Césaire marxisant

In the summer of 1935, the 22 year old Aimé Césaire published a short essay called “Conscience raciale et révolution sociale” in what was only the second and would be the last issue of L’Etudiant noir. By chance, I recently came across this essay—republished in 2013 by Les temps modernes—looking for a short piece of prose from Césaire suitable for anglophone undergraduates. “Conscience raciale” is probably not that piece, although it is very interesting. So interesting that I made a rough-and-ready translation of it and gave it to the students anyway, without great effect. Only later did I see that no less a scholar than Christopher Miller wrote about the essay in the PMLA a few years ago. The hook for Miller’s essay is that, thanks to the new availability of this short essay, we now know that Césaire used the word “négritude” for the first time not in the Cahiers in 1939, but in 1935, in quite a different context.

I don’t have very much to say about this here, but wanted to register a certain shock. The central point of Miller’s piece is that in “Conscience raciale,” Césaire is already engaged with a Marxist way of approaching the world, that his thought is already marxisante. Miller has other worthwhile observations, particularly linking this early text forward to the Cahiers and the Lettre à Maurice Thorez. And of course Miller is writing to tell people about this new Césaire text (and, as he does so, provide generous, translated, quotes). It seems that the relevant issue of the journal had been practically lost, and was brought to light only recently, reproduced in part in a 2008 book by Christian Filostrat. Hence the shock. Césaire is not a minor figure. How can this sort of material be, until recently, lost? How can there be the debate that, at least according to Miller, exists over Césaire’s relative awareness of Marxism in the 1930s?

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!

Gary Wilder and "Freedom Time"

Today I went to a wonderful talk given by Gary Wilder. His book The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars [the capitalization there seems odd] was already on one of my lists. Now I’m genuinely excited about it.

He was introducing a new project, which he says will be called “Freedom Time,” and for which he’s already attended a year of law school—this, I think, is probably the best way to do legal history, if you can get someone to pay for it.

He started off with a longish quotation from an unspecified Kant text, and then a little summary of French Imperial Nation-State. His summary made the book sound quite different from what I would have imagined given the title. His point, as he explains it, is to see Negritude as more than just a nativism. It is, rather, a critical theory of modernity (that is, a Critical Theory)—attempting to revise bankrupt positivist and instrumental reason through an appeal to poetic reason. It is a working-through, dialectical overcoming, rather than simple rejection, of modernity. In this project it is hardly alone during the 1930s. I don’t know a great deal about the ideas or figures here—mostly Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor—but from what little I do know, it seems a sensible move.

The payoff for Wilder is that once we think of Negritude as committed to the dialectical overcoming of empire and the colonial situation, rather than a simplistic rejection, we are able to make sense of the political moves made by Césaire and Senghor in the postwar world. Departmentalization and then subsequent attempts to form other supra-national organizations, are not false-consciousness, not (simply) anachronistic. These policies are rather an attempt to preserve certain aspects of the imperial project and reject others. So, for instance, the departmentalization of Martinique was not supposed to be its submission to France, but was rather understood as the first step of a radical re-visioning of Frenchness. Il faut assimiler et pas être assimiler. Wilder makes this argument in large measure by pointing to the self-conscious way in which Césaire mobilized and positioned himself in terms of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher (who was behind the French 1848 abolition of slavery). The largest, and in some sense very obvious structuring observation here is that we, as historians, shouldn’t assume that just because, in the post-1945 world, anti-colonial and Third World movements tended to be nationalist, that means that anti-imperialism anti-racism had to be articulated in terms of national projects. It isn’t so. Negritude, then, shouldn’t be seen as a nativism, or an anti-racism, or anything of the sort, it is rather both genuinely anti-nationalist and anti-colonialist. Again, given what I know about the immediate postwar, it seems to me to be (oh blessed conjunction) both true and a major historiographical trend to say that this period is more radically ‘open’ and undetermined than it has often been presented as having been—this especially in reference to what the shape of Europe ended up being, the viability (meaning) of communism.

This argument is set out with copious reference above all to Walter Benjamin. Adorno, Reinhart Koselleck, Ernst Bloch and others are also mobilized, but Benjamin is the major reference. I won’t try to explain exactly what Wilder is doing, but it has to do with multiple temporalities, and ways of thinking that which didn’t happen, that which did happen (but was impossible), the concept of concrete utopia, and others.

During the talk, all kinds of parallels with what I’ve been reading of Zizek, Badiou and, to a lesser extent, Laclau, were going through my head. A major issue is that of retroaction. This seems to me to be somehow Lacanian in origin (or at least inspiration), but I’m not sure about that. Similarly, the idea that the way, the only way, to move beyond the empire (in this case, the French Empire, rather than simply ‘Empire’) is to push it to its conclusion, or to a particular conclusion, has many echoes in what I’ve been reading.

Similarly, there is clearly a place for Sorel in this discussion of the imbrications, for the thinkers of Negritude, of politics and philosophy. I don’t think Wilder has quite figured out the best way of talking about this yet. He points to the utopian socialists—especially Proudhon—as an inspiration for Senghor and Césaire, but as has been pointed out in another context, a citation isn’t an explanation.

I’m not convinced that Benjaminian temporalities are the right way to talk about what’s happening here. I guess I don’t understand how they advance the discussion beyond the terms of past(s), appropriation and re-writing of them. It is likely, though, that if I read Koselleck (as I should), and more Benjamin, I could be convinced that this terminology is useful.

At any rate, it was a good talk, with some good questions. I’m very glad to have been there.

[also, i just noticed, it should be Négritude throughout. Dunno how that accent got away.]