October 29, 2003
Sometime in 1994 or 1995, while I was
working at the University of Pennsylvania, I suggested to Michael B. Katz that
he bring together scholars to reconsider the importance of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro (originally
published in 1899). He had applied for a grant from NEH seeking funding
for a group to focus on the urban predicament – an off-shoot of his SSRC funded
book on the Underclass debate. The NEH had responded that there wasn’t
much new in this idea, so he asked me what the group should be trying to
do. I suggested the Du Bois idea and apparently it worked a treat with
the foundation. My idea, though, was more in the realm of auto-critique
than the idea that went forward. I felt we should be critically examining
both the way Du Bois came to his study of the black community of Philadelphia,
and the way we undertake such study today, recognizing links between the two,
as well as the strengths and limitations of both. The result was a study
that did recognize some of the limits of Du Bois’ work in The Philadelphia Negro, but which by
and large showed a degree of contentment with the way things have been done
since. A case in point was my essay, “Giant Steps.” While there was
much of value in this essay, and I certainly do not repudiate it, the manner in
which it was edited down to fit the volume (W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and the City) was suggestive. Originally the
essay was called “Contesting White Mythologies” and was a meditation on Robert
Young’s volume, White Mythologies. Several parts of the essay drew considerable criticism, and largely these were
those parts where I was trying to say something radically new. In
particular, my comparison of Black
Reconstruction and Marx’s Eighteenth
Brumaire incensed Thomas Holt. I was asked to remove it. What follows, then, is a version of what was left out; what one should not say
about Du Bois.
In the
venturesome spirit proposed by James Clifford in his influential work on
travelling culture, I want to consider the impact that this outer-national,
transcultural reconceptualisation might have on the political and cultural
history of black Americans and that of blacks in Europe....It will require
comprehension of such difficult and complex questions as W.E.B. Du Bois’s
childhood interest in Bismarck, his investment in modelling his dress and
moustache on that of Kaiser Wilhelm II, his likely thoughts while sitting in
Heinrich Von Treitschke's seminars, and the use his tragic heroes make of
European culture.
– Paul
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic[1]
I.
Contesting White Mythologies
In White
Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Robert J. C. Young suggests that
the post-structuralist onslaught on the historical narrative was in part a
by-product of the Algerian War of Independence. This war awakened some western
intellectuals, many of whom had experience living in Algeria, to the
limitations of the Hegelian and Marxian historical method. The politics of
post-structuralism, which has often been denounced as apolitical and
reactionary,[2] was, Young asserts,
articulated in the weaving together of ‘capitalist economic exploitation,
racism, colonialism, sexism, together with, perhaps unexpectedly, “History” and
the structure of the Hegelian dialectic.’
In the
wake of the Algerian war, according to Young, left intellectuals began to
perceive that Marxism’s universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a
rational system of world history is simply a negative form of the history of
European imperialism: it was Hegel, after all, who declared that ‘Africa has no
history,’ and it was Marx who, though critical of British imperialism,
concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the best
because it brought India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history,
thus creating the conditions for future class struggle there. In short, while
‘History’ for Marxists promised liberation, for others ‘it entail[ed] another
forgotten story of oppression.’[3]
Such
analysis presents interesting questions for the student of W.E.B. Du Bois. For,
as many scholars have noted, Du Bois's own work grew out of the Hegelian
tradition.[4] While Du Bois worked in
the years preceding the Algerian War, his work dealt with exactly this issue of
the limits of white historical mythologies. How did he manage through his own
historical writing to transcend these limits? Was he able, as Marx claimed to
have done, to turn Hegel upside down through a brand of historical materialism,
especially in light of the fact that by the end of his life Du Bois was a
self-proclaimed Marxist? Or did some assumptions to be found in the idealist
historical method survive intact?
By
embracing Marxian categories, Du Bois made a self-conscious effort to test the
foundation stones of the historical profession – objectivity and progress, as
defined by the ‘White Man's Burden.’ In Black Reconstruction in America,
he endeavored to highlight the limitations of American history and to question
its propagandist or mythological aspects.[5]
In the process, his work has become a valuable guide (along with the work of
other anti-colonial and anti-racist writers of the period from C.L.R. James,
Eric Williams, George Padmore, and Kwame Nkrumah within the African diaspora,
to Jawarhalal Nehru in India), for historians who wish to move beyond strict
class and race analyses towards a history that weaves together class, race,
gender, and imperialism.[6]
Since
much of Du Bois's historical writing highlighted tensions and presaged new
ideas and approaches to history, we are brought at the end to consider some of
the predicaments of writing history in post-colonial societies. Looking at Du
Bois's attempts to contest ‘propaganda’ or ‘white mythology’ almost naturally
leads to the question of the degree to which Du Bois himself could represent ‘a
race’ when his subject position was in so many ways informed by ‘the Veil’ that
he had helped to describe.
II. Du
Bois’s Marx
Du Bois's
own criticism of his early work on The Suppression of the African
Slave-Trade reveals the degree to which he felt he had adopted Marxist
analysis in his work. In 1954, he claimed that he had earlier been ignorant
"of the significance of the work of Freud and Marx." After outlining
how his education at Harvard and in Germany had made him feel that Marx had
already been ‘superseded’ and so he had given ‘little time to firsthand study
of his work,’ he wrote:
This was
important in my interpretation of the history of slavery and the slave-trade.
For if the influence of economic motives on the action of mankind ever had
clearer illustration it was in the modern history of the African race, and
particularly in America. No real conception of this appears in my book. There
are some approaches, some allusions, but no complete realization of the
application of the philosophy of Karl Marx to my subject. That concept came
much later, when I began intensive study of the facts of society, culminating
in my Black Reconstruction in 1935.[7]
Finally,
he concluded his assessment of both the earlier work, and implicitly the method
of history from which it sprang: ‘What I needed was to add to my terribly
conscientious search into the facts of the slave-trade the clear concept of
Marx on the class struggle for income and power, beneath which all considerations
of right or morals were twisted or utterly crushed.’[8]
In Deromanticizing
Black History, Clarence E. Walker has dismissed Du Bois’s links to Marxist
analysis. With the dismissive wave of a hand, Walker argues that Du
Bois’s one claim to Marxism, Black Reconstruction in America, ‘is not
really a systematic materialist analysis of history.’ For, ‘Du Bois never
really accepted a key tenet of Marxism, that is, the idea of working-class
solidarity. What Du Bois’s personal and intellectual experience told him was
that, in America, racial caste and economic class were in conflict. He
understood the primacy of race as a “transhistoric” phenomenon in
America."[9] And yet, Du Bois’s
claim that Black Reconstruction in America was a Marxist history ought to
be taken seriously, for a scholar and intellectual of his stature could not
have been so easily misled. A man who many now assert (including Walker
himself) managed to redefine the history of Reconstruction among his many other
towering intellectual accomplishments surely knew what he was doing when he was
using Marxian models to describe and interpret Reconstruction. His own
ideas had emerged out of his training in German philosophy and he knew the
Kantian and Hegelian roots of his own ideas. He also wrote about the
relevance of Karl Marx for interpreting the African American experience at this
time. As Walker notes, Du Bois maintained that whatever Marx said
“concerning the uplift of the working class must...be modified so far as
Negroes are concerned by the fact that he had not studied at first hand their
peculiar race problems here in America.”[10]
But, if (as Walker suggests) this stands as a dismissal of Marx, why would Du
Bois have so explicitly embraced Marxism in Black Reconstruction?[11]
Walker
implies that any form of division within the working class contradicts Marxist
analysis, which he believes is dependent upon the notion of ‘working-class
solidarity.’ This one-dimensional reading of Marx, most likely seen through the
more political writings (e.g., The Communist Manifesto) as opposed to
the more historical works,[12] ignores the
fact that Marx clearly delineated divisions within all class groups. Marx
accounted for ethnic or ‘racial’ divisions when looking at the Irish in England
and the political factions within the bourgeoisie. The fact that Du Bois and
Marx would have and did define the proletariat differently is explained by the
fact that they were observing different societies. For Du Bois African
Americans represented a considerable portion of the American proletariat, and
race thus became a key element of his analysis.
In many
ways, Black Reconstruction in America can be seen as Marx’s The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte set in the United States.[13] ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and
personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He
forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’[14] This oft quoted statement from Marx works for
Reconstruction in the United States, except that in America farce and tragedy
occurred almost simultaneously. Reconstruction witnessed the farce of a
continuing bourgeois revolution occurring amidst the tragedy of a proletarian
revolution. According to Marx:
Bourgeois
revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success
to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in
sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived;
soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold
of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its
storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, the proletarian revolutions, like
those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves
continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in
order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies,
weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their
adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise
again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite
prodigiousness of their aims, until a situation has been created which makes
all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out.[15]
The
simultaneity of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions in America accounts for
Du Bois’s decision not to entitle Chapter 10 ‘The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat in South Carolina.’ Changing the title to ‘The Black Proletariat in
South Carolina’ (because ‘it has been brought to my attention that’ this use of
‘dictatorship’ was incorrect) signified that the Prolatariat never gained the
status of dictatorship in any meaningful sense. The bourgeoisie was still doing
its thing.[16]
In
America, northerners played the role of the French petty-bourgeoisie, seeking
an alliance with the southern worker, attempting to ‘weaken their antagonism
and transforming it into harmony.’ These people – missionaries, northern
Republicans, and captains of industry – did not wish solely to enforce ‘an
egoistic class interest.’ Rather, they believed that ‘the special
conditions of [their] emancipation are the general conditions within the
frame of which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle
avoided.’[17] How much closer to the
situation in America could Marx have approached without himself undertaking a
study of Reconstruction? Such a statement can encompass the widespread belief
in the benefits of free-labor ideology and the shoals of class division on
which it fell apart.[18]
Moreover,
the division between northern capitalists and southern slaveholders could be
comprehended as just a division within the American bourgeoisie similar to that
found in France and England. Marx wrote:
Each of
the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed
property and capital – sought to restore its own supremacy and the
subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for
large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been
rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society (p. 48).
This
passage brings into question Eugene Genovese's appropriation of Marx, where the
Southern planters are described as pre-capitalist and far removed ideologically
from northern capitalists.[19] It also
enables us to understand the trajectory along which counter-revolution would
travel in the United States, a trajectory clearly delineated by Du Bois in his
chapter, ‘The Counter-revolution of Property.’[20]
Northern capital ‘would thrust debt, concessions and graft on the South,’
divide northern labor into ‘exploiting and exploited groups’
(native-born/immigrant, skilled/unskilled), and transform the
‘laboring-peasants’ of the West ‘into land speculators and investors uniting
[the West’s] interests through railways to the Solid South in return for non-interference
with Big Business’ (p. 634).
For Marx,
bourgeois oligarchy was reestablished in France through the vehicle of Louis
Bonaparte and his manipulation of the peasantry. For Du Bois, the corresponding
vehicle was President Andrew Johnson, in large part representing the
‘limitations’ of the southern poor white. The promise of reform embodied in the
person of Johnson, ‘a champion of the poor laborer’ who demanded that ‘the land
monopoly of the Southern oligarchy be broken up, so as to give access to the
soil, South and West, to the free laborer,’ came to a halt as the President
underwent a ‘transubstantiation’:
He had
demanded the punishment of those Southerners who by slavery and war had made
such an economic program [free labor] impossible. Suddenly thrust into the
Presidency, he had retreated from this attitude. He had not only given up
extravagant ideas of punishment, but he dropped his demand for dividing up
plantations when he realized that Negroes would largely be beneficiaries.
Because he could not conceive of Negroes as men, he refused to advocate
universal democracy, of which, in his young manhood, he had been the fiercest
advocate, and made strong alliance with those who would restore slavery under
another name (p. 322).
This was
the ‘tragedy of American prejudice made flesh:’ The ‘rebel against economic
privilege’ acquiring the ‘conventional ambition of a poor white to be the
associate and benefactor of monopolists, planters and slave drivers.’ How like
Marx’s description of Louis Bonaparte as ‘the grotesque mediocrity’ is Du
Bois’s description of Johnson as ‘the most pitiful figure of American history?’[21]
In short,
Du Bois might have used the following text as the epigraph for his volume:
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. And
just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in
creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their
service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to
present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this
borrowed language.[22]
The
manner in which Johnson, the Ku Klux Klan, and eventually even radical
republicans ‘conjure[d] up the spirits of the past,’ undermining the democratic
promise of this revolutionary period closely paralleled the conclusion of
French revolutionary impulses in ‘Napoleon the Little’s’ coup d'etat of
1851. To say that Du Bois was Marxist, then, is to say that were someone like
Marx to be writing about Reconstruction in the United States during the 1930s,
this might be how he or she would have described it.
III.
Post-Philosophical
Black
Reconstruction in America witnessed Du Bois' move from a reliance on a single foundational
(transhistorical) category – that of race – to a more fluid position in which
race was still important, especially for highlighting the existence of
oppression, but was nonetheless mediated by and placed alongside categories of
class and gender. [23] Even though he may
not have used the discourse of postcoloniality and deconstruction, his position
was analogous to that of many Marxists later in the century, from Sartre,
Althusser, Foucault, and Jameson to Said, Bhabha and Spivak. He and they
differed from Marx in not giving primacy to the category of class, while
believing they remained true to Marxism.
In this
vein, Du Bois believed his world revealed different things from that of Marx.
While the development of industrial capitalism was seen as the most compelling
social and historical force for Marx, Du Bois heralded the centrality of
colonialism and imperialism (which clearly had important economic
manifestations). Du Bois’s proletariat was necessarily also differently
conceived from Marx’s. While the latter had conceived of the proletariat in
Euro-American terms (Indians, Africans and others needed to ascend to the level
of European capitalism before they could possibly contemplate transcending it),
the former saw the proletariat emerging from worldwide struggles in which
contesting white mythologies was crucial.
But, if
Du Bois eschewed economic foundationalism, how can he be described as Marxist?
The key here is not so much Du Bois’ readings of Marx, since he has never been
noted as a Marxist scholar. Rather it lies in his background as a
Hegelian (loosely conceived) and in the transformation that occurred slowly
from the First World War to 1935 when he published Black Reconstruction in
America. He, like Marx, endeavored to turn Hegel on his head. As outlined
earlier (borrowing from Appiah), Du Bois extended Hegel’s ideas about national
destinies to include African Americans. In doing this, he acted in a way rather
similar to the Young Hegelians who attempted to incorporate the working-classes
into their Hegelian model. But just as Marx had seen that adaptation was
insufficient with regard to the downtrodden working class, Du Bois came to see
that oppositions between colonizer and colonized, whites and blacks, men and
women also brought the Hegelian edifice into question. Hegel saw history as the
teleological unraveling of an Idea. While the young Hegel believed that ‘Man’
might still be unable to fathom the nature of that Idea and the providential
design (he was, after all, an objective rather than a subjective idealist),
thus providing a radical aspect to the dialectical model and enabling it to
appeal to later radicals like Marx and Du Bois, the notion that history was
driven by an Idea provided a profoundly difficult barrier for radicals to
surmount. [24] Hegelians of all stripes,
radical or conservative, tended to imagine that the Idea had finally been
revealed. Thus Hegel increasingly came to believe that the highest stage could
be witnessed in the appearance and ascendancy of the German State and
bureaucracy; Marx found it in the urban-industrial proletariat; [25] and Du Bois saw it in the souls of black
folk.
Having
outlined the full extent of propaganda in American history, Du Bois was
unwilling to make the further step to claiming that the very way in which
history itself had been conceived was by its nature propagandist. This
presented several problems that were evident at the time he was writing, but
which have become more so as ‘the problem of the twentieth century’ gives way
to or seems about to be refined in the twenty-first. For example, Du Bois
searched for African Americans in the historical record who exemplified his
notion of upright and worthy contributor to the cause of democratic
Reconstruction. But what if he had found none? Would this have meant that all
that American historians had said was true? Of course not. The pursuit of
‘Truth’ would always be heavily laden by moral intention; the attempt to deny a
lie might verify the question. Just as The Philadelphia Negro had
conformed to the model of finding urban poor guilty until proven innocent, Black
Reconstruction would valorize resistance (‘general strikes’) and
incorruptibility. In accepting such judgments as worthy, social historians have
cast shadows on those who do not participate in such narratives (and who may
still have their own unrecognized justifications for their actions) – those who
‘pass’, those who commit suicide, those who prostitute themselves, and who
might be labeled an ‘Uncle Tom.’
Du Bois
attempted to turn propagandist history on its head, to reveal historical
narratives that empowered African Americans and contested the rationalizations
of the elite. Nevertheless, even this social historical approach could harbor
within it limitations: whose narratives (based on class, color, gender,
religion, education, etc.) would come to stand for African Americans or
Africans as a group? Would the replacement of teleological histories (‘white
mythologies’) lead to other kinds of teleological histories? What hidden
‘facts,’ ‘well-authenticated truths,’ and other ‘raw materials’ might shape
historical narratives in ways that privileged some groups and led to the
disempowerment of others? [26] Such
questions could not necessarily be answered within Social History, which used
as its building blocks many of the same ‘facts’ fashioned to advantage by
social elites. Merely inverting a paradigm, showing what some African Americans
had achieved even after ‘the veil’ had been laid aside and the fullness of the
achievement had been made clear, was insufficient. For the search for the ‘real
truth,’ beyond that ‘veil,’ disguised the fact that the veil would never actually
be removed for everybody. Complimenting one group, in a relational world, meant
implicitly downgrading another. Thus, however, close historians flew to
‘historical truth,’ they could not fail but crash to the ground, their wings
melting in the heat of ‘propaganda’.
Thus, in
adapting and transcending Marx, Du Bois never transcended Hegel’s
historicism. His unwillingness to question the notion of historical truth
itself, left his own histories continually requiring modification and
development, in order to approach more closely the goal of establishing some absolute.
In effect, the objective of turning Hegel on his head – positing historical
materialism (Marx) or a form of cultural materialism (Du Bois) as a replacement
for Hegelian idealism – was in its own way the imposition of a teleology and
thoroughly Hegelian. In this regard, it is instructive that Du Bois never fully
examined or problematized his own position relative to racial discourse. He
clearly saw the problems in the works of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Mr.
Carter G. Woodson (as well as his own problems as a young man – before seeing
the light), but he didn’t acknowledge that ‘the Other’ might be himself – now.
How was it that he, along with Washington and Woodson, might have ‘practically’
accepted racial inferiority, and at what point was one able to lift the Veil,
when it lay across the face of American society? If the Veil was as all
embracing as Du Bois suggested, what enabled him to peak through? And how could
he be certain that his eyes had indeed seen the other side, and had not merely
seen further distortions from the Veil? Certainly, Du Bois’ own personal
history made his experience different from that of many African Americans, [27] but did that help him see, or blind him to
the realities of other members of ‘the race?’ The complexity of African
American culture and history that Du Bois had revealed in all his works made
‘speaking for the race,’ or living ‘a biography of the race’ as David Levering
Lewis would have it, simultaneously necessary and impossible – necessary
because white mythology denied complexity and difference among African
Americans, impossible because that complexity made representing the group as a
whole an imposition of one person’s or one faction’s vision of its historical
meaning and significance over others. Those who tried to accomplish this
feat by hanging onto this swinging pendulum generally fell off as it swung
towards reduced complexity: mythology would be inverted or tampered with but
reliance on it would continue.
Such a
pendulum, swinging between the points of myth and counter-myth, also confounded
other theorists grappling with the desire to appropriate Marx for the post-war,
anti-colonial world. Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to fashion a single ‘History’
with one meaning through the exclusion of others.
[28] In his attempt to create a Marxian narrative, Sartre would exclude
all histories except that of the West so ending in a state of ‘determined
ethnocentricity.’ Robert Young writes, ‘the lesson of Sartre's Herculean
attempt to make history truth, and to give it one meaning, was the relation of
such history to Western cultural imperialism.’ [29]
Du Bois’ own efforts to marry Marx and ‘the rest’, would evade such
problems of overt ethnocentricity, but they would be fraught with their own
difficulties. For Young notes that while Sartre may have been renowned
for his opposition to the Algerian War, even so:
[His]
courageous intervention against French and other Colonialisms could not have a
corresponding theoretical impact so long as he retained his historicist Marxist
framework. For his unitary theory of history was the effect of disallowing
radical attempts at rewriting or retrieving other histories excluded by the
West.[30]
Such
difficulties plaguing unitary theories remained on whatever side of the Veil a
historian was located.
At the
other end of the pendulum's trajectory, a theorist like Edward Said, whose use
of the notion of Orientalism seems to closely resemble Du Bois’ use of the
Veil, would argue that the object of Orientalism, Islam, was more complex than
Orientalists’ projections suggested. [31]
And yet, locating the post-Orientalist, characterizing the nature of Islamic
culture outside Orientalism, has become hazardous.
[32] Just as Said’s ‘analysis of Orientalism comes to seem remarkably
close to an Orientalist work itself,’ [33] so
also Du Bois’ analysis of the Veil could be seen as a product of a particular
racially inflected society. After all, ‘how does any form of knowledge – including
Orientalism – escape the terms of Orientalism’s critique?’
And yet,
such questions, such difficulties, have become evident in part because Du Bois’
historical writings made clear the propagandist nature of the practice of
history. Recognizing the significance of this genealogy, Homi Bhabha ends The
Location of Culture with a tribute to Du Bois.
[34] In endeavoring to open up a space that is not predetermined by the
veil or by Orientalism, to move ‘beyond’ them, Bhabha turns to Toni Morrison's Beloved
and finds that ‘a battle has been waged on hybrid territory, in the
discontinuity and distanciation between event and enunciation, in the
time-lag in-between sign and symbol.’ From this terrain, Bhabha attempts
‘to constitute a postcolonial, critical discourse that contests modernity
through the establishment of other historical sites, other forms of
enunciation’ (p. 254). Those ‘who have seen the nightmare of racism and
oppression in the banal daylight of the everyday,’ he writes, those behind ‘the
veil’ in Du Bois’ words, can ‘represent an idea of action and agency more
complex than either the nihilism of despair or the Utopia of progress. They
speak of the reality of survival and negotiation that constitutes the moment of
resistance, its sorrow and its salvation, but is rarely spoken in the heroisms
or the horrors of history’ (p. 255). Clearly this need not be the case: in
Morrison’s Beloved the characters find resistance in survival; but, for
much of his career, Du Bois’ history represented an attempt to reach for the
heroic.
Nevertheless,
as Bhabha proceeds to point out, Du Bois captured some of this spirit of
resistance and survival also: never defeatism, but ‘the enactment of the limits
of the “idea” of progress, the marginal displacement of the ethics [and
propaganda] of modernity.’ For Bhabha, this came from his ability to speak
‘across the veil’, becoming the ‘great prophet of the double consciousness of
modern America’ (ibid.). In the foregoing, I have suggested that it also
derived from the dialectical quality of his work – the emergence of alternate
readings, space, within his analysis. The Philadelphia Negro held
within it The Souls of Black Folk, which then released Black
Reconstruction in America. Each stage of Du Bois’s writing would represent
a release or step from the limitations of the previous one, while from its
confines the next one would appear like a defeat – the chiliasm or nihilism of
despair. As such, it comes as no surprise that we find Bhabha (or Paul Gilroy
for that matter) employing Du Bois, even though from the confines of his brand
of social history Du Bois might have scorned notions of postcoloniality, in the
way that so many historians dismiss it as ‘not history.’
Bhabha
makes Du Bois the ‘prophetic precursor of [his] discourse of the time-lag’ and
he quotes from The Souls of Black Folk:
So
woefully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress,
the meaning of swift and slow in human doing, and the limits of human
perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why
should Aeschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why
has civilization flourished in Europe and flickered, flamed and died in Africa?
So long the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation
proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom to those
who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty? (ibid.)[35]
For
Bhabha the Sorrow Songs resound once more in the way that Du Bois intended them
to do, ‘their eloquent omissions and silences’ concealing ‘much of real poetry
beneath the conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody.’ [36] This ‘unmeaning’ ‘discloses a symbolic
vision of a form of progress beyond modernity and its sociology.’ This
Not-history, has within it ‘an indeterminacy which is also the condition of
being historical.’ In this passage at least, Du Bois commands ‘the certain
shores of “modern” science to recede’ (ibid.). Bhabha closes with a
postcolonial rendition of Du Bois' work:
The
problem of progress is not simply an unveiling of human perfectibility, not
simply the hermeneutic of progress. In the performance of human doing, through
the veil, emerges a figure of cultural time where perfectibility is not
ineluctably tied to the myth of progressivism. The rhythm of the Sorrow Songs
may at times be swift – like the projective past – at other times it may be
slow – like the time-lag. What is crucial to such a vision of the future is the
belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our histories,
but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and
different spaces, both human and historical. (255-56)
Where
else might we end?
Notes
[1]
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London:
Verso, 1993) p. 17.
[2] See, for example,
Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the
Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
[3] Robert J.C. Young, White
Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990) pp.
1-3.
[4] David Levering
Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (NY: Henry Holt & Co.,
1993); see also, Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois
(Boston: Harvard University Press, 1976).
[5] Young, White
Mythologies.
[6] Paul Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic.
[7] Du Bois,
"Apologia," 1954, p. xxxi-ii.
[8] Ibid., p.
xxxiv.
[9] Clarence E. Walker, Deromanticizing
Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1991) p. 77. Walker's assumption that Du Bois could not
be Marxist derives in part from the general lack of attention to the work of
African diaspora scholars in the Marxist tradition. Walker treats the
notion of "Black Marxism" as an oxymoron, which Cedric Robinson
reveals to be far from the truth. Even Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin (not to
mention Marx himself, who followed closely events in India, the United States
and Ireland), considered the implications of Marxist theory for non-white
proletarian populations. This is how, as Robin D.G. Kelley shows in Hammer
and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 1990), their writings could appeal to Southern
black laborers and sharecroppers.
[10] Du Bois, “Karl Marx
and the Negro,” in Crisis 40 (March 1933), p. 6; quoted in Walker, Deromanticizing
Black History, p. 79.
[11] The two
contributions to the historiography of Reconstruction that Walker attributes to
Du Bois's text are profoundly Marxist: the international context within which
Reconstruction was occurring and the significance of economic developments in
shaping the outcome of reform. Moreover, Walker contradicts himself by
extolling Du Bois's departure from the idea of American exceptionalism, for he
himself claims Marx's irrelevance to American history precisely because of the
exceptional nature of race relations in America as compared to Europe. Deromanticizing
Black History, p. 86.
[12] Though this is mere
supposition, since Walker does not cite a single work of Marx's.
[13] It is unknown
whether Du Bois used Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
In a letter written in October 1934, as he was working on Black
Reconstruction, Du Bois noted that he had "a fair library of
Marx." He lamented, however, that he had "only one or two of
Lenin's works." For Aptheker, this accounts for his persistence
"in using the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat'--even in the very
limited way in which he did use that term -- as pertains to the Radical
Reconstruction governments." Aptheker, Afro-American History: The
Modern Era (NY: Citadel Press, 1971) p. 57. Aptheker's comment tells
us more about his own Leninist assumptions than it does about Du Bois's
Marxism. Moreover, Du Bois's discussion of "the weakness of French
democracy in Black Folk: Then and Now (NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1975), shows a
remarkable reliance on Marx's analysis of Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat:
particularly, Du Bois's description of "the French peasant" as
"a small, jealous reactionary landholder...with interests bound up in a
national land patrimony" (p. 375).
[14] Karl Marx, The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers,
1984) p. 15.
[15] Ibid., p. 19.
[16] Herbert Aptheker, Afro-American
History, p. 63. Aptheker claims that Du Bois was not Marxist but was
instead "Du Boisian." Unwittingly, this idealistic reading of
Du Bois is appropriate insofar as Aptheker is correct that "to the end of
his days [Du Bois] remained an idealist, philosophically speaking, in key areas
of his thinking.(p. 57) But to describe Du Bois thus is to make analysis
of his development as a historian meaningless. It also misses the fact
that Marx himself was unquestionably "idealist, philosophically
speaking," in spite of claims to materialism made by himself and
historians like Aptheker.
[17] Ibid., p. 50.
[18] David Montgomery, Beyond
Equality.
[19] Eugene Genovese, The
World the Slaveholders Made (NY: 1969), Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World
the Slaves Made (NY: Pantheon Books, 1974) pp. 3-25.
[20] Du Bois, Black
Reconstruction in America, pp. 580-636.
[21] Marx, The
Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 8; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America,
p. 322.
[22] Marx, The
Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 15.
[23] Gender was very much
submerged beneath race and class in Du Bois's work, though he was very much in
advance of many male social theorists of his time. See for example,
"The Damnation of Women," in Darkwater: Voices from Within the
Veil (London: Constable & Co., 1920).
[24] Lawrence Dickey, Hegel:
Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807 (NY: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).
[25] G.W.F. Hegel, The
Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) pp. 155-223;
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's `Philosophy of Right' (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 141-2.
[26] Many of these
questions and others are considered in Gyan Prakash's "Writing
Post-Orientalist Histories," Comparative Studies in History and Society
(1990).
[27] Gilroy, Black
Atlantic.
[28] Young, White
Mythologies, p. 46. "It is one history because it is (only) one
history."
[29] Ibid., p. 47.
[30] Ibid.
E.P. Thompson's own attempts to defend the empirical method did not preclude
his own anti-colonial political position.
[31] Edward Said, Orientalism.
[32] Prakash, "Writing
Post-Orientalist Histories."
[33] Young, White
Mythologies., p. 132.
[34] Homi Bhabha, The
Location of Culture (London: Routledge Press, 1994), page numbers appear in
parentheses in the text.
[35] quoting from The
Souls of Black Folk, p. 275.
[36] here Bhabha quotes
from The Souls of Black Folk, p. 271.
