Mushin-Sho

Weinbaum, Alys Eve. “Interracial Romance and Black Internationalism” Next To the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality and W.E.B Du Bois Eds. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum. Minnesota UP (2007): 96-123


Project:
    “This essay suggests how a Du Boisean obsession with interracial romance became constitutive to the substance and success of his antiracist, anti-imperialist, internationalist politics in the 1920s” (97).
    “The aim of this essay is thus twofold: first, to demonstrate the centrality of representations of interracial romance to Du Bois’ political project during the 1920s; second, to demonstrate Du Bois’ repeated deployment of “the stuff of Romance” as a form of propaganda that conjures a black imperialist response to both U.S racism and Euro-American imperialism” (101).


Weinbaum rereads and recontextualizes Du Bois’ famous passage from “The Criteria for Negro Art” in which he declares, “all art is porpoganda and ever must be.” In so doing, Weinbaum reads that statement as a culmination of a larger argument for internationalist solidarity, especially through miscegenation. There is also a distinction between “romance” and “Romance” to be made; Du Bois leaves the former term “uncapitalized and thus colloquial,” while the latter is capitalized and elevated “to the status of a literary genre with roots in narratives of heroic conquest, and back further still in the chivalric tradition” (100). The latter, Weinbaum argues, is the key genre in which Du Bois articulates a larger project for interracial international solidarity.

“Of all the generic forms that he might have elected as his principal vehicle for propoganda, Romance is the logical and natural choice. Romantic themes and Romantic forms are germane to expression of black life in the United States and black insurgent activity in the world. Romance is the idiom and romance the content in which black life is expressed and lived in rebellion against Jim Crow and imperialism the world over” (100).

On Darkwater:
    “As he suggests, the whiteness produced in the context of U.S. racial nationalism is part and parcel of a world straddling imperial whiteness that seeks to establish itself as a world economic power” (102).
    A close reading of the stories “The Comet,” in which heterosexual union trump race to give birth to “the race to be,” and “The Princess of Hither Isle.” The latter presents imperial conflict “as racial conflict that is in turn subtended by sexualized racial violence such that the consummation of interracial romance amounts to the symbolic resolution of global race war” (107).

On Dark Princess:
    The text “gazes outwards toward emerging struggles for decolonization, while simultaneously working to position African Americans as participants in such historical world events” (108). The focus is now on those factors that prevent solidarity between various colonized peoples, namely the “color line within the color line.”
    Weinbaum’s close reading of this text reaches a peak when she reveals an “affective logic” to black internationalism, one that refuses the symmetry of Pan Africa and Pan Asia but sensitive to the shared structure of feeling; “they together reveal the lineaments of a form of consciousness that connects all the world’s darker people into a single, world shaping force” (112).
    Du Bois’ suggestive articulation of this affective logic is unprecedented in his writing, Weinbaum continues, and sheds new light on his thinking through international solidarity movements. Indeed, these thoughts are shaped by and intervene in the communist debates that linked both the “Negro question” to the “colonial question.” Weinbaum finds traces of this context in the novel’s language.

The Problems:
    Thankfully, Weinbaum does not close the essay without noting the elephant in the room. In Dark Princess, Du Bois glosses over centuries of “Brahmin caste prejudice against blacks,” posits elitism and heterosexual reproduction as the means to overthrow imperialism. The novel relies heavily on Orientalist tropes rather than undercutting them and uses “ a form of legitimation by reversal––a mere revamping of the racial nationalism that undergrids an array of propagandistic works of art produced in the interwar period by nativists, restrictionists, eugenicists and white supremacists…”
    Noting these limitations is a scholarly responsible move, but one that unfortunately restricts the stakes of her essay to a slight rethinking of Du Bois scholarship. Unlike the high point of the essay, when Du Bois seemed to offer an affective axis of solidarity, its conclusion points to the treacherously essentialist ground one treads in thinking through these issues. Dark Princess, it seems to me, is more notable for its limitations and as an index of a particular historical moment; it reminds us how not to think.

Donnelly, Jack. “The Relative Universality of Human Rights” HRQ 29 (2007): 281-306

Thesis:
    “I defend what I call functional, international, legal, and overlapping consensus universality. But I argue that what I call anthropological and ontological universality are empirically, philosophically or politically indefensible. I also emphasize that universal human rights, properly understood, leave considerable space for national, regional, cultural particularity and other forms of diversity and relativity” (281).


Thirty years deep into this field, Donnelly provides a rigorous examination of basic tenets through a sociological-legal framework; the list of secondary sources offered in the footnotes alone is worthwhile. He begins by distinguishing conceptual and substantive universality. The former, he argues, are implied in the idea of human rights itself. Conceptual universality points to rights that “one has simply because one is human,” and that these rights are universally applicable to all humans (282). This universality, however, does not answer central questions: 1) are there such rights? 2) what are they?  These latter questions are central to contemporary human rights debates, especially when the rights in question are those specified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and make up substantive universality.

Either frame of universality, Donnelly continues, relies on sovereign nation-states to defend/ protect human rights. Although there are “internationally recognized human rights” and “norm creation has been internationalized,” this does not mean there is a universal enforcement of such rights. That is still left of sovereign states.

In his most polemic sections, Donnelly rejects that human rights have always been defended (historical universality) and that every civilization can trace human rights norms in their own cultural practices/ history (anthropological universality).

    “Such claims tot historical or anthropological universality confuse values such as justice, fairness, and humanity need with practices that aim to realize those values. Rights––entitlements that ground claims with a special force––are a particular kind of social practice. Human rights––equal and inalienable entitlements of all individuals that may be exercised against state and society––are a distinctive way to seek to realized social values such as justice…” (284).

Donnelly explicitly locates the creation of human rights as a concept and practice in the seventeenth century. Before that, he argues, all societies––especially Western––had no such working concept. Donnelly goes through a small genealogy of the pre-modern and even early-modern bases for individual rights. “Divine commandment, natural law, tradition, or contingent political arrangements,” not human rights, shaped both the conceptions and daily functioning of an individual within society. Finally, and quite astutely, Donnelly argues that although claims for anthropological universality are rooted in desires to demonstrate cultural sensitivity and coevalness, “they misunderstand and misrepresent the foundations and functioning of the societies in question by anachronistically imposing an alien analytical framework” (286).

Functional Universality:
    Although locating the first iteration of human rights in Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, Donnelly argues that “the socio-cultural “modernity” of these ideas and practices…not their cultural “Westernness” deserves emphasis” (287). Here, Donnelly begins to become more of a historical materialist. The rapid expansion of capitalist markets and their penetration into traditional societal structures ruptured “systems of mutual support and obligation.” The increasing fragmentation of social structures and the atomization of lives left individuals “to face a growing range of increasingly unbuffered economic and political threats to their interests and dignity. New “standard threats” to human dignity provoked new remedial responses” (287). Donnelly makes the obvious next step to state that, “the spread of modern markets and states has globalized the same threats to human dignity experienced in Europe” (287). Human rights, for Donnelly, represent the best response mechanism to deal with such pressures; they are not, however, the only avenue available. Thus, “although historically contingent and relative, this functional universality fully merits the label universal––for us, today” (288).

International Legal Universality:
     Here Donnelly is political scientist in full, although brief, flight. Basically, human rights, as articulated in the Universal Declaration and in subsequent conventions, have become widely recognized and accepted. Although no universal mechanism of enforcement exists, hence the continued reliance on sovereign states, “protecting internationally recognized human rights is increasingly seen as a precondition to full political legitimacy.” Donnelly points to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and China as examples. Again, like function universality, such acceptance is contingent and is not guaranteed to last.

Overlapping Consensus Universality:
    Borrowing from John Rawls’ distinction between comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines from “political conceptions of justice, which address only the political structure of society, defined (as far as possible) independent of any particular comprehensive doctrine” (289). Consequently, although there may be many religious or philosophical conceptions present in a given society, there exists the possibility that an “overlapping consensus” of a political conception of justice may be reached (289).

The rest of the paper is dedicated to defending against or critiquing other positions. I, however, found most helpful and informative the framework laid out above and the extensive footnotes. Moreover, this article has also helped me realize how ‘interdisciplinary’ human rights debates are and must be; I am both excited and appropriately nervous about driving toward ‘expertise’ in this field.

Located at: http://www.tamilnation.org/ideology/fannon.htm

This one is a bit more scattered and hurried.

Sartre’s introduction provides a context, namely the colonial structure of feeling in France, for Fanon’s groundbreaking text. Contextualizing Fanon is also an extension of his project because, argues Sartre, The Wretched of the Earth is not addressed to Europeans; indeed, this is part of the text’s scandal. “He speaks of you often, never to you” (3). If Sartre’s astute observation is correct, then Fanon has replicated, and reversed, the colonial structure of address; we speak about you, even for you, but never to you. Replicating imposed methods but reversing them in the name of subversion and freedom, argues Sartre, is precisely Fanon’s goal. That is, the violence exhibited by anti-colonial movements is not the exhibition of an inherent savagery but of lessons learned too well from the imperialists themselves. The opening pages of Sartre’s introduction, accordingly, are spent in reviewing certain colonizing methods.

––Creation of native elites, as a bourgeois buffer between metropole and colony: Transfer of European humanist ideals without noting the inherent contradiction of colonialism relative to them: dehumanization: physical violence:

3:  “Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavored…to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized societies”

5: “Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours.”

But then Sartre offers a different logic, one based on labor and production. Slavery requires bodily and spiritual suffering in order to properly subjugate its victims. By doing so, however, “you reduce his output, and however little you may give him, a farmyard man finishes costing you more than he brings in” (5). Constrained by the profit-motive, the settlers “are obliged to stop the breaking-in half-way; the result, neither man nor animal, is the native” (5). Sartre’s move here is impressive. By tracing the roots and limits of physical violence to market pressure, he places capitalism as the master of the colonial enterprise. Neither colonizer nor “native,” then, are granted subjectivities prior to their location in capitalist logic. Such a genealogy also allows Sartre to locate hope in capitalist logic. “Because he can’t carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization” (5). We must be careful to note Sartre does not equate decolonization with freedom from market logics, but rather with their realization; implicit here is our always already implicated position in the market.

Weirdly, Sartre then moves to strange psychologizing that posits a depth model of subjectivity and anti-colonial violence as “the same [settler] violence thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror” (6). The logic is strange and almost replicates imperial epistemology; we know how they work and they are essentially higher order monkeys who are good at emulating us. Perhaps I am not being fair to Sartre, but we move on.

A quote that may be useful for the Rwanda project:
 
6:  “In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy –– and you can count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don’t quench their thirst for blood.”

Notes on the French Left:

7:  “The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it.”

“They would do well to read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it –– that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.”

Although I deeply disagree with the last sentiment, Fanon’s move to link anti-colonial movements to the French Revolution (the forgotten truth) is an interesting and provocative one. He does not conflate but merely alludes, perhaps in the service of the larger Hegelian claim for historical teleology that he closes with.

8:  “This book has not the slightest need for a preface, all the less because it is no 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: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out.”

Gotta love the language of that last clause!

What makes Sartre so interesting in this introduction is the complicated, and sometimes contradictory (dialectical?), way he oscillates between granting agency to the actors involved and subsuming them within larger forces (markets, Man—transhistorical subjectivity, movement of history etc).

9:  “Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand year old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oprressors.”

Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora” American Literary History 10.3 (Fall 2007): 689-711


    “I will argue that the archives of internationalism can be read for a sensibility––or more precisely, a poetics––that allow diaspora to serve as a critique of the totalizing pretensions of globalization. I will focus, in particular, on the ways that interwar internationalism might be read as a reformulation of diasporic eschatology…, especially through a range of bilingual or multilingual practices in literature” (691).

Edwards locates his project in several contexts, including contemporary debates on diaspora(s) and globalization. He begins by reexamining the Jewish scholarly tradition around diaspora, one that he says has been sadly ignored, to disorient the term’s connection with historical remembrance only. Rather, Edwards recovers a tradition connecting “the diasporic condition to futurity” (691). Through a close reading of Hughes’ “Letter from Spain,” Edwards demonstrates that the future may not be redemptive but does hold “a potential internationalist solidarity” among what is now called the global South.

Edwards’ argument rests on a close reading of the aforementioned Hughes text. Attention to the poem’s form, genre, rhyme scheme and structure of address is interlaced with historical details form the poet’s life. Deploying biographical details but not limiting himself to them, Edwards lays out the various contexts within which the ballad is written: the Spanish Civil War, Hughes’ work for various newspapers and a translation of Federico Garcîa Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads. These contexts shape Hughes’ text at the level of content and form. Unlocking both is the key presence of salud closing the poem.

Outlining various readings the presence of this word allows, Edwards argues that it calls for a “diasporic responsibility [that] can only be signaled here at a distance, in the specific instance of encounter, through the specific interface of communication: the war in Spain and the particular Spanish idiom it engenders” (697, his emphasis). This particular vernacular moment consolidates the rest of the poem whose narrator is a black soldier writing home about his encounter with a dying enemy Moor soldier. The encounter is narrated in an English vernacular that is the “formal parallel”––not direct emulation––of Garcîa Lorca’s style. Content, context, form and structure of address intersect so that, suggests Edwards, “the singular idiom of “Salud” is grafted into the letter in a manner not just to carry over and commemorate that singular instance in Spain, but also thereby to transform the contours of English, and of “brotherhood” at home” (697, his emphasis). The poem is not a redemptive gesture, a healing, but the keeping open of a wound––the conscription of darker peoples in the logic and wars of European powers––and thus the possibility of solidarity at home with an internationalist consciousness.

A version of this brilliant and elegantly written essay was delivered a lecture during the 2006(?) Humanities Center Globalization Conference at Wayne State University. At the close of his talk, Professor Ken Jackson––himself very invested in “the religious turn”––prodded Edwards on both the overt and implicit “religious” logic his argument presents. The question was not taken as seriously as it should have been. Edwards’ claim that diaspora can, and indeed already has in the Jewish tradition, have an intimate tie to futurity parallels Derrida’s argument of the radical Other “to come.” The poem is, as Edwards repeatedly says, not redemptive but holds open the possibility of a new/ renewed diasporic consciousness; is this not solidarity “to come?” More importantly, Edwards seems to follow Derrida in an attempt to keep both the transcendent and immanent in play simultaneously. In Edwards’ argument, the poem is absolutely located in its historical, spatial and linguistic moment. And yet, the text attempts to transform a distant place (America), though a different language (the Spanish idiom) in the service of imagining a diasporic responsibility that is not yet available (i.e. that may yet come to be). The poem, in other words, takes uses its immanent context to build a bridge that will transcend the oceans.

And why not? I see nothing embarrassing in such an endeavor and I certainly don’t think that an elucidation of this logic undermines Edwards’, or Hughes’, project in any way. In fact, it may allow for a greater conversation between diaspora studies as articulated by both Jewish and global South scholars. Thinking through immanence and transcendence is difficult enough without limiting our tools and, as Edwards’ essay brilliantly demonstrates, one has to be immersed in the immediate contexts to even suggest possibilities to come.  

This is the first post under the new category "Reading Notes." As I move toward my Qualifying Exams and narrow my focus, creating these brief precis of important or thought provoking arguments will be a standard intellectual exercise. I will post them as I complete them, although many will not be in the full prose form that follows below. (I also have to do this for one of my final classes; the timming could not be better!)

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 Cheah, Pheng. “Posit(ion)ing Human Rights in the Current Global Conjuncture. Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture, and The Public Sphere. Eds. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Larry E. Smith, Wimal Dissanayake. Illionois UP: 1999: 11—42


Cheah argues against Human Rights normativity based on a Kantian transcendental “regulative idea” or the Hegelian notion of the state as the concrete embodiment of the universal. The former is rejected as blind to the historical forces shaping and transforming “norms,” and as operating at such a level of abstraction as to have no valuable effects on the “cultural, institutional context in which meaningful action can take place (14). Such a philosophy, moreover, is ostensibly backed by the presence of an international public sphere that acts something like humanity’s conscience. Cheah argues that claims for a “transnational political morality are implausible because they are grounded in a rationalist conception of normativity that the actually existing capitalist world-system renders untenable" (16).
    Neo-Hegelian bases for Human Rights, meanwhile, miss the real normative force international human rights discourse has. This philosophy, like Kant’s, is predicated on the presence of rational actors behaving according to rational obligations (15). Again, Cheah argues that the current world-capitalist system renders such faith in rationality naïve because based on a transcendental human subjectivity (32). Cheah points to Asian governments, especially those NIEs (Newly Industrializing Economies), as deploying the Hegelian-statist model for Human Rights, justifying their authoritarian rule as necessary for national economic development, which in turn will provide the material grounds for human rights.
    “Rather, the task is to rethink the normativity of human rights claims within the original contamination and violence of global capitalism, that is, within ineluctable historicity” (32). To this end, Cheah uses Derrida to call for a justice that “must be immanent and transcendent at the same time” (34). “Justice ought not to be exhausted by rational action in the present. But at the same time, it must have an effect on the present through rational action” (34). That is, the norms and ideals we use to defend human rights are born from the “shifting field of historical forces” that makes up a given present. Simultaneously, the possibility, “the ineradicable promise of ethical transformation” remains open precisely because these forces are always in flux, “and cannot be captured by the hegemonic forces of a given historical present” (34). So, pace Kant, norms rise out of concrete historical situations, not absolute human rationality. And, pace Hegel, the nation-state is not the sole manifestation of Geist (Spirit) because it is located in and accountable to a greater field of forces (global capitalism) that may radically alter its duties.
    I find this to be a brilliant attempt to think through the need for both historical materialism and transnational normative ideals. I would push this project by prodding further the source of human rights’ normative power. Although Cheah locates norms as being produced out of particular historical-material contexts, there does seem to be a world public opinion based on an implicit Kantian idealism. Witness, for example, the popularity of various (and admittedly problematic) “Save Africa” campaigns. Explaining the presence of such movements does not need recourse to a transhistorical human subjectivity, but a renewed sensitivity to historical residue. To borrow and deform Benjamin, there may be futures we have not yet forgotten. That is, the normative force of human rights claims may not reside totally in either the present’s play of forces or a transhistorical idealism. Rather, we are carrying the debt of previous generations whose ideals––themselves arising out particular historical moments––are with us as regulative norms. These norms seem transhistorical because they have become internalized in institutional discourse, literally taught in schools. This may all seem rather obvious, but it is a useful reminder and perhaps a complication of Cheah’s ‘ethical transformation to come’ move borrowed from Derrida.
    No proper historicist would argue that the “field of forces,” especially economic forces, have not significantly (radically?) transformed since Kant, Hegel, Marx and the French Revolution. Yet, as the normative power of human rights attests, their revolutionary ideals linger in the very language we use to prosecute our world. The presence of these traces seems to severely undercut the hope implied in the claim that “contextual conditions are subject to radical mutability” (35). Radical changes have emerged, become dominant and left as residue their norms. Perhaps there is no transhistorical subjectivity, but neither is there a subject made up entirely in the present.