Dispatches from the Colony

I need to process this but I must first offer it to you….
A terrific essay by Rebecca Wanzo of Washington University:
On the Passing of a Black Intellectual

As Hall once framed the argument in a discussion of his own field, “against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point?”

and later in the same essay:

As Stuart Hall once argued, “there is all the difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics.” Being an intellectual does not stand in place of marching in the streets and legislative transformation. But with black history month upon us again, I think it is important to remember black thinkers who battled valiantly against naturalized narratives of racism, and to honor lesser-known teachers and writers who opened their students’ minds to worlds they had not imagined.

Which brings me to my favorite quote from Hall, whose work on popular culture is some of the most important scholarship in the field. In the essay “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” he says that popular culture is not “the arena where we find out who we really are.” Instead, it is “where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the very first time.”

This is the obituary of the cultural critic and sociologist published today in The Guardian. A good document that explores some of the same themes that I do in my article on Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londonders. That is, the ‘familiar stranger,’ a trope that is the inheritance of diasporic peoples from the German sociologist, Georg Simmel. I’d like to link to a document that Hall wrote about the troubles with global capitalism and the New Left, The Kilburn Manifesto: our challenge to the neoliberal victory.

An important part of Hall’s work was in his leadership of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (closed in 2002) or British cultural studies. As a member of the Windrush generation, Hall departed Jamaica to attend university in England at Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, he was in a different category than many other immigrants to Britain after WWII. He was a student-scholar rather than a member of the working class explosion of the immigrant population. However, Hall never kept that aspect of his political commentary far from his own identity and, in fact, embraced the strangeness of his own presence in England.

As I have written elsewhere, Hall made the observation that diaspora is a central part of the intellectual work on race and ethnicity and, as such, is one of the critical sites on which the question of cultural identity is articulated. Here, I cite Hall’s own words:

Having been prepared by colonial education, I knew England from the inside. But I’m not and never will be ‘English.’ I know both places intimately, but I am not wholly of either place. And that’s exactly the diasporic experience, far away enough to experience the sense of exile and loss, close enough to understand the enigma of an always-postponed ‘arrival’ (87).

Hall connects his move from Jamaica to England to Georg Simmel’s concept of the ‘familiar stranger.’ Alienation or deracination is the archetypal post-modern and post-colonial condition: Increasingly, it’s what everybody’s life is like. So that’s how I think about the articulation of the postmodern and the postcolonial. Postcoloniality, in a curious way, prepared one to live in a ‘postmodern’ or a diasporic relationship to identity…Since migration has turned out to be the world-historical event of late modernity, the classic postmodern experience turns out to be the diasporic experience (88).

From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1996 as cited in Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing about Black Britain [London: Phoenix Books,1999, ed. and intro. Onyekachi Wambu]

Much of my writing and teaching gravitates toward the idea of the unhomely. I take it from Homi Bhabha and Martin Heidegger as cited in the introduction to Bhabha’s The Location of Culture:

To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres. The unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow and suddenly you find yourself… taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of ‘incredulous terror.’ And it is at this point that the world first shrinks… and then expands enormously… The recesses of the domestic space become sites for most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused:  and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.

—

Although the ‘unhomely’ is a paradigmatic colonial and post-colonial condition, it has a resonance that can be heard distinctly, if erratically, in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical sites.

From “Introduction: narrating the nation” by Homi K. Bhabha, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha

Nations, like narrative, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation–or narration–might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force. This is not to deny the attempt by nationalist discourses persistently to produce the idea of the nation as a continuous narrative of nation progress, the narcissism of self-generation, the primeval present of the Volk. ….

What I want to emphasize in that large and liminal image of the nation with which I began is a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it. It is an ambivalence that emerges from a growing awareness that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the ‘origins’ of nation as a sign of the ‘modernity’ of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality.

Benedict Anderson [in his book Imagined Communities ] expresses the nation’s ambivalent emergence with great clarity:

The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness…[Few] things were (are) suited to this end better than the idea of nation. If nation states are widely considered to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nation states to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and…glide into a limitless future. What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which–as well as against which–it came into being. (19)

The nation’s ‘coming into being’ as a system of cultural signification, as the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity, emphasizes this instability of knowledge….In Hannah Arendt’s view, the society of the nation in the modern world is ‘that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance’ and the two realms flows unceasingly and uncertainly into each other ‘like waves in the never ending stream of the life-process itself’. No less certain is Tom Nairn, in naming the nation ‘the modern Janus’, that the ‘uneven development’ of capitalism inscribes both progression and regression, political rationality and irrationality in the very genetic code of the nation. This is a structural fact to which there are no exceptions and ‘in this sense, it is an exact (not a rhetorical) statement about nationalism to say that it is by nature ambivalent.’

Times would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods and utility which matters, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going, and the rate at which you are getting there. – C. L. R. James in Beyond a Boundary (1963)

What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin … Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world–and I can identify with them easily–succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West–a world with which I can identify with the same ease–nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.” – Pamuk, “My Father’s Suitcase” from Other Colors: Essays and a Story

“The point about myths is that they are open-ended. They are open-ended when they are true in that they suggest new arrangements of human essentials based on contingent human experience, not on historical, systematic experience. Human beings are capable of all kinds of possibility, combination, and diversity….”
–Michael Harper, American Poet

I think this is how I want to guide the introduction to the concept of a Black literary tradition:

To be an Afro-American, or an American black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise honorable defend-which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn-and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. –James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (1972)

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. – Toni Morrison

This will be offered for the first time in Fall 2014 as a high-100 level seminar. I am happy to do it although it means a lot of work for me over the summer to make it accessible but not ‘easy’ and to make sure that I have a set of learning objectives in place for each and every session. I think that will come once I design the syllabus. I also want to bring in guest speakers to break up the routine. Additionally, I will try to build in some digital exercises in lieu of written responses. This is a seminar that the college needs and that I want to teach.

Disturbing the Peace: Baldwin, Morrison, and a Black Literary Tradition
This seminar serves as an introduction to the works of two of the most influential and prolific African American thinkers of the post-civil rights era: James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We will explore their fiction and non-fiction as frames in which to think through representation and presentation. As social critics and novelists, both engage concepts such as structural racism, religion, trauma, sexuality, politics and history in a way that calls attention to the state of writing and narrativity as an endlessly creative act.  This class will actively consider selected novels, essays and short prose of Baldwin and Morrison in order to formulate a set of intellectual problems around ethics and aesthetics, the relation between literature and politics, and the theorization of race, gender, class, sexual difference and nation in postwar American culture and in the twenty-first century. This class is intended to prepare students for advanced work in literature and literary studies and thus emphasis on form and genre, rhetorical devices and figurative language through close readings will be part of the work of the course.