Monthly Archives: March 2013

The mugshot of a young Malcolm X, arrested for his numerous 'hustling' activities, before he became an outright revolutionary

In my previous posts I explored selections from the historiography of the Subaltern Studies Group that impacted A Nation Under Our Feet. When discussing the formative influences on his conception of subaltern resistance, Steven Hahn cites only two books on explicitly American topics: Eugene Genovese’s landmark Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), and Robin D.G. Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994). While the influence of Genovese appears to be ubiquitous in nineteenth century American historiography, this week I decided to read Race Rebels in order to see what Hahn took away from this lesser-known work.

Kelley’s book is a rich collection of essays on “writing black working-class history from way, way below” (1). Thoroughly and openly working in footsteps of C.L.R. James, W.E.B. DuBois, and James C. Scott’s concept of “infrapolitics,” much of Kelley’s book revolves around a central question: “If we are going to write a history of black working-class resistance, where do we place the vast majority of people who did not belong to either ‘working-class’ organizations or black political movements?” (4). Kelley thus seeks to account for the wide range of life experiences between outright domination and open rebellion, and in doing so he succeeds in painting a three dimensional portrait of the African-American experience of the last century or so. The book includes essays on topics from African-American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, the resistance of McDonald’s employees, early 90s gangsta rap, Malcolm X (pictured above) and the politics of the zoot suit, and struggles over the right to public space.

For the uninitiated, infrapolitics is the term coined by Scott to describe both the deliberate invisibility of “everyday resistance” and the “infrastructural” role these subversive activities play in supporting future revolutionary outbursts. The first part of Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet, which describes black political activity under slavery, is a useful example of the infrapolitical framework, and it is clear that Kelley played a key role in shaping his analysis. Chapter two of Race Rebels, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: the Politics and Pleasures of Community,” is particularly important in this regard as it explicitly puts forward the notion that the oft-neglected study of the home may hold an important key in coming to understand everyday resistance: “Once we begin to look at the family as a central (if not the central) institution where political ideologies are formed and reproduced, we may discover that households themselves hold the key to explaining particular episodes of black working-class resistance” (37). While much, perhaps most, scholarship on resistance focuses on the point of production, Kelley notes how feminist historians have emphasized the ways in which types of class consciousness are often learned at home, before an individual ever enters the workplace. Perhaps, then, the study of the family and kinship networks may be the missing link in explaining the resilience and continual reproduction of black working-class resistance. Kelley notes, for instance, that family membership in mutual aid associations and religious organizations helped to build and maintain a collectivist, working-class culture (38). In this vein, Kelley describes the role of community-financed black churches in encouraging the growth of labor unions in the South (41-43).

But the realms of the sacred were not the only grassroots arenas of community-building; the more profane centers of commercialized leisure were also instrumental in inculcating an autonomous black consciousness. These “bars, dance halls, blues clubs, barber shops, beauty salons, and street corners” (44) were key in forming a “secular congregation” (45) under the Jim Crow structures of racial and class oppression. However – our class will be happy to know – Kelley does not automatically or necessarily conflate autonomy with resistance: “I am not suggesting that parties, dances, and other leisure pursuits were merely guises for political events, or that these cultural practices were clear acts of resistance. Instead, much if not most of African American popular culture can be characterized as, to use Raymond Williams’s terminology, ‘alternative’ rather than oppositional” (47). For instance, these spaces and practices could also reinforce rank consumerism and misogyny, trends that are able to coexist with the more oppositional characteristics of autonomous black cultural spheres (later in the book, Kelley also extends this insight to his discussion on the politics of early 90s gangsta rap).

Kelley further distinguishes himself from the pack of the “it’s all resistance” school in his discussion of the issue of black collaborators with white supremacy. Historians have to pay careful attention to how struggles are continuously made and remade, and note the multitude of possible (and actual) reactions to conditions of oppression in any given situation:

“That stool pigeons [informers or collaborators] can exist in black communities, and that their reasons for turning informant might be motivated by the same circumstances that led many of Hosea Hudson’s comrades into the Communist Party (i.e., joblessness and poverty), reinforce the idea that neither mutual oppression nor common skin color alone explain black working-class solidarity….When we search for the locus of working-class opposition, we ought to look not only at antiracist activities or workplace conflicts but at the dynamic processes by which social and cultural institutions were constructed and time and space for leisure appropriated” (52).

It is easy to see the impact that Kelley’s nuanced analysis of black infrapolitics had on informing the analytical framework A Nation Under Our Feet. Hahn’s conception of the political, particularly his emphasis on kinship networks as well as spaces of communication and autonomy, were clearly shaped in the wake of Kelley’s inventive scholarship.

I thought I would try something new and create questions that cater to some of the specific interests of the class (or more accurately, what I perceive some of your interests to be, and please forgive me if I am wrong). While I address specific people with some of the questions, I intend to start a discussion that we can all join based on our previous conversations and readings, and not limit this to the individuals named. And you of course have the right to reject these invitations 🙂

1. Hahn’s study more or less obliterates the traditional temporal boundaries of periodization for American historiography, using a nuanced and sustained argument to plow through the Antebellum era, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. In your view, what were the strengths and limitations of this approach?

2. A central argument of the book is “that African-Americans in the rural South contributed to the making of a new political nation while they made themselves into a new people – a veritable nation as many of them came to understand it” (Hahn 9). Did “African-Americans in the rural South” constitute a nation? Why or why not? If so, how was this nation constructed?

3. Do you find Hahn’s take on the Civil War and Reconstruction as “a massive social and political revolution” and “the largest slave rebellion in modern history” (7) convincing? Why or why not?

Cara: Considering your course this semester on comparative revolutions with Prof. Caldwell, would you consider the Civil War and Reconstruction a “massive social and political revolution” after reading Hahn’s book? Does your class utilize any particular definition of what qualifies as a “revolution”?

Wes: How does Hahn’s approach and argument differ from W.E.B. DuBois’ much earlier Black Reconstruction, which also emphasized black self-organization and explored Reconstruction as a revolutionary endeavor?

4. Hahn uses the term “grassroots emigrationism” to describe how black emigration from the south was a conscious, collective action taken in response to increasing expressions of white supremacy and its institutionalization. Did you find Hahn’s take on this convincing, or does he overemphasize freedpeople’s “agency” at the expense of “structure,” such as political economy or the agency of the white supremacists?

Suraya: Have you encountered other works that use a similar framework for conceptualizing mass migration? If so, how have they been received?

5. In consideration of what appears to be “the question of the semester,” how does A Nation Under Our Feet stack up against Walter Johnson’s seminal call to transcend the New Social History approach of “giving the slaves back their agency”?

Important points to consider:

The original inspiration from Karl Marx in “The 18th Brumaire”: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

“…cultural autonomy has been seen as in-and-of-itself a form of resistance to slavery, without careful attention to the ways that it could undermine as well as facilitate the formation of political solidarities among slaves” (Johnson 118).

“To put this another way: the term ‘agency’ smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion of selfhood, with its emphasis on independence and choice, right into the middle of a conversation about slavery against which that supposedly natural (at least for white men) condition was originally defined. By applying the jargon of self-determination and choice to the historical condition of civil objectification and choicelessness, historians have, not surprisingly, ended up in a mess” (Johnson 115).

“History after ‘agency’ might be written around a ‘Copernican revolution’ of memory, an intellectual inversion of the relation of past and present, by focusing attention on the present-life of the past, on what elements of the past are drawn upon at any given moment in history and the power-structured processes though which they are selected and enforced” (Johnson 119).

“If we are to draw credibility by doing our work in the name of the enslaved and then seek to discharge our debt to their history by simply ‘giving them back their agency’ as paid in the coin of a better history, some knowing laughter, and a few ironic asides about the moral idiocy and contradictory philosophy of slaveholders, then I think that we must admit we are practicing therapy rather than politics: we are using our work to make ourselves feel better and more righteous rather than to make the world better or more righteous” (Johnson 121).

"Editorial cartoon on the “massacre" at Cainhoy, South Carolina, October 1876."

Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet combines the best traditions of historical synthesis with extensive original research to trace the development of black politics in the rural South from slavery to the Great Migration in the first decades of the twentieth century. By recentering the story of emancipation onto the sustained self-activity of African-Americans – as opposed to “[measuring] politicization chiefly by what came to the freedpeople from the outside” – Hahn positions himself against the bulk of the historiography, which has been dominated by a “liberal integrationist framework” that posits assimilation as the presumed endpoint of black struggles against white supremacy (6).

Hahn’s focus on specifically rural actors also distinguishes his approach from the urban bias predominant in most other studies of black politics and working people in general. Slaves and freedpeople did not begin a political life upon their migration from the countryside to the city; rather urban political formations grew out of and built upon the extensive social networks constructed within slave communities. Far from unquestioningly adopting the hegemonic material and cultural power of their slaveowners, African-Americans built extensive networks based on kinship (17-19), religious belief (43-51), and even economic exchange (24-33).

These organized slaves later seized their masters’ secession an opportunity “to turn one rebellion into two” (64). Many (males) actively participated in the fighting, while others built “liberated zones” (80-82). The war brought together African-Americans in physical contact as never before, whether in contraband camps, Union-occupied plantations, or in armed battalions. The hothouse of war grew a new social and political consciousness of the potential for black “liberation and unification” (96).

The defeat of the Confederacy emboldened the newly freed slaves, as well as white Radical Republicans. Union-backed Reconstruction regimes operated as instruments of political revolution (259-260), while freedpeople organized into Union Leagues that attempted to protect and extend the social gains of the revolution. Dreams of significant land redistribution were crushed by the stubborn persistence of the old regime, embodied by the quintessential agents of the counterrevolution, the Ku Klux Klan, and a host of like-minded groups. As the strength of counterrevolutionary groups grew along with white nightmares of “Negro rule,” the resolve of the federal government to implement Reconstruction weakened, and politics gradually devolved into a paramilitary contest to impose the rule of either faction.

"'The Union As It Was' Harper's Weekly cartoon from October 1874 depicting White League and Klan opposition to Reconstruction"

However, the demise of Reconstruction did not end black mobilization. New biracial political alliances with insurgent white political movements brought a new era of experimentation, and Virginia’s Readjusters were notably successful in this vein (382). While Hahn details extensive attempts at forging a lasting black-white political coalition, “the wages of whiteness” proved too tempting: railing against “ignorant and degraded barbarians,” many former white allies proceeded to answer “the question of the supremacy of whites over blacks” (420) in the affirmative, often through extensive violence. While many freedpeople would stay in the South and attempt to withstand the emerging Jim Crow system, “Grassroots emigrationism,” or black collective action and desire to escape the viscerally white supremacist “‘one-party’ Democratic South” (450), appeared to be most popular alternative.

It is during these struggles for African-American self-determination that the foundations of twentieth-century Garveyism, Black Nationalism, Black Power, and the Civil Rights Movement more generally, were built. Hahn connected the dots in an original and highly influential fashion, and I am interested in hearing what you all thought about his treatment of these subjects.