Monthly Archives: April 2013

This week I think I finally figured out how to approach all the material I read this semester in order to cohere it into a meaningful historiographical critique. My previous post and a helpful conversation with Caleb led me to consider more fully the way in which contemporaneous political issues have a powerful informative effect on the way history is written. An author’s stance on political issues, broadly defined, reveals the premises and logic of their thinking. Often historians are motivated to write on a particular topic, or even make the decision to become a writer in the first place, based on their engagement with an issue that is meaningful to them. Though I have long felt this way, writing the final essay for this class will allow me to take the time to spell out my thoughts on this subject more clearly. Because if your ideas are not written down, and they only exist in your head, they basically don’t exist at all.

One of the big questions our class has been grappling with is the question of resistance and the extent human agency has the ability to affect a given situation. Since my readings have been structured around Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet (2003), which tells the story of African-American sociopolitical resistance to white supremacy from slavery to the Great Migration, the question of what constitutes resistance to oppression and how we conceptualize and write about such activity has been perhaps the foremost question of the semester. However, it has become clear to me that Hahn’s work will likely play a relatively small role in my essay, which will incorporate writings about events far removed from slavery in the southern United States. My purpose instead will be to focus on the way in which resistance to oppression has been written about and conceptualized over the course of the last seventy-five or so years, and the relationship between current events and historiography. Of course, my discussion will necessarily be incomplete and synoptic due to the sheer expansiveness of the topic and timespan, but I do hope to cover the broad outlines.

My survey will begin with two works of extraordinary influence: W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins (1938). Despite their seventy-five year provenance, these two works remain consistently cited as foundational in current scholarship. I will argue that their enduring influence is closely related to the author’s political approach to their subjects – post-civil war reconstruction in the US, and the Haitian Revolution, respectively – which emphasized the power and humanity of some of the most oppressed people in history: African slaves in the Americas. While asserting the “humanity” of particular groups of people may seem quaint to us now, in our supposedly “post-racial” era in the US, doing so in the 1930s was nearly unheard of, and both works were strongly against the grain of mainstream scholarship. In fact, it took a generation of historians asserting this to really hammer the point home. DuBois and James were motivated to write their books by the ongoing systemic oppression of black people in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond. They wrote with purpose and urgency, and they shared Marxian conceptions of class struggle and revolution as the fruit of the oppressed and exploited themselves. Liberation could not be delivered by reformist elites committed to piecemeal, “responsible” political change. For them, revolutionary changes for the better were made – and, importantly, should be made again – through mass popular action. Both DuBois and James advocated for multiracial, multicultural, and multinational democracy in which working people – ordinary people – would hold political sway. Both treated race as ideological categories, categories that have the power to create, enforce, and justify material inequality and exploitative labor regimes that disproportionally subjugated black people. At the same time neither were cultural nationalists or nativists who insisted the culture of the oppressed be the only exalted culture; they were committed to have black people and black culture be recognized and honored as any other. And they both lived cosmopolitan lives as international activists on a variety of issues, namely African-American human rights, the independence of Africa and colonized people around the world, and the struggle to build an economically just society.

The powerful ideas and examples of DuBois and James left a lasting impression on generations thinking about the struggle to end oppression. Hahn cites both authors liberally throughout his 2003 work. But their idea of revolution was informed by their time, where they saw an a number of restive colonial populations were in active revolt against their European masters, an active and organized European working class struggling to achieve their aspirations, and the Great Depression of capitalism was ravaging America and the world. Mass collective action was happening around them, and they wanted to instigate further. This trend would by and large gather steam into the 1960s, when their works were lifted from obscurity and nearly became the mainstream amidst the ongoing march of anticolonial revolutions, the Black Freedom Movement in the United States, and mounting currents of opposition against the bureaucratic state socialist regimes.

As old struggles came to an end, new struggles emerged, and there became new ways of looking at the past: the variegations of identity, gender, race, class and individual subjectivity became the emergent call signs of the New Left, new social history, postcolonialism, and subaltern studies.

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While this has been a somewhat hasty sketch without textual references, from here I intend to go into the more specific readings of the works I have blogged about, to show how the works of Guha, Kelley, and Scott, for instance, reconceptualized historiographies of resistance, and how they were influenced by macropolitical changes. This week I have also been considering the ways that the work of Edward Said, in Orientalism (1979) and Culture and Imperialism (1994), also has much to say about how knowledge is shaped and informed by the wider context. Wish me luck.

A post regarding Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb 1990).

This week, I wanted to explore how theories of subaltern resistance have been explored or utilized within scholarship on the Arab World. The text I chose is by a highly respected anthropologist in the amorphous and contested field of Middle East Studies, Lila Abu-Lughod. As a testament to the immense power of this traveling, interdisciplinary theoretical debate, this article was cited in Robin D.G. Kelley’s Race Rebels as influential on his own conceptions of African-American modes of subaltern resistance.

Abu-Lughod’s perceptive article makes a number of points worth considering regarding broader debates. First, she helpfully advances a suggested explanation for the popularity of resistance scholarship in a particular world-historical moment, which she attributes to “a growing disaffection with previous ways we have understood power” (41). While this may seem rather vague, it is important to consider her 1990 essay was written during the end of “the Cold War” showdown between official Capitalism and Communism, or what some pompously labeled “the end of history.” Along with the collapse of official “Communism,” Abu-Lughod argues that by the 1980s, “a number of social-political movements, including feminism, [shook] the hegemony of Marxism as radical discourse and open[ed] up possibilities for rethinking power and resistance” (53 n2). Indeed, she cites James C. Scott, one of the most prominent practitioners of the resistance framework, as pointing directly to his “disillusionment with socialist revolutions” as the inspiration for his pioneering work on everyday resistance. I think Abu-Lughod is right in trying to understand this widespread turn in scholarship within larger historical events. A host of people around the world turned to this framework because it resonated in an important way.

Moving away from Abu-Lughod for a moment, allow me to attempt to flesh out how I think this turn in scholarship played out a bit more clearly. Since around the 1980s (until now?), leftists and socially engaged academics have been disillusioned both by the crassly unequal, imperialist, and structurally racist and sexist consumer societies constructed by western capitalism and with the dictatorial, bureaucratic, and lifeless command economies constructed by the nominally “socialist” regimes in Europe, as well as the “radical nationalist” states in the Third World. Looking around the world, on a humanistic level all systems failed to work according to their best aspirations. This state of affairs appeared to mark the failure of numerous collective movements for social justice in all corners of the globe, under nearly every system of political-economic organization. However, a turn to the sphere of “everyday resistance” demonstrated how people on the receiving end of power continued to fight with dignity against oppression on the micro-level, without necessarily being connected to wider social movements. While some scholars began pushing subaltern resistance, or “history from below” in the 1960s-70s, we have seen from some of my other posts that such works largely took inspiration from W.E.B. DuBois’ and C.L.R. James’ pioneering work of the 1930s. And to this list of antecedents we must add Antonio Gramsci, from whom the term “subaltern” is taken. In light of the current stagnation of the “resistance” debate, it is important and illuminating to note that Gramsci, James, and DuBois all explicitly worked for open collective rebellion and revolution as the means to transform society – and they did not appear to counterpose everyday resistance with revolution. How little have we advanced from their work…

But back to Abu-Lughod. For her, the most lamentable result of the everyday resistance craze is its greater “[concern] with finding resistors and explaining resistance than with examining power,” which results in studies that “do not explore as fully as they might the implications of the forms of resistance they locate” (41). Going further, Abu-Lughod calls into question some of her own work in this vein, stating “there is perhaps a tendency to romanticize resistance, to read all forms of resistance as signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated” (41-42). This seems to me very similar to Walter Johnson’s famous thesis “On Agency,” expressed thirteen years earlier.[1] Drawing from Foucault, Abu-Lughod suggests what can be done instead is to “use resistance as a diagnostic of power…We could continue to look for and consider nontrivial all sorts of resistance, but instead of taking these as signs of human freedom we will use them strategically to tell us more about forms of power and how people are caught up in them” (42). In other words, we need to look at resistant people(s) not as having liberated themselves from power, but as reacting to and reconfiguring, but working within power structures.

Abu-Lughod later identifies three analytic dilemmas that may stem from the use of everyday resistance paradigms. First, is the “misattribution” of “forms of consciousness or politics” onto resistant populations (47). Just because the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin women of northwestern Egypt resist patriarchal forms of domination doesn’t mean they have a “feminist consciousness” equivalent to western discourses of feminism. Secondly, Abu-Lughod seeks to acknowledge that subordinate groups “both resist and support the existing system of power,” but she rejects Marxian conceptions of “false consciousness, which dismisses their own understanding of their situation” and “impression management, which makes of them cynical manipulators” (47). Finally, she also seeks to account for forms of resistance tolerated by dominant groups (such as satirical stories or songs), without viewing society as a machine with perfectly calibrated safety valves designed to relieve pressure. All these, I think, are important dilemmas to be considered in writing about resistance and domination.

Like Johnson in “On Agency,” Abu-Lughod is not concerned “about the status of resistance itself” – whether or not a particular tactic is productive toward collective revolution, a la Genovese. Her suggestion to end the stagnation in scholarship (and remember she is arguing in 1990) is to determine “what the forms of resistance indicate about the forms of power that they are up against” (47). In other words, using her examples, how do the subversive stories by women ridiculing men and their genitalia (“pisser[s] that dangle”) diagnose particular practices of patriarchy amongst the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin? In other examples, Abu-Lughod speaks of a generational battle between the youth and their elders in practices of marriage. Instead of the rigidly hierarchical collective negotiations surrounding a marriage, the youth were increasingly taking up paradigms of individual attractiveness and expression in finding a spouse. These practices horrified the elder generation, but the youth saw this as resistance against authoritarian control over their lives. At the same time, Abu-Lughod notes that “In resisting the axes of kin and gender, the young women who want the lingerie, Egyptian songs, satin wedding dresses, and fantasies of private romance their elders resist are perhaps unwittingly enmeshing themselves in an extraordinarily complex set of new power relations” (51-52).

I found this explanation persuasive, but also inconsistent with her focus (and that of others in the resistance school) on discrediting the Marxian notion of “false consciousness.” If Bedouin youth are “unwittingly enmeshing themselves” in a new set of dominating power relations, a set that is far more powerful (and Abu-Lughod identifies this as “the global economy”), in their attempt to escape familial power, are not the youth exhibiting a “false consciousness,” according to the terms Abu-Lughod’s own analysis? While I am in agreement that there have been many clunky misuses of the “false consciousness” concept within Marxian writing, it seems to me that the concept itself is useful if used carefully. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this. To take an example closer to our course readings, did not many slaveowners think their slaves genuinely appreciated their “benevolent paternalism” and desired nothing more than to be slaves? Were not many slaveowners shocked to find their plantations deserted, or destroyed or sabotaged by their slaves during the Civil War? And if this is true, couldn’t their political and social consciousness be determined to be objectively false? Just an idea, and I would be interested to hear other’s opinions on this. But I have a feeling that too often the false consciousness paradigm is treated as a straw man.

"When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.” C.L.R. James at home, Brixton, 11 January 1988

It has become abundantly clear to me over the course of this semester that two books in particular loom large over the development of the various movements determined to write history “from below”: W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins (1938). That these two works, both written by independent black Marxists in the 1930s, share a common political perspective is not a coincidence but a fundamental premise of their pioneering efforts. Both DuBois and James shared a commitment to documenting and analyzing the efforts of oppressed people to emancipate themselves and thus change all of society in revolutionary ways. Because our colleague over at A Nation of Abolitionists is doing such a fine job of expounding on the towering influence of DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, I thought I would take some time this week to take a look at Comrade James and The Black Jacobins.

Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989) was born on the Carribean island of Trinidad, and was an instrumental figure in the Pan-Africanist and socialist movements of his era. The Black Jacobins is his best-known work, and it could be described as a transnational history of the Haitian Revolution and its intimate connection with the contemporaneous French Revolution that both inspired it and made it possible. Writing in London in 1938, James had a clear purpose in mind: to “[make] the forward step of resurrecting not the decadence but the grandeur of the West Indian people…but as is obvious all through the book and particularly in the last pages, it is Africa and African emancipation that [I have] in mind” (James 402). James did not view emancipation as something that was legislated by “the perorating Liberals in France nor the ‘philanthropy plus five per cent’ hypocrites in the British Houses of Parliament” (James 123), but rather as something that was seized by an international proletarian alliance taking direct action toward liberation.

There are several important themes of the book I would like to stress as key to the thought of C.L.R. James:

1) A social revolution is made possible chiefly through the existence of severe divisions amongst ruling elites.

“The first sign of a thoroughly ill-adjusted or bankrupt form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree how to save the situation. It is this division which opens the breach, and the ruling classes will continue to fight with each other, just so long as they do not fear the mass seizure of power” (James 123).

This important point stands in contradiction to a common understanding of revolution as being the product of a mass campaign against a coherent and unified oppressive order. The advantage of this approach is that it demonstrates how a conflict that appears rather ordinary, or at least “nonrevolutionary,” can lead to a substantial opportunity for sweeping social change. This line of reasoning has major bearing on the interpretation of the American Civil War as revolution that I have been exploring: how the sectional conflict was transformed into a social revolution by the actions of African-Americans determined to take their own freedom. Throughout the book James constantly points out distinctions between contending classes: poor whites and rich whites on the island of San Domingo, French settlers and Frenchmen of the Mother Country, mulattoes and settlers, French bourgeois and French royalists, etc. The existence of divisions brings me to the next point:

2) Revolutions are possible not only due to structural cleavages, but are made by active human agents.

“Men make their own history, and the black Jacobins of San Domingo were to make history which would alter the fate of millions of men and shift the economic currents of three continents. But if they could seize opportunity they could not create it” (James 25).

James stresses the necessity of a committed, visionary, and responsive leadership working in tandem with masses already engaged in what might now be called “everyday resistance.” Within leftist theory, this places James in a unique space between Leninist vanguardism and anarchistic theories stressing the spontaneity of “leaderless multitudes.” In James’ view, Toussaint L’Ouverture provided the right leadership at the right time, and “It is the tragedy of mass movements that they need and can only too rarely find adequate leadership” (James 25). But leaders without masses were at least as problematic as lack of leadership:  “The masses were chained and muzzled; and without the masses the radical democrats were merely voices” (James 75).

3) Keen attention must be paid to racialized oppression.

Unlike some vulgar Marxists who insisted that race is irrelevant at best to the class struggle, James paid careful attention to careful dialogue between race and class. Like DuBois, he stressed the importance of the “wages of whiteness” about fifty years before “whiteness studies” became a fashionable topic in the academy. In this book, whites both “big” and “small” were determined to preserve the privileges of their skin against losses real and potential. For many – but not all – French revolutionaries “liberté, égalité, fraternité” were not considered applicable to slaves and mulattoes in the colonies.

4) No struggle can be divorced from its international context.

“[The San Domingo representatives in the French people’s assembly] tied the fortunes of San Domingo to the assembly of a people in revolution and thenceforth the history of liberty in France and of slave emancipation in San Domingo is one and indivisible” (James 60-61).

While there were many white hypocrites who did not think the famous slogan of the French Revolution applied to other races, there were others – particularly blacks, mulattoes, slaves, and the radical Left in France – who took seriously the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The ongoing French Revolution aroused the latent emancipatory impulse within Toussaint’s slave masses, and the twin revolutions developed in tandem. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike formed international and transnational networks of solidarity. It is impossible to understand one revolution without the other.

This is just a small sampling of the endless stream of wisdom to be found in The Black Jacobins and the thought of C.L.R. James. I hope you check him out!