Lewis - Main Currents

Lewis, Gordon K. Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900. Johns Hopkins, 1983.

One can object on several counts to Lewis’s book: his willingness to speculate about how ‘they must have felt;’ his casual use of the term ‘Asiatic;’ his sweeping and sometimes forced geo-historical comparisons. His prose often betrays him—sentences will occasionally be either meaningless or nearly tautological. He gives a degree of credence to the psychological dependency complex that is, to me, mystifying. (But what do I know?). His marxisant framework is married uncomfortably to a certain kind of idealist history of ideas. Lewis’s understanding of nationalism is highly teleological. He can sensibly point out that the legacy of slavery and colonialism were important for the development of nationalism in the Caribbean, but only in contrast to “the straightforward, linear character of European nationalism” (239). More seriously, although he says, strikingly, that “in a very real sense, the history of the Caribbean slave regime is the history of the sexual exploitation of the black woman” (232), it is as an aside, “a separate and final note.” Even inside the marxisant framework of ‘ideology,’ which allows him to discuss much that falls outside the purview of conventional intellectual history, he is not yet able to put gender at the center of his analysis in the same way that he puts class and race, though he is clearly aware that he somehow should.

To my mind the greatest fault of Main Currents in Caribbean Thought is that the introduction and the conclusion give only a very impoverished sense of the empirical richness of the text. Consider the important and telling examples of abolitionism and nationalism. In his conclusion, Lewis summarizes his findings on anti-slavery as an ideology by saying that it was “intrinsically revolutionary to the degree that it was essentially an ideology of protest on the part of the Caribbean masses...against an exploitative economic and political system seeking to justify itself in terms of a pseudoscientific doctrine of race” (323). The problem with this is that he has, over 150 pages, shown that most actual resistance against slavery was in no sense a “protest” against any kind of “exploitative economic and political system.” Rather, the various modes of slave resistance were generally of much more immediate and reactive nature. Revolts occurred when labor was especially hard, punishment especially cruel. Maroon communities (and here Lewis seems to largely be following Mintz and Price) were not intrinsically anti-slavery in the abstract, but would certainly fight to bloody death to avoid themselves being re-enslaved. In Jamaica in particular, the maroons established their safety and autonomy from the plantation system in part by agreeing to hunt down runaway slaves.

Contemporary research, above all in the French context, but also the British, would have tied abolitionism into imperialism much more closely. The conclusion says nothing about this connection. But Lewis has read Eric Williams, and if he doesn’t give the kind of attention to Haiti’s republicanism that one would today, he is nonetheless perfectly aware and articulate, in his discussion of Victor Schoelcher (213-216), about the way in which abolition generally went hand-in-hand with the ideology of Empire. In the British context as well, Lewis is clear that abolitionism in now sense entailed the dissolution of imperial control. Desire for independence (cast in terms of nation or not) was at first very much a thing of the planter class. The complex interaction and interference of anti-slavery, imperialism and nationalism comes out admirably in the body of Lewis’s text—but not in his summary of the work he’s done.

In the end, the documentary richness of Main Currents of Caribbean Thought saves the book from its shortcomings and the occasional awkwardness of construction. The simple fact is that the elites of various parts of the Caribbean wrote a great deal about themselves and their place in the world. If a lower percentage of the Caribbean population was literate and articulate, this does not mean that they had no thoughts, or that their way of making sense of the world wasn’t complicated and isn’t in need of explication (to use Rancière’s dirty word). Lewis’s work has the great merit of actually discussing some of the large amount of printed material that is available, and not shying away from thinking about how the lives of those with no access to printed voice would have effected and contributed to it. He takes the Caribbean seriously as its own region, with a certain coherence based on a broadly shared experience of slavery and colonialism. He even, in a somewhat odd and melancholy way, sees hope in the Caribbean past, compared to the US one: “In American society, money ‘talks’; in Caribbean society, money ‘whitens.’ If racial democracy is to survive anywhere in the twentieth century, then, it probably stands its best chance in the Caribbean” (10).

Cesaire and postwar France

Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. Présence Africaine, 1989. [1950?]

Reading Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) has affirmed my belief that products of the post-war Parisian intelligentsia need very much to be contextualized. I bought my copy of Césaire’s famous pamphlet used; they had several copies, probably it had been assigned in a class. The library has a similar edition. The original date of publication isn’t even to be found anywhere (instead we get a 1989 Présence Africaine copyright). The austerity of this edition should be compared to the more recent English-language translation, which has a flashy cover and an introduction.

This is an excellent opportunity to practice what I have recently come to think of as one of the main techniques, or perhaps the central imperative, of contextual intellectual history: to push back down into the muck of context any text that attempts to transcend the circumstances of its production and reception. One may say, generously, that it is only by assiduously contextualizing that it is possible to see the true value of any given work; the true value meaning the degree to which it is able to escape from its context. Put in more Lacaprian terms: certain texts resist the reader more than others, these are the texts to which we return, which challenge us—which are valuable. I’m a bit suspicious of this rarely-articulated valorization of transcendence and resistance.

At any rate, to Césaire. In 1950 Césaire was a member of the PCF, and this to me is the loudest voice in the Discours. His position is difficult, because he wants to demonstrate both the utter bankruptcy of European civilization, but also to save certain elements of it. This is, I think, typical both of the French-educated anti-colonialists of this period, and also for the most part of the Communists. Colonialism and racism aren’t put in a causal relationship here, as far as I can tell, but they are both barbarous; it is by way of the bridge-head of barbarism provided by colonial culture that racism enters Europe at its very heart, and leads, ultimately, to Hitler. Colonialism is a poison at the heart of European civilization, which has rendered it weak and decadent.

In a remarkable feat of historical parallelism, Césaire argues that just as Rome ultimately opened its gates to barbarians by destroying all the other civilizations around it, so Europe is failing because it has so relentlessly snuffed out the civilizations around it. I’m paraphrasing here, but the language of civilization, Europe, decadence, barbarism, poison...this is all very much Césaire’s. In the final pages, Césaire asserts that in order to save itself, Europe must put everything it has in the service of the proletariat Revolution that is in process in the areas it previously colonized. Save itself from what?

Et alors, je le demande: qu’a-t-elle fait d’autre, l’Europe bourgeoise? Elle a sapé les civilisations, détruit les patries, ruiné les nationalités, extirpé ‘la racine de diversité.’ Plus de digue. Plus de boulevard. L’heure est arrivée du Barbare. Du Barbare moderne. L’heure américaine. Violence, démesure, gaspillage, mercantilisme, bluff, grégarisme, la bêtise, la vulgarité, le désordre. (57)

That’s quite a list. So it’s the Americans, as the new avatars of capital, that must now be fought. Indeed, in the next lines we go directly from Wilson being asked what America will do now that it is about to control the world (in 1913!), to Truman’s generous offers of assistance to a ruined Europe. There’s a certain amount of controversy in the historiography right now about Truman, the Marshall plan, and American involvement in Europe in the postwar period. Did the Marshall plan really restart the European economy? In what sense? There is evidence that well before American capital began to flow into Europe, things had begun to get better—so perhaps it is hope that the US imported, before dollars? The relationship between hope and money is not, I think, likely to be understood soon, though perhaps closer attention to 1945-1955 in Europe isn’t a bad way of looking into it. This aside, it is possible to look, without much trouble, at the front pages of L’Humanité and other leftist newspapers in this period, and you’ll find plenty of anti-American vitriole. Graphs demonstrating how basic foodstuffs are becoming more expensive as a result of the Marshall plan, which was broadly accused of being a form of colonialism—after all, the story would go, we Europeans certainly know what economic domination looks like, having practiced it for long enough. So in this sense Césaire isn’t stepping very far from the PCF platform.

Much of the Discours is taken up by quotes or critiques of various writers, from Renan to Roger Caillois. (The former more or less equals Hitler, for Césaire—I wonder if Said draws much on Césaire for his treatment of Renan in Orientalism? Probably not). The critique of Caillois is interesting for several reasons, and a nice way to discuss the smallness of the Parisian world. Caillois is exactly the same age as Césaire, and also attended the lycée Louis-le-grand, though they may not have overlapped there. Caillois, in the 1930s, was a student of the cutting edge of academic ethnography in France (Dumézil, Mauss), and also (not coincidentally) with certain offshoots of the Surrealist camp. He was involved with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the creation of the short-lived Collège de sociologie. He was a hard-left anti-fascist, but (especially like Bataille) strange and scary, interested in limit experiences. During the war, Caillois goes to Argentina. He becomes something of a literary power-broker after the war, and is instrumental in bringing various South American writers to the attention of Paris, most notably Borges. But he also, after the war, repudiates the Communism of his younger years. In 1951, he published a pamphlet called Description du marxisme, that attacked Marxist dogmas of various kinds, generally accused it of being incoherent and, as a description of social reality, simply rendered obsolete by more recent sociological work. The young Roland Barthes wrote two extremely negative reviews of the booklet in leftist papers. (Barthes, by the by, may actually have been at Louis-le-Grand at the same time as Césaire).

So if one asks why it is that Césaire devotes 7 pages of a 60 page pamphlet to Caillois, we can perhaps respond by putting the Discours next to the broader policy of hard-left French intellectuals in the postwar of reflexively and viciously attacking anyone who criticized Marxism as a way of understanding the world. There are shades here—not everyone is actually PCF, and people still have differing views about what things are like in the USSR, but we can divide the great mass of the French intelligentsia in the years just after the war between the harder left (Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror) for whom the historical destiny of the Soviet Union must be defended unconditionally, and the softer left, for whom, at the very least, one can safely speak of the moral equivalency of the USA and the Soviet Union (Barthes, and others). It is this last position, really, that Tony Judt, for instance, is so intent on overturning. Cesaire should really be seen in terms of this debate, and his critique of colonialism should be seen as involved, at least instrumentally, with the ‘larger’ debate about Revolution and the Proletariat (both emphatically capitalized) going at this time.

Boaz Evron

Evron, Boaz. “The Holocaust: Learning the Wrong Lessons.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3. (Spring, 1981), pp. 16-26. [first published in ETON 77, 1980]

This short piece is almost 30 years old, but it sounds to me quite current. Has the situation not changed? Have the available arguments and ways of thinking not changed to reflect the new situation? Or, more likely, am I ill informed? The essential arguments, or way of seeing things, do not sound so very different from the scandalous Mearsheimer and Walt position paper on the Israel lobby from 2006 (also in the LRB). I suppose that Evron is addressing Israelis where Mearsheimer and Walt were addressing Americans; but the idea that the presence of the Holocaust (as a fact or provocation bound to the state of Israel) in international relations distorts things in dangerous ways is surely the key idea in both cases. Or would M and W say that their argument has nothing to do with uses of the Holocaust, that it’s all about a lobbying organization just like any other, only better? I’d have to look back at their paper with some care to see what they say about this.

Rosanvallon interview

The most recent issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas includes a translation of an interview with Pierre Rosanvallon, conducted by Javier Fernández Sebastián in Madrid in September of 2006. Sam Moyn provides some introductory paragraphs. The interview covers a great deal of ground, but a few things in particular piqued my interest.

I’d like to hear more of Rosanvallon’s thoughts on the role of the intellectual in contemporary society. Here he says “In France, the dominant model has been that of the individual who commits his academic legitimacy or his own academic projects in the public arena in order to take a stand. It's a vision that I've never shared. I don't see what special legitimacy an individual would have to interfere in a domain that is not his own. Granted, it's acceptable in a society where the access to public speech is very limited.” So Voltaire and Zola were doing the right thing, because if they didn’t speak, perhaps truth wouldn’t be spoken. But in today’s society, many voices are able to make themselves heard, and the academic has no special duty to speak for other people. Today, the intellectual’s “work has and ought to have the function of rendering contemporary society's difficulties more intelligible...A more lucid society that better understands its questions will perhaps be more rational, will be a society in which political deliberation will be able to be stronger and more active. Hence, I've defined the intellectual as someone who first and foremost possesses tools of comprehension, tools which may also become instruments of action.” (713)

I understand this to imply that I, as a historian (let’s say) of 19^th and 20^th century intellectual history, am not especially in a position to use my cultural capital or legitimacy to speak out against (for instance) police brutality. Rosanvallon gives two reasons for this that don’t exactly fit together. First, there are plenty of voices speaking, why, if I have no special knowledge, should I speak? Second, no one would listen to me anyway, since the intellectual is no longer able to aspire to meaningful celebrity status. Rosanvallon still, however, thinks that the intellectual should be filling the time-honored role of explaining society to itself--that is, to render society intelligible so that it can perhaps be changed for the better. I wonder if it really is possible to provide genuinely useful and new conceptualizations of society and politics without, also, engaging oneself with issues to which one has no deep ties.

At the end of the interview, Sebastián asks Rosanvallon whether he thinks the revolutions in the Spanish-speaking world—variously described as “Ibero-American,” and “Hispanic”—should be considered along with the North American and French as the third great revolutionary cycle of the period, crucial, in their own way, to the birth of modern political culture. Rosanvallon says yes, of course. I wonder how he would conceptualize the Hatian revolution? Would he take any interest in it, or would he regard it as an aberration, overturning as it did a slave society, rather than a feudal one, and replacing it not with a slowly liberalizing set of democratic institutions, but with long-term dictatorship? Would he make anything out of the republican rhetoric of the revolutionaries, or would its failure to produce a durable institutional structure disqualify it?

Kleinberg on deconstruction (light polemic)

Kleinberg, Ethan. “Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision.” History and Theory. Vol 46 (December 2007). 113-143.

This essay essentially tracks the troubled and confused ways in which historians have talked about deconstruction as a method in historiography. This is largely a history of confusion and fear, allowing for a certain amount of play on deconstruction as a Derridean specter (following Specters of Marx). The story centers around the linguistic turns of the 1980s in intellectual and cultural history embodied in the volumes Modern European Intellectual History (1982) and The New Cultural History­ (1987), and subsequent debates in the 90s and post- 9/11 US academy. Kleinberg points out the various ways in which Derrida and other French thinkers, especially Foucault, were all reduced into the somewhat vague word ‘deconstruction,’ generally meaning ‘to upset hierarchies, value-systems and assumptions.’ Kleinberg pays close attention to the rhetorical invocation of the specter of deconstruction. The essay is a useful overview of several of these debates.

Now, I broadly agree with Kleinberg, but I can’t help but notice that his paper treats methodological essays alone. This was no doubt on purpose, but it seems to me to preclude the strongest argument for the historiographical usefulness of Derrida in particular, and poststructuralism more generally: all the good books of history that have been written in a deconstructive vein. To mention two books I’ve been thinking with lately, Sexing the Citizen (2006), and to a lesser extent, The French Imperial Nation-State (2005) both rely on what it is neither especially unfair nor reductive to call deconstructive methods. I suspect that one reason Kleinberg stayed away from actual books of history is that one often finds Derrida and Foucault together in them. Surkis is a perfect case in point. If we think of Derrida as having (through Scott), taught historians to look for the points of contradiction and silence in cultural formations or well-articulated elite self-justification, then we might think of Foucault as standing for the attention to power which so often ‘fills in’ the gaps in various cultural and intellectual logics. The Trouillot’s Silencing the Past (1995), whatever its faults, is surely right about this.

Of course one can object to this way of framing things. Are these uses of Derrida and Foucault at all fair to the body of work left behind by these two remarkable thinkers? Not at all. Is this the only way to do history? Certainly not. But I do think that Kleinberg, since he is mostly interested in uses of deconstruction as a word, and a few argumentative tropes associated with critiques of it, leaves aside the very real and deep impact poststructuralism (this more generic and historical term is, i think, safe) has had on historiography. He’s also not interested in answering what strikes me as the most serious critique of certain forms of academic history: that they render the historian ‘theoretically and morally naked’(paraphrase of Trouillot) before genuine political threats. He mentions this criticism but brushes it aside as though it were obviously false. I happen to think it’s a completely incorrect and intellectually lazy attack on various forms of radical critique. But that doesn’t mean it can go unanswered (though it will here, for the moment).

Kleinberg argues that historians have, especially in recent years, retreated back into ‘experience’ as either an explanatory category or at least a source of authority. He cites Scott’s argument against this concept. He also points out that it cannot, ultimately, lead to universalizable authority, since even collective experience cannot possibly ‘collect’ everyone. I’m not sure about this argument from a number of directions (also, I’m somewhat committing something of a heresy of paraphrase here with his argument). In the end, I would certainly range myself on the side of ‘deconstruction’ in history, though we’d then have to fight about what it meant. I would want it to be as material as possible (relatively easy), and to attend above all to sites of ambiguity through which power is exercised. I suspect this sentence sounds as though it was written in 1986—but so what? Is this set of questions ‘saturated’ (to use Badiou’s synonym for ‘boring’)? I think not.

Negri

Negri, Antonio. "Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes," SubStance, vol 36, no 1, 2007.

Having read neither Empire nor Multitude, nor anything else Antonio Negri ever wrote, I am not well placed to take much away from this little text, published in English only last year (2007).

I am, I hope, slowly developing a personal ‘historical sense’—otherwise said, self-knowledge. This article has the taste of something that at first I think is gassy, at once too obvious and too subtle, but that later I come to appreciate. We’ll see.

The degree to which Negri relies on conceptual forms that I identify most strongly with Leibniz (monads) and Spinoza (materialist monism, something like this) is remarkable. I understand this to be a desire to return to some kind of pre-Kantian, (and therefore pre-Hegelian?) world. Although I’m not sure, I think this is best described as being a Deleuzian world-view. Parts of it strike me as foolish, in this case the description of globalization as an elimination of the ‘outside’ (point 5). Negri seems to be suggesting that the role of the artist in the contemporary configuration (situation)—or, rather, what constitutes art—has to do with reconstructing the larger world from within the body, through flesh, itself. The argument seems to be that since we can’t go out any longer, we can only go in. The premise is wrong, in my opinion, but even given the premise, the conclusion isn’t terribly inventive. No doubt I misunderstand. The most sensible, or comprehensible to me, possibility that he invokes is that of “engaging in politics by leading all the elements of life back to a poetic reconstruction” (point 6, pg 54). And this sounds to me very like Rancière, who himself sounds not unlike certain versions of Rorty.

No doubt I’ve much misunderstood Negri. I have a copy of Multitude, and perhaps soon I’ll read it.

final words

Here are the final words of Williams' book, words which, I have to admit, shame me a little.

"The historians neither make nor guide history. Their share in such is usually so small as to be almost negligible. But if they do not learn something from history, their activities would then be cultural decoration, or a pleasant pastime, equally useless in these troubled times. " (212)

Capitalism & Slavery

Today was another classic: Capitalism & Slavery by Eric Williams. While I’ve recently started to buy and annotate for myself a number of books, there’s occasionally a certain pleasure in using a venerable old library copy. Finding annotations from other people can be irritating, but I try to imagine it as a pale successor of medieval marginal commentary. This book has notes from two clearly identifiable hands: one scrawling in Spanish, the other neat and tall in English, making careful stars and boxes, occasionally writing ‘thesis’ next to things.

I can see why people might get excited about this book. It’s a satisfyingly Marxist account of slavery without being, I think, too abstract or simplifying things. So from the right, one can object that it over-emphasizes ‘capital’ and that it denigrates the genuinely moral sources of abolitionism (I don’t think, actually, that it does either). From what I guess we should call the contemporary left, one can object that it systematically subordinates racial factors to economic ones (it does). And also that it contains sentences such as: “The ‘horrors’ of the Middle Passage have been exaggerated” (34). I myself was shocked by the degree to which Williams assimilates the indentured servitude of whites in the early phases of British colonial development and the enslavement of blacks. His argument depends on the essentially economic aspects of these two situations, which are of course juridical radically different. I doubt that today anyone would choose to compare the deceptive strategies of recruiters (spirits, they were called) in London and the slave factories of the African coast, or the poor berthing conditions of both indentured servants and slaves. I’d be better able to evaluate all this if I had more empirical knowledge. At any rate, this kind of economism (no doubt even then played up by Williams for rhetorical effect) is no longer possible now that we’ve become ‘serious’ about experience as a category of analysis.

The central argument of the book is that slavery was in every sense an essential product of the mercantilist system of the 17^th and early 18^th centuries. Slave labor was preferred to nominally free labor because in the specific place and time of the sugar islands in the later 17^th century, it turned a profit. The particular reasons are complex, and have to do with various forms of competition, but the main narrative is that these islands became, for the British, less and less profitable. Eventually, the new industrial economy developing in Britain itself came to practice and then demands the institutions of free trade. The West Indies retained great political power as a result of their spectacular wealth and so continued to enforce their monopolies long after they had ceased to be genuinely advantageous to anyone but the island planters. British capital—now invested in industry and increasingly fluid trade—attacked slavery both because this institution was more valuable to other imperial powers than to Britain, and as a way to undermine the disproportionate and anachronistic power of the West Indians. Without denying the genuine moral fervor of at least a few abolitionists, Williams can none the less assert that it was always and only when the most powerful capitalist factions found a use in it that their rhetoric had any traction in public opinion.

What is to me methodologically interesting about the way Williams put together his argument is the faith it demonstrates in the ability of larger historical trends to deliver intelligibility in the face of genuine local confusion and conflict. There is no such thing, in Williams’ book, as a single unitary ‘capital.’ There are just capitalists, all striving to make the best profit they can with whatever resources are at their disposal. That’s all the ideology anyone in his book needs. In what I suppose is classic Marxist form, the seething mess of history only takes on meaning retrospectively, and even then, much is lost or rendered insignificant. I have to wonder if there’s something about the way history is written today which simply doesn’t allow the existence of such a thing as a historiographically insignificant fact. It may be that there isn’t a place for it any particular book, but each little fragment fits, somehow, into a larger synchronic system. The message of Marxist historicism would be, then, that it’s only later on going to be possible to see what matters and what doesn’t—but that some of it will retrospectively turn out to be irrelevant. Here I wonder if I’m letting contemporary Lacanian post-Marxism sneak into my reading of the implications of Williams’ kind of work.

Greenblatt

This morning I finished Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning. I had intended to move through it fairly rapidly. Instead, I ended up reading it with some care, savoring the quotations (especially, in retrospect, Spencer) and taking way too long with the thing. The construction of the book was impressive. I suppose that it was out of the ordinary in 1980 to mention Clifford Geertz as a methodological inspiration for a book on Renaissance literature, but discounting this, Greenblatt restrains himself from ‘theory’ for the whole, wonderful, first chapter. The second chapter, ‘the word of god in the age of mechanical reproduction’ makes elegant mention of Foucault, Freud and Benjamin in the space of ten pages. (Of course, the name of the chapter is Benjamin: can it be anything but a profound coincidence that ‘word of god’ and ‘work of art’ are so sonically similar?) Later in the book we get casual references to Lacan and Deleuze. The ease of all this is pleasant. Lacan’s Rome discourse turns out to be great for reading Shakespeare, while Deleuze is only there to remind us that repetition itself is difference.

It is hard to put myself in a place where the story he tells of individuality molded and fashioned at every turn not so much by itself as by Power is a depressing or discouraging one. Perhaps it’s too familiar.

Still, the thing passes the first test for me of a good scholarly work on literature: it makes me think I should read more Elizabethan literature. Especially Spencer and Marlow. Ever since, some time ago, I read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, I’ve had in the back of my head that Foxe and some of the other early protestants would be fascinating. No doubt a crazy idea, that the texts themselves would disabuse me of fast. At any rate, I understand now why people were excited by ‘New Historicism:’ it could claim this book as its own.

Global Declarations

Armitage, David. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Harvard, 2007.

This book begins in a Skinnerean mode with the original contextual goals of the US Declaration of Independence. It then traces the effects of this prototype declaration of independence immediately and over the following centuries in a global context. This is done almost entirely by comparing the original US Declaration’s goals and form with the many that have followed. The main lesson is that the Declaration of Independence was a document of 18th century political philosophy above all in the sense that it makes reference to the natural rights of states. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence as a genre has generally been used as a tool of state-creation and the affirmation of sovereignty.

States here are mainly opposed to nations. Armitage, oddly, seems to regard most people before the 18th century as stateless—as though vast, decentralized empires were somehow not states. Certainly global historians emphasize the degree to which states became more intrusive in the 18th century, but it seems to me that even most people who did not live under an empire of one sort or another might still be said to exist within a certain kind of state, however local.

Armitage writes well, and the book is a pleasure to read. It is fast, informative, and not especially complex. He gives the reader a history, from the point of view of a particular genre of political writing, that suggests the constant negotiation and ambiguity surrounding nation, state, and individual rights.

I haven’t got a great deal to say about this book. Since one of Armitage’s major goals must have been elegance, it would be a bit perverse to make methodological complaints. The goal of elegance certainly was achieved, though I’m not sure what the reader is expected to do with the compilation of declarations of independence that make up the second half of the book. Read them straight through? I was interested in seeing, for my own reasons, the Hatian declaration signed by Dessalines. Perhaps some sort of assistance could have been offered to the interested reader, since the point is clearly not to provide a scholarly edition of these documents. Perhaps some suggestions were included that I missed? (Since I’ve now returned the thing to the library)...I wish I remembered why I picked this up in the first place--it could conceivably have been mentioned in an occasional piece by Pierre Rosanvallon? Providing large quantities of original texts is very much his style.

Story of the New

Jameson, Frederic. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. Verso, 2002.

I have just finished a rather quick reading of Frederic Jameson’s A Singular Modernity (2002). Modernity and modernism aren’t terms that I’m especially committed to or that even excite me much, so it perhaps isn’t surprising that the book didn’t move me deeply. Still, it’s almost always worth reading Jameson. There are excellent commentaries here on Foucault, de Man and Althusser, as well as the relationship between Weber and Lukacs. Lots of Heidegger. Forced to summarize, I’d say that the main point of the book is that ‘modernity’ and also ‘modernism’ should be understood as narratives rather than concepts. They are also, to be sure, empirically existing historical realities. However, so many different things fall under these names that one cannot, according to Jameson, come to an empirical finding about their common traits. Rather, they are ways of narrativizing, and as such are always available. Indeed, the larger ‘political’ point seems to me that we (meaning, one supposes, progressive people of the world) should continue to fight to establish our own definitions of modernity, and consequently modernism, over and against the current hegemonic definition which revolves largely around the market.

What I appreciate about this is the effort made to conceptualize the various temporalities as mutually interdependent. The commonsense view might have it that the past determines the present to a certain degree, which itself determines the future within certain limits. Not so. Since the meaning of the past always depends on the narrative within which it is framed, and this narrative, made though it is in the present, always betrays a certain attitude towards the future, we can see that none of the temporal divisions (this can’t be the right way to say it) makes sense without the others. I find this view congenial—also, to a certain degree, commonsensical. It meshes well with the over-theorized temporalities of Gary Wilder’s talk, but seems somehow less self-concerned.

Probably this will go on my syllabus of ‘historical approaches to the literary’ because indeed it is extremely sensitive to these issues. Perhaps I’ll read some of Jameson’s more recent stuff.

stack of (mostly) caribbean books

The holidays have been a long break from writing.

I’ve completed a sort of scatter-shot primmer in Caribbean historiography. It was just as well to start with Silvio Torres-Saillant. If I’d left him for the end, I don’t think I’d ever have gotten through. After STS, I read what I should have read two years ago, C.L.R. James’ classic Black Jacobins. And I discovered that James, in 1938, said virtually every conceptually interesting thing that Torres-Saillant says in 2006. It’s true that in James they’re tucked into a page-long preface, or simply mentioned here or there. But still.

After James I sat down and read through Laurent Dubois’s A Colony of Citizens (2004), and have just now finished Gary Wilder’s The French Imperial Nation-State (2005).: two excellent and radically different books. I won’t say much here about Dubois, except that it’s basically social history. I mean by this that it is interested above all to document the lives of people-in-general, to understand the limits placed on them by their societies and times, and the possibilities they forced open. The conceptual nit-picks for me have to do with what ‘opening a possibility’ could possibly mean. If you can do something, it was possible, right? Agency is tricky. I am, broadly speaking, convinced that the French revolution would not have been the same if the slaves of San Domingue and Guadeloupe (among others) had stayed in their place. These revolutions did indeed force metropolitan politicians to take stands on racial and economic issues they’d rather have avoided. With James in 1938, with Dubois in 2004, the story of the French Revolution (here I’ll allow the majuscule) can not be told militarily, economically, politically, philosophically, without the Caribbean.

Gary Wilder’s book was not less convincing, in what I took to be its main argument. But Wilder (and this was obvious from the lecture I attended a few months ago) is a compulsive over-theorizer. He has a solid historical argument. He sets it out in a way that is recognizably ‘intellectual history’—though he rejects the term—even turning to Dominick Lacapra for what seems to me to be his most concrete and useful methodological moves. Having read the book, I’d say that my summary of his summary of it leaves out quite a lot.

The French Empire in the years after WWI had its own logic. It wasn’t a simple betrayal of some idea republicanism, rather, a complex and contradictory (but none the less functional) logic that Wilder calls colonial humanism developed as the ideology of the interwar Empire. This logic (an overused designation, I think, that almost never means more than a way of talking and explaining things to one’s self) put universalist Republicanism together with particularist ethnography. The Négritude ‘cohort’ set its cultural project in motion as an immanent critique of this discourse, and so Négritude cannot be understood apart from colonial humanism. If we see Césaire, Dumas and Senghor as (in the Lacaprian formulation) acting out and working through colonial humanism, then we can begin to asses their real failures and successes both in the interwar and after 1945. All this seems eminently reasonable to me, if a little jargon soaked.

[An aside: Clive Bell tosses off the witticism in his Proust book, that after the Great War, the Troisième République has come to seem more and more like the Troisième Empire. One of the things that bothered me the most about Wilder’s book was his assumption that some kind of specifically republican ideology must always have been governing the French during the 19^th century. Perhaps Bell’s belle-lettristic observation is not so far from the truth about the essentially imperial, rather than republican, nature of the interwar French state? At any rate, I think it would be interesting to look back at the way Sorel treats imperial holdings as a sort of exterior quarantine for metropolitan France’s old institutions—especially the church.]

I don’t especially mind cutting through the jungle of critical theory in which Wilder shrouds his actual ideas. But I’m not so happy with what kind of critical theory Négritude turns out to have been. Since it was placed in a conflicted situation, it insists on occupying various conflicting positions. Wilder argues for seeing Négritude as part of the broader trend of anti-liberal modernisms that flourishes starting in 1889—children of Bergson, really—and this seems exactly right to me. But you can’t just say that you’re going to be both universal and particular, both elite and popular, both essentialist/authentic and cosmopolitan/déraciné. It may be that individuals, historically, are forced to occupy both sides of an impossible divide. But the expression of this impossible situation does not constitute a solution, nor even a critical theory of it. I am not satisfied by saying that Césaire’s Cahier ‘enacted’ the various double-binds of the elite, educated class of ‘colonized.’ It does indeed do that, it may indeed thereby be a great poem, and may be powerful—but Wilder isn’t able, as far as I can tell, to argue that this text or any other do more than stage a certain problem. That just isn’t enough. Négritude isn’t thereby set apart from the horde of other illiberal antimodernisms that ‘solved’ the problems of modernity. It seems to me that since these problems are so great, so systemic, so integral to any posing of the question, that we’ve set the bar awfully low for solutions.

I’ve gone on long enough about this book. I’ll probably write something more substantial and official later. Before I do that, I’ll read Wilder’s article about Fanon and Césaire, in which he may talk more about this stuff. Next I think I’ll tackle another book that I’ve already read part of: Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. I only own it because I found its whole scholarly paradigm morally repugnant when I first looked at it. Books rarely make me feel like that.

Nose back to the grindstone!