new
formations no
45
Guest Editor: Laura Chrisman
This collection of essays brings post-colonial and nationalist studies
into dialogue with black diaspora and critical empire studies. Recent anti-globalisation
and reparations movements are creating transnational alliances based on
an understanding of the global interpenetration of capitalism, colonialism
and racism. This special issue attempts to bring academic practice more
in line with these current social movements.
This collection of essays brings post-colonial and nationalist studies into
dialogue with black diaspora and critical empire studies. Recent anti-globalisation
and reparations movements are creating transnational alliances based on
an understanding of the global interpenetration of capitalism, colonialism
and racism. This special issue attempts to bring academic practice more
in line with these current social movements.
Topics include the decolonisation of Palestine and South Africa; the impact
of colonial modernity on African democracy; the state and antiquities in
Egyptian nationalism; white constructions of black athletes; the racialisation
of the internet; racial others in Jack Kerouac and Che Guevara; race in
nineteenth-century US political economy; the transnational links of black
America and revolutionary Cuba; the meaning of Africa for Martin Delaney,
nineteenth-century black American nationalist; the micro-politics of contemporary
black American intellectuals.
The issue also features an interview with Gayatri Spivak and a roundtable
discussion of Frantz Fanon.
Contents and Contributors:
Laura Chrisman: Editorial
‘Mapping the Present’: Interview with Gayatri Spivak conducted by
Meyda Yegenoglu and Mahmut Mutman
Kelwyn Sole: The Witness of Poetry. Economic Calculation, Civil
Society, and the Limits of Everyday Experience in a Liberated South Africa
Salah D. Hassan: Terminus Nation-State. Palestine and the Critique
of Nationalism
Elliott Colla: The Stuff of Egypt: the Nation, the State and Their
Proper Objects
Ben Carrington: Fear of a Black Athlete: Masculinity, politics and
the body
Peniel E. Joseph: Where Blackness is Bright? Cuba, Africa, and Black
Liberation During the Age of Civil Rights
James T. Campbell: Redeeming the Race: Martin Delany and the Niger
Valley Exploring Party, 1859-60
Madhu Dubey: Postmodernism as Postnationalism? Racial Representation
in US Black Cultural Studies
Wendy Chun: Scenes of Empowerment. Virtual Racial Diversity and
Digital Divides
Somewhere in our past
we believed in the future
that a better world
would discover foundation
under our feet, and we
would be forever singing,
in its kitchen.
Bricks pile up in a field.
Whether they will be enough
no one knows. How
they fit together
is anybody's guess.
Men with darkening skins
scribbled on by weather
wait for their instructions.
From time to time
limousines miraculously appear:
there is always a somebody
in a suit willing to smile
and shake their hands
who lays the first stone.
Then the camera lights
and racing engines
turn around, shrink back
from where they came.
Those left behind
stare at their own hands
afterwards, puzzled
at precisely what
has been transacted, why
they are still being offered
bonds
squint
between gnarled fingers
pace out the hopeful distances:
- there will be a flower bowl.
- my bed is going here.
As for now the door knobs
have no doors.
Their windows peer out
at no sky.
--Kelwyn Sole, 'Housing Targets'.
The children of empire are swollen butterflies
Locked in this electric hive of steel and ice;
Clogged, clotted and black, in late August
Their nude arms and legs are their weapons,
Flashed like Nubian armor against white arrogance.
Under the cocaine glaze of her pimp she shrills,
"Hey mister, wanna go out, hey mister,
Wanna go out," this bright-eyed throaty girl
Whose hot sunflower head, beautiful as Georgia,
Is tricked into a wild parody of whoring.
Fuelled on the blood of the weak,
Wanton as Babylon, perverse as Rome,
The doom of Manhattan crumbles like shit
Into the twin rivers that lave its flanks.
--Robert Chrisman, 'Children of Empire'.
There are good reasons to open this special issue with poetry. The poems
- one concerned with the contemporary United States, one concerned with
the new South Africa - neatly capture several concerns of the special issue
as a whole. Kelwyn Sole's 'Housing Targets' highlights the confusion of
decolonising nations in transition to a future more neo-colonial than post-colonial.
In this issue Salah Hassan and Sole explore, respectively, the recent decolonisation
of Palestine and South Africa. Elliott Colla explores the problematic relationship
between subaltern populations and the nationalist elites that represent
them in Egypt. Robert Chrisman's poem 'Children of Empire' portrays an imperial
USA whose home black population, subjugated and resistant, exposes both
its power and vulnerability. 'The Rendez-Vous of Conquest' explores both
white hegemonic and black counterhegemonic practices. White racism, British
and US, is tackled in the contributions by Ben Carrington and Wendy Chun.
While Chrisman's poem focuses on the national arena, James Campbell and
Peniel Joseph explore the transnational dynamics of black liberation struggles,
and Madhu Dubey examines the micro-politics of contemporary black American
intellectuals.
'The rendez-vous of conquest' brings post-colonial and nationalist studies
into dialogue with black diaspora and empire studies. Recent anti-globalisation
and reparations movements are creating transnational alliances based on
an understanding of the global interpenetration of capitalism, colonialism
and racism. This special issue attempts to bring academic practice more
in line with these current social movements, refusing to respect the disciplinary
boundaries practised and preached by departments of history, sociology,
politics, comparative literature and English; refusing also the US exceptionalism
that all too frequently isolates analysis of the US from analysis of the
rest of the world. It is not only political activists that conventional
academics may have been lagging behind; it is also cultural producers. As
Sole points out in his article, South African poets are tackling socio-economic
injustice in ways that few of that country's academics are. Ironically,
perhaps, the culturalism that many of its academics take refuge in is being
resisted by cultural practitioners themselves. This, then, is another reason
for beginning with poetry.
This collection calls for more complex views of anti-colonial nationalism
and national identity than are found in the romanticised approach of Benedict
Anderson's 'Imagined Communities' or the equally popular, blanket anti-nationalism
of mainstream post-colonial and diaspora cultural studies. Colla, for example,
draws our attention to the operations of the state and material objects
in producing national culture, qualifying and complicating Anderson's focus
on print culture as nationalism's conduit. Joseph and Campbell suggest the
historically variable relations between black nationalism and internationalism,
revealing how these emancipatory political projects can work in complex
symbiosis. They thus provide alternative models to Paul Gilroy's 'Black
Atlantic' which presents black nationalism and black 'worldliness' as categorically
opposed impulses. Hassan and Sole show how contemporary decolonisation and
globalised capitalism can be mutually supportive, and look at the role the
metropolitan academy plays in masking this relationship. Dubey shows how
difficult it can be to 'transcend' nationalist logic, uncovering how many
contemporary post-nationalist intellectuals continue to base their arguments
and legitimacy on the very nationalist categories they claim to oppose.
These conceptual extrapolations should not obscure the materialist premises
of the contributors. Their concern is with identifying and analysing the
geo-historical particulars of their chosen subject. Thus Hassan differentiates
1960s PLO nationalism from its post-Oslo version, while Colla identifies
differences between statist- and culturalist versions of Egyptian nationalism.
If Benedict Anderson's culturalism is effectively rebutted here, so too
is his attempt to absolve nationalism from the taint of racism. The articles
by Carrington and Chun show just how integral racist classifications were
and are to the formation of national identity in the US and the UK. Chun
exposes the way US national mythology continues to operate in the internet.
Like Chun, Carrington features contemporary media in his analysis of hegemonic
nations; he traces the way British colonial mythologies of black masculinity
continue to inform media representation of black male athletes. Both Carrington
and Chun explore and critique market 'solutions' to racial injustice. Carrington
considers the notion of racial empowerment through mass media commodification
of black people, while Chun discusses the promise of racial freedom through
the consumption of technology. The market inflections of racial identity
may have intensified with globalisation, but they are not new. Campbell's
article underscores the importance of commerce in nineteenth-century ideologies
of black liberation, while Colla's discusses the material and ideological
role of tourism within nineteenth-century Egyptian nationalism. If the economic
components of anti-racist and nationalist struggles need further critical
attention, so too does the role of racial subjugation in the analysis of
economics.
Several of the contributors discuss the problematic behaviour of nationalist
leaders in first and third world countries. Dubey and Sole point to the
ways that, in contemporary US and South Africa, anti-racist struggles have
led to the emergence of a small black bourgeoisie that uses the language
of black nationalism as a smokescreen for class privilege. Joseph's account
of the creative fusion of socialism and nationalism in black American alliance
with Cuba provides, perhaps, an alternative resource, the hint of the progressive
possibilities still available for future social movements.
Laura Chrisman
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