Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity
368
Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253217783 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/22/2005 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Geomodernisms
Race, Modernism, Modernity
By Laura Doyle, Laura Winkiel
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34607-0
CHAPTER 1
The Future of an Allusion: The Color of Modernity
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
If the cynical consciousness of the "black" writers speaks the truth about bourgeois culture, ideology critique does not have anything in reserve to which it might appeal.
— Jürgen Habermas, Discourse
Toussaint's failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness.
— C. L. R. James, Jacobins
This is the last great battle of the West.
— W. E. B. DuBois, Reconstruction
1
there are eight million unfinished projects of the enlightenment in the naked city, this is one of them.
In his oft-cited introductory chapter to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas takes up the question Max Weber raised as a problem for any "universal" history. "For Weber," Habermas reminds us, "the intrinsic (that is, not merely contingent) relationship between modernity and what he called 'Occidental rationalism' was still self-evident" (1). Weber had pondered why, "outside Europe, the scientific, the artistic, the political, or the economic development ... did not enter upon that path of rationalization which is peculiar to the occident" (1). While Habermas recognizes that the intrinsic relationship of modernity to Occidental rationalization may have subsequently come into question itself, he does not pause here to inquire just where Weber might have stood to observe this "outside" of Europe. Neither does he appear to wonder at the seeming conflict between modern Occidental reason's pretensions to universalism and its simultaneous insistence upon its peculiarly Occidental character. In 1958, when Weber's The Protestant Work Ethic was published in New York, there was virtually no place on earth that had not been brought within the horizon of Occidental rationalization.
Clearly, though, Habermas does not have writers of African descent in mind when he addresses himself to the cynicism of "black writers" (still, there is no reason to suppose that an African writer might not indeed be a "black writer" in his formulation); Habermas's blackness is here entirely metaphorical. It is that same darkness invoked by C. L. R. James, but the failures that James attributes to Toussaint L'Ouverture are failures of the Enlightenment, failures of the always unfinished projects of modernity. They were failures of rationalization, not the metaphorical heart of darkness and ignorance. James's seemingly straightforward sentence is among the more overdetermined passages in his monumental history, The Black Jacobins. At one end of the sentence he is at pains to separate the "darkness" of which both he and Habermas speak from the black figures about whom Habermas is completely silent. James is intent upon the destruction of the epidermalization of moral darkness that modern reason had reified in the form of ideological racism, a racism that subsequent writers such as David Theo Goldberg view as a defining feature of state formation in modernity. In Goldberg's reading, "the racially conceived and reproducing state is characteristic of, not exceptional to, modernity" (114). But even as he separates a mode of Habermasian darkness from the bodies of dark peoples, James is bent upon demonstrating that the failures of Toussaint L'Ouverture's reasoning were the failures of a Western-inflected rationalization, not failures of reason per se. The Occidental claim to be the peculiar locus of a universal reason is just the sort of darkness that marks the unreason it would deride. In James's estimation, it is precisely because L'Ouverture had come of age within the slave-holding civilization of the modern West that he made the particular form of revolution that he did make, and that he failed to learn the most important lessons taught by the struggles of his fellow Africans in San Domingo to achieve freedom and independence, to constitute themselves as the very subjects of liberty and fraternity. In all senses, L'Ouverture's incomplete revolution was an unfinished project of the Enlightenment collapsed finally beneath the weight of opposition met within Western modernity.
When Toni Morrison speaks of "The overweening defining event of the modern world," in her essay "Home" (10), her title alludes to an earlier collection of essays by Amiri Baraka at the same time that her sentence alludes to a major thesis found in such works as C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, a thesis that had also been developed independently by W. E. B. DuBois, perhaps at greatest depth in Black Reconstruction. Paul Gilroy alludes to that same thesis in The Black Atlantic (originally titled Promised Lands) when he describes a conception of modernity periodized differently from that of Habermas, a conception "founded on the catastrophic rupture of the Middle Passage rather than the dream of revolutionary transformation" (197). When we follow Gilroy back to his sources we discover that this reconception of modernity projected by James and DuBois is, in fact, accompanied by its own dream of revolutionary transformation, a dream drawing its resources from earlier revolutionary movements carried forward by African peoples in the West, carried forward out of the profoundest rupture of Middle Passage.
James and DuBois both argue far more than the simple case that black people, whether in the New World or in Africa, have not in fact lived outside the horizon of Occidental modernity. DuBois asserts in Black Reconstruction that the "black worker [was a] founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world" (15). He further argues that "Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufactures and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale" (5). Both James and DuBois trace the emergence of new, modern world-encompassing economies to the rupture of Middle Passage and the monumental labors of black workers, but James's Black Jacobins, published just three years after DuBois's Black Reconstruction, audaciously broadens this historical thesis in two directions. In the first place, James holds that the New World's novel modes of social and economic organization brought New World Africans into a fundamentally transmuted life world. Fred Dallmayr, in his critical response to Habermas's works on modernity, argues that "Renaissance and Reformation (together with the discovery of the 'New World') heralded an implicit break with the classical and medieval past; but the notion of a distinctly 'modern' period emerged only slowly in the aftermath of these events" (61). As James develops the history of the revolutionary transformations wrought by New World Africans, he insists that the emergence of the distinctly modern as a fact on the ground was considerably less slow in the case of those who had experienced directly the more explicit break with the continuity of their own past. What he was charting here was the same phenomena that had brought DuBois to his revisions of the concept of double-consciousness, the same phenomenon about which Richard Wright was to remark so poetically: "We millions of black folk who live in this land were born into Western civilization of a weird and paradoxical birth" (12). In an appendix later added to the second edition of his history, James asserts
When three centuries ago the slaves came to the West Indies, they entered directly into the large-scale agriculture of the sugar plantation, which was a modern system. It further required that the slaves live together in a social relation far closer than any proletariat of the time. The cane when reaped had to be rapidly transported to what was factory production. The product was shipped abroad for sale. Even the cloth the slaves wore and the food they ate was imported. The Negroes, therefore, from the very start lived a life that was in its essence a modern life. That is their history — as far as I have been able to discover, a unique history. (392)
Where Weber wants to see the path to modern rationalization as peculiarly Occidental, James sees the unique history of Africans in the diaspora as not only determining a modern essence avant la lettre but as the very condition of possibility of Occidental development and the emergence of a world system. James had earlier established that the wealth generated from slavery in the Western hemisphere did much to fuel the remarkable capitalist expansion of European economies (in fact, it was this portion of James's thesis that inspired Eric Williams's still controversial volume Capitalism and Slavery). James saw that the altered material relationships created in Europe by these new sources of capital and power did much to instigate new modes of political thought. This leads him to conclude that "the slave trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution" (47). He cites Juares's remark to the effect that it was the fortunes created by the slave trade that "gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation" (47). Though later historians and economists have contested James's and Williams's estimations of the exact extent to which the changing economies of the slave systems in colonial production influenced the political agendas of abolition, James's central argument in this regard has never been displaced: that the labors of Africans in the New World created both the plantation wealth and much of the historical circumstances enabling the rise to power of the ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality accompanied by the violent final era of the old regimes. (It is just this that is completely overlooked in Dinesh D'Souza's fatuous The End of Racism when he asserts, completely ahistorically, that only in the West has a society "ever on its own account mounted principled opposition to human servitude" [100], an assertion whose only source, it turns out when one reads his footnotes, is an editorial column by Stanley Crouch.) In The Repeating Island, Antonio Benitez-Rojo reaches much the same conclusions as did James regarding the plantation system and its role in Western history:
So much has already been written about all of this that it is not worth the effort even to sketch out the incredible and dolorous history of this machine. Still, something must be said, just a few things. For one: the singular feature of this machine is that it produced no fewer than ten million African slaves and thousands of coolies (from India, China and Malaysia). All this, however, is not all: the plantation machines turned out mercantile capitalism, industrial capitalism ... [and] African underdevelopment. (9)
This is one of those truths about the narrative of emancipation that James, like DuBois, had good cause to believe "a venal race of scholars, profiteering panders to national vanity, have conspired to obscure" (51). Where other historians and philosophers had, following the logics of Occidental reason, held with Hegel that Africa was outside of history, James and DuBois simply adopted a tactic familiar to us now from the Watergate investigations of the 1970s: they followed the money. When we follow the money we find that Africans had made possible not just the growth of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, Montgomery Ward, Brown University, and so on, but the very course of modern history. Where venal scholars portrayed black people in the Americas as atavistically pre-modern, James held that they were among the first truly modern peoples.
Parallel to these theses of modernity as advanced by James and DuBois in their historical works has been an equally persistent thesis regarding aesthetic modernism. When Melvin B. Tolson wrote in his Harlem Gallery that "the listening ear can hear / among the moderns, blue / tomtoms of Benin" (59), he was not merely noting the immediate influence of American jazz on modern sensibilities, so easily heard in the compositions of Stravinsky, Milhaud, and others. That argument had been placed on the table by black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and their contemporary historiographers. In the special Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic and in the subsequent volume The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, historian J. A. Rogers took note of remarks European musicians and composers had made quite openly regarding the importance of black music to the modernizing of Western composition. Serge Kousevitzky had acknowledged that jazz had not simply made a contribution to modern musical literature, but that it had an epochal significance and was now fundamental to composition. Leopold Stokowski had praised jazz musicians as "pathfinders into new realms." "Thus," concludes Rogers in The New Negro, "it has come about that serious modernists and musicians, most notably and avowedly in the work of the French modernists Auric, Satie and Darius Milhaud, have become the confessed debtors of American Negro jazz" (222). Tolson was to take these arguments much farther. Where Walt Whitman had held in the preceding century that the job of the American poet was "to give the modern meaning of things" (1328), Tolson was to argue that it was specifically in the African diaspora that those modern meanings were to be formed. Looking to the incredible influence on European aesthetics wrought by the sculptures brought from Africa by Van Luschan, Tolson had already claimed that it was Benin "whose ivory and / bronze statues gave lyricism and / space reality to modernistic art" (container 8). In his lyric practice, Tolson was rearticulating arguments about modernism in the arts that had been current among black intellectuals for more than three decades, arguments found in the writings of Sterling Brown, Carter G. Woodson, DuBois and, at considerable length, Alain Locke. Locke had prominently placed in his 1925 New Negro anthology an essay of his own in which he maps out just a few of the overtly acknowledged circulations of African art forms in Western modernism. In painting and sculpture he names Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Modigliani, Utrillo, Pechstein, Archipenko, Zadkine, Guillaume, and others. Locke further tracks this influence as it spreads through the arts. "Attracted by the appeal of African plastic art to the study of other modes of African expression," Locke observes, "poets like Guillaume Appolinaire [sic] and Blaisé Cendrars [sic] have attempted artistic re-expression of African idioms in poetic symbols and verse forms" (261). One need only look as far as the Cantos of Ezra Pound, with their invocation of the Dausi epic and the tale of Gassire's lute, gathered from his readings in Leo Frobenius, to see the decisive role African expressive forms have played in modernist poetics. And this association of black arts with the evolution of aesthetic modernism was not a thesis confined to black thinkers and writers. As John Hammond publicized the "Spirituals to Swing" concert he was organizing at Carnegie Hall, he boldly predicted in the pages of the New Masses that "what we now have promises to be an evening of great discovery, a presentation that may well be to modern music what the Armory Show of cubist painting in 1913 was to modern art" (2). Those very cubist paintings seen at the Armory Show, of course, had tangible roots in their creators' rediscovery of African art forms.
But as we retrace these critical genealogies of blackness and modernity from the vantage point of our newly arrived century, we find ourselves following an intriguing fold in historical narrative. In order for intellectuals of the African diaspora to posit New World Africans as progenitors of modernity, in order for us, now, to follow them in thinking of African peoples as not simply subjects encompassed by modernity but as active producers of the modern, we must have modernity already there before us, and this is why all such writings are haunted by a "post-" and why all such histories must immediately be seen as revisionist. This is why contemporary critics such as Mark Anthony Neal posit African American modernity "as a 'counter' or at least 'alternative' modernity" (4), for it is a modernity that is found already there within modernity. It is as if black writers have had to steal past the disciplinary boundaries erected by whiteness around modernity, to slip inside modernity to demonstrate that they had been there all along. This accounts for the real violence that surrounds these arguments even now, as well as accounting for the redoubling of consciousness required of any who would think a future of modernism. A particularly biting passage in Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo satirizes the violent resistance with which such "black" writers and thinkers of darkness have been met. Blustering with anger, one character offers a damning litany against the sheer audacity of black thought:
I've seen them, son, in Africa, China, they're not like us, son, the Herrenvolk. Europe. This place. They are lagging behind, son, and you know in your heart this is true. Son, these niggers writing. Profaning our sacred words. Taking them from us and beating them on the anvil of Boogie Woogie, putting their black hands on them ... Why ... why 1 of them dared to interpret, critically mind you, the great Herman Melville's Moby Dick!! (114)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Geomodernisms by Laura Doyle, Laura Winkiel. Copyright © 2005 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsIntroduction: The Global Horizons of ModernismLaura Doyle and Laura WinkielI. Modernisms' Alternative Genealogies1. The Future of an Allusion: The Color of ModernityAldon Lynn Nielsen2. Africa and the Epiphany of ModernismSimon Gikandi3. Liberty, Race, and Larsen in Atlantic Modernity: A New World GenealogyLaura Doyle4. The Geopolitics of Affect in the Poetry of Brazilian ModernismFernando J. Rosenberg5. Ongoing War and Arab HumanismKen Seigneurie6. On the Ganges Side of Modernism: Raghubir Singh, Amitav Ghosh, and the Postcolonial ModernAriela FreedmanII. Modernisms' Contested States7. Twentieth-Century Chinese Modernism and Globalizing Modernity: Three Auteur Directors of Taiwan New CinemaSung-sheng Yvonne Chang8. Against "Library-Shelf Races": José Martí's Critique of Excessive ImitationGerard Aching9. Modernist (Pre)Occupations: Haiti, Primitivism, and Anticolonial NationalismPatricia E. Chu10. Gadze ModernismJanet Lyon11. Cabaret Modernism: Vorticism and Racial SpectacleLaura WinkielIII. Modernisms' Imagined Geographies12. Township Modernism Ian Baucom13. Paranoia, Pollution, and Sexuality: Affiliations between E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small ThingsSusan Stanford Friedman14. Unreal City and Dream Deferred: Psychogeographies of Modernism in T. S. Eliot and Langston HughesEluned Summers-Bremner15. Modernism's Possible GeographiesJessica Berman16. Modernism(s) Inside Out: History, Space, and Modern American Indian Subjectivity in Cogewea: The Half-BloodJustine DymondWorks CitedContributorsIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"The innovative essays in this collection emanate from conferences sponsored by the Modern Language Association. Thus, the book represents high-level academic literary criticism by scholars who go boldly where few have gone before. They explore and try to redefine 'modernism' and 'modernity' by setting their sights on aesthetic creativity inCuba, Brazil, Haiti, India, China, Taiwan, Lebanon, and South Africa—and, in a few instances, more familiar territory (England and the US). Confidently using the critical language of postcolonial analysis in discussing self-awareness, anxiety, freedom, and resistance to assimilation by a dominant ethos, the essays analyze features of rationalized racism, American Indian subjectivity, Haitian primitivism, 'Atlantic modernity,' Arab humanism, 'cabaret' modernism, and the construct of the gypsy. A few essays assess cross-cultural parallels, e.g., between E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas are among the predictable guides. The book's tentative but fruitful concept of 'geo—modernism' offers a new way of understanding cultural continuities and conflicts through the lens of modernist literary representation. This is a book for seasoned literary adventurers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty.— M. S. Vogeler, emerita, California State University, Fullerton December 2006"
The innovative essays in this collection emanate from conferences sponsored by the Modern Language Association. Thus, the book represents high-level academic literary criticism by scholars who go boldly where few have gone before. They explore and try to redefine 'modernism' and 'modernity' by setting their sights on aesthetic creativity inCuba, Brazil, Haiti, India, China, Taiwan, Lebanon, and South Africa—and, in a few instances, more familiar territory (England and the US). Confidently using the critical language of postcolonial analysis in discussing self-awareness, anxiety, freedom, and resistance to assimilation by a dominant ethos, the essays analyze features of rationalized racism, American Indian subjectivity, Haitian primitivism, 'Atlantic modernity,' Arab humanism, 'cabaret' modernism, and the construct of the gypsy. A few essays assess cross-cultural parallels, e.g., between E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas are among the predictable guides. The book's tentative but fruitful concept of 'geo—modernism' offers a new way of understanding cultural continuities and conflicts through the lens of modernist literary representation. This is a book for seasoned literary adventurers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty.— M. S. Vogeler, emerita, California State University, Fullerton December 2006