Tradition and the Black Atlantic Read online

  There’s a further irony that I think has never really been brought out. Wright was delivering a paper he’d composed beforehand, and he was delivering it after most of the other participants in the conference had made their pronouncements. And as you might expect, he had some doubts about whether he should modify his paper in light of what he’d heard. But not for the reason you might expect, not because he was in the least impressed by the sophistication of his fellow speakers, many of whom we would identify as germinal theorists of national liberation. On the contrary, incredibly, by the end of the day he found himself persuaded that these primitive Africans were so backward, so unenlightened, so unevolved, that he doubted that they would even be able to take in the subtleties of his analysis.

  It is intriguing to compare the version of Wright’s paper, called “Tradition and Industrialization,” as it appears in his collection White Man, Listen, to the relatively verbatim version published as part of the conference proceedings in Présence Africaine and from which I have been quoting. Whereas in the paper that he wrote beforehand, he joyously looked forward to the secularization of Africa, at the conference he registered his considerable disappointment. He interjected remarks such as, “When I wrote that statement, I was hoping and dreaming for black freedom. But after listening to the gentleman of the cloth who spoke here this morning . . . I wonder now if I can say that Africa is more secular-minded than the West.” And later on, he broke off from his exaltation of Africa’s Westernized elites to observe, “Again, I must check and correct my perceptions against the reality, mainly religious in nature, that has emerged from this conference.”10 But he’d already expressed his disappointment in the conference at a roundtable the day before: “I thought that with the political situation shaping up rapidly, we could have addressed ourselves in a concrete manner about why [African] culture was so easily shattered and how we could have gone about . . . modifying what seemed to be perhaps its too deeply subjective content; draining it off into objectivities and instrumentalities, that would have enabled a section of the ground to be cleared for the erection of concrete projects.” These, he told us, were “the ‘live’ questions from which we could have started grappling from the first day.”11 (And it is important that we remember, too, this vision of a base culture transmuted into golden “objectivities and instrumentalities.”)12

  So Wright had a strong conviction of being in a backwater, betrayed by the theoretical equivalent of what Marxist theory used to call “uneven development.” And in a funny way, his sense of being “out of time,” temporally disjointed with the third world participants, was somehow echoed in the fact that every time Wright spoke, he glanced at his watch. This runs through the record of the proceedings like a leitmotif. Wright’s formal presentation opened with the words “The hour is late, and I am pressed for time.” The day before, as a participant in a roundtable, he began with the words “Ladies and Gentlemen, I shall be as brief as possible: the hour is late.”13 He was the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.

  And I note this tiny detail not to labor Wright’s remarkable, one might say colonial, condescension toward his third world compeers, for I think perhaps the hour was late, historically speaking, too late for Richard Wright. His vision of Africa didn’t seem much of an advance on that of, say, nineteenth-century Pan-Africanist Edward Wilmot Blyden. For Wright, Africa was still a place, as Blyden had put it, “in a state of barbarism.” (Here, Wright and his former friend, Ralph Ellison, would have been in hearty agreement. Baldwin’s attitudes toward Africa were also complex. Of the “ big three” authors in the midcentury African American literary canon, only Wright would actually set foot in sub-Saharan Africa.) On the evening of the first day, just two days before, in a wide-ranging discussion on the nature of culture, Senghor had enthusiastically and generously extended to Wright the warmest and most encompassing embrace that his Afro-cosmopolitanism could muster, declaring that a poem of Wright’s and especially his autobiography, Black Boy, were in form and function, aesthetically and subconsciously, irresistibly and inevitably “African.” They were fundamental parts or extensions of a Pan-African canon, a collective “African autobiography,” as a startled Baldwin would write, “like one more book in the Bible, speaking of the African’s long persecution and exile.”14 Perhaps only through the glasses of one of the fathers of Négritude could one see the subtle degree of intertextuality between, say, The Palm Wine Drinkard and Wright’s autobiographical rendition of the trope of the noble savage.

  Two days later, Wright would make it clear that he had recoiled at the embrace. And maybe it’s worth insisting on the fact that Wright’s use of the Western category of “religion” concealed a larger freight: What does the word signify in nonsecular, nonindustrial, non-Western societies where, as Wright knew and lamented, no inpenetrable partition exists between religious practices and everyday life? In this sort of context, the word “religion” can be used only as a surrogate for “culture.” What Africa needed finally to shed, in Wright’s view, was nothing less than traditional African culture itself. Unable to conceive of any counter-hegemonic possibilities in autochthonous cultures, then, Wright could see, in the work of these third world intellectuals, only the dismal prospect of an Africa that would not cease to be African.

  But my target here is actually not Richard Wright at all. If, as Wright would have it, there’s a Bigger Thomas in all of us American Negroes, I want to argue that there’s a Richard Wright in our generation of diasporic intellectuals. In the sense that we are Wright’s heirs, I want to test that line from Ezekiel: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Because it won’t do just to say that Wright made some funny choices, and if my exposition sets anybody’s teeth on edge, I want to explore why.

  Wright’s stature as a black intellectual is beyond question. As Paul Gilroy has perceptively noted, he was “one of a handful of black writers who have seen black nationalism as a beginning rather than an end.”15 (In Chapter 2, I try to explore some of the paradoxes around this issue.) But there’s a fissure, a fault line—sometimes it can be a hairline fracture, sometimes a real break—that runs through Wright and through us when we’re trying to talk about cultural imperialism. It doesn’t start with Wright, though. I want to trace it further back. And this is where things start to get a little weird, because Wright himself told us where to start looking.

  When Wright said that Europe’s great gift to the third world was the Enlightenment, he very explicitly located it as the historic, capital-E Enlightenment, the flowering of European rationalism and universalism, what Will and Ariel Durant would call the Age of Reason. It was also the age in which mercantile networks were consolidated into the modern colonial state. I want to follow Richard Wright’s lead here.

  Enlightenment’s Esau

  So I’m going to summon a rather prophetic eighteenth-century figure who not only anticipated the post-colonialist critique of Enlightenment rationalism, but who also may have founded the discourse against imperialism with which we align ourselves today. His was in so many ways the perfect ideological antagonist to Wright’s position. But more than that, he was, and perhaps remains, the most powerful critic of the modern colonial state, which he tried to strangle in its crib. The anti-imperialist credo has had no more powerful rhetorician. His campaign against the British administration in India, then in corporate/parastatal form, preoccupied him for two decades. Moreover, his was a critique that apprehended fully the violence, both material and cultural, that the political economy of colonialism inflicted upon subject peoples. Nothing was more abhorrent to him than the coercive eradication of India’s diverse, indigenous traditions.

  Here was a man who, almost single-handedly, took on the most powerful instrumentality of empire, the man who led an eight-year-long prosecution of one Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal, head of the East India Trading Company. Toward the end of his life, this man wrote, “Let everything I have done, said, or written be forgotten but
this.”16 And yet he never really expected his impeachment to succeed. What mattered to him was enacting a theater, a public spectacle, that would expose the human cruelties of the colonial regime. So his impossible task was, in the first instance, a dramatic, rather than a legal, endeavor, as he argued, as early as 1783. “We are on a conspicuous stage, and the world marks our demeanor.”17 The trial was yet to begin, but the prosecutor had, by this point, been studying the matter of India for eighteen years.

  The indictment of Warren Hastings was more than a study of personification, more than impeachment by synecdoche, but it was that, too. As our prosecutor wrote, “It is not the culprit who is upon its trial, it is the House of Lords that is upon its trial, it is the British nation that is upon its trial before all other nations, before the present generation, and before a long , long posterity.”18

  In almost Fanonian cadences, he detailed the crippling physical tortures visited on the hapless natives and ventured that a day of reckoning could not long be deferred: The time will arrive, he warned, when “crippled and disabled hands will act with resistless power. What is it that they will not pull down, when they are lifted to heaven against their oppressors? Then, what can withstand such hands? Can the powers that crushed and destroyed them?” “ We may bite our chains if will, but we shall be made to know ourselves.”19

  The figure I summon, the father of anti-colonialism, is, of course Edmund Burke—probably not a paternity most of us would freely choose, at least not at first glance. It makes life easier when our radicals aren’t also reactionaries, when our anti-imperialists don’t partake of the imperial vision as well. Easier, but also less instructive.

  But let’s first grant him the historical prescience we granted Wright. “It is,” Burke admonished,the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from the ill-success of first oppressions; on the contrary, all oppressors, all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature, attribute the frustration of their desire to the want of sufficient rigor. Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty, which, producing, as they ever must produce, new disappointments, they grow irritated against the objects of their rapacity; and then rage, fury, malice, implacable because unprovoked, recruiting and reinforcing their avarice, their vices are no longer human.

  And in these words, he mapped out the course of colonialism in the century and a half to come. So when Burke claimed, about his prosecution of Warren Hastings, that his concern was “not only to state the fact, but to assign the criminality; to fix the species of that criminality,” I want to suggest that he fixed it—something we’d call colonial guilt—for posterity as well.20

  And to bolster my case, I want quickly to sketch three elements of the Burkean critique of imperialism. (And it has to be done, because historically speaking there are at least four barriers that any rereading of Burke has to handle. In reverse chronological order, these are, first, the misappropriation of Burke as a natural law proponent in the 1950s, which reinforced his popular appropriation as the “father of modern conservatism”—the sort of cartoon anti-Communist still touted by Irving Kristol and George Will and others. Second, and ironically, there’s the Victorian celebration of Burke as a kind of Benthamite liberal, of all things. Third, there are, of course, the Jacobin critiques of his contemporaries—Thomas Paine and William Godwin and so on. And fourth, there are influential nineteenth-century misreadings produced by people such as Thomas Macaulay. So there’s this whole obstacle course in the history of ideas that’s already set up for us.)21

  Now, the first element—which I want to pass over quickly, because it’s least relevant to my argument—is that Burke was the first to propose a theory of colonial extraction, known as the “drainage” theory, that was to become an extremely important subject in later Indian historiography. It’s worth noting that almost half of Burke’s published work concerns India in one way or another, and this particular stuff isn’t in the trial proceedings. It’s in his Ninth Report on the East India Trading Company ’s government, where he wrote about the “ruin of Bengal’s traditional economy,” the decline of native handicrafts, and the corporate techniques used to accomplish both. But his boldest observation was that, as he wrote, “the whole exported produce of the country (so far as the Company is concerned) is not exchanged in the course of barter; but is taken away without any return or payment whatsoever.... The country has suffered, what is tantamount to an annual plunder of its manufactures and its produce to the value of twelve hundred thousand pounds.” Indeed, “the whole foreign maritime trade, whether English, French, Dutch, or Danish, arises from the revenues: and these are carried out of the country, without producing any thing to compensate so heavy a loss.”22

  The interesting thing is that, even while Karl Marx was deriding Burke as “an out and out vulgar bourgeois” (not to mention a “celebrated sophist and sycophant”),23 he borrowed Burke’s “drainage” theory whole cloth, which is, if I may say so, another form of unrequited import: the transfer of ideas from Burke to Marx. Maybe it’s worth noting that if you take the concept of cultural imperialism seriously, the pair makes for an ironic contrast. Let’s take an example. In an article written for the New York Tribune of June 25, 1853, Karl Marx satirized the villages in Hindustan, charging that “they subjected man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to the sovereign of circumstances. . . . They transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.”24 In contrast, Burke argued strenuously for the beauty and integrity of these customs, these forms of alterity, however alien to an Englishman.

  Even when Richard Wright became a fierce anti-Communist in the 1940s and 1950s, he remained absolutely faithful to Marx in at least this one respect. Marx lauded Britain’s colonization of the Subcontinent for bringing about “the greatest and, to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia. . . . Whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”25 And of course Wright, as we have seen, retains this very unsentimental view of colonial hegemony in his views about the modernization of Africa. But that’s kind of a side exhibit.

  The Hastings prosecution found Burke ever mindful of the economics of colonialism, and it was through the cash venue that the horrors of the imperial venture would come home to corrupt the mother-land: “We dread the operation of money. Do we not know that there are many men who wait, and who indeed hardly wait, the event of this prosecution, to let loose all the corrupt wealth of India, acquired by the oppression of that country, or the corruption of all the liberties of this.” The currency of the realm would provide the circuit for colonial corruption to infiltrate the sovereign state. And even as his graphic imagery of torture and dismemberment fixed the species of colonial guilt, Burke implicated all of England in this economy of exploitation. The men of India, Burke maintained, “gave almost the whole produce of their labour to the East India Company: those hands which had been broken by persons under the Company’s authority, produced to all England the comforts of their morning and evening tea.”26

  Allow me to quote further: “If their blood has not mingled extensively with yours, their labour power has long since entered your economic bloodstream. It is the sugar you stir, it is in the sinews of the infamous British sweet tooth, it is the tea leaves at the bottom of the British cuppa.” Well put. Except these are, of course, the words of a latter-day rhizome—namely, Stuart Hall.27 But more of this later.

  Right now I want to pass on from this Burkean view of the economics of colonialism, to the second and third elements of the Burkean critique, though in fact they’re pretty hard to decouple. I want to get a fix on what I’ ll call Burke’s “relativizing imagination.” For reasons that probably don’t need explaining , it would be mis
leading simply to call Burke a relativist, but he was, in crucial respects, radically anti-foundationalist. (I guess most readers have figured out that I’m subjecting you to a semi-allegorical archaeology of British Cultural Studies generally, as well as contemporary colonial discourse theory particularly, which are the subject of Chapters 2 and 3. But it’s still worth going through the motions. I think I can promise you that from now on, every single point I’m going to make is one that we can take home, that we can thread through any conversation about cultural resistance and cultural imperialism.)

  A good test of this relativizing strain in Burke is provided by his response to Warren Hastings’s principal line of defense. Hastings based his defense on the claims that his actions were justified by what he called “geographical ethics.” Hastings (who knew very well the advantages of indirect rule) said—and you can see in this the ways that Hastings and Burke are really very similar, doppelgängers in a way, a fact that may help to explain Burke’s near obsession with the man—that he believed that people should be governed according to native custom and that his actions were consistent with the mores of “Oriental Despotism.” And yet Hastings was being tried in the House of Commons for offenses against British customary law.

  Burke’s response here is revealing: “I must do justice to the East, I must assert that their morality is equal to ours, in whatever regards the duties of governors, fathers, and superiors; and I challenge the world to show in any modern European book more true morality and wisdom than is to be found in the writings of Asiatic men in high trust. . . . If this be the true morality of Asia, as I affirm and can prove it is, the plea founded on Mr. Hastings’s geographical morality is annihilated.”