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Freedom with Violence
Race, Sexuality, and the US State
By CHANDAN REDDY
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5105-4
Chapter One
Freedom and Violence in W. E. B. Du Bois's
Souls of Black Folk The Land of Racial Equality
But black nationalists have recognized since the time of Delany in the mid-nineteenth century that the location of the land of the black nation is highly problematic, as is the establishment of a state when the territory for the black nation has been identified ... The status of land and statehood is ambiguous among the theorists who embrace the nation-within-a-nation thesis. "Revolution is always based on land!" Malcolm X argued in his speech entitled "The Black Revolution." Yet the land over which the black revolution is to be fought was never specified. —MICHAEL C. DAWSON, Black Visions
It is a bitter fact that the research university's great leap forward came in the decades, 1890–1910, during which Jim Crow segregation was being systematically installed in American life.—CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD, Ivory and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980
This chapter positions W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a critique of the emergent disciplinary organization of knowledge within the newly formed US research university. Du Bois interprets US modernity through two distinct currents at the start of the twentieth century. First, and the most apparent current by which the text is opened, is the emergence of black male citizenship in the state and the persistence of racial despotism after the abbreviation of Reconstruction. The second current, less remarked upon though no less central to Du Bois, is the development of the modern research university in the United States and the rise of positivist modes of knowing, especially for the sciences of government and state. The currents are not merely a contiguous development, and Souls renders each as constituting a unified and complex dialectic of US twentieth-century modernity. What emerges, Du Bois argues, is a modernity with distinct and marginalized contingencies and the possibilities they engender. It is in pursuit of these contingencies that I argue that Du Bois's composite text produces a materialist theory of black culture as a suppressed difference of national capitalist state modernity.
For Du Bois, the twentieth century forces the recognition of race as irreducible to its functionalist representation as an object of and means for violence, an emergent liberal-juridical thesis of the time. Rather, the text offers an understanding of race, as in the case of black citizenship, as the production of the bodily subject as an experience of freedom and violence. As such, race offers as much as it demands a different epistemology of US modernity than that institutionalized by emergent positivism. Rather than seeking to engage or resolve the current debates concerning the numerous inconsistencies in W. E. B. Du Bois's racial thinking in Souls of Black Folk, my goal in this chapter is to focus on a set of narrative occurrences that operate across the different empirical, historical, literary, and autobiographical chapters and that, taken together, reveal a suppressed narrative structure—a structure that I believe discloses Du Bois's theorization of race as one of twentieth-century liberalism's conditions of possibility. In this way, I read Du Bois's Souls as a form of countermemory to the official narratives of national citizenship and emancipation that were generated by the liberal positivist methods that organized the university and the state in this period. Comparing Du Bois's work to that of the liberal progressive historian Henry Jackson Turner, who sought to offer narrative meaning to the state (conceived of as a field of practice and information), I read the two authors as offering conflicting accounts of the narrative of emancipation through which the nation and the citizen are naturalized and accorded the status of truth. Considered against the background of Progressive Era state building, Du Bois's text can be read as more than an example of the contradiction of emancipation for African Americans. Rather, his text offers a theory of race as a genealogy of what the narrative of emancipation both cannot admit and seeks to subjugate as the outmoded, anachronistic, or the archaic part of state-based political modernity.
LIBERAL POSITIVISM AND THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION
The work of the early Du Bois, including Souls, has generally been read as thoroughly complicit with the liberal and racial progressivism that organized academic thinkers and political elites in the United States from the 1880s through the First World War. Scholars and critics cite Du Bois's reliance on liberal theories of political representation as a countervailing force to the chaotic and degenerate conditions of mass democracy, and his belief in Lamarckian evolution and the civilizational discourse that overtook a country thoroughly engaged in imperial geopolitics. For Adolph Reed Jr., many of Du Bois's most famous formulations in Souls—many of which, like "double-consciousness," he would never return to—were part of a larger Progressive Era worldview: "The many different expressions of 'alienage,' fragmented consciousness, and anxieties about overcivilization were articulated within an outlook that hypostatized dichotomous, essentialist categories as fundamental determinants of human existence." That the concepts expounded by the early Du Bois fit so well within these Progressive terms convinces Reed that we ought to read Souls as part of a larger corpus produced by a university-trained academic elite that was both progressive and positivist and that sought to engage the ongoing social conflicts of the time. Reed writes: "Knowing what we do about Du Bois's faith in science and the nature of social scientific discourse about race during the era in question, it should not be too surprising to see that he operated within the parameters of mainstream academic conventions."
Seen from this perspective, social and political history can help us decipher the politics of Du Bois's thinking in Souls. By engaging his racialist discourse or his commitment to the thesis of an elitist "talented tenth," this mode of interpretation suggests that we can discern the true political meaning and value of this otherwise generically and politically polyglot text. In my reading of Souls, I would like to break from this reading practice. I do so not so much to argue against it as to identify other strains organizing Du Bois's thinking and the ideas conveyed in Souls. I seek only to bracket these other forms of interpretation, rather than entirely displacing them, because I think that they are part of the text we have inherited, and their contributions make it richer. For example, radical black feminist critiques of Du Bois's talented tenth thesis must remain a central interpretation of the text and of his political thinking in this period—still many years before his turn to Marxism, communism, and decolonization. These critiques present rich discussions of how deeply gendered, sexual, and civilizational norms organized Du Bois's thinking of the political—registered, for example, in his continuous appeal to "manhood rights" in this period. These critiques are crucial because they reveal the degree to which reformist movements such as Du Bois's progressivist naacp are less a sign of the promotion of democracy than of the extension of political society's tentacles downward, inflicting violence on those excluded from political society in the guise of extending universal norms and values. Indeed, some critics have taken this argument to its most profound and historically accurate end: social reform doesn't just use universal values and norms for its own violent ends. Rather, the violence of political society—of universal norm and values—finds its best conduit in social reformers.
But I also want to argue that to interpret Souls as a text that vacillates between affirming the violence of reform and communal rights against racism, has the potential to prevent us from seeing another central preoccupation of Du Bois's text: the questions of what is race, and what might it mean to speak of a politics of race? These are the questions that preoccupy Souls, traveling across the different chapters and different genres of writing that make up the text.
To ask these questions, I think, is to reverse our orientation for a moment: we do not use the positivist social science that underlay state reform in this period or the talented tenth thesis—a thesis that organized so much of Du Bois's actual social politics, his academic efforts, and his ongoing contributions to build the progressive state in this period—to read his literary text. Rather, in this instance we use the text and the orientations and questions it creates for its readers, to remark upon the apparent clarity of the social actions it advocates. In this way, the text undoes some of the clarity of meaning of the talented tenth thesis (of the idea of uplift as a part of racial or national intra-group class control and politics). It reveals the interruption of that meaning by the very conditions of race for which uplift is figured as the social solution. Indeed, like the opening salvo in Souls, the whole text reveals that bringing the empirical and positivist discourse of solutions into the domain of race—so that the "Negro" becomes an embodied question—is a way to regulate and control race itself.
What is so powerful about Souls is that text undoes, as much as any text can, some of the meaning and clarity of concrete social actions such as reformist uplift projects, from which much of the US state was constructed in this period. In reversing the priority we usually give to practice over thinking and experience over representation, especially in our engagement with politics and the state, although not abolishing these distinctions, Souls asks us to rethink social actions, their meanings, and their very quality, as those actions become incorporated into the text. Souls argues that what is primary is not interpreting the meaning of the text through the determinative lens of the concrete social action of Du Bois as the political subject of American progressivism. Rather, it is to read and rethink social actions as they are constituted by the text, to accept the text's challenge to our sense of political society as composed of clear and precise discrete actions. In following Souls this way, we see that a politics of race is not so easy to pin down. Indeed, Du Bois's view is that a politics of race might be exactly what undermines the clarity of the political sphere, of definitions of what is and isn't politics, of imperial violence as extraneous from progressive state building, and so forth.
Although suspicious of the empiricism organizing much research on race in this period, Du Bois does not advocate abandoning the empirical core of the positivist project that organized the social sciences and the state in this period. This is true even in those chapters or moments in the text when he excoriates the racist smugness and laziness of empiricists—those "car-window" sociologists, as he calls them. Du Bois was particularly incensed by the sociologists who surveyed the southern "Black Belt" from their train while traveling on vacation, only to rely on such travels in their academic study of the so-called Negro problem: "To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unraveling the snarl of centuries,—to such men very often the whole trouble with the black field hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia's word, 'Shiftless!'"
For Du Bois, these pronouncements revealed a secret transcendental being, unheard and unseen, but at the core of the positivist project—the liberal egalitarian citizen, who allowed otherwise rigorous scholars to pass off their southern vacations as scientific research. And for Du Bois, this is not so much a ruse as it is a genuine belief among white social scientists in this period that the social scientist could actually do the empirical field research (and what we would now call the ethnography) necessary to solve the Negro problem in the same amount of time that important male scholars carve out for taking family vacations. Needless to say, Du Bois offers an image of the academic sociologist for whom the hard work of thinking with and through one's own empirical conditions happened elsewhere, in another time, among peers, paradoxically producing the sociological authority to establish the meaning of the post-bellum agrarian Black Belt while on leisure. It is precisely this authority, Du Bois seems to suggest, that enables the sociologist to miss the comedy behind ignominious academic pronouncements on "shiftless" black life that happily cite the sociologist's leisure time as the basis of such pronouncements. That is, in the context of professionalizing knowledge, it is the structure of sociological authority, and the racialized valuing of geographies and bodies that this authority conserves, that makes these leisure sociologists something other than shiftless academics by their own professional system of knowing. Furthermore, it is the slow pace of the racialized body—"shiftless!"—that guarantees leisure for the professionalized body we call a sociologist.
But Du Bois is also making a deeper criticism, beyond pointing out the lax standard for what qualifies as research, when it comes to racial inequality and representing the poor, racialized class of former slaves in his time. What he marveled at was that the car-window sociologist doesn't even think to ask (so committed is he to the positivist empiricism of the universal citizen subject) what he could and could not know as a free subject traveling in a region—the Jim Crow South—in which travel highlighted the differential conditions of race. For Du Bois, the car-window sociologist could have no reflexive capacities by which to interrogate his inquiry, as long as the conditions that made that inquiry possible—his freedom to travel—never once occurred to him as the organizing limit of his inquiry. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which permitted "separate but equal" train cars, Du Bois saw clearly that the transparent and universal vision that car-window sociologists were so committed to was indistinguishable from the juridical recognition of freedom that those (white) sociologists sought so desperately to exercise.
For Du Bois, this revealed something of the impossibility of the positivist study of race: to be a subject of positive knowledge, such as the use of the social survey in conditions where freedom to travel is a racially differentiated right, is to affirm a social world constituted through a juridical freedom that institutes racial divisions and appropriations through that very freedom. In Du Bois's view, this demanded a historical inquiry into race since sociology took freedom as a given, producing knowledge that formally sanctioned the racial divisions and appropriations that juridical equality produced. In other words, sociology could say nothing beyond reformist critiques about state power, as long as it remained entirely dependent upon that power in its methods and modes of knowing. It is only through a historical inquiry into race, Du Bois suggests, that the thinking subject can discover the conditions by which knowledge conserves juridical freedom as its unthinkable necessity—even, and especially, in those instances when the constraints of that freedom are perceptually registered, as in the case of the vacationing sociologist. Yet, as I argue below, Du Bois had to revise historical thought too, for the degree to which it affirmed the racial state as the outcome of its own investigations.
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER AND THE POLITICS OF THE FRONTIER
Frederick Jackson Turner initially presented what came to be known as his frontier thesis in a talk for professional historians gathered in Chicago for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, which marked the four hundredth anniversary of the European discovery of the Americas. Titled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Turner's speech concentrated on the significance of recent empirical data, particularly the census of 1890, for his profession and historical methods. Finding that the census offered data that the long history of US expansion and demographic movement westward was coming to an end, along with the closing of the territorial frontier, Turner argued that these data provided irrefutable evidence that the US state was a historical formation, dependent for its temporal persistence less upon its so-called Teutonic germs than on central positive dynamics unique to US modernity that only his progressive generation was in a position to grasp.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Freedom with Violence by CHANDAN REDDY Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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