Tradition and the Black Atlantic

by Henry Louis Gates

  The vision here, if it is a vision, is one of the central themes of Berlin’s corpus, but we can find it promulgated elsewhere and with a range of inflections. It warns us off final solutions of all sorts, admonishes us that the search for purity—whether we speak of “ethnic cleansing,” of “cantonization,” or of “cultural authenticity”—poses a greater threat to civil order, and human decency, than the messy affair of cultural variegation. It lets us remember that identities are always in dialogue, exist (as Amselle expatiates) only in relation to each other, and are, like everything else, sites of contest and negotiation, self-fashioning and refashioning. (As John Higham observes, “An adequate theory of American culture will have to address the reality of assimilation as well as the persistence of differences.”)29 And it suggests, finally, that a multiculturalism that can accept all that—and I see no inherent barriers to it—might be one worth working for.

  The not-so-very utopian vision here may correspond to what Alasdair MacIntyre has called for in the present-day university, as a place of “constrained disagreement.”30 Constrained disagreement: It doesn’t seem such a daunting ideal, and perhaps not only the university but also the society that supports it should expect to survive by conducting itself in this way. But let me anticipate some concerns.

  Have I permitted a benignly folkloristic notion of multiculturalism to preempt a potently oppositional one, “red in tooth and claw”? Here, I’d recommend that these critics on the left remind themselves of the vehement opposition of those on the right to even such concessive pluralism; surely anything that makes Buchanan foam at the mouth can’t be all bad. Beyond that, however, I believe we should concede that the radical critics are correct in suspecting multiculturalism as an agency for radical transformation. If you want radical transformation (as opposed, say, to dramatic reform), identity politics probably isn’t the place to start and multiculturalism is a veritable quagmire.

  Conversely, though, others may wonder, Haven’t I discounted too quickly the perils of cultural diversity? On the diversity issue, I meekly suggest that its conservative critics listen to its radical critics: If the issue is half as inert as they say, surely civilization as we know it is all too likely to continue.

  The truth is, though, I’m wary of overly schematic responses to these issues. The culture wars have presented us with a surfeit of either/ors. Tradition versus modernity. Separatism versus assimilationism. Mono-culturalism versus multiculturalism. Eurocentrism versus Afrocentrism. Communitarianism versus individualism. Rights versus responsibilities. My culture versus your culture.

  It seems to me that if the discourse of multiculturalism can yield a lasting benefit, it would be to steer us away from these mindless dichotomies. For we’ve become demoralized by the crude reductive side-taking on the debate. It’s gotten so I can’t find anyone not already in the debate who wants to identify with either side! Down with either/or. Up with both/and. Both rights and responsibilities. Both tradition and modernity. Both your culture and mine. And they will conflict, these things we cherish; they will jostle and collide against one another, and these clashes will determine and define who we are.

  There is a war going on, Pat Buchanan told us, incredibly, almost twenty years ago, in the words with which I began this chapter, a war “for the soul of America.” I think there’s a sense in which Buchanan was right. There was, and continues to be, such a cultural war going on, and, indeed, there always has been. (In words uncannily similar, the liberal Charles M. Blow has argued that the cultural right’s rage at Obama is just one face of “the current fight for the soul of this country. It’s not just a tug of war between the mind and the heart, between evidence and emotions, between reason and anger, between what we know and believe.”31 But when Buchanan said that the war was for the soul of America, he misspoke. This war, as it continues even at a length and in forms that we could not possibly have imagined in the early 1990s, is not for the soul of America. This war is the soul of America.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Kwame Anthony Appiah, Bennett Ashley, Houston and Charlotte Baker, Homi K. Bhabha, Tina Brown, Ross Curley, Angela De Leon, Henry Finder, Philip Fisher, Candace Heineman, Barbara Johnson, Isaac Julien, Joanne Kendall, Sieglinde Lemke, Kobena Mercer, W.J. T. Mitchell, Renee Mussai, Julian Pavia, Frank H. Pearl, Brandon Proia, Hollis Robbins, Elaine Scarry, Mark Sealy, Meredith Smith, Jennifer Snodgrass, Shirley Sun, Abby Wolf, Donald Yacovone, and the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford.

  Notes

  Preface

  1 Charles M. Blow, “An Article of Faith,” New York Times, April 3, 2010, p. A17.

  Chapter One: Enlightenment’s Esau

  1 Quoted in James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 44.

  2 Richard Wright, “Tradition and Industrialization: The Plight of the Tragic Elite in Africa,” Présence Africaine, nos. 8–10 (June–November 1956): 348.

  3 Ibid., 355.

  4 Ibid., 356.

  5 Ibid., 357.

  6 Ibid., 356, 358.

  7 Ibid., 358, 359, 360.

  8 Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” 59.

  9 See Addison Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971).

  10 Wright, “Tradition and Industrialization,” 356.

  11 “Débats—20 Septembre, á 21 h.,” Présence Africaine, nos. 8–10 (June–November 1956): 217.

  12 Wright provided his own prehistory for the “mood of objectivity,” although this bit does not appear in the White Man, Listen version: “Some few thousand years ago somewhere in the mountains of Greece, a mood overcame some poor Greek hunter or farmer. Instead of the world that he saw being full of life born of his own psychological projections, it suddenly happened that he saw it bleakly and bluntly for what it was. The mood of objectivity was born and we do not know on what date. But we find its reality in Greek life and in Greek art” (“Tradition and Industrialization,” 353). Presumably this vision of the disenchantment of the world is to be counterpoised to the mystified universe of the non-Westernized African. In an apparent concession, he wrote: “The most rigorously determined attitude of objectivity is, at best, relative. We are human; we are slaves of time and circumstance; we are the victims of our passions and illusions” (349). But to say that we are victims of our passions and illusions and history is not the same as to say that these things constitute who we are. To say we are victims of them is surely to posit that anterior ahistorical subject to which distorting circumstances are likely to affect, but for which we can try to compensate.

  13 “Débats,” 217.

  14 Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket, 51.

  15 Paul Gilroy, “Cruciality and the Frog’s Perspective,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 109.

  16 Edmund Burke, letter to French Laurence, 28 July 1796, in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. H. Furber et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–1965), 9:62.

  17 Burke, “Speech on Mr. Fox’s East-India Bill,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, by Edmund Burke, 12 vols. (Boston, 1889; hereafter referred to as Works), 2:434.

  18 Burke, Works, 11:158.

  19 Ibid., 10:85, 9:458.

  20 Burke, letter to Philip Francis, February 23, 1785, in The Correspondence, 5:245.

  21 See the discussion of Burke’s misappropriations in Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977), which advances a conception of Burke as an “ambivalent radical.”

  22 Quoted in Sunil Kumar Sen, “Introduction,” to Edmund Burke on Indian Economy, ed. Sunil Kumar Sen (Calcutta: Calcutta Progressive Publishers, 1969), i–xvii.

  23 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976), 1:926n13, 440.

  24 Karl Marx, “The British Rule in
India,” in Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed. Lewis Feuer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 480.

  25 Ibid., 480, 481.

  26 The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq., Late Governor-General of Bengal (London: Debrett, 1796), 8.

  27 Stuart Hall, “Race and Moral Panics in Post-war Britain,” in Five Views of Multi-racial Britain: Talks on Race Relations Broadcast by BBC TV (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1987); cited in Paul Gilroy, “Stepping Out of Babylon—Race, Class, and Autonomy,” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, by Paul Gilroy et al. (London: CCCS/Hutchinson, 1982), 284.

  28 James Mill, The History of British India, 6 vols. (London, 1820), 5:232.

  29 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches by Lord Macaulay, with His “Minute on Indian Education,” ed. G. M. Young (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 349.

  30 Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” 51.

  31 Burke, Works, 1:192.

  32 Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke, 8.

  33 Burke, letter to Richard Shackleton, 25 May 1779, in The Correspondence, 4:80.

  34 Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke, 84.

  35 Burke, Works, 12:31.

  36 Edmund Burke, A Note-Book of Edmund Burke, ed. H. V. F. Somerset (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 71.

  37 You might think this would be a point of affinity with Wright’s “scientific” outlook, but in fact the lexeme “nature” plays a multivalent role in Wright’s address. “Being a Negro living in a white Western Christian society, I’ve never been allowed to blend, in a natural and healthy manner, with the culture and civilization of the West.” Again, Wright’s immersion in a normative Chicago social science is detectable. What is “natural and healthy” has been, per-force, forestalled, but does this mean that this condition, the “pathology” of the Negro, is necessarily unnatural and unhealthy? “Me and my environment are one, but that oneness has in it, at its very heart, a schism. I regard my position as natural.” Again, note the word “natural,” which acquires a peculiar freight in Wright, where “nature” can be a threatening thing.On the question of social identity, Wright seemed to relinquish the voluntarist model of elective affinity: “I have not consciously elected to be a Western: I have been made into a Western.” (The process began, he said helpfully, in childhood.) And the content of his Westernness, he said, “resides fundamentally . . . in my secular outlook upon life.” He was a humanist; he was a secularist; he believed that religion should be separate from the polity. “I feel that human personality is an end in and for itself. In short, I believe that man, for good or ill, is his own ruler, his own sovereign.” Sovereign over all but his social identity. Human personality as an end in and for itself: yes, but personality abstracted from history. This is, of course, essentialist humanism, a doctrine, granted, that determines no politics in particular. (Compare, however, this passage from Burke’s speech on the representation motion: “I know there is an order that keeps things fast in their place; it is made to us, and we are made to it. Why not ask another wife, other children, another body, another mind?”) All quotes from Wright, “Tradition and Industrialization,” 350.

  38 Frantz Fanon, cited in Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” Framework 36 (1989): 71.

  39 See “Cornel West: With the People in Mind” (interview with bell hooks [Gloria Watkins]), Emerge 2, no. 1 (October 1990): 57.

  40 Here the classic text would be Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 1–36. What follows is a cento of Oakeshott describing his enemy, the rationalist: “To the Rationalist, nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations), familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny. . . . This assimilation of politics to engineering is, indeed, what may be called the myth of rationalist politics. . . . If by chance this tabula rasa [the supposed blank sheet of infinite possibility] has been defaced by the irrational scribblings of tradition-ridden ancestors, then the first task of the Rationalist must be to scrub it clean. . . . What in the seventeenth century was L’art de penser has now become Your mind and how to use it, a plan by world-famous experts for developing a trained mind at a fraction of the usual cost. What was the Art of Living has become the Technique of Success. . . . Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience” (4–5).

  41 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958).

  Chapter Two: Fade to Black: From Cultural Studies to Cultural Politics

  1 Kobena Mercer, “Travelling Theory: The Cultural Politics of Race and Representation: An interview with Kobena Mercer,” Afterimage 18, no. 2 (September 1990): 8.

  2 Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New York: Routledge, 1990), 38–40.

  3 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), 4–5.

  4 All these quotes from Williams are from ibid., 8–9, 11, and 12, respectively.

  5 Stuart Hall cited in Francis Barker et al., eds., Literature, Society, and the Sociology of Literature (Colchester, UK: University of Essex, 1977).

  6 The left hand, as I’m figuring it.

  7 Which is the right hand of the Burkean equation.

  8 What we know from Ben Anderson, the notion that “a nation is not an idea only of local extent, and individual momentary aggregation; but it is an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space” (Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honorourable Edmund Burke [London: Bohn’s British Classics, 1854; hereafter referred to as Works], 6:147).

  9 Raymond Williams, Towards 2000 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983), 193.

  10 Quoted in Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 205.

  11 Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 50.

  12 Robert Young, “The Politics of ‘The Politics of Literary Theory,’” Oxford Literary Review 10, nos. 1–2 (1988): 155.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).

  15 Parry’s own story focuses on the schism between cultural materialists and cultural discourse, between the perhaps incompatible perceptions “of radical humanist and postcolonial cosmopolitanism.” But that’s a tension that Hall has been forced to accommodate himself—containing, like Walt Whitman, multitudes—in order not to relinquish his ongoing relevance to both parties. Benita Parry, “The Contradictions of Cultural Studies,” Transition, no. 53 (1991): 37–45.

  16 Gilroy’s contributions to The Empire Strikes Back (London: CCCS/Hutchinson, 1982) have significant affinities with what Michael Sandel has been doing with liberal communitarianism; they just have recourse to completely disjunct libraries.

  17 Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Identity—the Real Me (ICA Documents 6), ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988), 44–46, 45. The politics of “infinite dispersal” would become, with the post- structuralist view of subjects, mere discursive smears and end by disassembling all fictions of human agency. We end up with monads, with atoms, not actors.

  18 We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Hall is, exemplarily, a public intellectual. And he played a significant role in revamping the British Communist Party in the early 1990s along these lines. The controversy occasioned by the manifesto of the revamped party, New Times, attests to the ability of such “post-Marxists” to disturb the old new left. And I would adduce a piece by the editor of Race & Class, A. Sivanandan, that displays that wonderful British gift for understatement: “New
Times,” he writes, “is a fraud, a counterfeit, a humbug. . . . New Times is Thatcherism in drag” (Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism [London: Verso, 1990], 19). There’s something revealing about Sivanandan’s use of the metaphor of transvestitism to denigrate a politics that would be attuned to the positionalities associated with ethnicity, but also with sexual identity. It’s the perturbing insertion of gritty and unsettling issues like gender in the smoothly oiled machine of Race & Class that people like Sivanandan find so infuriating.

  19 Hall, “Minimal Selves,” 44.

  20 Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 54.

  21 “Partnership of past and present” is Burke’s phrase.

  22 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” Framework 36 (1989): 68–82.

  23 As an acknowledgment of human agency—the political effectivity of human volition—voluntarism is frequently dismissed as a mystified fiction by those taken with deterministic social theories in which humans are mere cultural or structural dopes (to borrow Harold Garfinkle’s derogation of Talcott Parsons). Anthony Appiah has written that an Althusserian account of “interpellation” can “put one in mind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, pod-people and all” (“Tolerable Falsehoods: Agency and the Interests of Theory,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991], 90).

  24 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940), 228.

  25 Imamu Amiri Baraka, Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966), 216.

  26 Richard Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” Fire!! (November 1926).

  27 Mercer, “Travelling Theory.”