Anarchies and Empires

Within American studies, I absolutely love Amy Kaplan’s contention in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture that “domestic and foreign spaces” like Mark Twain’s Mississippi and the port of Honolulu in 1866 “are closer than we think, and that the dynamics of imperial expansion cast them into jarring proximity.” This is right on; I was thinking about this when I commented at SEK’s joint with regard to Huckleberry Finn’s famous “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”:

For me, the register of that line has always been that connecting “I’ll go to hell” to an actual social issue turns Huck’s silly little rebellions into something more meaningful (i.e., it’s not about slavery, but about whether hell is actually better than heaven). In this context, being a “boy” starts to mean something less like immaturity and more like an explicitly anti-civilization stance, harnessing the (as you point out, well established) moral authority of abolitionism to defy the authorities of polite society. And “polite society” (and the ways it extends its authority out to remake “immature” societies) had by no means disappeared by that point; 1884 is the very year of the conference of Berlin where Africa was portioned out to European powers who were really at the very peak of their ability to use moral arguments about “civilizing savages” to justify conquest. When Huck, as a character whose savagery is explicitly being civilized decides that he doesn’t want to go to heaven (and, in the same act, aligns himself on the right side of an already settled question), it seems to me that, in its historical moment, it has quite a lot of significance. I don’t know if I’d say “bravery” exactly, but it’s worth noting that the Berlin conference was convened by King Leopold, who Twain would directly attack in his “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” of 1905. But by that time Leopold was already a fairly reviled name, in certain reform circles, so it’s interesting in a different way that Twain had already attacked the principles that Leopold would use, and did it long before the “abuses” of the Congo had really begun.

Wiser words were ever spoken! But anyway, Kaplan is good because people in American studies so often tend not to think this way. The very institutional construction of American studies, in fact, reinforces an “exceptionalist” sense of its subject, the idea that “America” is coherent and autonomous, and that an “American” author like Mark Twain could only, in writing an “American” novel like Huck Finn, be talking about “America.” So I love that Kaplan seeks to put “America” in quotation marks, trying to establish that America’s sense of its “domestic” self has everything to do with how its “foreign” was conceptualized, and vice versa: sentimental novels, for example, may have taken the white family as their subject, but (as an example like Uncle Tom’s Cabin indicates), they could only do so by imagining the non-white alien other. And Kaplan extends this way of thinking outside the borders of the American domestic state itself, suggesting that, for example, we should think about Huck Finn and Hawai’i at the same time.

All good, so far. But as Kaplan sets out to “challenge the traditional understanding of imperialism as a one-way imposition of power in distant colonies and to call attention instead to ambiguities and contradictions of imperial relations in the formation of a national culture,” my cheering section start to get a little hesitant. In part, this is because the “traditional understanding” of anything is such a glaring cliché that challenging its spectral figure is not nearly as heroic as sentences like this one make it sound. Nor is this understanding of imperialism, as it happens, nearly as hegemonic or as “traditional“ as she portrays. There are certainly political reasons why a variety of thinkers continue to wrongly maintain a conception of imperialism as a “one-way imposition of power,” but her invocations of “ambiguities and contradictions” seem just as much a cliché of our post-“Postcolonial” moment in critical history as anything else: “ambiguity” became a buzzword precisely because everything from Edward Said to Homi Bhabha to Gayatri Spivak have presumed, for decades now, that nothing about imperialism was “one-way.”

In that sense, therefore, her exploration of “how international struggles for domination abroad profoundly shape representations of American national identity at home, and how, in turn, cultural phenomena we think of as domestic or particularly national are forged in a crucible of foreign relations” only really seems innovative within “American studies,” bless its pointed little head, because “American studies” has traditionally not conceived of itself as having “empire” as its object. And the idea that national identity is a function of imperial identity (while a certain tension between the two remains) has already been a basic given within post-“postcolonial” British studies for a while, ever since (at least) Edward Said.

The real intervention, then, is simply her contention that “American” culture needs to be understood as “imperial” from the get-go. And again, while there are political reasons why a variety of people have maintained America != Empire, it’s only because she’s talking to those very people (see under “pointed little heads”) that her application of postcolonial framings to American studies seems innovative and unusual. Not to say that the book isn’t for this very reason, totally necessary and helpful; it is, precisely because of the amount of American exceptionalism that still needs to be unthought.

But what, the heck, is “American exceptionalism”? I’m not sure anymore, especially given that Kaplan also wants to “call attention to the ambiguities and contradictions of imperial relations in the formation of a national culture.” The traditional definition of “American exceptionalism” is the Tocquevillian notion that America is just different than Europe, a kind of “new world,” if you will, that offered a way outside of the perils of industrialism, despotism, and revolution found in the “old world.”

To steal a chunk of text from the first draft of my first chapter:

In recent years, American studies has taken “American exceptionalism” as a central point of debate, but the question of whether or not “America” is “exceptional” has never been reducible to the question of America’s historical peculiarity. After all, not only is it a banal truism that any historical formation is unique (a uniqueness that is therefore without particular evaluative content), but the central premise of American exceptionalism is that American democratic ideals are both appropriate for adoption on a global scale and are virtually certain to be adopted. And if the future is a teleological convergence, then an “America” defined by reference to this future can hardly maintain a historical position distinct from the rest of the world. “American exceptionalism,” in other words, is precisely the opposite of what its name seems to suggest: it is the claim that America is universal.

The “New” American studies, has therefore been premised less on repudiating the idea that the American historical experience is unique than on recovering exactly the banal historicity of this uniqueness, an effort to strip the term of its trans-historical status as arbitrary evaluative marker by re-embedding it within the particularities of its North-American historical context. After all, if American historical formations are seen as produced by American conditions and history, non-American contexts cannot plausibly be held to standards of value defined according to that American civilization.

Man, I like using the word “banal.” And who wouldn’t? What a word. But here’s the point: if you are working to establish that “America” is a myth used to establish the United States’ right to colonize the world, as Kaplan is, then why would you revert back to the concept of a “national culture”? She is essentially mimicking the Said-ian move, the claim that “English” culture is really a transnational imperial culture, but perhaps because “America” has itself already always been a discourse about trans-nationalism (America is a nation of nations, a “United” federation of “States”), she doesn’t follow the thrust of her own argument to its conclusion: if “America” is a myth of empire, then there cannot be a “national” culture. “Nation” as a term of analysis (rather than a term we need to be analyzing), is precisely the thing that the “anarchy of empire” makes unavailable to us.

I like Amy Kaplan’s book a lot; she’s blazing trails I want to travel, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from reading her. But I come to this material (and to American studies in general) from a different place than she does, I think. When you learn about “American empire” after having already spent years studying the European colonial empires in Africa, a lot of truisms and falsisms about American exceptionalism look quite different. So I’m going to let this be a first post in a series on her book, a book which I’m totally incapable of reading for more than a page or two without scribbling furiously in the margins. But there’s something important about a book that you can agree with on the most basic level and yet still be unable to go twenty seconds without finding something to disagree with. I’m not sure what that is, really, but I’m going to try blogging (instead of marginalia) as a way of finding out.

Making Autobiography and Racial-Self-Making

David Roediger opens his brilliant The Wages of Whiteness with a bit of autobiography: growing up in Cairo, at the point where the Ohio river meets the Mississippi, he was educated to a knowledge of racism and white supremacy that was hardly hindered by the fact that he, personally, didn’t actually know any black people. The implicit point (which becomes more explicit later on) is simple: white supremacy, as he experienced it, is not really about black people, it just uses them as its object, on its way towards something else.

His book is therefore in sharp disagreement with someone like Winthrop Jordan, for whom “race” is a given (and for whom there are very basic psychological reasons why white people feared, then hated, and then despised black people, a point Jordan illustrates in White over Black at great and intimidating length). In Jordan’s narrative, in other words, racism begins when different races met each other, “race” being an existing precondition, and a thing which (it is implied) will continue in some form as long as they are in contact. For Roediger, on the other hand, “white” and “black” are very much in quotation marks; what they mean is neither a given, nor are they terms that mean anything in a permanent sense: race is a thing which is always being practiced and made according to social necessities, and as these practices and necessities change with changing society, so too does “race” change, fundamentally. That, you see, is an empowering gesture: in contrast to the kind of fatalism implied by the “race is forever” argument of a Winthrop Jordan, Roediger’s conception of race as a formation, a construction, or a production allow for the possibility that it might be made in different ways, or even unmade altogether. The title of Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race makes this point explicitly, and takes direct aim at the weaknesses in Jordan’s book to argue, again, that race is thing that must be made. And as Roediger’s more recent work (Towards the Abolition of Whiteness) argues, it is also a thing which must be un-made.

As a sidenote, this intellectual debate is related to one of the ways that Edward Said (of the previous post) can be usefully critiqued. One problem with “Orientalism” as a framing paradigm is that it conflates the kinds of orientalizing gazes that Europe used to understand the other it was Crusading against in the middle ages with the radically different ways an explicitly imperial Europe understood its colonial others in places like India (and with, as a bonus, the ways that “The West” has taken in recent years to understanding “the Muslim world”). Said has a tendency to run all these things together, to produce (ironically) a timeless and unchanging “Orientalist,” a figure who who continually re-imagines and reproduces a timeless and unchanging “Oriental.”

The trouble is, though, there is a kind of continuity between the ways that wars with the Saracens were understood in medieval Christiandom and the style of contemporary doctrines of “preemptive war,” as Bush’s revealing lapses into “crusade” rhetoric occasionally indicate. By the same token, for all the limitations of Winthrop Jordan’s work (and some of the psychoanalysis seems particularly sketchy to me), it is also true that colonial-era attitudes towards African slaves and free-men are part of the same history that informs the ways Barack Obama can and cannot run for president. Roediger wouldn’t deny that, of course; his work as an engaged historian indicates precisely his belief in the past’s relevance to present struggles. And how to navigate historical continuity and historical change, at the same time, is one of the most difficult rhetorical and conceptual problems that a historian has to grapple with. I personally favor Raymond Williams’ notion of “structures of feeling”: as he observes in the dazzling opening to The Country and the City, the difference between rural and urban in medieval England was completely and totally different than it was in industrializing England, and neither has a nearly strong enough empirical corellation with how urban and rural are integrated today. These terms, “urban” and “rural,” simply mean different things. And yet, he notes, the fact that we continue to use the same words even as we reinvent them indicates that our feelings about urban and rural have a certain continuity of structure, a fact which gives the social scientist something to grip on to as everything else changes.

I tend to be quite skeptical of the autobiographical gesture. W.E.B. DuBois, the patron saint of The Wages of Whiteness (and this blog, sort of) once claimed that “autobiographies have had little lure; repeatedly they assume too much or too little: too much in dreaming that one’s own life has greatly influenced the world; too little in the reticences, repressions, and distortions which come because men do not dare to be perfectly frank” and my dissertation will make a certain amount of hay out of the fact that he wrote five or so autobiographies. But in moments like this, DuBois was his own best critic, and he always cast a critical eye on the ways that “autobiography” could function as a technology of the self, to use a terminology not his own; likewise, the autobiographical gesture in The Wages of Whiteness also functions as a way of asserting a kind of control over history and personal history, a kind of place to stand from which the world can be moved. As Roediger explains it,

“Until very recently, I would have skipped all this autobiographical material, sure that my ideas on race and the white working class grew out of conscious reflection based on historical research. But much of that reflection led back to what my early years might have taught me: the role of race in defining how white workers look not only at Blacks but at themselves; the pervasiveness of race; the complex mixture of hate, sadness and longing in the racist thought of white workers; the relationship between race and ethnicity.”

This claim seems to me at least very optimistic, and perhaps somewhat of a delusion: the idea that one can transcend one’s history by looking back over it, by transforming the formative experiences of one’s life into “teachings” that can be discarded or retained, depending. I guess it’s just that I’m a believer in the nature/nurture debate: we are what we are, and whether that being is more determined by the stuff we were born with or by the experience we have been blessed to receive, there is no self that can make itself without reference to that formative experience. This is far from an argument for fatalistic acceptance of the status quo, of course; as Roediger puts it, “the complex mixture of hate, sadness and longing” is a volatile mixture, offering many choices and possibilities. As historians put it, beware monocausal outcomes, and this is just as true with personal histories: the overdetermination of the self means that we’re not so much determined by some singular identity as we are racked by conflicts between the many different and contradictory parts of ourselves that make us up.

So maybe there’s nothing necessarily so wrong with an optimistic delusion or two, and maybe it’s okay to occasionally assert, against all the available evidence, that “Yes we can.” And the gesture of Roediger’s authorial position, the claim that he could grow up amidst a culture of white supremacy and race hatred, and yet transcend that origin, to claim that we make race instead of being made by it, that we make ourselves instead of the reverse, well, I find such a claim as logically unconvincing as I find it emotionally necessary.

Edward Said as Masonry

Chapati Mystery noted, recently, how Edward Said’s death seemes to have ushered in a broad and sweeping effort to to obliterate his legacy. This silly review is an excellent example, written by a guy who wrote a book attacking Said (For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies) reviewing other people’s books attacking Said: Daniel Martin Varisco’s Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid and Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Here’s enough rope for Irwin to hang himself:

“So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978 ) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”. It is unlikely that the two books under review, both of which present damning criticisms of Said’s book at length and in detail, will change anything.”

To put it more succinctly: academics wish the arguments in Orientalism were true because if they were, these deluded academics can pretend to be political activists. And, so fervently do they wish this that they will ignore real scholarship that contraverts the Saidian thesis, scholarship such as that by this troika of mute, inglorious Miltons toiling in obscurity and in the Times Literary Review.

As Irwin demponstrates, Varisco sets out “to expose Said’s rhetorical tricks” and to critique his “use of pejorative vocabulary,” while Ibn Warraq notes Said’s damning failure to speak as many languages, or as well, as the Orientalist scholars he criticized. Leftist scholars, of course, will ignore these valiant efforts and continue to walk about with their heads in the sand (an impossible thing physically to do, I know, but such is the willful blindness of the left!). They will refuse to see, for example, that because Said uses the pejorative word “ransack” instead of “read,” “consulted,” or “examined,” it necessarily and oh-so-logically follows that all Orientalist scholars were politically neutral and unbiased scholars. Not only this, leftist scholars will fail to realize that because “Said was utterly oblivious to the humour and stylishness of Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen,” it naturally follows that, um,it’s completely obvious that, well… Actually, I don’t have a clue why this is supposed to be relevent. Here’s the passage:

“Said was utterly oblivious to the humour and stylishness of Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen. Kinglake had enough money to travel to amuse himself. But Said’s Orientalists are a classless lot. That is silly. It is impossible to browse through the early proceedings of the Royal Asiatic Society or the Société Asiatique without recognizing that nineteenth-century Orientalism was presided over by aristocrats and that for the most part the research was done by men with private incomes.”

The point this is in service of utterly escapes me. I’m open to the suggestion that Said missed something important because he used the dichotomy of West and East in ways that obscured rich and poor; frankly, I’m so open to it that I almost presume it to be true anyway, since this is an ongoing problem in “postcolonial” theoretical circles more generally. But Irwin doesn’t seem to have any sense of what Said is supposed to have missed here. Why the fuck do we care that he was utterly oblivious to “the humor and stylishness of Eothen”? It doesn’t seem self-evident to me that such a thing has any bearing on what it means to be an “Orientalist,” but Irwin declines to pick up that burden of proof. Instead, and this is typical of the entire piece, he just blasts him for having made a mistake and then draws large and sweeping conclusions from that mistake: because Said fails to recognize the stylishness of a writer no one cares about anymore, not only is his entire work bunk, but the opposite of what Said argued must now be accepted as true. I trust the logical fallacy of all this is apparent.

I think Said makes a good target, actually, because his work does indeed have a lot of problems. He could be sloppy, and because he did have a tendency to take a strong case too far in service of a particular political agenda, a book like Orientalism hasn’t aged as well as it might have. There is a great deal to pick on in that book published thirty years ago. But none of it matters, at all. People still read Said, but it’s not like they need to, not like Said is some kind of load-bearing wall without which the entire edifice collapses. The practices that Irwin tries to lay at Said’s doorstep—reading novels to discover hidden colonialist subtexts, a hypercritical version of Western achievements, and thinking of research and teaching as political activities—are not exactly inventions of this evil conniving Palestinian worm Irwin imagines as lurking in Columbia’s woodpile. I mean, for seriously, does he really think Said invented the idea of teaching as a political activity? Does he really think that Said was the first person in the world to be critical of the West? Does he really think that British novels written during the apex of British colonial expansion weren’t at least partially about colonialism?

Said could have said any goddamn silly thing and it wouldn’t have meant that any of these conclusions were right or wrong. Said, you see, isn’t a load-bearing wall; he’s more like a piece of brick and plaster that was saved when the original house was renovated. He’s not the best piece of masonry there is; he lets in some water when it rains, and the newer building materials are able to hold in heat in the winter (and let it out in the summertime) much better than technology allowed in 1978. But there’s both a certain sentimental and historical attachment to him that keeps him around. He laid the original pattern according to which the structure has grown, and that means he’s still important in understanding how “postcolonialism” as a discourse works. And sometimes his failings have been a limitation. Much of what he has to say about the West’s attitudes towards the “Orient,” for example, is simply not applicable to the texts I study, books about Africa by both Westerners and Africans, and the ways that the enterprise of “postcolonialism” often tries to stick us all under one roof does create problems (as does the broad “West” and “rest” dichotomies his work tends to suggest). But Said is still relevant not because everything he said was right but because he noticed a few very true things and tried to draw conclusions from them. One of these very true things is: that the ways in which Western scholarship produced knowledge about the “East” has tended to be self serving and imperialist, a fact which literary scholarship generally prefers not to think about. This remains true as a tendency; pointing out the ways that Said’s particular hypothesis doesn’t adequately account for this data doesn’t make the data disappear (as Irwin and ilk would like), it simply demands that we work better to produce better hypothoses, something wholly in the spirit of Said’s own work. Though Irwin would prefer not to admit it, Said was quite capable of critiquing people on both sides of the West/Rest dichotomy: he fought for Palestinian sovereignty while strongly criticizing Arafat and the PLO, and his brand of secular aesthetics was both (via its Auerbachian genealogy) implicitly quite “Western” and explicitly incompatible with most varieties of religious fundamentalism.

So Irwin is probably right that damning critiques of Said’s own work will not significantly hinder politically minded critics of a certain ideological strip from doing what it is that they do. This will occur to the extent that they are less blinded by their ideology than Irwin, an extent which, I will venture, is considerable.