally murders the daughter of his wealthy white employer and then intentionally beheads her and stuffs her body parts into a furnace. But no credible reader, in the 1960s or now, could possibly hold up Richard Wright as a model for Pan-Africanism. Indeed, Wright and his former friend, rival, and eventual literary antagonist, Ralph Ellison, curiously enough, shared this seeming aversion to Africa and its Africans. They saw the American Negro, just as Kenneth Clarke and the early Melville Herskovits did, as sui generis, the Middle Passage as an event so traumatic as to make the people who emerged from the nightmare of the slave ships a new kind of black person, a tabula rasa, Africa erased from their culture, their traditions, their language, their belief systems, their consciousnesses, like chalk erases words and symbols on a chalkboard.9 I have to believe that at least some of the members of his audience on that evening in September 1956 could not help thinking: “Thank you, Mister Wright man, for freeing me from the rot of my irrational traditions. Maybe someday I’ll return the favor.”