PENGUIN BOOKS
BETWEEN CAMPS
Paul G ilroy is Professor of Sociology and African-American srudies at Yale Univcrsity. U...
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PENGUIN BOOKS
BETWEEN CAMPS
Paul G ilroy is Professor of Sociology and African-American srudies at Yale Univcrsity. Until rece ntly he was Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths CoUege, University of London. H e is the
aUlhor of ThmAin', No Btack in tlx UnionJad, Tht BudA/tantU and SmallAclJ: TMught1 on tIN PofiticsofBlad Cul/um. Paul Gilroy is widely recognized for his critical commentaries on black music and vernacular culture and his work has been an inspir:a.tion to the resurgent black arts movement in Britain. His work has been translated into ten
languages.
PAUL GILROY BETWEEN CAMPS NAT IO NS. CULTURES AND THE ALLURE OF RACE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENCUIN BOOKS NIIiohod boy do< ~ C ...... L Fmo 01 H..-d u..mr.;,y 1'«00 2000 ..-.... pubIiohbIisho>',
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"betA bIWlVANC£ NXiiOAAWK AND ,..,."....,.ISH of continuing racial division into account. I want to show that important insighrs can be acquired by systematically returning to the history of strugg.les ovu th~ limits o~hwnani?, in which the idea of "race:" has bcc:n espe_ aally promrnent. l1us humarusm is conceived explicitly as a response to the sufferings that raciology has wrought. The most valuable resources for its elabo~tion derive from a principled, cross-cultural approach to the history and literature of e:xrrcffie siruations in which the boundaries of what it means to be human ~ being negotiated and tested minute by minute, day by day. These studies of the inhumanity inspired by and associated with the idea of"race~ arc not, of course, confined to slavery or the brutal foons of segregation that followed it. They have arisen from numerous episodes in colonial history and from the genocidal activities that have proved t~ be raciology's finest, triumphant ho~. They are especially worthwhile, not because the suffering of the victims of extreme evil offers easy lessons for the redemption of the more fortunate; indeed, wc cannot know w?at acute ~thica:l insights the victims of race:-thinking may have taken With them In death. The victims of these terrors arc necessarily mute, and if there are any survivors, they will be beset by guilt, shame, and un~arahly painful and unreliable memories. They will not be the best gwd~ to the moral and politica:l lessons involved in histories of pointless suffenn~, but they may still be able to yield important insight into the moral dilemmas of the present. W e should therefore pay attention to the dou~ts that the most eloquent and perceptive swvivors ofsystematic inhum~ty have thrown on the value of their own testimony. We must be alert to Its unspo~n conventions and genres, for there arc tacit rules governing the expectatIOns of rhe reading publics that have formed around these painful, moving words and texts. However, in an unprecedented situation in which ambivalence: reigns . and .gene~ laws of ethical conduct arc difficult to frame, this legacy of bearing Witness should not be spurned as a distraction from the laborious tasks of documentation and historical reconstruction. It is far better to make this ~ubious testimony our compass and to seek our bearings in the words of Witnesses than to fly vainly to orient oursdves with the unreliable charts supplied by covertly race-coded liberal or even socialist humanisms ~hich, if they did nOI steer us into this lost position, have offered VC1}' f~ Ideas about how wc might extricate ourselves from it and find ourselves again without the benefit of racial categories or racial lore.
tRl tlISI$ Of "iOill"1Hb k100L
~!9
GENES AND BOD I ES IN CONSUMER CULTURE
The contemporary focus on the 1ugc1y hidden potency of genes promotes a fundamental change of salle in the perception and comprehension of rhe human body. This change is not an automatic product of only the most recent scientific devdopments and needs to be connected to an understanding of tcehno-science, particularly biotcchno~ogy, ove~ a lo~ger period of time. I ts impact upon the statuS of old, that IS, esscnt1a11y elghteenth-centwy, racial typologies has been incxcusably neglected by most writers on "race:: The tragic story of H enrietta Lacks, an African-American .mother ~f five from Baltimore who died of cervical cancer at the age of thiny-one lJ\ October 1951, can provide important orientation as we move awa~ from the biopolitics of "race- and toward its nano-politics. Cells taken WIthout consent from Lacks's body by Dr. George Gey, a cell biologist at the J~hns H opkins Hospital. were grown in tissue culture and have been used sl~ce then in countless scientific experiments all over the world. The cdJ-line c:xtr.lcted from her cancer, now known as H eLa, was the first human tumor cdJ-line to be cultivated. It had a number of unusual properties. The unprecedentedly virulent cdls grew rapidly an~ proliferated, i~va~g ad. nt cultures and combining unexpectedly With other organums m the pce . d . labs where they were in usc. 9 They were soon being markete. as a research organism" and have proved to be an indispensable tool In the burgeoning biotech industry. . . The Lacks case raises important issues about when matenal of t~s type extracted from a body can be considered human tissue and the pomt at which it is to be identified alternatively as a fonn of property that belongs, not to the person in whose body it began, but to the commercial i~ terests i.nvolved in selling it for private profit. The story of H eLa cells IS also instructive for the confusion that was created when enzymes that suggested Mrs. Lacks's "blackness" revealed them~ves, .confoundin g ~nd perplexing researchers who had assumed her "whiteness or had,. more unponantly W1ed to think raciologically about her legacy or their own research. episode can be used to mark the point at which an important threshold in thinking about "race" was crossed. The message conveyed by commerce in H eLa cdls e:xccods even the old familiar talc in which black patients have sometimes been abused and manipulated by the white doc-
This
fRE tllBR Of "Md" AND IQCJOLOtY
tors employed to treat them. It would appear that race-defying cells, the body', smallest vit:t1 component, have become absolutdy cen rraJ. to controversies ovef the limit and character of species life. At the risk of sounding too anthropocentric, I would suggest that the cultivation of cells outside the body for commercial and other purp0sc5 is an epoch-making shift that requires a comprehensive rethinking of the wa.ys we u~derst~nd and anal~ our ~lnerable humanity. Like the speculatIVe mampulanon of genenc matenal between various species that. has rollowed it with unpredictable and possibly dangerous results for all human beings, this change suggests a wholly new set of boundaries within which humanity will take shape. The "engineering'" of tt:lJlsgcnic animals and plants, some of which have supposedly benefited from the insertion of human genes into their DNA, is a related phenomenon that has also been the subject of intense debate about its potentially Cltasuophic consequences. The international and therefore necessarily "tt:lJlsracial'" trade in inte~al organs ~d other body parts fOf transplant, sometimes obtained by dublOu~ means, IS another pertinent development. The challenges that hav~ .ans~n fro~ the manipulation and commerce in all aspects of human fertility, Including the vivicUy contentious issue of whether mothers of one ~race'" might perversely choose to bear babies of another, represent yet another. key .change,. while a number of recent attempts to patent or hold copynght In orgarusms, cells, and other elements of life itself would be the final sign that wc have to adjust our conceptions of life and our mutable human nature. lo All these changes impact upon how ·race'" is understood. Awareness of the indissoluble unity of all life at the level of genetic materials leads to a stronger sense of the particularity of our species as a whole as well as to new anxieties that its character is being fundame ntally and i~bly aIt~red. With these symptomatic developments in mind, it is difficult to re~ISt the conclusion ~at this b!otechnological revolution demands a change m our understanding of race,· species, embodiment, and human specificity. In other ~rds, it asks thal wc reconceprualize our relationship to ourselves, our speo.es, our nature, and the idea of life. We need to ask, ~or exampl:, whether there should be any place in this new paradigm of life for the Idea of specifically radal differences. The ~-~own and surprisingly popular portrait of human beings as an essentIally Irrelevant transitory medium fo r the dynamic agency of their
supposedly selfish genes is not the only morally and politic:ally objection~ble conscquenceof emergent, genomic orthodoxy. It, too, has fundamentallm plications for the coherence of the idea of "race" and its relationship to the increasingly complex patterns of natural variation that will no doubt be re\'Caled in a geographic:ally distributed species and the encUessly varying but fundamentally similar individuals who compose it. The specification of significant differences can only be calculated within specific scales, what the physicist liya Prigogine calls ~domains of validity ...n Sadly, however much common sense and popular comprehension of"racc"lag behind these de\'dopments, they do not mean that ideas of~race" based upon immediate appearance have become instantly redundant, acquiring ~ residual ~tatus that contraSts sharply with the conspicuous power they enJoytti preYlously in the ages of colonial empires, mass migration, and mass extermination. As actively de-politiciu:d consumer culture has Ween hold, the world of racialiud appearances has become invested with another magic. This comes courtesy of developments like the proliferation of ever-cheaper cosmetic surgery and the routine computer enhancement and modification of visual images. These changes, which build upon a long history of technical procedures for producing and accentuating racial differen~ on film, ~l undennine more than the intcgrity of raciological representanon. They interact with other processes that have added a conspicuous premium to today's planetary traffic in the imagery of blackness. Layer upon layer of easily commodificd exotica have culminated in a racialiud glamour and contributed an extra cachet to some degree of nonspecific, somatic difference. The perfect bces on billboards and saeens and in magazines are no longer exclusively while, but as they lose: that unifonnity we are being pressed to consider and appreciate exactly what they have become, where they fit in the old hierarchy that is being erased, and what illicit combination of those familiar racial types combined to produce that particular look. that exotic style, or that transgressive stance. The stimulating pattern of this hyper-visibility supplies the signature of a corporate multiculturalism in which some degree of visible difference from an implicit white nonn may be highly prized as a sign of timeliness, vitality, inclusivity, and global =ci>.
A whole new crop of black models, stylists, photogtaphcr1>, and now, thanks to the good offices of Spike Lee, a black. advertising agency, have conQibuted to this change of climate: in the meaning of racialized signs.
IHE tIRIS Of "MU" AND ItWO£l)(Of
kAClAL OlStkYARct. NXnONXlISM. ANd ROMANis"
symbols, and bodies. The stardom of prominent iconic figures like Tyson Beckford, Tyra Banks, and, of counc, Lee himself supplements the superhuman personalities and conspicuous physical attributes of the latest heroic wave of black athletes who built connections to the emerging planetary market in leisure, fitness, and sports products. In that domain, blackness has proved [0 be a subsuntial asset. What Fanon, pondering the iconic stardom ofJoe Louis and Jesse Dwens, called ~the cycle of the bioBu logical was initiated with the mythic figure of The Negro: either unthinkingly lithe and athletic or constitutionally disposed to be lethargic and lazy. Tha[ modem cycle may also be thought of as tenninating in the space of black metaphysica.lity. Zygmunl Bauman has argued thar the primal scene of postmodem social life in Ihe overdeveloped world is being staged in a distinctive private relation to one's own corporeality, through a disciplinary custodianship that can be specified as the idea of the body ~as task. RH This has unexpected consequences where the ideal of physical prowess, to which blacks were given a special title in exchange for their disassociation from the mind, assumes an enhanced significance. It is besl to be absolutely clear that the ubiquity and prominence currently accorded 10 exceptionally beautiful and glamorous but nonetheless racialized bodies do nothing to change the everyday fonns of racial hierarchy. The historic associations of blackness with infrahumanity, brutality, crime, idleness, excessive threatening fertility, and so on remain undisturbed. But the appearance of a rich visual culture that allows blackness to be beautiful also feeds a fundamental lack of confidence in the power of the body to hold the boundaries of racial difference in place. It creates anxiety about the older racial hierarchies that made that revolutionary idea of black beauty oxymoronic,just as it requires us to forget the political movement that made its acknowledgment imperative. It is as though these images of nonwhite beauty, grace, and style somehow make the matter of "race" secondary, particularly when they are lit, filtered, textured, and toned in ways that challenge the increasingly bafBed observer's sense of where racial boundaries might fall In this anxious setting, new hatreds are created not by the ruthless enforcement of stable racial categories but from a disturbing inability to maintain them. Confonning enthusiastically to wider social patterns, the surface of black bodies must now be tattooed, pierced, and branded if they are [ 0 disclose the deepest, most compelling truths of the privatized ontology within. The words "Thug Life" famously
inked onto the eloquent torso of th~
la
te
P'
Tu c Shakur, like the hexa~ other devices sponed by
grams, Oriental chara;e~, ~:::!I=Denrus Rodman, to name only a host of stuS-Trea~ :':d and have the ' additional significance of
Ih~~onn 1~\OW far from the color black these muscled black bod-
shOWing uu;: wor
fir
ies really are. th sha -shifting and phenotype-modifying It should be clear that l~ ck popular culture did not culminate antics that abound in the ~[ I JOa~n. U His physical rransfonnation of . oh' stran.... case of Mi,,:llae 'hili . PI yfuI IfI ' 0.. hase of creative poSSI ties. a himself ushered In this ~ew '~L hi affirmation ofanAfrican-Ameri"il)ation did not contradict elu,er s S..I , . ubli ' d distaSte fo r Africa itsdf. IIID ar pa mu,\ can heriuge or his well~p . . oze _.c. __I:.c.. ' the antics of the legions of · far more inSidious aJl:CJ.llU; m 'h terns enJOY a h c_,u rv and strength have conm ,thl and -"'onners w ose """ '/ . l"""'"" I . fh'- kness fromabadgeofinsultmto mod el:>,a etes, ~'snnodern tran5 anon 0 ....c . u[ed to Ule po . Iimi· d ·gnifier of prestige. The on. . I powerfu1 but still ve£}' te SI • ~_ h an mcrea.smg . heworIds of-,I-nsion . " yf . h ""oupmt • ..... . , musIc, sports. raS goingactlVltleso t IS e.' _11 _ .I •• , upplyfurtherproofthatas . d above ........ auYernsmg ion, e~te~~ment, an ed what you see is not necessarily what you get. far as race IS concern, &0 d tribute to the same uncer. f All th developments stem m an con . ese~ " hit call the self-evident, obvious authonty 0 taintics over race. They e p o s e racial typologies, into .' .. .ali7.ed appearances, of common-sen h miliar o . I:: ' ·fi.... nt detenninants m fixing . n Btill be ~t. u,e roost Slgm ,... questlon, VUlCS may s _ I. hod. now seen-figured · . f" "16 but blaU\. les are the SOCIal OptiCS 0 race, Adobe Photoshop. and similar . d .l • ..., tly Thanks to . and Image --Ulllcren . . L _ ore readily marupu. ch olntrics skin tones can uo;: m image-processmg [e n -e.- ~ uscul that sell the SYleated and b ted than the indelibly mar H~ r ~:n Klein, Tlmberland, and branded products of Tommy ge'd hl'cations like Vibt and The · ~t. I ""'''es of overgroun pu I . . Guess ID u,e g ~ Y-r;fbl ack culture but are nOI pnmarily adSouru that trade Widely m aspects .o Thi. . . h ,nsured that racialized s CTlS15 :as h i ck ding public. dressed to any a rea . .ccts amon other objects-are never bodies represented as obJecu--o~ cial d~erences remain what they going to be enough to guarant~ a, ~ !in betwecn white and colored were when everyone 0 n both Sides 0 f u,e C was supposed to be. li h kn ew w at . race h uld be placed in the context of [he leve ng Thesenmelyoccurrencess 0 . lanetari.22tion. The forctS of piaceless development and commerCial p
"'in.
M
M
.Rt OIM OF "it\U":me itAdOLOGt pI meaning and status of racial categories are becoming even more uncertain now that substantial linguistic and cultural differences are being Battened out .by the pr~ of a global market. Where cultural continuity or overlap IS recogruzed between different racialized groups, the smallest cultural nuances provide a major means of differentiation. Once the course of the mainstre~ is diverted through marginal, underexpioited cultural territol)', emphasis on culture can readily displace previous attention to the recedmg ce ~nties of~race. ~ In these conditions, the relationship between cultural differences and racial particularity gets complex and fraught. Culture, no less than Mn: Lacks's va.lua~l~ cells, becomes akin to a fonn of property attached to the histol)' and mditlons of a particular group and regulated by anyo~e who dares to speak in its name. This can produce some odd conflicts over the assignment of fragments truat resist all disciplinary pow_ ers'. ?ne small illustration springs to mind from the worlcings of the British political system. Much to the disgust of the Labour party's black members of Parliament, Bemie Grant and Paul Boateng, who wanted to place it in othe~ poli.tical traditions, some of Bob MarJey's music was employed as the curta.t n falsef for a fringe meeting of the European Movem ent (UK) at the 1996 Conservative~:uty conference. The person responsible for this grave affront to ~arJey's mherent socialism was Sir Teddy T aylor, an eccentric, Euro-s~t1c but reggae-loving right-winger who explained to the media ~at he thought the song ["Three Little Birds"] summed up the T ol)' pol_ ICY on Europe.. "17
:rn
. The emphasis on culture as a fonn of property to be owned rather than lived characterizes the anxieties of the moment. It compounds rather truan resolves the problems arising from associating "race~ with embodied or somatic. ~ation. Indeed, we must be alert to circumstances in which the body IS remvested with the power to arbitrate in the assignment of cultures to peoples. The bodies of a culture's practitioners can be called upon to supply the proof of where that culture fits in the inevitable hierarchy of va.lu~. The body may also provide the preeminent basis on which that culture i$ to be ethnically assigned. The body circulates uneasily through contemporary di~ons of how one knows the group to which one belongs ~d of what I~ ~ to.be recognized as belonging to such a collecti.vity. ~I~rences Within particular groups proliferate along the obvious axes of dIVISIOn: gender, ~'. SC:XUalit>:' ~gion, class, wealth, and health. They challenge the unarumlty of raClalized collectivities. Exactly what, in cuI-
run1 tenns, it takes to belong. and, more importantly. what it~. to. be
recognized as belonging, begin to I.ook.very uncertain. How~r ~lIn~ar individual bodies are, the compelling Idea of common. raeatly mdicanve bodily characteristics offers a welcome short-cut .into the ~vored ~orms of solidarity and connection, even if they are effecnvely derued by divergent patterns in life chances and everyday experience. . . . Even more perrucious symptoms of the cn sls of raciOlogy :u-e ~ d us. Thrv are more pronounced in Europe now that the raaal SCIaroun -, li' . ence5 are no longer muted by the memories of their active ~~mp ~ty tn the ~nocide of European Jews. The special moral and political dim~te. that arose in the aftermath of National Socialism and the deaths of millions was a transitory phenomenon. It has receded with the living memory of those frightful events. The Nazi period constitutes the most profound mon.! and temponJ rupture in the history of the twentieth century ~d the pretensions of its modern civilization. Remembering it has been tntegral to the politics of~race" for more than fifty years. but a ~er cuI~ and ethical transition represented by war-crimes trials, finanoal reparatiOns, and a host of national apologies is irreversibly under way. It aims to place this raciological catastrophe securely in an irrecoverable past, wh~t Jean Am~1)' called "the cold storage of histol)'; designed more .to be ate
. material and symbolic. This is not a straightforward conflict between a culturally sanctioned public obligation to ttmember and a private desire to forget the unforgetrable. The manner, style, and mood of collective remembrance are ab~ lutdy critiw issues, and the memory of racial slavery in the New W orld is not the only history of suffering to have been belittled by the power of corrosive or trivializing commemoration. One small example suffices here. The slaves in Steven Spidberg's courtroom drama Amistad arrive at their Cuban auctiOtl. block fresh from the horrors of the Middle Passage. They
cLll oIUkVXNt[l\LltIONALBH, AND ROHANI$H
are buffed: apparencly fit and gleaming with robust good health. They enjoy the worked-out and pumped- up musculature that can only be acquired throu~ the happy rigors of a postmodern gym routine. Against the grain of'."'hite supremacy's indi~erence and denial, the Middle Passage has been dehber.uely and pro~tlvdy recovered, but it is rendered in an impossible and deeply contentious manner that offers only the consolation of tears in place of more challenging and imaginative connections. It may be that those coveted abdominal muscles are now deemed to be an essential precondition for identifYing with the superhuman figures of heroes like Spielberg's Joseph Cinque. 11 There has never been spontaneous consensus over how to commemorate and memorialize histories of suffering. Significant discrepancies have been apparent, for example. between the ways that African Americans and Ghanaians have approached the conservation of fortified sites of slave- tnding activity that have recencly become places of pilgrimage and cultural tourism for some of the more amuent daughters and sons of the Atlantic diaspora. I ' In the very same moment that these sharp divisions have appeared insi?e what we were once urged to see as a single ~racial ~ grou p, a torrent of Images of casual death and conflict have been transmitt~d instantaneously &om all over the African continent. For some, these dis~a1 reports have ushered in nostalgia for the orderly world of colonial empires and threatened to make savagery something that occu.n exclusively beyond the fortified borders of the new Europe. Though genocide in Rwanda and slaughter in Congo and Burundi, civil strife in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and ~igeria, corruption and violence in Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, a~d ~ozamblque, government by terror has been associated once agajn WIth IOfrahuman blackness reconstituted in the "half-devil, half-child~ patterns f2vored bY,older colonial mentaliries,lO Attempts to emphasize that many of the architects of mass killing in Rwanda and Bosnia were educated to the highest standards of the W estern humanities have not achieved the same prominence. 21 Placing some of them on trial for war crimes or for the genoci~ activities. involved in their crimes against humanity has raised ~o~ difficult questions about the specificityand uniqueness ofearlier mass killing and the central ~hc~ofthe "race-thinking" that has recurrently been featured as a means to Justify more T«ent episodes.12 Interestingly, the impomnt work of South Africa's Truth Commission has mobilized a version of the history of Aparth~id that accenruates
mE oom Of "AAZt" ANtI MtlblOGt
P'
its political affinities as well as its concrete historical conne~ons to the criminal governance of the N:ni period.n With these connectIons underlined, Apanheid's elaborate theories of culrural and tribal difference can be S\viftly reduced to the bare bones of raciology that originally warran~ them and dispatched Broederbond commissioners back to Europe dunng the 19305 in pursuit of an appropriate ethnic content for the ideal white culture that was being actively invented,14 An even blend of those deceptively bland terms -ethnicity" and -culture" has emerged as the main element in the discourse of differentiation that is struggling to supersede erode appeals to -race" by asserting the power of tribal affiliations. These timely notions circulat~ ~n n:'0re specialized language, but any sense that they bring greater preoslon mto the task of social division is misleading. The culturaJjst approach still runs the risk of naturalizing and nonnali-zing hatred and brutality by presenting them as inevitable consequences of illegitimate attempts to mix and amalgamate primordially incompatible groups that wiser, worldlier, more a~thentical1y colonial government would have kept apart or left to meet only m the marketplace. The unfolding of recent postcolonial history has sent out a less nostalgic and more challenging message: if the status of "ra~e" ~ be mmsfonned even in South Africa. the one place on eanh where Its salience for politics and govemment could not be denied, the one location where state-sponsored racial identities were openly and positively conducted into the core of a modem civic culture and social relations, then surely it could be changed anywhere. If it is as mutable as that, what then does racial identity comprise? The widespread appearance of forms of ultranationalist race-thinking that are not easily classified as either biologistic or culrural but which seem to bear the significant imprint of past fascism is another dimension to the crisis of raciology, In Britain, today's patriotic neo-f.tscists are still undone by the memory of the 39-45 war, tom between their contradictory appeals to the figures of Churchill on one side and H ider on the other. The French Front Nationale has included a full complement of H olocaust deniers and apologists for colonial brutality, but it also managed to stand black and Jewish a ndidates in the elections of May 1997. The most prominent of these, Hugette Fatna, the organization's secretary f~r France's overseas territories, proudly declaimed, ~I'm black and proud of It , . , I'IJI a free woman, and I accept my difference;lS as though democratic
28iuCIAl blWiVXNCC RAfIORAtBH . ...,..ts Rort\NJSH
denunciations of her then leader,lean-Marie Le Pen, as a racist, required her to deny it. In other places, the loquacious veterans of Apartheid's death squads have protested at length that, speaking personally, they are not themselves inclined to antiblack racism. The Italian-born Belgian broadcaster Georges Ruggiu D.ces a trial for crimes against humanity as a result of being arrested and charged with complicity in the 1994 genocide of T utsis. His inflammatory programs on Radio Mille Collines famously compared the HUN assault to the French Revolution. Thus, in their genocidal confrontation with the Mrican proxies of-Anglo-Saxon- geo-political ambition, the francophone killers seemed to have imagined themselves as an extension of the French nation to which they were bound. GUard Prunier has described this as -the Fashoda syndrome. '"26 The advocates of these unsettling varieties of racialized politics have been forced to become Ouent in the technical, anthropological language of ethnicity and culture. Their opinions are a150 likely to be leavened with mechanistic detenninism and neurotic hyper-patriotism. Nonethdess, these obvious ties to past raciologies should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the language produced by this crisis of race-thinking differs from its predecessors. When facing these new phenomena, what we used to be able to call an antimcist opposition must involve more than merely establishing the secret lineage that associates these contemporary groups with their ndically evil, authentically fascist antecedents. What Primo Levi, with characteristic precision, referred to as -the silent Nazi diaspon" continues to go about its strategic work, but soon, mobiliung the fragmental)' memories of Hiderism will not be enough to embarrass its activists, never mind defeat them. Nazism and other related versions of populist ultranationalism have found new adherents and, more worryingly, new bands of imitators in all sorts of unlikely locations. The glamour of that particular political style and its utopian charge will be explored later on. They, too, have increased as emotionaJ.. psychological, and historical distance from the events of the Third Reich has grown. All these factors contribute to a situation in which there are diminishing moral or political inhibitions against once more invoking -race- as a primary means of sorting people into hierarchies and erecting unbridgeable chasms around their discrete collective identities. Why, then, describe this situation as a crisis of nciology nther than its crowning glory? It is a crisis because the idea of-race- has lost much ofjts common-sense credi-
nn: oom Of "It\U
lNO
iUCJOLOe'~
bility, because the elaborate cultural and ideological work that goes int.o producing and reproducing it is ~ore visible ~han ~ before. because It has been stripped of its moral and mtellecrualmtegnty, and beause there is a chance to prevent its rehabilitation. Prompted by the impact of genomics, ·ncc: as it has been defined in the past, has ~ ~:=O"!,e vulnenble to the claims of a much more elaborate, less detenmmsnc bIology. It is therefore all the more disappointing that much influential recent work ill this area loses its nerve in the final furlong and opts to remain ambiguous about whether the idea of"nce~ can survive a critical revision of the relationship between human beings and their constantly shifting social nature. 27 Whether it is articulated in the more specialized tongues of biological science and pseudo-science or in a vemarular idiom of culture and common sense, the term "race" conjures up a peruliarly resistant variety of natural diffe:rencc. It stands outside of, and in opposition to, most attempts to render it secondary to the overwhelming sameness that overdetermines social relationships between people and continually betrays the tragic predi~ aments of their common species life. The undervalued power of thIS crushingly obvious, almost banal human sameness, so close and basically invariant that it regularly passes unremarked upon, also confirms that the crisis of raciological reasoning presents an important opportunity where it points toward the possibility of leaving -race- behind, of setting aside its disabling use as we move out of the time in which it could have been expected to make sense. There is a danger that this argument will be read as nothing more than a nther old-fashioned plea for disabusing ourselves of the destructive delusions of racism. Injunctions of that kind have been a recurrent feature of some liberal, religious, socialist, and feminist pronouncemenrs on ~.ese maners since the term -nce~ was first coined. While I value that polincal pedigree. 1 want to try to be clear about exactly where this line of ~ought departs from its noble precursors in those traditions that have contn.buted so extensively to the ideas and the practice of antiracism. All the earlier arguments conform to the same basic architecture. They posit the partirular, singular, and specific against the general, univen:al, and transcendent that they value more highly. In contrast, the approach I favor attempts to break up these unhappy couples. It has less to say about the unan~nble fon:e of clai01s to singularity and particularity tlut have fueled ethOlc absolutism.
Il~ OMUVANC( RAtiONXUSR AND RORANISH Instead, it directs anention toward the other side of these simultaneous equations. We s.hould. it suggests, become concerned once again with the notion of the human into which reluctant specificity has been repeatedly
invited to dissolve itself. My position recognizes that these invitations would be more p lausible and attractive if we could only confront rather than evade the comprehensive manner in which previous incarnations of cxclusiomuy humanity were tailored to racializing codes and qualified by the operation of colonial and imperial power. In other words, the alternative: version of humanism that is cautiously being proposed here simply cannot be reached via any retrc:at into the lofty habits and unamended assumptions ofJi beral thinking, particularly about juridical rights and sover-
eign entitlements. This is because these very resources have been tainted by a history in which they were not able to withstand the biopoliricaI power of the race-thinking thlU compromised their boldest and best ambitions. Their resulting failures, silences,lapses, and evasions must become central.. They can be rein terpreted as symptoms of a struggle over the boundaries of humanity and then contribute to a counterhistory that leads up to the rough-hewn doorway through which any alternative conception of the human must pass. This can only be atta.ined after a wholesale reckoning with the idea of~race~ and with the history of raciology's destructive claims upon the very best of modernity's hopes and resources. A restoration of political culture is the evasive goal of these operations. Another curious and perplexing effect of the crisis of raciology is a situation in which some widely divergent political interests have been able to collaborate in retaining the concept and reinvesting it with explanatory power. Strange alliances and opportunistic connections have been constructed in the name of ethnic purity and the related demand that unbridgeable cultural differences be identified and respected. This desire to cling on to ~race~ and go on stubbornly and unimaginatively seeing the world on the distinctive scales that it has specified makes for odd political associations as well as for less formal connections between raciological thinkers of various hues. In doing battle agains t all of them and their commo~ desire to retain and reinflate the concept so that it becomes, once agam, a central political and historical reference point. we must be very clear about the dimensions of this moment and the significant discrepancies that have arisen between different local settings. We should recognize that ~race~ has been given a variety of accents. Problems of compatibility
AA tAlS1S Of "IQlI" DIb
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and rranslation have been multiplied by the globalization of culture in which local codes may have to tight against the encroachments of corporate multiculturalism if they are to retain their rustoric authority and explanatory power. For example, America's distinctive patterns of color consciousness may not be anything other than a fetter on the development of the planetary market in health. fitness. leisure, and sports products mentioned above. Certain common features. like the odd prestige attached. to the metaphysical value of whiteness, do recur and continue to travel well, but they tOO will be vulnerable to the long-tenn effects of this crisis. Some distinctive local patterns undoubtedly persist. but their anachronistic longevity compounds the problem. Where communication becomes instantaneous, the crisis of Dcial meaning is further enhanced by the way attachments to the idea of~l'llCC· develop untvfiliy and remain primarily associated with the context of overdevelopment. We CUlnot remind oursc.lves tOO often that the concept of-race as it is used in common·sense, everyday language to signify connectedness and common characteristics in relation to type and descent is a relatively recent and absolutely modem invention. Though it would be foolish to suggest that evil. brutality, and teTTOr commence with the arrival of scientific DCism toward the end of the eighteenth century. it would also be wrong to overlook the significance of that moment as a break point in the develop-ment of modem thinking about humanity and its nature. Even prescientific versions of the logic of-race- multiplied the opponunities for their adherents to do evil freely and justify it to themselves and to others. That problem was compounded once confused and unsystematic race-thinking aspired to become something more coherent, rational, and authoritative. This threshold is important because it identifies the junction point of~race· with both rationality and nationality. It is the beginning of a period in which deference toward science. scientists. and scientific discourses around ·race~ began to create new possibilities and orchestrate new varieties of knowledge and power centered on the body, what Foucault identifies as ~politica.l anatomy.The story of how this change was influenced by imperatives of colonial trade and government and shaped by growing imperial consciousness. how it was endorsed and then challenged by the developing science of anthropology, discredited by the catastrophic consequences of racial science, silenced hy the aftereffects of Nazi. genocide only to gain another B
tt\l d&Wh'ANd' NAfiONAlliR AND HURANI$I'I
commanding voice in the wake of Warson and Crick, is a familiar one. But (he most recent phases in this process-which we have already seen is not simply and straightforwardly reducible to the resurgence of biological explanations-have not been understood adequate.ly.
BEYOND THE NEW RACISM
Some years ago. a loose group of scholars in which the English philosopher Manin Barker was especially influential began, in recognition of changed pattems in the way the discourse of racial difference was employed in politics, to speak about the emergence of what they called a New Racism. This ncism was defined by its strong cu1turalist and nationalist inclinations. Whereas in the past raciology had been arrogant in its imperial certainty that biology was both destiny and hienrchy, this persuasive new variant was openly uncomfortable with the idea that "nce" could be ~iologically based. Consciousness of "race" was seen instead as closely linked to the idea of nationality. Authentic. historic nations had discrete cultural fillings. Their precious homogeneity endowed them with great strength and prestige. When: large: "indigestible" chunks of alien settlement had taken place, all manner of dangers were apparent. Conflict was visible, above all, along cultural lines. Of course. these regrettably transplanted aliens were not identified as inferior, less wonhy, or less admirable than their "hosts.· They may not have been infrahuman, but they were ccnainly out of place. The social, economiq and political problems that had followed their mistaken imponation could only be solved by restoring the symmetry and stability that flowed from putting them back where they belonged. Nature, history, and geopolitics dictated that people should cleave to their own hnd and be most comfortable in the environments that matched their distinctive cultural and therefore national modes of being in the world. Mythic versions of cultural ecology were invented to rationalize the lives of these discrete national and racial identities. The Gennans became a people in ·their forests, whereas the British were a nation whose seaf.u-ing activity shaped their essential inner chancter. In all cases, £rag~en: of .sdf~dent truth nourished the fantasies of blood and belong109, which 10 turn demanded an elabonte geopolitical cutography of narionality.19
tHll!ll51S Of ",.,.,;0:. bib IWOL&Y
I"
The culturalist arguments of the New ~cism enjoy a lingering residual appeal. Similar patterns appeared in a nu~ber of different settin~. They werc evident in Britain, where cultural diffcrence rather than .b ,~10 .ca! hierarchy emerged as the core substance of the nation s ~tcolOnial ncial problems. They were. audible. in the Unite~ Sta~es. where five great racioculrural agglomeratIons (Astans, blacks, H.spa.OICS, whitts, and Native Americans) appeared and took on many of the fateful characteristics associated with eighteenth-century racial groups; and they were evident also in parts of Europe where conflicts between migrant workers and their resentful hosts were re-aniculated as the grander cultural and religious opposition between Christian universalism and resurgent Islamic fundamentalism. . . The historic role of these culturalist notions in the consolidation and development of Apartheid in South Africa ought to be obvio~5 .. The wi.der shifts from biology to culture. from species to etMOS, from ngtd, pred.i~ able hierarchy toward the different perils represented by a cultural a1tenty tha t was as fascinating as it was contaminating were all to some extent pre-figured in the constitution of the Apartheid system. ~ether or n.ot these fonns of power and authority were broadly representatIve of colorual governance in general cannot be settled here.JO The pernicious. fiction of separate but equ.aI identities based in discrete homelands ~ an Impo~t marker of a change in which the idea of contending national and ethruc traditions was employed to legitimate and nrionalize the move from natural [0 cultural hierarchies. This shift was not, of course, an absolute change. Nature and culture may have functioned as neady exclusive poles in the models of early modem thought, but as the organic overtones of the word "culture" rCVC2l, the boundaries between them have always been ~ rous. The New ~cism endor.;ed the annexation of the idea of natural diffe rence by the clajms of mutually exclusive, national cultures. that now stood opposed to one another. In the political geometry of nation-states, culrure was offset not by nature but by other cultures. What seems new about the New Racism, twenty years after this insight was first employed, is not so much the tell-tale emphasis on culture that was its intellectual hallmark but the way its ideologues refined the old opposites-nature and culture, biology and history-into a new synthesis: a biocul~m that, as Barker had pointed out, drew its detenninisric energy from the mtellecrual lesources supplied by sociobiology?!
~ I ilAClAL
OiSlk\lANt( RXTIONALHH. ANb AUkANlsH
When this point is made. it is always necessary to emphasize that there arc many subdc shadings between the biological and the cultural and that the cuhunlist versions of racial discourse-though superficially more benign than the cruder force of biological "race" theory---ue no less vicious or brutal for those on the receiving end of the crudries and telTOrs they promote. With these important qualifications in mind, it is better to say that the sruring point of this book is that the en. of that New Rlacism is emphatically over. This should not be interpreted as a suggestion that we are therefore travding back towud some older, more familiar version of biological determinism. To be sure, a genomic reworking ofbiology has recmerged to supply the dominant pessimistic motifs in n1k about Mrace," bur the mere presence of what is better undecstood as a post-biological perspective does not confirm my diagnosis. There are ~ new versions of determinism abroad. They place and use the human body in 1. number of contrasting ways. The impatient manner in which other, less mechanistic, varieties of social and historical explanation are silenced by genomics betrays t~e. tra~s6guration of bio-logic into something unanticipated: a nonwhohstlc ~Icromechanism i~ which organisms are to be engineered, tooled, and spliced and human life rakes on qualities associated with the dead, menacing, but compliant world of machines. This change of perspective demons1nltes that todais raciology is no longer confined to the cognitive and perceprual habits of political anatomy. It has been drawn by technological and conccprual changes toward ~r-smaller scales. Thus what appears to be the rtbinh ofbiologism is not In fact the resurgence of older colonial and imperial codes that accenruated hierarchy ra.the~ than simple difference but pan of a bigger contemporary transfonnallon In the ways that people conceptualize the relationship between narure, culture, and society, between their freedom and their human agency. The status of~race" is inevitably transformed by this. Yes, we are once again i~ a period in which social and culrural differences are being coded accordlOg to the rules of a biological discourse, but it cannot be emphasized enough that this latest raciological regime differs from its predecessors. We must not approach it as though it represents a retreat behind the culturalist ambitions of the old, that is, the New, Racism. It is a distinctive phenomenon that needs to be apprehended and countered as such. "Race~ can no longer be ossified, and, as may have been anticipated, it is the gene-centeredness of this discourse that defines its deterministic ap-
I"
fRt elU$R 0, *lUU" ANa MAdOlOGt
proach to human action in general and the formation of racial groups in particular.ll The history of scientific writing about "races" has involved a long and meandering sequence of discounes on physical morphology. Bones, skulls, hair, lips, noses, eyes, feet, genitals, and other somatic markers of ~race" have a special place in the discursive regimes tlut produced the truth of "race" and repeatedly discovered it lodged in and on the body. The historian of science Londa Schiebinger has demonstrated how the study of bodily components and zones tint helped to focus the racializing gaze. to invest it with real scientific authority and to bring "race" into being in strongly gcndered forms while simultaneously producing an undentanding of gender and sex that sattlrated the interconnected discourses of "race," nation, and species.l l The textbooks of classical, eighteenth-century raciology were srudded with images. Their argumentation proceeded swiftly from illustration to illustration. The enduring power of the best-known visual material-depictions of Caucasian and Nordic heads or of the various skulls to be measured, drawn, and c1assified--was more than an iconic counterpoint to,the inscription of re5pectable racial science. It nises the interesting possibility that cognition of "race" was never an exclusively linguistic process and involved from its inception a distinctive visual and optical imaginary. The sheer plenitude of ncialiud images and icons communicates something profound about the forms of difference these discourses summoned into being. Racial differences were discove.red and confirmed in fragmentary selections of physical chancteristics. Because the combination of phenotypes chosen to identify a "nee" so actively generated the chosen racial categories, antiraciological thinking was soon alerted to the way that particular criteria varied within the selected groups as well as between them. My concern here is not with the well-known history of those necessarily doomed attempts to produce coherent racial categories by picking representative combinations of certain phenotypes: lips, jaws, hair texture, eye-color, and so on, It is tU more interesting that this race-producing activity required a synthesis oflogos with icon, of formal scientific rationality with something elsc-something visual and aesthetic in both senses of that slippery word, Together they resuhed in a specific relationship to, and mode of observing, the body.14 They fixed upon a certain variety of perception that favored particular representational scales and;:ould only fonow on from the isolation, quantification, and homoge-
"IitAciAt OIUK\lANCL NAtioNAlISH. AND RuHAHI\H nization of vision. Foucault is the most famous explorer of the epistemological consequences that accompanied the instirutionalization of this anthropologial gaze and its ~au[onomization of sight,ltJS Whether the distinguishing marks. organs, and features were discovered on the external sW"f.lce of the body or were thought to dwell somewhere inside it where the hidden properties of racially differentiated blood. bone, and sinew were imagined to regulate social and cultural manifestations, the modem idea of race favored a specific representational scale and operated within the strictest of percepruallimits. We can call that distinctive ratio the scale of comparative anatomy. The idea of"race~ leaked quite rapidly from the lofty confines where that scale was first codified and calibI'2ted, bUl it always worked best in conjunction with those ways of looking, enumerating, dissecting, and evaluating. Abstract and metaphysical, ~race~ defin~ and consolidated its accidentaJ typologies. In moving wwaro the emplOcaI and the concrete. it {re-)produced a set of methods, regulated a certain aesthetics,l6 and quietly delimited the field in which color-coded ethics would operate. The most compelling truths of political a~atomy we~e pro~uced "perfonnatively" from the hat that raciologiatl science prOVIded, like so many startled rabbits in front of an eager, noisy crowd: ~e idea of ~race" enjoyed its greatest power to link metaphysics and sclennfic technology under those conditions. Reinfon:ed by bdief in separate and opposing national culrures, it would later inspire the colonial anthr~pol~~ that succeeded the earliest versions of scientific raciology. Our sltuanon IS demonstrably different. The call of racial being has been ~ned by another technological and communicative revolution, by the Idea that the body is nothing more than an incidenw moment in the transmissi~n of code and information, by its openness to the new imaging technolog.es, and by the loss of mortality as a horizon against which life is to be lived. BI~ckness. can now signify viw prestige rather than abjecrion in a global mfo-tamment telesector where the living residues of slave societies and the parochial traces of American nciai conflict must yield to different imperatives deriving from the planetarization of profit and the cultivation of new markets far from the memory of bondage. In 1815 Cuvier, who woul~ evenrually dissect her, commissioned melancholy portraits of SaartJle Baartman depicted from several angles in a peculiarly empty landscape by Uon de Wailly. AlmOSt two centuries later, a different encounter
tAl G\lilj 01 "Uti" XRb OUOblO r'
oranguran carrying off a Negro girl that provides the frontispiet codified and instirutionali:zcd as a principle of governm ent. H owever, I want to invoke a different case for the value of that linkage. This orientation is today supponed by the bewildering tangles of recent postcolonial and postimperial history.'1 1t is also a perspective that, as Aim~ Ctsairc made clear long ago. went provocatively to the bottom of the relationship between civilization and barbarism. Its general message is certainly confirmed, for example, in the recent history of Rwanda, where, in conjunction with modem cultural technologies, the civilizing mission of colonial power hardened precolonial confficrs into full-fledged ethnic absolutism fueled equally by the imperatives of ruio\ogy and francophony. There, too, the emergence of camp-thinking,
Mlueoo: oBEhXNC( RAnomLl5K XHb HLWUNBH
militaristic, camp-style nation:a.lity, and encamped ethnicity-the key features of the first kind of camps-have been implicated in the institution of camps of the second variery: first genocidal death spaces in which victims were asse mbled and then, bewilderingly, the refugee camps in which yest~rday's killers became victims and reached out to seek aid and compassion. Understanding this situation entails more than just seeing camps as epiphanies of catastrophic modernity and focusing on the extensive colonial precedents for genocidal killing in Europe. It necessit.ltes recognizing our own postmodem predicament:: we are caught not only between national camps but amid the uncertainties and anxieties that the condition of permanent emergency associated with the second type of camp both feeds on and creates. Drawing upon his own memories of suffering as he moved toward eloquent demands for justice, Primo Levi wisely rttommended exactly this ~rientation. He presents it most clearly at the conclusion of his reflections on the role of the collaborators and other victims of Nazi violence whose persecutors made them complicit in their own destruction and the destruction of their kin and their communi ties. Facing these recurre~t abominations, Lcvi suggests that this stance should now be part of what It means to adopt a hea1thy and alert, propedy ethical attitude amid chronically corrupting circumstances; The fever of our western civilisation that -descends into hell with trumpets and dru ms; and its miserable adornments are me distorting image of our symbols of social prestige ... we ... are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility: willingly or nor we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that OUtside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is w:a.i.ting."" Lcvi's argument should not be an open license to indulge in paranoia. It loses none of its force when we appreciate tha t the trains are not necessarily being loaded right now in our own neighborhoods. Fascism is not perm~e~tly on the brink of assuming terroristic governmental power. His ~lDt IS. far more subtle. H we wish to live a good life and enjoy just relations WIth our fellows, our conduct must be closely guided not JUSt by this terrible history but by the knowledge that these awfu1 possibilities are always much closer than we like to imagine. To prevent their reappearance,
we must dwdJ. on them and with them, for they have become an essential moral resource: a compass sensitive to the demanding, individualizing, anti-ethical field of postmodernity. Levi's shocking insight is compounded by the fact that there are no more accept.lble excuses for the failure to become completely familiar with the institutional life of camps. We do not have to become inmates to appreciate that their testimony calls out to us and we must answer it. This means being alive to the camps out there now and the camps around the corner, the camps that are being prepared. With another sage version of strategic postmodem univenality in mind, Zygmunt Bauman has suggested that our unst.lble time could one day be remembered as 'The Age of Camps." For him, camps are confirmation of the fact that cruelty has been modernized, sundered from modem morality. Bauman, for whom a reconfigured humanism is neither explicitly post-anthropological nor postcolonial. makes no secret of his Europe-centeredness. He has Auschwitz and the gula~ in mind rather than events in Windhoek, Kigali, Dili, and Katanga. For him the murderous accomplishments of the gardening state do not extend to the genocidal activities ofTheodor Leutwein and Lethar Von Trotha among the Herero people of German South West Africa:'9 Although his case is weakened by this oversight, there is nonetheless something valuable and eminent1y translatable in Bauman's polemical observations, especially if they do not prompt simplistic speculation about some easily accessible essence of modernity. In moving toward more modest goals, I want to acknowledge the grave dangers that are involved in instrumentalizing e.xtrcmity. However, I will set those important inhibitions cautiously aside in punuit of the way that the twentieth century's camps ruptured modem time so comprebensively that remembering them enforces a "before- and an "after." They afford signifialtlt points of entry into a new ethical arid cultural climate associated with the repudiation of modernity's more extravagant but nonetheless color-coded promises. Adorno's acute sense of the unhappy obligations that these novel circumstances placed upon the committed anist have a wider applicabiliry. They should be studied carefully by the would-be committed academic lest "political reality is sold shott for the sake of political commitment; that decreases the political impact as well."SO In that spirit, I wan t to take the risk of identifying camps-refugee carpps, labor camps, punishment camps, concentration camps, even death
"I..
Clll oiStlYXNet NATIONJJJSI'( O\OI'ID HOHXNi5H
camps--as providing opportunities for moral and political reflection in the careful, cautious sense described by the philosopher Stuan Hampshire, who employs a consideration of Nazism as a means to refine his under-
standing of justice. 51 Other coungeous writers. particularly the German sociologist of the concentration camps Wolfgang Sofsky and the Ugandan political philosopher Mahmood Mamdani. who has insightfully applied
the concept of fascism [0 his careful study ofIdi Amin's Uganda, can guide and inspire this research into the historical and practical connections betwa:n ultnnationalism and the emergence of the infrahuman life forms that the institution of these camps is guaranteed lO produce.s1 To link together the very different historical examples to which this divem body of work is addressed is already to have transgressed against the prescriptive uniqueness invoked to protect the speciaJ status of the Nazi genocide. Without being drawn deeply into the question of what, if anything at all, might constitute a common denominator at the experientiallevd, we can observe that the camp and its extreme wrongs have been associated with the transformation of justice and with important attempts to clarify and restore the nonnat moral and historical order of modernity once the state of emergency has become an everyday reality. A conditio n of social death is common to camp inmates in regimes of unfreedom, coercion, and systematic brutality. I f genocide is no t already under way, the raciology that energizes camp-thinking brings it closer and promotes it as a solution. Let me be absolutely dear: the death factory is not itself a ~p--its inmates are unlikely to be alive long enough for camp rules to be epgaged. But camps gain something from their proximity to the death factory and other places o f organized mass killing. Tadeusz Borowski's extraordinary work springs to mind as our most vivid exploration of the articulation of the camp and the death factory. Wc can proceed heuristically by arguing that the camp is not always a death factory, though it can easily become one, and that the death factory is one possible variation on the patterns of ratio"" nal administration that the camp initializes. The procedures of the death factory might also be thought of as partially derivative of the camps that preceded them in Europe and outside it. The definitive st2tement of this argument is found, of course, in Cesairc's angry and moving Discouru on Colonialism. The second type of camp delivers us to the gray zone where the boundaries of humanity arc negotiated by force. They arc especially important
because they have provided some stem tests for the role and stance of the critical intellectual. Jean Amby, Primo Lcvi's most profound, though not his most unsettling, interlocutor-that tide is reserved for Borowski-describes the profound shock of discovering the redundancy of his own egg-head learning in the camp, where, without technical or practical skills, and devoid of religious certainties, intellectuals were less well equipped and more vulnerable than many of their fellows. Under these conditions, their characteristic commitment to an overly abstract h umanity amounted to
a disability: Notonlywas rational-analytic thi nking in the camp and particularly in Auschwitz of no help, but it led straight into a tragic dialectic of self-destruction ... F"trst of all the intellectual did not so easily acknowledge the unima~le conditions as a given fact as did the no nintellcctual. Long practice in questioning the phenomena of everyday reality prevented him from simply adjusting to the realities of the camp, because these stood in all-too-sharp a contraSt to everything that he had regarded until then as possible and humanly acceptable. 'U
Amery's acute commentaries on the temperamental and physical incapacity of intellectuals in camp conditio ns can be cited again for what they re\-caI about the specific vulnerability of intellectuals, not to the bodily dcmands of the camp regime, bur to its "philosophical" character and dynamics of its absolute power. One powerful passage in which Amcry illuminates the mechanisms of that total power in ways that cxtend far beyo nd his own particular case is worth quoting at length:
me
More than.his unintellectual mates the inteUectual in the camp was lamed by his historically and sociologicallyc:xplicable deeper respect for power, in fact, the intellectual always and everywhere has been totally under the sway of power. He was, and is, accustomed 10 doubt it intellectually, to subject it to his critical analysis, and yet in the same intellectual process to capitulate to it. The capitulation became entirely unavoidable when there was no visible opposition to the hostile force. Although outside gigantic armies might battle the deslroycr, in the camp one heard of it only from afar and was really unable to believe it. The ~r structure of the SS 5t2tt towered up
?OjlUeru OISUlYANe( RAtiONAliSM. AND ROHANiSA
before the prisoner monstrously and indomitably, a reality Ihal could not be esa.ped and therefore finally seemed wlSfJr/m,It. No matter what his thinking may have been on the outside, in this sense here he bec2me a H egelian: in the metallic brilliance of its totality the SS state appeared as a state in which the idea was becoming reality.
It is interesting tOO that Amel}', for whom Fanon's work provided a constant point of reference and dialogue, was driven to discover the power of even limited countemolence in the restoration of the dignified humanity of which he had been deprived: it f.l.cili tated the countermovement from infrahumanity back toward the recognizable subjectivity that would count in Kant's democratic equations. I n making that case, he points to another of Ihose resonant connections which often produces hesitation, shu£Ring, and embamlSSed silences. I n these circumstances, it should be noted that, against the wishes of essentialists and biopoliticians, his emaciated body did not spontaneously manifest the absolute truth s of its Jewish "racial" othemess. H is wo rds are all the more notable because thei r contribution to the phenomenology of embodiment and autonomy makes no concessions to the veracity of raciological differences: PainfuUy beaten, I was satisfied with mysdf. But not, as one might think, for reasons of courage and honor, but only because I had grasped well that there arc: situations in life in which our body is our entire self and our entire fate. I was my body and nothing else: in hunger, in the blow that I suffered, in the blow thal I dealt. My body, debilitated and crusted with filth , was my calamity. My body when it tensed to strike, was my physical and metaphysical dignity. In siruations like mine, physical violence is the sole means for restoring a disjointed personality. In the punch I was m~or myself and for my opponent. What I later read in Frantt Fanon's Les damnls dt la Im-t, in a theoretical analysis of the behaviour of colonised peoples, I anticipated back then when I g:.tve concrete fonn to my dignity by punching a human hce. To be a Jew meant the acceptance of the death sentence imposed by the world as a world verdict. To flee before it by withdrawing into onesdf would have been nothing but a disgrace, whereas acceptance: was simultaneously the physical revolt against it. I became a penon not by subjectively ap-
pealing to my abstract humanity but by discovering mysdf within the given social reality as a rebelling Jew and by realising myself as one.5Os tmodem self-discipline of working out.
D OGG I N' AROUND
They may be bonded by their cartoon manifestations and by an ethnic en+ thusiasm for playing ball, but the superhumanity of Jordan and the heroic fraternity for which he is the muscular point man represent the polar opposite of Snoop Dogg, whose infrahumanity induced him to present himself in dog-face, as less than human. It is best to set aside the question of whether the historic oral trademark ~ 1-8-7 on an undercover cop" that announced his arrival on the DuI' COWl" soundtrack might simply be an idiomatic restatement of some very well known modernist anxieties over the limits of existential agency, autonomy, and subjectivity in particular, about the relationship between making oneself and deliberately taking the life of another."2 Snoop's music and rapping remain doggedly faithful to the antiphonic forms that link New World black styles to their African antecedents. The fading public sphere is configured negative.ly, not nihilistically, but it is still just about as recognizable as a post-traditional transcoding of the black Christian congregation. Snoop's instructions to his audiences ~If you don't give a shit like I don't give a shit wave your mo rher-fuckin' fingers in the ai r" aren't very far from the cries of the old-school rappers whose cross-over ambitions required them to curse less than he does or even from the preachers who sought similar gesrures of solidarity from their congregations:U In any form , these gestures enforce the priority of the enunciative moment, of the saying over the said_ We must also remember that in this vernacular, "dog" is a verb as well as a noun. The sleeve of Snoop's album Doggy Stylt was printed on recycled paper. H e used it to send out extra special thanks to-among other people-Golgotha Community Baptist Church (presumably where his career as a performer started as a chorister and pianist): The G side of Snoop's albu~ begins with what is still his best-known track. Its title is formed by
202 ~ ASC/SH ANb IttVOlUTIONAltV cONUkVllflSH
two foundational questions that have arisen repeatedly, like twins at the heart of the historic dialogue that demands completion of the ontological inquiries in which newly freed slaves engaged as they strove to define and clarify the boundaries of their new statuS as free modem individuals:
"WHO AM I (WHAT'S MY NAME)?" Snoop has wisely asserted that his work has no political significance whatsoever. When he is pressed to operate in that restricted mode, his extremely conventional opinions are a long way from anything that could reasonably be called nihilistic;
As far as me being political, me only thing I can say is the muthafuclcin' U.S. can Stllrt giving money to me 'hood, giving opportunity and starting businesses, something to make niggu not want to kill each anomer. Give them some kind ofjob and fin2nces 'cos me killin ain't over love nor money. They are killin and jaclcin one another 'cos mere ain'l no opportunity. As long as ifS black on black or black-on-brown it's cool-they don't like black on white. They send national guards like when we took off on their ass in 4.29.92, armed forces and army muthafuckas with big ass machine guns-on account of niggas stealing." The saucy cartoon on the cover of Doggy Styli presented Snoop as a cartoon dog. It did not provide a more reliable guide to the supposed nihilism and other antisocial qualities of his work. We need to oonsider why a young African American wou1d choose--at this point-to present himself to the world with the features, with the identity, of a dog.~S H ow does Snoop's manipulation of the dog mask that he did not invent but which he has used SO creatively facilitate his cross-over celebrity? Is h e locating and testing out the limits of a de-racialized humanity or creating a new and sustainable relationship with nature within and without? Does the pussy-chasing, dog-catcher-outwitting dog persona simply seek.to make a virtue out of immiscration and insult in the &miliar process of semiotic inversion capable of changing curse words into words of praise, of revalorizing the word "Nigger and making -dog- into a term of endearment? Is there a sense in which calling himself a dog expresses an accurate evaluation of the social status of young black men? What comment on the meaning of black infrahumanity does Snoop's movement between bodies -between identities-express?
I/dIOOfItJ OUIb 'HE mu I'UIOC
SI'HlItJlW
A dog is not a fox, a lion, a rabbit, or a signifyin' monkey. Snoop is not a dog. His filling the mask of undifferentiated racialized oth~mess wi~ quizzical canine features reveals something about the operatlon of white suremacy and the cultures of compensation that answer it. It can be read as a ~Litical and, I believe, a moral gesture. Choosing to be a lo~-down dirty dog values the infrahuman rather than the hyperhumaOlty promoted through body-centered biopolitics and its visual s ignatures in the health, sportS, fitness, and leisure industries. It would be missing the main point to overemphasize that the dog is a sign for Snoop's victim status as well as for his sexual habits or that it sometimes requires the technoscientific resources of a firearm before it can interact with real, that is, white, humans on equal terms. In opting to be seen as a dog, he refuses identification with the perfected, invulnerable male body that has become the standard currency of black popular culture cementing the dangerous Link between bodily health and racial purity, dissolving the boundary line between singers and athletes, and producing strange phenomena l.ike Dennis Rodman's stardom, R. Kelly's eroticized app ropriatio n ofMichael Jordan's divine masculinity, and Shaquille O'Neal's short career as a singer and rapper. Snoop's "morphing" between the human and the canine displays those elements of identity that are not reducible to the six-foot, four-inch human frame of his sometime owner, thedoggfather ·Calvin Broadus."There is something leftover when that somatic operation is performed. The metamorphosis requires us to confront Snoop's reflexive capacities. His stylized ponrayal of a well-meaning gangsta self--protean, shape-shifting, and mu1tiple-is probably less significant than the full, vulgar, antibourgeois force of the black vernacular that crouches somewhere behind it.~ His low-down, dirty, animal self directs critical anention to the difficult zones where some people fall through me cracks in the Kantian moral edifice into the fiery pit ofinfrahumanity. These arguments have become urgent maners in consumer-capitalist societies where things reguJarly assume the social characteristics of people, and people can become, to all intents and purposes, things. Levinas and Vi Fu Tuan have both reminded us th:at the fate :and the role of animals can be quite different. 41 Though they can be agents and even bearers of rights, animals are neither things nor people.48 To underline the point, their modem destiny has been closely connected to the development of systematic raciology. Considering this link might even contribute to the restorationpf a lost humanity. Levinas has instructively recounted the story of the
ASCISH AND UvOWflONJJ(f c oNUkVAfl$H
wandering dog Bobby, "the last Kantian in Germany," who comforted him in the Nazi camp for Jewish prisoners of war where he and his comrades had been · stripped of their human skin" and become ·subhuman, a gang of apes." Snoop's inrerspecies shape-shifting performs 2 similar service. He, too, presents 2 case that one cannot entirely refuse the f.acc: of an anim;ll. It is vi2 the face that one undc:rs~ds, for example. a dog. Yet me priority here is not found in the :mimai but in the hum:m face . . . The phenometlOn of the face is not in its purest form in the dog. In the dog, in the animal there are other phenomena. For example. the force of nature is pure vitality. It is more this which characterises the dog. But it also has 2 face .49 The second half of DDggy Stylt commences with a bathroom scenario that gives the proceedlngs a traditional, "priva te~ framing moment. It is a throwback to a previous era in the odyssey of rhythm :md blues when the discourse: of racial authenticity called for the removal of clothing rather than the exchange of human skin for canine fur. This little drama presents Snoop in conversation with a girlfriend. H e is resenting the intrusion of the public world into their space of intimacy. Their conversation makes no mention of soul, but it is the bond between them. They stick closely to a script refined on hundreds of "rum out the lights and light a candle" soul records. However, their moves are not legitimated by references to any notion oflove. The dog and the bitch belong together. They are 2 couple, but their associ2tiOn does not bring about sexual healing. There is no healing in their encounter because the power of sex is not at work here as a mC2JlS of naturalizing racial difference. Nor is the unhappy union of bodily health and racial purity being celebrated. In this bathtub, cleanliness is not next to godliness, though funkiness may be. Their funky, besti21 sex is not about authenticity and offer.; neither 2 moment of communal redemption nor 2ny private mC2JlS to stabiliu the reconstructed racial self-male or female. Snoop's work exceeds the mascul.inist erasure of the sexual agency of black women that it undoubtedly contains.so These images circulate in a vulgar, .insubordinate public conversation about sex and intimacy. power, powerlessness. and bodily pleasure that can be reconstructed even from the fragme nts of antiphonal communication that have been captured in commodity fonn and circulated muJtinationally on that basis. I want to end this chapter by suggesting that the ethical and
political significance of Snoop's affirmation ofblackness in dog-face has one last imponant layer. I ts simultaneous questioning of humanity 2nd proximity can be used not only to rein terpret what passes as "nihilism- but to construct an argument about the positive value of intenubjectivity in black political cultures that are now subject-centered to the point ofsolipsism. In this sense. Snoop's dog may help to sniff out an esape route from the current impasse: in thinking about racialized identity. Arguing ~n5t those who would deny black popular culrure any philosophical 2nd metaphysical significance. we can bring the etho-poetics in his call to ~do it doggy styleinto focus by inquiring why individuals should recogniu themselves as subjects of freaky sexuality and asking about the premium that this talk about sex places on touch and the moral proximity of the other. Without wanting to supply a couple of esoteric "ethnic· footnotes in the history of the desiring subject, I'd like to try to siruate Snoop's dog and the chain of equivalences in which it appears somewhere in the genealogy of technologies of the free black self. The radica1ly alienated eroticism toward which Snoop and his canine-identified peers di rect our attentio n might perversely contribute some desirable ethical g rounding to the debased black public sphere. It confirms that we need to talk more, not less. about sex. The ~dual solitude" transmitted and celebrated in the popular trope of doing it doggy style was not about a naive or pastoral mutuality. It breaks with the monadological strucrure that has been instituted under the stern discipline of racial 2uthenticity and proposes ano ther mode of intimacy that might help to recreate 2 link between moral s ~ces and vernacular metaphors of erotic, worldly love:. A periodization of the subaltern modernity that encompasses this possibility is established in the movemem from ~domestic allegories of political desire"Sl to polirica1 allegories of private desire. Perhaps this conversation about sex can also reh2bilitate the untimely issues ofintc:rsubjective responsibility 2nd accountability that have been expelled from the interpretive community during the reign of ethnic absolutism and its bodily signs. The socialityestablished by talk about sex culminates in 2n invitation to acknow ledge what Zygmunt 82uman, again citing Levinas, describes as the pre-ontological space of ethics. ~ In this setting we can call it a beingforthe other o r even a willfuI nonbeing that exists prior to the racial metaphysics that currently dominates hip-hop's revolutionary conservatism. This ethical Core wa~ central to the musical cultures ofthe New World as they adapted sacred patterns to secular exigencies. It was first undervalued and then
206/.nclSH AND ktvOMIONAJ..,. tONSEiW"fBH
sacrificed. Snoop, R. Kelly, S.W.V., Usher, Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown, and the rest of the crew are already playing their parts in its revitalization. My con· cem is that the revolutionary conservatism that dominates hip--hop is likely to have limited patience with them. Revolutio na,), conservatism's enthusi· asm for the market means that the commercial achicvcmen~ of these artists will be respected. However, impurity and profanity cannot be to lerated in the lo ng run because they contribu te nothing to the heroics required by ra· cia! reconstruction. Authoritarians and censors can play the :authenticity c:ard, too. Revolutionary conservatism: this formulation takes us immedi· :ately to the limits o f our available political vocabulary. There is something explicitly revolutionary in the presentation of violence as the key principle of social and political interaction and perhaps also in the hatreds ofdemocracy, academicism, decadence, tepidity, weakness, and softness in general that have been regularly rehearsed. Conservatism is signaled loud and clear in the joyless rigidity of the gender roles that are specified in an absolutist ap· proach to both ethics and racial particularity and, above all, in agloomypre· sentation of black. humanity composed of limited creatures who require tradi tion, pedagogy, and organization. This seems to go hand in hand with a fascistic fear and contempt of the masses. Ice Cube has reported this revealing conversation with his sometime mentor Minister Louis Farrakhan: Mentally he told me, the people are babies. They are addicted to SCJ[ and violence. So if you'vc got medicine to give them, then put the medicine inside some sod2 so they get both and it won't be hard for them ro digest. Sl
It is important to remember that the dangers deriving from the fusion of biopolitics and revolutionary conservatism are not to be found in hip· hop alone. Black popular culture represents only one factor--a.lbeit an important and influential onc--in a wider balance of forces. Yet the conflict between revolutionary conservatives and other, more democratic and emancipatoty possibilities is readily visible there. Market-driven black. popular culture is making politics aesthetic usually as a precondition for marketing hollow defiance. And now, it is no longer communism that re· sponds immodesdy to this grave danger by imagining that it can politiciu an but rather an insurgent intellectual practice that reacts to these fascistic perils by revealing the extent to which popular art has alre:ady been politi· ciud in unforeseen ways.
6 TH E TYRANNIES
O~
UNANIMISM
I r~d cvc!)' account of the Fasci5r movement in Gennany I could lay my hands on, and from ~ to page I encountered and recognized familiar emotional pattems. What struck me with particular force was the Nazi preoccupation with the construction of a society in which there would exist among all people (GU11UI n people, of course!) line solidarity of ideals, one continuous circulation offundamenw beliefs, notions, and assumprions. I am not speaking of the popular id~ of regimenting people's thought; I'm speaking of the implicit, almosr unconscious" or pre·conscious, assumptions and ideals upon which whole Il2tions and races act 1Uld live. -RICH~IlD
WIlICHT
The nanower the scope of a community fonned by collective per-sonality, the more destructive does the experience of fratemal feeling become. Outsiders, unknowns, unlikes become creatures to be shunned; the personality a:aits the community shares become ever more exclusive; the ve!)' act of sharing becomes ever more cenrnd on decisions :ai:M>ur who can belong and who cannot ... Frarcmity has become empathy for a select group of people allied with rqec. ticn of those nor within the local circle. ThiJ rejection creates demands forauronomy from the outside world, for being left alone by it rather than demanding that the outside world itself change .. . I Fl'llgmentation and division is the very logic of this mtemiry, as the
I""
""I'mESA AND UvbCOTIONXJ(Y coNSlkYXfl$H
TRl fl'XAHNlEli 01 OHAHlMIlM
unitli of people who really belong get smaller and smaller. It is a VI:(lion of tTaremi ty which lead$ to fratricide. ~RI C H A.O
$£NNE TT
T his is an especially important period in the political Lives and consciousness of the African-descended pco-pies of the overdeveloped countries. Their journeys through modernity
have recently reached a significanl staging-post as Africa's struggle against colonial domination, which defined 50 many political aspiratio ns in the period after slavery, h as reached its conclusion. African countries are still exploited and excluded, but the quality of their marginaliulion has changed. The distinctive pan em s of nineteen th-cennuy imperialism have r~ded . New battles over health, technology, ecology, and panicularly debt have emerged to expand and adapt o ur understandi ng o f colonial and possi bly postcolonial political confl icts. The world's richest countries remain deeply divided over the desinbiliry of writing off the debts held by African govern ments. In this nominally postcolonial period, the desire for freedom, which was for 50 long the center of the modem black political im-aginary, must pause and reflect seriously when confronted by thc deceptively simple questions: -freedom from what?" -liberty to accomplish what?" The emancipation of South Africa fro m A partheid's criminal govern ance, incom plete thoug h it m ay be, provides a timely o pporruniry to reconsider the wider relationship between Africa's New World diaspora and Africa's future. This reflection involves pondering the politics of decoloniution in an age without colonies, and seeking the possibility of anti-imperialist consciousness in an era wit hout triumphant empires amtnged along bold, racist. nineteenth-centwy lines. h confronts the historical and philosophical limits of the idea of liberation and promotes a reeva.luation of those fundamental modem notions freedom and revolution. A language o f revolution may persist, but these days it is more likely to turn away from the complexities of wholesale societal transformatio n and promo te an -inward," New Age turn. This timely orientation is something quite different from the h istoric process of self-possession that James
Brown famously identified during the Black Power era as a Mrevolution of the mind.- W e have seen that it involves a changed understanding o f the racial seU articulated o.:clusively through the body and its imaginary power to determine human social destiny. This revo lution, if revolutio n it be, is a biopolitical project that not oo1y p roduces new common-sense truths abou t ~r:ace· but, in doing so, sets m ind and body in a distinctive relatio nship so t hat ma naging and training the latter become t he key to regu lating the forme r. The genocide in Rwanda and the continuing conflicts in Congo, Burondi, and elsewhere are o o1y the most notable recent events to have endowed inquiries made by diaspora blacks into the status o f racial difference, solidariry, and democracy with further disquiet about the limits of ratiaiiuJ particulariry. Recall h ere that the first people ever to be convicted of the crime of genocide were the Africans Jean- Paul Akayesu and Jean Kambamba. This should not obscure the fact tha t tribalism, though it has been manifestly invented rather than transmitted seamlessly from the precolonial past, and asserts itself as a supremely powerful force for "et hnic· solidariry and sectarian d ivisio n, is very ambiguously placed in relation ro modern ideas of~race."l To com plicate matters even more, the political and ideological divisions set down in earlier times are becoming blurred. The black puppet leaders of the Apartheid pseudo-state, Bophutatswana, disastrously summo ned the white supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (A WB) to protect them, bonded across the color line in spite of their political differences by deeply fascistic investments in mythologies of masculinism. the fiction of puriry, and a common hatred for the dilution of their sacred distinctiveness. C loser to hom e. the Strasserite id eologues w ho first forged a "th ird position" for the neo-fascist British National Front during the late 1980s presented Louis Farrakhan in their publications as "a God-send to all races and cultures,· distributed leaflets in support of his Nation of islam, and visited its #4 Mosque in W ashington , D .e.. in order to study its antidrug programs. Around the same time, the National Front magazine. Nahonalum Today, interviewed another ultranationalist African-American, Osiris Akkebala, -an elder of the Pan African Intemational Movement (P. A. l. N)," based in Florida. H e to ld them that his organization invested tbe separation of t he races with a sacred significance in keeping with its
1101 IfASCBH ANO lEYOlOTION:U'l
cONSUVAtKH
Status as part ohhe law of God, and that members opposed intermarriage between black and while because it Mresulrs in racial genocide. ~l Fraternal relations between these two ultranationalist groups appeared to be intact ten years later, when Akkebala reappeared in Britain. This time, he served as a witness for the defcnse in the 1998 trial of the British National Party (BNP) activist Nick Griffin, the publisher of The Runt, who had been charged. with incitement to racial hatred. On this occasion, he told the British black newspaper NtwNa/ion; "We see the B. N. P. as our natural allies. We both see the necessity of preserving our distinct races.-) The BNP may have been eager to recove r its position after suggestions that it had been implicated in the murder of Step hen Lawrence. But that is not enough to explain its active suppon for the family of an unemployed, twenty-six-year-old Bermuda- born chef and Rastafarian, Archie O'Brien, whom BNP members joined in a demonstration outside the Home Office in September 1996. O'Brien was seeking the financial sponsorship of the British Government for his plan to emigrate and settle in Mrica, preferably G hana. Interviewed by The Guardian, he said that, unlike his BNP associates. he was not advocating a compulsory rerum 10 Africa for all black people. H e explained: M 1 can't express myself here. I can only express myselfin Africa, surrounded by my own people and by nature ... h 's nOI for everyone. You have to reach a ccmin level of consciousness and be able to live off'the land before you go there. Black people have to be prepared before they return to Africa. ~4 . These contac~s contribute to a pattern of disturbing events that precipItates funher allXlety aboul the changing narurc of the claims that modem ideas about Mrace:" can make upon a world in which racial solidarities no longer enjoy an automatic allegiance or uncontested priority over other competing collectivities based on age. religion. language, region, health, gender, or sexual preference. These worries have been rendered aJl the more troubling in a new geopolitical context tha t increasingly lacks even the pos~ibility of imagining an alternative to capitalism, the regulating ~echamsms ~f the market, and the vicious logic of economic rationality. It IS not yet an Issue of whether blacks in the overdeveloped world. who arc likely to be substantially cushioned from the brute scarcity that defines the developing areas, will want to go on associating themselves with Mrica. Though that outcome remains a distinct possibility in the medium term, at prcs~nt it is mor~ a matter of how tenuous, precious connections might
be maintained or enhanced in the interest of economic justice:. political democracy. ecological equilibrium, and ongoing battles against white supremacism and other forms of absolutism. In this climate. it becomes important to consider how the vital symbolic and culrurallinks between Africa and its modern diaspora might be protected. They might even be made to mean something imponant for the future development of both locations at a time when the material and experiential gulf between over-developed and under-devdoped zones of the planet is being widened by accderated te1:rsi!)' Press, 1994). 2. William E, ConnoUy, ~Dcmocracyand Temroriality; in Ma!jorie Ringro6c and Adam J. Lemcr, cd5., &imagining the Natitm (Open Uniw:rsity PIa&, 1993).
n::u
3. Peter Hulme, ColoniaJ Encountm (Methuen, 1986). 4. Daniel Dcfoe, Robi1lJ(ln CruJl1e (penguin, 1985), p. 232. 5. Anthony Pagden, Lords ofAIJ lhe Wrnld: IdUlJogin of Empire i" Spain, Britain Ilnd Franc~ c15()()-d 800 (Yale University PR:5$, 1995). 6. lan W att, Myths of Modtrn IndiW/lIIlIity; Fllust, Don Quixott, DonjlUln and &bi1fSlln CrIlS« (Cambridge University Press. 1996). 7. }osef Chyuy, The AeJthetic State: A Quat in Mod«1l Gtrman Thought (University of California Press, 1989); Earl W . Count, This b /wu; An Al1thtNllfJ Sekcltdfr#m tIN /nttrnlllionaJ Littrahdt on tIN &ca ofMlln (Schuman, 1950); Christian Ncugebauer, "The Racism ofKant And HcgeI; in Sage Pbill/JOf'hy.' Indigmous ThinJ.m and Mod«1l lklxtlt on Afrielln Philf1Sllphy, cd. H . Odera
Orub (Brill, 1990). 8. George Mosse, Tll'UJIlT'd the Final s"lutiun; A H istory of ElIrIl/Man RAcism (Wisconsin University Press, 1985), esp. chapter 2. 9. Robc:rt Bernasconi, -Hegd at the Court of the Ashanti; in SNarl Bunett, cd., Hlgtl aft" Dtrrida (Routledge, 1998). 10. G. W . F. H cgel, The PhillJSopby of H istory, tnns. }. Sibree (Dovcr Boolc$, 1956), p. 96. 11. This term is men from Thongchai Winichaku!'$ Siam Mapptd: A History of tht CtD-Body ofa Nation (University of H awaii Press, 1994). 12. Mary Louise Pratt, Imptrial Eyu: Trawl Writing and TranS(ulturation
(Routlcdge, 1992).
13. Winthrop Jordan, White Owr Bkd (Norton, 1977); lvan Ha nnaford, Rau; Tht History ofan Idea in the Wtst Oohns H opkins, 1996). 14. I have in mind the work of Eric Voegelin, Martin Bemal, and lvan H annaford. IS. Eric Voegeli n. "The Growth of the Race Idea,· RM~ofPolilits Ouly 1940),
p.284. 16. Ronakl A. T. Judy, {DisJforming the AmuUlln Conun: Ajritsn-Arabit Skw NarTatiwJ anti lhe VtnrJUJd4r (University ofMinnCSOOl Press, 1993), chapter 4, section 3, -Kant and the Critique of Pun: N egro: 17. I. Kanl, Oh_liDru on the Fulingofthe Blaulifoland the Sublimt, rrans. John T. Goklthwait (University of California Press, 1960). 18. I. Kant, Anthropology fr#m a Pragmat~ Point of View, traM. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). 19. Kanl, Oh_lions, p. 111. 20. Emily H obhouse, &part un Il VISit tu the Comps (London, 1901); RIport of Dame MilJ~mt Fll'UXtltJ Committtt ofLadin (Cmnd. Cd 893); Louis Pern, 1r., CUDa Btlwttn tlx Empires, 1878-1902 (Univcrsity of PittSburgh Press, 19S3), and Lords of tlx Mountain: Social Banditry and Protnt in CUDa, 1878-1918(Univcnity ofPittsbwgh Prc", 1989). I am gfluefullO Peter Frase r for the Cuban material.
ems TO MW ....11 21. Bad Lang, lIet and Idta in /Ix Nazi Gmoride (Chiago University Press, 1990), d1apter 7, p. 189.
22. lbid.,p. I 79. 23. I. IUnI, IInthropology /mm a PragtMtic Paint of V'~ Inns. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 230. 24. Hannah Arcndt, Ei€h_nn injn"1lJlJkm 1Penguin. 1965), p. 136. 25. Aim~ Cbaire, Di.K#1IYU IIn QHlltliIllum (Monthly Rrncw Press, 1972), p. 15. 26. Cbude LeFon, Tk PoiitiuU FIITJru rfMOIkm St.ttUty (Polity, 1986). 27. Houston StCW2lt Chamberlain, 77N FIIJlndmiDn.s fI{ tN Nirutanth Cmtury. tnn5. John Lees Oohn Lane, 1912). See also Martin Woodroffe, "lUcial Theories of History and Politics: The Enmple of Houston Stcw:ut Chamberlain; in Paul Kenncdyand Anthony NidloUs, eds., Ns!Wnlllutllnd RlIciIlfut MtlWmrols in Brita;n IInd (krmany "ifun 1914 (Maanillan, 1981); and H annaford, &u, pp. 348- 356. 28. C hamberlain, TIN Fllundatillns rftN Nintlunth Century, p. 261. 29. Paul Connenon, Tbt TrllgtdyrfEnlightmmmt (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 110. 30. H egel, TIN PhifllSllphy rfHut~ p. 93. 31. Mark Cocker, Rivm rfB11IfJll, Riom ofGold' Europe's Conflittwith Tribal Ptt1pies (Cape, 1998); Cerhard Pool, &m~J Mahamll (CamsberglMaonillan, 1991 ). 32. Catrine Clay and Midlae1 Leapman, Mwttr &u: TIN LtINm/KmJ Expuimmt in NIlzi Gtrmsny (Corgi, 1995). 33. Midlcl Foucault, HutoryofSauslity. uans. Robcrt H urley, voll (Random House, 1978), p. 149. 34. Hugh A. MacDougall, RmW Myth in Engruh His/ury: T"?i(l1lS, TculllllS, snJ IIngJrrSauns (University Press ofNcw England, 1982). 35. WUfricd van der Will, "The Body and the Body Politic as Symptom and Metaphor in the Transition of German Culture to National Socialism," in Bnndon Tayio r and WJfricd van der Will, eds., Tbt Ntrr.ifoatilln of IIrt (Windle$ler Press, 1990). 36. Michael Lowy. Rnkmptilltl and Ut"Pis. tnns. H ope H cancy (Athlone Press, 1992). 37. Frantt. Fanon, WretcNd of tIN Esrth, uans. ConsWlCC Farrington (Grove Press, 1963), pp. 254-255 (emphasis added). 38. julian Young, Htidtggtr, PhilllSllphy, NllzUm (Cambridge University Prcu. 1997), p. 36. 39. Pri mo Levi, TIN DrrIwntd (lnd tIN Sswd, uans. lUymond Roscnthal (Summit Books, 1988), chapter 2; Richard Rorty, Ohjotiuity, &klti'llism (lnd Truth (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 205-206.
ROt6 TO
,ms IRj IlM
40. Jon Bridgman, TIN &WIt of tIN HtrnlJS (Univenity of California Press, 198 1). 41. May Opti::r. et al, eds., Showing DID' CoIrm.· lIjrtrGtrmun W"mm Sptal Dut, tnns . Anne V. Adams (University ofMassachuscm Press, 1992) pp. 1- 56. 42. Sandra Addl, DIIuhk Consci(1UJnus, DIIuhk Bind (University of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 29-55. 43. Woodruff D. Smith, Tbt Gtrmun CoI,1nial Empire (Univenity of North Carolina Press, 1978); Hermannj. Hiery andjohn M . Mackenzie, eds., Ell~1nI Imptut anJ Pucifo Injiumu: British and Gnman CoJllnillJ Ptdi£] in tIN Punfo Ishmds (lnd tIN InJigmllus &spo1lSl O. B. Tauris, 1997); W. O. Hendenon, 77N Gtrman Q,/"nillJ Empire, 1884-1919 (Cus, 1993). 44. Mu Weinreich, Hitkr's i+IIftutm.· Tht PurtofSdxJlanhip in Gmntlny's Crimes ag(linst tlNjroMh Pwpk (Yiddish Scientific In&tiNte, 1946), esp. p. 39 and
1'. 177. 45. Frantt Fanon, TtI'WtlT"d tIN African &w/uhlln." !'rJJihcaJ Euays, tram. Haakon Chevalier (Grove Press, 1967), p. 23. 46. Claude Lefort, Tht P"litUsl Fmns ofMMmI SlItitty.· BurtaU(r(lry, Dtmrxrary, Tlltalit(lrian[sm, ed. John B. Thompson (Polity P ress, 1986), p. 298. 47. Chetan Bhan, L i/Jtr(ltilltl (lnd Purity: Ruet, Nn» &Iigillus M_menls and tIN Ethics ofPrut-MMmlity (University College London Press, 1997), 48. Levi, TIN Drowned (lnd tlx &rwd, p. 5 1. 49. John Swan, "The Final Solution in South West Africa," M HQ: TIN Qusrttrly j"JJm(l1 of Mi/ittuy Hutrry 3(4), pp. 3&-55; A. F. Calven , S,Iwth Wesl Africa during IIN Gtrmsn ~tirm (T. Wemer Laurie, 19 15); I. Goldblan, Hut"" rif&tuthllftic(lOuta and Co., 1971); L. H. Gann and P. Duignan, TIN Rmtn of Gnman AfrW, 1887-1914 (SWlford Univenity Press, 1917); Everlyn Nicodemus, -Canying the Sun on Our Bac4" in Andrta &hbinJ snd Mtu &CIxT, cd. M. Catherine de Zegher ('The Kanaal Art Foundation, 1994). 50. T. W. Adomo, "Commitmmt" N,Ites IIn Littra/urt 2, tnn5. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 88-89. 51. Stuart Hampshire, Inn",mu and Exptrimu (Harnrd University Press, 1989), pp. 66-72. 52. Mahmood Mamdani, ImptriMu", and FlJIdsm in Uganda (Heinemann, 1983), esp. Part 2. 53. Je.n Ame:ry, At tIN Minas Limits; OmttmpluhllllS by (l Swviwr IIn Awchwitz (lnd I ts Rulitin, tnn5. Sid ncy and Stdla P. R.osenfeld (Indiana Univenity Press, 1980), p. 4. 54. Ibid., p. 91. S5. Uopold Stdar Scnghor, "Le Message de Goethe AWl: N~gre£ Nouveaux,· Lihulll Nlgritudt tf Hum(lnumt du Stui4 1964, pp. 84-86. My truulation. 56. }his incident drawn from correspondence with Pom pidou is quotcd by
366~ TB 10,Am "::/10
Holts to mu IJo::m
Jacques Louis Hyrnans in An Intdl«hm.1 Biography ofUopold Stdar Srogl»r (University of Edinburgh Press, 1971), p. 112.
3. I DENT IT Y, BEl.ONGING, AND THE CRITIQUE OF
P URE
SAMUO':S S
1. Mark Leonard, Brilain-(Demos, 1997). 2. Judim Butler, "'ColleaOO and Fractured,- in Itkntitiu, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (University of Chicago Press, 1995). 3. ].-]. Rousscau, "Considerations on the Government of Poland; in &u.utau !'ofitUal Writings, traIlS. and ed. Frcderick Watkins (Nelson and Sons, 1953), pp. 163-164. 4. The BliUhbirt (November 24-30, 1933), p. 5; quoted in John Harvcy, Mro in Black (Ch icago University Press, 1995), p. 242. 5. Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (Yale Univc.rsity Press, 1985), p. 39. 6. African Rights, Rwtmda [)tatb, DtsJ'llir and Dtfonce (London, 1994), pp. 347-354. See also Sander L. Gilman, Thejtw's Body (Routledge, 1991), especially chap. 7, "The Jewish Nose: Arc Jews White or The H istory of the
Nose Job.7. Arthur Malu-Malu and 'Thieny Oberie, Sunday Times, August 30, 1998. 8. William Grcider, Ont W()Tld, RLadyor Not: The Manu LogicofGlohal GRpitalism (Simon and Schuster, 1997);Jeny Mander and Edward Goldsmith, OOs., The Cast aga/rnt the Global Economy and f",. a Turn t()W(Jrd lhe LtxaJ (Sierra Books, 1996); Benjamin R Barber,jihad'lls. McWorid: H()fJJ Iht PlantlIs Both Falling AJ'lIrt and Coming Together and What This Mea1U for Democracy (Random H ouse, 1995). 9. Jean-Marie Guchenno, The End ofthe Nation State (University of M innesota Press, 1995). 10. Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom (Open University Press, 1988). 11. Charles T ayloc, SOUTUS of the St!f(Harvard University Press, 1989); William Connolly, Idmh·tylDiffennct (Comell University Press, 1991). 12. Chris Hables Gray, ed., The Cyharg Handbook (Routledge, 1995). 13. Amy Hannon, "Racial Divide Found on Information H ighway,- Ntw York Tima, April 10, 1998. 14. Sheny Turkle, Lift on the Scrtro: /drotity in the Agt oftbt Intuntt (Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 10. IS. Debbora Battaglia, ~Problematiung the Self A Thematic Introduction; in D. Battaglia, cd., IUxtories of &If-Mal;ing (University of California Press,
1995), p. 2.
I'"
16. Benedkl Anderwn, Imagintd Communitia.· R1kaill1U on the Origin and SprtadofNationulism (Verso, 1983). 17. President Mandela's inaugural speech was reprimed in The Indtpmdtnt, May 11, 1995, p. 12. 18. Martin Luther King, Jr., Whert [)Q We Go from Hert: Chaos or Community7 (Harper and Row, 1967), p. 124. 19. Donald G. McNeil,Jr., ~Mricans Seck Redress for Gennan Genocide," Nt'W Y()TI: Tima, June 1, 1998. 20. James Baldwin, Evidence ofTbings Not Sero (H enry Holt and Co., 1985), p.78. 21. Peter H ulme, Colonial EncounttrS (Methuen, 1986); Anthony Pagrlen, EUTQ~an EncounttrS in the Nt'W W()Tld: From Rmunwnct 10 &manhcism (yale, 1993); Richard C. Traler, SaandConquat(Cornell University Press, 1995). 22. Ch;ules Taylor, "Understanding and Ethnocentricity; in Philosophy and the Human Scitnca, Philosophical Papm 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 23. James Walvin, An AjrUanI Lift: The L ift and TImes of Olaudah Equiano, 174$-1797 (Cassell, 1999); Ola Larsmo, MaroanMrgtt (Bonniers, 1996). 24. Peter Fryer, Staying PI'J'f«r: Tht HistoryofBla(J; People in Britain (PlUtO Press, 1984). 25. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eya: TrllWl and Tra1Ucu/luration (Routledge, 1992). 26. Orlando Patlerson, Sltrotry and Social Dealb: A ComJ'llraliw Study (Harvard University Press, 1982). 27. Adam Potkay, "Introduction- to Adam Potkay and Sandrn. Burr, cds., Black Atlanlic WrittrS oflhe Eigbttrolb Cmtury (S t. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 9. 28. ·01'1 the Death of the Rev. M t. George Whitdield. 1 770,~ lines 20-23 and 34-37; John C . Shields, ed., The Co"uttd Wln'h of Pbil/is W/xatlry (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 23. 29. Daniel Boyarin has explored elements of the history of this idea in his extr"3ordinary srudy A RJuiiU2ljt'W.· Paul and the Polities ofIdrotity (University of California Press, 1995). 30. Olaudah Equiano, Tht Interating Narrt1tiw oftlH Lift ofOllludah Equiano, 2 vols. (Pall Mall, 1969), vo!. 2., p. 195. 31. Ibid., p. 182. 32. Mucus Redikl:r, Betw«n the Dtvil and the Dup Blut &lI: Mtrtbanl Stamm, PiTates and the Ang/o-AmtrUiJn Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge Univc.rsity Press, 1987); Janice E. Thomson, Mtrtmaries, Pirata, und Sowrtigm (Princelon University Press, 1994); E. E. Rice, ed., Tht &a and History (Sutton Publishing, 1996), esp. chap. 5; N. A M. Rodger, ·Sea Power and Empire; 1688-1793," in P. J. Marshall, cd., The Orford History ojThe British I Empire, Volumt Two: Tht Eighumth Cmlury (Oxford, 1998).
tU 10 MW Ill-U f
NotlJ to )Aets
33. Edith R. Sanders, 'The Ham itic Hypothesis; Its Origill and Functions in Ti me Perspective,» Journal ofAfrican History, X. 4 (1969), pp. 521-532. 34. Equiano, TIN Inttmting Narratiw, pp. 38-40. For a ground-breaking discussion of these fonnulations see Adam Potkay, "Introduction- 10 Blad Atlantic Writm of the Eightunlh Cmtury. 35. Elliott P. Skinner, 'The Dialectic between Diasparas and Homdands,» in Joscph E. H ams, ed., Global DimmsiollJ of the A.frican D iaspa (Howard University Press, 1982). 36. Edward Wumot Blyden, On theJtwish Question (Liond Hart and Co., 1898), p. 23. 37. SteM H clmreich, -Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspara,. Diaspora 2, 2 (1993), pp. 243-249. 38. Londa Scheibinger, Naturts &riy (Beacon Press, 1993). 39. "To be rhiwmorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or be tter yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them 10 new uses. W e're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to li nguistics.- GiUes D deuz.e and Felix Guattari, - Rhizome,» inAThousand PlaUallJ (University of M innesOla Press, 1988), p. 15. 40. Louis Farrakhan, -A Call to March,~ E"'"Kt, VG!. 7, no. 1 (O ctober 1995),
p. 66. 41 . Roger Griffin, Tht Nature of Fascism (Routledge, 1993). 42. Leroi Jones, Blad Music (~ill, 1967), pp. 180-211.
4 . H ITLER W OR!: K HAKIS
1. Douglas A.. Lorimer, Colour, CJa.ss and the V"u:toriam: EngliJh A ttihuks to tht Negro in the M id-Nintttmth Cmhrry (Leicester University P ress, 1978), esp. chapters 7 and 9. 2. Lean Poliakov, TIN ATJIln Myth: A H istory of Ratist and N ationalist Idtas in Europe, trans. Edmund H oward (Chan o and Windus, 1974); Ivan H annaford, Rau: TIK History of on Idta in the Wtst Oohns H opkins, 1996); Eric Voegelin, 'The Growth of the Race Idea: &Ww of Po/ilia Ouly, 1940), pp. 283-317; Peter HUUne, 'The Hidden Hand ofNarure,· in TIN Enlightmmmt ond Its Shtu!01JJS, ed. H ulme and L. Jordanova (Rootledge., 1991). 3. George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Volhgmt as Mtthod and Ethi, (Wisconsin Uni~ versity Press, 1996). 4. Ronald H yam, Empire and &xlUllity: The British Exp.tricru (University of Manchcster Pn:ss, 1990); K. Ballhatchel, Rna, &x and CI4ss under IlK RIlj
m-m
(Weidenfdd and Nicholson, 1980); Femando H enriques, Childrro ofColihan (Seeker, 1974); Ann Laura Stoler, ~Camal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and M orality in Colonial Asia: in Micaela di Leonardo, ed., Gmdn- at the Crossroads of Knowldgt (University of California Press, 1991); Christopher Lane, TIN Ruling Pa.nion (Duke University Press, 1995); Anton Gill, R uling PassJ.ms (BBC Books, 1995). 5. The path-breaking work of Eclwan:l Said has spawned a host of inferior imitations in which critical insight is not matched by grounded ethical and political sensibilities. 6. Annie Combes, TIK &;n(lrotion of AfriCll (Yale University Press, 1994); James R. Ryan, Picturing the Empirt: PhotDgraphy and tIK VUlUllizotion.ofthe BrilishEmpirdReaktion Books, 1997). 7. John M. Mac Kenzie, Propaganda and EmJX" (University of Manchester Press, 1984); }. W. M. H ichberger, i mages oftIK If,.."y: Tht Military in British Ifrt, 1815-1 914 (University of Manchester Press, 1988). 8. Sopbie D. Cot and Michael D. Cot, The Trut History ofChocolatt (Thames and H udson, 1996), p. 244. 9. Greta Jones, &xial Darwinism and English Thought: The Intn-alrUm htlwtm BiologUal and Sod4I Theory (Harvester Press, 1980). 10. Rudyard Kipli ng, Tbt Stwn &as (Methuen, 1897). These patterns are not confi ned to Britain. The Gennan novels dealing with the suppression of the Herero uprising in South West Africa are also a good example; see Gustav Frenssen, Pttn- Moon Famt nalh SUdwut: Ein Ftldugs-hnUht (Thousand, Berlin, 1936 [1907]); and H ans Grimm's Sudajrilpnischt NOfJtlim (FrankfurtlMain, 1913). In the French setting, the novels of Ernest Psichari, the grandson ofRenan, provide a good comparative example. All these and many similar works are discussed by H ugh Ridley in lmllgn of impn-ial Rule (Croom H elm, 1983). 11. Mu Weinreich, Hitln-s Profwon: The Part ofScholanhip in Gtrmonys Crimn against ThtJtwish Ptoplt (Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946). 12. More dellliled infonnation on Fischer can be found in the path-breaking and inspiring work of M ax Weinreich and of those scholars who have followed in his footsteps: Paul Weindling, Sheila Faith We.iss, and especially Robe" Proctor. See Proctor's extraordinary essay "From Anthropologie to Rassenku nde in the Gennan Anthropological Tradition,~ in George W. Stocking, cd., Bonn, Bodin, Bthatua/ NDI'7rI.I ill Modtrll EuroJ'e (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), csp. chapter 3; Jordan, Rare Air. V'tIH, "01. 2, no. 4 (May 1994), p. 72. The same article offen these interesting observations about Kclly's livingspace: -H e lives downtown on the Loop, in a sparsely dcc;orared one-bedroom apartment. 'Where I live il's lOO:: Batman in Gotham C ity. No o ne knows where I live. If you come to my crib, you have to be blindfolded .. . It's not just an apartment to me. I hear my music in there. I never have any company because that's my solitude. My being silent about my personal life a1lows me to express it in the sNdio." Joh n London, "Competing Together in Fascist Europe: Spon in Early Franroism," in Giinter BCIghaus, cd., FtJKism Ilnd TiNa/rt: Cclflptlratiw Studies Oil tiN dntiNtia and Po/iticJ of Pnjormllll(t ill E/lr#J't, 1925-1 945 (Bcrghahn Books, 1996). See his discussion with Angda D avis in TrQ1/.S;t;OIl, 58 (1992). It includes the following exchange:
loe Cube 11. Cl Did :onyonc in the Black Panther orpnization smoke? Dam lA. D.]: I'm SIlK they did. I. C.: Did :onybody drink? A. D.: I'm IU~ they did. I. C.: That lin', loving yourself ... To mc the hc$t o!pllization (or black propk is tbe Nation ofls1am. h is the bes, OfPllizalion: brodlcrs don't drink, don't smoke, lin't chasin' womm. They tuw: one job. An~h
18. Paul Gilroy, ''It's a Family AffiUr. Black Culture and the Trope o r Ki nship," in 5_11 A (h (Serpent's Tail, 1994). 19. See TiN Mwds "Annual Car Audio SpectacuWs," usuaJly found in the June issue of the magazine. 20. Emmanucl Larinas, 'The Transcendence of Words," in TIN LtviNJI &adtr; cd. Scan Hand (BlackwelJ, 1989), p. 147. 21. Eric Foner, Nothillg Bid Frttdom (Louisiana Sn.te University Press, 1983). 22. BoourT. W ashington, Up Fr(>m 51awry (Airmont Books, 1967), p. 27. 23. -No sooner had emancipation been acknowledged than thousands of'married' couples, with the encouragement orblack preachen and nonhem white missionaries, hastened to secure their marital. vows, both legaUy and spiriNally. . The insistence or teachcrs, missionaries and Freedmen's Bureau officers that blacks rormalize their marriages stemmed from the notion that lev.-J sanction was necessary for scxual and moral resttaint and that ex-slaves haa to be inculcated with 'the obligations or the married $tatc in civilized
m
MHU to
tb Ma$ If.... ' "
life.... Leon F. Lirwack, BwI in the ShIrm & LDng: 'I'M Aftcnnath 0/ SJawry (Athlone Pra.s, 1980), p. 240. See dupter 5, ~How Free IS Free?" 24. Daniel Miller, -Absolute Freedom in Trinid2d,~ Man., 26 (1991), pp. 323-341. 25. Mechai Sobel, TralMlin ' On: The Slaw Jtnmuy IQ an A.frrrBaptUl Faith (Princeton University P ress, 1988). 26. Charles H . Long, SignifoatilJftS (Fortress Press, 1986). 27. Lawrence Lcvi.m:, BI(l(~ Cultun and Bla(~ CtlnKioumas: A?Ammcan Fo/~ Thought ftvm Slawry to Frttdom (Oxford University P ress, 1971). 28. Michad E ric Dyson is again typical of these problems. H e notes that in the black velTlKlliar, -persorW freedom often is envisioned through tropes of sexual release- but takes this observa.tion no funher. Sec Dyson, RtjkdinK Blad, p. 279. It is not solely a matte! of-release," though this choice of VfOrtU has the virtue of making a. connection with sb.very aplicit. 29. Paul Gilroy, T& B/4dAllantic.: ModtrniIJ tmd Douh/~ Comciownas (Harvard University P ress, 1993), chapler 6. 30. On this concept see Paul Connerton's useful book HO'W S«ittia RnntmJxr (Cambridge University Press, 1989), section 3, "Bodily Pracrices." 31. Shahrazad Ali, Art You Still a SItlW7 (Civiliud Publications, n.d.). 32. This is poWl:rfullytransmitled and its relationship to the problematiC$ offreedom illuminated by seven1 tracks by Ice Cube's crew D a Lench Mob. 5«;, for enmple, ·Capital Punishment in America~ and "Freedom GOI an A. K..," both from theiralbum Gucilku in theMis/(Stteet Knowledge 7-92206-2). 33. Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, It,,,nlJrlDiity and Otm Lift SlTDltgia (Polity, 1993), pp. 187-188. See:ilia Emst Bloch and Theodor W . Adomo, -SomeMissing,· Emst BIoch, The Utopian FUNtifJn Dj'Art a"d Li'trDlurt (MIT PIdS, 1'J88), pp. 5-8. 34. Nu, "Life's a Bitch," from the CD Illmlltic (Columbia, CK 57684,1994). 35. Jean Luc Nancy, TIx ExpmtnctllfFrttdom (Stanford U niversity Pres.s., 1993). W . V. It'sAhout Timt(RCA 07B6366074-2, 1992). See:ilia S. W . V., The 36. &mi;J(ts (RCA 07863-66401-2, 1994). 37. Comel West, "Nihilism in Bbck America,- Roct Malun (SeatOn Press, 1993); see also Ishmad Reed, "Airing Dirty Laundry," in the book of the same name (Addison-Wesley, 1993). 38. The actor Mr. T anticipated the views of a generation of old-school hip-hoppen when in 1985 he gave this aplanation ofhis flashy taStC in jewelzy:
mini.
in
s.
~nds me of my great African ancesron, who wen: brought om' heR: all sb~ with iron dWns on their ankles, on their wrist$, their necb and sometimes around lheir .wisQ. I turned my chains inlO gold, so mY ftatcmcnt is this: the fact that I wear
The: gokI chains arc a symbol that
,.4GU "JOiIl]
gold chains inm:ad ofiron cluins is bec:aus.e I am still a sbve, only my pric:e t28 is higher IXM'. I am still bought and sold by the powers that be i n this IOcicty, white people, bul this rime thcypayfnC' on demand, millions and milliom of dollars for my semec.. 1demand it and thq pay il . . . Ya, I am still. sbve in this 1Ocicty, but I am ltill tnc by God. "How at!: )'0\1 $liD a slave Mr. T.?" You sec lhe only thing that intercsQ this M)cicty il money. And the only thing t hat il fears and rapecu is more money. Mr. T,AnAulohiographyhyMr. TC'W. H . AUen, 1985), p. 4. TIUsacoountof the connection between slavery and identity links personal autonomy with the signs of wealth and the memory of terror. The condition of slavery persilts but il changed by divine grace and the very worldly capacity to hire one&cif OUt to others. 39. dream hampton, "G down," The &unt (September 1993), p. 68. 40. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Frttdom: The Emtrgtnu and DimJiuhfJ" 0/ HitTDTrhy (C heshin: Books, 1982), p. 272. 41. Frcderick Douglass, My Btmdagt My Frttdom (Miller, O rton and Mulligan, 1855), p. 50. 42. See June Jordan, "Beyond Apocalyp5C Now,· in Ciwl WarJ (Beacon Press, 198 1), especially p. 171; Roben C . Solomon, FPTlm &tionDiism to uistmliDHlm: TIx uisttntialislJ and Their Nintl(mlh Cmtury &dgrounds (Harvesler, 1972), dupta 7. See:ilia the di5CUSSion of Alben Camus's L'Etrangtr in Edward Said', C.Jmu and ImpniaJism (Chatto and Wmdus, 1993). 43. Reponingon his recent performanccs in London, Hip Hop Ctlnn«tUm, no. 14 (1995), p. 14, norm this dynamic in opention: "At times this gig resembled a game of Snoop Says ... 'Throw ya hands in the air,' he'd ydl and the audience dutifully obeyW. They were strangely content. It didn't occur to them thu Doggystyle'l instrumental backing is ideally suited to a live concen. Dre's tuneful production means Snoop's performance should entail musicians, not a che1lp impersonal D AT. Unpenurbed by this glaring omission, fans avidly sang along to Snoop's casual paller." See:ilia Waiter F. Pins, Jr., Old Ship o/ZiQn,' TheAftrt-Baplisl Ri/fIIll in the A.frican DU2spt:Jra (Oxford Unjvenit)' Press, 1993). 44. Hip Hiif' Ctlnn«tilJn, 62 (April 1994), p. 31. 45. Edmund Leach, ~Anthropologica1 Aspects of Language: Animal Calegories and Verbal A.buse,- in E. H . I...ennebef]!:, cd., Ntw Dir«tWtu in the Study 0/ ungrmge (MIT Press, 1964), pp. 23-63. 46. Peter Stallybrass and AlIon While, 'I'M Politics and Poctia o/Transgmsu:m (Methuen, 1986). 47./ Emmanuel Levinas, '"The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rightli,~ in Diffitu/t
to 10 mn i6HJI
HOlD
"I!
Frmhm: En.trys juthiJm (Athlone, 1990); Vi Fu Tuan. DtJmiflllnc~ fllld AI[tcti",... TIN Ma!ing o:tj Pth (Ya1e University P ress, 1984); KC ilio Paul W. T aylor, Resp«tfor Natun; A Theoryo:tjEnvironmmlal Ethia(princeton University Press, 1986). 48. H ilda Kean, Anitmil Rights.: Political and Social Changt in Britail! fil!et 1800 (Reaktion Books, 1998). 49. wrbe Paradox of M onliry: An Intuview with Emmanuel Levinu; chapter 11 in Robert Bemasconi and David Wood, TIN Prttwuuion o:tj lAtIilliU (Roudedge, 1988), p. 168. 50. I.t is useful to compare Doggy Stylt with the out-and-out misogyny of DRS and other spokesm en for gangsterdom. 51. C laudia T ate, DIImtf/ic Alltg",.-ia o:tjPlliitital Dtsirt (Oxford U niversity Press, 1992), especially chapters 3 and 7. 52. Zygmunt Bauman, PIIJtmrximr Ethic (Blackwdl, 1993), pp. 92-98. 53. Ice Cube, interviewed by Ekow £shun in TIN Fau, no. 65 (Februuy 1994), p.91.
to I\4Gl1 Ui
1H
1'''
Did you teach Malcolm? Did you clean up MaIoolm? Did you put M alcolm out before the world? Was Ma1colm your traitor or was he OW'$? And if we dealt with him likr; a nation deals with a traitor, what the heU businas is it of yours? You just shut your mouth and stll.y out of it. BeclUse in the future, we are going to become a nation. And a nation gotta be able to deal with traitors, cutthroao and tumcoao. The white man dcals with his. The Jews deal with thcirs_ Salman Rushdie wrote a nasty thing about the Prophet, and Imam Khomeini put a death thing on him." These words were delivered by Minister Farrakhan at a closed meeting in hi$ mosque in Febmat)' 1993. They are quoted in the film Bro/Ixr MiniJ/tr made by Jefri A2lmuhammed, Jack Baner, and Lewis Kesten (phone 516-625-5561). 13. WJ.!.son J. MO$C$, Tht GoIJm Agt o:tj BliI(! Nationalism, 1850-1925 (Oxford UoM:rsity Press, 1988), p. 197. 14. Frederidc. Douglass, "What Arc the Coloured People Doing for Themselves?" in H. Brott, ed., Afrit#n-AmcVan Social #n' Pllijtica/ Thought (fnns:action, 1992), pp. 204-205; Martin Dchny, TIN Origim and Obfom of
A1IlicIt FrttnuJJ#n,,; Its IntrodU(~n illlo t« Unittd States IIn' bgitimmy llmong CoJ#rtd Mm (Pittsburgh, 1853). 6. T HE T VRAI'HU ES O F UNANIMISM
1. Edith Sanders, "'The Harniric Hypothuis: Its Origins and Functions in Tune Perspective," jOJn'1la/ 0/Afrium History, 10 (1969), pp. 524-526. 2. 4A Call to Arms, a Call to Sacrifice," Natillnalism TrxIRy (no t dated). 3. Ross Slater, "Revealed: the B. N. P:s Black Buddies," NtVJ NatiM, June 4, 1998. 4. TIN GUilrJum, September 11, 19%, p. 5. 5. Manan A. L. Miller, TIN Third World in G/~I £n'fJironmmltll Plliitiu (Open University Press, 1995). 6. lGem a Mayo Dawsey, "Caught Up in the (Gangsta) Rapture: Dr. C . Dclorcs Tucker's Crusade Against 'G2ngua Rap" and "Reality Check," both in TIN s.,,"uOunt 1994). 7. Richard King, M . D., Afrium Origin o:tjBioJogiuzl Psychiatry (U. B. and U. S. Communications Systems, 1990). 8. Douglass S. Musey and Nancy A. Denton, Amniam AparllniJ: $tgrtgation and tIN Maling o[tlN UntkrcJlIJJ (Harvard University Press, 1993). 9. Nt'W York Timts Mag(lZin(, April 3, 1994, p. 45. 10. Primo Lcvi, TIN Drownt' andtlN &rotd, tranS. R Roscnthal (Summit Books, 1988). p. 27. 11. Ychuda Bauer, jt'WS for &UtI NflZi-jtwish Nq,otitltiuns. 1933-1945 (Yale University Press, 1994). 12. ~Frankly it u n't none of your business. What have you got to say about it?
15. Prince Hall masonry was the black 5ystem of freemasonry in the eighteenth century. See Donn A. Cass, Ntgro FrumllJon'Y IInd Stgrtga/i(m (Eua A. Cook Publications, 1957); Willi am A. M uraskin, MiJJ/~ CllIJJ BUuh in Q Whitt ~ty; Prinu Hall Frtt'lNl$#n'Y in Amtriw (University of California Press, 1975); Hany E. Davis. A HislflrJ of FrttnuJJ#n'Y Amimg Ntgrots in AmtrUtI (United Supreme Council, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 1946); Loretta J. Willianu, Blad. FrttmJUon'Y on' MidJ/t-ClaJ1 &alitia (University of Missouri Press, 1980). 16. Steven H owe'l Afroctntrism; Mythical PlIJtJ and lmogintd HomtS (Verso, 1998), is a notable exception to this pattern; see chapter 6, "I1le Masonic Connection.· 17. Claude Andrew Clegg m, An Ori!inal MOl!; The Lift o:tj EJijtJh Muham11lllli (St. Martin's Press, 1997). 18. The important issue of continuities between these movements is complex, with interaction and overlap to be found at different levels, and thus it cannot be settled here. The perils of attempting to deal superficially with the topic are amply illustrated by the failures ofMattias GardeD's CountJrJWn t"ArmogtJJon; LouiJ FtlrralJxlII tlnd tIN Nati#n o:tjhklm (H un t and Co., 1996). 19. Nicholas Goodridc.-CIarke, TIN OmJt Rwho:tjNa:r.ism; &rnt Aryan Cults antJ TINir Injiumlt "n Ntni JJtlliDD (I. B. Tauris, 1992); and Hitltr'. Pritstess: &roitri lHvi, the Hindu-Aryan MythantJ N~Ntrl!ism (New Yo rk UnMrsity Press, 1998); Daniel Pipes, CtmJpirtUy; HrJW tIN Paranoid Stylt FI"urisJJa tin' roo-tlt Comn From (Free Press, 1997).
3801
Holti to ",en HI_Hd
!NOta 10 Mal: 12t=ln
20. Georg Simmel, "'The Secret and the Secret Society,w in TJx S«iology o/Grorg Simmel, 60, 87; and the dc:alh fiactOf}', 88, 307; maa er· termination, 21 , 26, 104; ~fup camps, 86
Campbdl, Lu~, 180 Camp Lee, Va., 314 cancer, 19 capitalism, 341
bio- politics, 19, 30, 48, 67. t27, In, IIl4, 196,260,281; political anatomy, 31, 34, 47,255,281
Horowski, T adeun, 88, 89 Hot:ni., 26, 113, 280
cmognphy, 155, 272 c:debrity, 196 cell -lines, 19 Central America, 118
bio-~r, 44
8011011, Maa., 115
CCsai~, Aim~,
bio-technology,19 Black Albntic, cultures, 8 bbck culnm:: 115 an altem:l.Ove public world, 214; in a global marXcl, 181; m:ulu:t--driv= fnrms of, 206; philnsophical and mttaphysial signi6a.na: of, 205; v=w:ubr fnrms of, 178-206. 266--270 black freedom muggIa, gcopnIiric:al and plancwy significance of, 345
Bowdicu, Pia,.." 163 boxing, 166. 372nS l Bmldock,J immy, 168 branding. 98, 107,151 Br.ow\ey, Benjamin, 288
'''~"" CAID"u.Jis>ll, 88 Chamberbin, Houston Slewan, 63, lOS, 138,364027
bbck hislnry momh, 339 black intcUcctuili., 69, 178, 340 hlaclr.libcn.tion 1IKJ\'aIlC1lt, 341 bbd< middle class., 2 13 bbck music, 251; crossover, 190; and public sphere, 252 black nuionalism, 212, 219 bbclcnns, 36; in dog-&ce. 205 ; as insull and pn:srige, 23; and &a, 267 black physicaliry, 258, 348 Black Power, 154, 209 Bb ckstrffi:,267
black $lIpcriorily, 211
B~mburg,
313 B~mc:n, 303 Brisc:no, Offic:a Theodoo:J., 262 Briu.in: army, 16; poIiDal system, 24; po5ICOIonial r.ari2l probkms, 33; . contemporary racist I'iokna in,
.,
British National Pany, 50 Briti~ Union oC Fascisl5, 3, 101 Broederbond. 27
Brown, Jama, 209 B...",. AINrinI", 1«, 294 BuchmwaId, 304, 306 Buffon, Georgcs-Louis Le ckrc, Comle-de,47 B...gs Bunny, 37 B... nchc, Ralph, 292 Burke, Kenny, 184
61, 66, 76,
n , 8S: DU·
Chicago, Ill, 184 Chilcittn of b rad, 99 "Chocolate Kiddiet- revue, 291
choic:o people, 112
Christendom, 247 Christianity,200 Chun:hill, WinslOl1, 27, 159 CIA, 345 citttenship, 82 civiliring protesf, as seen by rJavu, 200 C1arke, Edwud, 232 dass., 264, daSI dil'fcnncc, 214; clus divilion,254 Clinton, Georgc., 185,341 CNN, 242 Coke (Coca--Cola), 250 Cold W:u:, 281, 3 16, 345, 347 Collier, Miny, " I Had. Talk with My Man Last Nighl: 195
IHDDt
coJonialislll: colonUl ethnography, 340; colonial~, 33~ colonial his· tory, 141; colonial UODpI, 288, 308; colooW Yioknec:, 141 ; coioniution, 56; as a world of I!lINes, 255 comrnodifica.tion, 272 communi!)" 199 Como, Peny:Pmona of~" 312 Congo, 105, 209,321
CAnp bprtSJ, 298 of diffi:Rna:, 275 ConKrvltM Puty, 24 conspinq,224 consumer cuI~, 19, 21 , 107, 203, 254, 346; consumerism, 7, 178, 271 consumer present, 338 conlact-zones, 117 Coo""" Carolyn, 266 Coo""r, WiUiam, B~IxJIJ" Pale HlINe, 352 corpol':lt~ mu1!iculNum, 31, 52, 355 corporeal vita1i!)" 255 Con.in, 321 conno~ip
Dare. [)an, 355 I>arwin, Ch2rles, 39, 329 I>aughten of the American Revolution,
29J DDB Needham. 242 death, 196, 200; refusal of rcligious antidotes 10, 196 da:oJonization, 208 Du; HJ7, 201 De Gaulle, Charles, dc:-indllltrialiu.tion, 38, 214 Ddany, Martin, ill, 337 Ddcuu, Gilks, 302 Dcptford, 118
c.:.wr,
ro
lRr~,79
de Wailly, Uon, 36 Diana, Princess of Wales, 151
diaspon, 8, 122, 181, 209, 211 , 252, 330, 349; Athmic, 26; and terror, 123
:wooared with "raa:," 282; and CI.{Utrophe, 279; erouing culturc:t, 93; culruraJ di«CfeII(%, 241; culrunl ecology, 32, n; o;ulruraJ induflno, 106, 130; culrun.1 rnixnIn, 117;~nt.: ClIpnssiolU of, 283; diMc:rnination, 251; indus~tion of, 272; OYUinttgn,tro, 221; panmilitll)', 165; u~, 84; as property, 24; tnllJlUltional, 273; as travding form, 270; limulation, 273; and ulmm.tionallim, 281 Cuvier, Grorgu, 36
D icckhoff, H ans Hcinrich, 169 Diele.il:n, Gcmuinc, 340 digital media, 178 digni!)' and IlKC-thinking, 17 disalienation, 336 di$illU$ioned o.gncntici$m, 355 dispba:ment of verbal by visual, 156 Disndi, Bcnjrntin, 79 DNA, 15, 20, 40 dogs, 201-205 double consciousnc:ss, 71, 77 Dougbss, Fredc:rick, 185, 222 Dr. rh, 188, 195 Dr. Funlcnncin, 185, 351 drill, 102, 160 Du &is, W. E. B., I, 70, 288, 289 Duggal, Rohil, 49 Duke, Bill, 187 Dunbar, Rudolph, 324 Ousscldorf, 302 Dutch G..w.a, 324
Dachau,303,J04,305 , 306 dan~, 200, 214 Danish West Indies, 125
Earland, ChMlcs, 342 Earth, 55, 329 Earth, Wind and FIrC, 342, 350
cosmOl, S5 Coum BII.5ie, 167 Crick, F I':InOI, 32, 48 crimes ag:o.inst humanity, 229 Croatian Nationalil m, 300
Crurukn, 189 cuI~:
n,
Ea~ E, 262, 265 ecoIogies ofbdonging, 55, 274, 328 ecosystem, 39 Eidunann, AdoIf, 61 Elias., Norbcrt, 79 EIlingron, Duh, 291; -Sallcl of the Flying SalK%n, " 343; 'Tht. Raa: fOOStcoloniality,208 P~,()olin,353
Pl1Itt Instirute, 324 Preston, Billy, "Cum Space," 350 Prigogine, I1ya, 21 Prince, 188 print-ru1nm:,272 prisoners of war, 303; African-American,
29'
~tizarion,188,2 1 6;of~ering,230
Proctor, Roben, 72 "''''"''' 346 proletarian public spheK, 83 PROMELANIN 2000, 257 propaganda, 66, 139, 150, 151, 156, 165, 232,298 proteophobia, 106 Protestantism, 273 ProtI)(Q/s o/tiw EJJm o/Zion, 352 Pnmier, G.!rard, 28 pseudo-Kbellion, 179 psychoanalysis, 321 public sires of memory, 335 public sphere, 146, 153,177, 178,188, 201, 292; altematiVl: public sphere:, I n-206, 249; as basketball court, 186 Puff~y, 183
race: absunlity of racial rypologies, 305; critietl theory of I1Iciology, 335; as essential similarity, 38; go:nomic constructions of, 14; idea of, 11: met2physica.l value,I46; and metaphysiQ, 36: new racism, 32, 33, 34, 52; optical imaginary, 35; as rational irrationality. 69; and social optics, 23; and spaa:, 345; and visualization, 42 n.ces, climatic origim and adaptiVl: environmental diffen:ncc:s of, 329 race-thinking, 12; metaphysical forms of,
73 n.cial hygiene, 142, 164,281,297,326 racialiud bodies, 22 n.cial mjcvo, 280 scale, 34,35,37,44,47,94,96,132,150, 217,272; and ppolitics. 56; and group $Olidarity, 276; and scaling, 30 ..... ttering, 125 Sthanberg,Saul,264 Schiebingcr, Londa, 35 Schmeling, Mu, 78, 166, 168, 293 Schuyler, G~, -Black No More; 349 Scottsboro Boys, 313 sea, 121
""",. 224 sccrc{ world government, 354 segregation, 219 Senegal, SI , 92 Senepmbia, 115 Senghor, Uopold S&iar, 77, 79, 91, 302; fcwem humanism, 92; Hostin Nom., 92; -ryaroye; 287 seriality, 104, 160 Scv.:rin Wundcrman Museum, 324 sex, 196-197, 204,266 Shabba Ranks, 268 SIWrur, Tupac, 23, 187, 195, 255, 261, 262 shame, 304 Shamer, William, 344 Sicrn. Leone, 116 Simmd, Gcorg, 224 Simpson, D. j. , 212, 261 Siriw B, 340 Sissk, Noble, 290 slavery, liS; memory of, 194 Sly SWnc, 374n8 Smith, Will, 355 Smith, William Gardfl(";l", 3OlI; on Hider's commenl2ries on Negroes, 3 15; TiN Lmloftlx c.,n9"t"IWJ, 308-315; TIN SIDtI(F_, 316-324 SlL1pplt, 243
Snoop
Dog, 187,195,203,264; DoW SIy/(, 201 SoM, Mcchal, 194
Stephcnson, Jil1, 228 Sn:mhccl, Zeev, 145 Stocking, Gcorge, 141,
sociobiology, 33, 242 Sofsky, W olfgang, SS sofmess, 206, 221 soil, 111 solidarity, 13,25, 3S, 57, S2, 83, 104,110, 131,155,160, 170,179,209,213,214, 217,218,225,237,252,301; ttanslocal, S; unanimistic, 333; and visual technologies. 158; wordless and mctllphysica1 varieties, 163 Sonhg, Susan, 172, 175 sou1,196
Strasscri{c:s, 209
oound, 1 91,272;~nfed,13O
&"ITI, TIN, 23, 262, 269 South Africa, 26, 33, 102, 110, Ill , 184, 208; Afrikancrs., 102, 103; Dit SUnI wn S..iJ Aj"riU, 103 South West Africa, 87 space cxplonuion, 34S Spau}"nI, 37, 344 ~eships, 351 spice tranlers, 344, 350 Spain, 187 Sparkle, 183, 195 Spma, 232 specielO, 20, 33, 35, 42, 43, 46, 71, 94 sproes Iif~, IS spectacl.e, 165, 170 S~,~, 157 Spidbcrg, Steven, 25 Spoo: DDB, 242, 250, 255 Spilkrs. H orte""",, 262 spirituality,33O sports, 253, 258, 259; ~kc{ball, 187; mass spectaronhip, 166; and ph)"iical {raining, 165; soccer, I S7; World Cup (1998),34S Stargard, 342
SlaMip E"t~, 344 Star Trtl, 345 Slor Wan, 350 S~1y Om, lSl
m
stnncgic un~, 220, 230
Sufi Abdw Hamid, 293 Sun Ra, 331, 341, 348 S,m,tc,323 ~tika, 14S, 152,
162, 164, 174,
''''"''
SWIltch, 250 swoosh,78
Tansiey, Sir Aifred Tan:, Greg, 341
George, 39
tattoos, 22
T aylor, Sir Tcddy, 24
technological sublime, 337 technologies of the fn:c: black. self, 192, 20S {~~,252,3S9n2
teddy boys, 4 temporal d isjunction, 3