Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2002)
ISSN: 1530-5686
AGAINST RACE OR THE POLITICS OF SELF-ETHNOGRAPHY
|
Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2002) ISSN: 1530-5686 AGAINST RACE OR THE POLITICS OF SELF-ETHNOGRAPHY |
|
Carole Boyce Davies
In 1997 in a London bookstore, in the wake of the success of The Black Atlantic a publisher’s flier caught my eye. It announced that Paul Gilroy’s next book, was going to be on “Black Fascism.” Startled that a black scholar would actually produce and enshrine that combination, I relayed this information to a friend, a well-known member of the London black activist community who indicated disinterestedly that he would not be the least surprised if Gilroy would attempt such a project. I was not surprised then when an essay entitled “Black Fascism” appeared in Transition (Issue 81/82). Still, seeing this essay titled in this way became for me a defining moment in my assessment of Gilroy’s larger project. This project, my reading of Gilroy’s ‘Black Fascism’ then is his larger critique of any form of black nationalism and of any black activist/collective work taken to the limit. Against Race as title for this book under present consideration is that this is no more than a publisher’s recognition that a title such as “Black Fascism,” provocative though it is, would be harder to market to the U.S. academic public. Sold as Between Camps in London, Against Race as title fits better into the range of “race industry” books.
Continuing consideration of the relationship between this title and this original intent allowed me to come to the conclusion that the relationship between the two was neither trivial nor by chance. What I shall argue then in the following are three basic points in the allotted for this discussion: (1) Gilroy’s Against Race is a veiled attempt to deploy his “black fascism” as a partially legitimate category even as it lets the current version of “fascism” - U.S. imperialism and its fascist policies escape full analysis (2) Gilroy’s project is weighted not “against racism” as an entrenched practice but a philosophical argument against the idea of race, as a discursive category , hardly a new argument (3) the politics of self-ethnography that he employs is able to assert a white patriarch as it traffics over that same well known masculinist error, long recognized in feminist critique—the erasure of the black identitarian position, in this case, the black mother.
Contemporary U.S. “patriot politics”, enshrined in the USA Patriot Act of 2001 offers a perfect opportunity of witnessing “fascism” in its formation. A state level assertion of racism and racial profiling as policy; the erosion of basic civil rights for singled out portions of the population; incarceration without fair judicial processes; deportation; a massive military formulation which is able to level massive force and technological destruction wherever it feels like; a media absolutely aligned with the state’s position and through it the ability to marshal public opinion in support of the state’s interests. Under U.S. imperialism, the former British imperialists are reduced to being an active voice in the international assertion of U.S. imperial power. Fascism in this case refers to the state’s ability to use the range of its power for specific assertions of its own protection but which have the parallel effect of advancing its hegemony. Thus, under the “USA Patriot Act” as in the earlier Smith Act and Walter McCarran Act, the protection of U.S. borders makes into a deportable offense “any fundraising, solicitation for membership or material support, even for humanitarian projects, of groups that are designated terrorist organizations by the secretary of state.” It also requires mandatory detention of a person certified as a terrorist if the attorney general or deputy attorney general has reasonable grounds to believe that the alien is a terrorist or has committed terrorist activity. It further allows that persons certified in this manner shall remain in custody irrespective of any relief from removal for which they may be eligible or have been granted. Along with this legal prescription, an intense control of a range of citizens on certain “watch lists” via the use of technology ensures the limitations of movement of a range of people whose ideological positions and identities are not consistent with the state.
My work on the Caribbean/American scholar, Claudia Jones who with the communist party faced an intense barrage from the U.S. state in the 1940’s leading to her incarceration and deportation in 1955, has allowed me to make some important parallels between then and now. In even talking about U.S. fascism in this way, I am personally mindful of the danger of making public assertions that critique state power. Indeed critiquing state power has always been fraught with danger for the intellectual as for the activist.
The easier approach is to critique those who have been historically the victims of state terrorism rather than the state itself. And this is in my view one of the unfortunate implications of the Gilroy Black Fascism project. Much of his argument in what he calls “generic fascism” turns on the issue of style and performance, not on active practices of power. So, for Gilroy, parades, clothing and rhetoric become the key elements in identifying this generic fascism. In his words:
it is, however, to entertain the possibility of a profound kinship between the UNIA and the fascist political movements of the period in which it grew. These affinities can be approached via the idea of a common political style that usefully shades simplistic distinctions between ideology on the one hand and organizational strategies on the other (AR, p.232).
Gilroy is able to make this move by basing much of his argument on an early critique of Garvey by C.L.R. James. Gilroy identifies a coda to The Black Jacobins, in which James had indicated that Garvey was ahead of Hitler and Mussolini in that he had “organized storm troopers, who marched, uniformed in his parades, and kept order and gave color to his meetings. Importantly, James subsequent revision of his position in A History of Pan African Revolt (1970’s/1994) escapes Gilroy or is conveniently erased. With the benefit of a subsequent assessment of the black movement, that he had spent considerable time analyzing, James instead was able to say that the Garvey movement had been able to mobilize more black people than anybody else and indeed that Garvey, full of shortcoming and contradictions, had actually unleashed a black consciousness movement and was therefore a central pillar of any Pan Africanist movement. Up until then, James’s Trotskyist politics had seen only workers as credible subjects of history. A re-assessment of black liberation movements in the light of actual practice allowed James to see that the Black movement itself had the capacity to change the world and that Garvey was absolutely central to any understanding of this movement.
James in “From Toussaint to Fidel Castro” (1962) for example identifies “Garvey and Padmore” as the two West Indians able to move the emancipation of Africans internationally to the forefront and to make it one of the “outstanding events of contemporary history.”
Garvey found the cause of Africans and of people of African descent not so much neglected as unworthy of consideration. In little more than half of ten years, he had made it part of the political consciousness of the world .... when you bear in mind the slenderness of his resources, the vast material forces and the pervading social conceptions which automatically sought to destroy him, his achievement remains one of the progagandist miracles of this century (The CLR James Reader, Blackwell, 1992, 300).
The second person subjected to Gilroy’s critique is Zora Neale Hurston for her fascination with a Haitian colonel, a well-dressed, authoritarian figure for the same reasons, his military outfit, his desire to clear the beggars off the streets by building state farms: In Gilroy words again,
The combination of bodily perfection and a firm political hand on the beggars and thieves is not, of course, enough to damn him as a fascist, but the resonance is a strong one...(235)
While he asserts “I approach the concept of fascism with trepidation (144) because it links together so many different historical and local phenomena” and “I think that pursuing a generic definition of fascism is not only possible and desirable but imperative and we are obliged to distinguish between fascism as a historical development, a political and social movement, a rare pattern of government and a recognizable ideological and cultural formation,” (145), he nonetheless deploys the concept minus a clearly argued and developed set of analyses which would allow us then to see ‘black fascism’ as he wants to use it.
Absent of a consideration of state practices of fascism, Gilroy deals with precisely that the “resonances,” the glamour of fascism as it were. His article in Transition does it pictorally, juxtaposing photographic images of the KKK in formation with the Garvey movement, the Fruit of Islam and the Masons with the Mussolini and Hitler armies in military dress.
I want to assert that focusing on the semiotics of fascism: “style” fashion, rhetoric and then making the leap towards an assertion of black fascism is unacceptable...given the brutal nature of fascist practice. It is another version of a certain kind of “reverse racism” argument which asserts too that the victims of racism, once they organize or act against their oppression are automatically also practicing racists . In this way, the institutional practices of racism remain unaddressed.
Let me conclude this section then by referring to one of the members of the Johnson-Forrest tendency, Grace Lee Boggs who comments on a visit to the Schomburg in her Living for Change. An Autobiography (1998),
I visited the Schomburg collection in Harlem and red Amy Garvey’s compilation of her husband’s philosophy and opinions. It was exciting to discover that Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement had been inspired in part by the Russian Revolution. Lenin, said Garvey, had seized the opportunity of the crisis of the War to make the October revolution. People of the African Diaspora scattered all over the world, he thought, should follow Lenin’s example and exploit the post war crisis to recover Africa for themselves (52).
The reference to the Schomburg, and the specifics of doing actual study and research on African Diaspora subjects is deliberate.
To go to the Schomburg the repository of so much history of African diaspora without ‘tarrying there a while’ to do the type of research and communion required, and then to make baseless statements in the context of a conference on the Black Diaspora is a travesty. Similarly, to call Garvey a fascist without understanding the basic strategy deployed, the rhetoric of black leadership and the skill of mobilizing black populations to action on their behalf is also an amazing act of temerity. One has to ask then, why is Gilroy, minus the grounded research and thinking that has taken place in African American studies, so popularly deployed in the U.S. academy as the source of so much intellectual authority?
Gilroy’s Against Race then is a new reworking of an already given argument that “race” is a biological fiction. Indeed, most scholars who have been following the debates on race have for at least fifty years understood that position. The work of Audrey Smedley (who I was fortunate to have as a colleague in Binghamton) in anthropology The Concept of Race in Western Thought has now become the basic common sense understanding of the American Anthropological Association’s position on race. And the recent work of the biologists on “race” has been fundamental. Indeed what has not happened is the large scale shifting of that knowledge to the general population. So, Gilroy’s “against race” cannot be simply that, an argument well made or better made elsewhere. Instead, Gilroy’s argument is that we must divest ourselves from “race” and “racial thinking” or what he calls “raciology.” Based on his notion that in popular culture “blackness can now signify vital prestige rather than abjection in a global info-tainment telesector” (36), Gilroy asserts that:
I am suggesting that the only appropriate response to this uncertainty is to demand liberation not from white supremacy alone, however urgently that is required but from all racializing and raciological thought, from racialized seeing, racialized thinking, and racialized thinking about thinking. (40)
The limitation in this reading may be his overwhelming emphasis on popular culture rather than the actual living conditions of the range of U.S.African Americans. His orientation towards the larger, philosophical debate i.e. the larger scientific trope ‘against race’ without an analysis of the effects of the practices of racism in key sites institutionally.
It is significant then that Gilroy’s project is not “against racism” or the institutional practices of racism, but rather “against race. In other words, we do not get a series of “anti racist strategies” as has been done by a variety of other scholars and activists in the U.K. (Cambridge and Feuchtwang, eds. Antiracist Strategies, Avesbury, England), but rather that we must divest ourselves of “race.” The move to the U.S. is significant for it relocates him in a society which absolutely uses racial hierarchies via its media, police system, criminal justice system, academy, prison system, educational system and so on, one wonders who the “we” is identified here. Is Gilroy asking the victims of racism to then suddenly dispense with their acute ability to “read race” honed over the years of battling its effects. What do we do with the actual continuing practices of race and racism. In Gilroy’s understanding, we no longer feel the effects of racism, “We just feel pain!”
In Oneonta New York in the mid 1990’s at the word of a white woman who claimed that a black man had broken into her house and cut himself as he left, all black men in the town were rounded up and interrogated and searched for a cut that matched what had been identified. SUNY-Oneonta at the request of local police, gave a listing (which they had already computer-generated) of all black male students. In this small upstate town, young black men were picked up off their jobs, on public transportation, in their dorms. A lawsuit was subsequently filed and I discovered recently was unsuccessful in its realization of compensation for the victims. Versions of the same proliferate and one is aware of countless versions of “racial profiling” of those the society defines as racially ambiguous. For the socalled “Arab” designation is also a reference to a range of peoples who do not fit the convenient polarized racial definitions and categories used in places like the U.S.
The reverse racism argument we already know has been used successfully in places like Brazil where Blocos Afro like Ile Aiye organized because of exclusions, are made to feel guilty if they march without the participation of white Brazilians. It is an argument which while the actual practices of racism continue, has the temerity to ask its victims to somehow not organize, and leaves the state and its practices in tact while its black population is singled out for the most attack. And recently I noted that Gilroy’s position actually coalesces well with the “racial democracy” assertions in Brazil.
Gilroy had instead offered the aesthetics of hybridity. Hybridity itself as a concept still turns on the original categories of “black and white” even as it attempts to assume the space of instability and ambiguity. So in our contemporary moment, Puerto Ricans are misrecognized as Arabs, and a variety of “mixed race” people then become subject to surveillance and interrogation. The ambiguous space is no longer ambiguous. Black radicalism is not seen as threatening, save Mumia. One witnesses the state and its cycles of capital as it reproduces and enforces its racial divisions appropriate to its interest. And in this context the threat comes precisely not from black radicalism but from the unmarked racially and culturally, now newly marked again.
Transatlanticism as an intellectual experience and as a personal paradigm is an important consideration here. In the Gilroy case, the specifics of entering the U.S. space as a black intellectual weighs heavily given the various struggles for civil rights, for active participation waged by black scholars and activists. In this particular context, the hybrid space or the space of unambiguous biraciality yields reactionary practices given that the institutional context remains so brutal and often does not hesitate to mete out punishments to those who go against its entrenched positions. Gilroy’s final ideal of a planetary humanism may benefit more from the ongoing analyses of a scholar like Sylvia Wynter.
In the introduction to Against Race, Gilroy allows himself a self-ethnographic moment as follows:
I have had to recognize personal motivation for turning to the relationship between “race” and fascism (2)
For another two to three pages, he identifies being raised in post-world war II England, in the midst of the Nazi threat, and in the midst of an England recovering from the effects of the war. War games, war memorabilia, literature. Still much of the discussion revolves around the father-son axis, with his father the “conscientious-objector” with an admirable set of political positions who nevertheless fell short in his child’s eyes in terms of actual participation in this most momentous of events. And for some reason, Beryl Gilroy, Afro-Caribbean writer, victim of British racism that she catalogs well in Black Teacher, a prolific contributor to anti-racist education in London, to trying to understand the psychology of racism, consistent writer till her death disappears in this formulation. We get instead:
My mother, in any case younger, was equally unsatisfactory as a source of war lore. The conflict had certainly been registered in what was then British Guiana. Although the idea that a German victory would mean the reintroduction of slavery had been circulated there, along with the imperial propaganda newsreels, the was not central to her life prior to migration (4).
The rest of the self-ethnography peters out into a generalized discussion of childhood, and sympathy to his Jewish schoolmates who were kind to the West Indian students and whose suffering he realized bound him to them..”that their suffering was somehow connected to the idea of “race”. In a view shaped by a then bombarding media, images of civil rights, swastika flying, burning crosses and conflicting and confused positions about racial identity and of course the charge of fascism leveled against American imperialism and domestic policy. All of these ostensibly Gilroy identifies as positions he wanted to answer and therefore the genesis of this book.
The absent mother is telling in this case as for most black British intellectuals, it was the late Beryl Gilroy who has done the work, lived the struggle, and the one with the more credible credentials on the subject. And indeed one has to locate Beryl Gilroy within a generation of Caribbean creative thinkers who worked out of the London space from the 1950’s onwards (Salkey, Wynter, Carew, the Huntleys of Bogle L’ouverture publications, John La Rose, the New Beacon Books, Claudia Jones, Ricky Cambridge and subsequent generations). The erasure of Beryl Gilroy then is a simultaneous erasure or ignorance of the entire spectrum of Afro-Caribbean scholarship and creativity and activism.
What I call then ‘fear of identification with the Wretched’ is perhaps what seems to mark Gilroy in this incarnation. His “I am not an African American nor do I aspire to be one” spoken sacreligiously at the Schomburg no less, continues that self-ethnography. The extent to which one enters the U.S. as complicit with this state’s policies or critical of them is telling. The long internal debate in the African American community about the nature of engagement with the U.S. state and its politics remain significantly un-articulated in Gilroy’s process. An avoidance of that long African American history enshrined in the Schomburg remains.
Why then is the African American singled out for attack? What are the specific evaluations of African American history (broadly defined to include all the Americas here) that escape Gilroy? What about the long struggles of alliance between African Diaspora scholars as expressed in a Claudia Jones or a Kwame Toure and yes a Marcus Garvey and others who on entering the U.S. context allied themselves with the “wretched.” For while Gilroy cites a version of Fanon in which Fanon was mindful of rigid identitarian positions, his work does not similarly carry the actual anti-colonialist practices of Fanon of that generation of Afro-Caribbean activists in London (whose children are now like Gilroy ambiguously ‘Black British’). I use this idea of the “wretched” deliberately because it is Fanon ‘s confrontation with that “negre” who is himself that brings forward a certain politics of resistance. And this is perhaps precisely the meaning of Marcus Garvey that escapes Gilroy.
Against Race is not just a set of discursive positions but a very specific set of practices. It challenges the philosophy of “race” as a formation but it leaves in tact the very hierarchy of racial oppression and racial structuring.
A number of scholars have asked how did the “Black Atlantic Debate” produce this? One position may be that it is easier to critique British imperialism from the U.K. i.e. there is a long history of that challenge. It is a more difficult proposition to take on American imperialism in the belly of the beast. While on the one hand an interrogation of the reification of U.S. versions of blackness as dominant is appropriate, a recognition of a certain diaspora formation with which Gilroy had worked previously is perhaps more relevant. The work of an emerging scholar as is Gilroy can take a variety of turns. One would hope that what black political activism has accomplished throughout the Americas would also be a critical source of intellectual stimulation.
Carole Boyce Davies
MLA, New Orleans, December, 2001
Copyright 2002 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
Davies, Carole Boyce (2002). 'AGAINST RACE' OR THE POLITICS OF SELF-ETHNOGRAPHY. Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: 2, 1.