Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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ROM A NC E , DI A SPOR A , A N D BL AC K AT L A N T IC L I T E R AT U R E

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature offers a rich, ­interdisciplinary treatment of modern black literature and cultural history, showing how debates over Africa in the works of major black writers generated productive models for imagining ­political agency. Yogita Goyal analyzes the tensions between romance and realism in the literature of the African diaspora, examining a remarkably diverse group of twentieth-century authors, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Phillips. Shifting the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity rather than its forgotten past, Goyal argues that it is through the figure of romance that the possibility of diaspora is imagined across time and space. Drawing on literature, political history, and ­postcolonial theory, this significant addition to the cross-cultural study of literatures will be of interest to scholars of African American studies, African studies, and American literary studies. yo g i t a g oy a l is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of California at Los Angeles.

cambridge studies in american l i ter atu re and culture Editor Ross Posnock, Columbia University Founding Editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory Board Alfred Bendixen, Texas A&M University Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Ronald Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Gordon Hutner, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois, Chicago Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago Recent books in this series 159. yogita goyal Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature 158. michael clune American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 157. kerry l arson Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 156. l awrence rosenwald Multilingual America 155. anita pat terson Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernism 154. eliz abeth renker The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History 153. theo davis Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century 152. joan richardson A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein

ROM A NCE , DI A SPOR A , A N D BL ACK AT L A N T IC L I T E R AT U R E YO GI TA G OYA L

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521763592 © Yogita GoyaL 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010

ISBN-13

978-0-521-76359-2

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my parents



Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Introduction: the romance of diaspora

1

1 From domestic allegory to imperial romance:  Pauline Hopkins and racial mixture

25

2 From double consciousness to diaspora:  W. E. B. Du Bois and black internationalism

59

3 From nativism to nationalism: Joseph Casely Hayford, Chinua Achebe, and colonial modernity

104

4  From romance to realism: Richard Wright and nation time

142

5 From revolution to arrested decolonization:  Ama Ata Aidoo and the long view of history

181

6 From return to redemption: Caryl Phillips and postcolonial hybridity

205

Notes

240

Index

273

vii

Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many debts I have accumulated over the years of writing this book. Madhu Dubey has always been my best reader. My gratitude for her brilliant advice and encouragement as my dissertation director and beyond can never be adequately expressed. At Brown University, I would also like to thank Neil Lazarus (who taught me how to hate tradition properly), Josefina Maria Saldana, Daniel Kim, Laura Chrisman, Nancy Armstrong, Len Tennenhouse, Olakunle George, Tim Bewes, and Jim Campbell. Ashish Roy deserves special thanks for getting me started years ago. I owe a great debt to the curators and the seminar participants at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where I was a scholarin-residence in 2003–2004 funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities. I would particularly like to thank Miriam Jimenez-Roman and Colin Palmer for their generosity and encouragement. A fellowship from the University of California President’s Research Fellowships in the Humanities in 2007–2008 provided valuable time off from teaching to complete this book. I have been fortunate in finding invaluable support from my colleagues at UCLA. I am grateful to Thomas Wortham and Rafael PerezTorres as chairs of the Department for providing institutional support and encouragement. I am also deeply indebted to Eric Sundquist, Richard Yarborough, Jenny Sharpe, Mark Seltzer, Helen Deutsch, Arthur Little, Kathleen McHugh, Joe Bristow, Harryette Mullen, Felicity Nussbaum, Jonathan Grossman, Caroline Streeter, Françoise Lionnet, Shu-Mei Shih, Liz DeLoughrey, Joseph Nagy, Ali Behdad, Chris Looby, Purnima Mankekar, Akhil Gupta, Saree Makdisi, Wendy Belcher, and Samantha Pinto. Several scholars have offered crucial advice and feedback on the manuscript, including Madhu Dubey, Ken Warren, Simon Gikandi, Eric Sundquist, Walter Michaels, Matthew Guterl, and Khachig Tololyan. I viii

Acknowledgements

ix

owe so much to the women of the LOUD Collective for sustaining mind, body, and soul. A very special thanks to the friends who have always been there – Bakirathi Mani, Atreyee Phukan, Praseeda Gopinath, and Amor Kohli – and to those who make life infinitely more fun every day, in addition to being wonderful readers and collaborators  – Eric Hayot, Grace Hong, Arlene Keizer, Sanjay Krishnan, and Deborah Vargas. I cannot hope to express my gratitude enough to Helen Deutsch and Michael Meranze for always being there for me, in matters big and small, and to Arthur Little for all the advice and support (and not just when it comes to shopping for eyeglasses). Mark Seltzer’s wit and wisdom are indispensable. Daniel Kim will always be my favorite raft-builder. Without the friendship of Asha Nadkarni, Mai Al-Nakeeb, Sally Huang, Susanna RankinBohme, Gene Jarrett, Chris Lee, Gina Rucavado, Touria Khannous, Sanjeev Uprety, and Jason Solinger, graduate school would not have been the utopia it seems to have been now. Much of the joy of the years that spanned the writing of this book came from sharing my life with Anish Mahajan – not just as an intellectual sounding board, but also for the stolen pleasures of driving maniacally to catch the first day, first show of the latest Hindi movie. Thanks to my sisters, Reema and Anuja, who have always loved me more than I deserved, and who may not even know how much they inspire me. My mother always reminds me that she was the first in the family to get a BA in English and has intimately shared my journey in writing this book, its highs and lows, from near and afar. My father has made me who I am and no words can convey what he means to me. He has been waiting for me to write this book since the day he handed me my first real book. So finally, here it is, with all my love.

Introduction: the romance of diaspora

Romance offered writers not less but more; not a narrow a-historical canvas but a wide historical one; not escape but entanglement.

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

In August 1920, the Universal Negro Improvement Association held its first convention in New York City. Led by Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), its members held meetings, sessions, and ceremonies for a whole month, as UNIA officers dressed in full regalia, with the Black Star Line band and choir, the African Legion, the UNIA Motor Corps, and the Black Cross Nurses, along with contingents of delegates from the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Central America, and West Africa, paraded down the streets of Harlem. A mass meeting at Madison Square Garden, with attendance estimated at 25,000, capped it all off, as Garvey declared: “The other races have countries of their own and it is time for the 400,000,000 Negroes to claim Africa for themselves, and we mean to retake every square inch of the 12,000,000 square miles of African territory belonging to us by right divine.”1 Garvey, the most spectacular leader of the back-toAfrica movement in the first few decades of the twentieth century, offered a potent combination of religion, politics, militarism, and fantasy, as his marches in Harlem showcased a peculiar blend of spectacle and theatricality, discipline and determination. There is perhaps no better way of ­gauging Garvey’s impact than recalling W. E. B. Du Bois’s amused and yet perplexed description of his contemporary and rival: “When Mr. Garvey brought his cohorts to Madison Square Garden, clad in fancy costumes and with new songs and ceremonies, and when, ducking his dark head at the audience, he yelled, ‘We are going to Africa to tell England, France, and Belgium to get out of there,’ America sat up, listened, laughed, and said here at least is something new.”2 Garvey’s novelty lay not just in the militancy of his message, evident in his speech at the convention, where he warned white Americans that “four hundred million Negroes were sharpening their swords for the next world 1

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Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

war.”3 Rather, it derived from his ability to tap into deep-seated feelings of disaffection from the failed promise of American democracy and in his promise of a black nation that could embody the desire for autonomy and freedom. He posed a pertinent question when he asked, “Where is the black man’s government? Where is his king and his kingdom? Where is his President, his country and ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?” He concluded, “I could not find them, and then I declared, I will help to make them.”4 Whether we view Garvey’s meteoric rise as an expression of a growing urban consciousness, or as fed by “empty and silly fictions” (as one critic charged), the power of his movement is undeniable, as his historic cry, “Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad,” resonated across the black world.5 Though the back-to-Africa movement he heralded fizzled out fairly quickly, his impact across the diaspora and on the continent was phenomenal albeit still little understood, especially in academic accounts of black history and intellectual life. In part, this neglect may be explained as an inability to account for the spectacle, the theater, the extravagance – in a word, the romance – of Garveyism. After all, not only did Garvey imagine a line of black-owned ships readying for a journey to Africa, he went so far as to declare himself the Provisional President of Africa, and bestowed several equally grandiloquent titles on his UNIA officers, turning them into the nobility of his envisioned empire. And so the UNIA had Knights of the Nile, Knights of the Distinguished Service Order of Ethiopia, Dukes of the Niger and of Uganda, Earl of the Congo, Viscount of the Niger, and Knight of the Distinguished Service Order of Ashanti. In other words, his pan­A fricanism, if we can call it that, was not just a loosely defined vision of solidarity among all African-descended peoples. Instead, he envisioned an African empire that would both mimic and rival European imperialism. To do so, Garvey derived inspiration from a variety of sources, including the British empire, Zionism, the “supergovernment” of the Pope and the Catholic Church, and even the example of European colonization of Africa. Thus Garvey thundered, “It is only a question of a few more years when Africa will be completely colonized by Negroes, as Europe is by the white race.” Claiming a right to Africa on the basis of race, he insisted that there was no difference between continental and diasporic Africans, that they were all part of “one common family stock,” and refusing to accept existing forms of political communities, he declared, “I know no national boundary where the Negro is concerned. The whole world is my province until Africa is free.”6 As this announcement indicates, Garvey’s vision was resolutely global. Starting with “a nucleus of thirteen in a dingy Harlem

Introduction

3

lodge room,” he went on to imagine Harlem as a provisional capital of his African empire, a world capital for the race.7 Even before coming to the United States from Jamaica in 1916, he had traveled through Central and South America and Europe, and formulated his critique of colonial power that would interact with his experience of racialized being in the United States to form a potent  – and deeply contradictory  – brew of imperial might and racial pride. “The question may start in America, but [it] will not end there,” Garvey promised.8 Of course, Garvey himself never managed to set foot on African soil. Realism, it seems, played no part in Garvey’s grandiloquent ceremonies and schemes. Indeed Du Bois argued that “no dependence could be put upon his statements of facts.” “Not that he was a conscious liar,” Du Bois concluded, “but dream, fact, fancy, wish, were all so blurred in his thinking that neither he himself nor his hearers could clearly or easily extricate them.” Garvey’s detractors often emphasized his lack of common sense, highlighting the distinction between the practical and prophetic nature of Garvey, which is my central concern here. Garvey’s movement was clearly visionary, emotional, showy even, and yet scholars find few ways of assessing it other than noting its historical impact. Even Du Bois admitted that Garvey was a historical symptom, a “type of dark man whom the white world is making daily” and wondered if his rise meant that he was the harbinger of a “type of a mighty coming thing.” And certainly, Garvey’s historical impact on Africa and elsewhere may well be greater than that of his more illustrious rivals.9 Still, rather than assessing the historical contours alone, we also need to comprehend the romance of Garvey  – the spectacle, the myth, the drama – to account for the longevity, but also the meaning, of his extravagant platform. That Garvey takes up historical and political questions and reframes them for his audience in the language of prophecy means that he can promise at once both utopia and apocalypse, or even an apocalyptic understanding of history, a sense of crisis and catastrophe reimagined as the promise of a utopian transformation. Thus he can infuse a realist sense of injustice with the fantasy of a grander destiny. As Robert Hill and Barbara Bair put it, “in the transfiguration of Garvey in popular memory, historical time has been replaced with mythical timelessness,” and through songs circulated in popular memory Garvey has emerged as the race’s prophet, the Moses who will lead his people out of the wilderness. Garvey’s wife concurs with this assessment, pithily stating that “Garvey was temporal, but Garveyism was eternal.”10 Some forty years later the iconic figure of Third World liberation, Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), also imagined a pan-African army, an African Legion,

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Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

which would lead from Ghana to Algeria through the desert. In his capacity as a member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), fighting to free Algeria from French rule, Fanon visited the newly decolonized nation of Ghana to attend the All-African People’s Congress held in Accra in December 1958. There, as part of his advocacy of violence as the means to liberate Africa, Fanon imagined an African Legion, which could open up a second front within Algeria through troops based south of the Sahara. In his subsequent stay in Ghana, and travels through Ethiopia, Cairo, and Kinshasa, Fanon refined his plans for an African Legion, tapping into the swirl of excitement around the pan-African ideas and movements that were characteristic of the Bandung era. In 1961, the African Legion became a matter of actual planning as well. Fanon took a secret, mysterious, and dangerous trip through Mali and even wrote some rhapsodic poetry about an Africa awakening to revolution. His vision encompassed the entire continent, as he declared: Having taken Algeria to the four corners of Africa, we now have to go back with the whole of Africa to African Algeria, towards the north, towards the continental city of Algiers. That is what I want: great lines, great channels of communication across the desert. To wear out the desert, to deny it, to bring together Africa and to create the continent. Let Malians, Senegalese, Guineans, Ivoirians and Ghanaians flood into our territory from Mali, and men from Nigeria and Togo. Let them all climb up the slopes of the desert and pour into the colonialist bastion. Take the absurd and the impossible, rub it up the wrong way and hurl a continent into the assault on the last ramparts of colonial power.11

Invoking a geography of the revolution continental in scope, and hopelessly audacious in its reach, Fanon thus imagined an Africa rising as a single entity to overthrow colonialism in an upsurge directed not only at the colonizer but at nature and history itself. No such Legion ever marched through the desert and it is easy to think of plenty of historical and political reasons that testify to the fundamental impossibility of the project. Fanon died soon after the trip, and the dream was lost to history. It may seem immediately obvious that one would need to turn to scholarly accounts of pan-Africanism, diaspora, or transnationalism to begin to understand Fanon’s dramatic vision. But in what way is Fanon’s life and work to be understood as diasporic, internationalist, or black Atlantic? Alienated from French culture because of racism, estranged from native Antillean culture as a result of the French colonial policy of assimilation, and an outsider in the Algerian nation he died to help secure, Fanon’s rootlessness is certainly evident throughout his numerous journeys and

Introduction

5

migrations. Born in Martinique, he received a French colonial education, of which he later said, “the black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever talking about ‘our ancestors, the Gauls,’ identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries truth to savages  – an all-white truth.” It helps to remember too that as a black Martinican, Fanon was first taught to regard himself as French: “What is all this talk of a black people, of a Negro nationality? I am a Frenchman . . . What have I to do with a black empire?”12 In 1944, he even joined the French Army, fought on the European front, was wounded and disabused of his notions of belonging to European civilization. When he moved to Algeria to work at a psychiatric hospital in 1953, it only took him three years to resign from the post and join the FLN, as he came to recognize that under colonialism “everyday reality is a tissue of lies.” In this way, while Fanon first located his self through appellations of “we Frenchmen” or “we Martinicans,” from the mid-1950s, he began to speak of “we Algerians” and “we Africans,” and by the end of his life, he even imagined a “United States of Africa.”13 Even a quick glance at these biographical details evidences Fanon’s transnational or black Atlantic coordinates, but it is in his challenge to the very concept of diaspora as it is usually theorized that Fanon proves most compelling. Significantly, in contrast to accounts of diaspora that prioritize the memory of slavery, Fanon turns away from the past, and focuses on the moment of revolutionary transformation in anti-colonial struggle. Famously, he is harshly critical of calls to revere tradition, critical of négritude, and far removed from notions of returning to the source, or of ancestral veneration, as he declares that he is “not a prisoner of history” and keeps his gaze on the present and the future.14 Refusing to accept any romance of past greatness, any notion of a mystical black being, Fanon articulates his platform in the language of realism, rationality, and social justice. Fanon’s commitment to the nation is further difficult to assess through conventional accounts of nationalism, as it is founded neither in race nor ethnicity, but rather imagined as a form of political will, as the dynamic creation of the people’s struggle, and as the route to a more genuine humanism. Though I will discuss Fanon’s nationalism later in the book, I want to point out his commitment to political realism, even though several scholars assume his status as (to use Albert Memmi’s words) “a prophet of the Third World, a romantic hero of decolonization.”15 Unconcerned with turning to the past for validation, refuting any notion of redemption, Fanon imagines the nationalist revolution as wholly new, as a path to true internationalism.

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Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

Both Garvey’s and Fanon’s plans could be called quixotic instances of pan-Africanism, messianic dreams of black redemption, complicated interminglings of racial despair and hope. Both died early, one exiled in Jamaica, the other of leukemia in an American hospital (a land he didn’t want to come to and once called a “nation of lynchers”), and went on to enjoy posthumous reverence across the world, but especially in black power movements. And yet the two could not be more different. One was imperial, the other committed to revolutionary anti-colonialism; where Garvey asked for race purity, Fanon stood against all racial or ethnic forms of nationalism. Garvey also adopted wholesale the logic of romantic nationalism of Europe, equating race with nation, while Fanon offered a stinging condemnation of Europe and the Enlightenment. Finally, where Garvey wanted to conquer Africa, Fanon wanted to liberate it by making it the staging ground for a new humanism. In effect, then, Garvey eschewed realism to call for the overthrow of white domination, articulating a political vision that could not be expressed through an appeal to the real in his historical moment, but required the turn to romance. He not only mobilized the pomp and spectacle of romance to render himself appealing, he offered, in fact, a fundamentally romantic world view, where history could be redeemed to a former, primal glory, and space could become the ground for imperial conquest, thus imagining a future African empire as a return to a primal black destiny. Fanon, meanwhile, may well be synonymous with revolutionary romanticism (as Memmi charged), but his works also evince pragmatism and realism, deeply involved as he was in the minutiae of freedom, revolution, and governance. His commitment to freedom, and to the nationalist revolution as the vehicle of that freedom, was grounded in realism and in a rejection of romance. These two figures are key to any history or theory of black Atlantic exchange. The dreams and fantasies of these two thinkers testify to the historical fact of the intense cultural traffic among black diasporic intellectuals over much of the twentieth century. Both reveal the inextricable intermingling of nationalist and transnationalist visions, as they invoke – in unexpected, even startling fashion  – tropes of scattering and return that are at the heart of notions of diaspora. They thus evidence a tension between racial nationalism and universalism, a tension that will prove at times to be an opposition, at others to be dialectical. Garvey’s race-based nationalism and Fanon’s non-racial, non-ethnic anti-colonial revolution simply cannot be understood through received understandings of either nation or diaspora. Moreover, both men make Africa a central, even constitutive, part of their transnational visions. Africa powers their imagination,

Introduction

7

their political dreams, and their theories of modernity. Finally, both create a peculiar mix of political ambition and wild fantasy, what I will call realism and romance, where we find writ large all the contradictions of modernity. Garvey’s imperial romance and Fanon’s nationalist one, though equally apocalyptic in scope, could not be more different in their political import. This book is written in the belief that the differences between Garvey’s dream of a black army and Fanon’s of an African Legion matter, and that such differences have something to contribute to modern scholarship on diaspora. To grapple with the differences between Garveyism and Fanonism, the historical reasons for their formations, and their aesthetic agendas, it is necessary to excavate a larger tradition of diasporic debate over Africa. The three distinct features of their imagination – the synthesis of national and transnational concerns, the centrality of Africa, and the significance of romance and realism – form the subject matter of this book. B ac k t o A f r ic a To understand Garvey’s and Fanon’s visions, we clearly have to turn to what we have come to call the black Atlantic, following Paul Gilroy’s path-breaking book of the same name. Over the last fifteen years, the field of black Atlantic studies has emphasized racial formation globally, nationally, and locally, with an emphasis on the circulation of ideas, material artifacts, bodies, and cross-cultural negotiations over meaning and ownership. A range of scholars – historians, literary critics, and anthropologists, among others – have seized on the transnational circuits to reveal the exciting possibilities released by such patterns of mobility and exchange. And yet Africa is curiously absent in these vibrant and exciting discussions and debates, as the Atlantic continues to be thought of as primarily referring to the movement of ideas, peoples, and objects between Britain and the United States. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature explores the place of Africa in the writings and arguments of black diasporic writers and thinkers. Tracking literary representations of Africa by African-American, African, and black British writers, the study suggests that a mapping of Africa within diasporic discourse helps rethink existing models of nation and diaspora. Whereas Africa exists as the “dark continent” in conceptual constructions of the black Atlantic or is relegated to some timeless past as a mythic origin for a diasporic culture, this book shifts the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity.

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Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

At the heart of concepts of race and nation in black diaspora literature, the sign of Africa speaks as directly to dreams of redemption and return to a lost homeland, as it does to the politics of fighting racism and imperialism. Africa is not just a static marker of lack, or of a non-modern tradition – the sign of modernity’s erasure or its negation. To be sure, this is not to focus on good or bad models of representing Africa, but to reveal the discursive function of the phantasmatic Africas these writers produce to code other cultural conflicts, Africas of the mind that are neither unrelated to the landmass of the continent nor reducible to it. As Valentin Mudimbe has shown, the idea of “Africa” is an invented one – a concept, a political event, a sign of alterity, an imperial construction of the “other” that reaffirms the identity of the self; in other words, it is always a discursive construction and a locus of competing ideological interests.16 To track the lively transnational conversation on Africa among black intellectuals, the book moves from the late-nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican magazine fiction of Pauline Hopkins to the late-twentieth­century black British novels of Caryl Phillips, engaging along the way such writers and thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Casely Hayford, Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Ama Ata Aidoo. Read together, the writings of these intellectuals comprise what I call a black Atlantic canon. Such a canon includes not only texts that highlight transnational mobility across various locations of the Atlantic triangle, but also those that take up the conceptual core of the idea of diaspora: the loss of home, the meaning of memory, and the struggle to find a usable past. Further, as Gilroy has suggested, an exploration of diaspora necessarily involves a meditation on the legacy of slavery and colonialism, as well as a consideration of the relationship of blacks to the modern West and its traditions of thought, particularly those that have been defined in relation to an African other: Reason, Enlightenment, and modernity.17 Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature suggests that these questions can be fruitfully thought through by an analysis of literary form. Accordingly, I map current debates about nation and diaspora onto the literary genres of realism and romance. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that the choice of genre sediments social contradictions that the text then tries to resolve, I contend that black Atlantic fiction gains its energy from the friction of two competing modes – nationalist realism and diasporic romance. Jameson suggests that the genre of romance, understood as a literary institution that can mediate between a formal analysis of an individual text and the larger history that enables it, implies

Introduction

9

a salvational or redemptive perspective of some secure future from which we can recreate the past as myth. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s musings on the angel of history, Jameson tells us that genres not only emerge from specific historical situations, but carry that ideology in themselves as a ghostly after-effect. In this way, Jameson makes possible a historicist method at the level of form.18 The connection between the novel and the nation is well documented in cultural studies. Drawing from the work of Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, we are accustomed to thinking about the inextricable relation between the modern nation and the realist novel.19 Realism has been thought of as the perfect analogue for the project of producing a modern nation, along calendrical, clock time and faith in ideas of progress. On the other hand, the question of the literary form of diaspora narratives is more open-ended. (As Gilroy suggests, in black Atlantic narratives time stops and starts: there is no clear faith in progress, rather the coordinates are the void of the Middle Passage and the horizon of the Jubilee.) In this study, I suggest that diaspora is commonly tied to a break in the form of the realist novel and may be linked to the genre of the romance, implying a non-linear, messianic temporality. Black Atlantic literature expresses both the teleological, modernizing impulse of nationalist realism and the recursive logic of diasporic romance. To imagine a community that is characterized by both national and transnational concerns, black Atlantic texts constitute an eclectic genre, where the realist narrative of the nation is interrupted by the romance of the diaspora. The peculiar nature of black nationalism – its necessary constitution in diaspora – entails such ­complexity of form. Reading romance as a mode of representation across twentieth-­century black Atlantic novels, my study argues that romance provides two potentially contradictory understandings of diaspora. On the one hand, romance allows black Atlantic writers to imagine diaspora as a utopian horizon, one that breaks away from existing forms of social organization such as nation or ethnic group. On the other hand, romance – as a form that can harmonize seemingly irreconcilable opposites – helps black Atlantic writers collapse distances of time and space to imagine a simultaneity of experience. While the first mode theorizes diaspora as difference, the second mode implies a certain wholeness of vision that refuses to accommodate any sense of difference at all (spatial, temporal, historical, or geographical). Instead of identifying texts as belonging to either one approach, I suggest that they inhabit the two modes in constant tension, offering varying fictional or (what Jameson would call) magical resolutions. My point is not

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Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

to argue for the essentially escapist or subversive quality of the romance form, but to excavate its precise contribution to the construction of a global black imagined community. Thus, I suggest that romance ­enables black Atlantic writers to create certain partitions of space between the domestic and the foreign, and partitions of time between the modern and the primeval. Instead of accepting the binary opposition of romance and realism, and coming down on one side as for or against romance, I wish to inhabit and stretch to the breaking point the oppositions romance helps these writers to construct, dismantle, or otherwise perform. To ­render what such writers see as real, magical, or mythic, or to try to change reality by using romance to posit alternatives, or to disturb the boundaries between the real and the fictional, romance becomes an infinitely malleable form. Thinking of genre as the presence of the past in the present, my study highlights constant transformation, as earlier forms are constantly returning, being displaced, inverted, or reproduced. Impure at its very origin, romance inevitably implies a repatterning and rebeginning, rather than the birth of something wholly original, as the writers of diasporic romance compose narratives that function both as a recovery and as an imaginative projection. In this respect, romance allows these writers to collapse time and space to give us a whole, or to shine a beam of light onto one moment, or even to give us a progressive history read backwards from a future point of redemption. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison has written eloquently of the centrality of romance to American literature, urging scholars to decipher its racial coding and the significant work romance is called upon to ­perform in imaginings of the national community. Morrison insists that an “American Africanism” haunts American literature, figuring blackness as a blank empty space, always available for carrying out the duties of exorcism, reification, and mirroring. “Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette,” Morrison argues, “American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless.”20 Extending her insights in a global frame, this study investigates the ways in which romance produces Africa in the diasporic imagination. Certainly, for African-Americans and others in the diaspora, Africa occurs not just as a dark mirror but as a more complicated sign, which has the power to give or withhold meaning – to return value to the past and to give shape to the future.21 In excess of common colonial and imperial constructions of Africa as well as of American ones of blackness in general, black diasporic writers turn to Africa to garner cultural solace,

Introduction

11

to construct a usable past, or to search for the means to create a political future through the sense of a shared destiny. Veering between and across racial nationalism and universalism, they neither simply invert nor adopt existing notions of either formation, but attempt to transform their meaning to suit specific goals. It is worth noting as well that romance has long held a privileged place in studies of American literature as an analytic tool for gauging the national character as expressed in literature. The romance theory of American fiction forwarded by Richard Chase and other mid-century thinkers has become discredited in the revisionist critique of the New Americanists who point out Chase’s interest in creating an exclusionary canon.22 More broadly, genre criticism is seen as an outmoded or apolitical way of reading material that is better served by historicist and interdisciplinary approaches, inflected by an awareness of race, class, gender, and sexuality. But romance, as Morrison points out, is deeply implicated in and produced by heavily racialized tropes, and to limn the nature of the tropological work of race in US literature, it is necessary to turn again to the forms that literature takes. Discussions of genre often turn on the issue of aesthetic pleasure. It is not that I am unconcerned with the imaginative force of literature, but my focus lies elsewhere; I am interested in questions of aesthetic style as epistemology, as grounds for knowledge production, as the site on which questions of power play out. We need only recall the tussle between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois at the beginning of the twentieth century to note that questions of culture were at the heart of African-American struggles for equal rights. We may bear in mind as well Fanon’s lengthy discussions of national literature and an appropriate aesthetic form for the nationalist revolution in his manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, or Richard Wright’s insistence on avoiding sentimentalism in the portrayal of race relations. Writers as varied as Chinua Achebe, Pauline Hopkins, and Ama Ata Aidoo invariably entangle their aesthetic choices with weighty political and historical questions. It is my belief that by exploring the deep investment of black Atlantic writers in such literary and aesthetic strategies, we can add to the exciting array of possibilities opened up by transnational studies. To assume that genre is not pertinent to the study of race is to suppose that the minority text exists as itself, without institutional identity or pressures. Genre categories frame the expectations both readers and writers bring to a literary text, embedding within themselves a veritable social history of narrative conventions, patterns, and modes of representation. Excavating the cultural work of genre, then, helps highlight aesthetic

12

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

form as well as epistemological possibility. No genre is inherently conservative or radical, but insofar as genres and their circulation across various national and transnational literatures can be understood through historicist methods of analyzing form, genre analysis can help call attention to both politics and aesthetics at once. To truly globalize American studies, a catalog of what might constitute a black Atlantic canon can help revitalize the sometimes flat oppositions that characterize the field, as attention to the aesthetic may return us more fully and with greater subtlety and texture to the politics and ideologies at the heart of conceptions of the African diaspora. Diaspora is a term notorious for its semantic expandability, often coming in to stand in for a host of related terms, including transnationality, cosmopolitanism, transatlanticism, exile, expatriation, postcoloniality, migrancy, and globality. Clearly, the term is now a keyword in the manner defined by Raymond Williams. In black studies, the term “diaspora,” as Brent Edwards points out, emerges out of the pan-African movement of the mid-twentieth century, though of course, one could easily point to earlier forms of black transnational activity that would also be encompassed by the term, such as the Ethiopianist, Emigrationist, and African Colonization movements of the nineteenth century.23 The range of ideas and movements the rubric calls into play could vary from the sociological and historical work of Du Bois, St. Clair Drake, George Shepperson, and Arturo Schomburg to the anthropological inquiries into African sur­vivals conducted by Melville Herskovits and Jean-Price Mars. One could also turn to any number of historical moments to track a genealogy of the term, its relation to Jewish concepts of diaspora, or to socialist or communist forms of internationalism. In terms of naming diaspora, then, one could summon an infinitely large body of intellectual work dedicated to thinking through the connections between African-descended peoples. Such a process of nominalization is not my concern here. Rather, precisely because the term can as easily allude to a historical experience of displacement as to a figure for hybridity in cultural studies, I wish to insist on a rigorous and careful stratification.24 Historicizing the term involves realizing that diaspora is not simply a sign of hybridity, postmodern plasticity, or a logical result of the increasing mobility of ideas, people, and objects in a late capitalist world. In sharp contrast to those who would empty the term of its long and muddled history in discourses of racial essentialism, nationalism, or black Zionism and point solely to its emancipatory qualities, I would like to keep alive the political indeterminacy and richness of that very history.

Introduction

13

Romance is another particularly nebulous and historically capacious term, variously interpreted as a genre, a mode, a set of representational strategies, a host of narrative conventions, or even a kind of literary shorthand. As a recent attempt to define romance puts it, it is perhaps easiest to say of romance that we know it when we see it, even as defining it precisely is a much more difficult, even impossible endeavor.25 In broad terms, romance refers to a shift outside of realism into the sphere of the marvelous rather than the mundane, often organized around the motif of a quest into unknown territories (both physical and the uncanny zone of the self). Often seen as dealing with the eternal rather than the historical, the ontological rather than the political, romance suggests a movement outside of the linearity of time and history into the cyclic nature of myth and prophecy. Romance encompasses multiple reson­ances, from the medieval quest-romance, to the sentimental or domestic allegory of love and marriage, to the heroic narrative of struggle and redemption. As Northrop Frye has suggested, it often involves nostalgia for an idealized past, in part to search for alternatives to the social ideals of the here and now.26 In the words of Jameson, romance offers “the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms” free “from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage.”27 But rather than accepting romance’s self-presentation as timeless, unearthing the ideological contexts that govern its premises can help successfully assess its representational work across various times and places. To do so is not to curtail its meaning, but to note how it tries to manage the proliferation of such meanings in order to produce a set of desired cultural and political configurations. In thinking of the changing uses and functions of romance, it is worth recalling that the role of literature in black Atlantic societies has long exceeded the aesthetic alone, as literature is expected to carry out the work of both history and prophecy. Romance fits the elasticity and semantic openness required for such activities of cultural reconstruction and remembrance, but also for its ability to signal the freedom of possibilities beyond the degraded reality of the present. Once mimetic fidelity, consistency of plot or characterization, and plausibility can be jettisoned as the only criteria through which to judge a text, representations of excess in both form and content may be seen as offering greater possibilities for the political visions that prompt the questions: what is real, what is possible? My goal, then, in assessing the work of romance in this study is to open up rather than to foreclose interpretive possibilities by attending to the array of meanings encapsulated in the term itself. It is an expansive term,

14

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

fit for the reach of diasporic visions, which themselves accept no limit or boundary of time or space. In suggesting that romance is the paradigmatic genre of diaspora, my point is not to be prescriptive or to invoke some notion of purity of genre. Categorizing modern prose into the genres of realism and romance is, of course, a messy process.28 And after all, not all diaspora fictions are romances, and there is no reason at all why there could not be realist representations of diaspora. But most often over the twentieth century, the genre that writers have turned to over and again to represent the black diaspora is that of romance. Even writers like Du Bois, to take just one example, whose concerns are largely sociological, philosophical, and historiographic, have sought the genre of romance for their representations of diaspora. My point is also neither empirical nor taxonomic: to note the proliferation of non-realist strategies of representation in diaspora literature is not to say very much. Rather, by elaborating the varied and surprising work black Atlantic writers put romance to, I want to track these strategies to show how they construct a particular relation of diaspora to modernity by creating partitions of time and space, and by suggesting especially that traversing space can equal movement in time. The study thus offers not a comprehensive study of these explorations but a carefully selected and precise genealogy across various historical conjunctures of a group of writers who produce a distinct historical logic and make visible a particular theoretical and conceptual purchase of diaspora. As specific kinds of representational acts, and also as ways of conceptualizing the world, black Atlantic literature’s shifts between the genres of realism and romance call for a nuanced analysis of the cultural contradictions being mapped and managed therein. In this way, the book attempts to treat literary style politically, as a supple and disputed concept within twentieth-century black culture, by replacing static models of racial identity formation and national formation with more flexible, more dynamic ones of migration, circulation, and entanglement. In tracking the history of a genre, I call attention to the way in which genres exist in time, and so provide a means of reviving a kind of historical thinking, in order to stress the relationship between cultural texts located in different times and places. Each writer I look at remakes the form so that it will be adequate to a changing experience of modernity. In addition to offering new ways to read the place of Africa, then, my study of black Atlantic literature also aims to alter our understanding of how these writers use diverse narrative forms to make sense of – indeed, to make – our world. Framed as it is by a discussion of black modernity and counter­modernity, this study is also an exploration of the politics of time and

Introduction

15

space. If nation time is linear and developmental (albeit interrupted by what Arjun Appadurai calls disjuncture and difference), how may we theorize the time of diaspora?29 Similarly, if nationalist investments are invariably territorial, can the fluid spatiality of diaspora constitute a viable alternative? While for Gilroy, a black Atlantic space emerges as an unstable web of identifications that are marked neither territorially nor temporally, in my analysis, temporality and territoriality both remain central to discussions of diaspora. I suggest that shifts in genre index specific temporalities – linear and developmental in the case of nationalist realism, and recursive and messianic in the case of diasporic romance. While nation time links past, present, and future in a march towards progress, diaspora time emphasizes the breaks and discontinuities in such a movement, recalling the trauma of the Middle Passage and looking forward to the Jubilee. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, we may say that diaspora time works differently from nation time as “the time of the now” is shot through with the memory of the Middle Passage. Instead of defining diaspora time as the “homogenous, empty time” of progress, it is more appropriate to see it as a time that is characterized by rupture, but also by various kinds of imagined or projected simultaneities.30 That nationalism paradoxically presents itself both as new and old has been pointed out by several scholars. If, as Tom Nairn suggests, nationalism can be thought of as a modern Janus, facing back into history in order to move into the modern, every nationalist project must invent and codify a tradition.31 In black nationalist discourse, this doubleness is further complicated by the break of the Middle Passage which ensures that the immemorial past being hailed is geographically located in Africa, while the future being willed into existence is securely in the New World. Here it is helpful to recall Benjamin’s theory of history as a catastrophe, a notion that permeates black Atlantic literature, countering the Enlightenment notion of history as progress. Instead of an understanding of the past as a “chain of events” in the fashion of a positivist historian, Benjamin offers “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Benjamin asks for the historical materialist to break the myth of continuity in history, and to “brush history against the grain.”32 To accomplish this redemptive task, the storyteller creates images that fuse past and present, images that make visible that which has been left out and must now be reclaimed. These dialectical images confront the experience of the past with the reality of the now, and momentarily achieve a halt in the progress of history. Accordingly, rather than simply dismissing diasporic accounts that view Africa as the source of redemption, I draw on Benjamin to excavate the

16

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

political potential, if any, of such redemptive fantasies. How might we read diasporic romances against their grain to find the alternate future that we desire? Instead of viewing these dreams through the positivist lens of their eventual failure, we need to revisit them and find their potential, in order to redeem what Benjamin calls our “weak messianic power.”33 We can then understand our present not only in the terms of the hegemonic past but also in light of the counter-discourses that have been suppressed in the histories of the past. A Benjamin-influenced reading would release the alternatives that a single line of narrative has to suppress in order to constitute itself as dominant. R e t h i n k i ng n at ion a n d di a s p or a Whereas critics from Gilroy to Homi Bhabha have argued that diaspora implies the irrelevance of the nation-form, this study shows how nation and diaspora are mutually constitutive, as black writers trouble the ­distinction between the local and the global that most conceptions of diaspora have presupposed. In doing so, it rethinks our understanding of black nationalism in its various guises as imperial fantasy, anti-colonial mobilization, or leftist internationalism. While diaspora can imply a critique of the nation as critics contend, it can also infuse and exemplify nationalist longings. Its critique of nation, then, does not work as a disavowal alone, but more intimately, as it contains within it its object of critique.34 To note that nation and diaspora are mutually constitutive is to move against the grain of most accounts of nationalism today. Most theorists view diaspora as a frame for knowledge production that is resistant or exorbitant to the form of the nation, whether on account of the far-reaching connections across nations that transnationalism assumes, or because of nationalism’s conceptual entrapment within Enlightenment discourses of progress, reason, and civilization.35 Such theories assume that diaspora can stretch across space and time, while nation signals both territoriality and a linear temporal schema. The unique character of black nationalism helps collapse such oppositions, as black nationalism accommodates the territorial and the symbolic, the secular and the sacred, and the essentialist as well as the hybrid. Assuming a more nuanced relationship of nation and diaspora with ideas of racial purity and mixture, this book argues for a historically contingent approach rather than ascribing a fixed template to either formation. Reconsidering nationalism involves realizing that even racialized or messianic narratives stake a claim to universalism by entering modernity as equals.36 For instance, several key black nationalist thinkers, as we

Introduction

17

will see, view the nation as the agent and locus of modernity, and thus the means to imagine anew the space of the present and the future. This book explores the way in which thinking of nationalism as a utopian desire to be a part of modernity, as well as a desire to transform modernity by changing the structures of race and empire, troubles key postcolonial theories of nation and diaspora. In my revision of common assumptions about black nationalism as an expression of racial essentialism, I do not intend to simply insert ambiguity into these rigid characterizations, nor do I wish to replace this model with an equally rigid one, where nationalism enables a progressive politics, while diaspora resorts to mythic mystification. Instead I want to open up a critical dialogue between these formations, one that allows for interplay, flexibility, and debate, and is more carefully attuned to the diverse histories that produce such thinking. If, as I suggest, nationalism and diaspora are not mutually opposed, then our definition of a black Atlantic canon can expand to interrogate texts which interpret nationalism as racial destiny as well as texts that call for diaspora as a secular imagined community. More to the point, such a revision would enable us to analyze the traces of both impulses in the different constructions of diaspora. In addition, it would enable us to marshal the theorization of colonialism in postcolonial studies together with the theorization of racism in African-American studies. While there is often a vague assumption that diaspora occupies similar semantic and conceptual domains as the term “postcolonial,” my study takes the implicit overlap a step further to insist that the fields of African-American and postcolonial studies must be studied together under the rubric of diaspora. As a field, postcolonial studies has been marked by an inability to take into account First World minority texts. The study of race has also been a notable absence in the field. On the other hand, it is equally urgent for American literary studies to take into account the formative role of imperialism and colonialism. Amy Kaplan succinctly sums up the state of affairs between the two fields, when she points out that American culture has been as absent from the postcolonial study of empires as a discussion of imperialism has been missing from the study of American culture.37 There are, of course, several reasons for not collapsing the United States into the postcolonial. But as Donald Pease argues, in bypassing the United States, the field of postcolonial studies may end up reaffirming yet another variation on American exceptionalism.38 In this spirit, this study reads the two fields in dialogue, and returns to key debates on nationalism and diaspora, not simply to go over well-trodden ground, but to theorize historicity, memory, and modernity  – concerns

18

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

that are at the heart of black Atlantic studies. Reading black Atlantic texts through the lens of debates about nationalism in postcolonial studies does not simply require an application of these theories to black Atlantic texts; rather, it tests the limits of such theories, explores their insights, and ultimately offers up new constructions that can map the complex intersections of race, empire, and nationality. It should also be pointed out that though the interest in transnational and transatlantic frameworks invariably comes with a critique of the nation, it does so from differing standpoints in US, postcolonial, and black British studies. In American studies, the turn to the transnational comes from a desire to unsettle exceptionalist or isolationist narratives of the nation, to dethrone key tropes of the frontier or manifest destiny, revealing in the process its imperial ventures on one hand and its heterogeneous borders and multiplicity on the other. In the postcolonial context, studies of the colonial state, the anti-colonial nationalist movement, and the postcolonial nation-state form the object of study. Where some have called for a more thorough assessment of the nation’s emancipatory possibilities, others have shown the degree to which it falls short of the promise. Another key site from which studies of diaspora have emerged is black Britain, where British cultural studies theorists seek to expose the equation of Englishness with whiteness, by arguing for diaspora over nation as a useful frame for black culture. In reading black nationalism across various continents and historical periods, all these tensions come to the fore, as the clash of notions of imperial Americanism, decolonizing nationalism, and postcolonialism offers an especially fertile site for exploring the relation between the national and the transnational, helping illuminate each field’s blindspots, and pointing to surprising and productive intellectual convergences for our theories. The book thus expands the restrictive boundaries of the black Atlantic (often limited to the traffic between Britain and the United States) by placing historical and contemporary figurations of diaspora in urgent dialogue, to unearth the ways in which global black imagined communities take shape under the sign of Africa. Further, it uses the resources of twentieth-century black literary and intellectual culture to offer a new analytic vocabulary for the discourse of diaspora. Finally, as we move into the twenty-first century, the book argues for new ways of imagining Africa, beyond the familiar ones of return or redemption, characteristic of much of the twentieth century. Today, realist accounts of Africa would refer us to endless images of death, war, and disease, shorn of their history, divorced from their causes, and delinked from the histories of colonialism, cold war, slavery,

Introduction

19

migration, and globalization. On the other hand, romantic accounts of Africa also abound in the form of therapeutic Afrocentrism. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature asks us to think outside and beyond these dispiriting choices, to return historicity to the encounter of Africa and the West, and to attend to the power and work of imaginative writing. To restore a sense of the vitality, urgency, and sheer creativity of the dialogue among various black diasporic sites, the book seeks not just an acknowledgement of the centrality of Africa but a path out of these bleak choices. A diasporic methodology necessarily makes us suspicious of origin ­stories:  in what follows, then, rather than a linear narrative, we have a ramifying web (with many beginnings and endings), through time, of various uses of realism and romance. Instead of plotting a historical narrative that would involve accepting the telos of Western modernity as the ideal, ­tracing an itinerary of romance and realism through black Atlantic dialogues helps us to resist the overarching logic of teleological meaning. As Stuart Hall suggests, we can think of historical moments as conjunctures which let us construct not a history but a genealogy, a way to map structures of feeling.39 Accordingly, the first three chapters of this book set up a romance narrative, which the last three chapters unravel in various ways. In the first half of the book, I argue that romance enables Pauline Hopkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Joseph Casely Hayford to imagine Africa as the sign under which a theory of a transnational black imagined community takes shape. In the second half, I show how Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Caryl Phillips challenge the romance mode of imagining Africa – either to substitute it with a different kind of romance narrative, or to provide an alternative form of a transformative realism, or to create new mixed-up forms. Over the course of the first half of the book, we will see how Hopkins’s “new Negro” who finds his destiny as an Ethiopian king, Du Bois’s Talented Tenth hero who marries into ancient Asian royalty, and Hayford’s lawyer and colonial critic who becomes a messianic leader, gradually give way to Achebe’s crossroads of culture, to his sensitive portraits of Igbos caught in the transition to colonialism: the tragic warrior, the megalomaniac priest, and the hesitant Christian convert captured by the poetry of the church. The last three chapters unearth even more conflicted figures  – Wright’s rootless outsiders and exiles, Aidoo’s killjoy protagonists, and Phillips’s ambiguous and hybrid men and women. The book thus tracks how Garvey’s black empire becomes Fanon’s revolution, only to be betrayed by the exigencies of the postcolonial moment.

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Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

The first chapter, “From domestic allegory to imperial romance: Pauline Hopkins and racial mixture,” opens the book by reading Hopkins’s serialized, final novel, Of One Blood (1902–1903), as a diasporic travel ­narrative which turns to Africa to resolve the question of racial mixture in the American context. Teasing apart the diverse, and apparently conflicting, thematic and formal strains that run through Of One Blood, I suggest that Hopkins’s domestic allegory argues for the acceptance of racial mixture, while her African romance relies on racial purity. Hopkins theor­izes African-American identity as characterized by a kind of unproductive double consciousness, a condition which can be healed by invoking a racialized Africa. In linking the destinies of blacks in the diaspora to Africa, Hopkins inaugurates a way of thinking about race that will prove to be extraordinarily resilient over the course of the twentieth century. Contrary to the idea that Hopkins’s turn to Africa produces a pan­A frican perspective, I argue that this turn constitutes an imperialist approach to Africa for purposes of resolving the problem of racial identity in the United States. In so doing, Hopkins inscribes a vision of diaspora that necessarily limits history and modernity to the West, as it requires Africa to embody a timeless zone outside of history as a site of origin for African-Americans. Reading Hopkins’s novel in dialogue with influential ideologies of messianic nationalism and projects of uplift, the chapter suggests that Hopkins’s African romance indicates the limits of the popular rubric of hybridity even as it demands new models for reading how race writes and unwrites itself at the dawn of the twentieth century. Tracking these contradictions to their logical outcome, this analysis will, finally, allow the chapter to draw some conclusions about the relevance of these debates over purity and mixture in light of contemporary theories about nation and diaspora, and to offer some thoughts on the challenges of historicizing the transnational turn in American literary studies. The second chapter, “From double consciousness to diaspora: W. E. B. Du Bois and black internationalism,” turns to The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Dark Princess: A Romance (1928) to explore the intersection between Du Bois’s famous concept of double consciousness and more recent articulations of diaspora. The Souls of Black Folk situates romance at the heart of a deep-rooted cultural nationalism that establishes what is truly distinct about blackness. To do so, Du Bois aligns realism with white America and transforms the racist logic of Jim Crow to theorize a racial sublime, one in which the two selves – American and “Negro” – coexist in a state of fertile tension, thus exploding the binary between racial particularity and universalism that had proved so troubling to Hopkins. Synthesizing

Introduction

21

the contradictions between racial nationalism and universalism that Hopkins had stretched to the breaking point, Du Bois uses romance to present blackness as at once regional, national, and global in Souls. To do so, however, Africa has to figure as a mythic counterpart to the complex ­modernity delineated in the United States. When Du Bois turns more explicitly to the question of black or Third World internationalism in Dark Princess, these fault lines become even more pronounced. Du Bois takes us to a transnational space by transplanting the tension between realism and romance to the global South. He uses realism to historicize the intertwined question of race and labor in the United States, and romance to characterize the international plan of a dark empire to rule the world. Rather than a socialist framework of black internationalism or a vision of diaspora that is cosmopolitan or hybrid, the diasporic impulse in Dark Princess recalls black nationalist models of messianic redemption to imagine a prior union of Africa and Asia as a counterpoint to white domination. Paying attention to Du Bois’s use of romance not only allows us to uncover his critique of realism, rationality, and modernity, but also to raise questions about the uneasy coexistence of his utopian vision with imperial paradigms of viewing Africa, especially when compared to Garvey’s vision of a black empire. The third chapter, “From nativism to nationalism:  Joseph Casely Hayford, Chinua Achebe, and colonial modernity,” shifts from models of racial uplift in the United States to those of national uplift in earlytwentieth-century West Africa. Turning to the Gold Coast writer Joseph Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel, Ethiopia Unbound, I show how he rewrites the imperial romance as a narrative of Africa’s self-awakening into the Ethiopia of Afrocentric lore by situating his novel as a response to The Souls of Black Folk. Hayford’s nation-building project has to find a way to balance the demands of modernity (understood as Western or colonial) and those of tradition (understood as native, customary, or African). This is a story familiar to students of colonial culture, a narrative of a clash between the modern and the traditional, the colonial and the native. What is new about this familiar story is that Hayford feels no sense of alienation from either. To articulate this dual platform in his novel, Hayford creates a division of labor between realism and romance. He directs the voice of reason towards the British, proclaiming his modernity, and the register of revelation to prophesy the rise of Ethiopianism to diasporic Africans, asserting his authenticity. His idea of tradition is thus articulated vis-à-vis New World pan-Africanism while his modernity is defined in reaction to British colonial policies, which are interested in maintaining a sense of

22

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

African difference, and committed to preserving tradition under the mandate of protecting customary law. Shifting to the classic novels of African nationalism, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964), where tradition is to be mourned rather than revived, the chapter tracks his skillful reinvention of both realism and romance to demonstrate how he comes to define a successful African modernity, neither haunted by the specter of African alterity nor simply subject to colonial mimicry. Reinventing both the imperial romance and the official prose of colonial governmentality, Achebe inaugur­ates a new way of thinking about modernity and tradition. In breaking away from the deadlock that plagues Hayford, Achebe redefines the terms on which Africa can be engaged, marking the end of the Ethiopianist tradition, and the beginning of a truly postcolonial one. Where the first three chapters end their quest narrative with the figure of a messiah who will offer redemption, the next three complicate the romance narrative of the quest itself. With the struggle for decolonization gaining ground, Kwame Nkrumah’s rise to power in Ghana as the leader of the first independent African nation-state prompts a renewed interest in going back to Africa, as nationalism again becomes the locus of diasporic dreams, this time of political power based on governance, rather than as a messianic destiny. The fourth chapter, “From romance to ­realism: Richard Wright and nation time,” turns to this moment by reading Richard Wright’s diary of his travels in West Africa, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954). Firmly committed to demystifying the romance of race, Wright insists on the need for brutal realism in the project of nation-building in Africa, which he claims involves the birth of a new humanism, as the deracination produced by colonialism becomes the paradigm for the alienation of modern man as such. Reading the spaces in Black Power where Wright’s narrative of Africa’s political modernity chafes against his romantic invocation of a timeless and mysterious Africa, I place these shifts in dialogue with Fanon’s influential treatises on nationalism to show how Wright constructs Africa as the site of political modernity, at the vanguard of struggles for black emancipation in his reading of Nkrumah’s nationalism, but reverts to forms of primitivizing when he dismisses African tradition. Further, I argue that Wright’s ideas of Africa must be read in light of his American writings on race, realism, and romance and his later international writings on the Bandung conference, where he finds rootless postcolonials, who offer a conception of humanism free of both Western and native cant, s­ ymbolizing a third way.

Introduction

23

The last two chapters turn to the novels of Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Phillips, postcolonial writers who probe the meaning of slavery and colonialism across various national spaces. Neither writer is invested in the nationalist project in the manner of Fanon, nor do they invoke race as a stable sign like Garvey. Both are centrally of the contemporary moment, interested in fluidity and instability, yet deeply invested in the history of black nationalism and transnationalism. The two writers inherit and transform received paradigms of realism and romance to create new and more expansive mixed-up forms that best represent the dominant trends of diaspora studies in recent years. Moving away from earlier versions of nationalist realism and imperial romance, both writers think expansively in terms of both geography and genre and insist upon a long view of diaspora. Chapter 5, “From revolution to arrested decolonization:  Ama Ata Aidoo and the long view of history,” analyzes Aidoo’s novel, Our Sister Killjoy (1977), as a profound theorization of the meaning of history for postcolonial Africa. In Our Sister Killjoy, Aidoo reverses the imperial gaze, presenting Europe as the “heart of darkness” as seen through the critical eye of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman. Aidoo’s narrative itself takes on the form of arrested decolonization as the progressive narrative of Sissie’s journey is undercut by a bitter reflection on past injustice. While the prose of the novel follows a linear trajectory, the poetic interludes indicate that the logic of colonialism continues to unfold alongside the promised logic of nationalism, making postcolonial time an uneven, heterogeneous mixture. Refusing to sentimentalize Africa, the collective voice of the ­chorus explores the possibility of articulating diaspora in a mode outside of romance. For Aidoo, only bringing the nationalist project to fruition can exorcize the colonial past (which intrudes into and disrupts nation time). Rather than contemplating history as a sequence of distinct events, Aidoo’s narrator – in the manner of Benjamin’s angel of history – sees the past as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Caught in the storm of progress, mandated by the relentless logic of arrested decolonization, Aidoo’s narrator is determined to “blast open the continuum of history” and force open alternative futures.40 The final chapter, “From return to redemption: Caryl Phillips and postcolonial hybridity,” concludes the book with an analysis of contemporary diaspora fiction and theory. Reading the Caribbean-born, black British writer as an exemplary diaspora novelist, I suggest that Phillips’s fragmented sketches of the black experience in Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993) present diaspora as a collapse of time and space, one which

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Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

is impossible to represent within a realist framework. One would imagine that Phillips’s self-consciously experimental postmodern and postcolonial fiction would be far removed from the romances of Hopkins, Du Bois, and Hayford on the one hand, and the nationalist investments of Achebe, Wright, or Aidoo on the other. Instead, this chapter tracks a return to romance in Phillips’s fiction, unearthing a tendency to authorize his fragmented portrait of the diaspora by a static, mythic, and timeless portrait of Africa. Turning away from the political energies of the anti-colonial moment, Phillips challenges the notion of a return to origins (whether messianic or nationalist), and searches for a notion of literary or aesthetic redemption free of the political charge of earlier transnational imaginings. His metafictional explorations stage the limits of realism for representing diaspora, but they also plot a return to familiar oppositions between myth and history, aesthetics and politics, and romance and realism, indicating that the postcolonial moment faces some of the same challenges that plagued the colonial and anti-colonial era. I conclude the chapter with a comparison of the models of diaspora offered by Phillips, Gilroy, and the Martinican theorist, Édouard Glissant, to analyze the political stakes of the contemporary celebration of diaspora as a turn away from nationalist and Afrocentric models.

Ch apter 1

From domestic allegory to imperial romance: Pauline Hopkins and racial mixture

Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.

Psalms 68:31

Claudia Tate has taught us that the domestic novels of the last decade of the nineteenth century by black women writers are not simply black Victorian love stories but rather inscriptions of their readers’ political desire for justice. For Tate, the melodramatic narratives of chaste heroines, virtuous heroes, and dastardly villains stage important cultural conflicts, as post-Reconstruction era writers present the desire for civic order through portraits of genteel domesticity. Rescuing such romances from the critical scorn of previous generations, Tate and other feminist scholars explain how bourgeois decorum becomes an important emancipatory cultural discourse in these novels.1 The fiction of Pauline Hopkins, “the single most productive black woman writer at the turn of the century,” is central to such efforts at recovery.2 Hopkins herself anticipates such concerns when she lays out a literary manifesto for her black middle-class readers in the preface to her 1900 novel, Contending Forces. She poses the question, “Of what use is fiction to the colored race at the present crisis in its history?” and answers, “after all, it is the simple, homely tale told in an unassuming manner which cements the bond of brotherhood among all classes and all complexions.”3 Such simple tales would help the cause of racial uplift, a project Hopkins championed in her fiction and in her editorial work with the Colored American Magazine. In her words, such cultural narratives would make “our white brothers and sisters realize the work we are doing, and that, in a single generation after the abolition of slavery, we have produced not only farmers and mechanics, but singers, artists, writers, poets, lawyers, doctors, successful business men, and even some statesmen.”4

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The project of racial uplift, in the hands of intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois, Frances Harper, William Ferris, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Anna Julia Cooper largely took shape by focusing on culture. As Kevin Gaines observes in Uplifting the Race, black intellectuals assumed that if they could prove their own mastery of Western culture, and equal their white counterparts in intellectual achievement, they would be able to overcome the prejudice they faced. Determined to produce idealized portraits of “NegroSaxons,” to use Ferris’s term, black intellectuals sought to combat the era’s accelerated racism, evident in the ubiquity of lynching, the segregation legalized by the 1896 ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, and ever-narrowing horizons of advancement.5 The rule of Jim Crow, of course, was not enforced through legal statute alone, but significantly bolstered by revisionist readings of slavery as a benevolent institution that rescued blacks from their heathen and primitive life in Africa, by sociological predictions that African-Americans would regress to savagery if uncontrolled by segregation, and by the pseudoscientific authority of ethnological claims about the capacity of Africans to generate any form of civilization. Black intellectual emphasis on cultural achievement was thus clearly an attempt to undercut the very basis of the notions that upheld the violent policing of the color line. Fiction played a special role in this project. Nothing clarifies the role of fiction more blatantly than Abraham Lincoln’s greeting to Harriet Beecher Stowe – “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”6 Just as abolitionism harnessed the power of sentiment to argue for emancipation, writers like Hopkins drew on the earlier legacy and hoped to bring about social change by showcasing the respectability, industry, and moral purity of genteel families. For much of the twentieth century, literary scholars saw such uplift projects as evidence of a desire for assimilation into American society at any cost. Notably, writers of the Black Arts Movement, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, were especially hostile to writers like Hopkins, arguing that not only was Hopkins beset by “assimilationist urges,” she was in fact “a continuing slave, despite little bursts of righteous heat.”7 Over the last two decades, the important feminist revision of Tate, Hazel Carby, and Ann duCille drastically changed our appreciation of domestic fiction, showing us that the domestic is invariably political, and indeed carries radically destabilizing potential for narratives of the nation. Such scholars showed us that the recurring tropes of babies switched in the cradle, magical signs and birthmarks, mistaken identities and generational intrigues, are not incoherent, sensational, or formulaic alone, but that they code rich ­ideological conflicts, and are productive of new allegories of the nation as racially hybrid.8

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Carby, for instance, demonstrates how Hopkins challenges the rigid boundary drawn between black and white by presenting mixed-race characters who can pass into white society in novels like Contending Forces, Winona, and Hagar’s Daughter. Hopkins’s multi-generational tales challenge segregation by writing a new history of the nation in which black and white can coexist, not only in the same nation, or in the same family, but within a single body, that of the tragic mulatto/a. In doing so, she exposes the notion of racial purity as a fiction designed to conceal the intimacy that slavery’s sexual logic fostered. By dramatizing inter-racial romances (either as willing or as unconscious transgressions of the color line), sentimental fiction was able to explore the impulses that the official uplift project could not contain. Sentimental romances could not only uphold the basic platform of uplift  – to prove by cultural achievement African-American worth as a race – but could also go a step or two further and challenge the contradictions of racism and expose its incoherence by highlighting the explosive issue of miscegenation. But Hopkins’s last novel, Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, takes a dramatically different turn, taking us far from the concerns of genteel domesticity. The novel’s central plot has all the trappings of romance; we have Reuel Briggs, the hero, passing as white, his wife, Dianthe Lusk, unconsciously passing as white, with a villainous white Southerner, Aubrey Livingstone, completing the melodramatic triangle. A virtual compendium of several degraded genres, the novel features incest, reanimation of the dead, hypnotism, ghosts, a treasure hunt in Africa, ritual suicide, and murder. Even before it takes a particularly gothic turn revealing that the three main characters are in fact literally of one blood, born of the same slave-master and his female slave – and hence participants in a gruesome incestuous drama across several generations – the novel’s somber opening makes it clear that no conventional happy ending will be forthcoming. The novel’s melancholy tone, its frequent mention of ghosts, trance states, and other supernatural phenomena further indicate its gloomy prognosis. Reuel, a brilliant Harvard medical student, is almost morbidly interested in mysticism and psychology, or what the novel designates as the world of the “hidden self.”9 Following an accident in which the Fisk Jubilee Singer, Dianthe, loses her memory, Reuel revives her from the dead with his knowledge of mystical phenomena, claims whiteness for them both, and marries her. Meanwhile, Aubrey, also in love with Dianthe, schemes to get Reuel out of the way by persuading him to become the accompanying physician of a British archaeological expedition to Africa, in search of ancient Ethiopian cities. The expedition uncovers evidence of Ethiopian influence

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on Egyptian and classical Greek cultures, as well as of the irrefutable blackness of Ethiopian and Egyptian civilization. Straying from the team, Reuel stumbles upon the ancient subterranean city of Telassar, inhabited by direct descendants from Meroe, with a level of scientific, occult, and cultural achievement far beyond anything seen in the West, where he is recognized by means of a lotus lily birthmark as Ergamenes, the heir to the Ethiopian throne, destined to raise the city into glory. Aubrey murders his own fiancée and forces Dianthe to marry him. By the end of the narrative, Reuel, Dianthe, and Aubrey are all revealed to be siblings, and hence of one blood, children of Mira, slave of Aubrey’s father, a plantation owner in Virginia. The revelation of multiple incest kills Dianthe and drives Aubrey to commit ritual suicide under the hypnotic influence of Ai (Prime Minister of Telassar). Reuel returns to Telassar to serve as king, marry a bronze version of Dianthe, and bring the inhabitants of Telassar the benefit of Western knowledge and Christianity. As the novel ends with Reuel’s escape to an underground African kingdom and with multiple deaths, it appears to be far removed from the “simple homely tale” Hopkins had prescribed, thus prompting us to probe the seeming antithesis between her avowed agenda of racial uplift and her gothic portrayal of the future of the race and the nation. One way of understanding the novel’s turn away from genteel fiction, as Carby observes, is to see it as an index of Hopkins’s rising despair about the possibility of racial progress amid such hostile surroundings. In a time when the gains made during Reconstruction were being rolled back, and lynching and segregation were on the rise, Hopkins could be seen as documenting the racial nightmare that the nation had become. Moreover, Hopkins’s shift can also be understood as marking a historical shift from the genteel tradition to a more complex modernism. Tate suggests that as Hopkins comes at the end of the tradition of the domestic romance, her departure from its conventions proves that domestic romance is no longer possible as more complex strategies of representation are needed for the new century. Still, the fault lines of race and nation opened up by the novel resist a neat closure. To understand the failure of the domestic romance in Of One Blood, it is necessary to move out of the realm of the nation, and follow the novel in its turn to Africa. Rather than figuring a desired union of black and white in the tragic body of the mulatto/a, the novel draws on the separatist logic of black nationalism to take us outside the domestic realm into a diasporic one. To read the novel in light of its turn to Africa is to realize that the failure of the romance plot is also the failure of the American nation to

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provide a home for Hopkins’s mixed-race characters. By invoking another kind of nationalism, what literary historian Wilson Moses terms “classical black nationalism,” the novel substitutes the failed domestic romance with the successful union of its light-skinned hero and a virgin African queen, Candace, in the hidden African city of Meroe.10 It is worth recalling that Of One Blood is the only novel by Hopkins which invokes Africa in any significant way, and one of the first African-American novels to be set on African soil and to feature African characters. It thus inaugurates a logic that persists long over the course of the twentieth century in constructions of Africa as the sign under which ideas of black political futures can be debated, offering a rich critical opportunity for probing the relations between uplift and black nationalism, race mixture and hybridity, and the domestic romance and imperialism. And yet, the novel’s African turn raises as many questions as it is supposed to resolve. If Dianthe and Reuel cannot allegorize a national project of integration, then what might the union of Reuel and Candace symbolize? And what are we to make of the strange prophecy that concludes the novel, predicting that Reuel and Candace will produce a “dynasty of dark-skinned rulers” that will take shape under the shadow of encroaching forces of colonization in Africa (570)? It is somewhat surprising as well that Hopkins ends her literary career with the prophecy of a “dark-skinned” dynasty when so much of her work has argued for the acceptance of racial mixture, going so far as to chastise a white reader for objecting to her light-skinned heroines and her tales of miscegenation.11 For a writer accustomed to writing about her beloved New England, why does Hopkins turn to Africa at all? How might we understand her representation of Africa, oddly reminiscent of the period’s imperial romances by such writers as H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Joseph Conrad? Of course, Hopkins’s point, rather than constructing Africa as the heart of darkness, is to highlight Africa’s ancient glory as the cradle of civilization, and to build racial pride by claiming the evidence of Egyptian and Ethiopian achievements. Her Afrocentric turn is meant to challenge the supremacy of Western civilization with the prior success of African civilization. Accordingly, when Reuel goes to Africa as part of an archaeological expedition to search for rumored treasures, he ends up finding something far more valuable – the key to resolving his mixed-race identity. As he assumes his lost identity as Ergamenes, heir to the ancient Ethiopian throne, he inherits ancient wisdom, great wealth, and most importantly, a secure racial self.12 The broad arc of the novel, then, derives not from the project of uplift alone, but draws upon a strain of black cultural

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nationalism, known as Ethiopianism, which invoked biblical precedent to prophesy the rise of a black empire in Africa. An influential and persistent variant of black nationalism, Ethiopianism proved to be a powerful discourse in this era, one which seemed to offer a solution to the difficult problem of racism by rethinking African-Americans’ relation to the place of their birth and origin: the United States and Africa. Serving as a generic designation for all of Africa, the focus on the ancient civilizations of “Ethiopia” functioned as a bulwark against common popular and academic opinions that Africa could never produce any form of civilization. Ethiopianist leaders like Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, and Bishop Henry Turner inverted common racial theories of black degeneration to predict the imminent decline of Western civilization, imagining time as cyclical rather than linear. Given the need to authenticate Africa as part of world civilization in an era of accelerating violence and racist mythology, such leaders sought to counteract the view that African-Americans were “as completely broken from their tribal stems as if they had been brought from the planet Mars,” to use the words of an influential Southern historian.13 The task was as difficult as it was compelling, and as Wilson Moses reminds us, riddled with contradictions, as separatism and assimilation often appear as two sides of the same coin in black nationalist thought. It is therefore crucial to excavate the strains of emigration and inclusion that collide in Of One Blood, to understand the ways in which the novel’s title comes to refer at once to racial nationalism and universalism. In this way, though Hopkins is largely neglected in studies of black nationalism, reading Of One Blood illuminates the intense contradictions of black nationalism, because the novel lays bare such contradictions in both its form and content, thus exciting interest precisely because it undoes the coherent ideologemes that have come to be staples of African-American literary criticism. In order to appreciate its literary excesses, it is necessary to tease apart the diverse, and apparently conflicting, thematic and formal strains that run through it. This is particularly urgent now that Hopkins is becoming an established, canonized writer, celebrated for her strong portrayals of the racist violence of lynching and rape, her feminist interest in maternal genealogies, and her destabilization of racial boundaries through her focus on passing and racial mixture. Critics devote painstaking efforts to excavate the novel’s various sub-texts and sub-cultures, such as mysticism and the New Psychology, heredity and eugenics, Egyptology and nineteenth-century racial science.14 In contrast to the black feminist celebration of Hopkins, and black nationalist neglect, a reading of her novel through the perspective of diaspora and postcolonial studies produces a

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radically new way of thinking about uplift and Ethiopianism, nation and diaspora, assimilation and separation. In addition to offering a “domestic allegory of political desire” (in Tate’s choice phrase), Hopkins draws the contours of a black nation, and in turn becomes an ideal subject for theorizing the transnational turn in American studies. As cultural theorists Paul Gilroy and Amy Kaplan suggest, it is not sufficient to read American texts within a domestic framework alone.15 Rather, read from a transnational point of view, the domestic and imperial are to be seen as mutually constitutive. Consequently, when we encounter Hopkins’s underground city with its hidden civilization where Reuel is crowned as Ergamenes, we also have to question its relation to American politics of race. In other words, Hopkins’s African romance prompts us to probe the precise relation she maps between the domestic and the imperial, and to pinpoint the issues that are being displaced or reworked in her imagining. To paraphrase Countee Cullen’s famous question, what is Africa to Hopkins, and why? In what way does a concern with African heritage inform her domestic agenda, render it incoherent, or make available a usable past? Such ­questions also prompt us to think about black schemes for African colonization, which more than simply reflecting the despair over the possibility of racial progress in the United States, invite scrutiny over their intersection with imperial thought of the era, and signal their convergence with a common American search for roots and attitudes of reverence towards the past. Such schemes further gesture forward to the therapeutic Afrocentrism of our own era, such as that offered by Molefi Asante, as we attempt to sort out the meaning of race in a transnational framework, and seek to disentangle ideas of racial nationalism from those of universalism. Staging all the thorny dilemmas of studies of diaspora, then, Hopkins is not just of her own time, but also speaks to our concerns today, as the “contending forces” she presents in her fiction remain active in constructions of race and culture in our world. “T h e h i dde n s e l f :”   of on e bl o od a n d t h e p ol i t ic s of r ac i a l u pl i f t Elite advocates of uplift at the dawn of the twentieth century foundered on two questions – the fate of the mulatto, and the question of African origins. Of One Blood resolves both of these questions by dissolving one into the other. In other words, in Hopkins’s novel, the question of what it means to be a mulatto is neatly answered by the discovery that one is also an African king; as such, the “New Negro” becomes indistinguishable

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from the ancient Ethiopian. In this way, the progressive task of uplift – fashioning a new identity where one can be both black and American – becomes indistinguishable from the attempt to repossess an original African identity. In Hopkins’s novel, uplift’s goal to assimilate into the American fabric becomes the same as forging a separatist nation in Africa. How this happens is the rest of the story, as Hopkins sets up the conflicting narratives drawn from uplift and Ethiopianism, and draws upon the capacity of the genre of romance to dissolve such contradictions and present the two narratives as complementary. At the beginning of the novel, Hopkins establishes the need for wholeness by suggesting that American racism leaves black Americans with a curiously split identity. She afflicts all her African-American Talented Tenth characters with a certain melancholy. Establishing the costs of racial passing, the novel opens with Reuel contemplating suicide, his habitual “nervous temperament” further disturbed by phantom visions of Dianthe’s face, awakening memories and feelings he does not understand (444). The perils of passing as Italian or Japanese in order to advance his medical ­career at Harvard become evident when the novel reveals his interest in the paranormal, as he experiments with trance states and the possibility of life after death. His dilemma – clear to Hopkins’s first readers as one of the tragic mulatto – is presented as a question of split consciousness. Hopkins suggests that his interest in the paranormal is his way of camouflaging his conflicted racial identity. Reuel’s hallucination of a “lovely vision of Venus” (whom we later know as Dianthe) promises a respite from his suicidal bouts. Hopkins details their growing attraction not in the conventional language of sentimental fiction, but in that of a ghost story (446). Curiously enough, their first meeting is not in the physical realm, but in a supernatural one, and peculiarly laden with a dark, foreboding tone, as Reuel feels “a sense of sadness and foreboding wrapped him about as with a pall” (445). A similar melancholy envelops Dianthe as well, though at first Hopkins presents her as the ideal “New Negro.” A part of the Fisk singers, “not in any way the preconceived idea of a Negro,” Dianthe’s ability to sing in a voice “alive with the divine fire” qualifies her to represent the suffering and redemption of her race (453). Her rendition of “Go down, Moses” perfectly represents racial memory to her Boston audience, encapsulating “all the horror, the degradation from which a race had been delivered” (454). Subjected to repeated mesmeric trances, however, she is culturally alienated from her very self. Losing her memory and the ability to sing, she remains under the control of mesmeric power. In a trance state, she

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tells Reuel, “I know much but as yet have not the power to express it: I see much clearly, much dimly, of the powers and influences behind the veil, and yet I cannot name them. Some time the full power will be mine; and mine shall be thine” (475). Speaking through her at this moment, Hopkins suggests, is the African essence of which the protagonists are not consciously aware. It is only when the secrets of Africa are uncovered that “the hidden self” of racial identity can be recovered. In this way, for Hopkins, the divided self does not comprise a productive tension but a debilitating one. Although Hopkins revises the tragic mulatta stereotype in several other fictional works, imbuing such figures with agency and a future (for example, in the short story “Talma Gordon,” and in the figure of Sappho Clark in Contending Forces), in Of One Blood, Dianthe carries out the role of the doomed mulatta to the letter.16 Despite her refusal to conceal her racial identity, Dianthe never finds a route to Africa, precisely because she is trapped within the cycle of sexual violence initiated during slavery. Just as her mother and grandmother were hypnotized and sexually exploited by their masters, Dianthe undergoes hypnotic control by both of her brothers and husbands – Reuel and Aubrey. While she repeats the mesmerized state of her mother, her brothers replicate the psychic control of their father. Indeed, she does not even have the gift of prophecy her mother had. Dianthe succumbs to Aubrey as a repetition of the sexual and emotional violence of slavery, suggesting that emancipation has not led to a break from slavery. At no point in the novel does Dianthe gain any form of agency; even at the end of the novel, when the benign Aunt Hannah reveals all the secrets of the family, Dianthe submits to her will, as Hopkins tells us that “she seemed again to have lost her will in another’s” (603). The “ruined temple” of her body thus works as a stark contrast to Candace who emblematizes a future for the race that can turn away from this ­history of slavery (612). Only in her death can Dianthe be redeemed – as “the music as of a mighty host” heralds her death, Hopkins explains it as “the welcome of ancient Ethiopia to her dying daughter of the royal line” (615). In this way, Hopkins undercuts the notion of progress by showing how the past of slavery repeatedly intrudes into the present: the novel sets up patterns of repetition where Reuel, Aubrey, and Dianthe – the cast of the triangular love plot – resume their parents’ roles despite the ­novel’s post-Reconstruction setting. While time in the United States repeats itself, the novel will, as we shall see, produce a different figuration of time in Africa, as it rebirths its protagonists as the chosen ­subjects of a great romantic destiny.

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The striking difference of this narrative from Hopkins’s usual concerns becomes clear with a brief look at Contending Forces, where ­similar questions of racial mixture, sexual violence, and national belonging rear their heads, but are contained and resolved satisfactorily within a domestic realm. The earlier novel approximates the ideals of racial uplift far more closely than its successor. Even though Hopkins’s central concern in the novel is to expose white assault on black women by way of two convoluted plots of rape and redemption, both framed within the sentimental romance convention, she also departs from the genre by featuring several set pieces that present different aspects of the race question in barely dramatized form. One of these pieces is central to the novel’s didactic purpose – a passionate defense of the race by its archetypal race man, the Du Bois-patterned Will Smith, in an aptly titled chapter, “Will Smith’s Defense of his Race.” Here, Will takes up the question of emigration to Africa only to denounce it, turning ultimately to the need for racial uplift within the nation. He first cites the Ethiopianist sermon, “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hand and princes shall come out of Egypt” (266) and proceeds to demonstrate its limits by advancing a peculiar argument that seemingly accepts the common argument about black retrogression. Citing white Southern studies of black retrogression when removed from white paternalism, Will concludes, with obvious sarcasm, “Is such a race as this fit at the present time to carry enlightenment into a savage and barbarous country? Can the blind lead the blind? Would not the Negro gradually fall into the same habits of ignorance and savagery from which the white slave-trader so humanely rescued him when he transported him into the blissful lap of American slavery? The Negro cannot be deported” (267). Here, Hopkins marshals the racist rhetoric about innate black degradation in order to attack emigration. If this reinscription of white racist rhetoric is for the benefit of white readers, Hopkins also offers another interpretation for her black readers who may find the promise of Ethiopia tempting. Will concludes his lecture with an earnest plea for the work of uplifting the race, invoking abolitionists as his inspiration: “As the anti-slavery apostles went everywhere, so must we do today. Appeal for the justice of our cause to every civilized nation under the heavens. Lift ourselves upward and forward in this great march of life until ‘Ethiopia shall indeed stretch forth her hand, and princes shall come out of Egypt’” (272). Uplift, in this formulation, combines the moral fervor of abolition with the exploratory energy of emigration. Such a neat rhetorical solution eludes Of One Blood, where these contradictions, rather than harmonizing, proliferate

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­ ncontainably instead, despite Hopkins’s attempt to resolve them by the u use of romance. In Of One Blood, Hopkins’s representation of duality recalls Du Bois’s famous question: how is it “possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,” and “to merge his double self into a better and truer self” (Souls, 5), a question made urgent by the rising racism of the day (backed by a resurgent social Darwinism and a growing interest in eugenics). But where Du Bois’s theorization of a double consciousness  – an internally divided self, which “ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (Souls, 5) – highlights incessant contradiction, Hopkins takes up the African and American halves to present a synthesis.17 She does so by skillfully manipulating the ubiquitous – and heavily racialized – trope of blood. One of the most common rhetorical moves of white supremacist narratives of the era was to suggest that racial difference was a matter not simply of skin color, but of something internal to the body, that is to say, of blood. Hopkins’s novels always play with such fears to challenge ideas of racial purity. For example, in Contending Forces, one of her characters declares that “the fate of the mulatto will be the fate of the entire race” (151), believing that “there is no such thing as an unmixed black on the American continent . . . [W]e cannot tell by a person’s complexion whether he be dark or light in blood” (151). Here, Hopkins not only refuses any separation between the “mulatto” and the “unmixed black,” she also challenges the idea of the easy visibility of race. In a similar vein, in Of One Blood, Hopkins transforms the threat of miscegenation into the promise of a new racially mixed nation. By linking the human body with the national one, she imagines a nation where the two races can coexist. Her light-skinned protagonists are the product of a slave-owning father and an enslaved mother, and therefore unite the nation within them. Mulatto protagonists stage – in Werner Sollors’s phrase – “both ethnic sameness and difference” for white ­readers.18 For black readers, the mulatto figure becomes a trope for the uplift of the race. To insist on mixture, Hopkins makes it simply impossible to demarcate the boundaries of black or white in her fiction, as seemingly white characters are revealed to be legally black. She thus participates in a wider dialogue in the era on the meaning of racial identity, made infamous by the 1896 ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, debating the actions of the lightskinned Homer Plessy, who sought to challenge segregation by boarding a Louisiana railroad car in 1892. As the US Supreme Court legalized

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“separate but equal,” it mandated that a single drop of black blood was sufficient to outweigh a whole ocean of whiteness, figuring black blood as a pollutant in the process and disavowing the possibility of mixture by fixing racial identities as impermeable.19 Hopkins concludes Of One Blood by defiantly embracing the impossibility of fixing racial boundaries: “The slogan of the hour is ‘Keep the Negro down!’ but who is clear enough in vision to decide who hath black blood and who hath it not? Can any one tell?” (607). In this instance, her use of the trope of “one blood” insists on the hybrid nature of the population as a result of slavery, drawing on the biblical injunction, “Of one blood have I made all nations of men to dwell upon the whole face of the earth” (Acts 17:26) to argue for the single origin of all races. As Sollors has shown, nineteenth-century American ­literature uses the trope of “one blood” to lend a sacred unity to the nation.20 Hopkins pushes the concept one step further and suggests that white and black citizens are of one blood in America because of the institution of slavery. As she puts it, “in His own mysterious way He has united the white race and the black race in this new continent” (607). If the novel were to stop here, it would be consistent with other fiction of the era, but Of One Blood takes up the familiar literary figures of passing and the tragic mulatto and gives them a particularly gothic twist. Rather than using the trope of “one blood” to suggest universal humanity, Hopkins refigures the idea of monogenesis as incest, with the novel’s gradual revelation of multiple incestuous unions. The novel’s intertwined plots resolve in a grim irony, pointed out by Ai, the leader of the hidden African city of Meroe, who questions segregation when Americans are “all of one blood; descended from one common father” (585). In this context, “one common father” refers to the common father of Reuel, Dianthe, and Aubrey. Compelling as it is, Hopkins’s portrayal of incest as the legacy of slavery goes against her positive figure of “one blood” as amalgamation. When we discover that mixture comes from the same slave-owning father, it becomes difficult to see it as transgressive; rather it exposes the brutal patriarchy of slavery. While the overt logic of the trope of one blood reiterates the abolitionist message of universal brotherhood, this idea gets increasingly complicated by the gothic turns of the novel. In other words, on the one hand, Hopkins contests racial segregation to argue for the biblically sanctioned idea of the universal brotherhood of man; on the other, by way of the novel’s incest plot, she invokes the same trope of “one blood” to advance a form of racial nationalism. What makes this question even more resonant is the formal mélange Hopkins presents. The novel sharply splits between two recognizable

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genres: from sentimental fiction to an imperial romance. Given the fantastic quality of Hopkins’s claims, it is clear that no realist logic can help explain her turn to Africa, or make sense of the novel’s variable negotiation of its American and African landscapes. In other words, there seems to be a clear split between the avowed goals of uplift – gentility, respectability, and the pursuit of bourgeois morality – and the narrative techniques called into play by Hopkins. The excesses of Hopkins’s uncertainty of form signal not only her imbrication within American literary debates over realism and romance, but also her desire to make romance speak the unspeakable, what Toni Morrison calls “the fabrication of an Africanist persona . . . an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious.”21 Exploring Hopkins’s use of romance for her representation of Africa helps illuminate the way in which the novel is symptomatic of a larger contradiction within African-American uplift narratives of the early twentieth century, one that makes visible not just the cultural work required by the sign of Africa, but also the difficulty of defining race and nation in a stable manner. “T h e s h a d ow of E t h iopi a’s p ow e r”: A f r ic a a n d t h e u n di s c ov e r e d c ou n t r y To resolve the dilemma of her mixed-race characters, Hopkins turns to Africa to construct an imperial romance. She transforms Reuel into an ancient Ethiopian in the second half of the novel, as his journey into the hidden kingdom reveals to him a primordial memory of a bloodline free from the taint of slavery. By presenting this memory as innate rather than learned, by grounding this discovery in a birthmark on the body, and by concluding her novel with the marriage of Reuel and Candace, future progenitors of a black empire, Hopkins systematically undoes the basic tenets of uplift that she has stood by in her earlier works. In this respect, while Hopkins’s domestic allegory argues for the acceptance of racial mixture, her African romance relies on racial purity. This shift from uplift to empire, and from the domestic to the exotic, is best understood by situating Hopkins’s move within the intellectual contributions of two distinct traditions of black thought, the first embodied by Frederick Douglass, the second by Edward Wilmot Blyden. Douglass and Blyden both take up the entwined questions of the fate of the mulatto and African origins only to come to very different conclusions, one advocating assimilation, the other separation.

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For Douglass, African emigration renders impossible the project of uplift. Following a logic similar to the one Hopkins upholds in Contending Forces, he declares, “No one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward the colored people of this country, than that which makes Africa, not America, their home. It is that wolfish idea that elbows us off the sidewalk and denies us the rights of citizenship.”22 He argues that the political assimilation of the Negro is not only possible but necessary for the American nation. Prefiguring Richard Wright’s famous suggestion that the Negro is America’s metaphor, Douglass equates the two: “the Negro and the nation are to rise or fall, be killed or cured, saved or lost together. Save the Negro and you save the nation, destroy the Negro and you destroy the nation.”23 In this way, drawing a clear distinction between a national and a racial identity, without requiring biological amalgamation, Douglass makes a case for political assimilation by configuring a common destiny for black and white citizens insofar as “the black man in this land has as much right to stay in this land as the white man.”24 Rejecting the idea of a nation within a nation as well as the importance of magnificent pasts, he defines the African-American as constitutive of the American nation. Taking up the trope of “one blood” to come to very different conclusions from those of Hopkins or the Ethiopianists, he asks, “What if the Negro may not be able to prove his relationship to Nubians, Abyssinians and Egyptians? What if ingenious men are able to find plausible objections to all arguments maintaining the oneness of the human race? What, after all, if they are able to show very good reasons for believing the Negro to have been created precisely as we find him on the Gold Coast – along the Senegal and the Niger – I say, what of all this? – ‘A man’s a man for a’ that.’”25 Douglass argues that the search for justice and rights cannot be predicated on such “ethnological” claims but on the simple fact of humanity and inalienable human rights. In this way, Douglass clearly identifies the risks of losing ground in the search for justice in the turn to Africa, and yet, schemes of African emigration and colonization continued to gather appeal among some black leaders.26 To understand what made emigration feasible even after emancipation to such leaders, a closer look at Blyden’s thought is necessary, so that the mingling of despair and racial pride, the hostility to race mixture and a desire for purity which together make up his Ethiopianist ideology can be better appreciated. While Douglass uses the trope of “one blood” to advance an idea of universal humanity and national reconciliation, both black and white advocates of emigration call into play the same trope of “one blood” to argue for segregation. They do so by invoking the rest of

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the scriptural passage to establish biblical sanction for segregation, arguing that God “hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”27 In order to reconcile such a desire for segregation with a belief in the brotherhood of man, black advocates of emigration, such as Blyden, reproduce the terms of white romantic nationalism. Locating Africa as the source of a black nationalist identity, they thus end up promoting essentialist models of black identity.28 In his important study of black nationalism, Wilson Moses has established the Victorian, bourgeois, and Eurocentric underpinnings of nationalist ideologies in this era. But that still leaves unaccounted the intense investment of figures like Blyden in such ideologies as the source of freedom and escape from racism. As Moses’s later work, Afrotopia, acknowledges, a utopian element persists in such dreams.29 Recognizing that Ethiopianism offers a distinctive mixture of utopia and despair, pragmatism and whimsy, dreams of freedom and fantasies of a black empire helps clarify the political vision undergirding its construction of diaspora. Here, as in Hopkins’s novel, as we will see, the link between blacks in Africa and America is imagined through a rubric that is at once about diasporic kinship and imperial control. Ethiopia was at the core of black Zionist attachment: a figure that simultaneously referred to biblical prophecy and to the country Ethiopia, attacked in 1895 by Italy and a symbol of black independence and successful self-government. When Menelik II led the defense of the African nation, his surprising victory pumped fresh blood into the mythical and symbolic status of Ethiopia, heightening diasporic interest and identification. It is thus not surprising that Of One Blood was serialized in the Colored American Magazine concurrently with a series of articles on the “Ethiopians of the Twentieth Century,” indicating how flexible and expansive the term itself could be. Of course, racial messianism had been a strain in anti-racist thought for a long time  – from David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles to Robert Alexander Young to Martin Delany to Alexander Crummell, expressions of a chosen people comparable to the biblical Hebrews abound, as do notions of African-Americans as a distinct people with a divine historical destiny and a covenant with God. The promised land, as Eric Sundquist points out, is not necessarily located in geographical terms, but rather as a promised land of soul and symbol, an “African Zion.”30 Ethiopianism cannot therefore be assessed in realist or historicist terms alone. A form of nationalism that has to imagine time and space metaphorically rather than literally, by laying claim to the territory of the soul, Ethiopianism involved the transformation of consciousness rather than the conquest of territory. Ethiopianism was powerful

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precisely because it offered a mythological narrative and a romance paradigm through which the idea of diaspora could be thought: drawing upon the recursive temporality of romance, it could signal at once an ontological attachment and a political identification with Africa. It could accept the fundamental superiority of Western civilization at the same time that it prophesied the decline of the West. Ethiopianism is thus as much a chance to redeem racial manhood as it is to forge a black manifest destiny; it is as much a plan to set Africa free by bringing her civilization and Christianity as it is a scheme to facilitate African colonization; it is as much a concession to segregation as it is a search for salvation. The mutable, shape-shifting nature of Ethiopianist thought is symptomatic of the many different – and often incompatible  – needs it sought to fulfill, as it rendered historical conflicts as contradictions which could be sublimated through romance. A West Indian Presbyterian missionary, Blyden first became interested in Africa when he was denied admission to Rutgers Theological College because of his race. Educated in Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, Blyden inverts the Hamitic curse to theorize Africa as a great “spiritual conservatory” for the diaspora.31 For Blyden, the American nightmare would end only with the turn to the promise of an African dream, one in which the regeneration of Africa would fulfill the destiny of the black race as a whole. Drawing on the authority of the biblical verse, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalms 68:31), Blyden prophesies the rise of Africa to greatness, as well as the imminent decline of Western civilization, by rejecting mulattos and calling for unmixed blacks to recover their manhood in Africa. Becoming the foremost propagandist of the back-toAfrica movement in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Blyden articulated a form of black or African Zionism.32 In order to claim Africa as homeland, then, Blyden has to theorize blacks as exiled, scattered in the original sense of the term “diaspora,” and linked to each other by the simple fact of skin color. And so his extreme antipathy to racial mixture not only mirrors that of the white supremacists but also entails a purely biological definition of racial identity, which he then seeks to materialize in the form of a black nation. In this respect, his Ethiopianism, with its cyclic histories of the rise and fall of civilizations and races, profoundly interrupts the linear developmental narrative to which the champions of uplift referred the nation. Blyden’s account of his visit to Alexandria and Cairo to see the pyramids of Afrocentric fame fuses all the seemingly disparate elements of his thinking. While his summary of the trip describes the Oriental city in

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fairly conventional fashion, focusing on heat and discomfort, once confronted with the pyramids, he muses whether rather than assuming that machinery must have existed in the age of pyramids one should ponder if there wasn’t a “race of giants.” That is to say, rather than looking for evidence of technological achievement, Blyden draws inspiration from the fantasy “that the strength of one man of those times was equal to the strength of several men in these degenerate days,” clearly distinguishing the glorious past from the degraded present. Egypt thus becomes important only insofar as it was the “land of my ‘father’s sepulchres’” rather than a place significant for its current history. Recalling Herodotus’s mention of Cadmians, Blyden further writes: “I have often thought that the extravagant tales of the poets concerning people of enormous stature were founded on original truths; and though they are sometimes so confused that we find it very difficult to draw a correct line between truth and fable, some general ideas can be formed from them of the character of the men of remote antiquity.” He feels no sense of kinship with the contemporary inhabitants of Egypt but only with the ancient creators of the pyramids, and experiences no hesitation in making that claim of kinship with the ancients. He declares, “This, thought I, is the work of my African progenitors, Teage was right: they had fame, and their descendants should strive, by nobler deeds, to ‘retake’ it. Feelings came over me far different from those which I have felt when looking at the mighty works of European genius. I felt that I had a peculiar ‘heritage in the Great Pyramid’ – built before the tribes of mankind had been so generally scattered.”33 Figuring advancement as a return to the original source, Blyden’s fundamental goal is to “retake” prior glory, not to carve out a new racial destiny. As in Hopkins’s domestic allegory, time is also circular in Blyden’s thinking, not as a repetition of the violence of slavery but as a redemption of former glory. That Hopkins is tapping into the larger currents of pan-African thinking influential in Talented Tenth circles is beyond dispute; what I want to highlight though is how she brings together two seemingly incompatible streams of thought in a single novel and thus illuminates the circuitous yet constitutive relation between those streams of thought. Hopkins’s turn to Africa must not, of course, be seen as an eccentric or arbitrary one. Almost every black intellectual of her network had to consider his or her relation to Africa at some point. Drawing from both Douglass’s abolitionism and Blyden’s Ethiopianism, Hopkins gives us an uneasy synthesis, seemingly endorsing the very different logics the two propose. This contradiction comes sharply into focus when we consider the novel’s recurring trope

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of the “undiscovered country.” Where Hopkins uses the trope of “one blood” to imagine a racially mixed nation in the United States, she uses the trope of the “undiscovered country” to theorize a relationship between an ancient African heritage and contemporary African-American duality. Hopkins suggests that the “undiscovered country” of Africa holds the key to African-American redemption, as the psychic exploration of black identity metaphorically accrues the same force that a physical exploration of Africa furnishes for colonial explorers. In contrast to white imperial representations of Africa which acquire a sense of self by producing Africa as the site of chaos, Hopkins counters the notion of Africa as the heart of darkness, imagining it instead as the source of a proud black destiny.34 While white supremacists use colonization schemes as euphemisms for their desire for the extinction of the black race, Hopkins transforms their rhetoric into a journey of symbolic death and spiritual rebirth.35 Such a rebirth is not simply a new beginning, but the reincarnation of lost wholeness, the repetition of a providential cycle, as we find when the novel shifts to Reuel’s new destiny in the underground city of Meroe. Reuel’s physical journey and excavation of a hidden city clearly signifies a journey into his own racial unconscious, with Africa serving as a backdrop for this psychological drama. In keeping with this construction of Africa, Hopkins represents Reuel as undergoing a symbolic death with the news of Dianthe’s death, and a rebirth inside the pyramid in Meroe: “From profound unconsciousness, deep, merciful, oblivious to pain and the flight of time, from the gulf of the mysterious shadows wherein earth and heaven are alike forgotten, Reuel awoke” (544). This sleep saves him from insanity or death induced by the news of Dianthe’s death. In this way, Hopkins suggests that the scars of slavery must be purged through this “Lethean calm” or a figurative death and rebirth before Reuel can experience the fantasy world of Meroe (544). On reaching the depths of the hidden city, Reuel finds that he has memories of a past he has never experienced. Hopkins writes, “shadowy images of past scenes flitted across his brain like transient reflections of a past perfectly familiar to him” (551). His inculcation into the wisdom of the ancient Ethiopians is not a process of learning, but one of remembrance. In this way, Hopkins indicates her belief in the existence of an essential racial soul, one that survives American slavery, and finds its fulfillment in the hidden city of Meroe. Such a belief implies that racial identity is productive of a deeper, essential personality (what Blyden calls “the African Personality”), one that is inhibited by the social or biological mixture of different races. Hopkins offers the idea of a life force that persists beyond

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death, as in her short story, “The Mystery Within Us” (1900), where a character much like Reuel, on the brink of suicide, is redeemed when he discovers within him the life force of another who has transcended the finality of death.36 Such a notion of supernatural continuity reverberates in Of One Blood as well, where Hopkins suggests that Reuel’s knowledge of a racial soul might be buried but can be awakened with the proper mentoring offered by Ai. Hopkins thus refuses to accept a notion of duality at all. Instead of pondering the question of how the two selves might be united, she claims that they are already one, even if the memory of one part is suppressed. In this way, her representation of diasporic memory blurs the boundaries between experience and memory. Reuel does not need to be educated in African history, knowledge, or science; rather, once he acknowledges his blackness, he automatically remembers these forgotten knowledges. When the novel discloses the secret that Reuel, Dianthe, and Aubrey are siblings, and hence of one blood (children of Mira and her master, Aubrey’s father, a plantation owner in Virginia), it grounds this discovery in a birthmark inscribed on their bodies. Despite their displacement across generations to various parts of the United States, the royal descendants of Meroe maintain their original racial integrity in the shape of this lotus lily birthmark, preserved unmarked by successive waves of intermixture in the new world. Accordingly, the priests of Meroe inform Reuel: “upon your breast is a lotus lily, God’s mark to prove your race and descent” (555). If Hopkins’s frequent use of the convention of passing disarticulates visibility from race, the discovery of the birthmark literally reinscribes race on the physical body, making race both corporeal and empirically verifiable. Recent studies of fictions of passing and miscegenation suggest that while “one-drop” rules define race as an essential interior element, these fictions confuse such a boundary between race’s interior signifier, blood, and its exterior manifestation as skin color.37 But the very condition of “one-drop” rules is the unstable relationship of outward manifestation and interior identity. After all, miscegenation is the precondition of and ever-present threat to the “one-drop” rule and passing is the possibility that necessitates its assertion. The “one-drop” is premised on the notion that race is empirically verifiable, even if not visually, a premise which contextualizes the many signs of blackness adduced in fictions and tracts of the era, as blood is measured and cataloged in quarters, eighths, and sixteenths, and such signs as purple scrotums, dark half-moons at the fingernail beds, dusky outer rims of the ear, or coarse hair at the nape of the neck are harnessed in order to point to the presence of the drop of blood.

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This is the very logic that Charles Chesnutt made the subject of savage satire in “The Wife of His Youth,” as these so-called racial markers are inverted in his depiction of the uplift-oriented “Blue Vein” society which selects its members based on whether their skin is light enough to reveal the blue veins underneath.38 Viewing representations of passing or miscegenation as inevitably subversive of racial codes, then, seems premature at best, as they can as easily corroborate rather than confuse the logic they set out to contest. In Hopkins’s case, as she bodily materializes the one drop as the birthmark on the body, she seems to exemplify rather than push against “one-drop” identity. To highlight the impact of the birthmark as returning race to a corporeal realm, it is worth contrasting it with Du Bois’s frequent invocation of something quite different as a symbol of Africa – an African melody sung by his great-grandmother Violet. Du Bois cites the song as his “one direct cultural connection” with Africa, but goes on to emphasize that it isn’t a connection that may be quantified as originary. Indeed, he tells us that he does not know if Violet was herself born in Africa or if she heard the song from an ancestor herself. The song is untranslatable, resistant to fixed meaning, but of great symbolic power, as Du Bois demonstrates its cultural transmission through several generations of his family, all of whom know “as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but [know] well the meaning of its music.”39 The barely remembered melody has significance, then, not for what it may denote in another time, but rather as a sedimentation of historical change. In contrast, Hopkins’s birthmark seeks to arrest change by fixing the meaning of the birthmark as an everlasting sign of an essential African identity. Moreover, in Hopkins’s novel, even if we were to grant that her domestic plot confuses this boundary, her African turn reasserts it, as race is defined again as an essential interior signifier. The novel proposes that the interiority of race can be writ large with the help of Africa. Hopkins suggests that underneath the exterior layer lies a deeper, more essential reality. In the same way that Reuel brings Dianthe back to life after her seeming death, Africa can be awakened in someone who is passing as white. Both instances  – animating the dead body and recovering a lost memory – require a suspension of rational thought. As Reuel puts it, “I have never believed that the whole mental world is governed by the faculties we understand, and can reduce to reason or definite feelings” (459). At the beginning of the novel, Reuel claims that he has solved the problem of “the re-animation of the body after seeming death” (464). The scientific community at Harvard responds with a disbelief that in the novel’s terms

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reveals its own inadequacy: “Your theory smacks of the supernatural, charlatanism, or dreams of lunacy,” they tell Reuel, “we leave such assertions to quacks, generally, for the time of miracles is past” (469). Hopkins will of course go on to show us that the time for miracles is not past, but about to be realized, but only when Reuel is ready to deal with his racial past. Despite his attunement to the supernatural realm, what Reuel still has not resolved, Hopkins indicates, is the question of his black identity. His descent into Meroe settles this problem, reanimating racial identity after the seeming death of any trace of race consciousness. Just as Reuel claimed that “I am prepared to show you that in some cases of seeming death – or even death in reality – consciousness may be restored or the dead brought back to life,” the novel suggests that seeming death of all racial instincts is simply a matter of slumbering consciousness and memories of Africa can be recalled just as “life may be recalled when it has become entirely extinct” (467, 468). Associating the act of passing with death, the novel figures Reuel’s discovery of his African identity as a rebirth, and the awareness of racial identity as innate rather than learned. To do so, Hopkins uses the notion of the undiscovered country to confuse or challenge the trope of one blood. The resonance of the undiscovered country shifts from a psychic meaning alone to a more literal one, as it signifies the external landscape of Africa as the inscape of AfricanAmerican subjectivity. Drawn from the common psychological literature of the era, the trope of the undiscovered country opens the novel, as Reuel ruminates over “the wonders of a material world [which] cannot approach those of the undiscovered country within ourselves – the hidden self lying quiescent in every human soul” (448).40 Hopkins implies that while Reuel is passing as white, he might gain the approval of the white race, but until he acknowledges his hidden self, he will never achieve self-fulfillment. The undiscovered country of his identity is the memory of Africa (“the shadow of a mighty Negro past,” as Du Bois puts it), as represented by the underground city of Meroe.41 Upon being recognized as the royal heir to Meroe, Reuel understands that “the nature of the mystic within him was, then, but a dreamlike devotion to the spirit that had swayed his ancestors; it was the shadow of Ethiopia’s power” (558). In this way, the novel transforms Reuel’s mystic ability, mesmeric power, and melancholic unease into the promise of secure racial identity and power in the newly anointed emperor, Ergamenes, who will redeem the pain of the American past of slavery by commanding a new African empire. Thus far we have seen how Hopkins theorizes diaspora as a transhistorical, elemental consciousness beyond time and space. To appreciate the

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critical purchase of this construction of diaspora, it is necessary to take a closer look at its deep intertextual relationship with William James’s theories of the divided self. Indeed, James’s essay, “The Hidden Self,” not only provides Hopkins with her novel’s sub-title (and with several passages on mystical phenomena), it also enables her to analyze racial identity within the terms offered by emerging psychic discourses.42 Several critics have noted the congruence between James and Hopkins, but they have not probed the implications of the novel’s psychic interests for its representation of Africa and diaspora. Cynthia Schrager, for instance, discusses James and Hopkins to identify a binary opposition between a feminine-spiritual discourse and a masculine-medical one. She concludes that Hopkins draws on James’s notions of the divided self only to rewrite James to produce a genealogy of a maternal feminist consciousness that may be tracked across several generations. That such a reading requires positioning Africa as both essentially feminine and spiritual in order to construct a maternal tradition is crucial to note. Prioritizing the role that Africa plays in the novel to unearth its theorization of diaspora sheds a different light on the intersection between James and Hopkins, and further clarifies the ways in which Hopkins understands racial identity as haunted by an unproductive duality. Discussing the work of two French authors, Pierre Janet and Alfred Binet, on theories of double and multiple consciousness, James speculates about the influence of a buried or subconscious self which he associates with the feminine mystical mind evidenced in case studies of hysterics. For James, spirit possession – or the existence of two or more souls in one body – presents a state of double consciousness. Viewing this as a medical problem, James believes that a unification of the divided self is possible. James recounts the hypnosis of Janet’s patient, Lucie, in order to analyze the possibility of such unification. Lucie’s hypnotic state, produced by the magnetic method of passes over the face and body, consisted of several levels. What excites James is the revelation that at the third level of somnambulism, Lucie 3, in a “deeper trance” showed no signs of neurasthenia or hysteria, as her impaired senses (such as blindness) became whole.43 As Hopkins reproduces the language from this discussion, she also uses the same idea: African-Americans induced into the deeper trance state of Africa can become whole, and lose sight of the nervous conditions produced by American racism. As Reuel admits that he is haunted by hallu­ cinations, he adds that “the French and German schools of philosophy have taught us that going to places and familiar passages in books, of which we have had no previous knowledge, is but a proof of Plato’s doctrine – the

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soul’s transmigration, and reflections from the invisible world surrounding us” (478). If the act of passing presumes the rejection or the suppression of memory, the journey into Africa is an awakening into racial identity. But further, if trance states, as described by James, can return the patient to her childhood, so can the African journey return African-Americans to an anterior original self. In this way, the primary American self can recall the memory of a secondary African self, and the simultaneous consciousness of both selves can heal the fracture caused by racism. Double consciousness here is not a state of permanent tension, both debilitating and enabling, but a malady that can be healed by Africa. Hopkins’s shift to the genre of the imperial romance further highlights the connection between repressed memory and a racial unconscious. One of the most enthusiastic defenders of the romance at the turn of the ­t wentieth century, Andrew Lang, contended that the romance form surpassed the psychological reach of the realist novel by representing and awakening the deep-rooted, “primitive” aspects of human nature. Thus, for audiences at the turn of the twentieth century, while realism appeals to the rational side of human nature, romance caters to the unconscious, “the natural man within me, the survival of some blue-painted Briton or some gipsy.” Lang sees men as having a “mixed condition, civilized at top with the old barbarian under our clothes.”44 Patrick Brantlinger further suggests that at this time, romances are seen to appeal to the “barbarian buried self of the reader.”45 Such notions indicate that romance explores the fertile darkness beneath the surface of personality, affording intimacy with our hidden self. In Gillian Beer’s words, nascent here is the idea that “the last undiscovered country this side of the grave is the territory of the unconscious mind.”46 The association of romance with the unconscious mind thus allows a sifting through layers of experience and memory sedimented in the unconscious. Reuel claims that the scientific knowledge in Boston doesn’t quite get to the heart of the mysteries of creation, as “with all our knowledge . . . we are but barbarians in our ideas of the beginning, interim and end of our creation” (477). In Hopkins’s novel, this facet of romance expresses itself in conjunction with the undiscovered country of racial identity, as well as the continent of Africa, to suggest (just like Blyden) that barbarians can become civilized not by developing along the lines of supposedly advanced races but by recovering a primal knowledge of their own racial history. It is in this context that we must realize that Meroe is in fact a grave, “a magnificent Necropolis” (556). The buried city offers shelter to Reuel’s wounded racial psyche, makes it whole, and rebirths him.

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Before this rebirth can take place, in order to activate a remembrance of the essential African soul, Reuel must be made to confront his own denial of his black heritage. In so doing, the novel exceeds the generic expectations of the passing narrative, as it becomes apparent that if passing in the American context can be the means to disturb the racist logic of segregation, it can only be the source of racial shame in Africa. Reuel, who exhibits no qualms about passing as white in Boston, expresses regret for having concealed his black ancestry in Africa. When the inhabitants of Meroe ask him about passing as white, “Reuel bowed his head in assent, while over his face passed a flush of shame. He felt keenly now the fact that he had played the coward’s part in hiding his origin” (560). His feelings of shame, Hopkins suggests, redeem him somehow and he becomes not only proud of his black heritage but is refashioned as an archetypal race champion. The beginning of the novel had shown his callousness about black uplift; he tells us, “I have a horror of discussing the woes of unfortunates, tramps, stray dogs and cats and Negroes” (449). By the end of the novel, he assumes the persona of the defender of the race. Hopkins writes that Dianthe’s death and submission to Aubrey is not simply a personal affront to Reuel, but that “in Reuel’s wrongs lay something beyond the reach of punishment by the law’s arm; in it was the accumulation of years of foulest wrongs heaped upon the innocent and defenceless women of a race” (594). The novel’s detour through Africa enables this transformation, even as no such transformation is held out for Dianthe. That Reuel’s new position as a defender of the women of the race ­signals a dramatic shift for Hopkins becomes clear when we compare the discourse of manhood in Of One Blood to one of Hopkins’s earliest short ­stories, “The Test of Manhood.” The short story hinges on a similar dilemma as its male protagonist passing as white is made to confront the meaning of his actions. His test is whether he will embrace his long-lost mother, dark-complexioned and linked to Southern culture. By passing this test, the protagonist redeems his manhood and affirms the bond of brotherhood. By acknowledging his dark-skinned kin, he exercises choice in the same way that Iola Leroy does in Frances Harper’s novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, or Ryder does in Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth.”47 Presenting the question of one’s racial identity as one of choice was important for proponents of uplift precisely because they sought to emphasize the impact of the environment on identity, and stressed nurture over nature, to contest those racist notions that labeled blackness as innately inferior or degraded. This option to exercise choice or what Sollors calls cultural consent rather than descent is never shown to be available to

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Reuel. Rather than presenting racial identity as predicated on choice in the usual manner of narratives of passing, Hopkins’s novel returns it to the realm of destiny. And ironically, the novel’s African turn further returns us to questions of nature, notions of innate racial gifts, and a biological conception of identity, such as the one offered by Ethiopianists like Blyden and Crummell. Hopkins’s usual advocacy of racial mixture changes course, therefore, when she turns to Africa, as the novel reveals the incompatibility between such an advocacy and the black nationalist need to produce Africa as the fount of race purity. In a similar manner, restoring Reuel as the rightful patriarch of a black dynasty fulfills the black nationalist demand for recovering lost “race manhood.”48 For nationalist leaders like Blyden and Bishop Henry Turner  – a prominent Ethiopianist advocate who made several well-publicized trips to Africa in the 1890s – the experience of slavery and racism in the New World not only produced sterile mulattos; it also rendered the race effeminate. In order to counteract this degeneracy, they advocate emigrating to Africa and beginning a dynasty of pure black families who can flourish in a climate of freedom. Just as Turner argues for a return to Africa to recover racial purity and manhood, Hopkins also connects Reuel’s newly found black identity to a recovery of manhood. Reuel not only becomes the defender of wronged womanhood in his desire for revenge for Dianthe’s death, he also assumes the role of the patriarchal father in Africa. His queen Candace happily accedes to a subservient status: on first meeting Reuel, “her sinuous body bent and swayed down, down, until she, too had prostrated herself, and half-knelt, half-lay, upon the marble floor at Reuel’s feet” (568). Ai informs Reuel that the African kingdom is ruled by a queen while they wait for the rightful king to return: “We are a singular people, governed by a female monarch, all having the same name, Candace . . . Queen Candace is a virgin queen who waits the coming of Ergamenes to inaugurate a dynasty of kings. Our virgins live within the inner city, and from among them Candace chooses her successor at intervals of fifteen years” (561). While Dianthe is tainted by slavery’s sexual violence, Candace is “the embodiment of all chastity” (569). Candace is also curiously replaceable every fifteen years, functioning as an archetype of female purity and chastity rather than as an individual. Any question of sexual desire is accordingly dissipated with the alliance of Reuel and Candace, as their union is not about romantic love, but about the reproduction of a powerful black dynasty and the restoration of lost glory. In this way, Candace resolves the issue of passing and miscegenation; she also removes the messy question of desire and

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repression that characterizes the romance between Reuel and Dianthe. As the repressed racial memory of her protagonists is brought to the surface with the help of Meroe’s willing subjects, Hopkins’s search for a usable heritage in Africa ends up corroborating the logic of existing racial and gendered categories, rather than overturning them. The ­novel’s acceptance of doctrines of racial determinism and segregation thus does not lead to an alternative genealogy that does away with the notion of racial purity. Hopkins’s narrative does not ultimately argue for racial mixture, but shows the horrible effects of what Blyden termed the “sins of a mixed multitude.”49 It is particularly surprising that Hopkins’s last novel concludes with a turn to racial purity because so much of her writing tried to create a space for mixture as a way of claiming the United States. Her turn away from the United States, in synchrony with currents of black nationalist thought, brings her close to the advocates of emigration. But as she makes clear in her final published work, A Primer of Facts, which appears two years after Of One Blood, she believes that instead of wholesale emigration to Africa to escape racism, African-Americans need to learn about African history to build a foundation for black pride and to continue the project of uplift.50 Even though her novel proposes an emigrationist solution to the horror of American racism, it is clear that the goal remains the same  – Hopkins tries to provide a sense of a whole black identity, one that is missing in the American context. Hopkins’s revelation of a submerged kingdom beneath the forbidding exterior of Africa seeks to lift her American readers out of commonplace modern times and link their destinies to those of their illustrious forebears. In this respect, her representation of Africa conforms to common tendencies to cast it as the site of the origin of humanity, yet outside of the history of modernity. The novel associates Africa squarely with the mystical, supernatural world, where specificities of time and place melt away. In this way, the novel becomes an Ethiopianist romance, a form indebted to common imperial romances of the day, in which the past achievements of African civilizations may be admired, but contemporary African culture must be occluded to make way for the immediate psychological needs of the West. Prime Minister Ai explains to Reuel, “We are but a remnant, and here we wait behind the protection of our mountains and swamps, secure from the intrusion of a world that has forgotten, for the coming of our king who shall restore to the Ethiopian race its ancient glory” (547). Hopkins adapts this regenerative prophecy to promise not a glorious future but a resurrection of the glorious past. In this sense, the subterranean city of Meroe is not set in contemporary time – it is a place

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where past, present, and future collapse as can be seen in Ai’s globe, which can easily show the past or the future, but needs a special brew to show the present.51 The very language spoken in Meroe is called the “language of prophecy” (572). The past is understood as genealogy, the future as prophecy; there is no present in Africa. When a white member of the expedition, Charlie Vance, is confronted with the evidence of great ancient African civilizations, his response is incredulous: “you don’t mean to tell me that all this was done by niggers?” The leader of the expedition, Professor Stone, replies in a manner that helps to indicate Hopkins’s real focus: “Undoubtedly your Afro-Americans are a branch of the wonderful and mysterious Ethiopians who had a prehistoric existence of magnificence, the full record of which is lost in obscurity” (532). Africa’s former greatness has little meaning for its current inhabitants as the heirs to the glory of Africa are African-Americans. Ethiopianist constructions of Africa as the inheritance of the Talented Tenth uphold an identical structure. According to Blyden, “the exiled Negro . . . is the proprietor of a vast domain [who] is entitled to a whole continent by his constitution and antecedents.”52 Bishop Turner voiced the common fear that if African-Americans did not stake their claim to Africa, “Europeans, who had once stolen Africans from Africa, would now steal Africa from the Africans.”53 Turner’s statement may sound like a perfect chiasmus, but it isn’t one precisely because the second use of “African” refers not to continental Africans but to African-Americans. Of course, Turner’s point is to erase the difference between continental and diasporic blacks, even if this erasure at once obscures Africans and the Americanness of AfricanAmericans. By suggesting that all blacks are one family – “a race is a ­family,” Alexander Crummell argues  – African-Americans can be positioned as exiled rather than alien.54 Such a move presumes a racialist understanding, as Anthony Appiah observes, but also enables the New World African to inherit Africa, both culturally and – in a time of encroaching colonial forces in Africa – politically as well. Contrary to the idea that Hopkins’s turn to Africa produces a “pan­A frican” or “pan-racial” perspective, I would argue that this turn constitutes an imperialist approach to Africa for purposes of resolving the problem of racial identity in the United States.55 Hopkins casts AfricanAmericans as the rightful descendants of the glorious civilizations of ancient Africa, fit to inherit not only the nebulous sense of an African heritage, but also the material reality of African land as well. While African-Americans engage in a struggle for rights, the hidden inhabitants of Meroe remain trapped in the hermetic glory of an ancient civilization

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endlessly waiting for a redeemer – Reuel as Ergamenes, lost in the diaspora. As the novel shifts in genre from the conventions of the domestic sentimental melodrama to imperial adventure fiction, its descriptions of Africa unfold like an adventure tale in the vein of Rider Haggard, replete with leopards and lions and subservient natives, and promises of splendid treasures guarded by ferocious snakes. The description of the hidden city comes after a series of imperialist descriptions have undermined the claim of Africans to inherit this civilization. Our first glimpse of Africa is rich in such imperialist imagery: delineating this “country of thirst,” the narrator speculates that “the race who dwelt here must be different from those of the rest of the world” (509). In this sense, Africans are distanced from the universal humanity that Hopkins’s novel champions in its title. Instead African-Americans are “of one blood” with a slave-owning father as well as with the people of ancient Ethiopia. Fittingly, then, the African queen Candace becomes Reuel’s queen, the dark-skinned mirror image of Dianthe, but freed of the taint of incest and the history of slavery. Describing Candace as “an animated statue, in which one saw the blood circulate, and from which life flowed,” Hopkins refigures the trope of blood as visibly inscribed on the body, yet not as white skin (568). Candace can thus be the origin of a new racial future, as Hopkins concludes the novel with a prediction that the union of Reuel and Candace will produce “a dynasty of dark-skinned rulers, whose destiny should be to restore the prestige of an ancient people” (570). It is worth pausing here briefly to recall that most of sub-Saharan Africa was partitioned between various colonial powers at the Berlin conference (1884–5), just a few years before the novel was published, as part of the so-called Scramble for Africa. By 1902, the period of invasion that started around 1880 was complete and colonial frontiers (which would later become independent African states) were fixed, as Africa was carved out into separate areas of control by Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, and Belgium. At the time of Hopkins’s writing, then, European imperial presence is not (as she hints in her conclusion) a shadowy or vague anticipation, but a thriving reality.56 At the same time, the United States was also flexing its imperial muscle in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Hopkins ends her novel with Reuel safely ensconced in his underground empire, troubled nevertheless by the “advance of mighty nations penetrating the dark, mysterious forests of his native land” (621). Not only is the novel discomforting for its appropriation of Africa as the passive landscape for the resolution of African-American racial quandaries, it also renders

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the historical experiences of slavery and colonization in a providential light, as the leader of the hidden city, Ai, foretells the emigrationist future: “Ethiopia, too, is stretching forth her hand unto God, and He will fulfill her destiny. The tide of immigration shall set in the early days of the twentieth century, toward Afric’s shores, so long bound in the chains of barbarism and idolatry” (573). By situating suffering as the source of redemption, the novel ends up suggesting that African colonization (whether by African-Americans or by Europeans) is ordained, sanctioned even, by the workings of a divine providence.57 Thus, echoing the efforts of Bishop Turner, Reuel also becomes the means of another transformation, that of the religion of the residents of Meroe. Although the inhabitants of Meroe declare with racial pride that “at our feet the mightiest nations have worshipped,” they immediately accept Reuel’s religion as their own:  when Reuel expresses his concern about their pagan beliefs, Ai responds, “O Ergamenes, your belief shall be ours; we have no will but yours. Deign to teach your subjects” (563).58 It is thus difficult to see how Hopkins might be presenting an alternative to American racism by imagining a superior civilization when the portrayal of Africa follows conventional imperial logic. Ai offers a version of prophetic history that sees Reuel as the source of African redemption. Significantly Ai’s rendition of African history conjures up an Eden that is post-lapsarian, as he concedes that “great were the sins of our fathers, and the white stranger was to Ethiopia but a scourge in the hands of an offended God” (555). Both slavery and colonization can be read, in this formulation, as part of the workings of providence. Blyden highlights such a history when he links the revelation of the essential secret at the heart of Africa directly to the actions of African-Americans. Not only will such an act unlock the mysteries of Africa, it will also validate AfricanAmerican history in the New World, as upon their return to Africa, they “will then understand the purpose of the Almighty in having permitted the exile and bondage of the Africans, and they will see that for Africa’s redemption the Negro is the chosen instrument . . . They will recognize the scheme of the Colonization Society as the providential one.”59 Having circumscribed the rights of Africans to the glorious civilizations of the past, Blyden and Hopkins recover a civilization that, though unequivocally black, models Western lineaments in everything but skin color, producing what William Ferris had called “Negro-Saxons.” In doing so, Hopkins defines race as destiny, invoking a diasporic vision of origin, scattering, and return to construct Africa as the only acceptable home of the black population.

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Rendering organic what is an obviously constructed relationship to Africa, Hopkins returns to the very logic of racial purity that she rejects in the American context of Jim Crow. To fashion a positive representation of black identity, family, and civilization, Hopkins invents a new genealogy for her protagonists, and like other intellectuals of the Talented Tenth, she turns to the ancient kingdoms of Egypt and Ethiopia in order to do so.60 Espousing neither a simple belief in distinct races nor a fluid erasure of racial distinctions, Hopkins’s shifting construction of race in Of One Blood demands a historically contextualized reading, in which our present notions of hybridity and essentialism simply don’t hold up. Hopkins thus formulates a nationalist solution to the American problem, paradoxically by appropriating Africa as the source of an unmixed black identity. In doing so, Hopkins’s fiction represents larger contradictions in AfricanAmerican literature, where claims to nationalism can never be made in a simple manner, but must be located at the circuitous intersection of an American and an African identity. Hopkins’s black nationalism, as a nationalism without a nation, ­contrary to common theories of nationalism, does not form a community by imagining co-presence in terms of time and space, but by looking to recover a spatially distant past as the sign of a desired future. In thinking about the temporality of nationalism, scholars have identified a linear progressive movement into a certain future, albeit one that draws legitimacy from an invented past.61 If we consider the project of uplift through this lens, it is clear that it shares this developmental narrative; it cannot, however, conjure up an unbroken past with the same ease. When writers like Hopkins turn to Africa, the projected temporality of uplift gets further confused. Black nationalism in Hopkins’s era had trouble inventing a seamless line of tradition, and had to rely upon an apocalyptic temporality to imagine change. Its cyclic narrative of the rise and fall of civilizations found a ready ally in the genre of romance. As the promise of citizenship is interrupted by the legacy of slavery, Talented Tenth intellectuals search for an African alternative, a quest for a usable past that can only register as a desire for a black empire. In order to theorize Africa as the buried self of her characters, Hopkins finds the structural elements that make up romance helpful, particularly its quest for an elusive goal, and its characteristic narrative pattern of a movement into unknown territories or “other” imagined worlds, including the unknown territory of the self and the uncanny world of dreams. Romance allows Hopkins to move

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beyond everyday experience, reason, and common sense, and hint instead at repressed, hidden truths. In this way, Hopkins can revive the identity that was lost by suggesting that such an unmixed identity lies preserved in Africa to be inherited. Signaling recovery of the same rather than conquest of the other, Hopkins’s imperial romance can only imagine an African utopia within a mystical, non-modern paradigm outside of time and historicity. In doing so, she offers an understanding of temporality that is neither the linear, progressive one usually associated with nationalism nor one characterized by rupture, stops and starts identified by Gilroy as characteristic of black Atlantic thinking. Instead, as her use of romance indicates, in her recursive understanding, a lost time can be retrieved by traveling across space to the depths of the hidden city in Africa. Reading Hopkins’s novel through the lens of postcolonial or diaspora theories necessitates a critique of her representation of Africa and further indicates the difficulty of stabilizing the meaning of such terms as nation and diaspora in this historical moment. As we attend to the call of ­scholars to historicize the rubric of transnational literary studies, we come up against the difficulty of establishing a precise relationship between the term diaspora and such related terms as nationalism, Afrocentrism, or pan-Africanism. Gilroy’s influential model of the black Atlantic is quite clear on this count. For Gilroy, the black Atlantic is the very antithesis of Afrocentrism, nationalism, and even of pan-Africanism. In his reading, all nationalist cultural projects show signs of racial essentialism. But when we place the work of Hopkins within the historical context of uplift and Ethiopianism, it becomes clear that such a neat dichotomy between the two is difficult to sustain. A consideration of Ethiopianism further indicates that diaspora has a complex, often symbiotic, relationship to black nationalism, as the two are not always antithetical in the way assumed by Gilroy and others. Preoccupied with fantasies of a black messiah who would lead the projected black nation back to its former glory, Ethiopianist thinkers espouse a belief in racial distinction and hierarchy, curiously resembling that put forward by white advocates of racial separation. In so doing, they draw on tropes of migration, scattering, and return that comprise a difficult archive for diaspora studies in our own era – one that we cannot afford to ignore. This archive can neither be assimilated into a vague notion of a transnational black culture of resistance, nor can it be read as a “counterculture to modernity” identified by Gilroy as the distinguishing feature of the black Atlantic.62 Rather than a blueprint of antiracist and anti-imperialist politics of solidarity, Hopkins’s royalist vision (and the larger cultural and historical moment it emblematizes) gives us

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an untidy picture of transnational black culture, where Afrocentrism, nationalism, and diaspora co-mingle in ways that remain conflicted rather than seamless. Moreover, a consideration of Hopkins’s relation to imperial notions also prompts a rethinking of her domestic politics of race. If Hopkins’s invented Africa shares imperial modes of representation, can it also achieve the indictment of American racism that prompts it? And, in doing so, does it provide us with a critical model for thinking about racial identity, or can it only offer us a window into the complex reasons behind such desires to learn the past as a memory? Since the very logic of uplift produces Hopkins’s imperial and romance visions of Africa, her novel articulates an anti-racist project that does not go hand-in-hand with anti-imperialism. In her era, Ethiopianist ideas circulate as literary and ideological tropes which allow Hopkins to perform a certain kind of cultural work by collapsing the spatial distinctions between Africa and America to claim both as sources of a heritage for her mixed-race protagonists, but she ends up at a deadlock, as neither place can be home to her vision of racial mixture. Instead, each space demands racial purity as the precondition of nationhood. It is precisely these fault lines of Hopkins’s novel that are instructive for studies of diaspora, as the novel forces us to recognize that currently influential theoretical models cannot account for the sharply differentiated politics articulated in its American and African contexts. Rather than dismissing Hopkins and the larger politics she represents, or assimilating her work to contemporary paradigms of diasporic hybridity, as critics we need to inhabit the contradictions she lays bare in order to assess how race writes and unwrites itself at the dawn of the twentieth century. To highlight the contradictory leanings of the novel, then, is to be forced to ground our analysis of race in a particular historical moment and its distinct politics, rather than in a transhistorical paradigm of globality. Understanding the politics of her time, we can use Hopkins to refine Gilroy’s claim that black Atlantic cultural production is necessarily antithetical to what he calls “the dangerous obsessions with ‘racial’ purity.”63 A re-reading of Hopkins’s Africanist fantasy demonstrates the problem with his assumption that diasporic projects are always constitutively hybrid and anti-essentialist. In moving beyond nationalist approaches of the Black Arts era, as we saw at the beginning of the chapter, black feminist critics like Carby usefully rescue writers like Hopkins from disapproval and neglect. In turn, however, their rethinking of Hopkins downplays the continuing appeal of nationalist narratives. Reading Of One Blood for its turns through various racial ideologies of its era reveals the ways in which

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nationalism remains compelling to Hopkins, prompting a rethinking of the way in which she is being held up as an exemplary figure for hybridity in contemporary critical studies. Situating Hopkins within the emerging literary canon of diaspora or black Atlantic fiction further reveals the limits of the popular rubric of hybridity itself. As a concept hybridity often stands in for the transgression of essentialist notions of pure and authentic origins in contemporary cultural studies. But as Robert Young has argued, hybridity also derives from ideas of contamination and social Darwinism.64 His important history of the concept alerts us to its prehistory in discourses of colonial racism, where it occurs as a term of denigration, implying a blackening or sullying of an imagined purity. When notions of cultural mixture draw on prior ones of racial intermingling or cross-breeding, they remain shaded by the very essentialist languages of blood and racial descent they purport to transcend. Historicizing our notion of race brings into focus the disturbing resilience of notions of racial purity, requiring us to be more flexible in our ascriptions of hybridity or essentialism. This is not simply a matter of applying contemporary concepts of diaspora and hybridity to an earlier historical moment, but of uncovering how these concepts have been constituted through these earlier moments, and revealing what has been occluded in current definitions. To do so is also to recognize that Hopkins’s African turn doesn’t in fact allow her to present any realistic alternative to the American racial order, as no future can be imagined in her imperial romance. Hopkins thus inevitably concludes Of One Blood with a great deal of uncertainty, appealing to God to resolve the conflicts that find no resolution within the novel itself, concluding that “none save Omnipotence can solve the problem” (621). In marked contrast, her earlier novel, Contending Forces, successfully resolves the issues it raises, and showcases a happy marriage and a family reunion, as it upholds the ideal of racial uplift and justice. But in Of One Blood Africa cannot help Hopkins resolve the conflicts of American racism in a neat fashion. To imagine a diasporic link between Africa and America, Hopkins has to imagine Africa not as a viable alternative to America, but as the deep-rooted primitive self buried within AfricanAmericans. Hence, rather than difference, diaspora emerges as sameness. In this understanding, instead of representing a utopian horizon that can undo the damage of slavery, Africa connotes an inheritance of biological qualities, defined in the language of blood, and subject to imperial tropes of discovery and conquest. While later diasporic constructions of Africa would come to include a significant anti-imperialist component, in this historical moment it is

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difficult to find articulations of such anti-imperialism, as these imperialist desires offer the only means of imagining a nation. Created out of the swirl of racialized narratives of the era, the available avenue for imagining a nation (as a means of autonomy, self-determination, and freedom) was by way of an imperial appropriation of an African past. In a later historical moment, two different languages become available for a discussion of an African heritage – the language of cultural survivals, and of black internationalism.65 Developments in anthropology make available connections to Africa that are grounded in slave culture, as well as ways of theorizing cultural retentions as practices rather than as repressed memories. The second language of anti-colonial, international solidarity also becomes influential in the years following Hopkins’s last novel. Based on a political struggle against global white supremacy, structured by an understanding of imperialism as a stage of capitalism, black internationalism could theorize new ways of thinking about the interlocking of race, labor, nationalism, and culture. The work of W. E. B. Du Bois was to dominate such efforts for the first half of the twentieth century, and it is to his constructions of diaspora that I turn in the next chapter.

Ch apter 2

From double consciousness to diaspora: W. E. B. Du Bois and black internationalism

I know no national boundaries where the Negro is concerned.

Marcus Garvey

One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.

W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1928 novel, Dark Princess: A Romance, is often viewed as a prescient blueprint for Third World solidarity. The novel’s central concern  – orchestrating a romance between a Talented Tenth hero and a ­mysterious Indian princess – unfolds against a dense backdrop of plans for a secret society plotting the end of white supremacy, negotiating along the way all the weighty questions of labor, electoral politics, and the possibility of unionization. Towards the end of the novel, the Indian princess of the title proclaims: “in 1952, the Dark World goes free – whether in Peace and fostering Friendship with all men, or in Blood and Storm – it is for Them – the pale Masters of today – to say.”1 For some scholars, this ­prophecy comes uncannily close to predicting the historic meeting at Bandung in 1955, where the spirit of Afro-Asian solidarity found a rare occasion to flourish. Du Bois’s novel, then, becomes a sign of internationalist longings that register a turn away from white power as well as from a domestic focus on race in the United States. In the words of one critic, the novel offers a vision of “hybridity and intermixture that is especially valuable” as it ends not with “the fusion of two purified essences but rather a meeting of two heterogeneous multiplicities.”2 In other words, for Paul Gilroy  – as well as other critics like Homi Bhabha, Bill Mullen, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Nikhil Pal Singh – Du Bois’s novel not only promotes solidarity among the darker peoples of the world but it also anticipates many of the insights of postcolonial theory.3 Read in this light, the novel’s black internationalist leanings seemingly sit side by side with its espousal of a radical hybridity, as it gestures beyond the confines of race, nation, 59

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and ethnicity, offering ultimately for Gilroy and others, a profound vision of diaspora that is transformative of Western modernity. There are few novels that can sustain such a theoretical burden, and even a cursory look at Dark Princess raises immediate questions about these claims. Rather than announcing its political ambitions, the novel, as its sub-title indicates, first and foremost presents itself as a romance. Deliberately and self-consciously loaded with all the trappings of a classical romance – an envoi, a dedication to the queen of fairy, and a four-part division according to seasons – Du Bois signals in every possible way his commitment to the genre. The fantastic nature of the novel’s central marriage plot further calls into play all the intrigue, melodrama, and miraculous coincidence of an Orientalist fantasy. This is not to say that the novel tries to escape questions of politics or history altogether. Rather, it surfaces the historical and political questions of race, labor, and internationalism through the unwieldy medium of romance, as indicated by Du Bois’s description of the novel, “a romance with a message.”4 It is worth remembering that when it was first published Dark Princess was criticized precisely for its use of romance. Most of the novel’s first readers conceded that the novel had some political and historical merit, but they were far less willing to grant that Du Bois’s rhetorical skills were up to the task when it came to fiction. As Alain Locke put it in 1928, “amidst much pure romance and preciosity of style, there are rich deposits of straight sociology.”5 More recently, Arnold Rampersad agrees with Locke, arguing that “when the mists of romance are blown away from Dark Princess and the trappings of melodrama are forgotten, Du Bois’s aspirations appear quite humble, and his solutions sane.”6 In contrast, Du Bois himself called the novel his “favorite book,” and Claudia Tate follows his lead in her introduction to a 1995 reprinting of the novel as she argues for the novel’s value not only to a psychoanalytic reading of Du Bois but also to our understanding of his racial agenda.7 Paying heed to such rethinking, several scholars have recently turned to the novel and elaborated its relevance to issues as varied as cosmopolitanism and dandyism, reproduction and eugenics, oligarchy and democratic socialism. In doing so, however, scholars have continued to downplay the novel’s formal complexity, choosing to highlight its political agenda alone.8 How might we reconcile the novel’s formal architecture with its equally lofty political ambitions? Do we simply have a clumsy mix of fanciful speculation and didactic propaganda? Can we so easily separate the ­novel’s romance elements from its pronouncements on politics and history, or

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suggest, as some do, that its romance qualities are antithetical to its political vision of Third World solidarity? This chapter is concerned with how the novel’s politics articulate with its distinct formal structure. Taking Du Bois’s formal shifts seriously involves recognizing his lifelong interest in aesthetic form. As Rampersad puts it, “Du Bois’s concern with form is constant, reflecting the influence of his training in the classical tradition of rhetoric and oratory taught to him at Fisk and Harvard” (73). The tension between realism and romance, the prosaic and the visionary, the pragmatic and the prophetic is visible in almost every book he authors. His writings in the first four decades of the twentieth century – The Souls of Black Folk (1903), The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), The Negro (1915), Darkwater (1920), The Gift of Black Folk (1924), and Dark Princess (1928) – especially show the imprint of this ­tussle everywhere, and even his economic study of the Reconstruction, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), was received as a literary rather than an empirical study when it was first published.9 Indeed, other black leaders during this period tend to dismiss him as a poet, not a thinker, even as literary critics continue to ignore his aesthetic vision and his preoccupation with form.10 Thus, not only does romance provide a key to reading Dark Princess, it also emerges as a consistent strain in Du Bois’s vast oeuvre, and serves to pinpoint fundamental principles he adheres to throughout his life. Though discussing each of these works is beyond the scope of a single chapter, I will focus here on two foundational texts that showcase the ­formal question of realism and romance in direct articulation with Du Bois’s political shifts between nation and diaspora. In so doing, I map Du Bois’s shifts between realism and romance onto his shifts between nationalism and transnationalism, or between the racially particular and the universal, in order to track a double consciousness of form in Du Bois’s writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Along the way I will undermine the conventional take on Du Bois’s nationalism, showing how his turn to diaspora is hardly free of the constraints of race or nation whereas his nationalism may well indicate the route to universalism. Paying attention to the formal dimension of Du Bois’s shifts between the racially particular and the race-neutral universal will allow the chapter, finally, to produce a new understanding of the relation between race and diaspora in Du Bois’s thought. Traditionally, Du Bois’s career is divided up into two broad phases: the early years of social science and the later years of art and activism. We tend to think of his early years as focused on uplift through culture, education, and racial pride, while viewing the later years as marked by a more

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radical embrace of socialism and labor-based politics. Despite considerable consensus on these broad phases, scholarship is notably divided on how to read the dramatic shifts in Du Bois’s thought. His 1897 speech, “The Conservation of Races,” suggests a biological understanding of race, while just a few years later, the deeply lyrical The Souls of Black Folk issues an impassioned plea for culture over biology. His years of advocacy with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and The Crisis argue for assimilation into the country’s fabric, while the bitter Darkwater:  Voices From Within the Veil (1920) advocates separatist militancy. Despite his distaste for the sexual openness of the Harlem Renaissance, his own Dark Princess contains deeply eroticized scenes. Moreover, though he asks African-Americans to “close ranks” with the rest of the nation during the First World War and place their search for rights on hold (thereby alienating almost every shade of the political spectrum), by 1931, he supports separate race-based institutions, seemingly coming full circle from his ferocious opposition to Booker T. Washington’s acceptance of social segregation and to Marcus Garvey’s call for race-based institutions.11 The first three decades of the twentieth century, then, are particularly important for understanding Du Bois’s evolving thinking on race. By 1928, when he published his second novel, his position as unquestioned arbiter of black culture was under attack from various groups, ranging from the “New Negroes” of the Renaissance, to the nationalists of Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, and the leftist radicals of such organizations as the African Blood Brotherhood and the International Colored Unity League. Charting the journey from The Souls of Black Folk to Dark Princess provides an opportunity to assess some crucial changes in Du Bois’s thought, which in turn elucidate the larger history of race in the twentieth-century United States. Tracking Du Bois’s use of romance in these writings not only illumina­ tes his growing interest in Asia, Africa, and the international division of labor, it also refines our understanding of his famous conception of double consciousness and the role of the Talented Tenth, and more generally, of his discussion of the place of culture in the struggle against racism and imperialism. It also says something about our own conceptions of race and culture. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Du Bois predicted that the century would be dominated by “the problem of the color-line.”12 A hundred years later, does the color-line continue to dominate, and if so, in what way? Clearly, Du Bois’s work is central to any discussion of the black diaspora. Even a simple look at his life lays bare all the contradictions that

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make diaspora a compelling concept today. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in a largely white community, Du Bois died at the age of 95 in Ghana on the day of the March on Washington in 1963, after years of being hounded by the US government for his support of communism. Whether visiting Liberia in 1923 as a nominal dignitary of the US government or being facilitated as the father of pan-Africanism by independent Africa’s first nation-state under Kwame Nkrumah, Du Bois kept Africa at the forefront of his thinking. Just as he moved between realism and romance to articulate African-American identity as marked by double consciousness, he also theorized Africa as both the site of black political modernity and the locus of nostalgic diasporic sentiment. It would seem then, as it does to so many contemporary scholars, that Du Bois’s life and work present a figure who anticipates and exemplifies our own interest in thinking transnationally. A novel like Dark Princess has undergone a revival of interest precisely because of its international focus and because its central allegory is not domestic at all, but rather a reinvention of sentimental fiction into an international political thriller. In the following account, I unpack the critical moves that make this reinvention possible to suggest that Du Bois’s vision of diaspora also relies on nationalism in a manner similar to Hopkins, though the distance between the two is at first glance self-evident. In looking at the ways in which Du Bois represents Africa – as a mythical repository for a black nation in Souls and as a shadowy source of a primeval dark empire in Dark Princess – a crucial question emerges as to whether he finds a way to bridge the local and the global or whether he ends up appropriating Africa as a blank slate for another imperialist inscription. Moreover, Du Bois’s fiction gives us an opportunity to explore whether the obstinately American racial tropes that he and Hopkins employ – the tragic mulatto, the “one-drop” rule, the miscegenated body, among others – travel or transplant easily to the global South, and whether they can become the means to inaugurate a ­dialogue with other anti-colonial nationalisms. One of the questions that immediately emerges in such a discussion concerns the fact that Du Bois’s vision of a global alliance of darker races finds its inspiration in Indian civilization, symbolized by the princess, rather than in the familiar Ethiopianist turn to ancient African splendor, either Egyptian or Ethiopian. It is worth pausing to wonder whether Du Bois’s turn to India rather than Africa reveals more than the commonplace Orientalism of modernist fiction. What this turn indicates most clearly, of course, is Du Bois’s interest in internationalism, in other words, his interest in theorizing African-Americans as a nation within a nation which

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should be seen as being on a par with other colonized nations. Just as his appeal to the League of Nations for self-determination for Germany’s African colonies after the First World War was linked to his demand for civil rights at home in the United States, Du Bois’s desire to link AfricanAmerican struggles with other anti-colonial efforts also aimed at two political objectives. First, it allowed him to indict the United States as an imperial power like Europe, and to condemn the idea of ruling other races and nations at a time when anti-colonial sentiment was beginning to gain ground globally. Second, it helped him articulate a Marxist critique of ­capitalism and its exploitation of both white and black labor. Exploring the ways in which his thoughts on the international division of labor articulate with his transnational concept of race is also one of the tasks of this chapter. Beyond such political objectives, Du Bois’s turn to India serves as an important conceptual linchpin for his thinking on diaspora – and ours, for that matter. It makes us ask whether diaspora can be theorized in non-racial cultural terms. Or, as one of Dark Princess’s more unsavory characters puts it, does “blood” always “tell” (23)? The chapter takes up these questions to argue against a growing – and tendentious  – move in contemporary thought. Our recent interest in transnationalism and diaspora has largely come as a way to go beyond race and nation. Notions of cosmopolitanism, black Atlanticism, or planetary humanism are seen as a way to surpass the rigid assumptions and cultural insiderisms of nationalist thought.13 This book suggests that diaspora and nation need not be implacably opposed: it is an attempt to bring into visibility conceptions of diaspora that build on the insights of nationalism in a dialectical way rather than disavowing them. One of my central goals is to chronicle how the intellectual most responsible for creating race consciousness, for theorizing it with such subtlety and urgency, and for allying race with Marxist, feminist, and anti-colonial thought, suddenly emerges as a prophet of our own era’s move beyond race and ethnicity. Is this just one more reinvention as each historical era creates a Du Bois to suit itself? Or does such a construction of Du Bois do violence to his historical integrity? How may we assess this transition of Du Bois from the quintessential race man to an anti-race man, particularly in relation to the peculiar nature of black nationalism? If nationalism is indeed at the heart of Du Bois’s diasporic vision, as I argue in the following pages, that would then mean that the binaries through which we view Du Bois – either as American pragmatist or as black radical, as cosmopolitan dandy or panAfrican prophet, as race champion or a rootless man – need to be refined and readjusted.14

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To do so is also to explore what it might mean to read Du Bois as a l­iterary artist, and what the literary as such signifies in his work. Du Bois’s efforts to marry aesthetics and politics further tell us something about literary form in general and its possibilities and constraints for critical and utopian thinking. It is probably no coincidence that those scholars who view Du Bois as an anti-race race man are also the ones who value his literary work over and above his sociological work. In this way, they assume that literature inevitably becomes a venue for him to dwell above the veil and to escape the particularity of the black experience into the universalism of the human. In contrast, it might well be that it is in literature that racial genius can be expressed, as Du Bois and other black modernists argued time and again. If indeed “culture has no color” as Alain Locke claimed, it would seem that our attention to Du Bois’s fiction and poetry must take us away from his political involvement in the struggle for African-American uplift.15 But perhaps these categories have become too rigidly defined, and a closer look at Du Bois’s valiant efforts to bridge such divisions can offer us some pointers for our own politics and aesthetics of race. “T h e E g y p t of t h e C on f e de r ac y ”:  rom a nc i ng t h e n at ion i n t h e s ou l s of bl ac k f ol k The Souls of Black Folk, despite its ambitious political agenda, is astonishing for its excessively literary qualities. Composed of several distinct but equally powerful genres, Souls features the elegy, the pastoral, the short story, ethnography, biography, and autobiography. As Robert Stepto puts it, one of Du Bois’s most magnificent achievements is to transform “data” into “metaphor.”16 In what follows, I explore the way in which Du Bois’s literary choices – his use of romance, the logic of his metaphors, and the eclectic genres he employs  – enable him to fulfill his political agenda. His agenda was at once intensely local and stubbornly universal, deeply invested in asserting his Americanness and equally proud of his racial distinctiveness, rooted in the South, the “historic ground” of the Black Belt (91), but speaking in the name of “human opportunity” everywhere (12). All these tensions, as we will see, are managed not by a strict adherence to racial realism but by a turn to romance, and what we may call a double consciousness of form  – creative, unstable holding together of romance and realism. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the need for realist representations of African-American life could not be more urgent. Following the demise

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of Reconstruction, African-Americans found themselves ­marginalized in the North and reduced to sub-human status in the South. Institutionalized segregation, in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), returned them in many ways to a form of statelessness, even as the ritualized violence of lynch mobs proceeded unchecked. The first year of the twentieth century brought as many as ninety-nine lynchings, and in the culmination of a series of anti-black incidents, the Atlanta riot of 1906  – where mobs of whites attacked the city’s black neighborhoods in a terrifying orgy of racial violence  – revealed the inadequacy of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta compromise of 1895, showing that accommodation was no solution to the reign of Jim Crow. At a moment when the basic humanity of blacks was once again in question, Du Bois took on the task of articulating black humanity and spiritual aspirations. To read Souls historically, to place it in its time, is to recognize that Du Bois is at war with the Tuskegee machine over whether blacks deserved to be anything but a permanent and inferior labor force, whether they could have any access to or use for higher learning, culture, sentiment, or romance. It was a time when even wellknown abolitionists were retreating to the view that African-Americans “could not be educated much beyond the three R’s.”17 In the words of his most famous biographer, David Levering Lewis, Du Bois “agonized that the humanity of an entire race was again a serious national question” (Biography 275). The impact of Souls in this highly charged racial climate was unprecedented. In Lewis’s words again, Souls “redefined the terms of a three-hundred-year interaction between black and white people and influenced the cultural and political psychology of peoples of African descent throughout the Western hemisphere, as well as on the continent of Africa. It was one of those events epochally dividing history into a before and an after” (Biography 277). Du Bois’s challenge to Booker T. Washington’s Gilded Age “gospel of Work and Money” in Souls is well known. His impassioned question, “is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment” laid bare the enormity of accepting segregation for African-Americans (79). In an era when education was being defined as “the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black” (79), Du Bois’s task of making AfricanAmericans “co-workers in the kingdom of culture” was not an enviable one (5). He had to dethrone Washington and take on the mantle of the race leader by elaborating a unique racial destiny that could have meaning for blacks as well as whites. He had to fashion himself as the representative hero of the Talented Tenth even as he set out to produce the “Negro intelligentsia” that would prove his doctrine. He had to shed light on the hidden

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world of Southern blacks, a world opaque to most readers and prone to vicious misrepresentation in such popular Southern romances as Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock and Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman.18 And he had to explicate the rituals of the black church, to lay bare the economic tragedy of the Reconstruction, and even to open up his heart as a father mourning the death of his infant son, only to realize that death may well have freed his son from a life of virulent racism. Rather than responding to racist myth-making with realism alone, Du Bois finds the genre of romance infinitely serviceable because of its ability to provide a strategy of resolution in which opposing values could be played out against one another, in which people could be brought together, even rendered symbolically whole via one another. In other words, romance’s ability to reconcile and synthesize enables Du Bois not simply to surface a repressed racial self, as we saw in the previous chapter, but rather to use romance to metastasize and transform existing perceptions of race, to rewrite the history of blacks and whites, and to reconceive relations between black elite and subaltern groups so that those histories could be remembered differently, in the light of a desired future. By racially coding both realism and romance, Du Bois uses literary genre as a strategy of containment when the divisions he outlines (such as that of class) threaten to spin out of control. Romance then makes it possible for him to write both history and prophecy at once, as it names a location where the purchase of both history and fantasy, protest and utopia can most easily be mined. The changing functions of romance in Souls are the subject of what follows: I will show that, first, Du Bois brings romance into play to argue for a distinct black cultural identity as a gift to America; then, he uses romance to bridge the gap between the Talented Tenth and the masses; and finally, deploys romance (emblematized in both the land and the music of the South) to lay claim not only to the nation, but simultaneously beyond the nation to a universal human fellowship. The most striking aspect of Du Bois’s use of romance is, of course, its association with racial identity. A year after the publication of Souls Du Bois explains his stylistic choices, claiming that “In its larger aspects the style is tropical – African. This needs no apology. The blood of my fathers spoke through me and cast off the English restraint of my training and surroundings.”19 In identifying the book’s “tropical” or “African” style, Du Bois clearly refers to its romance qualities: its densely allegorical language, the weight of the imagery, the elaborate metaphors, and the passion of the prose. Associating romance with Africa and his ancestral blood, Du Bois also furnishes a critique of white America’s realism and rationality. “Cold

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New England reason” cannot convey the tropical message Du Bois has of a unique black destiny. In this way, he creates a fundamental aesthetic division between white and black America – white America is mechanical and material where black America brings its gifts of spirit, song, and sweat – as he affirms that “we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness” (11–12). To be sure, such a binary opposition between the material and the spiritual is common in cultural nationalist thought. What is new here is the way in which Du Bois holds the two in unresolved tension, neither wanting to “Africanize America” nor to “bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism” (5). Eventually, he hopes that “some day on American soil two world-races may give to each other those characteristics both so sadly lack” (11). Du Bois’s association of romance with Africa and blood recalls Hopkins’s romantic conception of an everlasting African soul, unaffected by history, slumbering beneath an American body in Of One Blood. Despite the convergence between the two texts, which are roughly contemporary (and it is likely that Hopkins had not only read Du Bois’s previously published essays but that she also patterned her protagonists like Will Smith and Reuel Briggs on Du Bois), Du Bois fundamentally transforms the terms of thinking about African and African-American identity in Souls. Where Hopkins literalizes the trope of the hidden self by inventing an underground city in Africa, Du Bois takes the notion of a secret self further by theorizing it as a permanent tension between “Negro” and “American,” the product of their coexistence rather than the function of their repression. In other words, instead of conceptualizing African-American consciousness as a hidden (African) self beneath the exterior (American) one, he theor­ izes a constant tension between the African and American selves, each one of which is also understood as internally complex, made up of divided loyalties and emotions. This enables him to say that African-Americans are at once both African and American and neither. His understanding of duality presents tension not as debilitating but as productive and creative, as it dramatizes perpetual strife, and a constant attempt to merge the two selves, thus opening up the possibility that such permanent tension might be a gift rather than a pathology, or even both at once. Because Du Bois does not prioritize an essentially African ­identity buried beneath an American one as the undiscovered country, Africa is not a static or repressed self, but part of a constant dialectical movement. Drawing on a long tradition in American letters where romance can get to the buried meaning in the human heart, as well as manipulating common tropes of a buried or retrogressive self in racial discourse of the era, Du Bois takes up

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and transforms the rhetoric of a savage African self into one that hides a sublime message for the world, best expressed by the spirituals that introduce each chapter of Souls and conclude the book. Du Bois calls into play the genre of romance to universalize racial concerns and to elevate race to a fundamental organizing principle of human history. In doing so, his romance reveals not just the truth of the human heart, as Hawthorne would have it, but the very soul of a race, tracked through centuries of struggle. If Du Bois were to simply align realism with white and romance with black America, his book would not read too differently from works by Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, and other black nationalist leaders of the era. Instead, Du Bois carefully theorizes and dramatizes his critique of realism and turn to romance throughout Souls. In order to unpack the logic binding races with literary genres, it is necessary to follow his turns through realism and romance as they unfold in an elegantly orchestrated movement. In the second chapter, “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” for instance, Du Bois suggests that the intensity of the slave experience cannot be captured in straightforward prose: “Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly,” he tells us, “so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded men” (26). This passion cannot be captured by the “car-window sociologist” (126); it needs to be experienced and narrated by someone who is intimately connected to those that dwell beneath the veil. Du Bois highlights his rejection of rationality in the figure of the “cold statistician” (8) who “wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen” but who misses the fundamental drama and the dignity of struggle. He characterizes the project of uplift as the time of “Sturm und Drang: storm and stress today rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul” (10–11). In this way, rather than viewing the task of uplifting the race as one of steady, genteel progress, he invests it with drama, grandeur, and elements of the sublime. To do so, Du Bois creates a certain division of labor between the poetic and the prosaic. While his sociological eye critically views the failed promise of Reconstruction and the unfinished project of emancipation, highlighting the urgent need for reform, education, and civil rights, his poetic eye celebrates the living souls of black folks as already sublime and capable of grandeur. In this way, Du Bois famously challenges Booker T. Washington’s doctrine of realism and accommodation by demanding access to the higher aims of life. When Washington asks the South to “cast down its bucket where it

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is” in his 1895 Atlanta address, he speaks in favor of the local, the immediate, and the static, opposing not only the migration of a labor force but also an opening up of wider horizons for African-Americans. Accordingly, Du Bois observes with sarcasm, “so thoroughly did he [Washington] learn the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities” (38). In sharp rebuke, Du Bois transforms this static and rooted labor force into a living, breathing, dreaming mass of souls, whose dreams and fears are as important as their social or economic reality. In Du Bois’s rich imagination, the Atlanta of Washington’s speech becomes Atalanta, the winged maiden of myth who succumbed to the temptation of Hippomenes’s golden apples. Where metaphors of mechanization (“work and wealth are mighty levers to lift this old new land” [66]) define Washington’s gospel of work and pay, Du Bois calls on mythology to argue for truth and beauty, and to revive a memory of “the grace and courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble” in the South (65). He insists that “the need of the South is knowledge and culture” (71), not a relentless pursuit of money. In the same way, a small town in Tennessee where he taught for two summers becomes an idyllic little world where “we read and spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill” (55). Passing through the same town ten years later, Du Bois learns the meaning of progress: “My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly” (59). His doomed tragic heroine, Josie, is dead and Du Bois wonders, “How shall man measure Progress there where the darkfaced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat?” (62). His elegy for the pastoral simplicity of Josie’s life elevates her to something other than the “tertium quid,” “somewhere between men and ­cattle” of racist myth (75). Josie allegorizes the heartache of the struggle to learn, to work on her farm without much profit, and to be devoted to her ­loving but poor family. Her death cannot be measured by any sociological tools – it requires the romantic capacity of wonder, empathy, and human understanding. In this way, Du Bois proves that any rationalist ideology of progress is necessarily incomplete without the power to appreciate the tragic beauty of Josie’s short life. He forces us to probe the value of facts or reason in light of such a need for human sympathy. As he sets out to present the souls of black folk – their history, their aspir­ations, and a prophecy of their unique destiny – it is not as if Du Bois

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does not first try realism. His turn to realism is perfectly logical, given the basic connection between realism and race in African-American writing.20 This is particularly evident in Du Bois’s representation of the South. He starts out with a call for objective representations that can counter the phantasmatic racism of plantation romances: we need, he writes, “a conscientious study of the phenomena of race-contact . . . a study frank and fair, and not falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears.” Taking up the South of plantation romance as his case study, he puts a premium on facts when he writes, “we must ask, what are the actual relations of whites and blacks in the South? and we must be answered, not by apology or fault-finding, but by a plain, unvarnished tale” (134). Quickly, however, he realizes that such a “plain, unvarnished tale” cannot hope to capture the racial drama of the South, nor can it counteract the virulent racist discourse of the region. Realism allows him to marshal facts against racist dehumanization to dismantle notions of retrogression and reversion to a primal African savagery. It also helps him challenge the nostalgic pastoral romance of the happy South, as in “Of the Sons of Master and Man” where he calls for “sober attention, study, and thought” to get to the truth of Southern society (134). To do so, he meticulously charts out the physical, social, economic, and political relations between the two segregated groups, seeking to “paint an average picture of real relations between the sons of master and man in the South” (151). Even as he creates this sociological picture, however, he realizes that realism alone is not sufficient for his nation-making project. Facts become inadequate guides to understanding the soul of the black nation. And so the veil of realism needs to be pierced to get through to the heaving passion, strife, and drama beneath, because he realizes that “in the name of reason alone” one can only associate blacks with “crime and listlessness” far removed from the higher aims of life (147). In order to unearth the truth beneath the surface, Du Bois subtly undermines the authority of his own sociological pronouncements. He concedes that “there still remains a part essential to a proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or fix in terms easily understood by strangers. It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one ­little actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation it is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole” (147). This “elusive” national character cannot be imagined through a realist lens; rather it calls for an appreciation of romance. This is particularly true in the South, Du Bois argues, which is undergoing “as deep a storm and stress of human

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souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of spirit, as ever a people experienced” (147). Such “a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts” cannot be understood without use of the imagination and the poetic eye. At “the center of this spiritual turmoil,” Du Bois goes on to say, are “the millions of black freedmen and their sons, whose ­destiny is so fatefully bound up with that of the nation” (148). To the “casual observer” (148), this great drama has no meaning, and such an observer is easily beguiled by plantation romances, seeing only the lazy days, the haze of the sun, and the contented and lazy Negro. Seduced by the old-world charm of the South, the “casual observer” and the “car-window sociologist” both miss its foundation of brutality and are unable to peer beyond the racist veil that divides black and white in the South. In his 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois recalls his disenchantment with his scientific training in strongly resonant terms. On hearing that Sam Hose, a poor African-American farmhand in central Georgia was accused of murder, Du Bois proceeded to compose a “careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts.” Before he can get to the office of the newspaper, Hose is lynched and his knuckles exhibited in a grocery store window. Du Bois gives up his posture of a rational scientist when confronted with the spectacular violence of the lynch mob, realizing that “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.”21 The horror of lynching – a negative sublime, as it were – cannot be captured through reason; it must be converted into a positive sublime, beyond the optic of the rational. In the following years, Du Bois’s writings use metaphor, passion, and prophecy to agitate against racism in terms that go beyond realism and rationality. But even as his rhetorical power and manipulation of form enable him to reimagine the relations between blacks and whites in the United States, he still needs to explain intra-racial divisions between elite and subaltern groups among African-Americans in order to construct a viable imagined community. It is his ability to both bridge and maintain such divisions of class that enables him to produce a nation of black folk even as he urges his theory of the Talented Tenth as the advance guard of all blacks. To manage such divisions of class, Du Bois once again turns to romance, and we see this most clearly in his well-known theorization of double consciousness in Souls. When looking at Du Bois’s famous theory of double consciousness articulated in the first essay of Souls, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” it is easy to read it as a general comment on the state of black being in the world. Certainly, Du Bois’s own terms lend themselves to an allegorical

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reading, as he claims that “the history of the American Negro is the history of this strife” (5). That Du Bois places the Negro as the “seventh son” in world civilization, coming after “the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian” further attests to his global aspirations. But it is important to note that despite such broad strokes, Du Bois also discusses a very particular dilemma, that of the member of the African-American Talented Tenth, who seeks to be a ­“co-worker in the kingdom of culture” but finds himself frustrated at every turn (5). Du Bois first presents the specific dilemma of double consciousness as a characteristic particular to the black intellectual. He explains double consciousness as a “hesitant and doubtful striving” as the black intellectual follows a “double-aimed struggle” to attend to the immediate pragmatic needs of his race, as he strives for uplift in a realm beyond that of “a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water” (6). The black elite – doctor, scholar, artisan, teacher, or minister – all face this dilemma, which we may characterize as one of attending to realist needs while being conscious of giving up the romance quest for higher ideals. Jessie Fauset’s well-known response to Souls makes this clear. She writes, “I am glad glad you wrote it – we have needed someone to voice the intricacies of the blind maze of thought and action along which the modern, educated colored man or woman struggles. It hurt you to write that book didn’t it? The man of fine sensibilities has to suffer exquisitely, just simply because his feeling is so fine.”22 Souls begins with placing the masses within realism in contrast to the idealized romance quest of the intellectuals. As the book progresses, the divide between the intellectual and the masses he represents narrows, as both become subsumed in a single vision. The black intellectual has to understand the inherent nobility of the masses, and to unlearn his own privilege by realizing the limits of the rational tools of sociology, language, and ideologies of progress. The gap between the needs of the masses and the conflicted response of the intellectual can be seen everywhere in the book, but is perhaps most urgently dramatized in the penultimate chapter of Souls, the short story, “Of the Coming of John.” John’s journey north opens up all the horizons of the world that have been shut out in the South. Swept away by a recital of Wagner in a great orchestra hall, John thinks, “This is the world” (191). Listening to the music, “a deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he would only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood! Who had called him to be the slave

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and butt of all? And if he had called, what right had he to call when a world like this lay open before men?” (193). The music inspires not just aesthetic appreciation in him but the call to serve the higher power of truth and beauty: “If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard, – aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his head and soul” (193). As is typical in the book, his exclusion from the music hall emblematizes the narrowness he’s confined to, despite his ability to appreciate the music. If the music gives him a vision of life beyond the veil, it also returns him to life within the veil as he thinks of his “far-off home, – the great eyes of his sister, and the dark drawn face of his mother” (193). While his experience in the North opens up to him the meaning of his life, it also irrevocably separates him from his family and neighbors. To open oneself up to education and culture is also to isolate oneself from one’s own community, in terms of both race and class. John’s return home on being evicted from the concert results in predictable tragedy as his distance from the masses becomes painfully clear even as he gets off the train and refuses to make any grand speech of homecoming. He comes back to see his familiar home with new eyes: “a little dingy station, a black crowd gaudy and dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch of mud” (195). If he is shocked by what he sees, the people’s response is equally horrified to see this “silent, cold man” (195) who “spoke an unknown tongue” (196). John realizes the extent of his alienation at every turn: “he had come to save his people, and before he had left the depot he had hurt them” (197). He also runs afoul of the white Southerners who see him as corrupted by his Northern education, and the story ends with his imminent death after his white double, John the Judge’s son, tries to rape his sister. Given that one of the clearest polemic goals of Souls is to argue for access to culture and higher education, why might Du Bois position this despairing short story towards the end of his book? Couldn’t this be seen as validating Booker T. Washington’s position that the pursuit of culture would simply make Southern blacks unfit for their own world? By the end of the story, John is so estranged from his own self that he begins to wonder what his Northern self might be doing at the very moment that he is waiting for the lynch mob, out to avenge his murder of the Judge’s son. In this way, John’s double consciousness leaves him with no agency but that of embracing his death. His education alienates him from himself, from his family, and from the black and white community of his hometown. Torn between city and village, between personal aspirations and service

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to his community, John’s story can only have a tragic ending, as Du Bois cannot find a way to mediate between these dualities without tragedy. What Du Bois cannot resolve as a writer of fiction, he resolves in his own person as the protagonist of the drama of Souls. As Rampersad observes, “The Souls of Black Folk is not a novel, but it has a major hero: the soul of W. E. B. Du Bois, his sufferings, his virtues, his gifts, offered as exemplary of the best achievement of the Afro-American people. In ­trying to expose the souls of all black folk, Du Bois bared his own soul” (88). Du Bois’s encounters throughout the book with the emblematic figures of Josie, John, and Alexander Crummell, among others, help him become the exemplary national hero of the bildungsroman, of the kind discussed by Benedict Anderson, in a manner analogous to that of such nationalist leaders as Jose Rizal, Jawaharlal Nehru, or Kwame Nkrumah.23 One of the major achievements of the book, in other words, is as a national allegory: to dramatize and produce the imagined community of a black nation by showing us Du Bois’s journey, allegorical of the Talented Tenth, to embracing community with the black folk he writes about. As Rampersad notes, Du Bois’s use of the word “folk” is “primarily a political one and should be understood as interchangeable with the more daring term ‘nation,’ which he had used to describe Afro-America in his ‘Conservation of Races’ address in 1897” (74). By the end of Souls, the divisions between the intellectual and the masses are bridged as both are shown to reside behind the veil. Du Bois discovers that it is the masses who emblematize the ideal of romance: for the black race, for the American nation, and for humanity as a whole. In finding romance to be inherent in the masses, not alien to them, Du Bois positions modernity, whiteness, and capitalism as inadequate means to give voice to their aspirations, to preserve their beauty, and to appreciate their nobility. Romance, therefore, provides the glue for a national imagined community of black folk. By making himself an allegorical figure, Du Bois blurs the gap between the public and the private realm, moving back and forth across the color line, behind the veil and out again, to be able to do two things at once: to speak to those outside the veil and translate the spirit of those within who cannot articulate their souls themselves, and at the same time, to claim to be at one with these inarticulate souls, “flesh of their flesh.” Clearly, Du Bois embodies the dilemma of the colonial or native intellectual that has been theorized by such anti-colonial theorists as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi. It is equally clear that Du Bois’s fashioning of “black folk” into a nation relies on imagination in the way that Anderson has suggested for state-based nationalisms. But if, as

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Du Bois claims, blacks are “a nation without a polity, nationals without citizenship,” then Anderson’s model of print culture, the realist novel, and standardized languages doesn’t quite fit in this context.24 Consequently, Du Bois has to imagine a community in Souls not by a realist mirroring of the nation’s linear progress through calendrical time, but rather by the intellectual’s ability to pierce the veil of the real, and go beyond the limited view of the “car-window sociologist” to recognize the teeming life within the soul and to hear the voices of the past of slavery made present in the sorrow songs. He will do this in two ways, first by transposing his notion of soul on to geography, and second by embodying his ideas in the slave songs. In this way, both land and music are sites of history, of romanticized labor, and emblems not only of what it means to be citizens of the nation, but also of the world, heralding a new humanism. We need only remind ourselves of his famous critique of Washington to realize the political stakes of his arguments, as the political life of African-Americans relies on the aesthetic resonance of his claims. Rather than being a scholarly construct alone, then, Du Bois offers a pragmatic (albeit highly idealized) one as well. If African-Americans comprise a nation, the heart and soul of this nation is in the South. To narrate this nation, Du Bois turns to the Black Belt of Georgia. He writes, “we seldom study the condition of the Negro today honestly and carefully . . . how little we really know of these millions, – of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses . . . Today, then, my reader, let us turn our faces to the Black Belt of Georgia and seek simply to know the condition of the black farm-laborers of one county there” (112–113). Starting out with such a persona of a tourist guide, Du Bois quickly realizes that the facts he wishes to oppose to racist myth are an inadequate guide. All that the numbers add up to is an admission that the county’s black population is indeed “poor and ignorant” (117). Accordingly, in the very next breath, Du Bois goes back on his call for details: “It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul . . . even as you and I” (118). It is only the “car-window sociologist” (126), Du Bois insists, who would see these masses as “shiftless” or lazy and fail to see their “bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world” (132). In other words, even as Du Bois the sociologist explains the economics of the “modern serfdom” of the South (124) which links town and country in a great migration, Du

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Bois the seer lifts the veil to unravel the inherent romance of the Black Belt, as he remakes it into “the Egypt of the Confederacy.” Du Bois represents the Black Belt in a manner reminiscent of Hopkins’s representation of Africa. The South is a mysterious place that cannot articulate its own history; it needs a narrator or an interpreter as it remains a land “outside of written history and outside of printed law” (147). The Black Belt is “that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond” (93). A land rich with history but with no future, the South seems to be outside of modernity. Even as the North promises mobility and access to culture, the South is both rooted and static. In this way, as we see Du Bois going into Dougherty Country, Georgia – which stands in for the entire South – we see him going into the heart of darkness, so to speak. Du Bois is our guide, as he lets us in behind the veil to uncover the secrets, to understand which the reader “must come into the ‘Jim Crow Car’” (93). Georgia turns out to be a land with “little beauty” with “scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty” (99). Even though all that is visible to the sociologist’s eye is a world of neglect and want, full of swamps and abandoned cabins, Du Bois’s imagination endows it with both history and grandeur, as it becomes not a thing apart from the nation, but pregnant with its history. The “historic ground” (91) of Georgia speaks to Du Bois’s imagination as he quickly displaces the present of the scene for its more glorious (even if violent) past. He passes over the neglect and focuses on the area’s natural grandeur, “marvelous in its weird savage splendor” (100). The trees seem like a “cathedral,” and “as I crossed, I seemed to see again that fierce tragedy of seventy years ago” – the war between native Americans and white men. In this way, time can be reversed and he can see in the landscape the “romantic past” of the place (108). Nature itself is marked by this history of bloodshed as Du Bois muses that “small wonder the wood is red” (101). Du Bois paints this landscape as mythic as he writes, “I could imagine the place under some weird spell, and was half-minded to search out the princess” (99). The South appears as a blank canvas for him: “How curious a land is this, – how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia. . . . men once called it the Egypt of the Confederacy” (100). There are no fences or civilization here, the jungle is untamed and still possesses a naked grandeur. Since time has stopped, he can still see in the landscape the battle of a hundred years ago, recalling first native Americans and then the black slaves who

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are the true inheritors of this sacred ground. By rewriting history as myth, fable, and fairy tale, Du Bois places slavery in the distant past rather than as a part of the modern world. Africa itself emerges in a similar way in Souls. As a mythic counterpart to the complex modernity of the New World, Du Bois uses Africa to invest the uplift project with moral fervor and meaning as he transforms the savage to a racial sublime. To do so, Africa appears coded, veiled, or displaced, and cannot materialize as a player in the modern world, as Du Bois’s representation becomes symptomatic of a historical contradiction that attends all African-American representations in this era. How might one invoke Africa to gain legitimacy for the black race when Africa itself was widely seen as barbaric and primitive? To solve this dilemma, Du Bois chooses to represent Africa primarily as a sign of loss – of home, language, faith, tradition, and heritage. It comes into view fleetingly as a shadow, a barely remembered melody, or a forgotten faith. Because Du Bois is not interested in claiming Africa as homeland, we only see Africa as an absence. Any return to Africa can only be thought of as an exile, as we see in Du Bois’s allegorical elegy for Alexander Crummell, or in his description of the changing religious faith of African-Americans. In “Of Alexander Crummell” Du Bois makes Crummell representative of nineteenth-century black leadership facing the temptations of hate, despair, and doubt. Remarkably, Du Bois repositions the well-known black nationalist leader, a robust advocate of black emigration to Africa, into a spiritual forefather rather than a political guide.25 Du Bois regards Crummell’s time in Africa as an exile, not a return home to a black nation, calling it a “weird pilgrimage” (184). Further, Du Bois writes of Crummell’s return to the United States as a homecoming: “Out of the temptation of Hate, and burned by the fire of Despair, triumphant over Doubt, and steeled by Sacrifice against Humiliation, he turned at last home across the waters, humble and strong, gentle and determined” (180). In this “history of a human heart” (176), Du Bois’s allegorical writing positions Crummell’s nationalist plans for a black nation as a more vaguely defined spiritual quest, a “world-wandering of a soul in search of itself” (184), a search that will only find a destination at home in the United States. In a similar vein, in “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” Du Bois discusses the relationship of African-American religion and African sociality. Again, he emphasizes the American setting of African-American religion and does not look to Africa as the source of these distinct practices. He concedes that the Negro church as an institution developed out of the African social unit of organization, “the polygamous clan life under the

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headship of the chief and the potent influence of the priest” (159). But as he traces the development of the Negro preacher, Du Bois shows the preacher to be equally constituted by plantation slavery as by African origins as part of a “terrific social revolution” rather than through a chain of continuity (159). He further claims that since the Negro church antedates the Negro home, it expresses “the inner ethical life of a people” most clearly. For Du Bois, the “transplanted African” is far removed from a rational world view: “Endowed with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of strange influences,– of Good to be implored, of Evil to be propitiated” (161). This heathen approach influences slave revolts, superstitious rituals, and religious practices and becomes converted slowly to Christianity, both contributing to a “deep religious fatalism” (162). For Du Bois, the abolitionist impulse provides the spark for a different religious and ethical framework, one in which the fight for freedom itself becomes the deepest expression of spirituality. All the confusion we see comes from the “double life” of the Negro – “swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling with the eddies of the fifteenth century” (164). Rather than presenting a religious faith as a source of strength, Du Bois is more interested in “the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great night a new religious ideal” (168). In doing so, Du Bois carefully lays bare the cost of the deracination from Africa, the pain and suffering caused by the loss of an African way of life, and the struggle to develop an ethical framework while being assaulted by slavery and segregation. Hopkins’s undiscovered country, thus becomes in Du Bois’s hands a symbolic consciousness of the past, available mostly as loss in the New World, yet encompassing the forgotten history of slavery, Josie’s labor and her pathos, John’s aspirations and his blocked horizons. At no point does Du Bois turn away from claiming African-Americans as the true representatives of the nation. At the beginning of the book, he writes, “there are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African” (11–12). The “spiritual striving” that Du Bois attempts to illuminate characterizes not one identity, but is borne in the name of “an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers, and in the name of human opportunity” (12). As he closes the book, Du Bois turns to the sorrow songs as

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the cultural practice that distills the real meaning of blackness. He writes, “Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They come out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine” (204). Starting off his concluding chapter with this emphatic embrace of community, Du Bois makes it clear that his journey has shown to him that he is indeed “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh” of those that dwell beneath the veil (2). Moreover, it has qualified him to be their representative. Not only are his initial concerns about the gap between his intellectual aspirations and the real needs of the masses put to rest, but he finds romance at the core of the black experience, represented most movingly by the sorrow songs. These songs are “full of the voices of my brothers and sister, full of the voices of the past” (205). Since the book has been a nation-building exercise, the nation’s soul is now ready to speak both culturally and politically and to make its demands heard. The slave song stands “not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side [of] the seas” (205). It is “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people” (205). As the “siftings of centuries,” the slave songs signal a time which has sedimented memory rather than destroying it, marking a location where African retentions coexist gracefully with New World cultural syncretisms (207). It is through these songs that blacks can articulate racial and regional particularity, represent their American nationality, and speak to broader universal concerns, as a pathway to “the ideal of human brotherhood” (11). In this way, the songs are a dual allegory, of geography as well as of aesthetics and epistemology. They combine matter and spirit, the mundane and the sublime, and the local and the universal, as Du Bois embeds race at the heart of what it means to be American, and what it means to be human. Rather than emerging from racial particularity as Gilroy argues, Du Bois theorizes race with such intensity, passion, and rhetorical brilliance that it can stage a new meaning of being human. Ultimately it is race that becomes a principle that can recreate a new humanism. Earlier in the book, looking outward to the world opened up by a cosmopolitan embrace of culture, Du Bois had claimed access to classic works of Western civilization: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?” (90). By the end of the book, it is the slave songs that embody the ideals of true universalism, humanism,

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and civilization. Du Bois thus lays out the unique destiny of AfricanAmericans – ex-centric to the nation but also at the core of its ideals, the truest embodiment of its highest aspirations. African-Americans can now represent their place of birth as easily as they can aspire to be citizens of the world with a claim to global leadership, based on moral suffering and transcendence. “Fac t or fa nc y ?”:  i m pe r i a l dr e a m s i n da r k pr i nc e s s: a rom a nc e Published in 1928 at the height of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, Dark Princess seems to be curiously out of step with other black fiction of the era. For Alain Locke, the guiding spirit of the Renaissance, the search for a new form was key to a “racial awakening” that would take AfricanAmericans “from medieval America to modern.” In 1925, Locke highlighted the iconoclastic nature of this awakening, declaring that “Negro life . . . is finding a new soul. There is a fresh spiritual and cultural focusing. . . . There is a renewed race spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart.”26 To capture the spirit of the race in its artistic production Locke called for a move away from dialect verse and from the idealized representations favored by the old Negro, from the domestic fiction of Hopkins and others, and from uplift in a bourgeois vein. The writers of the Renaissance wanted aesthetic freedom above all, in order to express their energy and sexuality without the fear of creating unflattering portraits of blackness. Chafing against what they saw as the bourgeois hesitation of the old guard, they were interested in experimenting with literary form in order to declare the death of the old Negro and the birth of the new. Du Bois, credited for creating “what never existed before, a Negro intelligentsia,” may not have been on the same page as other writers of the era, but he was not outside of the desires that animated the Renaissance, as his novel was intended both as a rebuke to the Renaissance and as a model.27 Where the Renaissance chose urban realism to declare the new modern black subject, Du Bois turned to romance to construct a more ambivalent and exotic black hero in Dark Princess. Unhappy with the gritty realism of novels like Nigger Heaven and Home to Harlem, Du Bois set out to exemplify a new model for black fiction, wanting to bring back the high-mindedness that he felt the movement lacked. His task was made more difficult by the fact that by 1928, his formerly undisputed position as the leader of African-American thought was under direct threat. Even as the Renaissance was certainly influenced, and perhaps made possible, by

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Du Bois’s efforts, it also proved deeply discomfiting to him, as he started being displaced by newer, more militant leaders, who asserted their independence from the prescriptions of The Crisis which they viewed as oldfashioned and not nearly strident enough. Du Bois’s corresponding antipathy to several prominent Harlem Renaissance artists is well known. Apart from his displeasure with the frank sexuality of the movement, Du Bois also felt that the success of the movement could be explained by its fundamental inauthenticity. In other words, he felt that the new kind of writing was doing no great service to the race precisely because it wasn’t true to life. The Renaissance failed, Du Bois argued, “because it was a transplanted and exotic thing. It was a literature written for the benefit of white people and at the behest of white readers, and starting out privately from the white point of view. It never had a real Negro constituency and it did not grow out of the inmost heart and frank experience of Negroes; on such an artificial basis no real literature can grow.”28 His own novel would presumably avoid such failure and be more authentically connected to the inmost heart of AfricanAmericans. In this way, his aesthetic criteria demand authenticity as a primary feature. This might seem surprising or at least inconsistent when we turn to Dark Princess, which seems at first glance both “transplanted” and “exotic” rather than a straightforward representation of hard-working, humble, and upright black folk. To understand Du Bois’s literary project in Dark Princess, it is necessary to realize that he holds on firmly to seemingly contradictory ­ideals – he asks for true-to-life representations at the same time that he favors idealized portraits of blackness. These two concerns merge in his use of romance, as his call for realism is not the same as that of naturalist writers but rather a call to unveil the simple dignity of humble folk. We see some of these issues at play in Du Bois’s rendering of Josie and of the slave songs in Souls. At the core of Du Bois’s aesthetic principles is the belief that rather than being an escape from racial matters, romance is the best way to engage with the concerns of racial realism. Resolving the seeming dilemma of romance appearing as an escape from realism, Du Bois suggests that realist representations of blackness will themselves be full of romance. In other words, he argues that the simple and humble life of ordinary blacks is full of the romance that characterizes the most sublime feelings or emotions. As we saw in the previous chapter, Hopkins called on black intellectuals to “faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history.”29 The central thrust of Du Bois’s rethinking of romance is also

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that romance is to be found in the daily struggles of black folk. As Frances Harper puts it, “there are scattered among us materials for mournful tragedies and mirth-provoking comedies, which some hand may yet bring into the literature of the country, glowing with the fervor of the tropics and enriched by the luxuriance of the Orient, and thus add to the solution of our unsolved American problem.”30 Du Bois often lamented that young black artists focused on low black life instead of writing about decent, hard-working Negroes in their own families. He also rejected idealized portraits of black life as obviously untrue.31 Looking for a form that escaped both these extremes, he attempted a literary hybrid. Du Bois clarifies this seemingly contradictory view of art and politics in his well-known essay, “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926). Though the essay has become famous as a thundering statement against art for art’s sake and as an unequivocal endorsement of didactic art alone, when we look at the multi-layered argument Du Bois makes, we get closer to the kind of aesthetic vision that interests him, a vision that helps explain the seeming contradictions of Dark Princess – its equally intense investment in aesthetics and politics. In “Criteria,” Du Bois begins with the same question that haunts both Souls and Dark Princess: “What have we who are slaves and black to do with Art?” Explaining that debates about art are integral to the “great fight” of uplift, Du Bois places this question at the heart of black participation in the nation. Of course, he admits, “we want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens.” But, he goes on to ask, “do we want simply to be Americans?” Since African-Americans have second sight, according to Du Bois, they have “flashes” of “clairvoyance” which allow them to “see America in a way that white Americans can not.”32 To explain his critique of white America, Du Bois recalls learning Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” in high school and going to see the lake later in life. His appreciation of “the soft ripple of romance on the waters” and “the cadence of that poetry of my youth” is rudely interrupted by a group of American tourists, who are oblivious to the “enchantment of the Scottish border.” In contrast to the quiet beauty of the setting, shared equally by Du Bois and the “quiet home folk,” the Americans bring with them both “incoherent” noise and rude activity. Du Bois delivers his indictment: “their hearts had no conception of the beauty which pervaded this holy place” (18). This lack of aesthetic appreciation points to a deeper lack of what Du Bois calls soul or spirit and he urges black Americans to not let go of this to become like other Americans. They can then “restore to men the glory of sunsets and the peace of quiet sleep.” For Du Bois, black Americans are uniquely

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suited for this task because “we have within us as a race new stirrings; stirrings of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be; as though in this morning of group life we had awakened from some sleep that at once dimly mourns the past and dreams a splendid future; and there has come the conviction that the Youth that is here today, the Negro Youth, is a different kind of Youth, because in some new way it bears this mighty prophecy on its breast, with a new realization of itself, with new determination for all mankind” (19). Insofar as Du Bois emphasizes the new stirrings of the race, he is in harmony with the New Negro Renaissance. But rather than celebrating the new urban reality of black life, Du Bois wishes to restore to it something from the ancient past which may get lost in the search for novelty. Du Bois insists that for these “new stirrings” to be realized artists need to look to their past, which has long been only a source of shame. Turning to the past will involve understanding the inherent romance of black ­history: “We thought nothing could come out of that past which we wanted to remember; which we wanted to hand down to our children. Suddenly, this same past is taking on form, color and reality, and in a half shame-faced way we are beginning to be proud of it. We are remembering that the romance of the world did not die and lie forgotten in the Middle Ages; that if you want romance to deal with you must have it here and now and in your own hands” (19). For Du Bois, the suicide of a darkskinned daughter who is not allowed to attend the wedding of her lightskinned sister amounts to “Greek tragedy” while the day-to-day life under the color line in the South or the conquest of German East Africa is full of the grandeur and suffering of classical romances. Du Bois writes, “Such is the true and stirring stuff of which Romance is born and from this stuff come the stirrings of men who are beginning to remember that this kind of material is theirs; and this vital life of their own kind is beckoning them on” (20). If black artists do not take on this task, Du Bois urges, racist representations of “Uncle Toms, Topsies, good ‘darkies’ and clowns” will continue to dominate the American literary scene (21). The project of recovering the lost history, or a usable past, then, is not simply a question of reconstructing the events of the past, but rather of finding the romance inherent in that past, and narrating the history with its “fire and romance” intact. To fulfill this “bounden duty” of “this great work of the creation of Beauty,” black artists need to seek Truth and Goodness. For Du Bois, one needs to seek such truth as the “handmaiden of imagination” rather than as a “scientist seeking truth” and goodness not as an “ethical sanction” but as a means of “gaining sympathy and human interest” (22). These

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definitions enable him to simultaneously ask for didactic art and artistic freedom. Both sides of the debate appear to him as one – to represent the innate stirrings of the black heart will, he insists, automatically reveal simplicity, humility, and spirituality. Du Bois’s essay carefully stratifies the needs and expectations of a white and black public, the aspirations of black artists, their duty to the mass of black folk, their entrapment within structures of white patronage, and their submission to the high-handed judgement of publishers. But whenever Du Bois lays down the basic criteria for “Negro art” – the pursuit of truth and beauty, the expression of soul – he collapses all distinctions between black artists, readers, and those people the artists claim to represent. Thus he writes “it is the bounden duty of black America to begin the great work of the creation of Beauty” collectively (22). The black public has to give up its narrow morality and simplistic requests for positive representations, and black artists have to realize the racist expect­ations of white publishers, patrons, and readers, and stay faithful at once to their own vision and the shared aspirations of the race. Du Bois assumes no distinction between the two – the artists and the masses – and exhorts both parties from his position as dean of African-American culture and politics, to work for uplift together, because, he writes, “until the art of the black folk compels recognition they will not be rated as human” (23). For Rampersad, Du Bois’s fundamental position on art and politics can be summed up by looking at his political goals:  “Unlike Jefferson, Du Bois had no national constituency except in his imagination. . . . For the black philosopher who sought to govern, dreams were the only reality, and romance was the most compelling mode of expression” (218). Dark Princess is Du Bois’s most fully realized work that dramatizes not only his aesthetic principles, but also his insistence that art and politics not only inform each other, but are in fact interchangeable. Early on in Dark Princess, Du Bois fictionalizes his theory of “Negro art.” The Talented Tenth hero, Matthew, takes a young minister from Atlanta around New York City. Feeling like “a man out of a strait-jacket” (62) the minister wishes to enjoy the pleasures of the city by sampling its restaurants, theater, and cabaret. Matthew educates the minister, who is swept away by the glamor of the city, explaining to him that such GildedAge pleasures rely on racism within and colonialism abroad, and all these pleasures come as a result of “starvation and toil of our dark fellows” (64). The minister begins to understand but it is only when he watches the play that the significance of Matthew’s words dawns on him. The play concerns a wealthy woman, her husband, and her lover. The minister responds: “why

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can’t they try other themes – ours for instance; our search for dinner and our reasons for the first balcony. Good dinner and good seats – but with subtle touches, hesitancies, gropings, and refusals that would be interesting; and that woman wasn’t interesting” (64). Echoing Du Bois’s widely circulated manifestos on black art, the minister suggests that romance of everyday life is the proper subject of art. Here, romance is not exotic or unfamiliar, rather it can deliver the simplicity, dignity, and basic humanity of African-Americans. But when we turn to the rest of the novel, the minister’s call for ordinary topics is nowhere to be found as we follow the convoluted journey of Matthew Towns and Princess Kautilya to realize their romance at the same time that they plot world revolution. By the time we come to the novel’s conclusion with the birth of their child and a pageant of “a score of men clothed in white with shining swords,” we are in a wholly different world (310). Clearly, the extravagance of the concluding masque of Matthew and the princess’s wedding has almost nothing to do with the search for good seats in New York. To understand how we move from the call for simplicity to the pageantry of this masque, it is necessary to follow the novel’s turns through – and disappointment with – several paths of uplift. These paths gradually unfold as we see Matthew reinventing himself – from a farm boy in Virginia to a medical student at the University of Manhattan, a flâneur in Europe, a Pullman porter, a jailbird, a Chicago politician, a laborer on a subway, and finally, in the most startling incarnation of all, the husband of Princess Kautilya and father to the royal heir of Bwodpur. As Matthew rejects each political option  – uplift, unionization, and participation in the democratic machine – Du Bois’s far-reaching critique of the black middle class crystallizes. The Talented Tenth are replaced by a Third World aristocracy as the saviors of the race. To counteract its disenchantment with the black middle class, the novel increasingly inflates its investment in the romance between Matthew and the princess. By the end of the novel, Du Bois associates their union not only with the glamor of darker aristocrats but also with the simple dignity of Matthew’s long-suffering mother in Virginia. The novel’s movement between these spatial poles – from Berlin to Chicago to India to Virginia  – is coded in its formal shifts between realism and romance. The novel constructs the tension between romance and realism by opposing the domestic and the global, the realist and the visionary, as the romance of the erotic, spiritual, and political union of Matthew and the princess offsets the realism of the world of Jim Crow America.

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In this way, the novel’s formal shifts neatly map on to its politics, as it uses a realist mode for national questions, and the mode of romance for transnational ones. Accordingly, it presents national issues in local, historicized ways, and transnational ones as outside of time and history. The detailed realist sections of the novel elaborate upon the possibilities of unionization, the significance of a strike by Pullman porters, the potential of political violence as a weapon against lynching, and of black participation in the democratic political machine. The novel’s realist strain constructs African-Americans as a distinct nation within a nation, a selfcontained imagined community of the kind described by Anderson. But the specificity that accompanies the portrayal of US racial issues eludes the novel when it turns to the darker world, where it deploys a framework of romance for its portrayal of visionary anti-imperialism in a global context. Romance can be the means to make visible utopian longings and a sense of an alternative historical rhythm, as Fredric Jameson has suggested, but only as a way of managing a historical contradiction.33 In Dark Princess, the genre of romance enables a powerful fantasy of a dark empire that overthrows white supremacy and a diasporic vision of AfroAsian unity, one that rather than functioning as an emblem of hybridity or Third World politics, recirculates common nineteenth-century motifs of black messianic thought. Throughout the novel Du Bois places the genre of romance in dialectical tension with the genre of realism, staging this debate in the psyche of Matthew Towns, in the figure of the dark princess, and in debates over the destiny of the African-American Talented Tenth. Each mode is scrupulously rendered, the realist sections detailed in a vein of documentary specificity, the romance ones in fanciful dialogue, miraculous coincidences, and majestic pageants. The novel draws its narrative energy from the friction between the two modes, and remains compelling precisely because of its unstable balance. A mixture of two antagonistic modes, the novel is thus produced by the generic contradictions which index the contrary pulls of what Gilroy calls the politics of fulfillment and the politics of transfiguration in The Black Atlantic. The politics of fulfillment are inside Western modernity, characterized by demands that the modern West live up to its political rhetoric. In contrast, the politics of transfiguration are outside the epistemic framework of the modern West, speaking an unspeakable truth that is non-discursive, performative, and utopian: such truth transcends modernity and points out its fundamental contradictions. Reading the novel in the light of this critical framework leads to questions about the politics of form that comprise it. That is to say, does the choice of romance

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present Du Bois with the tools to imagine an alternative modernity, one that is outside the constraints of nation or race-based discourses? Or, does romance foreclose a resolution of the issues raised in the realist representation of racism? In some ways, it would be easy to see the novel as Du Bois’s wish­fulfilling fantasy. The novel begins with Matthew’s rapid progress up from a farm in Virginia to medical school in New York, when a Southern dean ends his career with a racial taunt: “Do you think white women patients are going to have a nigger doctor delivering their babies?” (4). The novel concludes with the birth of Matthew’s child with the princess, a child destined to lead a glorious dark empire that will end Anglo-Saxon hegemony. It is worth noting as well that the novel reached its public just as Du Bois was preparing a wedding spectacle of his own, the grand occasion of the marriage of his daughter Yolande with the poet, Countee Cullen. Souls had chronicled the death of his son, and David Levering Lewis suggests that the novel’s end, hinging as it does on the birth of a male child, is symptomatic of Du Bois’s personal desire for a male heir. In “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” Du Bois imagines history turning into destiny as his past and future come together in his infant son: I “saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward through the ages through the newer strength of his; saw the dream of my black fathers stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world; heard in his baby voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise within the Veil” (171). Certainly, the novel exhibits several forms of possible fulfillment; for instance it features a caricature of Marcus Garvey as a bombastic and ineffectual Perigua and several silent and gendered objects of pathos  – the tender and selfless prostitute, the long-suffering Southern mother, and the adoring princess. But with Du Bois, the personal is always allegorical as well. Just as his autobiographies function as race history, the novel is also more than a personal saga, offering a biography of the race and its political futures. The novel’s most allegorically laden aspect  – the relation between Matthew and the princess – is also the one most likely to be a personal fantasy.34 Their first meeting is full of exotic glamor and offers a respite from the crass materialism of the United States. Feeling like a “man outcast in his own native land” Matthew leaves the United States for Germany, only to despair as he realizes the power of the “white leviathan” which “was the same vast, remorseless machine in Berlin as in New York” (7). The only saving grace comes with his encounter with the princess, and he is moved to action when he realizes that the woman he sees as a “wildly beautiful phantasy” looks like a “darky” or “nigger” to the white American seated

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behind him. The white stranger’s rudeness to the princess brings the two together, appropriately united by their distaste for the white world. Both view each other allegorically. Matthew sees her as the sign of a whole new world opening up for him, moving him beyond the narrow horizon of the United States. Meanwhile, she thinks of him as a representative of the lowest of the low, and sees him wholly allegorically, barely registering his identity as an individual: “it was evidently not of him, the hero, of whom she was thinking, but of him, the group, the fact, the whole drama” (15). Her empathy is instant, as is her understanding. As he pours out the story of his life, Matthew feels that her gaze “saw not him but the picture he was painting and the thing that the picture meant” (15). Once she realizes that “you American Negroes are not a mere amorphous handful. You are a nation” (16), Matthew “felt himself a man, one of those who could help build a world and guide it” (18). Their attraction always has a larger meaning in the novel; when first approached by Matthew the princess responds: “I had a curious sense of some great inner meaning to your act – some world movement” (17). Despite the instant mystical empathy between the two, the Council for Darker Races the princess belongs to harbors both racialist and imperial desires. In fact, unlike the princess (who has recently been to Russia), the members of the Council refuse to include Matthew, drawing what the novel calls “a color line within a color line” (22). The members of the Council – Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, and Arab aristocrats  – think that former slaves cannot contribute to this project of redemption, though the princess, due to her recent tour of Russia and the fortuitous meeting with Matthew, differs in this assessment of black fitness.35 The Council members believe in blood as the prime index of civilization, arguing that “always blood must tell” (23). Convinced of their “natural inborn superiority” they boast of their “millenniums of history where Europe counts her centuries.” Matthew’s burden is to persuade these aristocrats of the worthiness of the black race. At this critical juncture, he refuses to take an Afrocentric route. Instead, he challenges the idea of aristocracies of birth, and argues for democracy. He begins to respond in an Afrocentric vein – to assert the presence of “high-born blood among American Negroes” – but then, Du Bois writes, “it was as if he had faced and made a decision, as though some great voice, crying and reverberating within his soul, spoke for him and yet was him” (23). This double voice allows him to speak not only as an individual but – in a vein similar to Souls – as the spokesperson for the race, and to claim generations of black experience as his own: his slave grandfather, his father who died in jail, and his mother who “plows

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and washes for a living” (23). Asked to prove that sons of slaves can contribute to this glorious vision, Matthew admits that “we American blacks are very common people. We come out of the depths – the blood and mud of battle” (23). Refusing to stake his claim to the Council on the basis of ancient African glory, he strives to persuade the rest of the group of the value of the lowly and downtrodden, arguing that only from such suffering can true culture emerge. The Council is finally convinced of black fitness for modernity by Matthew’s stirring rendition of “Go Down Moses.” We are later told that this is the moment that the princess falls in love with him. Invoking the sorrow songs as the fusion of blood, sweat, and tears, Matthew’s vision of culture relies on the romanticization of labor, as he proves that art and culture are not the preserve of aristocracy alone. African-Americans can become the only non-aristocratic members of this Council, who are not there by right of blood or lineage but by demonstrating their power to create culture. Meanwhile, Matthew realizes that the “real talk” of the evening looks just like American racism, except neatly inverted (24). The Council members perceive yellow and brown races as superior and white workers of Europe as rabble. No black Africans are admitted, though this is 1928, and as the novel itself admits “the Congo . . . is flooding the acropolis” (20). These aristocrats believe that “the darker peoples are the best – the natural aristocracy, the makers of art, religion, philosophy, life, everything except brazen machines” (25). Matthew challenges this division, arguing that if art and culture are to be the criteria for superiority, then these can be found in “the great sodden masses of all men and even in black Africa” (25). The princess realizes with the force of a revelation that if Matthew is right and “if slaves can become men in a generation” then “it makes the world new for you and me” (34). In other words, the novel suggests that uplifting African-Americans can rejuvenate the ancient and possibly decadent splendor of Asia, and the union of the old and new worlds in this way will allow a new race to emerge that would be superior to the white race. If Matthew is disappointed by the dark aristocrats, on his return to the United States, he finds the black bourgeoisie equally lacking. Du Bois’s disenchantment with the “Negro intelligentsia” he had helped create is visible everywhere in Dark Princess, as we see that authentic romance is to be found outside black America rather than at its core. In contrast to Souls, Matthew turns to Europe and Asia for inspiration rather than to the Black Belt of the United States. Certainly, the inarticulate masses are romanticized as the novel progresses, particularly Matthew’s mother, as we will see, but the dominant note of the novel suggests that true romance

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is embodied in the princess. Matthew’s enchantment with the princess becomes the locus of the novel’s critique of black materialism, crystallized in the figure of his light-skinned, cold-blooded wife, Sara Andrews. Equally happy to “appeal to Negro race pride” (115) as she is to manipulate the Ku Klux Klan, Sara freely admits that she has “no particular scruples or conscience” (112). A wholly public figure with no interior life to speak of, Sara is most adept at the game of realpolitik and embodies the novel’s most accomplished realist. For Matthew, she signifies the death of romance in black America. The section of the novel concerned with her and their marriage, called “The Chicago Politician,” laments the “hard, cold winter” that seems to afflict bourgeois blacks, doomed to “white death in a white world” in its epigraph (109). Sara, fair enough to pass as white, personifies this white death, and offers an absolute contrast to the highly colored and romantic princess. Broken down by the racism of Jim Crow America, Matthew succumbs to the manipulations of the black bourgeoisie in Chicago. In this long section of the novel Du Bois presents a dazzling depiction of the play of ambition and power in the world of machine politics. Despite the novel’s emphasis on romance, Matthew does try to give realism a chance, as a politician in Chicago. Here, Matthew’s vision narrows down to the minutely local and particular – to nine blocks in his district, which make up a “little universe,” a “pulsing world” (127). In contrast, the global Council of Darker Peoples has incredible reach, focusing on civilizations past and yet to come, drawing ideas from all over the world, regardless of place, time, or ethnicity. His hard-headed realist work in Chicago leads Matthew to combat the princess’s vision of “freedom, emancipation, uplift  – union with all the dark and oppressed” with the simple statement, “dog eat dog is all I see” (135–136). In the end, this world of power proves unsatisfactory to Matthew: Du Bois suggests that his disenchantment is primarily aesthetic when he writes, “His revolt was against things unsuitable, ill adjusted, and in bad taste; the illogical lack of fundamental harmony; the unnecessary dirt and want – the ugliness of it all – that revolted him” (147). The novel’s critique of capitalism and corruption thus expresses itself as an aesthetic disquiet. Rather than viewing this kind of political work as an avenue for increasing political power, Du Bois presents this as the death of Matthew’s soul. As a realist, Matthew is metaphorically dead. If slavery was a form of social death, Du Bois suggests that acceding to the demands of American materialism is a form of spiritual death. Thus, to repress the romance is to repress the very essence of Matthew’s being. When the princess returns to

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his life, “he felt the surge of that old bounding, silly self that once believed and hoped and dreamed  – that dead soul, turning slowly and twisting in its grave” (141). Finally, jettisoning both realism and politics, Matthew embraces romance, and is reborn into a union with royalty, which the novel presents as a reclamation of his inner spiritual essence. Matthew’s trajectory is better understood with a closer look at the enigmatic princess, who functions almost wholly within the framework of romance. The princess is “one woman who drew and filled all his imagination, all his high romance, all the wild joys and beauty of his being” (145). As is clear from his first encounter with her, Matthew’s captivation to the romance vision comes from his rejection of Jim Crow America, as he realizes that his rejection of medicine because of racism was “distaste for the whole narrow career, the slavery of mind and body, the ethical chicanery. His sudden love for a woman far above his station was a . . . longing for action, breadth, helpfulness, great constructive deeds” (42). In this way, the novel invests his feelings for the princess with erotic, spiritual, and political weight, but this burden proves difficult to carry. Matthew is drawn to the princess and the Council not only because of the appeal of the ideal of world liberation but also because of a fascination with royal power. Her power, Du Bois suggests, comes from her royalty. Within a few sentences after first seeing her and her “singularly regal air,” Matthew muses, “How came this princess (for in some sense she must be royal) here in Berlin? . . . Never had he seen color in human flesh so regally set” (8, 19). The objects that come to stand in for her during their separation – a Turkish rug and a Chinese God – further signify voluptuous Oriental beauty.36 For Matthew, the princess emblematizes a “pageant of empire with black and brown and yellow leaders marching ahead” (151). He seems suitable for her, as, we are told, he displays “a certain inherent polish, an evidence of breeding” (203). In this way, in the romance mode of the novel, we have a merging of the quest for beauty and culture with the quest for power. The princess fuses both qualities for Matthew – beauty and culture, but also a form of power that is expressed in a world of royal privilege, secret councils, and blood fealty. As Matthew adoringly tells her: “You were born to power” (102). Prior to meeting Matthew, the princess used to dream of “the domination of the world by an ancient royal race and blood.” While Matthew teaches her a lesson in democracy, even at the end of the novel, she clearly remains invested in notions of hierarchy. She sees the Japanese baron as civilization itself, “the high goal toward which the world blindly gropes; high in birth and perfect in courtesy, filled with wide, deep, and intimate knowledge of the world’s past” (261–262). The princess also works as

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an imperial leader, rather than a nationalist one. She opposes the British as a competing imperial power, with a prior claim for governing India, since “her fathers were kings a thousand years before theirs were ragpickers” (231). She is equally opposed to the youthful nationalist movement, frightened by what she calls “a new India – fierce, young, insurgent souls irreverent toward royalty and white Europe, preaching independence and self-rule for India” (242). Her interest in African-Americans, a product not only of her meeting with Matthew but also the result of a trip to Russia (possibly echoing Du Bois’s own admiring visit) has its chilling moments. For example, weighing the option of political violence against white imperialism, she admits that “I had thought of you as a nation of outcasts to be hurled forward as shock troops, but you are a nation of modern people” (92). Most critics who view the novel as a brief for internationalism do so on the basis of the novel’s turn to India, seeing it as a precursor to the symbolic alliances forged by Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. But the novel’s representation of India remains wholly in a fantastical mode, as Du Bois situates both India and the princess firmly outside of modernity. The princess is clearly part of a global flow of ideas and politics, but also somehow stands outside of modern history. Even though she has traveled extensively in Europe, she belongs to “the forest, swamp, and desert, of the wide and struggling lands beyond the Law,” and thus cannot comprehend “the glory that is London, Paris, and Rome” (233). Moreover, contrary to his political writings of the time, Du Bois does not engage with the political and epistemic framework of imperialism in Dark Princess. While European imperialism remains a hazy figure in the novel, the idea of a dark empire fascinates it. Indeed, the princess’s vision for India is the creation of “a new empire of India, a new vast union of the darker peoples of the world” conceived with the help of visitors from Egypt, Japan, China, and Russia, who traverse an “old and secret highway of the Himalayas, hidden from the world” (246). She thinks of India as eternal, static, and passive, asserting that “Out of black India the world was born. Into the black womb of India the world shall creep to die” (227). In this way, India offers the distant safety of a glorious civilization, one with an unbroken dynasty that maintains an organic link between past and present. Moreover, Matthew’s (and indeed, the novel’s) fixation with the princess raises uneasy questions about Orientalism and about the erasure of African-American women from his vision of political revolution. Critics like Hazel Carby have charged that Du Bois’s notions of black leadership reveal a persistent masculinism and a silencing of black women as agents.37 In Dark Princess

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as well, precisely because the princess does not seem to represent a historically plausible figure of Indian anti-colonial nationalism, it is difficult to read her as a sign either of internationalism or of feminism. While Matthew claims a place for African-Americans in this transnational coalition on the basis of their suffering and culture, by the end of the novel, the criteria for inclusion change. The novel concludes with the recovery of a primordial link between Africa and Asia, renewed in the conjugal union of Matthew and the princess. The princess believes in a fundamental difference between the West and the East, between power and spirit. She aligns African-Americans with Asia and Africa and the ancient knowledge of the soul. She tells Matthew, “My home and heart is India. Your heart of hearts is Africa” (286). Instead of presenting the union of Matthew and Kautilya as a political, spiritual, erotic one oriented towards the present and the future, Du Bois suggests that this union is a recovery of a former union of Asia and Africa. When she calls Matthew Krishna (the name of a Hindu god, literally, black), Du Bois tells us, “his mind went racing back through the shadows and he whispered back, ‘Radha’” (the name of Krishna’s consort, 219). His repressed memory of a former union awakens, as past and future collapse in this conjugal union. The novel’s deeply romanticized representation of Matthew’s mother as Africa makes this even more obvious. The princess calls her an “ancient prophet of India,” and tells Matthew that “Your mother is Kali, the Black One; wife of Siva, Mother of the World!” (220–221). As the two pray together, “the sacrifice of flame and blood” becomes at once the ceremony of the princess’s fathers and that which came down to the mother from Shango of West Africa. Using the license of romance, Du Bois presents history not merely as destiny but as a recovery of a time past. The union of Matthew and Kautilya, or of Africa and Asia, is prefigured in the AfricanAmerican mother, who symbolizes ancient Afro-Asian civilization. As the two reunite in the newborn child, they image a repetition of an earlier repressed civilization whose memory can now surface, calling into play a salvational logic with a cyclical notion of history, suggesting that decline will be followed by redemption. In this way, Du Bois reiterates Afrocentric notions which depend on ideas of providential time and cyclical notions of history, entailing a recursive temporality of ancient glory, present decline, and future redemption. In other words, rather than articulating black modernity, Du Bois’s diasporic turn in Dark Princess seems to rely on a fundamentally anti-modern logic. Du Bois closes the novel with a postscript where he thanks the “Queen of Faerie” for lending him “that rich and colored gossamer of dream” to

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line his “heavy flesh of fact” and begs her to answer the question that the novel fails to resolve: “Which is really Truth – Fact or Fancy? The Dream of the Spirit or the Pain of the Bone?” (312). Rather than keeping such indeterminacy between fact and fancy alive, however, the final section of the novel clearly signals the end of realism and the victory of romance, as the messianic masque that ends the novel makes little concession to the dictates of verisimilitude. This leaves several questions raised in the realist section unanswered. In other words, Du Bois’s turn to romance in Dark Princess enables him to articulate the politics of transfiguration, but leaves him without the means to resolve the questions of the politics of fulfillment. The question of race struggle in the US is left hanging as the novel offers no resolution of the various issues it has raised. Turning back in time to a pre-modern Afro-Asian civilization, rather than looking forward to a future coalition of the darker races of the world, the logic of the genre of romance recuperates nostalgia rather than utopia.38 Apart from a vague suggestion that Matthew needs to return to his roots in Virginia, the urban politics elaborated with such urgency and eloquence throughout the novel remain unsettled and uncertain. If indeed the concluding masque with the birth of the male child is an image of hybridity as Gilroy claims, rather than a cultural notion of hybridity, the inter-racial union connotes a biological one, as the rule of monarchy is preserved through the creation of a royal male child. The concluding masque provides imperial pageantry, and cements the right of Matthew to be the leader of the darker world by virtue of association with royal blood. Du Bois presents the union of royalty and slavery in the birth of the child in the language of prophecy and vision, set outside modern time. Consequently, the temporality of his diasporic vision is recursive rather than progressive, as he collapses differences of time and space in order to imagine the revival of an archaic union between Asia and Africa. The novel makes no attempt to synthesize the oppositions it has so painstakingly created. In this way, just like Of One Blood, no real future emerges at the end of Dark Princess. The concluding masque predicts the rise of the messiah – the Jesus-Buddha child, who will presumably go on to rule the princess’s tiny kingdom and somehow bring about global revolution and the end of white dominance. But this prophecy of a dark empire seems to have little to do with the agrarian future imagined by the princess at one point: this is the only moment in the novel where some kind of a synthesis of the local and global is imagined, and critics have made much of the imaginative geography of this vision. In one of many letters to the princess, Matthew tries to argue for the relevance of his work in

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Chicago: “I agree that America is the place for my work, and if America, then Chicago; for Chicago is the epitome of America. . . . Chicago is the American world and the modern world, and the worst of it” (284). To ­create a new civilization, Matthew argues, “the center of this fight must be America, because in America is the center of the world’s sin” (285). The princess disagrees as her home will always be in Asia and Africa, outside the grip of Europe and America. For Matthew she envisions a place in the struggle not in Chicago or New York, but in Virginia: “Here in Virginia you are at the edge of a black world. The Black belt of the Congo, the Nile, and the Ganges reaches by way of Guiana, Haiti, and Jamaica, like a red arrow, up into the heart of white America. Thus I see a mighty synthesis: you can work in Africa and Asia right here in America if you work in the Black Belt” (286). But the novel doesn’t do the work to make this kind of synthesis visible or even imaginable. We find a very different landscape of the South from that outlined in Souls. There is no Josie here to lend poignancy and tragedy to the inevitable march of progress, no John caught between the narrow confines of Jim Crow and the horizons opened up by his education in the North, and there aren’t even the sorrow songs, sedimenting the memory of capture from Africa, slavery, and life in the New World. The Black Belt we see here is curiously shorn of the people and the history that had given it such dense meaning in Souls and is no longer “the Egypt of the Confederacy.” Readers might well be tempted to agree with Matthew’s wry comment in one of his earlier letters to the princess: “I wish I could see the solution of world misery in a little Virginia cottage with vines and flowers” (284). As the novel rolls towards its majestic end, we learn that the union of the two can be realized only with the birth of a male child, who can provide the royal blood necessary to inaugurate the new dark empire. The novel’s concluding invocation to the “Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds” (311) leaves no room for the urban American world and gives us no clear sign of where Matthew will live and work.39 In so doing, Du Bois’s romance draws upon the language of the rise and fall of civilizations, the existence of distinct racial types, and the glory of an ancient non-Western civilization that can once again lead to the decline of the West. The novel’s uneasy articulation of an internationalist conception of vaguely defined socialism cannot compete with the rhetorical power of the messianic pageant that concludes the novel, revealing in these fault lines what the genre of romance is being asked to do. Meanwhile, such a magical resolution represses other questions, attempting to foreclose the contradictions opened up by the eclectic form. Even if we see the novel as

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staging the limits of realism and modernity for ways of imagining change, the questions broached in the long realist sections of the novel continue to linger. The local and the global simply do not meet in the novel, making it impossible for us to assimilate it to contemporary definitions of diaspora or hybridity. Ultimately suggesting a more complex dialectic, the novel’s shifts in genre indicate uneasy and equivocal impulses towards nationalism and transnationalism, shifts which make it necessary for us to conceptualize such discourses in more supple and incommensurable ways. To read the novel as a template for transnational or black Atlantic politics, then, is to ignore or suppress its altogether more difficult and varied stakes and stances. The novel is indeed productive for our theorizing, insofar as it graphically attests to the fact that the space of domestic racial politics cannot be resolved by a turn to the transnational, especially if the domestic space is historicized while the transnational one is rendered fantastical. In the previous chapter, we saw that Hopkins transports her African-American characters to Africa in order to resolve their conflicts of mixed-race identity in a world subject to the law of “one-drop” politics, and ends up instrumentalizing Africa at the same time that the question of race mixture becomes ever more incoherent. In Dark Princess, Du Bois brings the Third World aristocracy to the United States to manage his disappointment with racial uplift and the Talented Tenth. Neither ploy succeeds in articulating race to empire, because as Du Bois himself shows in Souls, a claim to the nation involves both a critique from a transnational vantage point that can highlight the failures of democracy, but also an immanent demand that the nation live up to its promises. The national and the transnational have to be maintained in constant, irresolvable tension, each straining against the other, revealing the other’s blind spots, not one offering a resolution for the other. A f r ic a f or t h e A f r ic a ns:  Du B oi s, M a rc us G a r v e y, a n d t h e pe r i l s of pa n-A f r ic a n i s m By theorizing diaspora as a transhistorical consciousness rather than a Third Worldist coalition, Dark Princess recirculates Ethiopianist fantasies of redemption and black power similar to the ones outlined in the previous chapter. The novel surfaces the undiscovered country as an archaic memory of an Afro-Asian empire of the past, emblematized by the erotic, spiritual, and political union of Matthew and the princess. This is not simply to say, as Anthony Appiah does, that Du Bois’s thinking remains trapped within nineteenth-century constructions of race

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and nation.40 The point, rather, is to differentiate between a notion of diaspora based on culture and the political concept of black internationalism. Du Bois’s involvement in several pan-African conferences and his journalistic writings on Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean testify to his importance to any theory of black internationalism, but his fictional work gives us something other than a blueprint for such internationalist practice. To read his utopian aesthetic vision as something other than a political manifesto, we need to pick up on the cues he so painstakingly provides in presenting the novel as a romance. Reading Dark Princess as reflecting historical events or political currents would involve overlooking its fastidious scaffolding of romance. Just as the princess believes that her meeting with Matthew portends a greater “world movement” the novel also reaches towards a larger meaning, perhaps one that it cannot quite articulate fully (17). In recovering a pre-existing alliance between Africa and Asia as the seed of the vision of the rule of the darker races, Du Bois suppresses the notion of historical time and that of change, as linear, developmental time does not provide an adequate analogue for the global vision he imagines. That is why we cannot ask his vision of diaspora to do the work we want it to in the present moment, almost a century later, not only because we need to situate his vision in its historical moment but because his vision is fundamentally antagonistic to history and time. Du Bois’s nostalgic vision of transnationalism gives us a window into a difficult utopian project, one that critiques both racism and imperialism, but does not develop an anti-imperial politics of its own. His fantasy is itself produced by the racist order it is intended to combat, and as such, assimilates common ideas of imperial power and hierarchy. That is to say, Du Bois’s articulation of a global anti-imperialist alliance of darker peoples paradoxically ends up relying on imperial structures of nostalgia for a primordial past, one that can be located prior to the complexity of modernity. In so doing, the novel reveals the fault lines between concepts of black internationalism and those of black diaspora, making visible differences and schisms that are best left open rather than glossed over. Reading for Du Bois’s aesthetic construction of diaspora may then return us more fully to his politics, with greater subtlety and nuance, as we refuse to follow him in his collapse of differences between realism and romance, the domestic and the transnational, the rational and the sublime, and instead inhabit and stretch to the breaking point these oppositions to come up with a more complex theorization of the time and space of diaspora. Aspirations of anti-colonial, anti-racist alliances, broadly Marxist in orientation look

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very different from diasporic dreams of recovering a lost homeland, giving us a different telos from that of internationalism. To suggest that Du Bois’s vision of diaspora is fundamentally structured by his racial romanticism rather than his internationalism is not to invalidate his political insights. Rather it is to restore historical integrity to his vision instead of making him conform to current theoretical fashions. Any history of black diasporic thought has to reckon with its romantic conceptions of Africa. When Du Bois uses culture to argue against Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta compromise, he provides a model for our own conceptions of culture, but when culture becomes a euphemism for racial essentialism it ceases to be a panacea. Gilroy is right in showing the ways in which Du Bois challenges American racism by exploring the relative freedom accorded to him in his travels in Europe. But Gilroy stops short of explaining how we might read Du Bois’s admiring trip to Nazi Germany in 1936, his appreciation of Japanese imperial power, and his disregard of the suffering of the majority in Liberia, China, and the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. In the spirit if not the letter of black Atlantic modernity it behooves us to account for such seeming inconsistency. Allowing for the grip of racial romanticism on Du Bois’s imagination throughout his life offers possible answers to these questions. If we see Dark Princess not as a blueprint but as a difficult aesthetic vision where a utopian vision of overthrowing white imperialism expresses itself as an Afrocentric nostalgic fantasy we can more adequately assess its place in our newly forming canon of black Atlantic and diaspora studies. The novel opens up questions and fault lines and fissures rather than providing pat answers; like all great literary works, it inhabits many folds of time and must not be read as a literal prediction or prophecy but as a self-conscious use of the prophetic mode to showcase immediate political and cultural dilemmas. In Souls, Du Bois takes up the same question that Hopkins had struggled with – invoking a black empire in Africa while arguing that all human beings are of one blood. He reconciles the conflict by showing that the intellectual quest for romance resolves in recovering the inherent romance and nobility of the masses. In Dark Princess, Du Bois attempts to translate this vision in a global context, trying to articulate AfricanAmericans into an anti-colonial vision of the global South. Where Souls shows how universalism need not be free of race, Dark Princess reveals the difficulty of theorizing a transnational culture of resistance. Du Bois’s own story does not end in the 1920s of course, as he proceeded to refine his theories of race and empire until the day of his death in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana in 1963, the end of his life a testament to his disaffection with the

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nation he had once claimed in such plangent terms. Hounded for his support of communism, Du Bois moved to Ghana motivated by a different vision of pan-Africanism palpably visible in the middle of the century, as the diasporic ideology of pan-Africanism was transformed into a continental one. Du Bois’s limited imagining of African agency in works like Dark Princess speaks not to his Western imperial eyes but rather expresses a historical constraint. Up until the Second World War, before the intellectual contributions of such anti-colonial theorists as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, and Kwame Nkrumah, it is impossible for New World blacks to assign Africa a constitutive role in political modernity. It is worth recalling that Du Bois’s fantasy of a secret society working to bring about a dark empire had its spectacular historical counterpart. Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the core of the era’s back-to-Africa movement, shares much of the logic of Du Bois’s fantasy, though of course Du Bois’s antipathy to Garvey is well known. In The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, Wilson Moses has shown that Du Bois and Garvey share some crucial ideological assumptions ­despite their public antagonism, such as their belief in Victorian notions of civilization, their suspicion of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, and sexuality, and their fascination with the pageantry of empire. Garvey wanted to bring about a black nation that could serve as the fountainhead of black Zionism. In a recursive move reminiscent of both Du Bois and Hopkins, Garvey suggested that building this new imperial paradise would simply be a recovery of a lost black empire. Drawing on tropes of diaspora, he argued that “the great Empire of Ethiopia” is “scattered all over the world” and must be reunited. Echoing the idea central to Afrocentric thought that rather than imitating a European ideal of nationality, Africans actually invented such an ideal and are now working to return to a prior unity, Garvey claimed that “what the white man has done are but copies, replicas, are but duplicates, facsimiles of what the black man originated and endowed civilization with.”41 His diasporic vision, in other words, was thoroughly imperial and imperialist, and called for a race war, a “great gigantic struggle of the survival of the fittest group.”42 He believed that “everybody is looking towards Empire to insure protection  – a protection for their own. ‘African fundamentalism’ points to Imperialism. Imperialism means that whether we are in Africa or abroad, we are united with one tie of life blood, with one tie of race, and as Four Hundred Million we must stand together, willing to fall together or die together.” In Garvey’s conception, the solution to racism and black disempowerment was to replace the British empire with an African one: “The Negro must be united in one

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grand racial hierarchy. Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality . . . let us hold together under all climes and in every country, making ourselves a Racial Empire upon which ‘the sun shall never set.’”43 Wanting to create a visible empire that would counteract the so-called invisible empire of the Klan, he urged that “Nothing Must Kill the Empire Urge” and put forward a program of “African fundamentalism” which wasn’t simply about a free black state as an abstract ideal but rather fashioned a dream of imperial and political conquest, an African empire that would be a functioning political unit. It was also a vision that was redolent of fascism rather than liberation. In 1938, the Trinidadian intellectual and pan-African hero, C. L. R. James remarked that “all the things Hitler was to do so well later, Marcus Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921.”44 More recently, in Against Race, Gilroy refers to “a profound kinship between the UNIA and the fascist political movements of the period in which it grew” (232). Garvey’s injunction to “purify and standardize our race” speaks to his militaristic and masculinist concerns.45 According to one of his supporters, J. A. Rogers, Garvey believed that “We were the first Fascists. We had disciplined men, women and ­children in training for the liberation of Africa. The black masses saw that in this extreme nationalism lay their only hope and readily supported it” (232). In 1974, Garvey’s eldest son, Marcus Garvey, Jr., explained his father’s philosophy with explicit reference to fascism:  “African National Socialism postulates that the children of the Black God of Africa have a date with destiny. We shall recreate the glories of ancient Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia. It is natural that the children of Mother Africa scattered in the great diaspora will cleave together once more. It seems certain that the world will one day be faced with the Black cry for an African ‘Anschluss’ and the resolute demand for African ‘Lebensraum.’”46 In this speech, it is clear that fascist principles made famous by Hitler combine with ideas of scattering and return that are resonant for the black diaspora in a wholly different context. But as we saw in the Introduction, the lasting value of Garvey’s platform was not just in these militaristic edicts, but in the spectacle he created which caught the imagination of the masses. That both Du Bois and Garvey drew on the power of spectacle, dream, and romance to create their transnational visions speaks not just to their haunting similarity but to the pressing historical need to imagine an alternative to white imperialism, both in form and content. Of course, in contrast to Garvey, Du Bois was interested in a more ethereal form of racial contest. Struggling to transform the impending doom of the Darwinian logic of a race war for the survival of the fittest, Du Bois agrees that “the

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characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world’s undeveloped peoples” (Souls, 133). But he believes that such a struggle should be one that grants merit to spiritual rather than material power. He writes, “it is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty” (Souls, 134). These abstract ideals of truth, beauty, and nobility sit awkwardly next to the fantasy of political power in nonwhite hands that also fascinates Du Bois. Lewis tells us that Du Bois’s Harvard years were spent in constructing an “imperial self” and that he saw himself as “one of Hegel’s world-historical-men, a dark Messiah” who would save black America (Biography, 80). His messianic dreams find clear articulation in Dark Princess, elaborating a logic at variance with the direction of history. Even as Du Bois’s own ideas move towards socialism and communism, his imperial fantasy finds no room to stage such desires, and reverts instead to racial nationalism and Ethiopianism, reminiscent not only of Hopkins, Blyden, or Crummell, but also of Garvey. We can now make sense of his endorsement of segregation just a few years after the publication of the novel where he comes full circle to the plans of both Garvey and Booker T. Washington and moves away from the principle of integration he championed for so many decades in The Crisis and with the NAACP. We are used to thinking of Du Bois’s contradictory life – his ­universalism and racial nationalism, socialism and elitism, his consumerism and anti-materialism. Thinking of his pan-African urges as anti-­modern rather than modern helps make sense of some of these turns, and helps clarify some of his choices later on that have proved so puzzling, such as his admiration of German and Japanese imperial power. None of these acts nullifies his political insights or accomplishments but they give us a way to stratify the cultural and the political, and the iconoclastic and the traditional elements in his thought. His trips to Germany, Russia, China, and Japan showcase his refusal to criticize anti-Semitism or Japanese imperialism, as he glories in the alternative offered to AngloAmerican domination, no matter what its cost. It may be easy for us to write off Garvey as a fascist or a militarist, but when we realize the convergence of his ideas with those of Du Bois it should make us pause in our celebration of such transnational imaginings. It is time to ask why our current critical orthodoxies celebrate Du Bois and dismiss Garvey. Does Dark Princess offer the only vision that we may wish

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to hail as a black Atlantic counter-culture, hybridity, or postcoloniality? To answer these questions it is necessary to place Du Bois in the company of other black Atlantic intellectuals who are also engaged in thinking about the possibility of a black nation and the challenge it poses to white dominance. One of the most resonant and enduring slogans of such transnational efforts is the phrase “Africa for the Africans.”47 Used by black leaders as varied as Martin Delany, Edward Blyden, Du Bois, and Garvey, the phrase mutates in meaning from one figure to another. For Garvey, the notion of “Africa for the Africans” meant ruling Africa as an imperial power; in other words, he wanted West Indians and African-Americans to colonize Africa in the place of European powers. A hundred years after Delany first used the phrase, Kwame Nkrumah mobilized the masses of the Gold Coast in opposition to British rule to bring into being the first independent African nation. The next two chapters tell this story, beginning with an African contributor to the Ethiopianist tradition, Joseph Casely Hayford, and moving on to Nkrumah’s reinvention of this messianic tradition into a potent political force. Hayford’s 1911 novel, Ethiopia Unbound, produces his own prior claim to an African past, as he challenges Du Bois by writing his own version of The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois’s interactions with African intellectuals like Hayford lead him away from his own romantic conceptions of Africa, as his pan-­A fricanism develops far beyond from Hopkins’s mythical Meroe in the next three decades to begin to create a discourse of African modernity that can successfully imagine the end of empire. In a fitting historical irony, we will find that a figure like Hayford (a member of the Third World elite like the princess of Du Bois’s novel) himself adopts the rhetoric of Ethiopianism and racial romanticism in order to articulate a new identity for West Africans. Studying the import of his appropriation within the larger context of late colonialism in Africa, where instead of focusing on modernizing Africa, British authorities seek to extend their rule under the guise of preserving native custom, we shift away from the imperatives of American racism to those of British rule. We also turn to a figure who offers in the African context a synthesis of the particular and the universal, myth and history, and aesthetics and politics much like the one Du Bois presents in Souls. Chinua Achebe’s path-breaking fiction establishes a wholly new conception of African identity by rewriting the relation to the past created by the array of pan-African and Ethiopianist thinkers, sounding its ­death knell, and propelling us forward into the moment of the decolonization of Africa.

Ch apter 3

From nativism to nationalism: Joseph Casely Hayford, Chinua Achebe, and colonial modernity

The African in America is in a worse plight than the Hebrew in Egypt. The one preserved his language, his manners and customs, his religion and household gods; the other has committed national suicide.

Joseph Casely Hayford

Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound:  Studies in Race Emancipation (1911) begins expansively, with an epigraph addressed to “the sons of Ethiopia the world wide over,” employing the term “Ethiopian” as a synonym for all African-descended peoples.1 The novel presents the life of its protagonist, Kwamankra, a thinly veiled alter-ego of the author, as an allegory for the hoped-for nation of Ghana, prophesying the rise of a glorious African civilization. But this pan-African project quickly turns into a vicious attack on black writers from the diaspora, as Hayford argues that “the African in America” is deracinated, culturally adrift, and prone to a crippling self-doubt. Singling out W. E. B. Du Bois for particular censure, Hayford challenges his paradigm of double consciousness, offering his own prescriptions for the emancipation of the race as an authentic alternative. Though he admits the value of The Souls of Black Folk to the cause of black uplift, he takes issue with its central formulation of a divided self, claiming that Du Bois’s revelation of the psychic trauma of post-slavery populations has no meaning for colonized Africans. Indeed, he paints both Du Bois and his rival, Booker T. Washington, with the same brush, calling them “provincial” and “exclusive” in their prescriptions for the race, insensitive to the specificity of colonial rule in Africa (163). By displacing Du Bois’s autobiography of the race Hayford wishes to be able to speak for the continental and the diasporic African in Ethiopia Unbound. To do so, he rewrites the imperial romance as a narrative of Africa’s self-awakening, claiming to be speaking a truth about Africa that remains hidden from those in the diaspora. And so his novel – an unstable mixture of documentary, prophecy, and polemic  – presents itself as an authentic voice of Africa, one with a cautionary lesson for the diaspora. 104

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As scholars of transnational, black Atlantic, and diaspora studies, how may we situate this exchange? Why might a figure like Hayford – clearly invested in pan-African unity, and deeply indebted to the New World tradition of Ethiopianism – be so critical of African-American thinkers? Taking up this question necessarily involves recognizing the historical constraints that bound Hayford as he spoke to the gap between African experiences of colonialism and African-American experiences of slavery. Recent scholarship on diaspora points to the many misrecognitions, inadequate translations, and failed connections of diasporic encounters, and Hayford’s work is broadly symptomatic of such difficulties.2 His text points to one of the first important schisms in pan-African thought, showing how Du Bois’s claim to black leadership worldwide did not go unchallenged during this period, and was gradually replaced by African and Caribbean voices. Hayford’s novel marks the shift of pan-Africanism from the diaspora to the continent, testifying to the transnational circuits of exchange of the black Atlantic world. Du Bois himself acknowledged Hayford’s writings as initiating a significant transformation in his thinking on Africa’s place in the world, as the two discussed such issues as the unit of the African village as a model for socialism, the place of the headman of the tribe as a political and spiritual leader, and even the distinctions between the black “soul” and the “African personality.”3 In relating the question of West African national identity to the question of race in a larger pan-African sphere, Hayford further emblematizes the vibrant though often unacknowledged transnationalism of early anticolonial thinkers. Linking the stirrings of national consciousness in the Gold Coast to struggles against racism and imperialism elsewhere, especially in the United States, Hayford moves towards an articulation of a global race consciousness, one that would culminate in the pan-African platform of Kwame Nkrumah, who (as the first Prime Minister of independent Ghana) entwined the future of Ghana to the freedom of blacks everywhere. Despite Hayford’s clear engagement with a transnational arena, he and other early anti-colonial thinkers often go unnoticed in studies of black Atlanticism, largely because they are too easily pegged as proponents of a naïve or unsophisticated nativism, interested in the recovery and celebration of supposedly pure, non-European practices untainted by foreign dominance. It is certainly tempting to read Hayford’s critique of the diaspora along the lines of postcolonial critiques of nativism. Anthony Appiah, for instance, cautions against granting credence to claims of authenticity or cultural ownership, showing how such claims are often captive to the very

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colonial ideology they claim to contest.4 To be sure, Appiah is not alone in dismissing early African thinkers as simplistic nativists – mid-twentiethcentury nationalists were even more critical when they labeled them as traitors. Because the defining narratives about what resistance to colonialism looks like have been written by the nationalists who succeed the colonized elite, it is not surprising that this class fares poorly and is branded as a collaborator with empire. Chinua Achebe admits that he finds it impossible to write about his father’s generation without painting it in the tones of treason, as it is not available to him in his pantheon of “ancestral heroes.”5 The Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, takes Achebe’s critique a step further to draw a clear distance between the proper anti-colonialism of nationalists like himself, and the ambiguous complicity, guilt even, of earlier figures of colonial Africa.6 As a bridge between the black Victorians and missionaries of the mid-nineteenth century and the radical nationalists of the mid-twentieth, the colonial elite seem to satisfy no one. And yet, the writings of early African writers must not be ignored if we are to properly assess the meaning of race and nation in the first half of the twentieth century, especially when it comes to the role played by the novel. Though we are used to thinking of Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart as the first African novel in English – and as I discuss later, this is by no means an undeserved honor – earlier literary efforts such as Hayford’s deserve further analysis.7 Early African writers also wrote back to the empire, insisted on the value of African tradition, and affirmed the existence of tribal modes of social organization. They, like Achebe was to do later, mingled ethnographic details of African societies with mythic and romantic renderings of a past that could be the source of pride. Moreover, because they were captive to colonial rhetoric but also interested in contesting it, they reveal with particular intensity the messy encounter between colonizer and colonized that has become a mainstay in studies of imperial culture in recent years.8 Though often dismissed or disavowed by nationalist thinkers, early writers also help illuminate the nationalist story more clearly, allowing us to distinguish more sharply between collaboration and resistance, and the many instances where such broad oppositions fail to capture the nuances of the colonial encounter. Further, because their works are so often seen as aesthetic failures, they pose the question of form in the study of nationalism with peculiar intensity. Indeed, the form of the novel and its relation to the nation provides the key to understanding Hayford’s larger political platform, including his attack on Du Bois. After all, the form of anti-colonialism is as important as its content, as literary form shapes and makes concrete the body of

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thought that makes up anti-colonialism. Form makes certain statements possible, and others impossible: romance and realism are at the heart of African nationalism. Will Hayford be able to produce a realist novel along the lines suggested by Benedict Anderson as the perfect analogue of the nation? Will Ethiopia Unbound offer a successful African counterpart to The Souls of Black Folk, and if so, how will it reconfigure Du Bois’s negotiation of realism and romance? In trying to reappropriate romance as the key to Africa’s soul and its symbolic destiny, will Hayford show that the imperial romance can be so appropriated and put to work in the service of an anti-imperial project? Hayford’s use of the genre of romance, which allows him to stage oppositions and then resolve them by collapsing one into another, is at the heart of his contradictory stance, and it is necessary to pay more attention to his generic choices in order to understand the cultural project of early African anti-colonial thought. Earlier, we saw how Du Bois produced a national consciousness by placing romance at the core of the black experience. To do so, he also exposed the limits of realism in that particular historical moment. In colonial Africa, as we will see, Hayford faces a situation dominated by a binary opposition between Western modernity and African tradition, where questions of rights are invariably premised on losing tradition and the idea of maintaining tradition is seen to involve giving up those rights. In what follows, I suggest that this understanding of tradition and modernity came to be hegemonic in the context of colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century. Proponents of indirect rule, pan-African thinkers, and African nationalists together constructed an idea of Africa that remained captive to the poles of difference and rights. The language of rights is largely realist, and the language of tradition consistently traverses the terrain of romance. Reading Ethiopia Unbound and the larger cultural project it embodies as constituted by this tussle between preserving the past through nostalgia and producing the future along the lines of the Western modern nation-state not only makes sense of its seeming failures but also poses some challenging questions to our own postcolonial assumptions about nation-building literary projects. Studying these formal and ideological partitions will enable us to situate Hayford within the black Atlantic world, and allow us to rethink key features of colonial modernity: the place of race in constructions of diaspora, African responses to colonial rule, and the clash between modernity and tradition. Neither a simple traitor nor a nativist, Hayford deliberately engages with the numerous models of forming imagined communities available to him, trying to fashion a manifesto that works to the advantage of his class

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of educated natives, claiming cultural authority in the hope of accruing political power. Hayford’s challenge to Du Bois must thus be understood as a play for power within the domestic politics of colonial Africa, one that reveals the ideological formation and ambition of his class of educated Africans – the Anglicized colonial elite. His attack on Du Bois displaces other anxieties such as his relationship to the unlettered masses, to the chiefs, to the colonial authorities, and even to his own incomplete Englishness. Chafing against the distinction drawn between the educated native or the “fancy African,” and the true or the “unspoiled” African, Hayford attempts to regain political power by simultaneously asserting his rootedness in African tradition and parading his facility with Western culture. He mediates such a split or doubled agenda by manipulating the literary modes of realism and romance, using reason to counter the British while calling romance into play in his struggle over leadership with African-Americans. In so doing, Ethiopia Unbound stages an exciting clash between the local colonial realities of the Gold Coast and diasporic figuration of a mythic and symbolic Africa as Hayford tries to blend spirit and matter to engender not only a nation in West Africa but a global race consciousness for all African-descended peoples, producing at best an uneven, uncertain, and internally fissured narrative. It is up to us to prise these seams apart to see what kind of cultural project allows them to coexist seemingly seamlessly, untroubled by apparent contradiction. By placing Hayford’s thoughts within a larger matrix of West African anti-colonial writings, and in dialogue with colonial notions of customary law, I conclude the chapter by turning to Achebe’s novel, Arrow of God, where tradition is to be mourned rather than revived. Achebe reinvents both realism and romance – he repudiates the imperial romance, and offers in effect a realist representation of a romance; that is to say, he presents the romantic view of the past in the form of an elegy, thus restoring value to the past but only to mourn it not to revive it. The chapter, then, tells the story of how nationalist thought comes to think of tradition as a lost object, available as myth but never again as practice. It also explores how nationalist thought negotiates the demands of modernity and tradition, the limits of the imperial romance as an ally in this quest, and the reinvention of realism as the appropriate mode for the new nation. It may seem counter-intuitive to think about Achebe as part of a black Atlantic dialogue or as part of a study of romance, given that he has neither taken on the diaspora in any significant way (unlike, for instance, Hayford or Ama Ata Aidoo) nor has he ever produced romantic representations of Africa. In fact, Achebe is famous precisely for doing so much to

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establish Africa outside of the imperial romance. But he is indispensable to this study of the romance of diaspora for several reasons. First, in countering the imperial romance, Achebe throws the work of romance into sharp relief, exposing its cultural logic. Further, he deals centrally with questions of modernity and tradition which are key to any understanding of black Atlanticism. The relationship between the West and black modernity which is at the heart of Gilroy’s conception of the black Atlantic has to be able to speak meaningfully to the experience of colonized Africans as well, thus raising the question of whether Achebe’s relation to the West is also haunted by a double consciousness or if the terms of thinking about such an encounter need to be stretched. Finally, Achebe’s fiction illuminates the needs of the new nation like perhaps no other cultural text, and in its construction of nations and nationalism presents an alternative figuration of both, looking forward to the work of Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, and Aidoo – all of whom (as we will see) reject romance and maintain an investment in both the nation and in realism, albeit reinvented in each case. Assessing the work of realism in Arrow of God, then, will also help clarify the relation between nation and diaspora on the one hand, and realism and romance on the other – a relation that is at the heart of black modernity in both its continental and diasporic incarnations. “T h e a nc i e n t c i t y of t h e de a d”:  t h e or i z i ng r e v e l at ion i n e t h iopi a u n b ou n d Born in 1866 into a prominent Fanti and Euro-African coastal family, Hayford was educated at the leading institutions for the colonial elite: Cape Coast Wesleyan Boys’ High School and Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone. After working as a teacher and school principal in Accra, Hayford edited several leading local newspapers, most notably the influential nationalist journal, The Gold Coast Leader, before pursuing a career in law at Cambridge. Between 1896 and his death in 1930, he remained active as a lawyer, journalist, writer, and a member of the Gold Coast Legislative Council. As the founder of two important organizations, the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society and the National Congress of British West Africa, Hayford played a crucial role in mediating between the colonial and native populations of West Africa, and was once called the “uncrowned king of British West Africa.”9 To consider the first major African work of Ethiopianism is to be surprised by its seeming inconsistencies. An unstable mix of prescription and prophecy, Ethiopia Unbound unfolds in the varied genres of autobiography

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and novel, poetry and fiction, parable and realist narrative. It also incorp­ orates several non-fictional genres, such as lectures by Hayford’s mentor, the pan-African leader, Edward Blyden, and Hayford’s own educational articles published in the West African press on topics as diverse as sanitation and prohibition in the Gold Coast, the differences between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington in the United States, and the relative ­merits of the so-called yellow or black perils represented by Japan and Africa in the colonial imagination. And yet, Hayford’s text is insistent that it is a novel rather than a collection of essays. But it is difficult to sustain the narrative thread, as the central story of Hayford’s thinly veiled alter-ego, Kwamankra, pauses, falters, and soars into several directions at once. For instance, a chapter lamenting the scarcity of water in the Gold Coast exists next to one defending pagan religion in a carefully orchestrated allegory of an old woman’s loss of her Christian faith. The secular questions of dress, marriage, and education occupy the same narrative space as spiritual questions of the after-life. To add to the medley of genres, the social realism of much of the book shifts at a pivotal moment when Kwamankra ascends to heaven to meet his dead wife, now a goddess, and assume the mantle of race messiah. Finally, the book’s conclusion discards the linear plot entirely, culminating by way of a set of speeches, prescriptions, and prophecies for the future of Africa in a prediction that the publication of Ethiopia Unbound has already caused a revolution in thought.10 Moreover, Hayford repeatedly disturbs expected temporalities of nationalist thought. In the novel, he stops and speeds up time repeatedly as he takes us back to an eternal Africa, rushes us into a political future utopia, and at various moments in the novel, slows time down to show us the decay of society in colonial Africa, or to linger in the domestic harmony of husband and wife, mother and daughter, or father and son, and finally transcends earthly time altogether in an inter-racial heaven as we enter the ancient city of the dead, speaking at once to the past and future of the African nation. Reading the formal shifts of the novel as mediations of their historical context indicates the precarious balancing act – between the local and the global, the realist and the romantic, the secular and the spiritual – that preoccupies Hayford throughout the novel. In this way, the schisms between realism and romance that we have been tracing literally erupt in the novel, marking the limits of the diasporic romance and its ability to imagine the spheres of the home and the world. The novel begins with a synthesis of the modes of revelation and reason, as Hayford introduces his exemplary protagonist, Kwamankra, as a master of both realms, foreign and indigenous. Hayford opens the novel

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with the claim that it will provide the reader with a window into the “spiritual aspirations of the black man.” Carving out a place for agency in this scheme, though, the novel also makes it clear at the very beginning that mere expression of these aspirations will not earn the black race a place at the world table, “for there has never lived a people worth writing about who have not shaped out a destiny for themselves” (1). This text will then lay out a paradigmatic destiny, mirrored in the journey of the protagonist, Kwamankra, a Gold Coast lawyer like Hayford himself, “the scion of a spiritual sphere peculiar unto himself” (2), a perfect union of material and spiritual accomplishments. The first chapter, “An Ethiopian Conservative,” chronicles Kwamankra’s time in England as he discusses the merits of African and Western spiritual practices with a broadly allegorical figure, Whitely, who later becomes a corrupt chaplain in the Gold Coast. Foregrounding textuality at the outset, the two debate whether Jesus was God or man, opposing Whitely’s barely articulate doubts and uncertain faith to Kwamankra’s confident embrace of his African roots and showcasing his command of the supposedly Western art of rhetoric. In debating and defeating Whitely, Kwamankra represents Hayford’s desired union of the modern and the traditional, synthesized rather than opposed, even as the two categories are still presented as discrete entities. As someone who “likes to sniff a bit of the African air somehow ­where’er I go,” Kwamankra can carry his culture with him, as he furnishes his rooms in “the Oriental style” even as he studies law and masters “the science of jurisprudence” which “opened to him vistas of justice and fair play between man and man” (6, 25). But rather than suggesting that enlightenment comes from abroad, Hayford goes on to show that Kwamankra already possesses it in his very being. The debate between the two hinges on a linguistic issue as Kwamankra explains Whitely’s wavering faith as a consequence of the limits of English to express complexity. He explains that he learnt English “not as a vehicle of thought, but as a means of more intimately studying your philosophy” (5), thereby linking language to an expression of the inmost essence of a culture. In an Afrocentric vein, he further argues that the roots of Western culture are in Roman culture, who “had much to learn from the Ethiopians through the Greeks” (5). Having established a prior African claim to civilization, Kwamankra reveals not only the superiority of his rhetorical skills but the complexity of the culture he defends. Corresponding to the English word “god” is the Fanti word “Nyiakropon” which Kwamankra assures us, is no “mere barbarous jargon” but a flexible and expansive way of glossing

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the eternity and co-presence of the human and the divine, meaning at once “He who alone is great” and “He who is I am” (7, 8). Kwamankra understands Whitely’s religious doubts as a function of “the limitations of your language” (8). Kwamankra’s linguistic victory proves two things at once. First, it affirms the superiority of native African languages over English, which cannot encompass spiritual and worldly planes simultaneously. Moreover, at the same time that Kwamankra indicates the inadequacy of English, he also flaunts his own command of the language, and indeed of the colonial culture it represents. Unlike later African writers, who advocate influential responses to the problem of Africans writing in a colonial language, Hayford refuses to accept any such constraint. Famously, Achebe suggests that Africans should reinvent, appropriate, and reinvigorate English while Ngugi rejects English as the sign of a continuing imperialist subjugation, calling for a return to native languages to bring about a true decolonization of the mind.11 In a characteristic move, Hayford incorporates both sides of the issues: Kwamankra masters English and at the same time asserts the superiority of native languages and the deficiency of English. In this way, he is as equipped to be a paradigmatic modern African subject as he is to protect and nurture a distinctive African personality, a hybrid of both East and West, native and alien, and yet somehow true to the unchanging essence of Africa. The same impulse to dissolve opposing tendencies and transcend them is visible in the discussion that follows. When Whitely responds with a familiar primitivizing gesture: “somehow you Orientals manage to keep your hold on the eternal verities, where we flounder and are lost” (8), Kwamankra corrects him, claiming both Jesus and his African gods at once. He argues that “Jesus Christ came from the East . . . and yet you seek to teach Him us” (9). Western faith is “built in sand” whereas Africans like Kwamankra are at once in touch with their own beliefs and with the essence of Christian values: “We have caught His Spirit and live; you follow the letter and are tossed hither and thither by every wind.” Since it embodies the “greatest output of spiritual strength,” Kwamankra concludes that “the future of the world is with the East” (9). Significantly, he imagines this desired future as a retrieval of a lost past:  “Ours was the cradle of civilization, and that it had not the permanence that the Christian civilization is likely to have does not make it any the less a civilization” (27). Just as nineteenth-century black nationalists imagined the future of Africa as a recursive return to a lost wholeness, Kwamankra predicts the eventual decline of the West and the rise of

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Africa. As he walks away, having won the argument, he contemplates the hypocrisy of a missionary Christianity that presumes to convert the world yet holds on to notions of racial superiority and permanent differ­ence. Walking around London, he observes “the mighty procession of men, women, and children jostling one another” and is “overwhelmed with a sense of weariness which European civilization had evolved for itself” (20). Countering such weariness to his own energy and euphoric belief in a glorious African future, Kwamankra thanks the gods in “his inmost heart” for making him a “poor benighted pagan” (21). While the spiritual and material spheres are integrated perfectly in Kwamankra at the inception of the novel, this synthesis proves difficult to maintain as the novel progresses. Just as Hayford represents Kwamankra as the ideal African hero, he gives us a highly sentimental portrait of his equally idealized wife, Mansa. At first, Mansa also synthesizes the two modes of revelation and reason, but she gradually becomes an abstract symbol of Africa, which cannot be interpreted in the register of reason. We first meet Mansa as an “unspoiled” educated African, finishing her studies in Germany. When she first comes to England, she finds that “the life of the people seemed to me artificial. . . . I felt as if I was not in my proper element.” In contrast, Germany seems far less alienating to her: “I found things very different there – there, in the Black Forest, I got into direct touch with Nature; the song of the birds, the bleating of the lambs, the fragrance of the fields, all seemed so natural, and I said to myself: Here is my proper place; here the atmosphere wherein my nature may expand” (36). She shares Kwamankra’s assessment of artificial and weary English life and contrasts it to the vigor of her native Africa as well as a robust and earthy Germany. Rather than drawing a rigid dichotomy between the West and the East, both of these elite Africans feel that they can pick and choose between different cultural practices and traditions. In this way, Mansa comes to stand in for an idealized union, where the two are of one mind, wearing African clothes to their wedding and setting up a home filled with love and light. Hayford takes great pains to make it clear that the two do not represent an incomplete cultural acculturation to colonial norms; rather they choose to transcend such norms. Accordingly, Hayford informs us that when Whitely meets Mansa and her friends at a play in London, he is suitably impressed with her carriage and deportment. He thanks Kwamankra for his “agreeable evening in such a cultured company,” adding that “your friends, by Jove, are a credit to Africa, and it makes me feel inclined to lead a crusade against narrowness and prejudice” (32). In other words, Kwamankra and Mansa have both succeeded

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in the project of colonial mimicry but they choose to rail against such a project even as they embody it. Their belief in an Africanized modernity becomes even more apparent when they get married, in a union allegorical of a desired African future. When Mansa tells Kwamankra that she has found a job as a teacher, he proposes marriage to her by asking her to teach him instead. Quoting a repeated biblical phrase, “And a little child shall lead them,” he tells her that he “was hoping . . . that yours would be the task to teach me the way of duty, and that, when found, you would help me to tread it” (34). As the child who will show him the way of duty, Mansa symbolizes the role that Hayford ascribes to Africa as part of world civilization. Throughout the novel, Hayford insists, drawing on Blyden, that Africa is destined to be the “little child” that shows the way to the rest of the world. Mansa perfectly embodies this mystical view of Africa. Just as she can combine Western education with innate grace and modesty, Africa, Hayford suggests, can navigate the clash of civilizations with equal ease. In this way, Hayford figures the couple as ideal modern African subjects, respectable, cultured, and bourgeois, who nevertheless remain in touch with their native trad­itions. And so the two set up a home in Africa that mirrors Victorian gentility. Upon Mansa’s death, distraught with grief, Kwamankra follows her to an Afrocentric heaven, “the city of the ancient dead of his race” (44), and such is the depth of his love that the gods allow him to meet both Mansa in her new incarnation as a goddess and his daughter, Katsina, who will soon return to earth as his child again. In heaven, Mansa tells him that the gods themselves are distressed by Africa’s colonization and have sent down a prophet to regenerate Africa by saving its racial soul. Not surprisingly, the prophet is Kwamankra himself, but he has yet to comprehend his destiny. Consumed with grief at his wife’s death, he simply wishes to die himself rather than carrying on his mission to redeem Africa. In heaven, Kwamankra’s deepest soul awakens, much like Reuel Briggs’s unconscious memory of an African past revives in Meroe in Of One Blood. He remembers echoes of a past in which he was sent by the gods as an emissary of truth to teach the mortals and save them from destruction. Hayford writes, “In another sphere, as if from a dream, Kwamankra awoke, and, though he possessed not his physical body, as it seemed to him, he was sure of his identity as ever he had been” (44). In this magical city, peopled with elders in crimson robes, youth of incomparable beauty, and merry children, with magnificent temples built for prayer and peace, Kwamankra realizes that nothing is alien to him: “The scene

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around him . . . was by no means unfamiliar. He had the feeling of one who, ­traveling to a far distant country, and, for the nonce, forgetting the physical aspects of his native land, upon returning, in a moment, recalls the old place again” (44). His travel to the heavenly realm is, in fact, a return to his deepest essence and indeed to his native land. Nothing more than a “thin veil” divides this world from that of ours (51). The trip awakens Kwamankra’s repressed memories of a sublime past, as he realizes that not only is everything familiar to him but indeed it is home: “Even as the home-sick traveler, returning to his native shore, suddenly recalls distant echoes of the past, so did Kwamankra begin to catch glimpses and to recall impressions of the sacred abodes of Nanamu-Krome. It seemed to him, as if in some bygone age from this self-same abode of the ancient dead, the gods had sent him on an errand to mortals.” He discovers that his errand is to be a “witness unto the truth” as a racial messiah and lead his people to the truth (53). Mansa gives Kwamankra a prophecy of redemption: “Say unto the mighty that the cry of the afflicted and the distressed among the sons of Ethiopia has come up to us, and we will visit the earth. . . . Nyiakropon will establish in Ethiopia a kingdom which is different from all other kingdoms. Mammon will have no place therein, and an angel of light . . . shall guard the gates thereof” (63). Hayford expresses this desire for a utopian Ethiopian kingdom by way of a picture of heaven that is as much about political aspirations as it is a mystical fantasy. We learn, therefore, that this heaven is open to all races and nations: “the teeming multitudes represented every kindred, race, people, and nation under the sun. It was a congregation of select souls, men and women who had humbly done their duty, and done it well, in another life” (55–56). In contrast to the segregation on earth, heaven offers us a vision of a non-racialist future with universalist potential. But this future, following a romance temporality that we have seen before, is a reprisal of a forgotten past, a fabled golden age of harmony and plenty. Kwamankra makes this clear when he observes that “It was simple, yet majestic, ethereal yet earthly; and one feeling uppermost in him was that he had seen the like before in some forgotten age” (54). In this way, Pauline Hopkins’s “undiscovered country” becomes an Afrocentric heaven, where the pristine pre-colonial civilization is not in the past but in the future.12 As a synecdoche for African tradition, Hayford had earlier linked Mansa to a maternal principle signifying Africa’s primordial golden age. His rendering of an Afrocentric heaven makes it clear that his allegory is meant to inform his readers that this past continues to be available as inspiration. Just as Kwamankra realizes that the loss of Mansa is purely physical and

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that she continues to give him spiritual guidance, Hayford’s readers can be inspired by the message that Ethiopia Unbound preaches. Likewise, just as Mansa is dead in the physical world and there is no move in the novel to suggest her rebirth, Hayford does not advocate a literal revival of the lost past, nor a reinvention, using the past as a guide, but rather collapsing past and present to suppress the notion of historical change altogether, and highlight instead an eternal African existence. Kwamankra is made to realize that he mourns the loss of his wife for no reason: there is, in fact, no substantial loss as Mansa symbolizes an everlasting natal principle. Similarly, Africa’s past is not dead or unavailable, but vital and ever present. This past cannot, however, be apprehended without a journey outside the rational confines of colonial society. Mansa, now a goddess, with “a grandeur of soul, a depth of emotion, that mere mortals do not possess” (57), shows Kwamankra that “cold reason” is not enough to apprehend the message of the gods. His duty is to recognize that “Though a mortal, thou art a thinker, and even among gods, none may rank higher” (59). Valorizing his ability as a thinker, Mansa urges him to think outside the realm of rational thought, and to remember that “by knowledge God planned out the heavens, and laid deep the foundations of the earth. Only thou allowest full oft cold reason to usurp the place of simple trust” (59). In this way, the deaths of his wife and child prepare Kwamankra for the mantle of the messiah of Ethiopianist thought as his domestic tragedy turns out to be a moment of cultural discovery and rebirth. His task now is to bring about the salvation of his people by asking them to return to their traditions and rediscover their innate soul just as he has by visiting the city of the ancient dead. “T h e c u r s e of t h e e duc at e d n at i v e”:  r ac e , c l a s s, a n d t r a ns n at ion a l i s m i n c ol on i a l A f r ic a With this mission of racial retrieval, the rest of the novel seeks to illuminate Africa’s spiritual destiny. Kwamankra first turns to Anglicized Africans, the products of the nineteenth-century civilizing project of creating “Black Englishmen.”13 Elite Africans who reproduced Victorian society in debating clubs and reading groups, in their dress, language, and education, existed at the interface between European colonial presence and African society, occupying important posts in the administration from the 1850s onwards, and were culturally assimilated to Western rule, and correspondingly, estranged from the masses. This group was more interested in administrative autonomy than in self-government until a shift

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in colonial policy from reform to conservation meant that they were no longer useful, and were systematically removed from their posts towards the end of the nineteenth century. Hayford enters the debate at this unstable moment, when black Englishmen like him find that suddenly they are not the epitome of colonial modernity, proof of the success of colonization, but rather somewhat embarrassing mimics of Englishness, estranged from their African roots. To resist being rendered anachronistic, Hayford aggressively argues for his deep connection to native traditions even as he highlights his metropolitan skills. Writing against the missionary model, Hayford argues for the need for Afrocentric education, the cultivation of African languages, dress, and religion, and even makes a case for retaining polygamy. For Hayford, colonial rule in the Gold Coast brings with it the “plague of modern civilization” which “is a terrible scourge, a veritable canker, eating its way slowly, yet surely, into the very vitals of the life of the black people” (147). On visiting a Christian service, for instance, Kwamankra detects both hypocrisy (because of segregation of blacks and whites) and a lack of simplicity, spontaneity, and naturalness. He finds the schoolmaster at the head of the choir, dressed in European clothes, a “veritable ‘swell’” but also a “veritable fool” (74). He understands then that the worship of false gods, promoted by missionaries, is the key to African weakness, and analyzes their political conquest as a spiritual loss. He decides that “if my people are to be saved from national and racial death, they must be proved as if by fire – by the practice of a virile religion, not by following emasculated sentimentalities which men shamelessly and slanderously identify with the holy One of God, His son, Jesus Christ” (75). Hayford suggests that conversion is always accompanied by its double – gin-drinking and prostitution – and any government that makes available the trade of gin in mining towns loses the right to moral superiority. In speaking out against the missionary project, Hayford participates in a broader shift in thinking that was slowly gaining ground in the first decade of the twentieth century. Both British and African thinkers were beginning to believe that the missions were producing not the vanguard of a new African civilization but racially alienated misfits. The West African press agreed with this notion: as an editorial in The Standard put it, “the Europeanized African is a geographical, a physiological, and a psychological monstrosity.”14 Even as members of the colonial elite affirmed their loyalty to the idea of the civilizing benefit of imperialism, they had to argue for their distinct racial and cultural identity as Africans in order to have any relevance at all. To do so, leaders like Hayford argued that

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African culture was too substantial to have disappeared under European domination. Several prominent figures took on African names and dress and promoted African languages like Yoruba, Hausa, and Fanti. Such calls for African authenticity received support from an unlikely quarter. In Britain, some were beginning to doubt the virtues of industrial society and saw Africa as a simpler, primitive place. In contrast to early nineteenth-century notions of a savage Africa in need of external control, by the end of the nineteenth century, malcontents of Victorian civilization saw Africa as a simple place, content and eternal. As Mary Kingsley (a traveler and amateur ethnographer, who went to West Africa “in quest of herself”) put it in 1897, “a black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit is an undeveloped hare.”15 She claimed that sound African development required that British experts dispense with “the fancy African, the fiend-child planted in the imagination of the British public by unscientific people.” Believing in a permanent difference between African and European races, she argued that it was innate African qualities that ought to be nurtured, as “no race can, as a race, advance except in its own line of development.”16 In response, ambitious leaders like Hayford claimed that as educated Africans, consonant with both native and Western culture, they were best suited to guide the future of Africa. Even Kingsley, who found African imitation of Europe horrifying, conceded that educated Africans were destined to be the intermediaries. It was their duty, she asserted, to act as “true ambassadors and ­peacemakers between the two races and place before the English statesmen the true African, and destroy the fancy African made by exaggeration, that he has now in his mind.”17 In other words, even as Hayford himself is clearly the “fancy African” of the colonial imagination, he seeks to present himself as the “true African.” Accordingly, the novel offers a clear defense of polygamy in the ­service of combating colonial emasculation and promoting virility for a true cultural revival. Kwamankra persuades several young aspirants to colonial leadership, seduced by prevailing bourgeois norms, to see the error of their ways. For instance, Kwamankra counsels Tom Palmer, a dandy who aims to “be the leader of society” and “the leader of black aristocracy” (128) in Accra, and who realizes that colonial models of love and marriage will inhibit his social aspirations. Kwamankra teaches him that marriage is above all a question of cultural survival and cautions Palmer against Victorian notions of courtship, mocking the kind of love that “only comes when she is wooed in Parisian skirts and Regent Street high heels” (131). Arguing that “love is a spiritual magnetic force” (133), akin

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to the feeling between Christ and Mary, Kwamankra makes a case for the benefits of polygamy as an effective system of social organization. He laments colonial and missionary efforts to abolish polygamy, believing that they force “a life of hypocrisy”: “Whereas the average so-called convert was, before he came into the church, living a fairly decent, open, life in his marital relations, embracing Christianity invariably meant for him adopting ­subterfuges and chicanery to cover up the way of the old life, which not all the spiritual graces could help him to brush aside” (192). For Kwamankra, African polygamy is the only alternative to prostitution. He assumes that young men like Palmer will inevitably be involved with several women, and even have children with them. Rather than neglecting these women and children, Palmer should adopt polygamy and care for all his wives and children equally and so become a pillar of society. Harmonious relationships between men and women are thus best served by retreating to indigenous forms of social organization, rather than mimicry of Western forms, which are inevitably presented as decadent, artificial, and ultimately harmful to the preservation of society. Fittingly, the university Hayford imagines at the end of Ethiopia Unbound, a center of learning with an Afrocentric focus, will, he prophecies, produce “men – no effete, mongrel, product of foreign systems” (197). To argue for his aptness as the natural leader of Africa, Hayford scorns the British charge against the “educated native.” The colonial government consistently preferred the “noble savage” to the scholar, conjuring up the “curse of the educated native” as the chief barrier to preserving African culture. Kwamankra explains this charge as a way to separate the leader from the masses:  “the sagacious black man offers a point of resistance when he pleads his peculiar customs and institutions, and presto! the cry of the ‘educated native peril’ is raised, as if forsooth, the native ceases to be a ‘native’ the moment he is educated” (118). To argue for the worth of the educated native, Hayford found the transnational tradition of panAfricanism useful, as he could contrast himself to African-Americans and so present himself as more rooted in African culture. If Hayford is convinced that Anglicized Africans cannot promote African advancement – whether racial, national, or cultural – he is even more vehement in arguing against African-American aspirations to guide Africa. As we saw earlier, much of the impetus behind Ethiopia Unbound comes from a desire to unseat Du Bois from the symbolic position of panAfrican leader. To do so, Hayford takes up the same binary opposition between spirit and matter that Du Bois employs in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois had drawn a clear distinction between black spirituality and

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white materialism in Souls in order to make a case for black spirituality leavening or softening white material efficiency. Here, Hayford transforms this division to suggest that Africans and African-Americans can work together to regenerate Africa as long as it is understood that Africans bring spiritual wisdom and African-Americans material knowledge. Drawing on the providential notion of slavery propagated by nineteenth-century black nationalists, Hayford proposes a synthesis of diasporic and continental virtues: he writes, “In the order of Providence, some of our brethren aforetime were suffered to be enslaved in America for a wise purpose. That event in the history of the race has made it possible for the speedier dissemination and adoption of the better part of Western culture; and to-day Afric’s sons in the East and in the West can do peculiar service unto one another in the common cause of uplifting Ethiopia” (171). Figuring the various descendants of the African diaspora as members of the same family, Hayford defines specific roles for members of this diasporic ­family, suggesting that African-Americans bring their technological training while Africans educate African-Americans in the realm of cultural nationalism, teaching them “the preservation of national institutions, and the adoption of distinctive garbs and names” (171). He deems this training necessary because “the average Afro-American citizen of the United States has lost absolute touch with the past of his race, and is helplessly and hopelessly groping in the dark for affinities that are not natural, and for effects for which there are neither national nor natural causes” (172). Drawing on tropes of diasporic scattering and return, he argues that African-Americans have committed “national suicide,” and are more lost than “the Hebrew in Egypt” since they have not preserved their culture, or their “African personality” (173). Since AfricanAmericans are so deracinated and “in bondage,” he declares that “it is not so much Afro-Americans that we want as Africans or Ethiopians, sojourning in a strange land, who, out of a full heart, and a full knowledge can say: If I forget thee, Ethiopia, let my right hand forget its cunning” (173). Just as his mentor, Blyden, argued that blacks are in exile in the New World, Hayford suggests that African-Americans are merely sojourners in a land that will always be strange to them, and their only recourse is to return to their native land, if not physically, then at least culturally and spiritually. Blyden had long called for the return of the “exiled Negro in the Western hemisphere” in the faith that “the seed of a spiritual, intellectual, industrial life has been planted in his bosom, which, when he is transferred to the land of his fathers, will grow up into beauty, expand into flower” (68). In line with Blyden’s notion of Africa as a spiritual

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conservatory, an alternative to materialist and industrial Western civilization, Hayford emphasizes an unchanging African soul and articulates a romantic and racialist view of nationalism. For Hayford, diasporic blacks have committed national suicide and need guidance to the route of return to racial and national wholeness. He insists that the African-American will not garner respect until he ceases imitation and focuses on “originality and natural initiative” in order to rediscover “the treasure house of his own nationality” (170). Diasporic writers had often written of finding a treasure in Africa, and realized that the treasure meant the discovery of a glorious past. Hayford offers much the same treasure, but he argues that there exists an original essence of Africanness that has been lost by the diaspora, but preserved by Africans like him. By imitating African wholeness, African-Americans can regain the values of the “Mother Country.” Du Bois’s split subject leaves no room for the wholeness called into existence by Ethiopia Unbound. There will be no deliverance for the black man, Hayford believes, “not so long as he turns away from the Father’s house and elects to remain a slave in soul” (181). While Lincoln freed the body of the slave, Hayford suggests, the soul continues to be enslaved, and he takes the occasion of Emancipation Day at Hampton in 1907 to give us Kwamankra’s address to African-Americans. In this address Kwamankra situates Blyden as a superior thinker to both Du Bois and Washington who continue to be “provincial” where Blyden is “universal” (163). Du Bois and Washington are only concerned with social and material uplift, whereas Blyden is involved in a “sublimer task” for the black man: “the discovery of his true place in creation upon natural and national lines” (164). Blyden has no interest in imitating Western civilization; he urges Africans everywhere to “go back to the rock whence they were hewn by the common Father of the nations” (163–164) and rediscover an innate pure African identity. Hayford positions Blyden as a prophet “crying solitarily in the wilderness” – a black Moses whose voice can become “the voice of a nation and of a people, calling unto their kindred across the Atlantic to come back to their way of thinking.” There are still “cooling streams by the fountains of Africa,” Hayford entices, “which would refresh their souls” and bring them back to “first principles and to original and racial conceptions.” He insists that African-Americans are scattered in a foreign land, just like “Israel of old” but they can “walk out of Egypt” if they “conserve the characteristics of the race” “though sojourning in a strange land” (165). In this way, Hayford’s nativism is articulated in rhetoric reminiscent of Hopkins’s notion of the “undiscovered country” and Du Bois’s idea of the conservation of races; just like them, Hayford isn’t interested

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in emigration or physical return, but a spiritual one. The undiscovered country of the soul for diasporic blacks can be charted by Africans like him: they can be a guide to diasporic return to a lost wholeness. To further prove that the problem of double consciousness is an American problem alone, Hayford invokes the sphinx as an apt emblem for Africa:  “Watch that symbolic, reposeful figure yonder, and you can but see one soul, one ideal, one striving, one line of a natural, rational progress” (181–182). He mocks the idea that “Candace, Queen of Ethiopia, or Chephron, the Master of Egypt, [could be] troubled with a double consciousness” insisting that “to be a puzzle unto others is not to be a puzzle unto one’s self” (183). Just as Hopkins had reincarnated the damaged Dianthe as the “unspoiled” Candace to heal the psychic scars of slavery, Hayford offers himself and his class of educated Africans as the source of healing the race worldwide by “unlearning” Western culture. His claim to leadership rests precisely on this singularity of purpose, as he is an organic representative of Africa, not a “puzzle unto one’s self.” It may seem surprising to invoke the sphinx as the appropriate symbol of Africa, given its traditional association with an essential inscrutability. But it is urgently necessary for Hayford to insist on African mystery to prove the value of educated Africans as translators or mediators of a mysterious and inarticulate Africa. Ultimately, his attack on Du Bois argues for the relevance of his class, one coming under attack at this time from British colonials, as deracinated and out of touch with the real Africa, unable to speak for the unlettered masses it claims to represent. Despite Hayford’s rejection of Du Bois’s leadership of the race, however, it is clear that the two share deep intellectual affinities, especially when it comes to Du Bois’s most famous recommendation for racial progress, his doctrine of the “Talented Tenth.” Hayford also believes that “the future of the world is with the thinking few, be they black, white, brown, or yellow” (66). It is therefore not surprising that we find that the masses remain shadowy and abstract in Ethiopia Unbound; we find occasional glimpses of individuals – Nancy, lamenting the loss of her faith and finding ­little solace in a racist religion, and Essy, a convert who sees African practices as heathen  – but they remain objects of pathos, and object ­lessons for Kwamankra to learn from in his messianic quest. Hayford’s focus is only on the elite. In making a case for the authenticity of the colonial elite, Ethiopia Unbound fully adheres to the romance mode of viewing Africa, positioning it as the familiar ancient Ethiopia of Afrocentric lore, and developing the idea of an enduring African personality, spiritually capable of teaching

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the whole world. Hayford writes, “Africa seems destined forever to be a land of mystery. When, in our modern way, we have demolished African strongholds . . . we think we have solved the mystery of the gods, while, all the time, the heart of the matter is not reached” (184). This is because the heart of the people remains enshrouded in mystery: “In many a ­forest glen they dwell, undisturbed by the vulgar eye . . . All they ask for is for as little interference as possible. What can you do with such a people, except to give them scope and room for natural development?” (184–185). Hayford constructs the people as passive spectators of modernity, uninterested in its progress, existing in a different space and time. Looking at the main street of Kumasi, he tells us that the passing men and women are reminiscent of the “men and women who walked the banks of the Nile in days of yore” (185). The heart of the people – their gods, their spirituality, their beliefs – is hidden from view, and is not expressed in the houses and streets they build according to European dictates. In this way, he concludes, “all the symbols of European authority, responsibility, and opportunity are more impermanent than the frail houses you see about you” (185). Linking contemporary Africans to ancient Egypt, in a move similar to nineteenth-century Afrocentric thought, Hayford writes that despite the efforts of missionaries, “today the Ashanti goes unconcerned of the white man’s religion and of the white man’s ways, as ancient Egypt might have done” (186). Collapsing all distinctions between the modern Ashanti and the ancient Egyptians, Hayford situates both as fundamentally antagonistic to Western modes of existence. Of course, claiming modernity while calling on an unchanged tradition is a hallmark of nationalist thought. Hayford’s novelty lies in the manner in which he refuses to accept any alienation from the native African or the colonial modern; rather he claims both as an expression of his innate essence. Rather than creating separate spheres of the home and the world, the spiritual and the material, or the native and the foreign (as Partha Chatterjee suggests in the colonial Indian context), Hayford collapses one into the other, drawing on the power of romance to synthesize contradictions.18 Instead of accepting a binary opposition between the modern Westernized world and the native, traditional one, then, Hayford seeks to present both his colonial and African heritages as sources of cultural authority, one derived from rhetoric and law; the other from custom and tradition. Because he embodies the best of both worlds – African tradition and Western modernity – he suggests that he is best equipped to be Africa’s natural leader and to lead the emerging transnational public sphere of the black Atlantic. In the vein of Du Bois’s notion of the

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Talented Tenth, Hayford thus claims that Western-educated Africans like him are destined to be the “saviors of the race” (211). If Hayford draws on the romance of his origins to disempower AfricanAmerican leaders, he also offers another kind of justification for his class. This line of reasoning is addressed to the colonial government, and follows the language of reason. To convince the British that his education prepares him to be a better representative for the unlettered masses than the traditional authorities, the chiefs, he emphasizes his acquisition of colonial modernity. His nativism is thus expressed in relation to AfricanAmericans, while his universalism is expressed in relation to the British. When he addresses the diaspora, in other words, he does so as an authentic unspoiled African, and when he argues with the British, he channels his Western modernity. In this way, to challenge the competing claims of African-Americans and the British authorities, he invokes opposing sources of his cultural authority and presents himself as an exemplary hybrid of both worlds, as the best of the East and the West meet in his person. The search for national form is complicated further when he addresses the alien imperialists in the language of reason, as his nativist romance proves to be a dangerous companion in the quest for civic justice and social reform. Ultimately, as we will see, the project is irrevocably contradictory to the core, as his assertions of African difference fail to bring about the autonomy he so desperately seeks for his people. While much of Hayford’s understanding of African culture takes the form of romance, Ethiopia Unbound critiques colonial rule in markedly different genres. Drawing on satire, parody, harangue, comedy, and diatribe, Hayford highlights the corruption and hypocrisy of colonial administrators, as well as the resourcefulness of the colonized. In these sections, Hayford showcases Kwamankra’s metropolitan skills (worldly knowledge, English, literacy, legal training, constitutional background, and a cosmopolitan outlook) as we see him beating the British at their own game by succeeding in colonial mimicry. More British than the British, Kwamankra masters the art of rhetoric, champions fair play, and uses the voice of reason to argue for reform. At a party which tries to mix Africans and Europeans, Kwamankra silences everyone with his eloquent debating skills as he proves the inefficiency of colonial rule. Presenting Kwamankra’s sophisticated persona as an antidote to British claims about the necessity of tutelage, Hayford establishes the metropolitan skills of the class of the educated native. At the same time, Hayford broadens the social fabric in these sections to attempt a realist representation of vernacular colonial life. We see, for

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instance, a comic scene where the British try to present the railway as a colonial gift to Africa, but the sheer incompetence of the system gives the lie to this claim. Instead, what emerges is a sense of the African passenger’s ingenuity, as he refuses to pay the fare for a line that rarely completes its service. Similarly, Hayford focuses on the introduction of gin in the Gold Coast, and the ways in which it changes social relations. Rather than bemoaning the demise of African cultural institutions that we saw earlier, these sections emphasize the many ways in which the failed promise of civic society fares under colonial rule. In other words, Hayford highlights alcohol consumption not to show us the corruption of the pure and simple African native, but to demonstrate how this is a strategy used by the British to make society unproductive and submissive. In his analysis, colonial power works by providing an incomplete modernity, geared towards maintaining control rather than native welfare. In this way, Hayford counters the colonialist iconography of African barbarity and sub-humanity by assuming an intellectual self with depth and interiority, ambition, and spiritual development. Rather than appealing to romance, Hayford addresses the colonial authorities in the language of reason, believing that the road to success lay “in the gentler art of persuasion by the logic of facts . . . before which all reasonable men must bow” (168). Hayford concedes that European colonialism comes with the promise of universalism and an entry into modern civilization, but contends that it practices exclusionary policies of racial division, ruining existing cultural, religious, and political structures of society. Rather than arguing for the value of preserving African political systems because they are expressions of African culture, he claims that indigenous political systems that were dismantled by colonialism were in fact democratic to the core, instead of being antithetical to modernity. Aptly enough, in Gold Coast Native Institutions, Hayford explains his defense of native institutions as a practical, progressive, modernizing stance:  if the country’s institutions were free and in touch with custom, “we should soon have good wharves and harbours, gas works, water works and railway communication all over the country.”19 In this way, he does not see colonial reform and the quest for modernity as somehow antithetical to his defense of native institutions. Instead, he shows how native institutions are indeed, already modern. Systematically comparing African institutions and practices to European ones in Ethiopia Unbound, Hayford praises the essential logic and grace of African customs. The living representatives of Africa, he insists, are not civilized merely because of their mastery of Englishness. Rather, he asserts, the “so-called aboriginal races” were “a developed people, having our own

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institutions, having our own ideas of government” long before the British incursion (40). To prove this, he makes an earnest case for the modernity of Africa’s institutions  – he argues that they are inherently democratic, not atavistic remnants that stand in the way of Africa’s development. For Hayford, the fundamental principle of Akan society is democracy, and native institutions derive their authority not from alternative or indigenous forms of authority but from the principle of political representation. For instance, he represents the highly formalized principles of government in his society as modeling a “family system” (41). In this way, as the head of each family represents the family’s interest in governing the community, it is clear that this system runs along the putatively Western notions of political representation. Similarly, in his analysis, polygamy is a form of efficient social organization, not the repository of customs, values, or culture. Likewise, the headman is a political leader like any other, without a particular claim to spiritual leadership. Rendering African institutions ordinary rather than exotic, Hayford claims similarity rather than difference. By arguing that ancient African institutions were democratic, Hayford asserts that they could then be used as the template for advancement on the lines of modern statehood. For him, there is no contradiction between preserving African tradition and developing an African state, as he diffuses the question of Africa’s future as a choice between the foreign and the indigenous by collapsing the two, and seeing them as embodying the same principles of democracy. In doing so, he locates Africa firmly within modernity, historicity, temporality, and politics. It then makes sense that though he invokes the timeless throughout the novel, his prescriptions remain temporal. The prophecy that closes Ethiopia Unbound has a specific date – 1925 – rather than an unforeseeable future. Why might Hayford choose to emphasize the modernity of native institutions in a text that has spent so much time and energy arguing precisely the opposite – the continuity of a traditional Africa, unspoiled by foreign influences, and destined to recover an ancient glory? I want to suggest that his ideas have led him to an impossible impasse, because if we are to accept his arguments for the importance of nativism and authenticity, then the obvious “natural leaders” of such a society would automatically be the chiefs, not the educated elite. Indeed, the colonial policy of indirect rule was geared precisely towards maintaining and amplifying the power of the paramount chiefs as a bulwark against the claims of the educated elite. To understand Hayford’s dilemma, it is necessary to recall the shift in colonial policy from the civilizing mission of the nineteenth century

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(which purportedly aimed to rejuvenate native society) to promoting indirect rule with the help of designated native authorities (aimed at conserving society). No longer interested in reforming supposed heathen practices, whether religious, domestic, or political, colonialism aimed to use existing systems to broaden its sphere of influence. In this way, colonial authorities sought to protect rather than dismantle native structures of tribe and ethnicity and created a broad definition of the customary to assist their domination of Africa. With the imperial partition of Africa and the rise of a racist colonial state, the civilizing mission was replaced by the new colonial order, which reduced the elite to “colonized clerks” rather than “heralds of civilization.”20 Learning from earlier experiences with colonialism in India and South-East Asia, British administrators realized that creating a stratum of native elites, the so-called Macaulay’s mimic men, educated along Western lines and committed to reforming indigenous practices, only helped create an articulate group of natives opposed to colonialism. Between the time of the Scramble for Africa and the Second World War, the British perfected the policy of indirect rule to consolidate their power under the guise of preserving custom. As political theorist Mahmood Mamdani notes, the system was based on the premise that “every African belonged to a tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation.”21 According to this logic, every tribe must have a chief, and where none existed, colonial authorities created one. In the process, they privileged the least democratic traditions, modeling the system of indirect rule on nineteenth-century conquest states, creating a thoroughly patriarchal and monarchical model. In this way, custom came to be the language of force. Moreover, as Lord Lugard made clear, viewing the chiefs as the real leaders meant that the educated elite had no role to play. For Lugard, the architect of the policy of indirect rule, the chiefs were the “true” Africans and men like Hayford the “fancy” African.22 If the language of racial difference had once enabled a rejoinder to imperial racism, it now became a barrier to social reform and self-government. The contrast with nineteenth-century goals of producing black Englishmen was absolute. And so thinkers like Hayford encountered an impossible straitjacket, where the demand for equal rights was tantamount to destroying native culture, while preserving culture necessarily involved segregation and inequality. In this way, the romance of race, constructed by pan-African thinkers and African nationalists alike, proved a useful ally to colonial authorities. Hopkins, Du Bois, Blyden, Garvey, and Hayford, among many others, may have differed on many issues, but they all believed that a defense of

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African culture would help uplift the race. In invoking a fundamentally romantic vision of history, they conceived of Africa as the undiscovered country that could be the spiritual conservatory of the race. But in turning away from modernity, they could not articulate a successful counterpoint to imperialism. All this was to change with the decolonization of Africa, as we come to the period of high nationalism in the middle of the twentieth century. To elucidate the change from Hayford’s romantic nationalism to a more coherent defense of African tradition, I turn to Chinua Achebe’s mid-century fiction, which, I will show, successfully creates a counter-narrative to imperialism. “T h e wor l d i s c h a ng i ng”:  C h i n ua Ac h e be’s e l e g y f or t r a di t ion As the inaugural moment of the African novel in English, Things Fall Apart initiates a tradition of contesting the notion of Africa as the heart of darkness by affirming the value of an African world view as Achebe restores order, moral and psychological complexity, and aesthetic beauty to the pre-colonial society he represents. In contrast to imperial views of African chaos, Things Fall Apart highlights the dignity and tragedy of African culture even as it chronicles the psychic and social alienation caused by Africa’s epochal encounter with Europe. As a self-conscious attempt at creating an Anglophone African literary canon, the novel sets in motion a paradigmatic view of African tradition precisely by offering an articulation of African modernity. But, more often, the novel is read as a picture of how Africa really was, before the colonial encounter, as a representation of tribal life from the inside, as an evocation of an authentic Igbo world. Achebe’s startling new voice, accordingly, is viewed in the hue of ethnographic realism. Over the last few years, scholars of African literature have urged us to resist such mimetic and anthropological claims, and to focus instead on Achebe’s works as cultural productions with the goal of creating a realist picture of pre-colonial society, rather than a documentary appraisal of actually existing Igbo culture.23 While scholars have pored over Things Fall Apart to elaborate such issues of form, history, and ideology, another one of Achebe’s novels also offers a particularly rich ground for mining these debates. Like the earlier novel, Arrow of God (1964) focuses on the pre-­colonial past in order to counterpoint imperial representations of Africa, and chronicles an African past, located at the moment of initial colonial incursion into a cohesive community. The novel engages the clash of

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world views between the colonial and the African, the cultural misunderstandings wrought by the violence of the encounter, and the pressures placed on notions of tradition under the missionary onslaught. But even as Achebe famously invents a past for Africa, and invents the idea of tradition (as Simon Gikandi argues), the protagonists who embody his traditional Africa – the warrior Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart and the priest Ezeulu in Arrow of God – are far removed from the royal Ethiopians that populate the fantasies of Hopkins, Du Bois, or Hayford.24 Achebe thus offers a dramatic break from the tradition of racial romanticism, though some have read his novels as instances of racial retrieval.25 In inventing the idea of modern African culture, Gikandi suggests, Achebe moves us away from romance and nostalgia, from a rhetoric of lack to an affirmative culture, from European primitivism to African modernism. In contrast to the pan-African efforts of Crummell or Crowther or Blyden, who accepted that Africa needed the light of Christian civilization to lift it out of darkness, Achebe asserts the coherence of pre-colonial culture, but not in order to revive an imagined glory; rather he seeks to make the past usable for the new nation taking shape in the middle of the twentieth century. Achebe’s work thus takes us to the constitutive dilemma at the heart of the nationalist project in the postcolony: how to suture the traditional to the modern, the indigenous to the foreign, and memory to history. It is worth remembering, also, that Achebe’s novels were written at the height of the nationalist movement, and are necessarily influenced by what he calls a “mental revolution.” He explains, “the nationalist movement in British West Africa after the Second World War brought a mental revolution which began to reconcile us to ourselves. It suddenly seemed that we too might have a story to tell. Rule Britannia to which we had marched so unselfconsciously on Empire Day now stuck in our throats.”26 It goes without saying, therefore, that Achebe’s traditional society is a representation that is centrally entwined with the urgent pressures of decolonizing Africa and the cultural project of nationalism in that moment. Why might the new nation have needed an image of its past, and why has that image continued to speak to generations to come? The fictiveness of the nation comes into even sharper view in this context as the artificial borders of the new nation-states in Africa were decided by colonial powers with little regard for homogeneity of language, physical borders, or religion and had nothing organic or natural about them, hence the task of imagining the nation as coming out of an immemorial past was as difficult as it was compelling. Because Achebe wrote at a time when the nation became a real

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possibility, not a distant dream, his fiction negotiates different historical constraints and possibilities than the ones encountered by Hayford. Achebe reveals in several essays, interviews, and speeches that he views the role of the African writer as the defender of a culture long seen as having no history, as the custodian of an emergent national consciousness, and later, as a critic of corrupt postcolonial governance. The commemorative nature of his historical novels is never in doubt, and the political imperative of his fiction is well known. Just as Du Bois had to write against the incomprehension of the car-window sociologist, Achebe is impelled to write against colonial rhetoric which assumes the cadences of reason and science, to challenge what he terms “the sedate prose of the district-officergovernment-anthropologist of sixty or seventy years ago.”27 At the same time, he writes against the imperial romances of Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad, to prove that the African “past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.”28 Thus, both realism and romance will have to be reinvented. Moreover, when Achebe tells us that his first novel “was an act of atonement with my past, the ritual return and homage of a prodigal son,” it becomes clear that we also need to recall Achebe’s alienation from the very Igbo culture he memorializes in his fiction. He notes that he was born to a “devout Christian” family which “tended to look down” on the “heathen or even ‘the people of nothing.’” Slowly coming to appreciate an existence at the “crossroads of cultures,” Achebe thus writes from the vantage point of deracination rather than belonging.29 In doing so, he departs from Hayford’s insistence on authenticity, highlighting instead a modern African identity, equally composed of Christian and native influences, and alive to the poetry of both. As several critics have noted, Achebe’s omniscient narrators in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God move back and forth between claiming oneness with the communities they describe and maintaining narrative distance. In this way, Achebe’s novels are not so much ethnographic as highly literary and self-conscious constructions of a notion of African tradition. Achebe establishes tradition as valuable but also as past, as dead, as no longer available without mediation. In other words, his defense of tradition is also an articulation of his own modernity. His novels thus offer an elegy for the way of life depicted therein and indicate that those customs need to be translated, made legible, and taught, rather than reawakened through an unconscious memory. Achebe breaks away from the deadlock that plagues Hayford – how to articulate a demand for rights when they have become premised on losing the very culture he set out to defend. Achebe’s success in contesting

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this binary redefines the terms on which Africa can be engaged, and inaug­urates a new literary form, which blends myth and history to fashion a sophisticated modernist account of the meaning of tradition. Achebe thus marks the end of the Ethiopianist tradition, and the beginning of a nationalist one.30 His fiction closes the colonial era and makes it impossible to write the same way about Africa. To successfully conjure up a past that speaks to the present and the future, and one that converges questions of politics and culture, Achebe makes use of both realism and romance. He creates a world that is tactile, has density of detail, intricacy of social relationships, and psychological complexity in a realist vein, but at the same time presents this world as mythical, as charmed, and as essentially romantic. He thus offers a realism that can encompass the sacred and the secular, the apocalyptic and the mundane, the mythic and the historical. His descriptions of ceremonies like the masking ceremonies, the planting of yams, the breaking of the kola nut, and the rhythms of lunar cycles and the harvesting associated with them create a sense of time as organic, but he also shows the breaks and ruptures, the moments of crisis that threaten the community’s survival, after which time still unfolds. Moreover, his novels create a sense of totality, but the governing principles of the society he represents turn out to be flexibility, linguistic agility, and a profound tolerance for contradiction  – what he describes elsewhere as the mainstay of Igbo philosophy: “Wherever Something stands, Something Else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute.”31 Because Achebe represents tradition as reflexive, evolving, and dualistic, it stands in direct counterpoint to the notion of tradition upheld and institutionalized in the practice of indirect rule. Achebe’s novels are sometimes viewed as romantic evocations of a pristine pre-colonial world, shattered by the coming of an alien order. But when read closely, it becomes evident that rather than idealizing such a past in romantic terms, what Achebe offers instead is a realist representation of a romance, teaching us that the proper attitude to the past is one of reverence, not shame, and not revival either. Okonkwo and Ezeulu have a romantic world view  – both want to arrest change, which the novels show to be an impossible yearning. In contrast, those who adapt to the colonial threat and are willing to bend custom in order to find creative ways to deal with the missionary presence, survive and sometimes even flourish. In the reign of indirect rule, everyone codifies an idea of tradition conducive to the accrual of greater power to themselves: those who survive are the ones who can manipulate tradition to negotiate the new world order coming into being. And yet dignity, tragedy, and heroism accrue to

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those who make a stand against colonialism, like Okonkwo. The past may be full of romance in Achebe’s novels, but it is indeed past, it can never be made present. Only by accepting that loss can the nation be birthed. What is commonly perceived as a defense of traditional culture is actually an acknowledgement of its fragility, an anatomy of its demise, and finally, an elegy for a conception of a world that can no longer endure. Because all nations mourn lost wholeness, even as they imagine future fulfillment, they have to first create the past as an object worthy of being mourned. To read Achebe’s novels, then, is to be aware of two temporal scenes – the moment of their writing in the era of nationalist upheaval, and that of the events described at the moment of colonial incursion. Set in fictional Umuaro in south-eastern Nigeria in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Arrow of God dramatizes indirect rule from various perspectives that counterpoint but also echo each other. The narrative pivots on the inconsistencies generated by the colonial state in its efforts to expand its reach. The central crisis hinges on the policy of indirect rule, as the novel’s action encompasses the colonial administration’s attempt to appoint Ezeulu, the protagonist of the novel, and the priest of the deity, Ulu, as a warrant chief. Ezeulu refuses, but is himself involved in a dispute with his own people, and the novel ends with an unprecedented moment in history as Ezeulu refuses to name the day of harvest, thus facilitating the weakening of the very world order that produced his priesthood. One might assume that the ensuing debate will organize itself along familiar poles of upholding custom or embracing change, reviving sacred principles to oppose the new secular authority or succumbing to the inevitable march of power. But the novel takes a different path, one in which it becomes impossible to distinguish between the secular and the sacred, the Western and the African, the modern and the traditional, as each is shown to be contingent on the other, and moreover, to be locked in a battle over power. The novel opens with Ezeulu pondering his own power and trying to plumb the depths of its limits. “Whenever Ezeulu considered the immensity of his power over the year and the crops and, therefore, over the people he wondered if it was real,” Achebe writes, establishing Ezeulu’s spiritual responsibilities as awe-inspiring but also as fundamentally puzzling to him. Indeed Ezeulu wonders what would happen should he choose to refuse to name the day of reaping: “But could he refuse? No Chief Priest had ever refused. So it could not be done. He would not dare.”32 He thus realizes that his power has its limits, and wonders further, “what kind of power was it if it would never be used?” (4). The novel elaborates exactly

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a situation that tests the limits of the power of the Chief Priest, taking us to a moment when Ezeulu refuses to name the day of harvest and so brings on famine on his people, in the process facilitating the incursion of Christianity into a community which had proved resistant to its charms and threats alike. But rather than presenting a moral or spiritual fable about the deity, its worship, and the faith of the followers, Achebe presents us with something quite different when we discover that the deity itself has been invented in response to the growing political threats to the community:  Ezeulu’s sacred office thus exists with regard to wholly secular imperatives – as a marker of the threatened present and its strategies of survival rather than as a testament to an everlasting tradition. A symbol of discontinuity and resilience, negotiation and tact, and not of continuity, ontology, or metaphysics, the deity Ulu comes to stand for a locus of power around which competing political interests stake their claims. The area’s District Officer, Winterbottom, believes that the new policy of appointing native authorities to mediate between the British and the Africans is thoroughly misguided. Taunting the newly arrived Assistant District Officer, Tony Clarke, as “one of the progressive ones,” Winterbottom laments the British policy by contrasting it to the French one of not being “ashamed to teach their culture to backward races under their charge.” He tells Clarke that he would soon forget any notion of preserving native institutions “if you saw, as I did, a man buried alive up to his neck with a piece of roast yam on his head to attract vultures” (35). Winterbottom believes that Africans have no sense of time, are congenitally predisposed to lying and an “elemental cruelty” (58), and need a stern hand to make them behave. As “the man on the spot” (57) he is furious at the directives coming from colonial headquarters insisting upon appointing warrant chiefs. It is worth noting that Winterbottom repeats precisely those tropes of the civilizing mission that Achebe had satirized in his earlier novel, Things Fall Apart, and written against repeatedly in his explanation of why he wrote these novels. Unhappy with the directives coming from the Lieutenant-Governor’s office asking him to appoint a warrant chief, Winterbottom decides that he would not look for a “mission-­educated smart alec” but would “go for that impressive-looking fetish priest” (59). Why might Winterbottom seek to empower Ezeulu as warrant chief, why might he try to preserve a custom he views as barbaric? The answer lies in his belief in his own knowledge of Igbo culture. He decides to appoint Ezeulu because he reasons that “the prefix eze in Ibo means king. So the man is a kind of priest-king” (107). Achebe thus emphasizes that the system relies on the arbitrary invention of tradition as a form of control. In

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highlighting Winterbottom’s biased vision, Achebe shows how the policy of indirect rule is arbitrary not only in its application through limited and self-serving bureaucrats, but also fundamentally misguided as an ideology, based as it is on a false codification of an invented notion of African customs. What Winterbottom fails to realize is that the priest is himself selected by the people to speak for an invented deity, and can be overthrown, if he threatens the survival of the community; nor does he realize, of course, that the idea of fetish priests reeks of common colonial fantasies about African authoritarianism. Meanwhile, it is the priest who has sent his own son to the mission, so the boundaries between the mission and fetish-priesthood are hardly clearly defined and there is no obvious dividing line between those who resist change and those who embrace it. When Ezeulu refuses to play the part of a warrant chief, the colonial administrator Clarke is enraged that “a witch-doctor [was] making a fool of the British administration in public!” (174). Comically, as well, as the new figure of colonial authority, the diffident Clarke wonders under what charge he may hold Ezeulu captive, and marvels at the way in which a sick Winterbottom comes up with the perfect phrasing of colonial governmentality: “refusing to co-operate with the Administration” (177). Achebe thus reveals the workings of colonial power as rooted in mystification rather than in rational attempts to enlighten, develop, or modernize the communities they seek to govern. In trying to harness an ancient authority for colonial governance, Clarke and Winterbottom fail, because the representative of that authority is himself caught up in the winds of change, resisting in some ways, contesting in others. Anyone who assumes fixity loses the battle as Achebe depicts constant transformation, evolution, and strategic shifts in power. To negotiate colonial power from either side – the administration or the administered – one has to be a political realist, or perish. Ezeulu does not abide by realist imperatives. For him, his duty is clear as truth-teller, even if it means speaking against the interests of the community in front of the white man; he justifies his seeming treachery at the beginning of the novel by saying that “how could a man who held the holy staff of Ulu know that a thing was a lie and speak it?” (6). Moreover, he imagines his charge as maintaining a direct line of continuity from his ancestors in order to hold off what he views as the impending ruin of the world: “how could he fail to tell the story as he had heard it from his own father?” (6). Wanting to hold on to the ways that had persevered through time, Ezeulu invokes “the dead fathers of Umuaro” and imagines their bewilderment at “the ways of the new age” (14). But what he seems to

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forget or suppress is the fact that such continuity has been held together by the deliberate efforts of the community to bend tradition and custom according to new challenges, and in the process install a new deity, Ulu, in order to unite six different villages to avoid being subjected to slave raiders from Abam. In this way, the six villages became Umuaro and their deity Ulu, and their Chief Priest, Ezeulu. Ezeulu counters the desire of the villages to go to war by wondering, “how could such a people disregard the god who founded their town and protected it? Ezeulu saw it as the ruin of the world” (15). Ezeulu’s reading of the moment of crisis is apocalyptic: he warns the community, “Today the world is spoilt and there is no longer head or tail in anything that is done” (26). But it is not as if Ezeulu is left wholly untouched by change; in fact, he is one of the first to send his son, Oduche, to the mission in order to learn the ways of the white man. Ezeulu explains his decision to his son, seen by many as a form of sacrifice in order to protect the elite male ­succession of the priesthood for his favorite son, as a response to the times. “The world is changing,” he tells his son, and prepares fully to deal with the change by gathering power to himself by any means necessary. Explaining his decision to send one of his sons to the church, Ezeulu again invokes the sense that time is apocalyptic rather than unfolding: “A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with everyday herbs. . . . [W]e have reached the very end of things” (133). In the battle between Ezeulu and a rival from another village, Nwaka, while the former calls on ancestral customs and invokes the inherent justice of the deity (“Ulu would not fight an unjust war” [15]), the latter refuses to accept the validity of such a claim, pointing to its constructedness instead. Nwaka reminds the assembly that “the man who carries a deity is not a king. He is there to perform his god’s ritual and to carry sacrifice to him. . . . [Ezeulu] is a man of ambition; he wants to be king, priest, diviner, all” (26–27). Nwaka insists that the “Igbo people knew no kings” (27). When we learn that in another village, the people “burnt one of their deities and drove away his priest” (39), Nwaka’s position that the authority of both priest and deity is temporary not ­eternal seems borne out. Meanwhile, instances of everyone adapting and bending custom to suit their own ends abound. For example, Oduche, the new convert to Christianity who wishes to impress his church by killing the sacred python, is unable to muster up enough courage for the act of abomination, and so decides to lock the python in a box, reasoning that “the python would die for lack of air, and he would be responsible for his death without being guilty of killing it, which seemed to him a very happy compromise” (50).

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Ezeulu’s other son, Obika, both irresponsible and indulgent, congratulates himself for his restraint in not sleeping with his new wife before the ceremony, and Achebe ironizes him by writing, “Obika began to admire this new image of himself as an upholder of custom – like the lizard who fell down from the high iroko tree he felt entitled to praise himself if nobody else did” (115). And further, the diviner brought in to sanctify the wedding takes the invention of customs one step further, as he decides to take the hen meant to be buried in the ground home with him. Edogo, Ezeulu’s eldest son, responds: “it seems to me that the man does not get enough custom and is grabbing whatever he sees” (120). As we learn that an English florin shows up in the middle of a customary sacrifice by the highway, we understand that mixture is everywhere, and there is no purity of custom to be found. Indeed, even when the people follow custom, they are always ready to acknowledge its invented nature, and to reinvent it as needed. In the New Yam Feast, for example, a new ancestral mask is to be presented to the village, an act that requires mystery in order to wield its ceremonial or ritualistic power. The elders decide that there is an urgent “need for strengthening the defenses around this mystery in Umuaro” (195) since it had become easy for the women to guess the figure behind the mask by looking around and seeing who was absent. To maintain mystery, the elders decide to bring a man from another village and keep his presence secret. Similarly, when two messengers arrive in Umuaro carrying the white man’s summons, they refuse to leave without benefits, and argue that “when a masked spirit visits you you have to appease its footprints with presents. The white man is the masked spirit of today” (154). One way of understanding Achebe’s insistence on muddying the reified categories of colonial rule is to consider the key figure of John Nwodika, steward to Winterbottom, who becomes Ezeulu’s surprising ally during his captivity. Nwodika understands the changing times well: he is a realist who knows how to manipulate colonial power to his own advantage. Determined to join “the race for the white man’s money” (169), his sense of shame for members of his clan comes from their inability to acquire material wealth. He laments, “Is there one Umuaro man among the wealthy people here? Not one. Sometimes I feel shame when others ask me where I come from. We have no share in the market; we have no share in the white man’s office; we have no share anywhere” (170). In his quest for money and the power that money brings in the new world order, he goes so far as to become Winterbottom’s cook, enduring the contempt of those who view the task as menial and emasculating. He is one of the few characters who

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negotiate the transition to colonial rule successfully, and ends the novel setting up a trade in tobacco, as he had desired. But it is Nwodika who becomes Ezeulu’s champion by imagining that Winterbottom’s sudden illness is a result of Ezeulu’s mystic power. Nwodika concludes that “in spite of everything then, power still resided in its accustomed place” (155) and proceeds to spread the rumor of the cause of illness, thus increasing Ezeulu’s power in the minds of the Umuaroan people. Moreover, and even more surprisingly, he and Ezeulu are shown to be of one mind, despite his collaboration and Ezeulu’s conflict with the colonial state. Ezeulu approves of him as acting “like a man of olden times” (171), and Ezeulu’s closest friend, Akuebue, realizes that “their [Nwodika’s and Ezeulu’s] thoughts are brothers” (170). In this way, Achebe shows that there can be no clearcut separation between collaboration and resistance, between reverence for tradition or belief in juju and adaptation to modern forms of power.33 Ezeulu refuses to accept this new reality. When summoned by the District Officer to appear in Okperi, and then imprisoned for thirty-two days when he refuses to be a Warrant Chief, Ezeulu is elated as he decides that “his quarrel with the white man was insignificant beside the matter he must settle with his own people” (161). In this battle, Ezeulu imagines that he embodies divine power, as an arrow of god, rather than as possessing human agency, and grows increasingly alienated from the community. He invokes Ulu to justify his aggression towards his community. Ezeulu resolves: “Who was Ezeulu to tell his deity how to fight the jealous cult of the sacred python? It was a fight of the gods. He was no more than an arrow in the bow of his god” (191). Achebe writes, “this thought intoxicated Ezeulu like palm wine” (191) and Ezeulu wonders if all the events that have puzzled and challenged him, ranging from the desecration of the sacred python, the white man’s religion, and the coming of the white man himself, may also be arrows of god, in a sense, allies in his fight for power. His assumption of such godly authority inevitably produces unintended consequences, both cosmic and practical, as his intransigence becomes a boon for the forces of conversion in the community. Ezeulu thus ends up weakening the very power he seeks to rule by, as the novel unfolds the tragic results of his actions. For Wole Soyinka, the novel is to be read as a lamentable secularization of spiritual and metaphysical questions, a form of “iconoclasm” on Achebe’s part. Soyinka argues that “the history of Ulu itself has robbed it even of the awe and reverence due to the autochthonous” as we do not have “even a fraction of the immanence of the deity.”34 But Achebe’s engagement with the sacred on the plane of politics is precisely what enables him

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to offer a representation of traditional culture that is adequate for his project of national consciousness-building. The point of the actions of the novel doesn’t seem to be a meditation on whether the sacred is real, in any sense, but that people believe it to be so, and respond accordingly. Achebe thus avoids getting caught up in claims about an African cosmology, as the only generalizations he is willing to hazard about Igbo culture relate to linguistic complexity or traditions of tolerance or the interaction between performer and audience.35 Because the novel is about the interpenetration of the secular and the sacred, its point seems to be not ontological but about how Ezeulu, Ulu, and Umuaro play out their roles in the struggle for power. Even more significantly, Achebe dismantles the dichotomy where Africa signifies a sacred plane, and the West a secular one, by showing how both are historically contingent, shifting, manipulated by both sides to negotiate change. One of the most startling scenes in the novel is one where Ezeulu talks to his deity, Ulu, and the novel seems unwilling to decide whether it will present the scene as one where the god actually speaks to the priest, or whether Ezeulu imagines the conversation. Moreover, even as Ezeulu claims that his entity is a delicate balance of spirit and man (“I am known and at the same time I am unknowable” [132]), the novel shows how rather than maintaining this sense of duality – not so much a split, but a productive doubling, a form of double consciousness, if you will – Ezeulu tries to collapse the two, and use the force of authority of his spirit side to reinforce the decisions he makes as a man. A similar indeterminacy haunts the novel’s ending as well. Ezeulu’s madness, the response to his son’s untimely and shocking death, could be seen as a genetic inheritance of his mother’s madness, the vindication of the community over the individual, a sacrifice to usher in the new world order, or as the revenge of Ulu, the god he meant to serve but failed. Umuaro interprets it in the following way:  “Their god had taken sides with them against his headstrong and ambitious priest and this upheld the wisdom of their ancestors – that no man however great was greater than his people; that no one ever won judgement against his clan” (230). Because the novel refuses to choose between these interpretations, it also creates a certain amount of ambiguity about how Ezeulu’s fate may be judged: whether it signifies, in other words, a personal, historical and cultural, or metaphysical tragedy. That is to say, is Ezeulu doomed because of his own egotism, or because he misinterprets the cultural mores of his people, or is his fate an inevitable part of the march of colonial power when faced with a technologically outmatched power? In trying to assess why Achebe refuses to answer what would seem to be a key question, it is

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important to recall that his novel’s avowed goal is to create a sense of value for the new nation, not necessarily to resolve the question of how power was ceded, but rather to interpret what the loss of power means, and to invest the process with a tragic grandeur that can serve as a resource for the new national memory.36 One of the organizing themes of the novel further reveals the confusion of assumed binaries between Africa and the West, as both camps are shown to be engaged in a battle over elite male succession. On the one hand, Achebe presents a wry and mocking account of a new colonial officer, Tony Clarke, as he navigates the unknown landscape of colonial bureaucracy, caught between the arrogant authority of old hands like Winterbottom, motivated by a belief in the civilizing power of their work, newer and even more merciless mercenaries like Wade and Wright, and contradictory missives from the colonial headquarters, with various guidelines on how to manage or pacify the natives. On the other, Ezeulu and his family’s actions can easily be read as an elaborate drama over the question of which of his sons will become the next Chief Priest of the deity, and the novel explicitly describes several characters wondering whether Ezeulu’s decision to send one son into the missionary church was a way of removing him from the pool in order to make way for his favorite son. Several ­scholars have detailed the novel’s representation of the question of succession, and my concern is not with those details here. Rather I want to point out the way in which the novel embeds a great deal of indeterminacy around the question, and never quite tells us the narrator’s position on it. Further, by twinning the issue of Ezeulu’s successor with that of Winterbottom, the novel suggests an oblique parallel between the two situations, thus positioning both within the same world view, not one sacred and the other secular, but rather each drawing from all kinds of mystificatory and pragmatic ways of apprehending power. In addition to the twinned figures of Winterbottom and Clarke on the one hand, and Ezeulu and Nwaka on the other, Achebe also presents two different kinds of black missionaries. The first is John Goodcountry, a particularly gifted missionary from the Niger Delta, who believed in taking a hard line with so-called heathen customs (such as the matter of the sacred python). He is also supplanted, in a sense, by Moses Unachukwu, who is far more creative and flexible in his efforts at conversion. Their efforts succeed only when they tell the people that they could harvest their crops if they bring an offering to the Christian god instead of to Ulu; when faced with questions, Moses clarifies: “if Ulu who is a false god can eat one yam the living God who owns the whole world should be entitled to eat more than one”

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(215–216). In this way, those who adapt are the ones who can successfully navigate the confusing times. All these questions come to a head in the crisis that concludes the novel. When Ezeulu refuses to name the day of the harvest, he invokes custom, pointing to the yams that were not eaten while he was in captivity. The elders urge flexibility and offer several ways out of the seeming conundrum Ezeulu has cleverly concocted. When Ezeulu says that he cannot eat the yams because “what you ask me to do is not done,” they respond with an awareness of the urgency of passing time, of the new challenges thrown up by the historical ferment they are caught in: “We know that such a thing has never been done before but never before has the white man taken the Chief Priest away. These are not the times we used to know and we must meet them as they come or be rolled in the dust” (208). They offer further instances of change: “numerous examples of customs that had been altered in the past when they began to work hardship on the people. They all talked at length about these customs which had either died in full bloom or had been stillborn” (209). They explain that “disagreement was not new in Umuaro” and point to the instance of the abolition of face marks, but only after much discussion and dispute (210). In this way, Achebe shows that only the political realists can survive in this world and those who take a romantic view of culture are doomed, because culture is a pawn in the colonial contest for power. The end of romance is thus both inevitable and tragic, and Achebe gives it its due in showing how much dignity and order it has, but it cannot survive in the modern world. In showing that culture is invented, Achebe doesn’t somehow empty it of meaning, rather he reveals that the role of culture is to provide answers to real questions and historical impasses brought by time. Ultimately, the question isn’t whether the culture of Igbos itself is democratic or authoritarian, but rather how it is used, practiced, or adapted, how it responds to the rhythms of history, or to the demands of ethical judgement. In this way, the novel is not a template for the future, but rather a means to understand the role of the past in the building of the new world. As a character in Achebe’s novel Anthills of the Savannah says, “The story is our escort; without it, we are blind.”37 Abiola Irele rightly points out that when we take into account Achebe’s numerous criticisms of pre-colonial culture evinced in his novels, it is clear that he speaks from the margins of traditional culture, rather than from within it.38 The affirmative power of his vision, consequently, comes not from giving value to the past but in addressing the needs of the present – the need for the new nation to break free from imperial representations. Achebe is effective precisely because he is self-conscious about his

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deracination, where Hayford protests that he perfectly embodies an essential and unchanging African identity. Because the nation doesn’t exist as a realistic entity in Hayford’s historical moment, he cannot imagine its peculiar ability to synthesize seeming contraries, as it can be the form that can be at once most African, and most modern, coming out of an immemorial and distinct past at the same time that it promises participation in universal history. Thus Hayford is the inheritor of the diasporic romance, not the inaugural figure in the new discourse on African modernity that Achebe represents. Achebe’s tone is appropriately elegiac where Hayford’s is proleptic. Hayford imagines Kwamankra as a messiah for the deliverance of the race where Achebe shows how Ezeulu’s dream of messianic power is doomed. If we compare Kwamankra walking down the street in London arguing with his white friend about Western and African spirituality to Ezeulu in Umuaro, the irony of Hayford’s nativist investment in modernity becomes self-evident. Because Hayford will not acknowledge that traditions are both evolving and invented, he cannot break out of the binary opposition of rights versus culture instituted by indirect rule. By showing that ongoing debates about culture offer the means to resolve questions of rights, Achebe rejects the binary, and offers new ways of imagining productive ways of engaging with the past. In so doing, he anticipates Fanon’s famous definition of national culture, offering an instance of the kind of aesthetic project Fanon believes to be a necessary ally of the struggle against colonial rule. In the following chapter, we will see how Kwame Nkrumah synthesizes ideas of African culture with modern political forms to lead his successful assault on colonialism in Ghana. We will also see how writers like Richard Wright and Fanon rail against the petrification of tradition and the ways in which culture can become an obstacle to political change when ideas of tradition are fetishized for their own sake.

Ch apter 4

From romance to realism: Richard Wright and nation time

Tradition is no longer a guide.

Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing”

On March 6, 1957, the day of Ghana’s independence from colonial rule, Kwame Nkrumah declared that “from now on there is a new African in the world and that new African is ready to fight his own battles, and show that after all, the black man is capable of managing his own affairs.” Not content with representing the aspirations of four and a half million Ghanaians alone, Nkrumah went on to say “We again rededicate ourselves in the struggle to emancipate other countries in Africa, for our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.”1 Ghana took its name from an ancient West African kingdom, but the new nation as it was imagined by Nkrumah was resolutely transnational and pan-African in scope. The black star at the center of Ghana’s flag paid tribute to Marcus Garvey’s dreams of a black nation, functioning as a reminder that Nkrumah’s vision encompassed all African-descended peoples. As the first sub-­Saharan African nation to gain independence from colonial rule, Nkrumah’s Ghana transformed the familiar Afrocentric slogan to the new one, “Africa for Africans at home and abroad.”2 The moment of decolonization in Africa, then, was one of promise and exhilaration, as Nkrumah’s Ghana became the locus of black aspirations for freedom. A free Africa would provide a rebuke to challenges to black selfdetermination everywhere. Perhaps no other moment coalesces the deep desires for self-determination and autonomy across the black diaspora, as the nation-state offers the utopian means for a complete entry into modernity, heralding the transformative power of a new vision of Africa. Linking the destinies of blacks worldwide, Nkrumah’s own platform insists that the independence of Ghana will have no meaning until all of Africa is free. Until this moment, the notion of “Ethiopia Unbound” had necessarily been visionary, but now it seemed to acquire flesh as the 142

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successful unfolding of a new black destiny began to take a concrete shape. In many ways, Ghana’s independence – which would be followed by over thirty other African nations in the decade to follow – materializes the dream of a black nation and signals the moment of the real in this study of black aspirations for freedom. To note the powerful nexus of nationalist and transnationalist aspir­ ations in Nkrumah’s politics is to recall that in sharp contrast to contemporary notions of a necessary polarity between the two, Ghana’s freedom was imagined with no sense of such a dichotomy. Fusing both kinds of affiliations, black intellectuals inspired by Nkrumah believed that black political modernity in Ghana would presage black freedom elsewhere. Additionally, the nation-state appeared not as the sign of an ethnic or tribal identity, but as the source of transcending such prior affiliations. Indeed, the nation was widely perceived as the utopian vehicle for entering modernity, not as a belated participant, but as the rightful bearer of those dreams of Enlightenment the Western world had forfeited in the carnage of the world war. That is to say, the historic nature of Ghana’s freedom was not confined to Ghana alone; rather it became the political vanguard of black struggles everywhere, and in so doing, the real rather than the belated subject of Enlightenment humanism. Certainly this is how many in the diaspora saw it. Nkrumah’s rise to power seized African-Americans’ imaginations in a way unprecedented in the history of the black diaspora, as it fulfilled long-held dreams of an Africa awakening from slumber at the same time that it promised a new way forward into modern forms of black political power. Numerous intellectuals from across various sites of the black diaspora, from the United States, the Caribbean, London, and Paris, visited or moved to Ghana, including such luminaries as W. E. B. Du Bois, Adam Clayton Powell, Ralph Bunche, St. Clair Drake, David Levering Lewis, Pauli Murray, Julian Mayfield, and Maya Angelou.3 Nkrumah himself had spent a decade in the United States and absorbed the lessons of Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois. Fittingly, then, when he visited the United States as an African leader of state, he paid tribute to those earlier dreams of pan-Africanism by issuing a formal invitation offering an entry visa to any African-American who wished to come and build a free Africa. Nkrumah’s vision of black transnationalism might seem like the final turn of a providential cycle imagined by such pan-African leaders as Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany, and Henry Turner, who had long dreamed of an Africa remade by the skills of African-Americans.

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It is, after all, a romantic story, often narrated as romance as well. But, in fact, Nkrumah’s Ghana presents a sharp contrast to the strains of Ethiopianism and messianism that characterized earlier African-American attitudes to Africa. Many of the expatriates who came to Ghana were motivated not by the redemptive logic of return but by a powerful desire to actualize a modern political destiny. That they would escape segregation and help build something of great symbolic power for black dreams of freedom everywhere was an added incentive. Rather than hearkening to earlier forms of return – the longing to return to the primordial glory of a mythical African empire, or a symbolic gesture to heal a divided racial soul, or simpler still, a call to revere tradition as a path to the ways of the ancestors – what resonated most roundly about Nkrumah’s revolution was the promise of black people finally making history on the world stage. The complexity of this intersection of national and diasporic dreams of freedom is the subject of what follows. Perhaps nothing captures the irony of diasporic involvement as the famous gaffe by then Vice-President Nixon who asked a group of black bystanders how it felt to be free, only to hear their chilling response: “We wouldn’t know. We’re from Alabama.”4 Even as Nkrumah seemed poised to herald a new future for Africa, segregation and racism continued apace in the United States. Amid an array of diasporic accounts of Nkrumah’s leadership, nothing has aroused more controversy than Richard Wright’s 1954 travelogue, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos.5 Based on a ten-week trip to the Gold Coast Wright undertook in the summer of 1953 to witness firsthand Nkrumah’s campaign for independence from British rule, Black Power documents the powerful nexus of black nationalism and transnationalism in Africa with great intensity. Taking the form of a travelogue, the book embodies the many contradictions of Wright’s own life at the same time as it offers his meditations on key issues confronting black politics globally. Wright’s own migrations, between Natchez, Memphis, Chicago, New York, and Paris, as well as his travels to Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Indonesia, and Ghana, attest to his self-proclaimed status as an outsider and a rootless man. The central issue of finding a home that animates the study of the black diaspora seems already embodied in Wright’s life and work. And yet, it may seem counter-intuitive to turn to Black Power to study the moment of decolonization, given that the text is anything but utopian or celebratory; rather it offers a veritable catalog of despair, misunderstanding, and even condemnation. The failings of Black Power are well documented: both then and now it has hardly ever been a popular text.6 While Wright’s

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domestic works on race in the United States received hyperbolic reviews – as is evident in Irving Howe’s famous quip that the day Native Son was published, American culture changed forever – Wright’s transnational travel writings have evoked more censure than praise. Not only Black Power, but also its companion volumes, The Color Curtain (his account of the momentous 1955 Bandung Conference of twenty-nine decolonizing African and Asian state leaders in Indonesia, published in 1956) and White Man, Listen! (a collection of speeches and essays on race and colonialism, published in 1957), have been seen as deeply tainted by Wright’s ethnocentric appraisal of non-Western cultures.7 This chapter suggests that notwithstanding such critical suspicion, it is imperative to return to Black Power in order to situate it within the intellectual history of black diasporic engagements with Africa. To do so is to breathe new life into key questions of modernity and rationality, humanism and racialism, and most crucially, anti-colonial nationalism and panAfricanism. Because Wright elaborates these binary oppositions with such intensity and rawness, there is much to be learned from his explorations, not only as a corrective, but as a precursor to our own interest in transnational paradigms. An early advocate of rootlessness, firmly opposed to racial romanticism, and unable to cede any value to the non-rational, Wright’s intellectual journeys lay bare every contradiction inherent in the concept of diaspora. His self-fashioning as a “Twentieth Century Western Man of Color” dominates his assessment of Africa, as his personal quest for the meaning of race becomes a means of adducing the various possibilities evoked by his African encounter.8 It is critical to remember that even as his own personal identity occupies center stage through much of Black Power, Wright frames his journey as allegorical of something larger, something truer to the experiences of a racialized being inside and outside Western modernity, which structures his reading of Africa, making such ambiguities almost “unbearable” in the words of one critic.9 In order to limn the significance of Wright’s turn to the transnational, in what follows I want to offer a detailed exploration of Black Power and its many inconsistencies, in dialogue with a reading of a larger body of work by Wright on questions of race, realism, and romance, showing how an encounter with Africa made him question his aesthetic philosophy, expressed in works as wide-ranging as literary manifestos like “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” “How Bigger Was Born,” and “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” as well as his political writings of the final stage of his career, particularly those collected in White Man, Listen! A former communist who became subject to the pressures of the Cold War,

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Wright chose exile in Paris, yet could not escape the chokehold of American racism. In Paris, even though he often disagreed with influential theorizations of black identity which prized the very notion of black culture he railed against, he did become an important part of a large community of black diasporic intellectuals. In his interactions with leaders of négritude like the Senegalese poet Leopold Senghor and the Martinican Aimé Césaire, the Trinidadian George Padmore (later to be one of Nkrumah’s most trusted advisers), and through his membership in Alioune Diop’s Présence Africaine, the most important pan-African journal of the era, Wright was fully attuned to the various dimensions of black politics, aesthetics, and culture. The story of the diaspora at this historical juncture, then, cannot be told without accounting for Wright: he forms a crucial if thorny part of the history. But nothing distinguishes Wright more sharply from all other accounts of black transnational thought than his provocative and unsettling study of the Gold Coast. While the rawness of Wright’s observations on Africa makes Black Power a uniquely compelling narrative, it is especially the fragmented form of the text that makes it invaluable to this study. To call the book polyphonic would be an understatement, as Wright tends to present one point of view, followed by its complete opposite, only to contradict both readings entirely within the span of even a few pages. The drama and rhetorical power of the book comes from Wright’s changing persona and his conflicted responses, seemingly presented without the filter of introspection. Rather than glossing over these contradictions and presenting a reading of the book as an advocacy of a single point of view (either a search for home, or an acceptance of dispersal, or the demonstration of an exilic consciousness), I want to read its many turns with a full exploration of its tensions, prising them apart rather than seaming them together, to zero in on certain moments of analytical clarity and force in the text in order to account for its literary density and historical texture. As Black Power moves across a variety of genres – travelogue, ethnography, history, journalism  – it strains against the constraints of each of these. We find, for instance, that his ethnography is curiously empty of distance or authority, whereas his account of the history of the Gold Coast might well be prefaced by a disclaimer about the adequacy of such information, and each time he moves into the photographic mode of the documentary observer, he finds himself unhinged by some occurrence that erodes any sense of certainty he may have arrived with. In order to understand the unstable nature of Black Power, or rather its “unbearable” qualities, to disentangle these varied genres, we must

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return once again to the formal opposition between romance and realism we have been tracing throughout this study. In contrast to earlier ­writers, Wright takes a firm and unyielding stance against romance, and concludes Black Power with an appeal for the most brutal form of realism for Africa. Rejecting as well all hints of racial romanticism and any suggestion that his racial identity would grant him access to Africa, Wright strives to make his lifelong interest in realism the key to his understanding of Africa. In doing so, he provides a rich opportunity to assess the ways in which his shift away from romance might prove either valuable or disabling. In other words, in turning away from romance, what alternative does Wright offer? So far we have witnessed the limits of romance as a model for theorizing the black diaspora. Will Wright be able to present a realist figuration of diasporic representations of Africa, informed by a political solidarity alone, free of Ethiopianist or messianic constructions of blackness? Will Wright give us the realist, rationalist, scientific assessment he promises in the preface or will we find reason an inadequate lens through which we view the moment of decolonization? That is to say, if Wright fails to represent Africa through realism and reason alone, this failure might well indicate the need for romance, even if just as an enabling fiction. Can there be a nationalist revolution without romance, or does nationalism need romance? Finally, the fundamental question that Wright poses is one that must be deliberated at some length: on the eve of the actualization of the long-held dream of a black nation, how will this story be told? The form of the telling – as romance, tragedy, or as history fulfilling itself – matters both then and now, as our remembrance of this historical juncture is inevitably framed by the form it takes in its making.10 To recall the utopian hopes surrounding the moment of Ghana’s decolonization is not to ask for a revival, nor, I hope, an exercise in nostalgia alone, but rather involves an opportunity to assess the rich possibilities and successes – even if short-lived, provisional, and incomplete – of the project of decolonization. This is not simply a question of setting the historical record straight, but of understanding the deep investment in black modernity, the utopian construction of the nation-state, and the vision of universalism birthed by these dreams of freedom, a vision unparalleled in the history of the diaspora. In the words of historian Basil Davidson, the optimism of the era was real and profound: “People even talked of a ‘new Africa,’ and yet it did not sound absurd. A whole continent seemed to have come alive again, vividly real, bursting with creative energies, claiming its heritage in the human family, and unfolding ever more varied or surprising aspects of itself. The world became a larger and a happier place.”11

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In recent years, in light of a growing interest in the transnational, scholars have called for a revaluation of Wright’s works on transnationalism and global culture.12 Paul Gilroy rightly cautions against limiting Wright to the United States alone, arguing that to see everything he publishes after his move to Europe as inferior or inauthentic is to remain indebted to a certain romanticism about the folk. Gilroy also points to the importance of the frame of exile for understanding black explorations of modernity, and argues especially for the significance of France for Wright in works like The Outsider, The Long Dream, and Eight Men. But for Gilroy, this is also a plea for a philosophical rather than a literary lens for understanding Wright.13 This is somewhat surprising given that at the time of writing Black Power, Wright was the most important literary artist in AfricanAmerican letters, a major figure in world literature, and without doubt the most famous black writer in the world. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939, and especially after the publication of Native Son in 1940 and Black Boy five years later, Wright’s participation in the Bookof-the-Month Club made him a bona fide literary celebrity, one who was often asked to speak for African-Americans as their representative. In what follows, we will see that literary concerns are not to be placed on the back burner in thinking about Black Power; indeed they cannot be separated from Wright’s philosophical inquiries. Wright’s lifelong interest in realism structures his thinking about modernity and diaspora while his disdain for romance drives his appraisal of African culture. In this way, his advocacy of realism as a literary strategy dovetails with his belief in rationality and becomes the key to understanding Black Power, its reception, and finally, its significance to the archive of black diasporic explorations of modernity. Wright’s literary career pivoted on his rejection of romantic views of black culture. Understanding Wright’s disdain for romance involves a necessary exploration of the precise meaning of realism in his writing, its links with forms of social protest, and more generally, the place of literary form in his larger body of work. Wright’s break from tradition is clearly sounded in his iconoclastic embrace of urban realism as a new form of protest fiction, no longer beholden to the genteel project of racial uplift. In a well-known passage in Black Boy, Wright explains the logic behind his passionate embrace of the naturalist fiction of Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane:  “All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of

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them.”14 As the champion of urban realism, Wright’s literary endeavors launched African-American literature in a direction far removed from the celebration of primitivism of the Harlem Renaissance. As James Baldwin put it, “The Negro, who had been during the magnificent ’twenties a passionate and delightful primitive, now became, as one of the things we were most self-conscious about, our most oppressed minority,” and Wright was “the most eloquent spokesman” of this New Negro.15 Reflecting the influence of the Communist Party and the era of depression, Wright moves away from romance to hone in on the alienation of modern man. Michel Fabre suggests that Wright saw romantic fiction as an escape from reality, “a synonym of evasion and vicarious revenge, wholly artificial because it precluded meaningful action.”16 But to view Wright’s interest in realism as an advocacy of documentary accuracy alone is to do violence to the hypnotic power of his narratives. Certainly, we might be tempted to view Wright’s realism as a reflection of the naturalist concerns of the era, especially when we recall Wright’s fidelity to existing sources of information. When writing Native Son for instance, Wright aimed for literalness when he copied verbatim the Chicago Tribune’s descriptions of a real case, the murder in the Thomas Nixon case, and used the brief prepared by attorney Ulysses Keys. Similarly, he copied real letters from American sailors to Spanish prostitutes in Pagan Spain. For Fabre, such details prove that Wright put a premium on authenticity and documentary realism, striving for an almost photographic verisimilitude in his writings. Fabre concludes, “to Wright, the document, designed as proof, is nearly sacred.”17 Many other commentators agree, especially in light of Wright’s work as a correspondent for the Daily Worker, and his avowed desire to use words as weapons, after the fashion of Mencken. To read Wright’s realism in this manner, however, is to suppress or ignore the fact that Wright was deeply interested in questions of literary form and their relationship to content, and resisted attempts by the Communist Party to dictate his message, choosing instead his autonomy as an artist. Notably, he dedicates Native Son to his mother who taught him “to revere the fanciful and the imaginative.”18 Similarly, in the autobiographical Black Boy, Wright waxes eloquent on the power of the imagination not just to encapsulate reality but to transcend its vicious grip and to transport him into a world rich with possibilities. Wright describes the transformative impact of his first encounter with the power of narrative, when Ella, a schoolteacher, tells him the story of Bluebeard. Wright recalls the impact of the story: “She whispered to me the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives and I ceased to see the porch, the sunshine, her face,

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everything. As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me. . . . The tale made the world around me be, throb, live. As she spoke, reality changed, the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow. Enchanted and enthralled . . . my imagination blazed.”19 For the young Richard, storytelling not only obliterated the harshness of the material conditions of his life, it also forged a new reality alive with possibilities. Able to alter “reality” itself, the new world opened up is full of magic and romance which emerge from within him and in so doing, transform his environment. Clearly, then, Wright’s work will not present us with a dogmatic adherence to naturalism, but rather with its reinvention, shaped by a careful documentation of existing conditions of want, but also by a will to alter such conditions through the sheer imaginative force of his writing. The question of Wright’s relation to realism, read in this light, appears neither as obvious nor as flat as some would assume, but rather forms a necessary, dynamic, and complicated component of his understanding of the place of African-Americans in the United States, and later, in the world. Wright’s well-known 1937 manifesto, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” further elaborates his understanding of the role of fiction, as he insists on realism not as a passive representation of reality, but as a means to bring about social change. Wright begins by distancing his own work from the “humble novels” which showcased “prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America” and urges black writers to be sensitive to “daily living” instead.20 Instead of presenting either genteel or exotic portraits of black culture, he exhorts writers to recognize actually existing sites of black culture, such as the African-American church and folklore. For Wright, in contrast to the “rising Negro bourgeoisie, parasitic and mannered,” black folklore offered the “most indigenous and complete expression” of “racial wisdom” for the masses (47). In this way, his insistence on realism is linked to a concern not with the Talented Tenth or with idealized representations, but with the lived experiences of the black masses. Far from a concession to mimetic accuracy alone, Wright’s interest in realism as a strategy is further intertwined with the question of black political futures and the possibility of racial advancement. Nowhere is such a link more evident than in his discussions of black nationalism. Wright first admits the reality of black nationalism, arguing that to do so is to mark “the vital beginnings of a recognition of value of life as it is lived,” thus viewing the “problem” of black nationalism as one of realism as well. But he insists that such nationalism does not bespeak some “morbidly

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inherent trait of the Negro, but rather the reflex expression of a life whose roots are imbedded deeply in Southern soil” (48). In other words, nationalism – a product of the environment of Jim Crow – is for Wright not an expression of race. He insists that black writers must first embrace nationalism in order to ultimately transcend it, and to do this they may find that “a simple literary realism” may not suffice. Moreover, since nationalism appears not organically, but more often in camouflaged forms, the black writer must comprehend the source of nationalism in broader black life, manifesting itself in a “hundred devious forms” and further highlight the “revolutionary significance of these nationalist tendencies” to do full justice to the reality of black life (49). Wright cautions against equating realism with simplicity, as “all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence, should be there” (50). Arguing against a “vulgarized simplicity” he emphasizes as well the importance of the power of emotional rather than literal truths. He ends the essay with a revealing metaphor of black nationalism as “stunted plants” in “stony soil,” which must be weeded out by black ­writers to make room for “hardier and sturdier” growths (52–53). In clear contrast to the organic conceptions of race and nation offered by a Blyden or a Garvey, Wright’s metaphor of a stunted plant offers no hope for a flourishing family tree of a black nation. Though his language may be reminiscent of earlier nationalist figures (as varied as Blyden, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois), he refuses to see any relation between race and nation as such. Black nationalism emerges only as a product of history alone, the stunted growth of oppression, taking shape in the absence of any other outlet for agency. At no point does he suggest that black culture is full of “fire and romance” that must be brought out into the open in the manner of Hopkins or Du Bois; rather he rails against those that “felt that Negroes led so passional an existence” and argues for the “essential bleakness of black life in America.”21 For Wright, black nationalism must be understood not as the expression of a racial personality but as a reflexive response to oppression, carrying no greater romance. Black nationalism, then, must be understood in realist fashion, through the prism of reason as an expression of historical circumstances, and must be represented in realist ways as well. What was already visible in tentative form in “Blueprint” becomes even clearer in Wright’s famous essay explaining the writing of Native Son, “How Bigger Was Born.” In this essay, Wright again insists on reality as the foundation for his art, laying out the contours of the lives of the many real-life Biggers in Mississippi and Chicago who inspired his

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creation of Bigger Thomas. Undoubtedly, the novel is a landmark for the representation of urban realism and readings of Native Son routinely remark on its stunning evocation of the reality of race relations in the United States, without recourse to sentimentality or fear.22 And Wright’s oft-quoted declaration against sentimentality further affirms the novel’s commitment to realism: he regrets his earlier work, Uncle Tom’s Children because he realizes that he “had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”23 And yet, a closer look at Wright’s own recounting of how he wrote the novel shows that social realism was not his only concern; indeed he rejected the claims of realism when he felt that an emotional truth deserved precedence. Wright explains that he envisioned the project along scientific lines: “Why should I not, like a scientist in a laboratory, use my imagination and invent test-tube situations, place Bigger in them, and, following the guidance of my own hopes and fears, what I had learned and remembered, work out in fictional form an emotional statement and resolution of this problem?” (447–448). But he finds that rather than making the events of the novel seem plausible or probable alone, his main concern was “to tell the truth as I saw and felt it” (458). If the emotional truth required abandoning “surface reality or plausibility,” Wright adhered to it without doubt, and in the end found that rather than feeling like a scientist in a laboratory, “the writing of Native Son was to me an exciting, enthralling, and even a romantic experience” (458, 461). Wright thus reveals that his commitment to realism means not dry reportage but emotional truth, psychological complexity, and existential intensity, captured in the hallucinatory power of his prose. In writing Native Son, Wright comes to realize that realism simply isn’t enough to convey the drama of Bigger Thomas and so he concludes the essay with a response to those American writers (such as Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allen Poe) who had lamented the lack of romance in American life, who had complained about the “bleakness and flatness of the American scene” (461). Echoing Du Bois’s assertions in The Souls of Black Folk about the poetry of blacks amid a “dusty desert of ­dollars” (11–12) Wright seems to find in black life an antidote of sorts to the “money-grubbing, industrial civilization” of America: “we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a

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shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him” (Native Son, 462). Ultimately the story of black America is once again of the romance – this time as the gothic underside – of the story of the nation. But Wright’s goal is not to showcase the romance inherent in black life to ask for uplift, but rather to acknowledge the romance as a product of oppression, to embrace it as the inevitable historical outcome of a group’s marginalization, and to reveal it to readers in order to shock them out of any complacency about race and racism, and so, bring about change. Such an insistence becomes even more pronounced when Wright notes the real-life Bigger Thomases who inspire his fictional creation, emphasizing that Bigger was both black and white, a product of racism and class-­exploitation, and increasingly, in Wright’s eyes, global. That is to say, neither the conditions of inequality nor the gesture of nihilistic rebellion was to be limited to black men alone; they were the conditions of all humanity subjected to the forces of industrial life. Wright clarifies that the same concepts explain black and white life: black life “is the same life lifted to the heights of pain and pathos, drama and tragedy.” Because of this, “the history of the Negro in America is the history of America written in vivid and bloody terms; it is the history of Western Man writ small.” It is in this sense, Wright famously maintains, that “the Negro is America’s metaphor.”24 Wright’s conclusions about the relationship between race and nation, romance and realism would be put to another test when he turned away from the American scene to the global one. And nowhere would his convictions about race find a greater challenge than in Nkrumah’s Ghana. Because, for Wright, racism in the Jim Crow American South had become linked in some complicated way to the “problem of freedom in the Western world, the problem of Africa and Asia,” his transnational explorations in the 1950s would also be a laboratory for testing his belief in the power of narrative to bring about change and an exploration of the limits of realism.25 Speaking of a group of Garveyites he comes into contact with during his time in Chicago, Wright lays out a suitably conflicted response, noting both his admiration for them, and a fundamental disagreement with their ideas. Wright distances himself from their “ideology,” mocking their fanciful dreams of Africa. But he finds himself drawn to the “emotional dynamics of its adherents” because of their absolute rejection of any illusion of racial advancement in America, and their acceptance of this harsh reality. Even though he disagrees with

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their “racialistic outlook” and “gaudy regalia,” he finds in the form of the movement signs of strength: “It was when the Garveyites spoke fervently of building their own country, of someday living within the boundaries of a culture of their own making, that I sensed the passionate hunger of their lives, that I caught a glimpse of the potential strength of the American Negro.”26 We find such a fascination with black nationalism in “How Bigger was Born” as well, as Wright discusses the inevitability of the growth of black nationalist sentiments in conditions of extreme racial injustice to elucidate the logics behind nationalist dreams of a Marcus Garvey, a black superman, or a glorious African empire. He explains that black political hopes, finding no realist outlet of expression, need the fantasy of a spectacular figure like Garvey. Even as he concedes that such dreams are childish, impractical, and unreal, Wright does not dismiss them without recognizing their power. He writes: When the Nazis spoke of the necessity of a highly ritualized and symbolized life, I could hear Bigger Thomas on Chicago’s South Side saying: ‘Man, what we need is a leader like Marcus Garvey. We need a nation, a flag, and army of our own. We colored folks should organize into groups and have generals, captains, lieutenants, and so forth. We ought to take Africa and have a national home.’ I’d know, while listening to these childish words, that a white man would smile derisively at them. But I could not smile, for I knew the truth of those simple words from the facts of my own life. . . . Those words told me that the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded, a free agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplined and unchannelized impulses. (445)

Wright was to find the same emotional and spiritual void, the same repressed desire for a messianic leader, and the same appeal of a ritualized, symbol-rich life in the Gold Coast. In “How Bigger was Born” Wright had speculated about the emergence of a nationalist figure – the messiah of Ethiopianist fantasy – who may mobilize the Bigger Thomases of the world and transform their disaffection and rage into a coherent political movement against injustice and exploitation. Now that Nkrumah was at the head of the first black mass movement in modern history, Wright had a chance to study him at close quarters and reveal its meaning to the world, as the herald of the revolution, or at the very least, as its translator to the outside world.

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“P ol i t ic s pl us”: K wa m e N k ru m a h’s n at ion a l i s t m i r ac l e When Wright turns to Africa, he begins with a focus on the impact of the environment on individuals, readying us for a framework similar to that found in his American writings, promising both objectivity and precision in his analysis. In his preface to Black Power, “Apropos Prepossessions,” he assumes the voice of reason itself, championing facts and scientific discretion. He begins with reference to the intellectual climate of the Cold War era, declaring that it behooves a writer to “lay bare before the reader his working frame of reference, his assumptions and preoccupations” (xxxv). Promising in essence a sociological study of “the most highly evolved native life of present-day Africa,” he explains his motivation as dispassionate scholarship: “I felt that it was time for someone to subject a slice of African life to close scrutiny in terms of concepts that one would use in observing life anywhere” (xxxix). The moment of Nkrumah’s tabling of the motion for self-government, a struggle achieved with formal independence in March 1957, would be Wright’s test case. Even as he clarifies that he is no longer a member of the Communist Party (on the insistence of his publisher) he defends his use of Marxist methods of analyzing history by casting such methods as “instrumentalities” alone. He adds, moreover, that “I’ll willingly accept any other method of interpreting the facts; but I insist that any other method must not exclude the facts!” (xxxviii). Wright’s confidence about “the facts” and his strategy for interpreting them immediately opens up several questions about the status of Black Power as a non-fictional document. Clearly, Wright wishes to imbue it with the cadences of historical knowledge about a place that he admits most Western readers know little about. He also wishes to present the Gold Coast as a case study, an opportunity for testing out several political theories, such as the impact of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the ideological stakes of capitalism and communism, the meaning of colonialism in Africa, and the relevance of Western ideals and beliefs in a non-industrial society. Posing the question of the relation of minorities like himself to the Western world, of which he is “an uneasy member,” he suggests that his exploration of Ghana will ultimately tell us something about the West itself: he writes, “the aim of this book is to pose this problem anew in an area of the world where the issue has not yet been decided. . . . The Western world has one last opportunity in Africa to determine if its ideals can be generously shared . . . now has come Africa’s turn to test the ideals that the West has preached but failed to practice”

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(xxxvi–xxxvii). As the purveyor of “unwelcome facts” Wright assumes a hectoring authority in relation to the Western readers he addresses, who will, he promises, learn something of great value about the meaning of Western civilization by reading this book (xxxvii). While he does clarify that the book is “a first-person subjective narrative” (xxxix), the preface as a whole prepares the reader for an authoritative, unbiased, and essentially impersonal account of the unfolding of nationalism in the Gold Coast. Of course, Black Power offers anything but such an impersonal or objective account. Wright’s persona as a traveler not only anchors but dominates the narrative, as his descriptions of politics, customs, religious and cultural practices, and even of history are subordinated to detailed descriptions of his own incomprehension, doubt, and confusion. More than one reader has noted the book’s similarity to the novels of Joseph Conrad and André Gide.27 After writing the book, Wright defends his circumlocutory account to his editor, Paul Reynolds, by explicitly invoking the methods of Conrad: “By going from spot to spot, talking to this person and that one, I had to gather this reality as it seeped into me from the personalities of others. Conrad wrote all his novels in this roundabout way. It involves going back to some extent over ground already covered, but each going back reveals more and more of the things described.”28 Similarly, Wright explains in his travel journal from which the text of Black Power was culled, “The reader will discover these realities just as I discover them. He too must feel my confusion. . . . All I’m trying to do here is to understand and what I do not understand I shall say so.”29 In some ways, the gap between the preface and the book itself marks the distance between Wright’s aspirations for the project and what it ended up being – a profoundly unpopular text that most readers greeted with either silence or dislike. Long before his trip to Africa was a reality, he had written in his journal in 1947, “I must see Africa. I say here and now that I shall write the only book about Africa that will be written in my time.”30 At the beginning of Black Power he offers a radically different view of the trip, presenting it as a spontaneous and unexpected response to Dorothy Padmore’s question over a leisurely afternoon meal: “why don’t you go to Africa?” (3). He stages his response as a total surprise but also introduces an element largely missing from the preface. While he expresses genuine interest in the political situation of the Gold Coast, he admits that “yet another and far more important question was trying to shape itself in me” (4). This was the question of race, of Wright’s Africanness, of the possibility of an ancestral connection; in other words, an opportunity to undertake a deeply personal exploration of his racial identity and of his relation

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to Africa. “Am I African?” he wonders, and if so, “what does being African mean?” (4–5). These two distinct questions – a dispassionate account of nationalism in Africa and a personal inquiry into his African heritage – form the contradictory substance of much of Black Power. After considering various titles for his travelogue, including “A Stranger in a Strange Land,” “Stranger in Africa,” “What is Africa to Me,” and “Ancestral Land,” (titles which not only acknowledge his own centrality to the narrative but also aptly highlight his feelings of estrangement from Africa), Wright settled on something far less equivocal. The final title, “Black Power” – the literary equivalent of the raised fist – invokes what was to become the most famous black nationalist slogan. But the text itself doesn’t promote black nationalism in any of its various guises, neither the pan-Africanism of Du Bois, the Ethiopianism of Hopkins, the anti-colonial nationalism of Nkrumah or Azikiwe, the pan-Africanism of C. L. R. James or George Padmore, nor the African empire envisioned by Garvey, and certainly not the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts era. That Wright repudiated all notions of a racial consciousness as the basis of nationalist sentiment made impossible such a commitment. As we will see, the key question that emerges in Black Power pivots on the romance of race. Wright self-consciously puts himself squarely in the anti-romance camp, offering the book as an antithesis to romantic renderings of Africa. There will be no romance of race, he warns readers, no quest for roots, no voyeuristic look into the heart of darkness, and no triumphalist telling of the nationalist revolution. Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t any traces of such powerful ur-narratives in Black Power, but rather to suggest that Wright actively grapples with a way to write the story of Africa against such romance narratives. “I could not feel anything African about myself,” he declares (5), rejecting popular notions of any kind of ancestral or unconscious kinship with Africans. Any talk of black rhythm, African survivals, or African genius, Wright tells us, “had always seemed beside the point” as he was fundamentally opposed to “explaining life in ‘racial’ terms.” His “habitual” thinking, he informs us, “had no ‘race’ in it” – it was a thinking “conditioned by the reaction of human beings to a concrete social environment” (6). His study of Africa would also, in a sense, be a test of his belief in realism and naturalism that had dominated his American writings. Rejecting an automatic appeal to nationalist solidarity, Wright premises his interest in Africa in two distinct ways that map on to the two goals of the book: the first, as a dispassionate observer of a modern political movement, and the second, more conflicted exploration of his own ideas about

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race, racial heritage, and his relation to Africa. His first goal is arguably stunted fairly early on in Black Power, as Wright finds that his interest in the activities of Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party isn’t reciprocated and every attempt to observe the workings of the party is treated with suspicion. It is important to note that Wright’s access to Nkrumah was severely limited and since Wright didn’t manage to see much political activity to report, he ended up recording his immediate observations as he toured the city, and later the inland country, by himself. His long diary recording his travels also ended up being truncated into a lengthy first draft, which was furthered shortened with the help of his editor, revealing in the process his need to negotiate the constraints of the Cold War, and hence to calibrate his critique of British colonialism at the same time that he had to be careful not to offend American sensibilities.31 After witnessing just two political rallies in his first few days in Africa Wright complains that he finds that he is no longer invited to anything, and has to rely on his own exertions to find something to write about. The book changes then, from being an attempt to portray the details of the nationalist awakening to a more general commentary on African culture and lifestyle. In this respect, his persona as objective social-scientific reporter or sympathetic observer quickly gives way to the less desirable one of a frustrated voyeur, solipsistic traveler, amateur ethnographer, and at best, he hopes, a mediator or translator of the African world to the West. But even as his attempts to observe the Convention People’s Party are thwarted, the most interesting moments in the text are precisely the few occasions on which he does get to watch Nkrumah’s politics in action. Scholars have largely ignored these moments, highlighting instead Wright’s conflicted response to Africa through the prism of his racial identity. But these moments, brief though they may be, provide a radically different frame for the narrative that is to follow. Rather than detailing the twists and turns of Wright’s reaction to Africa, then, I will focus first on his analysis of nationalism in the Gold Coast. In the first instance, Wright drives through the city with Nkrumah and witnesses a meeting of the women’s division of the party. Another involves a political rally, where Wright actually gives a speech. In each of these instances his response to the politics of the first “mass movement conducted by Negro leadership” (68) is interrupted by his increasingly unsettled feelings about his own racial identity in relation to his African origin. Watching the women’s meeting, Wright pauses in his comments on the unique synthesis of modernity and tradition evidenced in Nkrumah’s politics to puzzle over what seems like a clear example of “African survivals”  – something he has been quick to

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disavow in the past. Even as he marvels at the “wild and liquid emotion” he witnesses, analyzing it as a meeting between the modern politics of mass nationalism and the emotional appeal of religion, he struggles to account for the memory called up by the “queer shuffling dance” of the women of the Gold Coast (61). The dance, as a non-discursive form of performance, seems to enact a racial sublime, which hits the limit of his rational humanist outlook. He recalls that he had seen these dances before, “in America, in storefront churches, in Holy Roller Tabernacles, in God’s Temples, in unpainted wooden prayer-meeting houses on the plantations of the Deep South.” Finding both scenes of performance equally “astonishing and dumbfounding” (62), Wright ponders his own lack of rhythm, his own inability to dance even as he reaches no conclusion about how to account for the similarities across the Atlantic without taking recourse to the “mystic influence of ‘race’” (73). Unable to resolve the conundrum, he cryptically defers the issue, telling his readers that “the answers to these questions did not come until after I penetrated deep into the African jungle” (63). And yet at the same time that he tantalizingly defers the question of race and African survivals, he does offer a remarkable account of the politics of Nkrumah’s nationalism, aptly labeling it not “politics proper” but “politics plus” (100). Responding to the meetings and rallies of the Convention People’s Party with a mixture of awe and disbelief, Wright records his amazement at the amalgamation of elements he considered separate and incompatible from his Marxist training as well as from his observations of Western-style democracies. Wright correctly notes that Nkrumah’s rise as a political force, what he would later call “the miracle of nationalism in the African Gold Coast,” marks a historical rupture in the trajectory of black politics.32 Nkrumah’s nationalism, Wright notes, blended elements of Christianity, tribalism, paganism, sexuality, socialism, Marxist organization, and Western-style political party politics. Wright marvels, “Here was religion melting into politics; prayers were becoming pledges; hope was translating itself into organization; devotion was becoming obedience” (85). That is to say, the spiritual and metaphysical loyalties of the masses were being given a clear, definable political edge, without losing the emotional power of those habits of devotion and reverence. As a psalm is sung before a libation, and an oath to the leader sits cheek by jowl with a discussion of housing and industrial schemes, Wright realizes that Nkrumah has “fused tribalism with modern politics” (65). Such a fusion – a syncretic brew of past and present, messianic and modern, spiritual and secular, East and West – electrified the people of the Gold Coast, fashioning them into an unbeatable anti-colonial force.

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While the British had assumed that elements of African societies  – such as tribal ancestor worship or networks of kinship – would pose an insurmountable barrier to democratic functioning, Nkrumah instrumentalized precisely those traditions in the service of building a democratic nation-state.33 Notably, colonial elites shared British attitudes about the masses, and could not imagine “stick[ing their] hands into this muck” of tribalism (71). Wright understands this as Nkrumah’s realization that the ­missionary onslaught on Africa had created a spiritual void in the masses, an “abandoned emotional reservoir” (66). While the missionary teachings had “smashed the tribal culture of the people” they had done nothing to fill the “vacuum” left as a result, and Nkrumah’s brilliance for Wright comes from his ability to fill this vacuum with a nationalist fervor so intense that it rivals the passions called up by religion (65). As we have seen earlier, Chinua Achebe plangently documents the frustration, self-doubt, and deracination produced by the colonial encounter in his novels. In the Gold Coast, Nkrumah channeled those feelings of alienation into a vital political force, fusing the romance of tradition with the realism of modern political goals to produce a heady and powerful force. Rather than leaving behind the ways of tradition, he offered a platform that would be at once modern and traditional, promising both continuity and change to the people who had been deemed incapable of surviving in the modern world. In Wright’s words, “it was so simple it was dazzling” (65–66). Watching the spectacular theater of nationalism at the rallies of the party, Wright wonders how Nkrumah managed to acquire the intense loyalty of the masses in the service of his nation-building agenda. Certain that any other Western observer would attribute Nkrumah’s skills and strategy to communism, Wright dissents sharply from such a view, convinced that what he had seen was not “ideological” but the “quintessence of passion” (99). Rather than seeking to limit the politics of the Gold Coast to received forms of action, Wright highlights the newness of these forces, seeing in them an exemplar of the roiling forces of new historical paradigms. He writes: “it was my conviction that the twentieth century was throwing up these mass patterns of behavior out of the compulsive nakedness of men’s disinherited lives.” In the “shattering [of] the traditional tribal culture that had once given meaning to these people’s lives” Wright finds the source of the birth of something new, a burning hunger to be free, to “create a new sense of their destinies.” Only a lack of “imagination,” Wright cautions, would narrow the radical implications of this new nationalist movement; in this potent mixture of old and new, Wright finds the seeds of a wholly original political alignment, an existential drama that exceeds all received

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notions of African futures. Accordingly, he highlights not just the bare political facts of the movement, but rather the emotional core that drives it. This “politics plus,” Wright argues, “smacked of the dreamlike, of the stuff of which art and myths were made” (100). In other words, there is an elemental quality to the nationalist revolution, a profound romance that cannot be comprehended through the lens of reason alone. The Gold Coast “miracle of nationalism” promises a transformation of history itself in its blurring of notions of what is real and tangible, in its harnessing of fantasy to political rights, and in its mystical, mythical consummation of human life and its destiny. While romance and realism, tradition and modernity, religion and politics, and the messianic and the mundane are fused in this moment, they are prised apart as irreconcilable polarities in much of the narrative that follows. Wright’s analysis of nationalism as transformative rather than derivative fades from view with his increasing detachment from Nkrumah and his party, as the underlying quest for the meaning of race takes center stage for the rest of the narrative. Even as he documents his own feelings of alienation from African culture at length, his despairing conclusions about the worthlessness of African culture are difficult to endorse given his earlier insights about the revolutionary import of the nationalist movement. That is to say, because Black Power establishes early on the syncretic mingling of the modern and the traditional as the basis of Nkrumah’s appeal, Wright’s subsequent demarcations between Africa and the West seem not only contradictory but also rather trite and familiar recyclings of colonial tropes of African difference. “S e e i ng A f r ic a b y ta x ic a b”:  W r ig h t a n d t h e pat ho s of di s ta nc e Taken as a whole, Black Power provides two distinct readings of the Gold Coast, the first as a land transformed by the political moment of nationalist revolution, and as such a figure of great potential and exemplarity for world history; the second as a static emblem of the primitive land of colonial imagination, dogged by tribalism, tainted by the history of slavery, and dominated by the spell of irrationality. It is difficult to reconcile the two. My attempt to highlight Wright’s complex analysis of the syncretic quality of nationalism in action is not to ignore his many primitivist observations of Africa, particularly in the long section on “The Brooding Ashanti.” Rather it is to pose the contrast, the irreconcilable difference between the two historical modes of thinking tearing the book apart, as it

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were, rather than piecing it together as a coherent account of Wright’s journey to Africa. It is impossible to assess Wright’s representation of Africa without noting the dissonance between the analysis of “politics plus” discussed above and most of what Wright says about tradition and African culture. The key to such dissonance lies in Wright’s understanding of the place of tradition in African cultural life. Wright’s journey to the Gold Coast convinces him that the worst feature of colonialism was not its economic exploitation, military rule, or political dominance. Instead, he writes, it was the destruction of a culture and of the collective psyche of Africans, for which nothing could ever compensate. But most of Black Power rails against all kinds of practices and beliefs of African culture. In “Blueprint for Negro Writing” Wright had urged black writers to recognize that “tradition is no longer a guide” (53). In Africa, Wright goes even further, finding in tradition not only no usable past but rather the seeds of African powerlessness. During his stay in Africa, Wright meets a Gold Coast intellectual who is an authority on traditional African culture. In his meeting with J. B. Danquah, author of The Akan Doctrine of God (1944), Wright is told that the longer he stays in Africa, he will inevitably “ feel” his race and “the knowledge of [his] race” will come back to him (241).34 Of course, this turns out to be manifestly untrue, as Wright’s stay in Africa produces nothing so much as a resolutely anti-heritage narrative. His half-acknowledged diasporic quest for the meaning of race and kinship generates only a heightened sense of his distance from Africa. All his encounters with Africans reek of misunderstanding and an irretrievable fracture in cultural, social, and even existential terms. Indeed, Wright’s first glimpse of Africa brings not euphoria but “a mild sense of anxiety” which soon blooms into “panic” (42, 44). Wright explains this as a response to the “strangeness of a completely different order of life” (42). But as his account unfolds, it is clear that his response is not just about encountering something unfamiliar, rather it falls neatly into inherited patterns of viewing Africa through “imperial eyes.” Black Power ends up advocating the complete destruction of actually existing African culture, as Wright’s condemnation is absolute. He is offended by African habits of dress and food, by traits of personality as wide-ranging as laughter and secrecy, by practices of reverence (whether of a sacred lake, of ancestors, or of chiefs), by social customs such as the segregation of men and women and what he reads as openly homosexual relations, and perhaps most of all by his fantastical fears about human sacrifices. And so, Wright ends his journey with a letter to Nkrumah, asking him to smash all vestiges of African tradition, to destroy the institution of

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tribalism, and at the same time asking the West to step aside in order to allow Nkrumah to finish this task, no matter what the human cost. Such an extreme condemnation of African culture is probably at the heart of the book’s unpopularity. Certainly, the sweeping nature of Wright’s general­ izations about the tribal mind, which then becomes a shorthand for all of Africa, is difficult to swallow, especially when compared to his ­textured response to black nationalism in the United States discussed earlier. Once removed from access to Nkrumah’s nationalist activities, Wright’s narrative retreats to a fairly conventional assessment of African culture, but one that is characterized by a tension between refusing the romance of race but at the same time primitivizing African culture. This tension is never resolved as Wright swings incoherently from one to the other. The synthesis, control, and attention to the rhythm of history he asks for in “Blueprint” simply isn’t visible here. Earlier, we have seen how Wright analyzed black nationalism in the United States, recognizing it as born of oppression and carrying no greater romance. In other words, he located nationalism in the realm of history rather than ontology. In Africa, he fails to position romance as a historical need, and reverts to pronouncements on African ontology, thus relinquishing the balance between form and history. In this way, his test of realism and objectivity fails as no fact can explain to him the meaning of the women’s dance or the phantasm of his own fears about race in Africa. For an intellectual committed to breaking through the romance narratives about blackness, it is surprising to find Wright arguing that African culture (especially in areas outside the cities) is static, ahistorical, and out of tune with modern forms of politics. For instance, the answer to the question of African survivals that had plagued him from the beginning of his journey comes to him deep in the African jungle. At his most Conradian, Wright broods over the mist and rain in the dense jungle, admitting that “it does seem that some presence, some living but invisible being is hovering here” (284). Trying to imagine the “order of emotional logic” (291) that must have governed the minds of pre-colonial, pre-Christian Africans (“these jungle children” he calls them [290]), Wright waxes eloquent on the well-worn subjects of sacrifices, ghosts and spirits, and tribal taboos. He concludes, “these shy people of the mud villages seem to live lives extending more into space than into time. They are static; they move and have their being, but it’s a kind of being that bends back upon itself, rests poised there, settled” (293). Extending such observations not only to offer a theory broad enough to encompass the tribal imagination as a whole, but also to explain African political institutions, like royalty, chiefdoms, and the

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desire for a “glamorous leader,” Wright decides that “system is the enemy of the tribal mind” (294). Wholly dominated by “feeling,” not rational thought, for Wright “the tribal mind is sensuous: loving images, not concepts; personalities, not abstractions; movement, not form; dreams, not reality” (294). Having defined the tribal mind (working as a shorthand for Africa as a whole) as wholly divorced from reason, Wright moves along a familiar colonialist track, suggesting that Africa is simply behind in human development, signifying a primordial existence that men elsewhere have transcended. He explains: “the tribal African’s culture is primally human; that which all men once had as their warm, indigenous way of living, is his” (296). Such temporal distancing serves an important function for Wright insofar as it enables him to proclaim the meaning of African survivals that had puzzled him early on in his trip. Wright concludes that the entire issue of African survivals has been “misnamed” as it does not understand the true nature of African approaches to existence, which he insists “spring from a natural and poetic grasp of existence and all the emotional implications that such an attitude carries” (295). He discovers that “what the anthropologists have been trying to explain are not ‘African survivals’ at all – they are but the retention of basic and primal attitudes toward life” (295). Relegating Africa to the realm of pure difference, he describes the encounter of Africa and the West as a clash of incompatible civilizations: “when one realizes that one is dealing with two distinct and separate worlds of psychological being, two conceptions of time even, the problem becomes clear; it is a clash between two systems of culture” (296). While focusing on Africa’s essential human qualities might suggest a moment of inclusion into the universal, Wright’s temporal distancing, his placing of Africa in a prior time, reduces Africa to a space outside of history and modernity. Even as Wright unravels the racial romanticism that links AfricanAmericans to Africans through the language of survivals, or presumes cultural continuities between the two (whether defined in essentialist or social constructionist terms), he thus reinstates an equally powerful primitivist mode of representing Africa. By defining Africa as a primal poetic entity that the rest of the world has progressed from towards a more rational order, Wright situates Africa as a space outside of the universal, standing apart from world civilization, in dramatic contrast to the assumption that had fueled his journey to Ghana: that it represented an emblematic moment for the twentieth-century stage of world history. How might we understand such an oscillating movement in Black Power, one strand asserting Africa’s complex modernity, the other undermining any such

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claim, freezing Africa in static tradition, and concluding with a call for destroying all tradition? It needs to be said, also, that Wright’s conclusion about African sur­ vivals is by no means the only moment of such rhapsodizing about Africa – time and again he repeats that the African world he travels through is far removed from the real, and must be viewed as a dream. Moreover, he suggests that Africans themselves see the world as a “waking dream” (176), and live a life dominated by instinct, where the other world is as real, if not more, than this one. Wright is so committed to such “vital and earthy” (147) instincts that he even ends up defending the funerals he finds barbaric and savage, preferring them to the alternative of a prim bourgeois Christian mentality. Contrasting the paganism that puzzles him to a Christian service in a Wesleyan Methodist church, Wright finds that there is no “fierce joy here, no dread, no anxiety”; rather the service takes all the romance out of worship. He concludes:  “if religion partakes of the terror stemming from the proximity of human life to eternity, to an absolute otherness, then there was, by a hell of a long shot, much more genuine religion in that barbaric pagan funeral than I could feel in this quiet, bourgeois Christian church” (147). He evinces the same feeling of loss of romance when he witnesses the dancing outside and the prim Legislative Assembly inside, finding more genuine political feeling in the rallies of the masses than in the deliberations of politicians. Thus far the story seems to demonstrate diametrically opposed reactions on Wright’s part, on the one hand asserting Africa’s complex political modernity, on the other, its eternal tradition. But Wright also peppers numerous moments of doubt, parody, and extreme self-consciousness about his own assumptions throughout the book. The most important moment of such self-doubt amid his hyper-modern beliefs comes when he realizes that the future he so desperately craves for the Gold Coast might well bring another darkness: “the pathos of Africa would be doubled if, out of her dark past, her people were plunged into a dark future, a future that smacked of Chicago or Detroit” (251). Such a moment of insight marks Wright’s distance from colonial travel narratives that also offer up Africa as static, chaotic, and banished from modernity. In contrast to the figure of the imperial traveler consolidating a rational self in the face of African darkness, Wright’s deeply self-conscious, questioning, confused, and doubtful narrative voice may well be seen as a parody of colonial travelogues, as an exploration of the impossibility of documentary witnessing, or a speculative, even hesitant, account of a larger disarray of the Western mind. And certainly, even a brief look at Black Power would convince that

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by undercutting his own narrative authority, Wright presents not so much an indictment of Africa but of his own diasporic construction of Africa. He mocks his own attempts to tour the areas outside the city, for instance, saying, “Good God, whoever heard of seeing Africa by taxicab?” (156). As Joyce Cary puts it, “Wright not only reports against himself; he writes so honestly, so directly as he feels, that he gives the material for another book contradicting his own arguments.”35 It must then be said that though Wright does fall prey to the symbolic power of primitivizing narratives about Africa, the critical purchase of his critique differs dramatically from colonial representations of Africa, as his dynamic of identification, dis­ identification, and misidentification provides much of the drama of the text, as he destabilizes every assertion he makes about African stasis, degradation, or innate savagery. Moreover, his resolution of the question of African distance from modernity is again different from what we have seen before, as rather than wishing to preserve any semblance of culture, he ends up advocating its total obliteration. Critical response to Black Power has largely focused on Wright’s arrogance towards African culture, his unabashed ethnocentrism and his lack of cultural humility, which raises great discomfort through the hindsight of history. In the vein of James Baldwin, most critics conclude that Wright’s own uneasy relationship to race leads him to seek to distance himself from the mirror Africa provides. Some critics have also pored over the text’s freewheeling, radically shifting voice, but have ultimately corroborated Wright’s affinity with colonial quest narratives, evincing a remarkable consensus about the insufficiency of his exilic consciousness to apprehend African realities.36 I do not wish to suggest that such discussion is beside the point in an appraisal of Wright’s varied stakes and stances in Africa – indeed much of the narrative energy that drives Black Power derives from such drama. Rather, by focusing on Wright’s stance on realism and romance in relation to his political affiliations, I wish to draw attention to the relationship between the two distinct components of Black Power that seem necessarily contradictory. That is, it seems clear that Wright offers an understanding of nationalism in Africa and a theorization of black modernity in general which enriches our understanding of diaspora. At the same time, it seems equally clear that Wright’s extreme investment in modernity leads him to a wholesale condemnation of tradition, offering an appraisal of African culture and its encounter with colonialism that appears curiously short-sighted.37 Another way to put this is to note that as an advocate of modernity, and firmly opposed to the romance of the noble savage, Wright offers a clear and pointed rejoinder to

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the romance of race and to romantic calls to preserve tradition, basing his own anchor in the realm of reason. But at the same time, his own representation of Africa consigns it to a space outside of history, antithetical to modernity, and trapped in a static tradition. In other words, in the later sections of Black Power, he reverts to the same primitivism he had famously criticized in the United States in his attack on Zora Neale Hurston. In order to make sense of Wright’s dismantling of romance when it comes to race and restatement of it when it comes to Africa, and to disentangle the two tendencies in the book, one primitivizing, the other modernizing, it is necessary to turn to a deeper exploration of Wright’s views of tradition and modernity. To better understand the valence of his representation of Africa, I also compare his assessments to those of Frantz Fanon in order to direct critical scrutiny towards those aspects of the text that have been obscured by the focus on Wright’s persona as a traveler. Doing so, I suggest, will position Wright alongside Fanon as a theorist of black modernity and colonial culture, rather than as a precursor of such travel writers as V. S. Naipaul. Fanon offers a synthesis of realism and romance, politics and culture, and modernity and tradition remarkably similar to Wright’s early observations about the Gold Coast revolution but significantly different in its conclusions, thus opening up a productive space for theorizing Wright’s place in the study of diaspora. “S e e k y e f i r s t t h e p ol i t ic a l k i ng d om”:  W r ig h t, Fa non, a n d t h e p ol i t ic s of r e volu t ion Fanon and Wright share some key assumptions about colonial culture. Writing just a few years apart, the two were familiar with each other’s work, and both were deeply influenced by Nkrumah’s Ghana, using it to formulate a larger narrative about the meaning of postcolonialism.38 Both are wary of romanticizing the masses, both argue for the transformative nature of the anti-colonial revolution, and both are suspicious of automatic assumptions of cultural unity when it comes to the black diaspora. But Fanon comes to a resolution of romance and realism, nationalism and universalism, and modernity and tradition significantly different from that offered by Wright. Of course, Fanon chooses an identification with the cause of anti-colonialism, based not on racial identity, but through his support for the Algerian struggle against French colonialism, and perhaps the details of his life make it easy to romanticize him as the iconic figure of Third World revolution. It is not my intention to do so: instead I wish to draw attention to Fanon’s theorization of culture, especially as it mutates

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during the moment of decolonization, in The Wretched of the Earth, in order to draw a contrast with Wright’s writing on the Gold Coast.39 Decolonization, for Fanon, “transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them.”40 Describing the Manichean colonial world, Fanon writes of the “becalmed zone” of the colony, seemingly unmoved by the vicissitudes of time, where the native “exists interminably in an unchanging dream” while the settler “makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey” (39). Meanwhile, the colonized appear as “torpid creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs” almost becoming an “inorganic background” for the actions of the colonizer (40). Native myths about supernatural beings, nature, and the after-life, all seem to Fanon a “magical superstructure” that enables an avoidance of a direct confrontation with the oppressor (43). But the nationalist revolution breaks through this stasis, as “no native can remain unmoved by this new rhythm which leads the nation on” (106). For Fanon, decolonization takes place with a temporal imperative: the time is now, and it will transform everything, bringing with it a “rebirth of the imagination” (197). Not just a naïve or positivistic belief in progress and development, Fanon’s utopia involves a leap through time rather than gradual reform. Since colonialism brought but didn’t deliver the promise of modernity, Fanon argues that the task at hand is to conquer time, not simply to arrest temporality but to exceed and transcend it. In this way, Fanon’s revolution is presented from the perspective of a future time where the revolution has already been won, and itself provides the temporality of victory, and the redeeming of history.41 It must be said, also, that Fanon’s utopian musings are accompanied by a resolutely realist assessment of the moment of decolonization. In his argument for violence as an instrumentality, for instance, or his discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of spontaneity in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon offers a circumspect, historically contingent analysis, one that is by no means anchored in ontology. This is most clearly articulated in his discussion of the dynamic nature of culture as it is mobilized in the service of political struggle, his warnings about the “pitfalls of national consciousness,” and in his scathing critique of the native elite’s tendency to petrify or fetishize tradition in their role as leaders of the struggle against colonialism. Without a genuine revolutionary struggle, Fanon warns that decolonization will mean little, it will be a “fancy dress parade” alone, leaving “at the bottom an undivided mass, still living in the Middle Ages, endlessly marking time” (118). Moreover, he argues, if assimilation was the “great

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white error,” the myth of blackness would be equally dangerous as négritude offers only “the great black mirage.”42 Cautioning against turning to pre-colonial culture as a refuge, Fanon informs the alienated Westernized elite (the “native intellectual”) that the culture he so desperately seeks has already been transformed. The ideas of the native intellectual about culture and tradition offer no indication about “the real situation which the men and the women of his country know.” Fanon points to the estrangement of the native intellectual from indigenous culture when he says that the native intellectual “wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion” (180). So rather than capturing the essence of culture, the native intellectual only manages to approach the garments which cloak the reality. But Fanon does not suggest that this essence is somehow innate or static (unlike Senghor’s négritude); rather culture involves a “much more fundamental substance which itself is continually being renewed.” Fanon distinguishes between “culture,” this unstable, mobile, constantly evolving entity, and “custom,” simplified, deteriorated, and “mummified fragments” (180). Fanon believes that culture has little to do with essential qualities, it is always within and about history; he writes, “when a people undertakes an armed struggle or even a political struggle against a relentless colonialism, the significance of tradition changes.” In the context of decolonization, there is nothing rigid about tradition, and every attempt to fix tradition, to stabilize it, will necessarily distort its meaning. Traditions, he argues, “are fundamentally unstable and are shot through by centrifugal tendencies” (180). Any desire to retrieve past traditions, to recover or to rejuvenate them is already false, then, simply the “cast-offs of thought, its shells and corpses” (181). Rejecting all attempts to revive or revere tradition, Fanon asks for artists and intellectuals to be alive to the reality of the decolonizing nation. “The truths of a nation,” he declares, “are in the first place its realities” (181). But in saying so he does not ask for an adherence to simple realism alone; the task of the intellectual is far more complicated. Fanon concedes that artists might be tempted to cling to realism alone when faced with the imperatives of independence, to confine themselves to “the most detailed representation of reality.” But such a mimetic impulse will not be enough, as they will merely produce “representative art which has no internal rhythms, art which is serene and immobile, evocative not of life but of death.” For Fanon, a realism that is little more than a sterile formalism is not much of an advance on romantic or exotic art that showcases

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the difference of the African personality in the manner of the poets of négritude.43 Neither realism nor romance as they exist will suffice. Both attempt to capture “the inner truth,” but Fanon warns that this truth does not correspond to reality, as it is “already outworn and denied, called in question by the epoch through which the people are treading out their path towards history” (181). The key, in Fanon’s thought, is to recognize that the culture of the decolonizing nation is by no means static; rather it is in constant flux, in dialectical interplay with the forces of history sweeping through the colony. Thus he proclaims the duty of the intellectual: “It is not enough to try to get back to the people in the past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called in question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light” (182–183). Here it is not the subaltern masses who dwell in the past, tethered to an unforgiving tradition; instead they have already emerged out of the same tradition lionized by those who dote on traditional African culture. It is, in fact, the elite who are out of step with history, nostalgic for something which has already been transformed. Moreover, Fanon does not suggest that the elite must lead the masses; rather, he calls upon them to “join” the people, and even suggests that the culture being given form is itself unstable, camouflaged, and dynamic, but in the end, illuminating. Accordingly, tradition is not static for Fanon; it is the elite who seek to mummify those aspects of native culture that they fear are disappearing under the onslaught of colonialism. For Fanon, no nostalgia will prove adequate to the task of decolonization, which involves creating a new kind of art, with a new rhythm in synchrony with the demands of history, addressed to the people and not to the colonizer, what he calls a “national literature” or “a literature of combat” (193). This national literature “moulds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons.” It also involves a new temporality, not a focus on what happened long ago, but “what we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow” (193). This new culture needs the political reality of the nation: Fanon writes, “the nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity” (197). The

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relationship theorized here between the politics and culture of the nation is thoroughly reciprocal, even dialectical, as Fanon intertwines the two to a degree that makes each the condition of the other’s existence. Together, this syncretic and dynamic mix of the elite and the masses, of tradition and modernity, of the past and the present, will bring about a more radical form of humanism, which will embody the promise of the utopian nationstate. In revisiting Fanon’s vision of national culture, its romance is visible everywhere, as his conception of nationalism is thoroughly utopian. But this nationalist romance differs in every respect from the romances we have been looking at so far, because even as its form might reiterate notions of heroism and overcoming, at its heart is the conviction that the new nation will not embody a primordial essence, but will signal the entry into modernity, as equal to the rest of the world.44 The content of Fanon’s nation is universal, not racial, as he imagines the nation as a utopian force transcending divisions of race, region, class, and ethnicity. Looking outward rather than retreating to the particulars of race or tribe, Fanon offers a vision of social and political justice where he attempts not just to be included in the universal, but also to redefine the very way in which the universal is imagined. That is to say, Fanon is not content to simply enter the categories of modernity, history, or politics, as Western theorists have defined these, or to claim them for Africa, but to transform what they mean. Fanon’s utopia is not a compensatory one then, but transformative, not a return to humanism as imagined by the West, but a new and genuinely emancipatory humanism, a form of secular redemption that shatters existing modes of history to imagine something as yet unknown. Just as Wright had suggested with his concept of “politics plus” in Black Power and later in White Man, Listen!, Fanon insists that Africa is the real subject of the dreams of the Enlightenment, and so an exemplar for the rest of the world. To do so, Fanon fuses romance with realism in the service of revolutionary nationalism, synthesizes tradition and modernity to bring together the elite and the masses, and finds a way to theorize culture as the necessary counterpart to the nationalist revolution. In doing so, Fanon offers an analysis of culture in the moment of decolonization that is exactly the same as the one presented by Wright in his analysis of Nkrumah’s “politics plus.” Where they diverge, though, is that Wright goes on to separate these forces later in Black Power, seeing African culture as static and the masses as trapped by tradition, even though he had earlier shown the flux of Nkrumah’s nationalism that Fanon theorizes as transformative.

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In contrast to Fanon, Wright polarizes the elites from the masses, associating the stagnation and irrationalism of African tradition with the unlettered masses, and thus exhorting the African leadership to distance itself from tradition as much as possible in order to commit solely to a rational, modern, and inevitably Western framework. This sharply divergent view of the masses and the elite seems to stem from the distinct logics of colonial accounts of African backwardness on the one hand, and from modernization and development theory on the other.45 Wright begins with noting how the nationalist movement led by Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party sharply rebutted those British assumptions that had fostered a split in the colonized, educating a select group to produce an elite loyal to the British while leaving the masses in the grip of custom under the policy of indirect rule. Indirect rule, Wright demonstrates, created a Manichean world, with “millions of psychologically detribalized Africans living uneasily and frustratedly in two worlds and really believing in neither of them” (72). And so it is fitting that the first group to challenge Nkrumah’s movement is the missionaries themselves. But a more difficult challenge comes from the colonial elites, the very same group that Joseph Casely Hayford had hoped would prove to be the “saviors of the race” as we saw in the previous chapter. The Cape Coast elite families, proud of their lineage, firm in their reverence for ancestral tradition, and fiercely loyal to the British, transmogrify – in nationalist parody – from “Orders of the British Empire” to “Obedient Boys of the Empire” (96), becoming the traitors of the people rather than their leaders. For Nkrumah himself, a nationalist revolution without the masses would be a chimera; he famously writes, “a middle class elite without the battering ram of the illiterate masses can never hope to smash the forces of colonialism.”46 Wright sits down with their two representative leaders – J. B. Danquah and K. A. Busia (whose books he had pored over) – and finds their lack of understanding of the historical forces speeding the Gold Coast to freedom a source of tragedy and pathos rather than outrage. Both miss the romance, the passion, of the great nationalist drama. The two men embody the acme of the colonial project of producing black Englishmen, and both have been left by the wayside in the great historical revolution taking shape in front of their eyes. In his discussion with Danquah, Wright finds an “aristocrat” barely cognizant of the desires and passions of the masses of his country, latched firmly to the gentility of the nineteenth century, unwilling to accept what Wright sees as the new reality of an industrialized world. Danquah views Nkrumah’s mobilization of the masses as based on “emotion” alone, and seeks his anchor in the “facts”

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(243). And yet, rather than a hard-headed realism governing his opposition to Nkrumah, Wright finds that “the good doctor’s grasp of life was essentially poetic; it was close to that which our fantasies and daydreams would have reality be; its essence was woven out of what we call human traits” (245). Wright believes that in order to be effective, Danquah would have to lay aside “such poetic preoccupations” and commit to “more realistic measures” (245). Danquah’s failure is then twofold: on the one hand, he fails to comprehend the romance of the mass nationalist uprising in the Gold Coast, choosing a prim colonial appeal to reason instead; on the other, he fails to apprehend the realities of modern politics, and falls prey to a dreamy mysticism about tradition. In prizing facts, not emotion, Danquah misses the great romance of nationalism. He assumes that romance is the property of the aristocracy, and when it is seized by the masses, he has to pose as a realist. His alienated realist voice, counseling inertia, patience, or gradual reform at best, misses the import of the revolution Nkrumah calls for. Removed from the masses on account of his elitist views, and estranged from the British who formed him because of their submission to Nkrumah, Danquah truly has no place left in the new world taking shape around him.47 For Wright, Danquah’s suspicion of the masses as a world-historical force in modern politics points to his status as an anachronism, out of step with history itself. But what Wright fails to see is that he himself has evoked a similar suspicion of the masses in his meditations on the soft, woolly African personality, impervious to reason, captive to dreams and fears of the after-life. So when Wright concludes that “our apprehensions of reality were too profoundly different” (245), he is right as far as matters of faith are concerned, but perhaps suppresses a kinship with Danquah in terms of their views on politics. Having met both Busia and Danquah, and with Nkrumah always on his mind if not present in person, Wright formulates a theory to explain the process of deracination that must take place in all Westernized Africans. In his most substantial attempt to imagine the emotional texture of their lives, Wright imagines the anti-colonial subject being formed through a series of uprootings. Torn from the certitudes of tribalism through his education by the missionaries, the African subject loses the native romance of his own people and clings to the Western romance of America or Europe. But “what at first had seemed a great romance” loses its magic as he learns the hollowness at the heart of industrial civilization, its “panting after money,” its structural racism and inequality (258). On his return to Africa, he finds “his culture shattered and rendered abhorrent” and discovers that he himself is “an outsider in his native land” and finally, “lifts his voice in an agonized

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cry of nationalism, black nationalism” (262–263). Wright concludes, marveling at the great drama of anti-colonial figures, birthed by a Western world that then turns on them:  “The strange soil of the Western world, composed as it is of individualism, hunger for a personal destiny, a romantic sense of self-redemption, gives birth to fantastic human plants that it is ashamed of!” (263). Here, Wright theorizes the anti-colonial subject as born of a tussle between two great romances, the native African romance of tradition and the Western one of individualism. Left unmoored to either one, the anti-colonial subject finally finds meaning in his cry of nationalism, where the two competing forces can fuse together to engender a revolt that will be transformative for human history. Wright revisits the topic in White Man, Listen!, where he develops his most fully fleshed-out theory of native elites. Though he was critical of native elites in Black Power and also revealed the contradictions of their uneasy class position, poised between the colonizer and the subaltern masses, in White Man, Listen!, Wright ends up placing a considerable investment in the nationalist leaders of Africa and Asia. Consisting of a series of lectures delivered in various European cities between 1950 and 1956, the book offers Wright’s most detailed explication of colonial elites, his most thorough analysis of leaders like Nkrumah. Consolidating an argument begun in Black Power, Wright presents the “Westernized and tragic elite of Asia, Africa, and the West Indies” as “lonely outsiders who exist precariously on the clifflike margins of many cultures,” as “rootless” men. For Wright, these elite figures are exemplars of new universalism, who “seek desperately for a home for their hearts: a home which, if found, could be a home for the hearts of all men.”48 They occupy this exemplary role because their history  – their movement through a nonindustrial past, a colonial education, and subsequent deracination from both – is for Wright the history of the world writ small as they experience in heightened and shortened form the basic movement from romance to realism, from tradition to modernity, from an organic relation to culture of birth to an estranged one that is the heritage of all humanity. This is a movement both inevitable and desirable for Wright, not something he wishes to critique or contest as he writes from within Western modernity as its uneasy spokesman. Even though he acknowledges that modernity is tainted by racism, he continues to believe that an industrial future with all its woes is preferable to the alternative of returning to tradition. And so he concludes in his provocative address to the Congress of Black Writers and Artists that colonialism was good insofar as it destroyed indigenous culture and tradition precisely because it produced figures like the ones who

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attended the conference, the Bandung generation, free of both Western and native cant, true companions for Wright’s own rootless journeys. For Wright, Nkrumah offers the right path forward precisely because he differs from the traditional elites and from the colonizer. In Wright’s analysis, in Nkrumah’s revolution, “the tribal traditions were emphasized at the very moment when they were being organized toward goals that would eventually nullify them” (WML, 801).49 Wright reiterates his idea here that the nationalist project in the Gold Coast involves not simply a transfer of power but a fundamental transformation of the life-universe of Africans, and – he emphasizes – of the Western world as well. He writes, “they were striving for a total transformation and redemption of the situation,” and suggests that their political investment “bordered upon the intensity of the religious” (WML, 780). Speaking of Westernized Africans who are planning to call for selfgovernment, Wright concludes that “these men were spiritually homeless and they were ardently seeking a home for their hearts” (WML, 783). What Wright calls “the miracle of nationalism” consists in its opposition to both British and native traditions. He views this process as dialectical, the “strange fruit” of “the colonizing effort” leading to a true freedom for the elite, free from tribalism and estranged from the West (WML, 786). If the Negro was America’s metaphor for Wright, the tragic elite are the metaphor of the new rootless men of the twentieth century. Outsiders, like Wright himself, to the West and to their own people, “these men were free in their hearts. By enslaving them, Britain had liberated them.” They are thus free to instrumentalize any and all political ideologies, whether Marxism, communism, or fascism, as all ideas become “weapons” and “techniques” (WML, 791) in their mission. It is the Westernized African’s rootlessness, his homelessness, his degree of alienation from both Africa and the West that makes him exemplary for Wright, as he suggests a great potentiality, beyond Africa or Europe, as Wright concludes that “the truth is that he has yet to make himself into what he is to be” (WML, 794). For Wright, this syncretism truly furnishes something new. He writes: “this incongruity, this mixing of tribal and Western values, runs like a red thread through the whole story I’m to tell you. Watch this curious intertwining of tradition with modernity; study these Western blacks dealing self-consciously with their tribal religions; contemplate polygamy blending with Puritanism; marvel at the sprouting of socialist thought in a ­jungle where no working-class ideology existed to support it; try to grasp this strange transition of politics turning into a passion whose intensity partook of the religious” (WML, 795).

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But through all this, Wright makes no mention of the non-elite nonWestern world, and offers no attempt to theorize their psychic or social lives; in fact he separates them from the elites he valorizes, even though Black Power had linked the two in their attempt to forge a new nation. His only prescription is the one that concludes Black Power: give the elite the freedom to complete this transformation from the tribal order to the industrial, and in the process, if militarization is the only form it can take, so be it. In this way, Wright ends up situating the elite as the engineers of the desired transformation of Africa, blocked at every turn by the masses they seek to move into modernity, rather than powered by them. In sharp contrast to his writings on the United States, where a folk nationalism was necessary for the artist to recognize, understand, and even embrace for a time, here Wright offers an inverted formulation where the masses are incapable of a true nationalist consciousness and must be forcibly propelled by their leaders. If Fanon romanticizes the masses in his theories of anti-colonial nationalism, Wright ends up romanticizing the tragic and rootless elite. Wright focuses on the elite as the source of revolutionary energy, whereas Fanon insists that the peasant is the true motor of the revolution. Both offer the same critique of cultural traditions fetishized for their own sake, but Fanon crucially redefines modernity by turning away from the West, whereas Wright ends up urging Nkrumah to approximate Western forms of modernity. Moreover, in the US context, Wright had asserted that romance was a consequence of injustice alone, not inherent to blackness, and with no intrinsic value. Black artists needed to use realism to explode romance, even as their style of writing could include elements of the gothic, to take one example, as rationalism alone could not be adequate to the hallucinatory nature of race relations. But, in the Gold Coast, Wright’s recognition of romance in the masses is shorn of a historical rooting, and he turns to realism as a political policy for Nkrumah with a disquieting advocacy of militarization. In his infamous letter to Nkrumah that concludes Black Power, Wright cautions against “soft, sentimental feelings” and “hearts swamped with emotion” (384–385). His refrain – “you must be hard” – recurs as a mantra designed to counteract the softness of the African personality, the “cloudiness,” the “sodden vagueness” and the “gummy tribalism” that besets Africa (385, 387). Advocating hardness numerous times, Wright asks Nkrumah to remember that “since we cannot wait for dreams, let us turn to reality” (391). And, as is well known, this reality consists of the need for “militarizing” African life. To hurtle Africa full throttle into the twentieth century, Wright argues that “a military form of African society will

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atomize the fetish-ridden past, abolish the mystical and nonsensical family relations that freeze the African in his static degradation; it will render impossible the continued existence of those parasitic chiefs who have too long bled and misled a naïve people” (391). Where Fanon had emphasized the “occult instability” of the masses, Wright notes a temporal deadlock of “static degradation.” In saying so, Wright’s final comment on African culture is at best a critique of the chiefs and tribalism, but at worst, reads like a comprehensive rejection of the totality of African culture. He writes, assuming an identification that is nowhere to be found throughout the long book, “Our people must be made to walk, forced draft, into the twentieth century” (388). Recently, such critics as Kevin Gaines and Manthia Diawara have defended Wright’s injunction that “African life must be militarized” by portraying it not as an advocacy of the dictatorship and tyranny that was to follow but as a more loosely defined desire for discipline.50 But it is difficult to derive such nuance from what Wright offers fairly bluntly, not only in the letter but elsewhere in his writing on Third World politics.51 He admits that the organization he advocates will look like “Communism, Fascism, Nazism” to Western observers (392) and even says that “a militarized social structure can replace, for a time, the political” (391). Wright’s travel journal makes it even clearer, where he says that the people of the Gold Coast “must be made to walk into the twentieth century. . . . They must be made slaves, but not for profit.”52 Given that the chapter that concludes Black Power begins with Wright’s sentimental journey through the slave forts of the Gold Coast, it is difficult to view his reference to slavery in his prescriptions for Nkrumah as accidental or unconscious. In the published version, Wright amends the reference to warn Nkrumah against shifting from tribal to industrial slavery. Wright further links his advice back to his discussion of “politics plus” when he tells Nkrumah that “you know as well as I know that politics alone is not enough for Africa. Keep the fires of passion burning in your movement; don’t let Westerners turn you away from the only force that can, at this time, knit your people together. It’s a secular religion that you must slowly create; it’s that, or your edifice falls apart” (392). In other words, Wright suggests that even if the content of the nationalist revolution is still understood as “politics plus,” its form will inevitably take the shape of militarism. It isn’t as if Wright is not self-conscious about either the form or the content of nationalism. Indeed, his letter includes a discussion of both, suggesting that “the content decides the form” (392). But if the content involves a synthesis of politics and religion, of modernity and

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tribalism, and of romance and realism, it remains unclear why the form must look like fascism. Fanon warns of the dangers of such militarization in “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in The Wretched of the Earth, suggesting that unless national consciousness crystallizes the people’s hopes for social and economic justice, the entire movement for decolonization will only become “an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been” (119). And Wright’s unpublished manuscript version of Black Power reveals only too clearly his worries that Nkrumah was indeed proceeding towards such a dictatorial role, as the manuscript is peppered with references to Nazism, fascism, and Hitler.53 Given Wright’s misgivings, and his lifelong defense of individual freedoms, it is impossible to defend his stern espousal of the militarization of Africa, even when explained as a result of his distaste for tribalism and religion. Moreover, the form of the public letter itself raises questions. Obviously, the letter is supposed to somehow compensate for not being able to get Nkrumah’s attention during his visit. The reader of Black Power then becomes voyeur to a conversation that never took place. Wright also places the West in a strange relation, as his letter warns Nkrumah that the West might respond with homilies of democracy but Nkrumah should ignore such advice. Given that the book is explicitly positioned as explaining the secrets of Africa to the West, it makes little sense to speak to Nkrumah about the same West that is being situated as uncomprehending and irrelevant. Earlier, Wright had railed against Africans holding secrets from foreign eyes, not wanting to reveal their hidden truths to a hostile Western world (themes sounded in Color Curtain and White Man, Listen! as well), viewing such fantasies of secrecy as immature and childish. And yet, he seems to return to such a notion of African secrets and positions himself as the translator of such secrets to a West that he has already dismissed, and thus creates an elaborate scheme where his prescriptions for Africa are meant for Nkrumah alone, rather than for his Western readers. How then might we view Black Power, especially as part of an archive of black diasporic writings on Africa? Certainly, Wright provides a powerful counterweight to theories of diaspora based on a narrative of return, heritage, or cultural unity. And yet, Wright’s representation of Africa in general and the Gold Coast in particular is by no means free of common colonial and racial tropes. Though many of his prescriptions for Africa’s future are clearly motivated by his desire to bring Africa into a modernity he views as inevitable, desirable, and emancipatory, many of his actual descriptions of African cultural practices, tribal belief systems, habits of

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dress, food, and even laughter, render Africa as the sign of pure differ­ ence. The relation between the two representations, one historicizing, the other rendering Africa timeless and static, is crucial to ponder because the stakes of Wright’s descriptions and prescriptions are quite high. As an important spokesman for the cause of racial advancement, his advocacy of dictatorship and his wholesale dismissal of African culture necessarily give pause to our assessment of his value to constructions of diaspora. But precisely because Black Power falls outside most definitions of diaspora, it may be productive for our own history of the term. Believing neither in racial essentialism nor in hybridity, one strand of the text frames diaspora as a political identification based on the real suffering and hopes of the people as Ghana becomes a stage for the rest of Africa, and for the world. In this way, Wright signals a new moment of diasporic thought where the theorization of Africa does not construct it as homeland, or as the site of a symbolic or physical return, but rather as a test case for studying a political movement, making the premise of the text necessarily universalist. But at the same time Wright falls short of maintaining such a political identification because there is such an extreme cultural disidentification as he goes on to polarize politics and culture, separating the elites from the masses, and perhaps, most damaging of all, tradition from modernity. In reassessing Wright and Fanon’s role as theorists of revolution, the point is not to assert their accuracy, or to decide whether they were right or wrong, but to analyze the manner of their conception of the revolution. The affirmative power of Fanon’s political vision comes from his broadly egalitarian, even if utopian, conception, whereas Wright’s dystopic conclusion gives a measure of pause. It must also be said that larger historical constraints inevitably shaped Wright’s views, revealing in the process the fault lines of realist approaches to race in a diasporic context as well as the urgency of the political and material pressures on the decolonizing nation. 1960 was variously thought of as the “Year of Africa,” as sixteen nations followed Ghana in breaking free from colonial rule by Britain and France. But the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo in January 1961 already signaled the precarious nature of African freedom. The utopia of decolonization dissipated rapidly as Nkrumah’s years of leadership were dogged by his dictatorial methods of rule, neo-colonial difficulties over the expensive Volta Project, and the constant tussle between local and pan-African struggles for power. When Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup in 1966, the final bell on the era seemed to have sounded. Postcolonial writers were then left to grapple with many of the same questions that plagued Wright,

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in an era of despair and disappointment. One of their challenges was to offer a more nuanced view of tradition and modernity, culture and politics, and romance and realism than the one put forward by Wright, and it is to such exertions to make the past usable even as the unfulfilled project of decolonization could be brought to fruition that the next chapter turns, by looking at the work of the Ghanaian writer, Ama Ata Aidoo.

Ch apter 5

From revolution to arrested decolonization: Ama Ata Aidoo and the long view of history

It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

In his famous preface to Frantz Fanon’s explosive anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre sets up the text in a peculiar relationship to its Western readers. On the one hand, Sartre claims that Europeans have much to learn from Fanon, not only about the non­European world, as “the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice,” but also truths about the core of Europe itself. On the other hand, Sartre believes that Fanon is not concerned with the West at all, and instead only speaks to the rest of the world.1 Sartre declares, “What does Fanon care whether you read his work or not?”; “he speaks of you often, never to you” (11, 9). In this way, in Sartre’s reading, Fanon’s work signals the end of European hegemony and a turn away from Europe on the part of the colonized, as “in the past we made history and now it is being made of us” (23). Ultimately, Sartre concludes, “this book has not the slightest need of a preface, all the less because it is not addressed to us. Yet I have written one, in order to bring the argument to its conclusion; for we in Europe too are being decolonized” (21). Accordingly, Sartre’s assessment of Fanon’s manifesto for liberation comes full circle, as reading the book will not only free the colonized but also the colonizer, birthing a new, more inclusive humanism in the process. In his conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon follows a similar path, as he begins with the declaration that “the European game has ended.” He exhorts his readers to abandon all notions of imitating or catching up with Europe. Rather, he tells us, “let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them” (251). For Fanon, decolonization will not only end imperial rule in Africa, 181

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but also it will lead to a fundamental reorganization of life itself, as “it is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man” (254). To offer a complete transformation of the colonial world, Fanon concludes, as did Sartre, that the struggle against colonialism will make the world new for all involved: “For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man” (255). The Wretched of the Earth captures the pulse of the historical moment of the post-decolonization world as no other work of the era. Notable for its rejection of common assumptions of black unity forwarded by the influential négritude movement and its Anglophone counterpart, pan-Africanism, Fanon instead invests his hopes in anti-colonial nationalism. In so doing, his work offers a rich opportunity for rethinking the divide between nation and diaspora that has become almost self-evident in recent scholarship on the subject. Fanon’s utopia makes the nation the locus of its hopes, a nation that comes into being as a global emancipatory force through the revolutionary struggle against colonial rule.2 Fanon urges native intellectuals to take up arms in the struggle for national liberation, because without such a commitment their art will continue to be sterile, either trying to assimilate Western values, or formulating some abstract notion of a pre-colonial existence that can only be an anachronistic throwback to a fantastical past. While there is much that is idealistic and ­utopian about Fanon’s conception of national struggle, it is worth noting that he does not, in fact, romanticize the past. He cautions against wanting to redeem a lost glory, clearly stating that “all the proofs of a wonderful Songhai civilization will not change the fact that today the Songhais are under-fed and illiterate” (168). Moreover, rather than imagining a march towards progress where colonial rule is replaced by sovereign nationality, Fanon’s idea of liberation works at a deeper, more elemental plane, suggesting a fundamental transfiguration of being, the birth of a new humanism, and the inauguration of a more just social order. Neither imagining a return nor promising redemption, then, Fanon’s vision is based wholly on newness, born out of the conception that colonialism caused a definitive rupture with the past, one that can never be sutured through memory or imagination, but can only be the foundation of something altogether new, forged through revolutionary struggle. Fanon insists, moreover, in a controversial address to the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome in 1959, that there is no value to statements of black unity or black culture. Rather, he argues, “every culture is first and foremost national,” and will take shape in the

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struggle for liberation. He continues, “the problems which kept Richard Wright or Langston Hughes on the alert were fundamentally different from those which might confront Leopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta” (174). When read in context, it is clear that Fanon is speaking against those African politicians, like Senghor from Senegal and Jacques Rabemananjara from Madagascar, who are happy to speak of a common black destiny yet are reluctant to support the Algerian struggle for independence against the French.3 As we have seen earlier, Fanon’s commitment to the Algerian struggle led him to develop a conception of internationalism that went beyond and against common notions of pan-African unity. Accordingly, he proclaims, “there will never be such a thing as black culture because there is not a single politician who feels he has a vocation to bring black republics into being” (188–189). What interests me here is the interplay between aesthetic or cultural forms of black unity and political ones. Of course, Fanon draws a clear distinction between the two, and even suggests that without giving primacy to the political achievement of decolonization, it is futile to hanker after cultural declarations of independence. In subordinating culture to politics, he echoes Kwame Nkrumah’s clarion call: “seek ye first the political kingdom and all things shall be added unto you.”4 In this way, Fanon’s fierce commitment to the nationalist project places him in sharp contrast to most conceptions of black diasporic culture and politics, such as négritude, the New Negro Renaissance, and certain forms of pan-Africanism, where declarations of a cultural and even ontological unity are frequent, even as dissent over politics is ubiquitous. It certainly contrasts significantly with Pauline Hopkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Casely Hayford, and Chinua Achebe, all of whom, as we have seen, viewed the cultural decolonization of the mind as a necessary vehicle for political change. What is further remarkable and distinctive about Fanon’s principles is his conviction that national consciousness has nothing to do with race or ethnicity; instead it is necessarily universal in aspiration.5 He distinguishes between “nationalism,” all too easily co-opted by the neo-colonial world order as an accessory to capitalism, and “national consciousness,” a genuine, historic evolution of a social and political imagined community, forged through the liberation struggle. For Fanon, moreover, in contrast to current cultural theories where an investment in the nation seems antithetical to cosmopolitan impulses, national consciousness can encompass, rather than reject an international consciousness, as the anticolonial struggle becomes the path to a truly global emancipation. And so, he famously concludes, “It is at the heart of national consciousness that

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international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture” (199). To better understand such a definition interlocking national and international consciousness, both in its historical context and in counterpoint to current understandings of the national and the transnational, this chapter turns to the work of the Ghanaian writer, Ama Ata Aidoo. In novels, plays, short stories, poems, and critical essays, Aidoo’s oeuvre tries to come to terms with the legacy of colonialism and the relationship of Africa to the West. Deeply influenced by Fanon’s writings, Aidoo’s eclectic and explosive writings shift us to a historical moment that is beyond the utopian understanding of decolonization evidenced in Fanon’s work, but still profoundly invested in cultural nationalism and a commitment to African uplift. The previous chapter outlined both the promise and the difficulties of the project of decolonization in Africa. In this chapter, I shift to a moment which is removed from the initial euphoria surrounding Ghana’s freedom, but still vitally energized by the nationalist project. It is also a moment of great excitement and interest in Africa, of a broad and wide consciousness of a global destiny, visible in such cultural and political movements as the Black Arts Movement in the United States, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and the rise of a distinct black British identity. In dialogue with such intellectual movements, as well as others, such as international feminism, socialism, and Third Worldism, Aidoo’s work presents a sophisticated meditation on nationalism and internationalism, and the tensions inherent in trying to hold on to both affiliations. In this respect, this chapter turns to an analysis of Aidoo’s work not to reassess Fanon’s insights on politics and culture, but to go beyond the historical moment of decolonization to appraise the historical longevity of the claims of nationalism. In the postcolonial moment, the political possibility of the nation-state as a vehicle of social and economic transformation fades rapidly. In 1966, as Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup, Aidoo’s native Ghana ceased to appear as the beacon of pan-African aspir­ ations. Part of a wider failure of postcolonial Africa, Nkrumah’s decline prompted writers like Ayi Kwei Armah to take on the task of attacking tyranny and dictatorship. Meanwhile, African writers like Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Nuruddin Farah, Efua Sutherland, and Buchi Emecheta also attempted to understand the dystopic landscape of Africa, at the same time reconceiving the relationship between tradition and modernity, Africa and the West, the past and the future, and between men and women. Reading Aidoo’s work within this matrix of postcolonial meditations on Africa’s future helps trace the dialectic between the nation

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and pan-Africanism, and between racial nationalism and universalism, enabling us to enrich Fanon’s insights through the hindsight of history. Moreover, insofar as Aidoo grants primacy to gender as a crucial lens through which to study political transformations, her work also offers a chance to extend the place of gender in theories of nation and diaspora, a topic that has been a flashpoint in recent critical readings of Fanon’s work.6 Born in 1942 in Ghana’s central region, to a progressive family with chiefly heritage, Aidoo was educated at such prestigious institutions as Wesley Girls’ High School at Cape Coast and the University of Ghana. Her paternal grandfather was “tortured to death in a colonial prison for being ‘an insolent African’” and her father supported Nkrumah and believed in women’s education as an index to the nation’s progress.7 Aidoo further reveals that “looking back to my parentage, I think I came from a long line of fighters. . . . I have always been interested in the destiny of our people. . . . I am one of those writers whose writings cannot move too far from their political involvement.” She believes that she learnt to be pan-African from an early age, as “I came from a people from whom, for some reason, the connection with African-America or the Caribbean was a living thing, something of which we were always aware. In Nkrumah’s Ghana one met African-Americans and people from the Caribbean. In my father’s house, we were always getting visitors from all over.”8 Participating in social and cultural activism in addition to publishing fiction, poetry, and drama, Aidoo even served as Minister of Education in Ghana in 1982. Living out a pan-African itinerary, she also came to study in the United States and met such luminaries of the Black Arts Movement as Amiri Baraka. She has since taught African literature in universities across the United States, Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. Gathering all these influences, Aidoo’s bracing meditations on nation and diaspora reveal two deeply held convictions. The first is her belief that the history of slavery and colonization has relevance for all blacks worldwide, and her burden is to figure out the import of what it means to be postcolonial. At the same time, Aidoo also stands firmly against the celebration of mobility, migration, and hybridity, interested instead in understanding how a neo-colonial world order comes into being in the wake of decolonization. Innovative not just in terms of content though, all of Aidoo’s works are a volatile mixture of several genres, and her formal inventiveness provides a key to her sophisticated reinvention of tradition. Offering the most textured representation of tradition we have seen so far, Aidoo suggests that the usable past is not a fact to be assumed,

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but rather a dilemma to be pondered. Turning the imperial romance on its head, her 1977 novel, Our Sister Killjoy, offers her most detailed and accomplished appraisal of postcolonial African consciousness, its relation to the West, and to various forms of internationalism, such as global feminism. Offering neither a pre-colonial idyll nor a post-colonial dystopia, the novel furnishes a challenging task for studies of the black diaspora and its representation of Africa. In what follows, this chapter suggests that Aidoo’s novel refigures the “undiscovered country” of the imperial romance into a moving meditation on the meaning of Africa to modern African female protagonists, who mine the rich traditions of their societies not only for their reserves of strength but also for traditions of dissent and discord, in order to plot a journey not to redemption but to historical reckoning, which may provide the path to a truer understanding of the postcolony and its relation to the West. Aidoo’s nuanced view of tradition offers no nationalist dogma, nor does she take refuge in invocations of black cultural unity. Her voice  – sometimes wistful, often cynical, and occasionally full of rage – remains committed to the cause of uplifting Africa. Pondering the possibility of bringing Fanon’s vision to fruition in a neo-colonial landscape saturated with despair and disillusionment, Aidoo also looks elsewhere, to the Black Arts Movement, transnational feminism, and other internationalist alliances. Her feminist consciousness remains deeply connected to oral traditions, and seeks resources within traditional cultures – networks of kinship and community, internal tensions, and traditions of dialogue and debate. Aidoo rejects the mode of romance for representing Africa, and refuses to sentimentalize Africa, searching for a form that can express Africa in a mode outside of romance, as a vital participant in global black modernity. “I n t o a b a d dr e a m”: t r av e l i ng t o t h e h e a r t of da r k n e s s i n ou r s i s t e r k i l ljoy Our Sister Killjoy might at first glance seem like an unlikely candidate for a study of the black Atlantic, as it goes against much of the current emphasis on mobility and migration. The experimental novel departs from contemporary celebrations of hybridity, offering instead a strong critique of African emigration or “brain drain” to Europe. Calling the African elite to return to Africa and work for its uplift, the novel works as a political demand for African regeneration. In doing so, the novel recalls classic return narratives of the vein of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.9 But the terms of this desired African regeneration

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differ markedly from earlier calls, whether pan-African or anti-colonial. Where pan-African ideas offered spiritual and metaphysical redemption by retrieving an archaic African glory, and nationalist projects promised a transformation of colonized subjects in pursuit of the modern, Aidoo departs from existing ways of theorizing Africa. Although critics have read the novel as an instance of reverse racism, presenting Europe as the real heart of darkness, while it upholds Africa as its saintly opposite, a closer look at the novel’s formal tensions reveals a more complex dynamic.10 Certainly, the novel explicitly counters familiar models of colonial travelogues, which often acquire a sense of self by positing Africa as the chaotic, non-rational heart of darkness.11 Reading the novel as a response to such imperial travel narratives, critics like Brenda Cooper suggest that Aidoo goes too far in her response to Europe, neatly inverting the stereotypes associated with Europe and Africa, without offering much else in terms of refiguring the relationship between the two. Cooper further accuses Aidoo of “a revived ethnic négritude” which amounts to a form of reverse racism.12 Not only does Aidoo, according to this view, fail to present a balanced and insightful view of Africa and Europe, she also remains trapped in the vicious logic of racism. In contrast, by taking a closer look at the novel’s experimental form – its split between prose and poetry, the distance between the protagonist Sissie and the chorus that comments on her travels, and the complex logics of its elaborate metaphors  – this chapter suggests that the novel carves out a new path to think about race, nation, and colonial legacies, rather than being trapped in older formulations. To do so, Aidoo theorizes history in the postcolony as one long catastrophe, in sharp contrast to the nationalist vision of time unfolding in a march towards progress. Refusing to posit a redemptive future, she searches for other ways of thinking about time and history. Rather than revolution, for Aidoo, the African nation is a site of arrested decolonization. Questioning official nationalist discourse in which the moment of decolonization is seen as a definitive break and the birth of a new era, Aidoo suggests that time has stopped, as the same vicious cycle repeats itself as postcolonial misery rather than the transformation Fanon had prophesied. Aidoo thus disturbs the linear chronology of nationalist constructions which see pre-colonial Africa as an idyllic society, destroyed by colonial intervention, and finally redeemed by the success of decolonizing nationalism. Instead of such a trajectory, Aidoo highlights the fact of ongoing exploitation of the Third World, showing how the paradigm of arrested decolonization testifies to the meaninglessness of development

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programs for Africa, which entail not real change but a stunted growth reinforcing continued dependence. The opening of Our Sister Killjoy sets out the inexorable temporality of the postcolonial nation-state: as we fall “into a bad dream,” we realize that “things are working out / towards their dazzling conclusions.”13 Highlighting “a cruel past, a funny present” (8) and we might add, an uncertain future, the novel ponders the possibility of freedom in a neocolonial world. To express this vision of history, Aidoo chooses a highly experimental and fragmented form that can convey this sense of time. A “fiction in four episodes,” the novel’s restless form constantly highlights gaps, fragments, and fractures, as it shifts between prose and poetry, the immediate present and the long-forgotten past, and despair and utopia.14 Aidoo’s work, like many writers of her generation, is expressly concerned with the meaning of the past, and the way in which history may or may not be a guide for a genuine postcolonial future. Collapsing linearity not to escape or transcend time but to understand its workings more fully, Aidoo refuses the nation time of decolonization:  instead of seeing the moment of national liberation as a watershed, she sees it as “a dance of the masquerades called Independence, for Africa” (95) that Ghana opened. Split into four sections, the novel tracks Sissie’s travels through Germany and England and her return home to Ghana through a combination of third-person narration, a choric commentary that takes a long view of history to place her travels in a continuing and fraught relationship between Africa and Europe, and a love letter Sissie writes on the plane back to Africa, analyzing her failed relationship with a young African man who chooses to stay in London instead. Most of Sissie’s vitriol is directed at colonial elites  – both those who become, in Fanon’s words, the “transmission line” (Wretched, 122) between the nation and neo-colonial capitalism, and those who choose a form of self-exile by reserving their skills for a comfortable life in the West rather than the uplift of the continent.15 Sissie’s critique of the native bourgeoisie echoes Fanon’s prescient warnings of “the pitfalls of national consciousness” as she laments that “national consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people” has become “an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been” (Wretched, 119). Aidoo thus sets up her novel as a confrontation with her primary interlocutor – those moderate “academic-pseudo-intellectuals” who mouth platitudes about Africa’s problems to prove their servitude to their former colonial masters. Reducing them to less than human, Aidoo suggests that arguing with them is like playing chess with “the dog of the house instead of the

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master himself” (6). In this way, the novel’s main target is the continuing colonization of Ghana and Africa, despite the political fact of decolonization and independence. Before her trip, Sammy, an obsequious African who meets her at a party thrown for her by the ambassador, is anxious to assure her that “going to Europe was altogether more like a dress rehearsal for a journey to paradise” (9); in contrast, Sissie will find in Europe not paradise but a nightmare. Written in the heyday of disillusionment with the promise of decolonization, the novel thus participates in a wider postcolonial commentary on the dystopic reality of Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. As the utopian belief in African freedom, and in the promise of a political modernity that would transform existing relations, starts to fade, Aidoo exposes the hollowness of nationalist dreams, focusing instead on documenting the abuses of Africa’s leaders and dictators. And yet, as we will see, even though Aidoo’s disgust with the postcolony is as acute as Ayi Kwei Armah’s, to take one example, she does not restrict herself to realist, naturalist descriptions of waste, squalor, and violence to depict the despair and dystopia of the postcolony.16 Rather, her novel condemns the body politic by highlighting the monstrous nature of African elites, but reserves a space of possibility in the voice of the chorus as a reservoir of a usable past. The chorus of the novel sounds a collective voice that functions as a community of village elders. Drawing deeply on traditions of orature, Aidoo establishes the strength and continuity of tradition  – without stultifying or reifying it as static – in the voice of the chorus that guides Sissie through her journey.17 Rendered female, the chorus also serves to remind us of the wisdom and insight of those commonly assumed to be far removed from modernity. The chorus articulates a sharp and pointed critique of neo-colonialism at the same time that it embodies a valuable resource in its ability to process the contradictions of the postcolony by taking a long view of history. The novel’s restless shifts between genres  – poetic and prosaic  – can be largely mapped on to the narrative split between Sissie and the ­chorus:  where Sissie’s thoughts are rendered in fragmented prose sections, the reflections of the chorus are given to us in poetic snatches. Sissie tends to have strong and immediate reactions to what she sees around her, while the chorus offers a more lyrical, elliptical, and relational assessment of the events it describes. Additionally, while the prose focuses sharply on the present moment, honing in on particular moments in Sissie’s journey, the chorus creates a larger transhistorical arc, not one that is outside of

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history and time, but one that continually juxtaposes past, present, and future to draw insights from the unfolding of time. In contrast to the prose, then, which follows a linear trajectory, the poetic interludes indicate that the logic of colonialism continues to unfold alongside the promised logic of nationalism, making postcolonial time an uneven, heterogeneous mixture. Rather than contemplating history as a sequence of distinct events, the chorus – in the manner of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history – sees the past as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”18 In playing with various temporal registers, the novel makes available several (and sometimes contrasting) representations of history and an aspiration for a genuinely postcolonial future. The split between Sissie and the chorus is important to note because several critics have collapsed all distance between the two.19 But a closer look at the novel reveals clear fissures between the two voices. Such a split suggests (at the very least) some doubt about Sissie’s analysis, and places us at a distance from her, not allowing an easy identification. Such formal experimentation does not invite the usual relationship between reader and traveler. Moreover, since the novel fractures and fragments its narrative so completely, it is impossible for Sissie to constitute a coherent self in the manner of colonial or First World travel narratives. The distance between Sissie and the chorus is most clearly evident when the chorus directly assesses Sissie’s analysis of various situations. Written from the vantage point of a moment in the future, the chorus situates Sissie as young and immature, possessed simply of “one quick composite vision” (89) rather than true knowledge or wisdom. The chorus repeatedly comments on her lack of maturity: “Our poor sister. So fresh. So touchingly naïve then” (89). Frequently, the chorus explicitly contradicts Sissie, seeing her as immature and hasty, not yet equipped with the wisdom that can take a long view of history. The pervasive refrain, “from knowledge gained since,” further situates Sissie’s observations on a temporal track, one in which her immediate conclusions are suspect rather than to be embraced. While Sissie’s thoughts run along a linear track, mirroring her travels, and calling for a return to Africa, the chorus embeds a more ambiguous temporal scheme. Its long historical view collapses linearity and offers a transhistorical, trans­ temporal sweep where past, present, and future events can be understood as part of inevitable processes of a global history that includes colonialism, capitalism, and slavery. While Sissie focuses on specific pinpoints of history, time, and space, the chorus asks for a more expansive assessment of migration. A critique of Sissie’s point of view is thus clearly available in the novel, despite her strong and confident voice. The chorus suggests that she

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is naïve and instinctual, while her lover sees her as suffering from an “antiWestern neurosis” which makes her blind to the situation around her. Further, Sissie’s own interior monologue suggests doubt about her stance, as she despairingly concludes: “we are all a joke, both the pigs who run our countries and us the chickens who criticize them” (94). The mix of affective registers available in the novel, alternating between sarcasm, outright anger, black humor, and pathos, further testifies to its desire to fragment, rather than to offer a cohesive account. Though we might be tempted to read Sissie’s voice allegorically as the voice of Africa – and certainly she is quick to pass judgement on Europe and those Africans who succumb to its lures – the novel will not allow us to read her in this manner, as it constantly displaces her authority by refusing to be allegorical. The chorus interrupts Sissie’s allegorical readings, signaling far more discontinuous forms of identity and change. It doesn’t wholly dismiss her perspective but rather places it under erasure, visible in its being crossed out. In this way, the novel gives us enough to question her perspective, but not enough to wholly invalidate it. This ambiguity indicates Aidoo’s refusal to ventriloquize Africa through Sissie, and as the narrative constantly moves between the two perspectives of Sissie and the chorus, it creates a certain amount of friction, where each perspective has to be read against the other. It makes sense, then, that rather than invoking the common figure of Africa as motherland, with its associations of nurture, fertility, and myth, the novel chooses as its protagonist a sister rather than a mother. Such narrative tensions suggest that Aidoo’s work, rather than presenting fully formed, ossified, and essentialist analyses, is best read as open, experimental, and constantly evolving. In order to comprehend the novel’s view of diaspora, it is necessary to explore the schism between Sissie and the chorus further. Two distinct understandings of diaspora are at work in the novel; the first voiced through Sissie’s observations, or what the text calls her “black-eyed squint.”20 The second is more ambivalently voiced – at times, it seems like an extension of Sissie’s thoughts, at other times her journey is the occasion for such musings and insights, part of a collective timeless consciousness represented by the chorus’s poetic reflections. Sissie adopts a clear cultural nationalist position on exile and migration, viewing diaspora as loss. In her letter to her lover, she laments the loss of cultural wholeness that makes it impossible for Africans to converse with each other without Western mediation.21 She writes, “Great cataclysmic faults of the ages. An enemy has thrown a huge boulder across our path. We have been scattered. We wander too far. We are in danger of getting completely lost. We must not allow this to

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happen” (118). In this way, using tropes of scattering, wandering, and loss to invoke a desire for wholeness, Sissie understands diaspora as a betrayal of the nation. Figuring the nation as motherland, she views the male son’s abandonment of his mother as an allegory for a larger abandonment of the cause of uplift by the African elite who choose to live in the West as self-exiles. Acceding to the tenets of cultural nationalism, common in the 1960s and the 1970s, Sissie views migrations as a matter of individual choice, even of greed or selfishness. As for herself, she firmly rejects the call of Europe, equating its colonizing past with its racist present, and dismissing anyone who refuses to follow her condemnation as a bearer of bad faith. As her journey across Europe unfolds, rather than forming new relationships, Sissie finds herself drawn to the history of colonialism and she insists that her contact with Europe cannot take shape without an accounting of the past that Europe and Africa share. By the end of the novel, she methodically demolishes various justifications offered by a group of African students in London for refusing to return to Africa, finally silenced by the realization that one of the men is holding hands with a white woman. On the verge of tears, Sissie realizes that “the superior monkey has got his private white audience for whom he performs his superior tricks” (130). When first confronted with racism in Germany, Sissie reacts with visceral disgust. Her reactions to racism are emotional and intellectual but also physical:  she evinces an almost instinctive revulsion towards the West. We see this, for instance, when Sissie is made aware of her otherness for the first time in the airport at Frankfurt where she is “feasting” her “village eyes” on the glut of consumer goods and is stopped short on being hailed as a “black girl” by a child. The scene is clearly reminiscent of the opening of Fanon’s famous chapter, “The Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks, where he faces a child’s cry, “Look, a Negro,” and begins to understand his racial identity as a black Martinican in France.22 As Fanon points out, colonialism’s Manichean constructions of good and evil, black and white, find a perfect echo in the response to such racism. Sissie’s response, accordingly, is to notice the whiteness of everyone around her. Aidoo writes, “All that crowd of people going and coming in all sorts of directions had the color of the pickled pig parts that used to come from foreign places to the markets at home. . . . She looked and looked at so many of such skins together. And she wanted to vomit” (12). Sissie reacts to any suggestion of racial mixture with the same visceral disgust, viewing it as a violation of her integrity. As her journey unfolds, her disgust encompasses Western food, customs, and practices, as well

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as such historical legacies of violence as Nazism, colonialism, and slavery. Representing Europe as a place of over-abundance, overflowing with material goods that are so scarce in Africa, Sissie obsessively recounts the abundance of fruit, meats, and drinks in Germany, strangely attracted and repulsed. She is particularly revolted by “cold food” – pondering the “strange looking food that tasted even stranger,” she cannot understand why one would “actually chill food in order to eat it” and “decided it had something to do with white skins, corn-silk hair and very cold weather” (68). To emphasize the point even more, Aidoo has Marija, Sissie’s German friend, refer to meat as “cold flesh” (38). The group of international volunteers Sissie is a part of are presented as “baby hounds” intent on “devouring” as much food as possible (42): “They stuffed themselves. / Oh yes: / Darling teenage pigs from / Europe / Africa / Latin America / The Middle East” (33). At the same time, neo-colonial rulers are also rendered monstrous through their consumption of food. Suggesting that they feed on “carrion” to become a “cultural Vulture” they ensure that the nation becomes a predatory parasite as well: Ghana “picks tiny bits of / Undigested food from the / Offal of the industrial world” (53). If anti-colonial nationalism routinely suggested the birth of the nation as an awakening from a deep sleep, Aidoo suggests that the deep sleep continues after decolonization, as an artificial, induced coma, in which the leaders sell their nation to the highest bidder, all the while continuing to feed themselves in a frenzy of meaningless consumption. Aidoo writes, “Rulers / Asleep to all things at / All times – / Conscious only of / Riches, which they gather in a / Coma – / Intravenously – / So that / You wouldn’t know they were / Feeding if it was not for the / Occasional / Tell-tale trickle somewhere / Around the mouth” (34). In this way, the dystopic reality of the postcolony is emblematized by the disruption of any natural or organic relation to food. Instead of the yam and the kola nut that had such intense ritual significance in Achebe’s novels, Aidoo highlights the “dried, stewed, sugared-up, canned” fruit, vegetables, and meat that count for a civilized diet in neo-colonial Africa:  “Praise the Lord for all dead things. / First course:  / Cream of Asparagus soup / Thirty months in an aluminum / Tin. / Second course: / Chicken moriturus under / Pre-mixed curry from / Shepherds Bush” (38–39). But Germany overflows with rich and succulent fruit, especially plums, after which the second section of the novel is named “The Plums.” Marija, the Bavarian housewife attracted to Sissie, is the purveyor of these plums. The color of Sissie’s skin, these plums operate as somewhat of a fetish for

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Marija, who gives them to Sissie every day. The plums stand in for the famous apple of the Garden of Eden, as Sissie finds herself in a seemingly idyllic pastoral, a truly romantic setting: “An ancient ruined castle at the edge of a / Brooding pine forest, on the / Bank of a soft flowing river that / Sparkles silver / Under the late-night / Sun” (41). But this Bavarian paradise, Sissie finds, is deeply tainted, as she articulates her anti-romance travel narrative. For Sissie, Germany is not idyllic but nightmarish, as the “romanticism of the setting” does not dispose her to make “puppy-love, European-style” (41) but rather to ponder the differences between Africa and the West. The novel’s insistent imagery of food establishes a clear divide between the two, and in the process, renders food a material object indexing unequal relations of power. As Sissie accepts the plums as tokens of Marija’s feelings, “her tongue caressing the plump berries with skincolour almost like her own” (49), she finds that what might seem innocent exists along a continuum of a global trade in food that symbolizes hierarchy and power relations between Africa and West. Sissie cannot accept Marija’s overtures without constantly referring back to the area’s Nazi past. Marija’s ominously named husband and son, Big Adolf and Little Adolf, recall for Sissie the specter of “silent screams in dungeons” (78). Seeing a Europe characterized not by its dense forests and romantic setting but a landscape littered with ghosts of black and Jewish corpses, Sissie situates her relationship with Marija as part of a larger story. As the relationship between the two unfolds, the novel offers a profound meditation on the relation between the West and Africa, the possibility of a feminist coalition between First and Third World women, and the forbidden pleasures of an inter-racial same-sex alliance. But the novel opens up the possibility of a universal feminism only to foreclose it because of the mutual implication of Third and First World women in a history of oppression and exploitation. In a striking appropriation of Fanon’s phrase, “the wretched of the earth,” the chorus first creates a space for all women: “Beside, my sister, / The ranks of the wretched are / Full.” Sissie’s relationship with Marija emblematizes a possible feminist union of the wretched of the earth. Accordingly, Sissie’s interaction with Marija provokes the poetic interpreter to comment repeatedly on the shared lot of mothering, the preference for male children, and the loneliness of her situation. When Marija expresses a desire to be alone without her son, the chorus meditates on the common burden of mothering: “It is / Heresy / In Africa / Europe / Everywhere. / This is / Not a statement to come from a / Good mother’s lips” (49). Here, the text clears the space for the affirmation of an alliance between First World and Third World women.

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Gesturing towards universalism, Aidoo writes, “Any good woman / In her senses / With her choices / Would say the / Same / In Asia / Europe / Anywhere” (48). However, this space is quickly foreclosed as it is impossible for a feminist coalition to be formed which does not acknowledge its historical and contemporary complicity in imperialism and neo-colonialism. Sissie and Marija cannot form a sisterhood against common exploitation:  “From knowledge gained since, / One wonders if their / Buxom wives had ever been / Guinea pigs to test / The pill and other / Drugs (70).” Here, Aidoo unveils the concrete nature of a difference as capitalist subjects between Third and First World women. What can bring some measure of control over one’s sexuality in the West, can become blatant experimentation and exploitation of women’s bodies in the Third World, and the two processes cannot be separated as the one enables the other. Accordingly, Sissie rejects Marija’s world view and call to solidarity: “Marija, There is nowhere in the / Western world is a / Must  – / No city is sacred, / No spot is holy” (79). Sissie cannot forget that Marija is not simply a lonely housewife who is attracted to Sissie; instead she is “A daughter of mankind’s / Selfappointed most royal line, / The House of Aryan” (48). Sissie concludes, as did Fanon, that “the white man is sealed in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness.”23 In so doing, she highlights the violence of history and redefines the entire Western world as the site of imperialist hegemony and capitalist dehumanization. Throughout this section, the novel manipulates paired images of black and white, African and Western, and masculine and feminine to destabilize common assumptions about such binaries. In a recent interview, Aidoo angrily responds to the characterization of the novel as a masculine one. She says, “Killjoy has been described as ‘masculine’ which gets me raving mad. The implication is that when a woman’s writing moves away from the record of minutiae, like our clothes and our wigs and so on, and discusses more obviously political issues, she is being masculine, which is mad.”24 It is worth comparing this to a moment in Our Sister Killjoy, when Marija makes sexual overtures to Sissie. In rejecting these, Sissie experiences a particular form of pleasure, one that she can only understand as masculine. Realizing for the first time that there is “pleasure in hurting,” Sissie experiences “a strong three-dimensional pleasure, an exclusive masculine delight that is exhilarating beyond all measure” (75, 76). Feeling like a bastard rather than a bitch, Sissie’s new-found power over Marija is not only masculine but also extends in terms of race. As she rejects Marija’s advances, watching Marija blush with shame,

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Sissie decides that “it must be a pretty dangerous matter, being white. It made you awfully exposed, rendered you terribly vulnerable. Like being born without your skin or something. As though the Maker had fashioned the body of a human, stuffed it into a polythene bag instead of the regular protective covering, and turned it loose into the world” (76). In this way, assuming a masculine role also enables Sissie to devalue Marija’s whiteness. Earlier, Sissie had speculated that if she were a black man, she could have had “a delicious love affair” with Marija (61). The word delicious is particularly apt, given that their relationship is symbolized by the exchange of rich, succulent plums. While the rest of the novel’s imagery suggests something obscene about the excess of cold food in the West, the plums stand in for the attraction that the West can hold. Sissie imagines their love affair mostly as a source of anguish, doom, and danger, savoring the thought of Marija’s tears, even as the poetic voice of the chorus reminds us of the consequences of inter-racial romance, by evoking the image of lynched black male bodies in the Western world:  “Beautiful Black Bodies / Changed into elephant-grey corpses, / Littered all over the western world . . . Their penises cut” (62). In this way, Aidoo demonstrates how masculinity and whiteness are functions of power alone, rather than products of biological or even social certainties. She also calls attention to the structures of power that underwrite, and in this case render impossible, structures of feeling. While Sissie savors her power over Marija, the chorus repeatedly draws attention to other relationships and hierarchies of power. At times guiding Sissie’s awakening consciousness, at other times, chiding her harsh critiques, the chorus recalls the Nazi history of Marija’s country to suggest that Bavaria cannot escape its past. The chorus draws connections, even as Sissie explains cultural differences to Marija: looking at the Bavarian widows, Aidoo writes, “How this reminds me of the / Abome kings of Dahomey” (36). Similarly, Sissie likes to be called Sissie, as it is a name that represents “one of the very few ways where an original concept from our old ways has been given expression successfully in English” (28). In contrast, the poetic narrator highlights the refusal of Europeans to accept that Sissie was named Mary, as they see it as a German, Swedish, English, or French name, anything but African. This prompts the chorus to ponder the ironies inherent in missionary activity in Africa, which institutes a sense that God is white, while the only dark angel is Lucifer. Such missionary efforts make African naming practices nothing more than “anthropological / shit,” signs of “Pagan / Heathen / Abominable idolatry to the / Hearing of / God” (26).

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Sissie attributes Marija’s lesbian impulses to her loneliness, born of her aspiration for “lower middle-class cosiness” as her “nuptial chamber” is no longer a “love-nest” but “only a nest now, with love gone into mortgage and holiday hopes” (64). When visiting Marija’s bedroom, Sissie experiences a journey back in time as well, as “all images of twentieth century modernia escaped Sissie” as she feels that she is moving “down into some primeval cave” (62). In this respect, the heart of whiteness reveals a horror as potent as the familiar one evoked by the heart of darkness. Viewing Marija’s extensive collection of cosmetics  – “fragile weapons for a ferocious war” – Sissie feels no sense of shared female camaraderie but rather a profound alienation from Marija’s life. She further situates Marija’s sexual overtures as part of a long history of Western imperialism: “And so this was it? / Bullying slavers and slave-traders. / Solitary discoverers . . ./ Missionaries who risked the cannibal’s pot to / bring the world to the heathen hordes” (65). For Sissie, Marija’s interest in her is somehow tied to her sterility, her loneliness, and her heritage of Western imperial rule. While Sissie wonders why “the entire world has had to pay so much and is still paying so much for some folks’ unhappiness,” the chorus draws our attention to instances of African homosexuality, which horrify the European headmistress (66). In doing so, the chorus refrains from suggesting that homosexuality is part of Western degradation. The European headmistress’s response to two African girls sleeping together is to ask them if their parents are “bush” which would explain their primitive sexuality. The chorus responds, “But / Madam, / It is not / Just / Bush . . ./ From knowledge gained since” (67). In this way, while Sissie suggests that the sterility of Europe is tied to its lonely lesbian representative, the chorus steps back from such essentialist observations, constructing lesbianism as an African practice as well, seen as a sin by missionaries. Sissie’s travel narrative is not just a quest for personal identity, but an attempt to understand the meaning of colonization itself. Thus, Sissie’s attempted alliance is not with Marija but with African expatriates, whom she struggles to convert to her creed. The third section of the novel “From Our Sister Killjoy” takes us to London, Sissie’s colonial home, where her voice matures and becomes increasingly bitter and critical, rather than the exploratory, meditative, and provisional one we saw in Germany. She tells us that “if anyone had told her that she would want to pass through England because it was her colonial home, she would have laughed” (85), but realizes that she simply would not have been “abroad” without such a trip. In England, rather than being the lone exotic “African miss” (46) that she was in Germany, she sees hundreds of black people, all of whom

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seem “wretched” to her. Their poverty in a cold land, she laments, shows as it would nowhere else, and throughout her stay, as she argues with other African “been-tos” – students, doctors, teachers, and other professionals – she never understands “whatever drives our people to leave their warm homes to stay for long periods, and sometimes even permanently, in such chilly places” (89). Moreover, the novel suggests that this meeting of warm and cold isn’t simply a question that can be resolved by an appeal to cultural relativism, as her boyfriend tries to convince Sissie that “whatever other people eat and live on is good for all human beings” (120). Rather, Sissie insists that “these cold countries are no places for anyone to be by themselves. Man, chicken, or goat” (119). For Sissie, the stark contrast between the warmth of Africa and the chill of Europe signals a more insidious and fundamental division, one which the text gestures at in a discussion of the case of a South African doctor who transplants a heart from a dying black man into the body of a white patient. Meeting Kunle, a compatriot who had been in London for seven years, Sissie marvels at his enthusiasm for the heart transplant. Kunle believes that the transplant will “solve the question of apartheid / and rid us, ‘African negroes / and all other negroes’ of the / Colour Problem” (96). When Sissie points out that such experiments must have involved earlier failed attempts as well, Kunle responds with perfect aplomb: “he must have experimented on the hearts of dogs and cats” (97). While Sissie “lost speech” in the face of such absurdity (97), the novel turns to an extended meditation on race relations in South Africa in the form of an interior monologue, rich with sarcasm and anger at Kunle’s belief that “cleaning the Baas’s chest of its rotten / heart and plugging in a brand-new, palpitatingly / warm kaffirheart, is the surest way to usher in / the Kaffirmillennium” (101). In this way, the constant mention of black warmth and white cold culminates in the chilling reminder of apartheid medical science, as the novel refuses another kind of imperial romance, one of incorporation. The heart transplant literally fuses black and white bodies, and so, for Kunle, this possibility of mixture gives the lie to segregation. What he fails to note, of course, is the clear exploitation and racism that devalues black life and makes black bodies mere fodder for the preservation of whites in an apt metaphor of the institutional violence of apartheid. Even as the “Christian Doctor” flourishes, the chorus reminds us that everyone else in South Africa suffers torture, arrest, and misery, in “a veritable catalogue of / Death and just plain / Heartbreak” (102). In a fitting irony, Kunle himself dies in a car accident back in Nigeria, even as his reputable colonial insurance firm refuses to honor its contract. Aidoo

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relates this with ferocious and morbid glee, lamenting the “utter waste” of Kunle’s heart, “Still pumping under the / Sizzling chest” (107) as he lies trapped in the car wreckage. Suitably punished for his naïve hope in a fusion of black and white as the solution to the problem of race, Kunle’s life and death offer a moral condemnation of those Africans who choose to be seduced by imperial rhetoric. Throughout Our Sister Killjoy, the exterior landscape of Europe becomes the interior landscape for Sissie’s discovery of her own place in a world created by a violent history. She is adamant in refusing to incorporate any part of the external world. At the same time, her journey through Europe offers the chorus an occasion to recall this long history and to link it to contemporary migrations from the global South to the North. In so doing the chorus offers an alternative to Sissie’s cultural nationalist view of diaspora as betrayal, as it theorizes diaspora in synchrony with an acute analysis of neo-colonialism as an interlocking structure of power – economic, social, cultural, and historical. Rather than viewing diaspora as a betrayal of the nation as Sissie does, the chorus focuses on the inevitability of transnational migrations, driven by the needs of global capitalism, and a logical development of colonialism and its aftermath. The two understandings of diaspora create constant friction, even if neither is canceled out by the other. Moreover, the chorus also offers a historically conscious critique of the Western world, but one born of an awareness of colonialism and its impact on transnational migrations today. Rather than referring to “eternal contaminations” (to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase), the chorus’s critiques are located within history, as it presents a historical materialist reading of the workings of race, gender, and class in the international division of labor.25 While Sissie remains focused on the immediate present and the urgent need to return home, the chorus situates the migrants within a larger span of time, and within relations of power. Aidoo writes, “the story is as old as empires. Oppressed multitudes from the provinces rush to the imperial seat because that is where they know all salvation comes from. But as other imperial subjects in other times and other places have discovered, for the slave, there is nothing at the centre but worse slavery” (87–88). The “been-tos” become “the ghosts of the humans that they used to be” (89) in the same way that Fanon’s alienated native intellectual loses consciousness of self, history, and community, experiencing a triple depersonalization. Sissie’s cultural nationalist vein laments this fragmentation, longing for a whole, stable identity. But the chorus’s self-reflexivity challenges such a nostalgic desire, and critiques the fragmentation not from a

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whole standpoint but from an equally fragmented one: reflections from a black-eyed squint. In this way, Aidoo fragments the narrative voice to better represent the psychic fragmentation that results from an encounter with racism, an alienation Fanon describes so powerfully in Black Skin, White Masks. Indeed, one might say that while Sissie gives voice to racism’s psychic damage as shown in Black Skin, White Masks, the chorus represents the interplay of race, nation, and colonialism in the manner of The Wretched of the Earth. The difference between Sissie and the chorus is clearly visible in an extended metaphor of migrant birds. Calling to mind East and West Indians migrating to Canada, Germany, or New England, the chorus wonders about the necessary loss that migration brings: “But what else did / Migrant birds of the world, / Beginning with such / Few feathers too, which / drop / and / drop / and drop / from / constant flights and / distances?” (20). Arguing that “Any Negro can burn” the chorus mourns the inevitable end of such journeys: “Until the / Last wing / falls: and / Skins bared to the / Cold winds or / Hot, / Frozen or / Scorched, / We / Die” (23). This metaphor firmly establishes migration as loss, heartbreak, and ultimately, death. Allying itself with these migrants, the poetic voice joins the inevitable death, suggesting that the suffering of migration extends to those left behind as well (“we die”). At the end of the novel, in the final confrontation with African migrants in London, Sissie realizes the power and the limits of this metaphor. When the most eloquent of her interlocutors affirms the pleasures and fluidity of migration, saying that “wherever one feels at home must be home. This earth belongs to us all. We can perch anywhere,” Sissie refutes his claim by saying that “we are not birds” (129). In this manner, the novel establishes its suspicion of a certain cosmopolitan reluctance to affirm loyalty to a place or to roots, as well as of the idea that home can be made anywhere. Maintaining that “the price is high” of such migrations, Sissie responds with a naïve anger towards the “been-tos” or the self-exiles who choose to migrate to the West.26 But the poetic voice undercuts her reflections, seeing them as limited and unaware of the broader picture: “Our poor sister. So fresh. So touchingly naïve then. She was to come to understand that such migrations are part of the general illusion of how well and unfree population think they can do for themselves. Running very fast just to remain where they are” (89). This image of running without moving contributes further to the novel’s paradigm of arrested decolonization, where transnational mobility signifies no progress, but a trap of history. In this way, the novel articulates a future that cannot yet be born. It cannot imagine progress because it is

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locked in a bitter dialogue with the past. Sissie’s lover castigates her tendency to “freeze time,” to “lock it up in a capsule of tragic visions” (113). But Sissie counters that time is a “precious vehicle” and “we have got to give it something to carry . . . something we value” (113). The last section of the novel attempts to explicate this “something” without resorting to what Sissie calls “metaphysical crap” (129). The novel ends with an extended meditation on the figure of the African mother. The final section, “A Love Letter” culminates in Sissie’s passionate call for African migrants to return home to Africa. Recalling the scene at a students’ union meeting in London where she met the boyfriend she is now leaving, Sissie dramatizes – and renders absurd – numerous arguments put forward by a group of African self-exiles who justify their foreign stay by invoking “the mother thing” because “my mother has suffered” (122–123). Refusing them any sanctuary in their sentimental appeal to the long-suffering African mother, Sissie exhorts them to adopt her clear vision. She responds ferociously and cynically, saying that “of course she has suffered, the African mother . . . Just look at what’s been happening to her children over the last couple of hundred years . . . When she did not have to sell them to local magnates for salt, rampaging strangers kidnapped them to other places . . . Meanwhile, those who grew up around Mother woke up to forced labour and thinly-veiled slavery on colonial plantations . . . Later on, her sons were conscripted into imperial armies and went to die in foreign places . . . And now look at those for whom she’s been scrimping, saving and mortgaging her dignity in order to send them to school nearby, or abroad. Look at them returning with grandchildren whom she can’t communicate with, because they speak only English, French, Portuguese or even German, and she doesn’t” (123). In this interior monologue, Sissie extends the particular, local situation to a broader, diasporic one, seeing black history as a global one. Invoking the global history of the diaspora, she recalls the pain of slavery, rape, poverty, service in colonial armies, and cultural alienation. It is significant that in citing the litany of historical violence visited upon the African mother, including the Atlantic slave trade and colonization, Sissie ends with the image of the “been-to” grandchild who no longer speaks the same language. For Sissie then, the migration to Europe she has been speaking out against throughout her trip, appears as deracinating as the other histories of exploitation she mentions. That is to say, the loss of tradition signified by the loss of mother tongue seems to her an assault on the integrity of the African mother. She thus compresses diasporic history into a single poetic vision by placing suffering within an expansive frame of time and place.

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As Sissie writes in the unsent letter to her lover, she believes that they have been “caught at the confluence of history” (118) and without a hardheaded reckoning of the deep wounds caused by this, there can be no romance between them. The lover tries to challenge her hatred of the West by arguing that the two of them could not have met without the prior colonial encounter that brought each of them to London. But Sissie responds with a fantasy of a pre-colonial encounter between them:  “in the old days, who knows, we could have been born in the same part of the land. Or we could have met when they brought me as a novice to understudy one of the famous priestesses in your area or when they sent you to be apprenticed to one of our goldsmiths” (115). This is the only moment in the novel where any attempt is made to imagine an Africa outside of the framework of its imperial subjugation. But as soon as Sissie offers us this tentative vision, she immediately checks herself, and admits: “Maybe, it’s all nostalgia and sentimental nonsense” (115– 116). Deeply conscious of the common Afrocentric tendency to idealize a pre-colonial Africa, Sissie is careful to articulate both her resistance to the West and her commitment to Africa without invoking a precolonial idyll. Rather, she recognizes the dangers of sentimentalizing the past or resorting to nationalist tropes of serving the motherland. In her response to the African doctor who affirms a cosmopolitan ability to uproot and retrench like birds who perch on different branches, all Sissie is willing to say is “our needs are more complicated than those of birds, aren’t they? Surely our bodies demand more than branches, air, and seeds” (129). She stops short because she will not romanticize Africa: “I was groping for a way to tell him what was in my mind. Of life being relevantly lived. Of the intangible realities. Such stuff. Yet I didn’t want to get caught up in a lot of metaphysical crap. When an atmosphere is as inert as Africa today, the worst thing you can do to anybody is to sell him your dreams” (129). Dreams are not only useless in her journey, they are actually destructive. Firmly committed to realism, and wary of romance, Sissie realizes that in this world, the only value can be found in the rich insights of the choral voice, which guides her back to Africa, to recreate another imagined community. Sissie thus ends her journey and returns to Africa. On the plane back to Africa, references to warmth multiply, and Sissie resolves that she would not even mail the letter, because “she was back in Africa. And that felt like fresh honey on the tongue: a mixture of complete sweetness and smoky roughage. Below was home with its unavoidable warmth and even after these thousands of years, its uncertainties” (133).27

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It is worth noting that throughout the novel, Sissie develops a commitment not just to her nation, Ghana, but to Africa as a whole. As Aidoo puts it in an interview, “nationalism is such a powerful term for us (Africans) because of what we have been through as a people and are still going through. Over the last five hundred years, African people have been under all kinds of onslaught – physical, mental, emotional. It seems to me that whatever is left for us to recoup cannot be done unless we see ourselves as a people, as a nation. When I say African nationalism, I am also using the term to embrace the global African world. . . . Maybe then the better term for me to use is Pan-Africanism.”28 In this remark, Aidoo expands the idea of nationalism to include “the global African world” which would indicate that it refers to the diaspora as well. Certainly, the choric commentary in the novel is as interested in the legacy of slavery as that of apartheid, and sprinkles its musings with instances of history from across various nations and continents. In refusing to situate Africa in the realm of romance, it is not as if the novel retreats to conventional literary realism alone. Rather, the narrative tussle between Sissie and the chorus embeds two distinct scenes of temporality: a linear narrative of African nation-building that Sissie is committed to, and a longer temporal duration signaled by the chorus, where colonialism and its aftermath is one crisis among many, rather than the definitive rupture assumed by many theorists of development, the singular event that defines African destiny. The fragmented and multi-­perspectival nature of the narrative thus plays havoc with literary realism as it is generally understood. Postcolonial African writing, as Anthony Appiah has pointed out, departs from both realism and nationalism in order to delegitimize grand narratives of modernity, but not in the name of postmodernism as it plays out in the West.29 Rather, writers like Aidoo retain an ethical commitment to the project of decolonization even as they highlight its many failures and disappointments. In the end, there is nothing static or sentimental about Aidoo’s portrait of Africa in Our Sister Killjoy. Africa names a geo-political entity (a physical, geographical place), a longing, a site of political possibility (including despair), and a rich repository of cultural practices and evolving traditions. To be sure, Sissie tends to hypostatize London and Germany, but the ­chorus counterpoints her dismissal with a materialist understanding of race, gender, class, and the international division of labor. As Sissie returns home to her native land, she affirms a commitment to Africa, one involving a clear rejection of migrants who form part of the brain drain to the West.

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Aidoo thus remains politically committed to the idea of Africa without at any point trying to revive either Afrocentric romances or nationalist dogma. Instead, she explicitly critiques nostalgic visions of an idyllic African past and strives to highlight internal divisions and fault lines in the African past. She also refuses the temporal imperative of developmental or modernist accounts of African uplift. In this way, she redefines the basis for a true national identity by parsing the notion of tradition and asking for historical accountability both within national memory and diasporic memory, as well as in relation to the neo-colonial world order. Her novel insists that we have to reckon with colonial history, with the transatlantic and trans-Saharan slave trade, and at the same time puts in play important questions of gender as irreducible components of any meaningful analysis of African past and present. In doing so she articulates a solid critique of colonialism, rendering it not a providential advent of modernity but a catastrophic rupture of African history. In her work, the past is neither static nor to be surpassed, but rather something to be made usable, as a resource for the challenges of the present and the future. Neither a pre-colonial idyll nor a postcolonial dystopia, the African landscapes she represents speak to the complex temporal folds inhabited by modern African subjects, particularly by women, as they mediate competing pulls of tradition and modernity without positing the two as irreconcilable dichotomies. In this way, Aidoo’s work brings us to a moment in black Atlantic and pan-African dialogue where the rubric of the “undiscovered country” no longer suffices as it is transformed beyond recognition. In Our Sister Killjoy, the true object of the quest isn’t really Europe, just as Sartre says of Fanon’s writings. Rather, Sissie’s discovery along her journey through Europe is of her own political and ethical commitment to Africa. Aidoo thus draws upon but also extends Fanon’s insights to delineate a new kind of relationship between Africa and the diaspora, based not on a bodily memory or cultural unity, but on a shared political commitment to Africa. The next chapter tracks a very different kind of postcolonial project, interested in the same questions that animate Aidoo, but one that marks a definitive rupture with her continuing nationalist and pan-African affiliations, as we turn to a writer rooted not in Africa or Europe or America, but to the in-between space of the Atlantic Ocean.

Ch apter 6

From return to redemption: Caryl Phillips and postcolonial hybridity

I wish my ashes to be scattered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at a point equidistant between Britain, Africa and North America.

Caryl Phillips

In his latest collection of essays, A New World Order, black British writer Caryl Phillips explains the philosophy behind his desire for a watery grave in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Meditating over W. E. B. Du Bois’s prophecy that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line, Phillips wonders about the place of race in the twenty-first century, particularly for someone like him, whose life and work are both marked by that line and by a desire to transcend it. Born in St. Kitts, raised in London, and now living in the United States, Phillips sees his own travels as mirroring the triangular movement of the black diaspora he chronicles in his fiction. Explaining that he feels both connected to and disconnected from the various points of the Atlantic triangle, Phillips ultimately chooses as his anchor the unstable space of the Atlantic Ocean. Of the Caribbean, Britain, Africa, and the United States, Phillips concludes: “I am of, and not of, this place. History dealt me four cards; an ambiguous hand.”1 Rather than lament the loss of stability, he claims that his experience is paradigmatic of the twenty-first century in the same way that Du Bois’s was of the twentieth. Phillips writes, “the colonial, or postcolonial, model has collapsed. In its place we have a new world order in which there will soon be one global conversation . . . In this new world order nobody will feel fully at home.” Even as his fiction explores with great nuance and intensity the condition of homelessness for the black diaspora, Phillips’s point isn’t simply to highlight the loss brought about by the historical experience of slavery or the contemporary one of migration. Rather, he suggests that since “[t]hese days we are all unmoored [and] our identities are fluid,” the old narratives of race and nation no longer suffice: we must instead come up 205

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with new ones that can represent more adequately the hybridity of our times.2 Phillips’s fiction presents a more complicated and interesting approach than these somewhat shopworn clichés of globalization might suggest. As the self-styled “bard of the African diaspora,” this “citizen of the world” maps the multiple geographies privileged by diaspora studies in eight ­novels.3 His fiction spans Caribbean independence (A State of Independence), plantation slavery (Cambridge and Higher Ground), migration to Britain (A Final Passage, A Distant Shore, and Foreigners), black minstrelsy (Dancing in the Dark), and the Middle Passage (Crossing the River); it also delves into the relationship between the African diaspora and the Jewish experience of the holocaust in The Nature of Blood. All his novels explore new ways of representing a transnational black imagined community outside of Afrocentric or nationalist modes of thought. Clearly, Phillips’s distaste for race and nation (and that of other influential black British writers such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall) is motivated by a desire to dissolve the very idea of Britain as a white nation. As Homi Bhabha has famously suggested, migrant writing brings about the “dissemiNation” of the English nation to challenge the essentialism inherent in narratives of nationalism.4 But Phillips’s interest in uncoupling whiteness from Englishness extends into disdaining the value of race itself as a category and replacing it with culture. In doing so, he aims to bypass not only racist narratives of nation but also Afrocentric ones. Moving beyond the binary of “white racism” and “black essentialism,” Phillips concludes that – contrary to the American fixation with race – “Race matters. Sure it does, but not that much.” To make his point he echoes Ralph Ellison’s lament: “I want to throw my hands up in the air every time somebody reduces a complex question of culture to a question of race.”5 This chapter explores whether culture can bear this difficult burden by reading two of Phillips’s most celebrated novels, Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993). Reading Phillips’s fiction as symptomatic of larger trends in black diaspora studies, the chapter also assesses the implications of a shift from race and nation-centered models to those promoting hybridity. Phillips’s fiction explicitly stages the question of representation as he searches for a form that might best convey the rupture of the Middle Passage, the dislocation of slavery, and the many “unfinished migrations” launched by that process.6 In Crossing the River, for instance, the diasporic theme of loss of home works as a central formal strategy, as the novel itself splits into various fragments to convey the fracture of the Middle Passage. As it turns away from the realist novel and its common association with

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national narratives of purity and “untroubled continuity,” Phillips’s fiction appears emblematic of a diaspora aesthetic, both in form and content.7 Using multiple narrators, juxtaposing conflicting accounts, and crossing vast boundaries of time and space, his disjointed narratives embody the self-reflexive aesthetics that characterize postcolonial interrogations of modernity. Reminiscent of recent “neo-slave narratives” by such writers as Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Fred D’Aguiar, and Charles Johnson, among many others, the formal fractures of Phillips’s novels signal a deeper dilemma, as they stage the question of whether postcolonial and postmodern approaches to diaspora enable more productive engagements with Africa and the history of slavery than the nationalist ones these approaches claim to transcend.8 In what follows, I suggest that Phillips’s rendering of diaspora keeps in play two distinct and contradictory tendencies, one historicizing, the other transcendent. His attention to existing historical records ensures that his characters and settings are meticulously researched and faithful to our notions of slave culture as it actually existed. To do so, Phillips draws upon such existing historical records as a slave-trader’s logbook, or the diary of a slave-owner’s daughter, or letters from Liberia from African-American emigrants. He painstakingly strives for verisimilitude, for instance, as he attempts to find the exact tone of voice of someone from the eighteenth century. Slipping into the skin of blacks, whites, men, and women with equal felicity, Phillips ventriloquizes their voices in their own idiom. The critical edge of such a choice on his part – as several scholars have argued – comes from his refusal to posit some kind of authentic space outside existing narratives, to highlight the shared history of slavery, and to move away from more strident nationalist narratives of blame. In these rigorously historicized and largely realist moments, Phillips’s novels prize discontinuity. Here, memory is broken, and time and space become intensely focalized as distinct (and meticulously researched) pinpoints. In this mode, diaspora emerges as difference. Rather than representing these fragmented vignettes alone, however, Phillips also offers another understanding of diaspora, one that is characterized by continuity and collective memory. Here, diasporic connections endure beyond distances of time and space, and slavery acquires a metaphoric rather than a materialist meaning. Phillips emphasizes affective bonds of guilt, shame, and loss in order to bring out the shared nature of black and white experiences of slavery. In contrast to the realist representation of diaspora, the second mode draws upon romance conventions in order to suggest continuity amid change. In this vision, Africa remains

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static and mythic, rather than a co-participant in the making of history. Promoting a transcendental view of diaspora, Phillips turns to a romance temporality to freeze time, to collapse distance, and to stage the simultaneity of experience and memory. We have seen in earlier chapters that shifts in genre between romance and realism map shifting relations of time and space in models of diaspora, where realism is used for representations of diaspora highlighting fragmentation and difference while romance is called into play to present notions of diaspora promoting continuity and seamlessness. Here, we find that once again, realism historicizes Western experiences while romance and myth render Africa timeless, as Phillips – despite the postmodern packaging – leaves us with a humanist content. Rendering slavery as a metaphor further points to the limits of aesthetic constructions of diaspora, as Phillips’s insistence on complicity between slave and master risks folding into common liberal humanist notions of universalism. In Cambridge, as we will see, the bulk of the novel is in the voice of Emily, the slave-owner’s daughter, rather than that of Cambridge, the slave whose story the novel purports to tell, as is clear from the title. Such a choice might ultimately recenter the master, and once again, render the slave inarticulate or silent. Further, as diasporic descendants are linked to each other by feelings of shame, guilt, and loss, rather than by race or skin color, or a political identification (as in earlier models of black transnationalism), the historical specificity of slavery as a transnational system of labor disappears from view. Such a move raises disturbing questions about the stakes of rethinking the legacy of slavery. To come up with a concept of diaspora that isn’t based on race or nation, Phillips turns to a post-essentialist framework for thinking about identity, but such a project runs the risk of flattening out historical inequities by giving up the emphasis on resistance and agency. In a political climate resistant to talking about redress for slavery, do novels that describe slavery in metaphorical rather than material terms ultimately make it easy for modern readers to claim memory as history, and forget history itself? Moreover, do aesthetics or culture become watchwords only because politics seems no longer possible? In other words, do the neo-slave narratives of Phillips actually make us question the wrongs of slavery more deeply, or do they offer a comforting narrative of hybridity and redemption? Untangling the two strains of diaspora in Phillips’s novels – one, scrupulously historicizing, the other, proposing that diaspora involves a transcendence of time and history – forms the focus of the following discussion, as I analyze the precise value of postcolonial narratives of hybridity, and ask whether our

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interest in complexity and ambiguity does indeed take us away from narratives of return as well as those of redemption. “T h e s c h i z oph r e n i a of s l av e r y ”:  be yon d bi n a r i e s i n c a m br i d g e The desire to escape binaries of master and slave in favor of a radical hybridity is clearly etched in Phillips’s 1991 novel, Cambridge, set on a West Indian sugar plantation at the peculiar historical moment between the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1807 and actual emancipation in 1834. The novel centers on two figures – Emily Cartwright, a thirty-year-old single Englishwoman sent to the Caribbean to supervise her absentee father’s plantation, and Cambridge, an African slave living on the same plantation. Framed by a third-person prologue and an epilogue, as well as a brief newspaper report that chronicles the events, the narratives of Emily and Cambridge unfold in distinct genres – Emily’s version takes the shape of the nineteenth-century Englishwoman’s travel diary while Cambridge’s brief confession follows the conventions of a slave narrative. Emily’s account clearly draws on existing nineteenth-century travel narratives and memoirs such as Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, Monk Lewis’s Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, and Mrs. Carmichael’s Domestic Manners. In the same way, Cambridge’s confession replicates the style and events of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Not only does Phillips adhere to the conventions of the two genres and to nineteenthcentury genteel English, he also reproduces specific incidents, passages, even paragraphs from some of these works.9 In this way, at one level, the novel is scrupulously attentive to historical specificity and to the demands of verisimilitude. Phillips goes to great lengths to set up what might be called the “schizophrenia of slavery” – the existence of two separate worlds that confine master and slave to their respective and rigidly defined roles – by allegorizing it as form.10 As Cambridge and Emily inhabit the world of the plantation, they barely notice each other despite numerous parallels in situation and outlook. The novel’s formal structure splits between their accounts to reconstruct the interconnected events that lead up to the murder of the plantation’s overseer, Cambridge’s hanging, and Emily’s birth of a stillborn child she conceives with the overseer. Phillips’s task is to break through the artificially imposed boundaries of the plantation and reveal the similarities between the two characters. To do so, even as he sets up their disparate

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social worlds, he elucidates their moral and psychic worlds through their deeply personal narratives to imply their commonalities and to make it clear that the history of slavery is best studied with attention to nuance rather than as a simple tale opposing victim to oppressor. Not surprisingly, this aspect of Phillips’s novel gathers him significant acclaim in both academic and mainstream circles. The novel is seen as revealing what one critic calls “the catholicity of estrangement,” as it treats Emily’s fairly racist observations with the same level of sympathy it accords the tragic life of Cambridge.11 As the South African writer, J. M. Coetzee, puts it, Phillips is interested in “extending the compass of oppression to include the white woman, particularly the white daughter figure.”12 In Cambridge, Emily’s confinement within a patriarchal order complements Cambridge’s narrative of literal enslavement to the extent that for many critics, Emily becomes as much a victim of slavery as Cambridge. In what follows, I suggest that as the novel situates slavery as the shared heritage of blacks and whites, it also decenters Cambridge’s narrative in order to privilege Emily’s memoir of moral growth. Not only does Phillips accord Emily the most narrative space and sympathy, he also assigns to her the constitutive qualities of diasporic affect. Accordingly, while Emily comes to function as the representative diasporic subject, Cambridge remains far more static, caught within the common literary stereotype of an “Uncle Tom,” never turning into a candidate for diasporic hybridity. By the end of the novel, Emily becomes creolized, while Cambridge identifies primarily as English. Phillips blurs these boundaries formally as well, giving us neither a classic travel narrative nor a classic slave narrative. Instead, the two genres begin to adopt each other’s conventions and resonance, even as the characters barely notice each other though their lives and destinies are so forcefully intertwined. This is not only to say that multiple ironies and symmetries link the two narratives, but rather that the two exchange roles: Emily’s version takes on the shades of a slave narrative while Cambridge’s account sounds more and more like a European travel narrative. Cambridge’s narrative movingly testifies to the horror of the Middle Passage, recording how “our history was truly broken” (137). The evidence of fracture is most apparent in the succession of names he inhabits in the text: he moves from Olumide in Africa to Thomas (or Tom) on the Middle Passage, to David Henderson with his English master, who schools, converts, and finally manumits him. David becomes Cambridge as he marries a white Englishwoman and plans to return to Africa as a missionary, but he is captured by a treacherous crew and condemned to a second slavery

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on the West Indian plantation as Hercules. Rather than presenting a complex subjectivity to respond to these changes, however, the dominant note of his account repeats Christian sentiments. Early in his life, he realizes that “I earnestly wished to imbibe the spirit and imitate the manners of Christian men, for already Africa spoke only to me of a barbarity I had fortunately fled” (143). He thinks of himself as “an Englishman, albeit a little smudgy of complexion!” (147). En route to Africa as a missionary, as he is captured on the ship and enslaved again, Cambridge’s response is again instructive: “That I, a virtual Englishman, was to be treated as base African cargo, caused me such hurtful pain as I was barely able to endure” (156). Thus, Cambridge distances himself as “a virtual Englishman” from other captives whom he sees as “base African cargo” (156). Phillips renders Cambridge as an ambiguous figure, both slave and missionary, not an easy symbol of resistance or survival, yet not the bearer of contemporary notions of hybridity. Neither a trickster nor a hero, Cambridge is a black Englishman who speaks from within the script of missionary culture. On first viewing “the tropical new world that was now, home” (156), Cambridge decides that his time there would be brief and refuses to accept this definition of home. Unlike Equiano, whose narrative presents an ­idyllic portrait of his childhood in Africa, Cambridge refuses to remember the first fifteen years of his life, telling us that “on this subject my memory is no more” (133). In his loyalty to the idea of England, Cambridge, forged in the furnace of missionary Christianity, refuses to become ­creolized, as he identifies with England alone rather than with Africa or with the Caribbean. While Cambridge affirms his English identity, Emily divests herself of it, casting it off slowly as she acclimatizes to the Caribbean. In contrast to Cambridge’s static identity, Emily’s account documents her steadily increasing psychological complexity. Her narrative begins with recording ethnographic observations of the black slaves in a pseudo-scientific discourse of objectivity. As she enters what she perceives as “a dark tropical unknown” (22), she provides detailed descriptions of black lust, ignorance, debauchery, belligerence, sexual excess, and lack of parental feeling. Slowly, however, her gaze turns inward, and the narrative increasingly reads like a spiritual confession, as it testifies to her moral growth. Surprisingly we find a sleight of hand of sorts, as it is not Cambridge who comes to represent the rootless subject, displaced multiple times by slavery, but rather Emily, the daughter of the plantation owner. By way of tropes of home and exile, creole and African, Phillips wrests the significance of the diasporic experience of displacement away from Cambridge and the other

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slaves, and invests Emily’s consciousness with this experience. Thus, she acquires an authority beyond that of her subject position as white slaveowning woman, and comes to represent both victim and oppressor. Emily makes this journey with the help of a sympathetic omniscient narrator in the prologue and epilogue that bookend the novel. In the “Prologue,” the third-person narrator characterizes Emily as a “daughter sacrificed to strangers” (3), because of her father’s arrangement of her impending marriage. To escape this alliance with an older man, father of three children, and to indulge her vague abolitionist leanings, she agrees to travel to her father’s plantation. The third-person narrator of the prologue places her travel within a frame of suffering, banishment, and bondage, lingering on her feelings of powerlessness as she endures “the rude mechanics of horse-trading” (4). Phillips makes the connection explicit in an interview when he suggests that Emily’s place in a patriarchal order somehow aligns her with the experience of the racism of the slave institution. He believes that “to a certain extent, she is about to be sold into slavery – by the marriage.”13 Escaping this patriarchal order, Emily soon succumbs to another one on the plantation as she becomes romantically involved with the brutal overseer, though at first repulsed by him. Her attraction stems in part from her jealousy of his interest in Christiana, a slave practitioner of Obeah and Cambridge’s wife. Brown’s rape of Christiana precipitates the novel’s conclusion as it leads to Cambridge’s murder of Brown, followed by Cambridge’s hanging. Meanwhile, Emily stays on the island to give birth to her illegitimate stillborn child. Throughout these events, the novel aligns Emily with a general diasporic experience of loss as she becomes the mouthpiece of Phillips’s notion that countries are not dependable garments that will always fit. Emily realizes at the moment of the birth of her stillborn child that no longer does “our country” refer to “England” for her. She has been creolized and finds that “this country-garb is no longer of a correct measure” (177). Unlike most of the English expatriates, she realizes that maintaining England as home while staying in the Caribbean fosters a peculiarly double identity. In contrast to such duplicity, she chooses to become creolized by acculturating to the Caribbean. Phillips represents Emily’s process of creolization by exploring the ­category of hybridity through Emily’s thoughts on the slaves. Emily records the differences between Africans and Creoles on the plantation, arguing that Africans are slaves who retain memories of Africa, while Creoles are slaves acculturated to the West Indies. In her understanding, Africans are unchristian and ungovernable, their native ferocity spurred on by their memories of the jungle, while creoles, having been in contact

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with whites, are servile. She also believes that “the imported slave” and “the slave of local origin,” with time, become “the single, indistinguishable creole black” (63). She further writes, “It is to be hoped that this process of creolization will soon replace all memories of Africa, and uproot such savage growths from West Indian soil” (63–64). In this way, becoming creolized takes on several meanings in the novel. In Emily’s racist imagination, becoming creolized means becoming servile; she realizes, however, by the end of the novel, as she herself becomes creolized, that such creolization is the source of moral awareness and growth. Thus, Emily traverses and transcends both sets of categories, home/exile and Creole/ African, with a degree of fluidity that makes her the privileged bearer of post-humanist notions of split subjectivity, even as she is being offered to the reader as the quintessential humanist subject who can speak for all humanity. Cambridge, in contrast, does not acquire either such flexibility or such complexity. Ultimately, the novel – despite its fractured narration and multiple points of view – forwards a humanist vision where Emily’s gradual awareness of her racist attitudes signifies a moral triumph, and the beginning of a diasporic model of redemption. In this way, Phillips gradually disarticulates the notions of exile and uprooting from specific reference to the historical system of slavery. He hints at the possibility throughout the novel that the experience of the Middle Passage and enslavement can be related to Emily’s experience of patriarchy. By the end of the novel, Phillips explicitly presents Emily’s body as a site where notions of exile, loss of home, and uprooting can be located. He equates Cambridge’s capture and enslavement with Emily’s pregnancy which reveals her confinement to the dictates of her body and of a patriarchal society. Phillips delineates her feelings with some detail, writing about her perception that her dead child had “merely sheltered in her body” (180). Figuring her pregnancy and miscarriage in terms of exile and loss of home indicates that this experience qualifies her for membership in a black diaspora experience of loss of home. Emily’s first-person narrative describes her dead child as a foreigner who never found a home in her body, “the little foreigner now no longer resident in my womb” (183). As the text shifts to the third person, it becomes clear that the novel corroborates her perception as the narrator describes Emily standing naked in front of a mirror, looking at the “ruins of her face” (182) and realizing that “the masonry had truly crumbled from all corners” (181). Here, the narrator figures her body as a house which cannot offer shelter or provide refuge, as her belly becomes “a house of life which had shamefully pitched out its tenant” (182). As this loss deadens her body, the narrator tells us that

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“her vision had begun to pulsate with a new and magical life” (182), words which appropriate the language used for a newborn child to suggest that the sterility of her body is in sharp contrast to the birth of understanding. What the narrator calls the “new and magical life” is not a child, but her awareness of the complexity of displacement. The novel somewhat surprisingly celebrates this moment as it presents Emily’s consciousness in hauntingly lyrical prose. Phillips explains in an interview that his own sense of marginality from British society resonates with Emily’s precarious location, and his enormous sympathy for her emerges from her ability to rise above her racist attitudes to find solace in black companionship. In a sense, then, Emily’s experience of loss redeems her as her body becomes a ruined shelter. Not only does Phillips highlight her suffering, he suggests through numerous textual parallels that this experience of loss aligns her to the slave experience of the loss of home. For instance, she refers to the doctor attending her as the “slave-doctor” though he has earlier been a potential suitor. In a novel intensely concerned with the meaning of home, figuring Emily’s body in this manner serves to universalize the notions of loss and displacement that invest the meaning of home with such poignancy in black diaspora thought. One would expect our sympathy to go to the black male slave in this narrative. Counter-intuitively, Phillips presents Cambridge as less tragically complex than Emily. This move centers a white Western subject – albeit female – at the core of his narratives about displacement and exile. As these concepts are uncoupled from the specific experiences of slavery and the Middle Passage in the novel, they indicate a non-racial understanding of the contemporary condition of rootlessness. Consequently, the fragmented form of the novel is in tension with the moral and psychological coherence of the reinstated subject. My point isn’t simply to note the split between the form and the content in Cambridge, but to suggest that such a split is symptomatic of a larger representational impasse in the contemporary neo-slave narrative. At its crux is the question of how to narrate an absence, how to substitute memory for history, and in so doing to exorcise the ghosts of slavery.14 This question further resonates with the larger one of how we might redefine race and politics in what is often seen as a post-national moment. Given Phillips’s adherence to postmodern concepts of metafiction, it is clear that Cambridge is motivated by the belief that there is no space outside of existing historical documents to which we may turn in order to find alternatives to the hegemonic voice of the master. As the authenticating white preface of the slave narrative expands and takes over most of the narrative

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space in the novel (that is to say, the conventional white preface of the traditional slave narrative asserting the truth of the narrative that is to follow becomes in Cambridge the bulk of the novel itself), Cambridge’s story is in danger of disappearing once again. And so, Phillips’s representation of the violence of historical narratives about slavery risks repeating that violence, and rendering the slave absent from his own story. Of course, in pointing this out, I do not mean to gloss over further complications that arise out of Phillips’s crosshatching of race, gender, and sexuality, which are crucial to unpack. One may immediately think of the figures of the black female slaves in the novel to look for a way out of the binary of Emily and Cambridge. But we hear little of the experience of Christiana, Cambridge’s wife, and the object of Brown’s lust and Emily’s envy. It seems possible to read Christiana as a sign – however opaque – of resistance, given her interest in Obeah, her refusal of language itself, and her recourse to animalistic gestures, which suggests her attempt to reject the system of slavery. However, as we hear nothing of her speech or thoughts, or those of Stella, Emily’s black companion and the source of her seeming moral growth, it is difficult to oppose Christiana as a counterpoint to the narratives of either Emily or Cambridge, since Phillips makes little attempt to give us access to her feelings or experience. Christiana’s fleeting glimpses in the novel visibly testify to the violence of the erasures of narratives about slavery, further disturbing any comforting acceptance of Phillips’s disquieting equivalence of the white female slave-owner and the black male slave. What then does it mean to equate patriarchy with slavery, or to refer to Emily’s moral growth as an instance of creolization? Phillips’s goal is likely to gesture to an unlikely alliance between the two figures, and the meaning of the lack of that solidarity, but even this suggestion rests on excluding black women and rendering their experiences transparent. As feminist scholars studying the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality have often argued, the silencing of black female figures in order to prioritize the alliance of black male and white female ones cannot lead us outside the constrictions of racial and colonial discourses.15 Recent theories of diaspora have been fueled by the post-structuralist critique of humanism for its complicity with colonialism. As Kobena Mercer reminds us, “the demise of grand narratives” was supposed to ­signify “the end of the universal intellectual who thought he had an answer for everything. [This was] the decentering of the subject of liberal humanism  – Man  – . . . the subject who had monopolized the microphone in public culture, by claiming to speak for humanity as a whole.”16 Accordingly, the emergence of minority voices relativized putatively universalist truths and

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uncovered the complicity of Enlightenment rationality with racial terror. In Phillips’s version of the black Atlantic world, the sharp indictment of Western modernity is lost in the attempt to transcend the artificiality of race-based models of identity. Despite its focus on fragmentation and absence, Cambridge ends up recovering the universalist subject by ascribing key categories of diaspora discourse to Emily, while under the same deconstructive glare, Cambridge emerges as a far less complex figure, presenting a monochromatic foil to Emily’s “frieze of sharp stabbing colours” (182). “A s h a m e f u l i n t e rc ou r s e”:  A f r ic a a n d i t s di a sp or a i n c ro s s i ng t h e r i v e r Emblematic of Phillips’s refusal to be confined to national, racial, or gendered boundaries is the sheer scope of Crossing the River. The novel spans some two and a half centuries of the African diaspora, as it travels across the globe, taking us aboard a 1752 slave ship, deep into the “heart of darkness” to a missionary settlement in Liberia in the 1830s, along the ­nineteenth-century westward migration of a fugitive slave, and to a small town in Yorkshire during the Second World War. It opens with an African father lamenting his “shameful intercourse” – his exchange of the “warm flesh” of his three children  – Nash, Martha, and Travis (whose stories we read in the rest of the novel) – for “cold goods” at the hands of James Hamilton, a slave-trader and the central figure of the third vignette.17 Following this act, “the chorus of a common memory” (1) begins to haunt the speaker. The novel is framed by the narrative of this father, who personifies Africa looking for the stories of his lost and scattered children. By localizing the descendants of the diaspora in specific times and places, the novel inscribes migration as a site of pain, remembrance, and deracination. It also shows, in the words of one critic, how “rootlessness” is “emblematic” of “most twentieth-century individuals.”18 In other words, the novel both represents particular black diasporic experi­ ences across time and space and it renders such experiences universal. The novel’s formal fragmentation, its rejection of realism, and its refusal to provide closure are often read as symptomatic of Phillips’s postmodern and postcolonial project, where his critique of modernity manifests itself as a move beyond race and nation. In contrast, I want to suggest that despite the emphasis on fracture, the novel gives us a fairly coherent representation of the black diaspora. It does so by linking the various stories thematically and organizing them around a single note, sounded

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emphatically in the prologue by the African father: “there is no return” (2). This single piece of advice imparted by the African father becomes the dominant theme of the novel’s varied narratives. Even though the father occupies relatively little space in the novel, he remains pivotal to its structure, as his voice literally frames the other narratives, imparting underlying coherence to the apparent fragmentation. The African father warns the descendants of the diaspora against reverting to a lost origin, telling them that “there is no return. To a land trampled by the muddy boots of others. To a people encouraged to war among themselves. To a father consumed with guilt. And I, who spurned you, can blame only myself for my present misery” (2). Here, Africa has no contemporary existence. Guilt-ridden, it is outside of history and time, ossified in the primal moment when it betrayed its paternity by the “shameful intercourse” (1), thus birthing the diaspora through this act of betrayal. Casting the debate on the terrain of family wrenches the diaspora out of history and turns it into something organic and violated, or rather, born out of the violation of something organic. This presupposes a primal bond between Africa and its diaspora that is outside the realm of history. While all of the specific stories of the descendants have a fair degree of historical, geographical, temporal, and national specificity, the voice of Africa clearly has mythic rather than historicized overtones. The novel’s diasporic subjects can “sink their hopeful roots into difficult soil,” as they carry “the seeds of new trees,” but Africa can only wait patiently “for the drum to pound across the water” (2). Africa has no future or present here – no struggle being fought for survival. The novel imagines Africa solely as “a guilty father. Always listening” (237). This mythic figure of the African father sets in place a primary, archetypal moment of abandonment that inaugurates the history of the diaspora. While each resulting black diasporic experience is sensitively depicted, the only connection between the disparate narratives is that of a common origin. It is not the memory of slavery that unites these descendants, nor suffering, nor the experience of the Middle Passage, nor a qualified access to modernity, nor double consciousness – it is the simple fact of origin in Africa. The central unifying figure in the novel is the frequently repeated question, “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” This conception of Afro-diasporic genealogy rests on attributing a simple paternal function to Africa, and is rooted in the moment of African betrayal of that paternity.19 From this reified origin, the novel proceeds to complex histories. Significantly, the novel traps the African father in a cycle of repetitive guilt even as it explores the dynamic journeys and histories of the diasporic characters. The juxtaposition of these experiences

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suggests that they are indeed part of a “common memory,” sedimented in the African father’s continuing feelings of guilt.20 In this respect, Crossing the River consigns Africa to the realm of romance, visible in earlier Afrocentric narratives which tend to freeze Africa in mythic time rather than allowing it a contemporaneous existence. Although the novel gives us a fragmented, non-totalizing, and hybrid picture of the black diaspora, it also reifies Africa as mythic, metaphysical, and sublime. For even as the novel invests the histories and narratives of the inhabitants of the diaspora with complexity, it simultaneously divests Africa of a comparable complexity, and freezes it in the moment of the initiation of the slave trade. Phillips warns against diasporic myths of return, but he unwittingly reinstates such myths of origin in his own portrait of Africa. In addition to the mythic representation of Africa, as the formal principle of fragmentation juxtaposes various kinds of experiences of displacement, the novel suggests a kind of equivalence between these experiences. Because the experiences of slavery and the Middle Passage are rendered as metaphors, they become available equally to the master and the slave. Moreover, the novel tellingly refuses to provide voice and agency to the slave, while it invests the white characters with a fair degree of moral and psychological coherence, thus diluting the critique of modernity activated at the level of form. Encouraging simple forms of reader identification with white Western characters, the novel inscribes the white Western subject at the heart of its picture of the black diaspora, privileging that subject in its advocacy of universal humanity. Where the novel’s prologue warns against the notion of return, the epilogue firmly establishes the possibility of redemption, as the African father rejoices in the polyphony of the common chorus of memory he can now hear. In this way, by highlighting four distinct encounters with slavery, Phillips takes us from an understanding of diaspora that highlights the folly of return to one that champions the acceptance of dispersal and the possibility of redemption. Since Phillips is not interested in the old narratives of nationalism or racialism, he turns his attention to new protagonists who are neither ­heroes nor victims. Rather, his morally ambiguous (and frequently unreliable) narrators are often slave-owners, slave-traders, and black colonizers, and his focus is on moments like black-on-black colonization in Liberia or the massacre of native Americans by black soldiers. Clearly, Phillips wishes to argue that there are no easy victims or oppressors. Exemplifying this, the prologue alternates the voice of the father with italicized thoughts of the slave-trader. As the characters echo each other’s thoughts, conducting

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their human trade, the novel diffuses any difference between buyer and seller, as both parties conclude that “I believe my trade for this voyage has reached its conclusion” (1). Leaving who is speaking ambiguous, the novel refuses to distinguish between the two, insisting on complicity and symmetry. The interspersed voices suggest that this exchange is part of a shared history, indicating not only connection, complicity, or intimacy, but in fact, interchangeability. Hence, feelings of guilt are to be shared equally by buyer and seller. Illustrating this tendency to render slave and master as equal participants, the first vignette in Crossing the River, “The Pagan Coast,” highlights the intimacy between a former slave and master rather than their opposition. We learn about the relationship between Nash, a manumitted slave who is now a black missionary in Liberia, and his former master (and lover), Edward, through Nash’s urgent letters asking for help in settling the new colony in Africa. We see how Edward abandons his former slave and protégé, Nash, and is in turn abandoned by another former slave, Madison, in Liberia. Further, Nash gives up on his mission and faith as he “goes native,” taking on multiple wives and becoming a farmer in the interior. In this way, what one scholar calls the “strange barbarism” of the Liberian experiment comes to light as Phillips emphasizes the heartbreaking cost of a desire to return to a presumed origin.21 Most critics have applauded Phillips’s resistance to portraying heroic figures and welcomed the ambiguous portrait of Nash as an instance of a mimic man, a sign of colonial hybridity.22 But contrary to the notion of a mimic man, Nash seems to shift from one set of identifications to another, rather than signifying a double inscription. He swings from being a puritan ex-slave (with his language saturated with the values of industry, dedication, and perseverance) to a stereotypical “native” of the colonial imagination. His letters display only contempt for Africans, as he expresses gratitude for his Christian identity, distancing himself from the “robes of ignorance which drape the shoulders of my fellow blacks” (21). Nash’s sentiments in the letters evolve from deference towards Edward to a posture of defiance, which takes the shape of nativism, most obvious in his embrace of polygamy. Moreover, his notion that “Liberia is the only home for the black race” (18) reiterates a racial construction of nationhood that is elsewhere questioned in the novel. Showing no substantive emotional, moral, or psychological development, he retains an unqualified acceptance of British benevolence and civilization, which Joyce, the white working-class narrator of the fourth section, later deconstructs from her own subject position.

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In this way, Nash is displaced from the narrative in favor of Edward’s moral and psychological quandaries. While the first section of the novel establishes the folly of Nash’s return to Liberia, consonant with a postcolonial suspicion of return narratives, it also situates Nash as far less ambivalent or hybrid than Edward. Edward displays vacillation, guilt, suffering, and ultimately growth, thus displacing Nash from the center of his narrative. Upon reaching Liberia, Edward realizes that “this business of encouraging men to engage with a past and a history that are not truly their own is, after all, ill-judged” and suspects that his physical fever is a manifestation of a “profound guilt” (52). And so the rhetoric of guilt becomes an organizing principle of the narrative:  it places the various experiences on an equal emotional plane by asserting a common humanity. This allows the slave-trader of section three, James Hamilton, to hijack the category of slave for himself. In a letter to his wife, explaining how his shipmates ridicule his single-minded devotion to her, he writes: “They say I am a slave to a single woman; I claim they are a slave to hundreds, of all qualities” (109). The stretching of the meaning of the term “slave” here illustrates the tendency to metaphorize slavery in the novel, allowing one critic to contend that “Joyce can also be regarded as a slave of sorts.”23 In many ways, the most striking part of the novel is its third section, “Crossing the River.” Reconstructed from John Newton’s Journal of a Slave Trader, this section presents the journal of James Hamilton, the devout Christian captain of a slave ship in 1752, gathering human cargo off the African coast. The narrative juxtaposes Hamilton’s matter-of-fact logbook, which records his buying, selling, and routine torture of slaves, and his sentimental love letters to his bride at home in England. But rather than presenting him as a monster, Phillips focuses our attention on his feelings of loss, as the death of his father also haunts Captain Hamilton. The degree of complexity accorded to the white Western characters  – Edward, Hamilton, and (as we will see later) Joyce – may be traced to the immediacy of their narratives. Phillips ventriloquizes each of their narratives through literary conventions that enable reader identification, most evident in Joyce’s uniquely compelling first-person narrative. In contrast, the voices of such black subjects as Nash and the slaves of Hamilton’s ship are unavailable to us with the same immediacy. Instead, these characters are allowed to emerge, if at all, only through the silences of the master’s narrative. This is most notable in the third section, as Hamilton’s journal frequently refers to insurrections and failed uprisings, yet these entries are never counterpointed by an alternative perspective that might provide any information about such dissent. The slaves registered as numbers in

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Captain Hamilton’s logbook are shown to be continually rebelling, but are never represented as agents. Rather, the suggestion is that the body itself is rebelling, causing Hamilton damage through disease and death. Hamilton’s diary evenly recounts attempted uprisings by slaves and crew members alike, as a “violent body flux” threatens all the passengers of the slave ship (116). Hamilton himself emerges not as a figure of authority, but as a lonely twenty-six-year-old son trying to succeed in his father’s footsteps.24 Phillips thus forecloses the possibility of representing active resistance, choosing instead to delineate the discourse of the master. It is possible to read this refusal to give voice to historically silenced figures as a reluctance to commit epistemic violence on the subject under representation. However, Phillips meticulously reconstructs the voices of the masters with a great deal of fidelity to existing historical models. As in Cambridge, Phillips turns to the official records of slavery to find signs of slave consciousness rather than searching for a space outside received narratives. While the impossibility of speaking for the “subaltern” is well documented in postcolonial studies, the difficulties that necessarily attend Phillips’s project of historical and linguistic reconstruction surely need not be completely disabling.25 Although Phillips avoids locating any kind of authentic blackness outside of official records, he also ends up emphasizing collaboration, complicity, and shared emotions across barriers of race and nationality to the extent that slavery acquires metaphorical meaning alone, at the cost of its historicity. Moreover, because Phillips’s principle of selection juxtaposes various kinds of experiences of displacement with no evident hierarchy, he not only suggests equivalence between various kinds of experiences, but also attributes a narrative of moral growth to white characters while withholding a similar representation of black subjectivities. Even though his avowed goal is to avoid representations of Afro-diasporic subjects as victims of history, Phillips’s aesthetic strategies tend to marginalize them and to endow white characters with more agency. The center, then, in a novel purportedly concerned with the margin, once again comes to be England, not as the historical site of slavery but as a place of loneliness and isolation for whites and blacks alike. The novel also demonstrates that racial constructions are fluid, as African-Americans are “dark white men” (91) to native Americans, while repatriated African-Americans are white men in Liberia. As slavery becomes a metaphor for a general human condition of dislocation, rather than a historical institution, racism can then be seen as a phenomenon experienced by individuals, rather than as structural or

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historical. Exceptional characters like Joyce can transcend racism, which becomes a cause for celebration. The result is that the novel reinstates the white Western subject at the heart of its vision of diaspora, robbing the diasporic subject of historical specificity. Phillips’s differential treatment of Martha and Joyce, the subjects of the second and fourth sections of the novel, further affirms the metaphoricity of his diasporic vision. The second section, “West,” collapses the distinction between pre- and post-Civil War America by focusing on Martha’s journey away from slavery, which appears as a never-ending series of abandonments. Through an “atavistic mist,” Martha remembers her father’s shameful exchange as she laments her own family being torn apart on the auction block as her daughter is sold away from her (73). As Martha journeys to California, a group of black pioneers abandons her, unable to bear her burden any longer. Even in her death, she is renamed once again, as a white woman plans to give her a Christian burial out of charity. If Martha’s life appears as a long, heartbreaking tale of suffering, the novel’s other female protagonist proves to be markedly different. Joyce transcends the circumstances of her life as she divorces her uncouth, insensitive, and abusive husband, falling in love with an African-American soldier, Travis. When Travis dies fighting in Italy, she gives up their interracial child for adoption. The novel’s concluding paean to the survival of diasporic subjects significantly highlights Joyce, as the African father claims her as a central part of the history of the African diaspora. The inclusion of Joyce but not of Greer (her son with the African-American GI, Travis) brings the question of even-handedness into even sharper focus. Just as Captain Hamilton’s narrative displaces that of the slaves, Joyce’s story marginalizes that of Greer and Travis. Travis figures as an absence in this narrative, and only the barest details of his life can be gleaned from those embedded within Joyce’s own history. Joyce’s inclusion situates white characters at the heart of the African diaspora, as victims of history rather than its agents. It is significant that only Joyce gets uninterrupted first-person narration, as no other perspective qualifies her claim to tell Travis’s story. Martha’s section, in contrast, is given to us in alternating first- and thirdperson narration. Joyce is further thematically linked to the descendants of the black diaspora by her feelings of alienation from her society. She has no memory of her father, who was killed in the First World War, while her churchgoing mother’s “sole occupation in life seems to be to make me feel guilty” (150). Soon after her marriage, she tells us, “not for the first time in my life I felt the humiliation of being abandoned” (155). Claude Julien’s essay brings out the parallelisms implicit in the novel: “When giving baby

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Greer up for adoption, Joyce symbolically becomes the African father’s own daughter and starts a new life” (88). Joyce’s betrayal in giving up her son for adoption parallels the original moment of betrayal: the “shameful intercourse” of the African father. As Farah Griffin remarks, “Joyce’s sensitive, if cynical, voice dominates her tale” and, it seems, dominates the novel as well.26 As a fairly acerbic and entertaining critic of war-torn English jingoism, Joyce uncovers the deceptions that constitute English identity, history, and nationality: she realizes that she “was getting good at learning the difference between the official stories and the evidence before [her] eyes” (165). The novel’s black characters never conduct such an interrogation, remaining captives of the dominant systems of representation instead. Joyce’s critique of English nationalism from within enables her to embody the privileged insider–outsider dichotomy of the critic of modernity so often championed by Phillips. The unsettling optimism of the epilogue further diffuses specificity. The novel suggests that the traumatic historical experiences of slavery and displacement can be healed through the poetic transcendence offered in the epilogue. While the burden of the four sections has been to render the fracture of these broken lives, the epilogue purports to heal and unify them.27 Once again, this gesture of transcendence works differentially for Africa and the diaspora. While diasporic subjects are shown to be “singing,” “insisting,” “declaring,” “hoping,” “haunting,” and finally, arriving “on the far bank of the river, loved” (236–237), Africa’s only role is that of listening to these voices. The phrase “I have listened” recurs in the epilogue, fixing Africa in passivity to contrast with the agency granted to the diaspora. The voice of the African father functions as that of an all­k nowing prophet who can perceive the mythic correspondences between various historical fragments and subsume them within his overarching vision. His redemption lies not in any form of agency, but in the ability to witness the redemption of his descendants in the New World. The novel cannot imagine a productive or dynamic role for Africa beyond that of celebrating the determined survival of its descendants, thus freezing Africa in the moment of the sale of its children. Phillips’s insistence on a “common memory” (235) is important to note. Even though the “chorus” is “many-tongued,” ultimately it can be subsumed within a single vision, which presumes the never-ending guilt of the African father, and his one and only role as passive witness to the determined survival of his descendants in the diaspora. Moreover, for the diaspora, Phillips resists casting his characters as larger representatives, and even emphasizes his own inability to access and represent their thoughts.

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However, even as he demarcates the unrepresentability of the protagonists of the four core narratives, he inscribes the African father as the primal representative of the diaspora’s origin. In this way, Phillips authorizes the father to present the experiences of all different diasporic subjects in his own voice in his role as an ossified witness. The epilogue gathers the ­dispersed histories in such a manner that the four vignettes stand in for the diasporic experience as a whole. In other words, once we have read the stories of Nash, Martha, and Travis, we can then comprehend other experi­ences that are invoked in the epilogue. Phillips intersperses snippets from the stories of Nash, Martha, and Travis with numerous other ones, including that of “a barefoot boy in São Paulo rooted to his piece of the earth” and a child in Santo Domingo who “suffers the hateful hot comb,” and of a mother who watches “her eleven-year-old daughter . . . preparing herself for yet another night of premature prostitution” (235). Such fragmentary references contribute to the sense that the epilogue is all-encompassing, as Phillips jettisons any anxiety about the ability to represent the diasporic experience of loss. Instead, he points to the possibility of transcending such conditions of loss by using the mythic figure of the African father to unify the diasporic world. Here, diaspora emerges not as difference, but as a simultaneity of experiences and memories, and as a collapse of time and space. And thus the novel’s histories of pain, displacement, and loss conclude in a climactic moment of being “loved” on the far bank of the river. Rejecting the notion of diaspora as return, then, Phillips inscribes diaspora as the redemption of a shared and fallible humanity. Phillips’s practice of hybridity, in its effort to explode binaries of master and slave, fractures the discourses of dominance and resistance equally, leaving us with a seemingly evenly matched playing field, where the scars of history affect all participants equally. An examination of Cambridge shows us the ways in which Phillips’s postmodern rendering of slavery ends up prioritizing Emily as the diasporic subject, rather than Cambridge, raising difficult questions about the relationship of neo-slave narratives to questions of redress for historical injustice. Emily’s gradual creolization – evident in her psychological growth and complex subjectivity – is offered up as a stark contrast to Cambridge’s rigid Englishness. The novel’s fractured and fragmented form, then, ultimately reveals a fairly humanist content, one that resists granting agency or heroism to black characters, but surprisingly reinstates the voice of the master at the heart of the diaspora, providing at best a deeply equivocal relation between the memory of slavery and black political aspirations. Crossing the River takes this a step further, as the novel’s four vignettes are ultimately

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unified by the frame of the African father’s feelings of guilt. The cost of prioritizing such a disjointed picture of the black diaspora appears to be the marginalization of Africa. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the sign of Africa has been at the heart of concepts of race and nation in black diaspora literature, speaking as much to dreams of return or redemption as to the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Hence, Africa – as a sign neither unrelated to the landmass of the continent nor reducible to it – cannot be made just a static emblem of lack, or of a non-modern ­tradition: the mark of modernity’s erasure or its negation. My point is not to suggest that Phillips offers a bad model of representing Africa but rather to indicate the discursive limits of his representations of the diaspora, which, in evacuating historical specificity, end up centering a white, Western subject as the ideal figure for the diaspora, thereby displacing the black characters that are seemingly the focus of his metafictional explorations. “T h e u n i t y i s s u bm a r i n e” I have suggested that Phillips’s representation of diaspora illustrates larger trends in contemporary cultural studies. In what follows, I wish to consider his conceptions in relation to some influential theorists who have theorized diaspora and transnationalism in recent years. Most importantly, Phillips’s work is strikingly similar to the conception of the black Atlantic forwarded by Paul Gilroy. Gilroy’s black Atlantic, though a sophisticated analysis of the webbed network of black diasporic cultures, also leaves little room for Africa, allocating it a marginal role in the construction of vibrant transnational cultural formations. Gilroy’s main target, of course, is those cultural nationalist discourses (such as Afrocentrism, négritude, and pan-Africanism) which bypass the historical experience of slavery to arrive at a pre-historic mystical Africa frozen in time. Firmly opposed to the romance of Afrocentrism, Gilroy argues that in viewing Africa as an idealized motherland, such romantic narratives fail to refute Eurocentric racism because they accept its assumptions of an essential division between Africa and the West. Further, in their desire for a glorious past, they prioritize an image of Africa as anterior to modernity, and so largely tend to suppress the history of slavery, because in their view, Gilroy suggests, “slavery is the site of black victimage and thus of tradition’s intended erasure.”28 At once nostalgic, triumphalist, and compensatory, Afrocentrism situates Africa as origin, authenticity, and purity. Gilroy rails against such definitions of “invariant tradition” and “an idea of politics as a therapeutic activity” (188). In sharp contrast,

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he delineates an alternative black diasporic tradition which confronts head-on the rupture of the Middle Passage and as such cannot dissociate black subjects from the history of the West. Moreover, he differentiates Afrocentric discourses from his own on their basis of time as well. For him, Afrocentrism relies on a linear idea of time and a polarization of tradition and modernity. Gilroy pits “diaspora space and its dynamics of differentiation” (197) to the “nation time” of the Afrocentrists. Defining black Atlantic temporality as characterized by rupture, non-­synchronicity, and fracture, Gilroy wishes to redefine tradition as the “living ­memory of the changing same” (198). But while Gilroy rightly critiques Afrocentric frameworks of return to Africa, he fails to provide any alternative way of thinking about Africa, and offers little guidance as to how to extend his particular model to Africa. In effect, Gilroy brackets Africa, without ever marking the limits of his own discourse as solely confined to the West. By deconstructing the presumed binary between being black and modern, which he argues is assumed equally by Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists, Gilroy ends up reinstating a binary between Africa and the West. Where négritude (arguably) saw Africa as the homeland and the fount of racial purity, in Gilroy’s analysis, Africa is relegated to the margins.29 Even though Gilroy’s chosen subjects of discussion – Martin Robison Delany, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Alexander Crummell, and Edward Wilmot Blyden – have written eloquently about the dangers of romantic racialism and have struggled to demarcate relationships to Africa that transcend such racialism (with varying degrees of success), Gilroy’s black Atlantic cannot accommodate Africa as part of its vibrant syncretic formation. Once Africa is removed from diasporic discourse as an Afrocentric emblem of purity, authenticity, or rootedness, there emerges no alternative figuration of Africa’s place in the black Atlantic. Such an absence points to a larger inability in diaspora studies to counteract Afrocentric invocations of Africa with more ­syncretic ones.30 Gilroy also resonates with Phillips at another level. Both writers emphasize the impossibility of representing diaspora in realist terms, but then go on to provide a clear content to their definitions. To challenge realist and rationalist accounts of modernity, Gilroy posits the slave sublime as an “unsayable claim to truth” (37). It is also a counter-culture to modernity, as the slave sublime “strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic, and performative” (38). Elsewhere, Gilroy uses terms such as “the phatic” and “the ineffable”

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to describe the slave sublime (131). Essentially, the sublime escapes any attempt at historical representation.31 Since Gilroy locates the structures of feeling of historical remembrance as always the same, in his model of the black Atlantic, it would seem that remembrance is effectively not a practice but an ontology. In many ways, his notion of the racial sublime marks his (unwitting) return to the mode of romance, as in turning away from the romance of the Afrocentric tradition, and in wishing to transcend the age of realism and rationalism, Gilroy ends up returning the discursive sign of Africa to the space of a lack. In order to theorize his model of the slave sublime, Gilroy cedes the ground of literacy and prioritizes the nonrepresentational, pre-discursive site of black music instead. Gilroy’s insistence on the slave sublime matches the dilemma of the genre of the neo-slave narrative in remarkable fashion. Such late ­t wentieth-century narratives face a difficult problem with regard to the status of the real. Writing in an era of radical skepticism about notions of historical truth, and constantly aware of the epistemic danger inherent in attempting to speak for the subaltern, writers like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Fred D’Aguiar, and Charles Johnson are interested in recovering the imaginative universe inhabited by slaves, but are nevertheless concerned about their ability to faithfully represent forgotten voices of slaves. These authors produce narratives that are supposed to memorialize past injustice but the question of how to narrate an absence, given the paucity of the historical archive, haunts their efforts. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot puts it: “Slavery here is a ghost, both the past and the living presence; and the problem of historical representation is how to represent the ghost.”32 Given that such fictions depart from the realist and rationalist imperatives of the classic slave narrative, what happens then to its emphasis on authenticity, its process of subject-formation, and its tradition of an exemplary hero in its contemporary makeover? These questions are even more urgent when we turn to explicitly postmodern neo-slave narratives (such as Phillips’s novels), which are neither animated by the urge to consecrate nor burdened by a reverential attitude to the past. Perhaps the most famous such narrative is Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and indeed, Gilroy’s discussion of the slave sublime is firmly anchored in a brief reading of the novel. Morrison explicitly situates the distance between the nineteenth-century slave narrative and its contemporary reinvention as hinging on the question of realism. Where the nineteenthcentury slave narrative needed to claim literacy as a source of political power and agitate for the abolition of slavery by adhering to documentary realism, she argues that in its pursuit of the real, it left significant elisions,

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imposing a silence about those “excessive” proceedings of slavery that were “too terrible to relate.” In order to “fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left,” Morrison had to step outside the confines of literary realism.33 Her rejection of realism echoes her critique of Enlightenment reason, the most striking instance of which may be found in the novel’s representation of Schoolteacher listing Sethe’s animal and human characteristics in his manuscript about slavery.34 My concern is not with the novel as such here, but rather with its significance to Gilroy. For Gilroy, this incident would reveal the complicity of rationality with racial terror, and hence underpins his rejection of modernity as an adequate container for black politics. Rather than indicting modernity for its coexistence with terror alone, though, Gilroy turns away from it entirely to search for alternative counter-currents to modernity in black culture and politics. Because Gilroy and Phillips imagine the black Atlantic as something sublime and transcendent, beyond time and space, they end up reverting to the mythic to represent Africa as an absence. In this way, romance returns even in such postmodern approaches, as in the wake of nationalism, diaspora continues to be represented primarily in the genre of romance, rather than with its particular historicities. Insisting that the diaspora comprises “a common memory” (235) Phillips collapses time and space to present a simultaneous vision where the past, present, and future are indistinguishable, and the no-space of the Atlantic Ocean becomes the substitute for home. And so we can track a formal return to the same opposition we saw in earlier moments, as realism is used to historicize the diasporic experience while romance and myth render Africa timeless. Insofar as the new conception of diaspora excludes Africa and presents a dehistoricized picture of the African diaspora, it ironically continues to be captive to the same structure of duality it claims to have transcended. By locating a complex modern black subjectivity in the West alone, Gilroy denies a similar complexity not only to Africans, but also to those diasporic blacks who continue to be animated by myths of return. Hence, rather than being a descriptive model of black Atlantic subjectivity, Gilroy presents a fairly prescriptive model of diasporic hybridity, where hybridity is the essence of black identity. Though premised on a salutary attentiveness to historical remembrance, Gilroy’s black Atlantic lacks specificity. In its transhistorical sweep, the memory of slavery takes on a reified form and content, allowing Gilroy to argue that this memory always makes the inhabitants of the black Atlantic prioritize aesthetics over labor, and hybridity over national or ethnic particularity. The structure of this argument reiterates the essentialism of the nationalism it claims to oppose: it

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posits a single – albeit internally hybrid – definition of blackness. To see all blackness as constitutively marked by double consciousness is surely as much of a theoretical straitjacket as placing a relation to Africa at the core of black identity. In contemporary discourses of diaspora, hybridity seems to come with a loss of historical specificity, as slavery becomes a diffuse metaphor for displacement, while Africa tends to disappear from view. Further, Phillips’s fiction raises important questions about the relation of hybridity to a more general notion of universalism. Insofar as the notion of hybridity challenges the racist narrative of nations like Britain or the United States, it does valuable cultural work. But what if racist and nationalist narratives can also accommodate conceptions of hybridity, as we have seen in earlier chapters? And what if hybridity rather than exploding narratives of purity returns us to an uncritical universalism? As Phillips moves away from racial particularity, does he also move towards race-neutral universalism? In other words, does hybridity also remain captive to evolving notions of liberal humanism? Both Phillips and Gilroy break down simplistic binaries, yet they reinstate a redemptive urge that ultimately renders the inclusion of Africa impossible. Both writers explore the persistence of memory in complex ways but they marginalize African participation in these intricate networks of historical remembrance. As the notion of the slave sublime unifies Gilroy’s model of the black Atlantic, Phillips’s representation of the African father in Crossing the River totalizes the fragmented depiction of the black diaspora. Where Gilroy’s model of the black Atlantic as a structure of loss, longing, and redemption renders slavery a metaphor, Phillips’s substitution of Emily for Cambridge takes the dispersal of specificity a step further as diaspora becomes a generalizable figure for complex subjectivity. As a result, Phillips’s and Gilroy’s depiction of diaspora cannot accommodate an understanding of Africa’s continuing role in the syncretic formation of the black Atlantic; nor can it take us beyond not only a model of return but also one of redemption. This becomes even more visible when we turn briefly to a recent essay by Phillips, “Out of Africa,” recounting a meeting with Chinua Achebe.35 As the two writers discuss their reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Phillips finds himself puzzled by the passion of Achebe’s antipathy to the novel. Wondering why he doesn’t feel the racism of the novel in the immediate way Achebe does, Phillips reckons that it’s because he is not African. He concludes that he is invested in the decline of the European mind in a way that Achebe isn’t. This incident reveals the limits of Phillips and

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the larger diasporic approach emblematized in his work. What happens to the desire to fragment the continuity of national narratives, or destabilize the fixity of place, in such an assertion? Faced with Achebe’s critique, Phillips simply resorts to a banal discovery about his own identity and its location in Europe, without pausing to ponder the overlaps or entanglements with Achebe’s own intimate relation with Europe and the colonial project, symbolized most forcefully by Achebe’s famous embrace of the genre of the novel as the mark of his constitution as a colonial subject, inevitably formed by the encounter between Europe and Africa. When we remember Phillips’s ferocious rejection of Europe in his travelogue, The European Tribe, his blind spot regarding a possible productive overlap between his tortured relationship to the West and Achebe’s is even more visible.36 Clearly, at the heart of Phillips’s writing is the question of the identity of black Britain, a construction that implies at once an unpacking of the association between Englishness and whiteness, and an unpacking of the idea of blackness itself. But any theory of diaspora that posits itself as going beyond national boundaries must also be able to speak to the heterogeneity of the black experience in other sites. In the end, though crucially important to the project of understanding the relation of blackness to the West, both Phillips and Gilroy fall short of extending or reformulating their insights in a truly Atlantic or global framework, one which would involve a redefinition of core–periphery, North–South alignments. To be able to theorize diaspora beyond the idea of return offered by Afrocentrism and the free-floating hybridization presented by postmodernism calls for a more thorough and thoroughly differentiated account of the dynamics of diaspora. In this context, it is helpful to note that there exists a long history of Caribbean writers and intellectuals who have written with depth and sensitivity about their relation to Africa or to what came to be known as “the African presence” (to use George Lamming’s phrase).37 In no way do they simply subscribe to Afrocentric banalities or echo the dogma of racial nationalism. Rather, writers ranging from Lamming to Edward Brathwaite to Paule Marshall to Maryse Conde have plumbed the depths of the ambiguities, conflicted loyalties, and complexities that make up such transnational encounters. Most significantly, Lamming’s famous account of his visit to Ghana in The Pleasures of Exile forcefully illuminates Phillips’s omissions and the impact of those omissions of Africa for an understanding of the affective and political dynamics of black diaspora cultures. In an account of his visit to Ghana in 1958, a year after independence, in sharp contrast to Wright’s Black Power, Lamming not only finds the new

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Ghana exhilarating but also an occasion to reflect on his relationship to Africa as a West Indian. Where Wright highlights a sense of distance from Africans (as we saw in Chapter 4), Lamming meditates on the meaning of his instant feelings of kinship. He first acknowledges that any understanding of Africa for him is both “personal” and “problematic” filtered as it is by the “rumor and myth” that bolstered colonial power rather than through history. His own experience as a West Indian, as a colonial, and as a black writer will therefore mediate his experience of Ghana. At the airport, Lamming witnesses a procession of Boy Scouts there to welcome an English dignitary, an incident that reveals to him the uneasy combination of similarity and difference between himself and Africans. The Boy Scouts seem to him identical to West Indian colonial ones, and so he sees himself in them, writing that “it was a profound experience, for I was seeing myself in every detail which they lived.” But he makes it clear that his response doesn’t simply mean that “we used to be like that” (161). Rather, he claims, “it was an example of habits and history reincarnated in this moment. It was as though the Haitian ceremony of the Souls had come real: a resurrection of voices at once familiar and unknown had taken place” (162). The ceremony, a religious ritual involving a redemptive dialogue between the living and the dead, provides the framework for the entire book, a cultural counterpoint from the African diaspora to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a part of Lamming’s attempt to rewrite the relations between Prospero and Caliban. In saying that the ceremony comes alive for him at Ghana’s airport, Lamming’s point is not to suggest a linear or developmental trajectory linking him to the African Boy Scouts. Rather, his witnessing of the moment is invested with a sacred significance similar to that of the ceremony, because the disparate colonial histories of Africa and the Caribbean seem magically fused in this one moment in time. Later Lamming also experiences his sense of alienation from the Boy Scouts, watching them break apart from the formal procession held in English to a polyphony of various indigenous languages. For Lamming, no such language exists. And so realizing that “Ghana is free” also necessitates noting that “the West Indies were not” (162–163) and it is this dialectic of sameness and difference that calibrates Lamming’s nuanced observations of Africa. Lamming explains that he becomes one with the people he watches in Ghana because they are all equally inspired by Ghana’s freedom and because it offers him an occasion for probing the different political fortunes of the Caribbean. Ghana’s freedom has meaning for all, but not in any flat static or racial way. As Lamming recently explains, his investment in Africa or pan-Africanism has nothing to do

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with the affirmations of proponents of négritude or of the African personality.38 Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s recent discussion of the concept of “my people” in Lamming is helpful here, as Ngugi elucidates the genuinely emancipatory sense of community emerging through struggle that is to be found everywhere in Lamming’s work.39 In this way, rather than dismissing Lamming’s aesthetics of decolonization as outmoded, it is necessary to see that he dismantles the distinctions between provincial and cosmopolitan rather than replicating them. Indeed his sense of alienation and exile structures his entire body of work. In discussing his trip to Ghana and Nigeria, Lamming reveals his understanding of the volatile nature of the newly free Ghanaian society, as everything from class relations, urban and rural patterns of behavior, and traditional or Westernized modes of dress or habits seems to be undergoing a profound shift. Accra thus becomes a site of possibility of new modes of existence rather than a sign of an ancient past, that which must be left behind. Moving to his trip to the United States in the same chapter, Lamming insists that this “African presence” structures his American encounter as well. Discussing various migrations or journeys across the Atlantic triangle, then, does not need to involve a disavowal of Africa. Lamming insists, moreover, that the Caribbean world extends to metropolitan sites like Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Birmingham, and London, so much so that these cities may be seen as part of the “external frontier” of the Caribbean.40 In this way, the various sites of the Atlantic manifest visible signs of creolization, a process that must, in the end, acknowledge the intervention of Africa, thus producing more supple definitions of diaspora and the black Atlantic. Édouard Glissant proposes precisely such a framework in Caribbean Discourse, one that avoids positing diaspora either as a (mythic or actual) return to Africa or as an endless scattering that marginalizes Africa. Glissant conceptualizes diaspora and hybridity in ways that can negotiate productive cultural engagements with Africa and heterogeneous ways of understanding the memory of slavery. In this way, Glissant’s theories offer a way to rethink the concept of hybridity, suggesting a way out of the binary between racial nationalism and a color-blind universalism. Sensitive to political necessities and attentive to history without being captive to positivism, Glissant’s elliptical prose balances a materialist approach to slavery and colonization with an intensely metaphorical, lyrical understanding of diaspora and migration. He neither collapses culture and politics, nor does he oppose history and memory, as he makes the site of his theorization, the modern Caribbean, at once exemplary and distinctive. This is not to suggest that Glissant gives us a paradigmatic method for understanding

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diaspora. Indeed, much of his writing argues against the very notion of a singular paradigm that can represent such diverse histories of displacement. Rather, a discussion of Glissant’s theories can open up productive avenues for studying alternative – albeit less well-established – models of diasporic relation. Glissant contends that populations such as those in the modern Caribbean are formed by a forced process of uprooting (déracinement) inaugurated by the slave trade, which leads to specific cultural politics of reclamation. In contrast to influential thinkers in cultural studies, Glissant does not homogenize such cultural politics as forms of false consciousness, or as a simple nostalgia for lost origins. Instead, he articulates complex and heterogeneous forms of remembrance. In particular, he contrasts two cultural forms of strategic remembrance  – those of reversion (or retour) and diversion (or détour).41 Rather than mapping linear trajectories of exile and return, he traces the complex and circuitous paths of multiple reversions and diversions. Glissant defines the impulse of reversion in black diasporic cultures as “the obsession with a single origin” (16), one instance of which would be the “strange barbarism” (17) that marked the founding of Liberia. Reversion is the “first impulse of a transplanted population” that does not have the assurance of an identifiable genealogy and tradition. As a compensatory impulse, “to revert is to consecrate permanence, to negate contact” (16). This understanding of rituals of return is similar to conceptions of diaspora as return to a lost origin, and is aligned with Gilroy’s definition of Afrocentric invocations of tradition as static and resistant to the rhythms of history. Glissant goes on to argue that once reversion ceases to be a material possibility for the transplanted population, it attempts to imitate the dominant culture. In contrast to influential postcolonial theories, Glissant views such mimetic impulses as a form of violence.42 Instead, he outlines the practice of diversion, which symbolizes the redirecting of energies away from reversion. Diversion constitutes the last resort of a population that does not have the option of exploring political possibilities for emancipation. Glissant’s examples of diversion include the use of creole and the figure of the trickster. Diversion is characterized by the need for an oblique or indirect response to domination, rather than direct opposition. It can, therefore, draw attention away from tangible forms of resistance towards tactical or strategic measures alone. According to Glissant, however, the strategy of diversion can acquire other, more productive forms, and “can therefore lead somewhere” (22). His examples of such productive forms of diversion include Frantz Fanon’s investment in Algerian independence, George Padmore’s mentoring of

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Kwame Nkrumah, and Aimé Césaire’s commitment to a poetics of négritude, as necessary detours through African political struggles at a time when Caribbean political forms were not adequate containers for these energies.43 In other words, these acts of diversion to Africa were forged in antagonism to European dominance, in a deliberate attempt to emphasize the commonality of the struggle of the black diaspora. Glissant believes that these acts of diversion were circular, in effect, as “the poetic word of Césaire, the political act of Fanon, led up somewhere, authorizing by diversion the necessary return to the point where our problems lay in wait for us” (25). Here, Glissant makes the crucial point that “diversion is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement [point d’ intrication], from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish” (26). Contemporary cultural theories exhibit great interest in such forms of diversion, especially ones expressed through cultural and aesthetic means. For instance, we can read Homi Bhabha’s emphasis on hybridity, Henry Louis Gates’s identification of the practice of signifying, and Gilroy’s interest in the heuristic of diaspora as forms of diversion. The difference between Glissant and other theorists of diaspora is the suppleness of these seemingly schematic categories of reversion and diversion. Although Gilroy and others would likely see Garveyism and négritude as instances of reversion, or moments where the insistence on racial purity leads to the obsession with a mythic origin, Glissant situates these cultural and historical phenomena as instances of diversion. In this way, while he distances his own affiliations from these earlier models, he accepts the rationality of their essentialist positions rather than seeing them as inexplicable pathologies of racial purity. Not only does he not choose to accentuate one of the two modes – reversion or diversion – as preferable, he sees both as responses to immediate historical currents, and thus potentially productive or unproductive at different moments in time. Glissant’s theories arise directly out of his reading of history. Because of the forced nature of the dislocation and the presence of the hostile colonizer in the Caribbean, Glissant suggests that the cultural dynamic of memory is by necessity camouflaged. The necessity for such camouflage can lead to both national and transnational forms of collaboration, though not always in a singular arc of response to the colonizer’s occupation. An “elsewhere” can become a point of mobilization, as in the case of Fanon’s involvement in the Algerian struggle for independence from French domination. Glissant sees such detours or diversions as “camouflaged or

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sublimated variations of the return to Africa” (24). Creating such links maps an alternative genealogy of the black Atlantic, a different diasporic terrain, where movement is not linear or singular, but crosshatched by journeys and uprootings and political commitments to home and to “elsewhere.” He formulates a direct link between dispossession at home and a cultural repossession elsewhere, without championing a transnational focus as the only laudable one. Glissant takes this a step further as well. He links such acts of repossession of an “elsewhere” back to the native homeland (pays natal) as the point of entanglement. For Glissant the point of entanglement is the Caribbean, or Martinique  – the nation-state and its immediate local problems. He engages with both political issues and more abstract ones such as the meaning of historical consciousness and the place of national literature. But he does not invoke the nation in the name of authenticity or racial purity. In fact he theorizes creolization as a component of the nation-state as he situates the nation-state as the necessary site of the forces of creolization. In contrast to theorists who create a mutually exclusive binary between nationalism and diaspora, Glissant’s perspective argues against such a stalemate. He does so by enabling us to directly relate the current interest in hybridity or diaspora to the perceived failure of such earlier ­models of nationalism as négritude, Afrocentrism, or pan-Africanism. Rather than disavowing this complex legacy, unlike Gilroy or Phillips, Glissant engages with its implications for new theories of diaspora. He situates the perceived failure of such ideologies within their constrained political context and isolates the asymmetry of power as one of the reasons for their lapse rather than an inappropriate conception of race or nation. In other words, for Glissant, it is not as if proponents of négritude failed to see that their relationship to the West or to modernity was necessarily ambivalent. Instead, they attempted to realize the promises of such modernity at a time when such realization seemed both possible and necessary. Glissant’s theorization of creolization or métissage dissociates itself from a more generalized form of relativist hybridity or dislocation, but is instead anchored in an imagined reversion to “the point of entanglement.” In this way, his theories do not present creolization as an alternative to the fixities of nationalism, but situate it as part of an ongoing struggle for decolonized forms of identity. Glissant’s impulse to connect the rootless structure of creolization with a rooted structure of the nation-state synthesizes the affiliations of both models, rather than positing them as dichotomies. They can thus be seen as mutually constitutive. This is a far more invigorating model for cultural studies than the

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models of diaspora discussed earlier, as it offers a way of engaging with local histories, poetics, and politics in a complex and circuitous relation to other histories and politics, without positing an essentialist entity. His theory of reversion and diversion also seems more supple than notions of black Atlanticism or hybridity, all of which only allow a priori valuations of indeterminacy and ambiguity. Glissant’s thought has the virtue of being concrete and abstract simultaneously, as it negotiates what David Scott calls the “demand of black diaspora criticism” – the need to move away from cultural nationalist conceptions of unitary black identities, as well as postmodern ones of “unscripted” and free-floating subjectivities.44 Glissant’s ideas also help situate Phillips’s work in relation to black diaspora studies. Similar to Gilroy’s antipathy to Afrocentric discourses, Phillips’s work wishes to highlight the dangers of reversion, and to exorcise the ghost of return that has haunted displaced subjects of the black diaspora. Phillips’s diversion takes the shape of aesthetic fragmentation, supposed to generate multiple, shifting, and flexible locations of subjectivity that would subvert oppressive master narratives. However, a close reading of Crossing the River and Cambridge reveals the reinstatement of white subjects at the heart of narratives that, though overtly fragmented, are also structured by a containing, totalizing urge. Phillips’s detour through black diaspora critiques of modernity does not return to a point of entanglement. Phillips chooses to represent slavery through the gaps and prejudices of the master’s discourse, thus risking the recentering of the master. Instead of subaltern presences or voices, he presents the conditions of impossibility of such resistive voices, foreclosing other options. In Glissant’s terms, this would constitute a diversion through the master’s texts but a failure to return to a point of entanglement with the slave. Phillips detours us through the postcolonial and diaspora critiques of older models but does not present an alternative that can escape similar problems. I would like to suggest that the diversion could be nourished by a return to history, politics, and ideology, to an exploration of power, domination, and resistance. Without a consideration of relations of power, the attempt to construct slavery as a joint trauma of slave and enslaver collapses into an uncritical liberal humanism that recenters the master’s discourse. In an effort to militate against the racial purity of Afrocentrism, Gilroy takes a diversion through diaspora – which he argues is fundamentally opposed to any notion of return, or any exclusive sense of purity. However, the emphasis on mixture and travel leaves him with no way to be able to theorize Africa, or the relationship of the diaspora to Africa. Accordingly, even as Gilroy

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challenges forms of reversion to Africa, he leaves unexplored a place for Africa that a diversion may furnish. In contrast, Glissant’s advocacy of a diversion, fueled by an imagined reversion, resumes the postcolonial critique of Western humanism masquerading as the universal. Analyzing the Caribbean “irruption into modernity” (146), Glissant focuses on the gap between what history is supposed to represent and its distance from such representation. He maintains that “this dislocation of the continuum, and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, characterize what I call a nonhistory” (62). Glissant agrees that History (with a capital H) is “a highly functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone ‘made’ the history of the World” (64). Similar to the post-structuralist and subalternist suspicion of history for its reliance on notions of progress and temporal closure, he also questions the confinement of history in a Eurocentric prison house. Glissant’s indictment of History is clearly as sharp as that of other postcolonial thinkers. He also links History with literature, claiming that “the surface effects of literary realism are the precise equivalent of the historian’s claim to pure objectivity” (74). However, he complicates this notion considerably, as he goes on to say that this “double hegemony” (76) requires a resistance not simply in terms of a semiotic fracturing but other battles as well. He links these abstract statements to a concrete political purpose, writing that “the struggle against a single History for the crossfertilization of histories means repossessing both a true sense of one’s time and identity: proposing in an unprecedented way a revaluation of power” (93). This invocation of power and its material effects is often underplayed in cultural studies, for instance in Gilroy’s valorization of the aesthetic or of the politics of transfiguration, or in Homi Bhabha’s “linguistic turn.”45 Glissant exhorts postcolonial writers to confront rather than escape ­history, advocating transversality rather than transcendence. Transversality suggests subterranean convergence rather than a linear hierarchical march of a single history that is the original and ideal that damns everything else as a bad imitation. An exemplary instance of transversality that demonstrates Glissant’s consistent invocation of networks of power and materiality is his response to Kamau Brathwaite’s statement that “the unity is submarine” (66). For Glissant, this poetic principle instantly and necessarily recalls slaves thrown overboard from slave ships. Thus, he avoids working only at the level of metaphor, but introduces materiality into metaphorization. Brathwaite’s image of a submarine unity and Glissant’s invocation of drowned African slaves takes him to transversality, which he suggests is opposed to the “universal transcendence of the sublime.”

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Militating against sublimation and transcendence, transversality offers instead “submarine roots: that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches” (67). This image of submarine roots is neither free-floating nor fixed  – a fitting alternative to the rootlessness advocated by Gilroy and others insofar as Glissant’s image retains subterranean connections even as it eschews fixed origins. Glissant’s image also opposes Phillips’s romantic notion of the Atlantic Ocean as a watery grave by restoring a sense of the Caribbean as an engine of modernity, not just a drop in the ocean. In this way Glissant identifies – and celebrates – a “shared process of cultural mutation” (67), a process that he theorizes at once as a convergence and a divergence. The divergence lies in the multiples routes taken, while the convergence is that of subliminal roots that are constantly being created rather than located in a single primordial moment. Glissant’s meditations on history and literature throw into sharp relief the problems with Phillips’s revision of history and his erasure of questions of power and resistance. Glissant’s approach is far more productive in its ability to incorporate a critique of imperialist forms of history and an alternative conception that is not magically outside History, or in nativist reaction to it, but in continual struggle against the violence committed by history. A return to the point of entanglement for diaspora theories might follow from an interrogation of the centrality of culture in these theories. In A New World Order, Phillips had bemoaned the reduction of the complex question of culture to that of race, but it is crucial to remember that just as race and nation were not adequate containers for the energies of earlier projects, culture cannot be a panacea for the contemporary moment either. For instance, Blyden and Crummell were certain that bringing Christianity to Africa would set her free, would civilize her, and that the prism of racial identity would be enough to turn back the clock to a past glory. Similarly Fanon, Nkrumah, and many other anti-colonial thinkers from the mid-century were certain that the nation would provide a successful entry into modernity. In our postcolonial moment, for us to truly move beyond the colonial heritage, our path has to be through these varied histories, not by the means of either a disavowal or a transcendence of such histories. While the status of race in discourses of cultural nationalism and pan-Africanism has been dissected in great detail, the status of culture in current diaspora discourse receives little commentary. I have suggested in this chapter that an analysis of the networks of power and

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resistance, discursively constituted but with material effects, could well be the required point of entanglement for the diversion through culture. When culture and politics are folded into one another, neither benefits. More recent work on diaspora seems to be moving in this direction. Robin Kelley and Tiffany Patterson have indicated their preference for the rubric of black globality over black diaspora, which would enable analysis of other forms of internationalism that do not arise out of the Atlantic ­triangle alone, that include Africa in their compass, and that intersect with other international movements, such as feminism, international socialism, and anti-­imperialism. Along similar lines, Brent Edwards offers the notion of décalage for thinking the articulations of diaspora through gaps, discrepancies, and mistranslations.46 Moreover, one could turn to a large body of theories that complement or contest Glissant’s ideas about the Caribbean, to such writers as Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Paget Henry, Shalini Puri, and Roberto Fernández Retamar, among many others.47 Indeed, more recent work by Gilroy also affirms an “unabashed humanism” as he offers the utopian notion of “planetarity” as a counterpoint to that of globalization.48 Similarly, in The Poetics of Relation and in a recent essay, “The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World,” Glissant insists on “worldness” as a model, incorporating both attachment to one’s place, but also its relation to “all the places of the world.”49 All these writers attempt to negotiate alterity without reducing it to the same or as the sign of an impregnable difference. Whether these new models enable us to syncretize the political tools of nationalism with the cultural and aesthetic contours of diaspora and black Atlantic theories to produce innovative theorizations of Africa and its relation to the diaspora, remains to be seen, but in their rapid proliferation, they offer signs of hope for a future that is yet to be realized.

Notes

I n t roduc t ion: T h e rom a nc e of di a s p or a 1 Quoted in Edwin Redkey, “The Flowering of Black Nationalism:  Henry McNeal Turner and Marcus Garvey” in John Henrik Clarke (ed.), Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage, 1974), 388–401, quotation on 395. For accounts of the UNIA Convention, see Robert Hill and Barbara Bair, Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 2 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Back to Africa” in Clarke, Marcus Garvey, 105–119, quotation on 110–111. 3 Marcus Garvey, “Articles from the Pittsburgh Courier” in Hill and Bair, Life and Lessons, 41. 4 Marcus Garvey, “A Journey of Self-Discovery” in Clarke, Marcus Garvey, 73. 5 Franklin Frazier charged that Garvey’s rise was fed by “empty and silly ­fictions” (quoted in Wilson Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978], 265). Moses views Garvey as “the fulfillment of the nineteenth century tradition, rather than its negation” (Golden Age, 267). For readings of Garvey as a radical black nationalist hero, see Hill and Bair, Life and Lessons and Tony Martin, Race First:  The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976). For readings of Garvey as a black fascist, see Paul Gilroy, Against Race:  Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Mark Christian Thompson, Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). For a reading of Garvey in a Caribbean tradition of masculine transnationalism, see Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2005), especially 75–125. For a class-based structural analysis, see Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986). For studies of gender in Garvey’s movement, see Ula Taylor, The Veiled Garvey:  The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); for Garveyism in the US South, see Irma Watkins-Owens, 240

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 Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); and for Garvey’s impact on African nationalism, see J. Ayodele Langley, “Marcus Garvey and African Nationalism” in Clarke, Marcus Garvey, 402–413. 6 Amy Jacques Garvey (ed.), Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 70, 71, 37. 7 Hill and Bair, Life and Lessons, xix. 8 Ibid., xviii. 9 Du Bois, “Back to Africa,” 108, 113–114. Garvey’s influence in Africa was long lasting and profound. Kwame Nkrumah, for instance, claimed that Philosophy and Opinions “did more than any other [book] to fire my enthusiasm” (Amy Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions, xxxviii). Similarly, the King of Swaziland reported that he only knew two black men in the Western world – the boxer Jack Johnson and Garvey (Clarke, Marcus Garvey, 188). 10 Hill and Bair, Life and Lessons, xvi, lxii. 11 Quoted in David Macey, Frantz Fanon:  A Biography (New York:  Picador, 2000), 439–440. 12 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 147, 203. 13 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 52, 187. 14 Fanon, Black Skin, 229. 15 Albert Memmi, “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” Massachusetts Review (Winter 1973), 9–39. Since his death, Fanon has been transformed into the icon of revolutionary movements led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, reinvented as an apostle of violence, functioned as the point of inspiration for Marxist and postcolonial thinkers alike, and in the academic context, has generated work in British cultural studies of the 1970s and 1980s, American cultural studies of the 1990s, and both critical and protective readings from feminists, queer theorists, and Antillean advocates of créolité, among others. Where some scholars see his commitment to Algeria as a form of disavowal (see Françoise Verges, “Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal,” Critical Inquiry 23.3 [1997], 578–595), others find in it an instance of transnational humanism or Saidian affiliation (see Anthony Alessandrini [ed.], Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives [London and New York: Routledge, 1999], 13). 16 Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 17 Definitions of diaspora abound in recent scholarship. For diaspora as cultural hybridity beyond ethnicity or nationality, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993); for diaspora as a set of practices that require translation, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora:  Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); for a reading of diaspora as a methodology, see

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Notes to pages 9–12

 ichelle Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora M (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2004); for diaspora as an epistemology of fracture, a failure to connect, see Kenneth Warren, “Appeals for (Mis) recognition:  Theorizing the Diaspora” in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1993), 392–406. 18 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 19 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 20 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992), 7. 21 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 22 Richard Chase defines romance as “an assumed freedom from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude, development, and continuity; a tendency towards melodrama and idyll; a more or less formal abstractness and, on the other hand, a tendency to plunge into the underside of consciousness; a willingness to abandon moral questions or to ignore the spectacle of man in society, or to consider these things only indirectly or abstractly” (The American Novel and Its Tradition [New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1957], ix). Chase’s argument relies on tropes common in transnational studies, as he draws a distinction between imperial English fiction, concerned with bringing order to disorder, and American fiction, interested in exploration, discovery, and escape, and so more fittingly called “border fiction” (19). For a trenchant critique of the romance thesis, see Nina Baym, “Concepts of Romance in Hawthorne’s America,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38 (1984), 426–443. See also Frederick Crews, “Whose American Romance?” New York Review of Books 35 (1988), 16 and Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 23 For a thorough map of the genealogy of the term “diaspora,” see Brent Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 66 (Spring 2001), 45–73. For definitions of black diaspora, see Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory:  A Reader (New York:  Columbia University Press, 1994); “New Ethnicities” in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Ching (eds.), Stuart Hall:  Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London:  Routledge, 1996); “Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad,” Small Axe 6 (1999), 1–18; David Scott, “‘An Obscure Miracle of Connection’: Discursive Tradition and Black Diaspora Criticism,” Small Axe 1 (1997), 19–38; Jonathan Elmer, “The Black Atlantic Archive,” American Literary History 17.1 (2005), 160–170; and Xiomara Santamarina, “‘Are We There Yet?’: Archives, History, and Specificity in African-American Literary Studies,” American Literary

Notes to pages 12–13

243

History 20.1–2 (2008), 304–316. For discussions of diaspora in cultural studies, see Khachig Tololyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora 5.1 (1996), 3–36, who argues that “cultural studies discourse has found in the diasporic subject a figure for double and multiple consciousness, for a split, even dispersed subject-in-process that crisscrosses boundaries and resists totalization.” In this way, diaspora becomes a trope for the hybridity of the postcolonial or postmodern condition, a move that disregards a longer history where the term has a different resonance (such as the nineteenth-century writings of Blyden, Crummell, Delany, and Turner, and the twentieth-century activity of Garvey, Chief Sam, George Padmore, and the poets and thinkers of négritude). See also James Clifford, “Diasporas” in Routes:  Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1997), 244–278; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 24 It is important to note that “black Atlantic” and “diaspora” are not interchangeable terms, as Colin Palmer has argued (“Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” Perspectives 36.6 [1998], 24–25). But the two terms – though different in their historical and geographical moorings – often end up doing a similar kind of conceptual work in literary and cultural studies. For Gilroy, using the frame of the Atlantic rather than that of diaspora was an attempt to escape the suggestion of return that older conceptions of diaspora may carry. And yet, the Atlantic cannot preclude the difficult question of origins or of myths of return. See Alasdair Pettinger, “Enduring Fortresses: A Review of The Black Atlantic,” Research in African Literatures 29. 4 (1998), 142–147; Charles Piot, “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001), 155–170; and Elliott Skinner, “Dialectic between Diasporas and Homelands” in Joseph E. Harris (ed.), Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993). 25 Barbara Fuchs writes, “Romance is a notoriously slippery category. Critics disagree about whether it is a genre or a mode, about its origins and history, even about what it encompasses. Yet, paradoxically, readers are often able to identify romance almost tacitly:  they know it when they see it” (Romance [New York and London: Routledge, 2004], 1–2). Also see Bell, Development of American Romance; Winfried Fluck, “The American Romance and the Changing Functions of the Imaginary,” New Literary History 27.3 (1996), 415– 457; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) and The Secular Scripture:  A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic:  Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

244

Notes to pages 13–23

26 See Frye, Secular Scripture. 27 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 104. 28 See Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel:  The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 29 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 27–47. 30 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, HarperCollins, 1992), 255. 31 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain:  Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London:  Verso, 1981). On time and nation, see Anderson’s Imagined Communities; Bhabha’s Location of Culture; Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Eddie Glaude, Jr. (ed.), Is it Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 32 Benjamin, Illuminations, 249, 248. 33 Ibid., 246. 34 Compare Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s useful definition of the term “postcolonial” where the prefix “post” isn’t a temporal marker of belatedness, but a process of critique, of saying an “impossible ‘no’ to a structure that one critiques yet inhabits intimately” (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999], 191). Diaspora can similarly be defined in dialectic relation to earlier models of transnationalism. 35 In addition to Gilroy, see Clifford, Hall, Appadurai, and Bhabha cited above. 36 See Simon Gikandi, “Reason, Modernity and the African Crisis” in Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, and Heike Schmidt (eds.), African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 135–157 and David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity:  The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 37 Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’:  The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism, 3–21. 38 Donald Pease, “New Perspectives on US Culture and Imperialism,” in Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of US Imperialism, 22–37. Also see Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, “Crosscurrents, Crosstalk:  Race, ‘Postcoloniality’, and the Politics of Location,” Cultural Studies 7.2 (1993), 292–310; Jenny Sharpe, “Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race,” Diaspora 4.2 (1995), 181–199; Richard King (ed.), Postcolonial America (Urbana:  Illinois University Press, 2000); and Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (eds.), Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000). 39 Stuart Hall, “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain:  Three ‘Moments’ in PostWar History,” History Workshop Journal 61 (2006) 1–24. 40 Benjamin, Illuminations, 249, 254.

Notes to pages 25–29

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C h a p t e r 1 F rom d om e s t ic a l l e g or y t o i m pe r i a l rom a nc e : Pau l i n e Hopk i ns a n d r ac i a l m i x t u r e 1 Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 2 Richard Yarborough, Introduction to Pauline Hopkins’s, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1988), xxviii. 3 Pauline Hopkins, Preface, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, 13; hereafter cited parenthetically. 4 Pauline Hopkins, Colored American Magazine, March 7, 1904, n.p. 5 See Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 6 Quoted in Kenneth Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1. 7 Gwendolyn Brooks, Afterword to Contending Forces (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 437, 434. 8 See Tate, Domestic Allegories; Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1988); Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention:  Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a discussion of aesthetic value in melodramatic works, see Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 9 Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, rpr. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, intro. Hazel Carby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); hereafter cited parenthetically. 10 Moses defines classical black nationalism as “an ideology whose goal was the creation of an autonomous black nation-state, with definite geographical boundaries  – usually in Africa” (Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Classical Black Nationalism:  From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey [New York:  New York University Press, 1996], 1), which enjoyed a “golden age” between 1850 and 1925 (Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978], 6). 11 A letter from Cornelia Condict, a white reader of the Colored American Magazine, complained about the prevalence of inter-racial love affairs in Hopkins’s writing. Hopkins responded angrily to the criticism, claiming that white readers simply do not understand “what pleases Negroes.” See Hanna Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins:  A Literary Biography (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2005), 143–154. For discussions of Hopkins’s editorial and ­fictional contributions to the Colored American Magazine, see Penelope Bullock, The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838–1909 (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1981); C. K. Doreski, “Inherited Rhetoric and Authentic History: Pauline Hopkins at the Colored American

246

Notes to pages 29–36

Magazine” in John Gruesser (ed.), The Unruly Voice:  Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1996), 71–97; and Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979). 12 Hopkins probably learned about Africa from reports on anthropological expeditions in The New York Times and from the prolific black nationalist literature of the period (especially William Wells Brown’s 1874 The Rising Son; Or, the Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race [New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970]). 13 The reference is to Ulrich Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 160. For studies of Ethiopianism, see Moses, Golden Age; Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations:  Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993), 551–563; John Bracey, August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, Black Nationalism in America (New York:  Bobbs Merrill, 1970); and Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon, 1972). 14 See the essays collected in Gruesser, The Unruly Voice; Thomas Otten, “Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race,” English Literary History 59.1 (1992), 227–256. 15 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 16 Pauline Hopkins, “Talma Gordon,” Colored American Magazine 1 (May 1900), 271–290. 17 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York:  Penguin, 1996), 5. On scientific racism and social Darwinism, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Ronald Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind:  The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Hanover, NH:  Wesleyan University Press, 1987); and Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 18 Werner Sollors, “‘Never Was Born’:  The Mulatto, an American Tragedy?” Massachusetts Review 27.2 (1986), 293–316, quotation on 305. 19 See Eva Saks, who argues that “by choosing the internal, biological res of blood, miscegenation jurisprudence transformed race into an intrinsic, natural, and changeless entity:  blood essentialized race” (“Representing Miscegenation Law,” Raritan 8 [1988], 39–70, quotation on 48). On Plessy v. Ferguson and US literature, see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 225–270. 20 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1986). For debates over polygenesis

Notes to pages 37–41

247

and monogenesis, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981). 21 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992), 17. 22 Frederick Douglass, “African Civilization Society” in Howard Brotz (ed.), Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920:  Representative Texts (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 262–266, quotation on 264. 23 Frederick Douglass, “The Present and Future of the Colored Race in America” in Brotz (ed.), Negro Social and Political Thought, 267–277, quotation on 268. 24 Frederick Douglass, “Prejudice Not Natural” in Brotz (ed.), Negro Social and Political Thought, 213–215, quotation on 213. 25 Frederick Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered” in Brotz (ed.), Negro Social and Political Thought, 226–244, quotation on 242. 26 Emigrationist leaders constantly declared the impossibility of black elevation in the United States. Bishop Turner warns in his periodical, Voice of the People, in 1901, “The Negro has as much chance in the United States . . . of being a man . . . as a frog in a snake den” (quoted in J Ayodele Langley, PanAfricanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900–1945 [Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1973], 25). For studies of emigration, see Rodney Carlisle, The Roots of Black Nationalism (New York: Kennikat, 1975); Imanuel Geiss, The PanAfrican Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa, trans. Ann Keep (New York:  Africana, 1974); and P. J. Staudendraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1877 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 27 John David Smith (ed.), Anti-Black Thought, 1863–1925:  The American Colonization Society and Emigration (New York: Garland, 1993), vol. 10.2, 32. 28 See Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 98–134 and Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–46. 29 Moses, Golden Age; Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 30 Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 554. 31 Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (London: University of Edinburgh Press, 1967), 147. 32 For a discussion of black nationalism and its links to Zionism, see Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 205–212. It is worth noting as well, as Robin Cohen points out, that ancient Greeks thought of “diaspora,” deriving from speiro (to sow) and dia (over), as referring to both migration and colonization (Global Diasporas:  An Introduction [Seattle:  University of Washington Press, 1997]). 33 Edward Wilmot Blyden, “From West Africa to Palestine,” in Hollis Lynch (ed.), Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden (London: Cass, 1972), 145–157, quotations on 151, 157, 152.

248

Notes to pages 42–50

34 See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:  Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:  Routledge, 1992) and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 35 See Thomas Nelson Page, Red Rock:  A Chronicle of Reconstruction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898) and Thomas Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1902). 36 Pauline Hopkins, “The Mystery Within Us,” Colored American Magazine 1 (May 1900), 14–18. 37 See Judith Berzon, Neither White nor Black:  The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York:  New York University Press, 1978); Giulia Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), as well as the work of Carby and Tate referenced above. 38 Charles Chesnutt, “The Wife of His Youth”in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968). 39 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1984), 114–115. 40 The reference to death as the undiscovered country alludes, of course, to Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. 4 1 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 6. 42 William James, “The Hidden Self,” Scribner’s Magazine 7 (1890), 361–373. For discussions of James’s work on multiple personalities, see Gillman, Blood Talk; Otten, “Pauline Hopkins”; Sundquist, To Wake the Nations; and Cynthia Schrager, “Pauline Hopkins and William James:  The New Psychology and the Politics of Race” in Elizabeth Abel (ed.), Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 307–329. 43 James, “Hidden Self,” 364. 44 Quoted in Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness:  British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 231–232. 45 Ibid., 232. 46 Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), 71. 47 Pauline Hopkins, “The Test of Manhood,” Colored American Magazine 6 (December 1902), 113–119; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 48 Henry Turner (1834–1915), a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, argued that the black race had been stripped of its manhood, which can only be regenerated by forging a black nation in Africa. He writes, “I do not believe that there is any manhood future in this country for the Negro, and that his future existence, to say nothing of his future happiness, will depend upon his nationalization.” Quoted in Edwin Redkey (ed.), Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 146. 49 Quoted in Lynch, Black Spokesman, 59.

Notes to pages 50–53

249

50 Pauline Hopkins, A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants – with Epilogue (Cambridge, MA: Pauline E. Hopkins, 1905). 51 Johannes Fabian calls such a device “the denial of coevalness,” a move that serves to distance Africans from modernity and casts them as primitive (Time and the Other:  How Anthropology Makes its Object [New York:  Columbia University Press, 1983], 31). 52 Blyden, Christianity, 124. 53 Quoted in Redkey, Respect Black, 36. 54 Alexander Crummell, “The Race Problem in America” in Brotz (ed.), Negro Social and Political Thought, 184. 55 While most critics bracket the question of Hopkins’s representation of Africa, those that do gesture to it tend to view the novel as a reflection of common pan-African tenets. For instance, Carby argues that “the discovery of Reuel’s heritage was the discovery of Pan-Africanism” (Reconstructing Womanhood, 158) while Susan Gillman maintains that the novel shifts from “a purely Western to a syncretic, panracial perspective” (“Pauline Hopkins and the Occult:  African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences,” American Literary History 8.1 [1996], 57–82, quotation on 70). For an overview of African-American writing on Africa, see John Gruesser, Black on Black:  Twentieth Century African American Writing About Africa (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2000). 56 It is worth remembering here that Chinua Achebe’s influential novels (discussed in Chapter 3) chronicling the inroads of colonialism in West Africa are set in the period between 1900 and 1920. 57 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famed abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), also ended with advocating African-American emigration to Africa. According to Stowe, slavery could be redeemed as having a providential purpose of leading to the arrival of Christianity and civilization in Africa. She writes, “Let the Church of the North receive these poor sufferers in the spirit of Christ; receive them to the educating advantages of Christian republican society and schools, until they have attained to somewhat of a moral and intellectual maturity, and then assist them in their passage to those shores [Africa], where they may put into practice the lessons they have learned in America.” By arguing that African-Americans craved “an African nationality” Stowe further implied that an American nationality could never be available to them (Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962], 458, 444). A similar logic, I am suggesting, can be read in both Hopkins and the proponents of African emigration like Blyden, Turner, and Crummell. 58 Dickson Bruce Jr. argues that such a move ensures that Hopkins does not offend the deeply Christian sensibilities of her middle-class AfricanAmerican readers (“Ancient Africa and the Early Black American Historians, 1883–1915,” American Quarterly 36 [1984], 684–699). For a discussion of religion and the politics of respectability, see Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous

250

Notes to pages 53–60

Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993). For a discussion of African-American missionary activity in Africa, see Walter Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 59 Edward Wilmot Blyden, “The African Problem and the Method of its Solution” in Brotz (ed.), Negro Social and Political Thought, 126–139, quotation on 134. 60 For a discussion of Afrocentrism in this era, see Bruce Jr., “Ancient Africa,” and Kevin Gaines, “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission’: Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism” in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 433–455. 61 See Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation:  Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” The Location of Culture (London:  Routledge, 1994), 139–170. 62 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 5. 63 Ibid., xi. 64 Robert Young, Colonial Desire:  Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 65 In the years to come, Ethiopianist ideas do mutate and are transplanted to various locations in Africa and the diaspora, where they acquire a distinct anti-colonial – albeit millennial – force. In South Africa, for instance, churches such as the AME Zionist Church become the locus of anti-­colonial movements. In Hopkins’s era, however, back-to-Africa movements are commonly referred to interchangeably as black emigration and black colonization. See George Shepperson, “Ethiopianism and African Nationalism,” Phylon 1.1 (1953), 9–18.

C h a p t e r 2  F rom d ou bl e c ons c ious n e s s t o di a sp or a : w.e .b. du b oi s a n d bl ac k i n t e r n at ion a l i s m 1 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess:  A Romance (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 297; hereafter cited parenthetically. 2 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 144. 3 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 4 Herbert Aptheker, Introduction, Dark Princess:  A Romance (Millwood, NY: Kraus Thomson, 1970), 19.

Notes to pages 60–62

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5 Quoted in Claudia Tate, Introduction, Dark Princess:  A Romance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), xxiv. 6 Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 218; hereafter cited parenthetically. 7 See W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn:  An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1984), 270. In contrast, he refers to his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (New York:  Harlem Moon, 2004) simply as “an economic study of some merit” despite the novel’s deeply embedded symbolic drama of the heroine’s fall and redemption. For Claudia Tate’s influential rereading of the novel through psychoanalytic theory, see Psychoanalysis and Black Novels:  Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 8 For studies of Du Bois and cosmopolitanism, see Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); for dandyism, see Monica L. Miller, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Dandy as Diasporic Race Man,” Callaloo 26.3 (2003), 738–765; for an analysis of gender and reproduction, see Alys Weinbaum, “Reproducing Racial Globality: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sexual Politics of Black Nationalism,” Social Text 67 19.2 (2001), 15–41; for Du Bois and eugenics, see Daylanne English, “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Family Crisis,” American Literature 72.2 (2000), 291–319; for an analysis of oligarchy and democracy in Dark Princess, see Kenneth Warren, “An Inevitable Drift? Oligarchy, Du Bois, and the Politics of Race between the Wars,” boundary 2 27.3 (2000), 153–169; for Du Bois’s pan-Africanism, see Manning Marable, “The Pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois” in Bernard Bell, Emily Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (eds.), W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics (New York: Routledge, 1996), 193–218; and for socialism, see Adolph Reed, W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). One critic who takes on the question of genre in relation to geography recently is Dohra Ahmad, “‘More than Romance’: Genre and Geography in Dark Princess,” English Literary History 69.3 (2002), 775–803. Ahmad contrasts Du Bois’s depictions of Chicago, India, and the US South to argue that geography dictates genre in Dark Princess. But she does not link the generic shifts of the novel to its politics of nationalism and diaspora. The critical thrust of her essay is a critique of Du Bois’s representation of India by way of a consideration of his correspondence with the Indian nationalist leader, Lala Lajpat Rai. 9 For a review of the reception of Black Reconstruction, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York:  Henry Holt, 2000), 349–378 and Singh, Black is a Country, 89–100 and 248–249. 10 See Tony Martin, Literary Garveyism:  Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1983). 11 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races” in David Levering Lewis (ed.), W. E. B. Du Bois:  A Reader (New York:  Henry Holt, 1995), 20–28;

252

Notes to pages 62–67

W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (New York: Dover, 1999); W.  E.  B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York:  Penguin, 1996). For a controversial reading of “Conservation of Races” see Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), “Race,” Writing and Difference (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1986), 21–37. For a discussion of Darkwater, see Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 12 Du Bois, Souls, 13; hereafter cited parenthetically. 13 See Gilroy, Black Atlantic and Against Race:  Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2000) and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006). 14 For Du Bois as American pragmatist, see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (London:  Macmillan, 1989); as a black radical, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) and Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986). Posnock suggests that Du Bois “reinvent[s] the race champion as dandy-prophet” (Color and Culture, 182). Gilroy situates Du Bois as a rootless black Atlantic hero in Black Atlantic, while Wilson Moses argues for the importance of Du Bois’s pan-Africanism and Ethiopianism in several books, most notably, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Afrotopia:  The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982). 15 Locke’s view of culture and color is part of a larger debate in this era over the place of race in cultural production, made famous by George Schuyler and Langston Hughes in “The Negro-Art Hokum,” The Nation (June 16, 1926), 662–663 and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation (June 23, 1926), 692–694 respectively. 16 Robert Stepto, “The Quest of the Weary Traveler” in William Andrews (ed.), Critical Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 172. 17 Quoted in David Levering Lewis’s W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 268; hereafter cited parenthetically. 18 Thomas Nelson Page, Red Rock:  A Chronicle of Reconstruction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898); Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1902).

Notes to pages 67–89

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19 Du Bois, “On The Souls of Black Folk,” Independent 57 (May 17, 1904), 1152. 20 As Madhu Dubey puts it, there is a “durable link between realism and racial representation” and “[p]olitical claims about African-American literature have always depended on realist aesthetics, from the documentary impulse of the slave narratives to the reflectionist principles prescribed by the cultural nationalist program” (Signs and Cities:  Black Literary Postmodernism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 44). 21 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 67. 22 Quoted in Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 68. 23 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso 1991). 24 Quoted in Singh, Black is a Country, 49. 25 See Robert Gooding-Williams, “Du Bois’s Counter-Sublime” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (eds.), The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1999), 245–262. 26 Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro:  Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 6, xxvii. 27 When Du Bois resigned from the NAACP in 1934, the board of directors paid tribute to his achievements, recognizing that he “created, what never existed before, a Negro intelligentsia, and many who have never read a word of his writings are his spiritual disciples and descendants.” Quoted in Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 219. 28 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro College,” The Crisis 40 (August 1933), 175–177, quotation on 176. 29 Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces:  A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13. 30 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 282. 31 For more on Du Bois’s aesthetic theories, see Darwin Turner, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Theory of a Black Aesthetic” in Andrews, Critical Essays, 73–91. 32 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Criteria of Negro Art” in Winston Napier (ed.), African American Literary Theory: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 17–23, quotation on 17; hereafter cited parenthetically. 33 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 34 Du Bois’s Princess Kautilya may well be modeled on an Indian princess, the Ranee of Sarawak, whom he met at the 1911 Universal Races Congress. See Lewis, The Fight for Equality, 215. 35 The Council is not without its realist counterparts in global politics as currents of anti-colonial internationalism begin to surface. But Du Bois chooses to represent such currents not realistically but in the realm of romance. His readers in The Crisis would have been familiar with the figures of Indian nationalist thinkers like Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, and Du Bois himself was friends with the nationalist leader, Lala

254

Notes to pages 92–103

Lajpat Rai. But the novel never takes up these currents of Indian anti-colonial nationalism. 36 See Tate, Psychoanalysis. 37 Hazel Carby, “The Souls of Black Men” in Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (eds.), Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 234–268. 38 I do not mean to suggest that nostalgia is always uncritical. As Svetlana Boym has shown in The Future of Nostalgia, a study of longing and loss in post-communist cities, it is important to unpack the power of critique of the present enabled by nostalgia and to differentiate between its “restorative” and “reflective” aspects (New York:  Basic Books, 2001, xviii). But in the configuration offered by Du Bois in Dark Princess, nostalgia emerges as a compensatory rather than a critical tendency, and so rather than disturbing existing forms of power or politics in the present by calling on an idealized past as a vantage point from which a critique may be mounted, it seems to collapse past, present, and future to offer instead a redemptive notion of revived glory. 39 In contrast, in “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” Du Bois writes that the problem of the color line may be better reconceived as “what we call Labor, the problem of allocating work and income in the tremendous and increasingly intricate world-embracing industrial machine that our civilization has built” (Locke, The New Negro, 385). But rather than posing the two questions – those of the color line and labor – as distinct, Du Bois goes on to reveal their mutual constitution by revealing their interpenetration in Europe, the Americas, and in Africa. 40 See Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument.” 4 1 Marcus Garvey, “African Fundamentalism” in Robert Hill and Barbara Bair (eds.), Marcus Garvey:  Life and Lessons (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1987), 1–25, quotations on 18, 23. 42 Marcus Garvey, “The Negro’s Place in World Reorganization” in Amy Jacques Garvey (ed.), Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 34. 43 Garvey, “African Fundamentalism,” 23, 5. 44 Quoted in Gilroy, Against Race, 231; hereafter cited parenthetically. 45 See Michelle Stephens, Black Empire:  The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2005). 46 Marcus Garvey, Jr., “Garveyism:  Some Reflections on Its Significance for Today” in John Henrik Clarke (ed.), Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage, 1974), 387. 47 See Martin Delany, “Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party” in Howard Brotz (ed.), Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 110 and Edward Blyden, “Africa for the African” in Henry Wilson (ed.), Origins of West African Nationalism (London: Macmillan Press, 1969), 231–238.

Notes to pages 104–106

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C h a p t e r 3  F rom n at i v i s m t o n at ion a l i s m:  Jo s e ph C a s e ly H a y f or d, C h i n ua Ac h e be , a n d c ol on i a l mode r n i t y 1 Joseph Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound:  Studies in Race Emancipation (London: Frank Cass, 1969); hereafter cited parenthetically. 2 Kenneth Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora” in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1993), 392–406; Brent Edwards, “Three Ways to Translate the Harlem Renaissance” in Geneviève Fabre and Michael Feith (eds.), Temples for Tomorrow:  Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 288–313. 3 See J. Ayodele Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900– 1945 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1973); and Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa, trans. Ann Keep (New York:  Africana, 1974). Eric Sundquist notes that Ethiopia Unbound was formative for Du Bois’s Darkwater (To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 558, 610). 4 Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House:  Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28–46 and 47–72. 5 Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 33. Achebe had planned a family saga encompassing three Igbo generations:  that of his grandfather, of his father, and of Achebe himself. While the first was immortalized in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, and the last in No Longer at Ease, Achebe never managed to write the second novel about his father’s generation, though he concedes that “there is a great story in that generation that navigated the perilous crossroads” of colonial incursion. He explains that “the major problem was this: my father’s generation were the very people after all who, no matter how sympathetically one wishes to look upon their predicament, did open the door to the white man. But could I . . . dare to suggest that my father may have been something . . . of a . . . traitor?” (Preface, The African Trilogy [London: Picador, 1988], 11, 10). 6 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 1986). 7 Other early novels include Joseph Walters’s 1891 novel, Guanya Pau:  A Story of an African Princess (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1994), Sol Plaatje’s 1930 Mhudi (London:  Heinemann, 1978), R. E. Obeng’s 1943 Eighteenpence (Legon:  Sub Saharan Publishers, 1998), Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy (London:  Dorothy Crisp, 1946), and Amos Tutuola’s 1952 The Palm Wine Drinkard (New York:  Grove Press, 1984). Non-fictional texts include John Ocansey’s travel narrative, African Trading (Accra: Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1989); Kobina Sekyi’s 1914 dramatic comedy, The Blinkards:  A Comedy (Ibadan:  Heinemann, 1974); Attoh Ahuma’s

256

Notes to pages 106–127

 1911 nationalist polemic, The Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness (London:  Frank Cass, 1971); John Sarbah’s 1897 Fanti Customary Laws (London:  Frank Cass, 1968); and Hayford’s 1903 Gold Coast Native Institutions: Thoughts upon a Healthy Imperial Policy for the Gold Coast and Ashanti (London: Frank Cass, 1970). 8 See Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56. 9 See Ethiopia Unbound, Introduction, vii. Hayford also edited a series of nationalist newspapers between the 1880s and 1930s, imagining his role as that of the mouthpiece of the nation: “The people are silent. I will be the advocate of this silence. I will speak for the dumb” (Gold Coast Native Institutions, 181). 10 Early reviews of Ethiopia Unbound doubted its status as fiction, calling it episodic and inconsistent. See Ethiopia Unbound, Introduction, xxxiv. For recent readings, see Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana:  How to Play the Game of Life (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2002) and Kwaku Larbi Korang, Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa:  Nation and African Modernity (Rochester, NY:  University of Rochester Press, 2003). 11 See Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language” in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (New York: Anchor Press, 1975), 91–104 and Ngugi, Decolonizing the Mind. 12 To offer an African version of Ethiopianism, Hayford takes Du Bois’s Souls as a model and a challenge as he simultaneously imitates it and seeks to displace it. Accordingly, Du Bois’s infant son’s death is transformed into Kwamankra’s wife’s death – an occasion not for despair but for rejuvenation. Meanwhile, Mansa and Kwamankra’s son lives and is trained by his father as a future pan-African leader. Similarly, the veil that divides the black and white worlds in Souls becomes an easily lifted curtain between the physical and ­supernatural realms. 13 See Michael Echeruo, Victorian Lagos:  Aspects of Nineteenth Century Lagos Life (London: Macmillan, 1977). 14 Philip Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects:  An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 57. 15 Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco, and Cameroons (London: Macmillan, 1900), 559. 16 Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, 63. 17 Ibid., 67. 18 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). 19 Hayford, Gold Coast, 130. 20 Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, 56. 21 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 79.

Notes to pages 127–131

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22 F. D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1926). 23 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York:  Anchor Books, 1994). For readings of Achebe that emphasize his ethnographic value, see Robert Wren, Achebe’s World: The Historical and Cultural Context of the Novels of Chinua Achebe (London: Longman, 1981); Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition, and Society in the West African Novel (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1975); and Clement Okafor, “Igbo Cosmology and the Parameters of Individual Accomplishment in Things Fall Apart” in Isidore Okpewho (ed.), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart:  A Casebook (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003), 67–82. For arguments stressing that the novel is a representation, not an anthropological account of an unmediated African reality, see Ato Quayson, “Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both: A Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart with an Evaluation of the Criticism Relating to It,” Research in African Literatures 25 (1994), 117–136; Rhonda Cobham, “Problems of Gender and History in the Teaching of Things Fall Apart” in Okpewho (ed.), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, 165–180; Neil ten Kortenaar, “Beyond Authenticity and Creolization: Reading Achebe Writing Culture,” PMLA 110.1 (1995), 30–42; Eleni Coundouriotis, Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London: James Currey, 1991). 24 Simon Gikandi, “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture,” Research in African Literatures 32.3 (2001), 3–8. 25 See Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (Ibadan: New Horn, 1988), 180. 26 Achebe, “Named for Victoria, Queen of England” in Morning Yet on Creation Day, 115–124, 123. 27 Achebe, “Colonialist Criticism” in Morning Yet on Creation Day, 3–28, quotation on 6. 28 Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher” in Morning Yet on Creation Day, 67–74, quotation on 72. 29 Achebe, “Named for Victoria,” 123, 115, 119. 30 Note Achebe’s difference from Du Bois. For Du Bois, as we saw earlier, the turn to romance or the racial sublime was a consequence of disenchantment with cold reason, scientific racism, and realism. The racial sublime doesn’t work for Achebe who needs a different strategy in order to claim modernity (such as the English language) in a way that Du Bois doesn’t. This is not to suggest that Achebe has unmediated access to the indigenous point of view – he is alienated, even profoundly so, from the cultural practices he represents in his fiction, but the break isn’t perceived to be as total as that of the Middle Passage is for Du Bois. For Du Bois, any kind of tradition is not supposed to exist; for Hayford and Achebe it exists and is the very reason for being conquered. Because this tradition is seen as debased, it has to be given back its value.

258

Notes to pages 131–144

31 Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, 161. 32 Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), 3; hereafter cited parenthetically. 33 For studies insisting on breaking down a Manichean understanding of colonial relations, see Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 34 Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 86, 88. 35 See, for instance, Achebe’s “Chi in Igbo Cosmology” in Morning Yet on Creation Day, 159–175 and “The Igbo World and Its Art,” Hopes and Impediments, 62–67. 36 Olakunle George argues that one must keep in mind that African nationalism of the mid-twentieth century was trying to translate the Western category of the nation-state into an African political sphere, and so one must not assess the novel for its success or failure in providing answers to Africa’s problems, but rather Achebe’s “achievement should be located in the depth with which [he] reveal[s] the problems in the nationalists’ undertaking” and in conveying a sense of a “notionally different future” (“Achebe’s Arrow of God,” Comparative Literary Studies 42.4 [2005], 344–362, quotations on 345, 360). 37 Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 114. 38 Abiola Irele, The African Imagination (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001).

C h a p t e r 4 F rom rom a nc e t o r e a l i s m:  R ic h a r d W r ig h t a n d n at ion t i m e 1 Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), 107. 2 For historical assessments of Nkrumah, see David Apter, Ghana in Transition (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1972); David Birmingham, Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nationalism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998); Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of The Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (London: Allen Lane, 1973); David Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah: The Political Kingdom in the Third World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). See also Nkrumah’s autobiography, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York:  International Publishers, 1971) and Marika Sherwood, Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad, 1935–1947 (Accra-Legon: Freedom Publications, 1996). For an overview of anti-colonialism, see Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (New York: New York University Press, 1957). 3 For a recent study exploring the journeys of the many expatriates who moved to Nkrumah’s Ghana, see Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University

Notes to pages 144–145

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o f North Carolina Press, 2006). Gaines argues that Nkrumah’s Ghana became “the beacon for the black world’s liberatory aspirations and a political sanctuary for exiles from American and colonial racial oppression” (26). For a historical overview of African-American journeys to Africa, including those motivated by Nkrumah, see James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans:  Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 150–180, and James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin, 2006), particularly 266–364. For AfricanAmerican anti-racist struggle and anti-colonialism, see Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire:  Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1997) and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country:  Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 4 Nkrumah’s secretary, Erica Powell, describes Nixon’s encounter with the Alabama delegation in Private Secretary (Female)/Gold Coast (London: Hurst, 1984), 106, though some have doubted its veracity. 5 Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995); hereafter cited parenthetically. 6 Black Power was received by silence from most critics (such as Time and Newsweek) in the US and a harsh review by The New York Times. Predictably, African reviewers in Accra took issue with the negative appraisal of Africa while British readers objected to the severity of Wright’s condemnation of colonialism. The most powerful recent critique comes from Anthony Appiah, “A Long Way from Home: Wright in the Gold Coast” in Arnold Rampersad (ed.), Richard Wright:  A Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995), 188–201, who suggests that Wright’s book reads like a colonial travel narrative where his reactions “oscillate between condescension and paranoia” (193). Rather than illuminating the complex reality it documents, Appiah claims that the “book is the record of a mind closed to the world through which he traveled” (194). Instead of taking us away from the paternalism of the civilizing mission of nineteenth-century thinkers like Alexander Crummell and Edward Blyden, for Appiah, Wright reiterates their imperialist view of Africa. 7 Richard Wright, The Color Curtain:  A Report on the Bandung Conference (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994); White Man, Listen! in Black Power:  Three Books From Exile:  Black Power; The Color Curtain; and White Man, Listen! (Introduction, Cornel West, New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). 8 See “Tradition and Industrialization” (White Man, Listen! 697–728). 9 Paul Gilroy writes, “the ambiguities that stem from Wright’s uncomfortable position – inside but not organically of the West – become unbearable in Black Power” (The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993], 151). Though Gilroy defends Wright’s later writings (such as The Outsider, The Long Dream, and Eight Men), he does not offer any other commentary on Black Power.

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Notes to pages 147–152

10 The question of Wright’s form is important also because it offers a contrast to other pan-African readings of Nkrumah. For instance, George Padmore offers an account of Nkrumah that focuses primarily on the ideological questions of communism and African socialism in The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom (London:  Dennis Dobson, 1953) while C. L. R. James deliberately foregrounds the distance between the Nkrumah of the moment of the upheaval of decolonization and the one that becomes the leader of the state in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (London: Allison and Busby, 1977). For James, rather than taking the place of the tribal chief (as David Apter suggests), Nkrumah embodies the revolutionary figure of a black modernist. 11 Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the NationState (New York: Times Books, 1992), 196. 12 See, for instance, the collection of essays, Virginia Whatley Smith (ed.), Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). 13 Gilroy writes, “Wright’s intellectual legacy is especially interesting because it has been so routinely misunderstood. The depth of his philosophical interests has been either overlooked or misconceived by the almost exclusively literary enquiries that have dominated analysis of his writing” (Black Atlantic, 147). 14 Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Perennial, 1998), 250. 15 James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone” in Notes of a Native Son: Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 25. 16 Michel Fabre, “Beyond Naturalism?” in Harold Bloom (ed.), Richard Wright: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 37–56, quotation on 41. 17 Fabre, “Beyond Naturalism,” 46–47. For a compelling investigation of Wright’s relationship to techniques of documentary reporting and photography, see Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 18 Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Perennial, 1987), v. 19 Wright, Black Boy, 39. 20 Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in Winston Napier (ed.), African American Literary Theory: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 45–53, quotation on 45; hereafter cited parenthetically. 21 Wright, Black Boy, 37. 22 For instance, Arnold Rampersad writes, “The sound of the alarm that opens Native Son was Richard Wright’s urgent call in 1940 to America to awaken from its self-induced slumber about the reality of race relations in the nation” and calls the novel a deliberate attempt to explode “a range of fantasies about the true nature of the relation between the races” (Introduction, Native Son, ix). See also Wright’s famous attack on Zora Neale Hurston, discussed in Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey:  A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 118–122, 180–185

Notes to pages 152–166

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and Hazel Carby, Cultures in Babylon:  Black Britain and African America (New York: Verso, 1999), 168–185. 23 Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” Native Son, 431–462, quotation on 454; hereafter cited parenthetically. 24 Wright, White Man, Listen!, 734. 25 Quoted in Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 364. 26 Wright, Black Boy, 286–287. 27 For comparative studies of Wright and colonial travel narratives, such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and André Gide’s Travels in the Congo, see Subramaniam Shankar, Textual Traffic:  Colonialism, Modernity, and the Economy of the Text (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2001) and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 28 Quoted in Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 403. 29 Richard Wright Papers, Box 22, Folder 342, 317, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 30 Quoted in Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright:  The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 417. 31 See Rowley, Richard Wright, 434–437, and Constance Webb, Richard Wright:  A Biography (New York:  G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968), 325. Rowley reports that though Wright planned to stay in Africa for four to six months, within two weeks of his arrival, he started inquiring about booking a passage back to Europe but couldn’t find one. Also, once rebuffed by Nkrumah, Wright felt welcomed by the American consul, William Cole, and submitted a report to him on Nkrumah and communism, something Rowley assesses as a conscious “act of betrayal” as Wright gave away “black men’s secrets” to the CIA (437). 32 Wright, White Man, Listen!, 775. 33 Contrast this to Partha Chatterjee’s influential reading of nationalism in the colonial world as defined by a separation between Western, modern, and rational forms on the one hand, and native, traditional, and spiritual forms on the other (Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986]). Nkrumah’s “politics plus” fuses these binary oppositions to offer a radically new conception of black modernity, as the two spheres – home/world, masculine/feminine, spiritual/ secular – merge, mingle, and are themselves transformed. 34 For more on Danquah (1895–1965), see Kwaku Larbi Korang, Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 156–169. 35 Joyce Cary, “Catching Up with History,” The Nation 179 (October 16, 1954), 332–333. 36 See James Baldwin, “Alas, Poor Richard,” and “Princes and Powers” (Notes of a Native Son: Collected Essays [New York: Library of America, 1998]) for his suggestion that when an African-American “faces an African, he is

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Notes to pages 166–168

facing the unspeakably dark, guilty, erotic past” (267). Most critics have seen value in Black Power only insofar as it illuminates Wright’s exilic status. Accordingly, John Reilly views Black Power as a project of self-fashioning, an attempt on Wright’s part to resolve the intellectual crisis evident in The Outsider. Thus, having exhausted other options, Wright finds new energy and direction in the transnational sphere, making “a secular salvation for himself out of his discovery of the Third World” (“Richard Wright and the Art of Non-Fiction:  Stepping Out on the Stage of the World” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah [eds.], Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present [New York:  Amistad, 1993], 423). Even such recent critics as Shankar (Textual Traffic), Jack Moore (“‘No Street Numbers in Accra’:  Richard Wright’s African Cities” in Smith, Richard Wright’s Travel Writings, 45–59), and Ngwarsungu Chiwengo (“Gazing Through the Screen: Richard Wright’s Africa” in Smith, Richard Wright’s Travel Writings, 20–44) who ask for more attention to Black Power concede that Wright subscribes to colonialist conventions familiar from writers like Conrad. Yoshinobu Hakutani offers a defense of Wright in Richard Wright and Racial Discourse (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1996) seeing Wright’s account of Africa as balanced, and Mary Louise Pratt reads Black Power as a parody of colonial travel narratives (Imperial Eyes), but most critics concur in condemning Wright’s representation of Africa. 37 It is worth recalling, however, that Wright views culture as the product of oppression. He explains, in a foreword to George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa, “The black man’s is a strange situation; it is a perspective, an angle of vision held by oppressed people; it is an outlook of people looking upward from below. It is what Nietzsche once called a ‘frog’s perspective.’ Oppression oppresses, and this is the consciousness of black men who have been oppressed for centuries, oppressed so long that their oppression has become a tradition, in fact a kind of culture” (London: Dennis Dobson, 1956, 11–14). 38 As his biographer David Macey points out, though we assume that Fanon’s writings refer to Algeria, when reading The Wretched of the Earth, it is important to remember that the specific references to the history, the landscape, and the literature indicate that Fanon could well be writing about Ghana. Given the time he spent in Nkrumah’s Ghana in the last years of his life as an Algerian representative of the pan-African dream, Fanon’s immediate experience of decolonization came not from Algeria but from Ghana (Frantz Fanon: A Biography [New York: Picador, 2000]). 39 For overviews of scholarship on Fanon, see Henry Louis Gates, “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 7.3 (1989), 457–470; Anthony Alessandrini (ed.), Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); and Lewis Gordon, Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee White (eds.), Fanon: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). For a poststructuralist reading of Fanon, see Homi Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 40–65; for

Notes to pages 168–174

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critiques of cultural studies appropriations, see Nigel Gibson, “Fanon and the Pitfalls of Cultural Studies” (in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 99–125); Cedric Robinson, “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon” (Race & Class 35.1 [1993], 79–91); and E. San Juan, Jr., “Fanon: An Intervention into Cultural Studies” (in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 126–145) among many others. 40 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 1967), 28; hereafter cited parenthetically. 4 1 For an excellent account of Fanon’s relationship to African decolonization, see Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Lazarus argues that Fanon took a messianic approach to decolonization, and like other anti-colonial intellectuals, ended up conflating the achievement of independence with the revolution. I should point out that my use of “messianic” is different from Lazarus’s emphasis, as I refer to the tradition of pan-African romantic racialism as the messianic mode in black intellectual thought. For Lazarus, messianism in Fanon’s thought refers to an orientation “in terms of which the moments of (revolutionary) consciousness and (spontaneous) resistance were telescoped together in a prophetic register that made it sound as though the hour of revolution in Africa had already announced itself and needed only to be recognized in order to sweep away all obstacles to its successful realization” (27). Lazarus concludes that Fanon’s messianic strain is countered by a fiercely practical one as well, and that “the greater logic of his thought mandates a non-messianic stance” (17). I am, of course, suggesting a similar dialectic between romance and realism, and utopia and pragmatism in Fanon’s thinking. 42 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 27. See also Wretched, 171. 43 Note Fanon’s similarity to Wright’s thinking on realism in relation to intellectual aspirations to represent the masses in “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” See also Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 31–37, for a discussion of Wright’s novels. 44 Of course, Fanon’s idealism about the potential of decolonization is not borne out by history. As Lazarus argues, radical African writers were wont to “overvalue the emancipatory significance of independence” leading inevitably to the “mourning after” (Resistance ix). 45 For a discussion of Wright in the context of modernization theory, see Nina Kressner Cobb, “Richard Wright and the Third World” in Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed.), Critical Essays on Richard Wright (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1982), 228–239. 46 Nkrumah, Ghana, 215. 47 And yet Wright discovers that Danquah feels no sense of conflict in his simultaneous embrace of his pagan heritage and his Christian beliefs. A sense of ease with such coexistence puzzles Wright in all his encounters with educated bourgeois Africans, as he cannot comprehend how the rational and non-rational could coexist in one mind. 48 Wright, White Man, Listen! 633; hereafter cited as WML.

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Notes to pages 175–182

49 In this instance, compare C. L. R. James’s dedication of his book, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, to Francis Nkrumah: “Like Cromwell and Lenin, he initiated the destruction of a regime in decay  – a tremendous achievement; but like them, he failed to create a new society” (London: Allison and Busby, 1977). 50 Diawara interprets Wright’s injunction to militarize African life as relating to questions of “discipline, punctuality, the inner organization of the personality, solidarity, focus, perseverance, and stalwartness” (In Search of Africa [Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1998], 69). Though he feels unsettled by the book, Diawara concludes that “Wright was for Africa, and he gave Africans the most precious weapon he had to offer: his theory of modernity” (72). Gaines highlights Wright’s speculative tone to soften the impact of his final injunction to militarize, arguing that Wright’s rejection of racialism and his challenge to the rhetoric of return opens up new possibilities for the study of diaspora, achievements that should not be obscured by a relentless “preoccupation with the idiosyncratic nature of Black Power” (American Africans in Ghana, 69). 51 For instance, in White Man, Listen!, Wright repeats many of these observations, clarifying that African society will need a temporary dictatorship in order to advance towards an industrial society. 52 Richard Wright Papers, Box 22, Folder 346, 951, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 53 To take just one example, watching Nkrumah rally the masses, Wright notes the similarity of the effort to Hitler’s noted efficiency. He also notes that the citizens of Accra possess a “physical lyricism.” He explains, “The only other people I’ve noticed which possessed so high a degree of physical expression that spills over into nationalism and politics are the Germans, and many things that I’ve seen on the Gold Coast have reminded me of things I’ve read about the Germans” (Richard Wright Papers, Box 22, Folder 342, 281, Beinecke Library, Yale University).

C h a p t e r 5 F rom r e volu t ion t o a r r e s t e d de c ol on i z at ion: a m a ata a i d o o a n d t h e l ong v i e w of h i s t or y 1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 1967), 9; hereafter cited parenthetically. 2 For a thorough discussion of various critical and popular appropriations of Fanon and his legacy, see David Macey, Frantz Fanon:  A Biography (New York: Picador, 2000). Of particular interest is Macey’s challenge to constructions of Fanon as a black nationalist. In the 1960s, as The Wretched of the Earth found an American audience, black nationalists like Stokely Carmichael and Elridge Cleaver claimed Fanon as a “patron saint” (24). Macey shows how Fanon’s commitment to Algeria and the Third World gestured far beyond

Notes to pages 183–187

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a race-based nationalism. See also Benita Parry on Fanon and négritude, “Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance, or Two Cheers for Nativism” in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (eds.), Colonial Discourse/ Postcolonial Theory (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1994), 172– 198; and Neil Lazarus’s discussion of Fanon’s nationalitarianism (an egalitarian nationalism) in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 3 Senghor prioritized his allegiance to De Gaulle’s proposed Franco-African community at the expense of Senegal’s support for Algeria. Meanwhile, in Fanon’s native Martinique, Aimé Césaire backed the constitutional referendum on the Fifth Republic, which made Martinique an overseas department of France. Finally, Rabemananjara, once a political prisoner in French jails and an acclaimed poet of négritude, now a Minister in Madagascar, voted against Algeria in the General Assembly of the United Nations. 4 Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana:  The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 164. 5 For an argument that nationalism is not the antithesis of universalism, but can in fact lead to a truer universalism, see Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998). 6 See Rey Chow, “Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon” in Anthony Alessandrini (ed.), Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1999), 34–56; Madhu Dubey, “The ‘True Lie’ of the Nation: Fanon and Feminism,” differences 10.1 (1988), 1–29; and Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” diacritics 24.2–3 (1994), 20–42. 7 Quoted in Ketu Katrak, Afterword, “Telling Stories and Transforming Postcolonial Society” in Ama Ata Aidoo, No Sweetness Here and Other Stories (New York: Feminist Press, 1995), 135–160, quotation on 136. 8 Adeola James (ed.), “Ama Ata Aidoo,” In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk (London: James Currey, 1990), 9–27, quotations on 13–14, 20. 9 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land in The Collected Poetry:  Aimé Césaire, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 10 For a reading of Our Sister Killjoy as an instance of reverse racism, see Brenda Cooper, “Chaiba the Algerian versus Our Sister Killjoy: The Case for a Materialist Black Aesthetic,” English in Africa 12.2 (1985), 21–51. Anuradha Needham makes a milder charge, suggesting that though Aidoo’s view of Europe is deeply racialized, it may be read as an instance of “strategic essentialism” towards the goal of resistance (Using the Master’s Tools:  Resistance and the Literature of the African and South-Asian Diasporas [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000], 89). Paula Morgan argues that “the ideological confrontation between the self and the other through the travel encounter has merely been reversed. The black-eyed squint does not go much beyond overturning the white-eyed vision” (“The Risk of (Re)membering My Name: Reading

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Notes to pages 187–191

Lucy and Our Sister Killjoy as Travel Narratives” in Ada Uzuamaka Azodo and Gay Wilentz (eds.), Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo [Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999], 187–211, quotation on 208). 11 See, for instance, Hildegard Hoeller, “Ama Ata Aidoo’s Heart of Darkness,” which reads Aidoo’s novel as a postcolonial revision of Conrad’s novel (Research in African Literatures 35.1 [2004], 130–147). 12 Cooper, “Chaiba the Algerian,” 39. 13 Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (Edinburgh:  Longman African Writers, 1977), 1–4; hereafter cited parenthetically. 14 Quoted in James, “Ama Ata Aidoo,” 15. 15 Note the distance traveled by Aidoo on the subject of colonial elites and their place in African uplift from earlier thinkers. For Du Bois, the Talented Tenth would uplift the race, and for Hayford, colonial elites like himself were destined to be the saviors of the race, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3. For Aidoo, as for Fanon, the elite are the problem. 16 Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1968). For a study of Armah’s novels of disillusionment and their relation to the excessive hopes attached to the project of decolonization, see Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 17 Aidoo’s recovery of tradition sharply distinguishes her thinking from both Fanon and Wright, who – as we saw in Chapter 4 – focus on the distortion and destruction of traditional culture under the onslaught of colonialism, rather than highlighting its strength or ability to adapt. For Aidoo’s use of orature, see Arlene Elder, “Ama Ata Aidoo: The Development of a Woman’s Voice” in Azodo and Wilentz (eds.), Emerging Perspectives, 157–169. 18 I refer, of course, to Benjamin’s famous essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, HarperCollins, 1992), 245–255, quotation on 249. As we will see later, despite this frame, Aidoo doesn’t end up with a paralysis sometimes associated with anti-positivist views of history. Rather, she concludes the novel with a sense of agency and purpose for her protagonist. 19 Needham explains this collapse in detail: “It is hard to determine whether or not Sissie . . . is also the narrator, or even whether there is only one narrator. Nevertheless, although Aidoo, in her interview with me, cautioned against viewing Sissie as an autobiographical subject, or even as someone whose values and judgments are identical with Aidoo’s, insofar as Sissie’s views and judgments are not subjected to either implicit or explicit interrogation, we must view them as those OSK, and its creator, Aidoo endorses” (Using the Master’s Tools, 143). In my reading, the chorus challenges Sissie’s claims, and the formal fragmentation renders impossible the emergence of a coherent ideology that the novel might champion. 20 It is also possible to read the novel’s title differently, where “Our Sister Killjoy” would refer to Sissie, and the “Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint” to the

Notes to pages 191–206

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chorus. In either reading, the chorus’s questioning of Sissie’s views remains, as also the suggestion that the novel’s biased views of Europe are but reflections of Europe’s own racist views of Africa. 21 For a defense of Aidoo’s nationalism as metaphoric, non-foundational, and anti-essentialist, see Ranu Samantrai’s compelling argument that the novel undermines race as a foundational identity by showing it to be equally constituted by class and gender (“Caught at the Confluence of History: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Necessary Nationalism,” Research in African Literatures, 26.2 [1995], 140–57). 22 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109. 23 Ibid., 9 24 Ama Ata Aidoo, Interview with Rosemary George and Helen Scott, “A New Tail to an Old Tale,” Novel 26.3 (1993) 297–308; quotation on 302. 25 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, where he distinguishes between the “eternal contaminations” dreamed up by racism in contrast to the “historical destinies” imagined by nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 149. 26 For a discussion of the figure of the been-to and the self-exile, see Gay Wilentz, “The Politics of Exile: Reflections of a Black-Eyed Squint in Our Sister Killjoy” in Azodo and Wilentz (eds.), Emerging Perspectives, 79–92. 27 More than anything, Sissie’s journey has been a space-clearing gesture, rejecting the certainties of First World feminism and Third World nationalism, to articulate a different vision for Africa, one that may be able to negotiate the competing as well as complementary demands of feminism and nationalism. 28 Quoted in Needham, Using the Master’s Tools, 71. 29 Appiah argues that the first generation of African writers find realism the eminent genre for nation-building, as writers such as Achebe construct a usable past to serve the needs of the new nation, but soon after, we find no more celebrations of the past. Rather, from the late 1960s on, we find a clear post-realist and post-nativist aesthetic articulated in postcolonial African novels. Appiah insists that this turn away from realism does not signal an investment in postmodernism; it comes instead from “an appeal to an ethical universal,” from a humanist concern for African misery, and a rejection of both Western and nationalist paradigms (In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 152).

C h a p t e r 6 F rom r e t u r n t o r e de m p t ion:  C a r y l Ph i l l i p s a n d p o s t c ol on i a l h y br i di t y 1 Caryl Phillips, A New World Order: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2002), 4. 2 Ibid., 5–6. 3 See Maya Jaggi, “Tracking the African Diaspora,” Manchester Guardian Weekly 148.22 (May 30, 1993), 28 and Dana Rogar, “A Citizen of the World: Caryl

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Notes to pages 206–214

Phillips Talks about Race, Class and Home,” Newsweek (May 10, 1999), 63 for the quoted phrases. For readings of Phillips as an exemplary diaspora novelist, see Bénédicte Ledent, Caryl Phillips (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 4 Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation:  Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation” in The Location of Culture (London:  Routledge, 1994), 139–170. 5 Phillips, A New World Order, 14, 17, 16. 6 See Tiffany Patterson and Robin Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review 43.1 (2000), 11–45. 7 Phillips, A New World Order, 292. 8 The term “neo-slave narratives” was coined by Bernard Bell in The AfroAmerican Novel and Its Tradition to describe modern narratives of escape and freedom (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). For further analysis, see Ashraf Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives:  Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1999) and Remembering Generations:  Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Arlene Keizer, Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Novel of Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Valerie Smith, “Neo-Slave Narratives” in Audrey Fisch (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 168–185. 9 See Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 10 Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (New York: Vintage, 1993); hereafter cited parenthetically. The phrase, “schizophrenia of slavery,” comes from the jacket of this edition. 11 Richard Patteson, Caribbean Passages: A Critical Perspective on New Fiction from the West Indies (Boulder:  Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), 138. Also see Sylvie Chavanelle, “Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge: Ironical (Dis)empowerment?” The International Fiction Review 25 (1998), 78–88. 12 J. M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (New York: Viking, 2001), 163. 13 Caryl Phillips, Interview with Graham Swift, Kunapipi 13.3 (1991) 96–103. 14 See Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally, History and Memory in AfricanAmerican Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Sidney Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley, Imagining Home:  Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (New York:  Verso, 1994); Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen (eds.), Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999); Earl Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot:  Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas” in Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod (eds.), Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1999), 3–32; and Thomas Holt,

Notes to pages 215–221

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“Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World: Reflections on the Diasporan Framework” in Hine and McLeod (eds.), Crossing Boundaries, 33–44. 15 See Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes:  Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30 (1988), 61–88; Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies:  Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (New York: Guilford Press, 1994). 16 Kobena Mercer, “Back to My Routes: A Postscript to the 1980s” in James Proctor (ed.), Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998:  An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 285–292, quotation on 287. 17 Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (New York: Vintage, 1995), 1; hereafter cited parenthetically. 18 Janet Burroway, “Slaves to Fate,” The New York Times (January 30, 1994), 10. 19 A certain slippage exists between the notion of Africa as fatherland in Phillips’s novel and the conventional trope of a feminized Mother Africa. For feminist perspectives on diaspora, see Carol Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations:  Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 20 In an interview with Jenny Sharpe, Phillips tells us that Crossing the River was written out of his experience in a slave fort in Ghana, characterized by a sense of mutual discomfort between his African friends and him, as well as by clear feelings of guilt on the part of the Africans, for not having been shipped out on the Middle Passage. For a novel supposedly interested in transcending the politics of blame, it is unclear why guilt continues to be an organizing principle for the African father and for Edward (“Of this Time, of that Place,” Transition 0.68 [1995], 154–161). 21 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: Caraf, University Press of Virginia, 1989), 17. 22 See Farah Griffin, who sees Nash as “the ambivalent diasporic subject in search of ‘home,’” in “Review of Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River,” Boston Review 19.3/4 (1994), 45–46, and Dieter Riemenschneider, who argues that Nash signifies “a syncretic post-­coloniality” (“One Hundred Years of Darkness: ‘I am no longer of Monrovia, having relocated into the Heart of the Country’: Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River [1993] Writing back to Heart of Darkness [1902]” in Liselotte Glage (ed.), Being/s in Transit:  Travelling, Migration, Dislocation [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000], 83–92, quotation on 91). 23 Ledent, Caryl Phillips, 129. 24 Gail Low, for instance, writes that the slave-trading captain of section three, James Hamilton, is a character “in one long line of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and lovers in Crossing the River in search of kinship connections.” Low reads the juxtaposition of love letters with descriptions of torture as evidence of the slave-trader’s essential humanity (“A Chorus of Common Memory: Slavery

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Notes to pages 221–228

and Redemption in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River,” Research in African Literatures 29.4 [1998], 122–140, quotation on 137). 25 See Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” in Subaltern Studies:  Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), vol. I, 1–8; Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; and Sumit Sarkar, “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies” in Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 26 Griffin, “Review,” 46. 27 In an interview with Maya Jaggi, “Tracking the African Diaspora,” Phillips justifies this moment of redemption in Crossing the River: “there is an annealing force. I didn’t want only to explore the fissures and crevices of migration. There’s an underlying passion that informs people’s ability to do more than just survive  – a love and faith present everywhere I look among the children of the African diaspora, from Jimmy Baldwin to Miles Davis, to Marvin Gaye that’s both triumphant and celebratory.” Jaggi reiterates his point: “while the diasporan experience is one of painful dislocation, fracture and abandonment, in Crossing the River, the final pages are suffused with a moving, almost jubilant sense of redemptive love” (24). 28 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 189; hereafter cited parenthetically. On Afrocentrism, see Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). 29 For a defense of négritude against charges of racial essentialism, see Benita Parry, “Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance, or Two Cheers for Nativism” in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (eds.), Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1994), 172–198. 30 For critiques of Gilroy, see Laura Chrisman, “Journeying to Death: Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,” Race and Class 39.2 (1997), 51–64; Joan Dayan, “Paul Gilroy’s Slaves, Ships, and Routes:  The Middle Passage as Metaphor,” Research in African Literatures 27.4 (1996), 7–14; Simon Gikandi, “Introduction: Africa, Diaspora, and the Discourse of Modernity,” Research in African Literatures 27.4 (1996), 1–6; Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially 51–67. In Gikandi’s words, in his desire to “transcend both European rationalism and its anti-humanist critique,” Gilroy “detour(s) historicity” in the process (2). 31 Compare Du Bois’s use of the racial sublime in The Souls of Black Folk, discussed in Chapter 2. 32 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past:  Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 146–147. 33 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” in Russell Ferguson (ed.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 299–305, quotation on 301; Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1988).

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34 For a compelling reading of Morrison’s novel and its invocation of a “sonic sublime” in relation to Gilroy’s theorization of a slave sublime, see Madhu Dubey, “The Politics of Genre in Beloved,” Novel 32.2 (1999), 187–206. 35 Phillips writes, “The realization hits me with force. I am not an African. Were I an African I suspect I would feel the same way as my host. But I was raised in Europe, and although I have learned to reject the stereotypically reductive images of Africa and Africans, I am undeniably interested in the break-up of a European mind and the health of European civilization. I feel momentarily ashamed that I might have become caught up with this theme and subsequently overlooked how offensive this novel might be to a man such as Chinua Achebe and to millions of other Africans. Achebe is right; to the African reader the price of Conrad’s eloquent denunciation of colonization is the recycling of racist notions of the ‘dark’ continent and her people. Those of us who are not from Africa may be prepared to pay this price, but this price is far too high for Achebe” (“Out of Africa,” The Guardian [February 22, 2003], 4). 36 Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe (New York:  Vintage, 1990). See also Phillips, The Atlantic Sound (New York: Knopf, 2000), where he juxtaposes various forms of (coerced and voluntary) travel to situate his powerful critique of the contemporary tourist travel to Ghana’s slave forts. 37 George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 160; hereafter cited parenthetically. 38 In an interview with David Scott, Lamming explains his stance on political identifications with Africa as strategies rather than evocations of a black or African essence: “I have no intention of being diluted into a general thing called ‘African’ . . . I’m talking about political continuities of struggle – I am speaking from a particular space which is distinct, which may overlap, have its connections whether it is with Camara Laye or Achebe or whoever it is. I’m speaking from a space that is distinct, and I resist the dilution of that space either into a real or manufactured category that you would call Africa or African personality” (“The Sovereignty of the Imagination: An Interview with George Lamming,” Small Axe 6.2 [2002], 72–200, quotation on 122). 39 Ngugı wa Thiong’o, “Freeing the Imagination: George Lamming’s Aesthetics of Decolonization,” Transition 100 (2009), 164–169. 40 George Lamming, “Concepts of the Caribbean” in Frank Birbalsingh (ed.), Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 9. 4 1 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 16; hereafter cited parenthetically. 42 In “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Homi Bhabha argues that acts of colonial mimicry undermine and deconstruct the authority of colonial discourse (The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994], 85–92). It is fair to wonder whether it can be so easy to translate these concepts forged in other postcolonial sites such as nineteenth-century AngloIndian encounters to a slave in Liberia who is also a colonizer. Are Nash and

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Notes to pages 234–329

Cambridge to be read simply as Bhabha’s mimic men, signs of ambivalence and ambiguity? 43 Highlighting these aspects of Glissant’s theory helps resituate him in relation to négritude. Most critics see his theory of métissage as a radical break from the négritude of Aimé Césaire, sounding its death knell, but as my discussion of reversion and diversion indicates, Glissant has a far more textured analysis of négritude, one that goes beyond simple rejection or judgement. See Michael Dash, Édouard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Celia Britton, Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory:  Strategies of Language and Resistance (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). 44 David Scott revises the black Atlantic paradigm to position the meaning of the figures of Africa and slavery as part of an ongoing discursive debate (“‘An Obscure Miracle of Connection’: Discursive Tradition and Black Diaspora Criticism,” Small Axe 1 [1997], 19–38, quotation on 23). Like Stuart Hall, Scott makes ample room in his discussions for those black political aspirations that seek sustenance from symbolic invocations of Africa. 45 See Parry, “Resistance Theory.” 46 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Nationalism (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2003). 47 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, “In Praise of Creoleness,” trans. Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar, Callaloo 13 (1990), 886– 909; Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island:  The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1992); Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason:  Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (New York:  Routledge, 2000); Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial:  Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 48 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), xv. 49 Édouard Glissant, “The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World,” trans. Haun Saussy, in Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (ed.), Beyond Dichotomies:  Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2002), 287–295, quotation on 287); Poetics of Relation, trans. Betty Wing (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1997).

Index

Achebe, Chinua, 8, 21, 103, 106, 112, 160, 183, 184, 193, 229, 249, 255, 271 and black Atlantic, 108 Arrow of God, 108, 128, 132–141 on nationalism, 129, 132, 138 on romance, 109, 131, 137, 140 on tradition and modernity, 22, 130, 131, 135, 140 study of, 257 Things Fall Apart, 106, 128, 133 Africa, 52, 101, 171, 179 as sign, 7 in Ama Ata Aidoo, 186, 188, 191, 201, 203 in black Atlantic theories, 7, 57, 105, 226, 236 in Caryl Phillips, 207, 217, 218, 223, 225 in Chinua Achebe, 128, 131, 138 in George Lamming, 231 in Joseph Casely Hayford, 104, 110, 112, 116, 122, 125 in Pauline Hopkins, 28–31, 41, 50–57 in Richard Wright, 145, 147, 157, 160, 161, 163, 167, 176, 178 in W.E.B. Du Bois, 63, 68, 78, 94, 100, 103 realism and romance, 18 Africa for the Africans, 103 and Garvey, 2 and Nkrumah, 142 African survivals, 58, 158, 163 Afrocentrism, 31, 55, 56, 89, 94, 100, 115, 204, 206, 225, 230, 250 Ahmad, Dohra, 251 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 8, 23, 109, 184–204 biography, 185 feminism, 194, 195 literary form, 189, 191 on migration, 186, 192, 197, 200, 201 on racism, 187, 192 Our Sister Killjoy, 186–204 study of, 265 American studies, 12

transnational turn, 18, 20, 31 Anderson, Benedict, 9, 75, 87, 107, 199, 265, 267 Angelou, Maya, 143 anti-colonial nationalism, 15, 106, 108, 123, 127, 129, 131, 141, 142–144, 155–165, 167–180, 182, 183, 184, 187, 189, 203 and literary form, 106 Appadurai, Arjun, 15 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 51, 97, 105, 203, 267 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 184, 189, 266 arrested decolonization, 23, 187, 200 Asante, Molefi, 31 back to Africa, 1, 22, 40, 62, 250 Bair, Barbara, 3 Baldwin, James, 149, 166, 261 Bandung conference, 22, 59, 145 Baraka, Amiri, 185 Beer, Gillian, 47 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 15, 23, 190 Bhabha, Homi, 59, 206, 234, 237, 271 Black Arts Movement, 26, 184, 186 black Atlantic, 18, 97, 99, 103, 105, 107, 123, 143, 186, 205, 216, 218, 225, 228, 235, 243 and Fanon, 4 and nationalism, 55, 64, 105 canon, 8, 12 place of Africa, 7–8 black Britain, 18, 206, 230 black Englishmen, 116, 172 black internationalism, 58, 59, 63, 98, 183, 186 black nationalism, 16, 29, 30, 39, 75, 97, 106, 120, 150, 154, 163, 171, 182, 247 and diaspora, 55 and literary form, 9 and racial essentialism, 17 temporality of, 54 black Zionism, 39, 40, 100

273

274 Blyden, Edward, 8, 30, 37, 39–42, 49, 50, 51, 53, 103, 110, 114, 120, 121, 129, 143, 151, 226, 238 Boym, Svetlana, 254 Brantlinger, Patrick, 47 Brathwaite, Kamau, 230, 237 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 26 Bunche, Ralph, 143 Carby, Hazel, 26, 27, 28, 56, 93 Cary, Joyce, 166 Casely Hayford, Joseph, see Hayford, Joseph Casely Césaire, Aimé, 146, 186, 234, 265 Chase, Richard, 11, 242 Chatterjee, Partha, 123, 261 Chesnutt, Charles, 44, 48 Coetzee, J. M., 210 colonial elite, 106, 108, 117, 119, 122, 124, 160, 172, 188 colonialism, 125, 132 study of, 17 Colored American Magazine, 25, 39, 245 Conde, Maryse, 230 Conrad, Joseph, 156, 229 Convention People’s Party, 158, 159, 172 Cooper, Brenda, 187 Crummell, Alexander, 30, 49, 51, 78, 226, 238 Cullen, Countee, 31, 88 customary law, see indirect rule Danquah, J.B., 162, 172, 263 Davidson, Basil, 147 decolonization, 128, 147, 184, 189, 193, 203, 232 Delany, Martin, 103, 143, 226 diaspora, 56, 98, 100, 230 and nation, 16 definition of, 12, 55, 57, 241, 242, 247 in African-American and postcolonial studies, 17 in Ama Ata Aidoo, 185, 191, 199, 201 in Caryl Phillips, 206, 207, 208, 216, 222, 224, 228 in Édouard Glissant, 233, 235 in Edward Blyden, 40, 120 in Joseph Casely Hayford, 105, 120 in Pauline Hopkins, 30, 41, 45, 55 in Richard Wright, 146, 157, 178, 179 in W.E.B. Du Bois, 62, 64, 93, 94, 97, 99 study of, 56, 236, 239 Diawara, Manthia, 177, 264 Diop, Alioune, 146 domestic novel, 25 double consciousness, 61, 63, 104, 109, 138

Index in Joseph Casely Hayford, 122 in Pauline Hopkins, 33, 35 in W. E. B. Du Bois, 35, 65, 68, 72 in William James, 46 Douglass, Frederick, 37, 41 on Afrocentrism, 38 Drake, St. Clair, 12, 143 Du Bois, W. E. B., 8, 14, 20, 44, 45, 58, 59–103, 104, 105, 107, 119, 121, 123, 130, 143, 151, 152, 157, 183, 205, 226, 266 and aesthetics, 61, 65, 68, 81–86 and Chinua Achebe, 257 and Marcus Garvey, 1, 3, 100–103 and nationalism, 64, 68, 75, 97 as race man, 64 “Criteria of Negro Art, The”, 83 Dark Princess, 59, 63, 82–98, 99, 102 Dusk of Dawn, 72 on India, 63, 93 on romance, 60–62, 67, 75, 87, 88, 98 sorrow songs, 79, 90 Souls of Black Folk, The, 63, 65–81, 88, 89, 99, 104, 119 study of, 60, 61, 64, 251, 252 Dubey, Madhu, 253, 271 duCille, Ann, 26 Edwards, Brent, 12, 59, 239 Ellison, Ralph, 206 Emecheta, Buchi, 184 emigrationism, 38, 50 Ethiopia, 30, 39, 100, 104, 122 Ethiopianism, 21, 30, 32, 34, 39, 55, 63, 97, 102, 105, 109, 116, 131, 144, 154, 250, 256 as romance, 39 temporality of, 40 Fabian, Johannes, 249 Fabre, Michel, 149 Fanon, Frantz, 3–5, 8, 19, 22, 75, 100, 109, 141, 167–171, 176, 177, 179, 181–186, 187, 188, 192, 194, 199, 204, 233, 238 and Marcus Garvey, 6 on realism and romance, 6 study of, 241, 262, 264 Farah, Nuruddin, 184 Fauset, Jessie, 73 Ferris, William, 26, 53 Frye, Northrop, 13 Fuchs, Barbara, 243 Gaines, Kevin, 26, 177, 258, 264 Garvey, Marcus, 1–3, 8, 19, 21, 62, 88, 100–103, 142, 143, 151, 153, 157, 234

Index and Frantz Fanon, 6 and romance, 6 Gates, Henry Louis, 234 genre and historical thinking, 14 and minority text, 11 as apolitical, 11 George, Olakunle, 258 Gide, André, 156 Gikandi, Simon, 129 Gillman, Susan, 245 Gilroy, Paul, 7, 8, 9, 15, 31, 55, 56, 59, 80, 87, 95, 99, 101, 109, 148, 206, 225–229, 233, 236, 237, 239, 243, 259, 270 Glissant, Édouard, 24, 232–239 Hall, Stuart, 19, 206 Harlem Renaissance, 62, 81, 100, 149, 183 Harper, Frances, 48, 83 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 69, 152 Hayford, Joseph Casely, 8, 21, 103, 104–128, 130, 141, 172, 183 and transnationalism, 119–122 biography, 109 Ethiopia Unbound, 104, 108, 109–126 on colonial rule, 117, 124, 125 on realism and romance, 107, 123, 124 on reason, 116, 124 on tradition and modernity, 115, 123, 125, 126 Hill, Robert, 3 Hopkins, Pauline, 8, 25–57, 63, 68, 77, 82, 97, 115, 121, 151, 157, 183 Contending Forces, 34, 35, 57 “Mystery Within Us, The”, 43 Of One Blood, 20, 25–58, 95, 114 Primer of Facts , A, 50 “Test of Manhood, The”, 48 Howe, Irving, 145 Hughes, Langston, 183 Hurston, Zora Neale, 167 hybridity, 54, 56, 57, 59, 97, 206, 208, 211, 212, 219, 228, 232, 234 imperialism, 100, 105, 128 incest, 36 indirect rule, 107, 126, 131, 134 Irele, Abiola, 140 James, C.L.R., 101, 157, 260, 264 James, Henry, 152 James, William, 46 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 13, 87 Julien, Claude, 222

275

Kaplan, Amy, 17, 31 Kenyatta, Jomo, 183 Kingsley, Mary, 118 Lamming, George, 230–232 Lang, Andrew, 47 Lazarus, Neil, 263 Lewis, David Levering, 66, 88, 143 Locke, Alain, 60, 65, 81, 252 Low, Gail, 269 Lugard, F.D., 127 Lumumba, Patrice, 179 Macey, David, 262 Mamdani, Mahmood, 127 Marshall, Paule, 230 Mayfield, Julian, 143 Memmi, Albert, 75 Mercer, Kobena, 215 miscegenation, 27, 35, 43, 49 modernity, 16, 87, 94, 100, 128, 141, 159, 161, 165, 166, 168, 171, 174, 178, 186, 189, 204, 207, 216, 218, 225, 238 as colonial, 21, 107, 114, 117, 123 Morrison, Toni Beloved, 227 on romance, 10, 37 Moses, Wilson, 29, 30, 39, 100, 240, 245 Mudimbe, Valentin, 8 Mullen, Bill, 59 Murray, Pauli, 143 Naipaul, V. S., 167 Nairn, Tom, 15 nationalism, see anti-colonial nationalism, black nationalism nativism, 105, 124 Needham, Anuradha, 266 négritude, 182, 183, 225, 226, 232, 234, 235, 272 new Negro, 31, 32 Ngugi, wa Thiong’o, 106, 112, 184, 232 Nixon, Richard, 144 Nkrumah, Kwame, 22, 100, 103, 105, 141, 142–145, 153, 155, 157–163, 167, 171–179, 183, 184, 185, 234, 238, 241, 258 one-drop rule, 36, 38, 43 Orientalism, 63, 93 Padmore, Dorothy, 156 Padmore, George, 146, 157, 233, 260 pan-Africanism, 51, 55, 143, 185, 225, 238 in Marcus Garvey, 2 in Ama Ata Aidoo, 203

276

Index

pan-Africanism (cont.) in Édouard Glissant, 235 in George Lamming, 231 in Joseph Casely Hayford, 104, 119 in Kwame Nkrumah, 142 in Pauline Hopkins, 249 in W.E.B. Du Bois, 100 passing, 32, 36, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49 Pease, Donald, 17 Phillips, Caryl, 8, 23, 205–239 Cambridge, 208, 209–216, 221, 224, 229 Crossing the River, 206, 216–225, 229 diaspora aesthetic, 207, 210, 236 European Tribe, The, 230 on realism and romance, 207 A New World Order, 205, 238 Plessy v. Ferguson, 26, 35, 66 Poe, Edgar Allen, 152 postcolonial studies, 30 and African-American studies, 17 Powell, Adam Clayton, 143 Présence Africaine, 146 racial uplift, 25–27, 28, 31–38, 54, 55, 65, 81, 86, 97, 128 Rampersad, Arnold, 60, 75, 260 realism, 23, 37, 47, 67, 71, 73, 91, 109, 227, 228 and nationalism, 9, 107, 150 in Ama Ata Aidoo, 203 in Chinua Achebe, 128, 131, 134 in Richard Wright, 148–156 in W.E.B. Du Bois, 65 religion, 78, 110, 112, 117, 139, 165 Reynolds, Paul, 156 romance, 47, 127, 225, 228 and diaspora, 8, 9, 14 and nationalism, 54, 107, 147 definition of, 13, 243 in Ama Ata Aidoo, 186, 198, 202 in Caryl Phillips, 207, 218, 228 in Chinua Achebe, 108, 129, 131, 140 in Frantz Fanon, 6, 171 in Joseph Casely Hayford, 104, 107, 110, 115, 122, 124 in Marcus Garvey, 6 in Paul Gilroy, 227 in Pauline Hopkins, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 37, 47, 54 in Richard Wright, 147, 148, 152, 157, 160, 163, 164 in W.E.B. Du Bois, 60, 67, 69, 72, 75, 82, 86, 90, 96 Rowley, Hazel, 261 Saks, Eva, 246

Samantrai, Ranu, 267 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 181, 204 Schomburg, Arturo, 12 Schrager, Cynthia, 46 Scott, David, 236, 272 Senghor, Leopold, 146, 169, 183, 265 sentimental fiction, 37 Shepperson, George, 12 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 59 Sollors, Werner, 35, 36, 48 Soyinka, Wole, 137, 184 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 244 Stephens, Michelle, 240 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 26, 249 Sundquist, Eric, 39, 255 Sutherland, Efua, 184 Talented Tenth, 59, 62, 66, 67, 73, 75, 86, 97, 122, 124, 150, 266 Tate, Claudia, 25, 26, 31, 60 time, 50, 126, 226 in Ama Ata Aidoo, 187, 188, 190 in Chinua Achebe, 130, 132 in Frantz Fanon, 168, 170 in Joseph Casely Hayford, 110 in Pauline Hopkins, 33, 55 in Richard Wright, 163 in W.E.B. Du Bois, 95, 98 of nation and diaspora, 14 tragic mulatto/a, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 63 transnationalism, see black Atlantic, diaspora Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 227 Turner, Bishop Henry, 30, 49, 51, 53, 143, 247, 248 undiscovered country, 42, 45, 47, 68, 79, 97, 115, 121, 128, 186, 204 UNIA, 1, 2, 100 universalism, 99, 125, 164, 185, 237 and nationalism, 147 in Ama Ata Aidoo, 195 in Caryl Phillips, 208, 216, 229 in Édouard Glissant, 232 in Pauline Hopkins, 30, 31 in Richard Wright, 174 in W.E.B. Du Bois, 61, 65, 80 Washington, Booker T., 62, 66, 69, 74, 76, 102, 104, 110, 121 Wilentz, Gay, 267 Williams, Raymond, 12 Wright, Richard, 8, 22, 38, 109, 141, 142–180, 183, 226 Black Boy, 148, 149 Black Power, 144–167, 171–179, 230

Index Wright, Richard (cont.) “Blueprint for Negro Writing”, 145, 150, 162 “How Bigger Was Born”, 145, 151 “Literature of the Negro in the United States, The”, 145 Native Son, 145, 148, 149, 152 on realism and romance, 148–156

277 study of, 259, 262 Color Curtain, The, 145, 178 Uncle Tom’s Children, 152 White Man, Listen!, 145, 174–175, 178

Young, Robert, 57