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On Double Consciousness

Emmanuel C. Eze

Callaloo, Volume 34, Number 3, Summer 2011, pp. 877-898 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0162

For additional information about this article


http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cal/summary/v034/34.3.eze.html

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ON DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS*
by Emmanuel C. Eze

What are the historical origins of the Du Boisian notion of double consciousness? What explains the enduring existential resonance of the notion in various literatures on the black diaspora, particularly in what Paul Gilroy has rendered poignant as the Black Atlantic? There are unmistakable echoes of the notion of double consciousness in the wider vocabulary of postmodern and postcolonial criticism, particularly in concepts such as ambivalence or, increasingly, the religious and cultural identity of the modern Muslim. What relations might we, today, draw across these existential and historical dispersals in the senses of the Afro modern? With no aspirations to the exhaustive, I intend to accomplish the following through these and similar questions: a) explore the double roots of double consciousness in the histories of capitalist racial slavery and colonial modernity; b) examine the motives for current practices of characterizing identities by the psychological and cultural conditions of double consciousness; and c) ask in what ways the identities so characterized may or may not be compatible with key features of sociality and transnational conviviality that could be marked as democratically progressive and universal.

Reasons of Empire In 2001, the United Nations Durban Declaration of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance declared: Colonialism has led to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and . . . Africans and peoples of African descent, and people of Asian descent and indigenous peoples were victims of colonialism and continue to be victims of its consequences. The contexts of the arguments in the declaration can be found in studies of modern imperial expansions. For example, Niall Ferguson has noted the fact that at the beginning of 1625, the British Isles was an economically unremarkable, politically fractious, and strategically second -class entity, but in a mere two centuries transformed itself into Great Britainthe largest empire the world had ever seen.1 The transition from a small island to an imperial power was marked by colonial expansion: by the mid-twentieth century, the British Empire consisted of forty-three colonies on five continents. The clues to the reasons of this development are obvious: the British relieved the Spaniards of colonial territories, copied the Dutch, beat
* Professor Emmanuel C. Eze submitted this article to Callaloo before 2007, the year he died. The editorial staff has made every effort to supply missing page numbers for passages cited and bibliographic information for works cited.

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. . . the French and plundered the Indians. But it is also true that commerce and conquest by themselves would not have sufficed to achieve the phenomenal imperial expansion. No matter what the strengths of British financial and naval power, Ferguson argues, there had also to be colonization (Ferguson 5152, emphasis added). Just as empire was instrumental in the definition to the colonial identity of British modernity, so was, according to the Durban conference, the experience of colonial racism. The double consciousness of the (post)colonially modern is historically integral to the emergence of modern racialism/ racism. If double consciousness is a phenomenon of racial ambivalence, it has to be seen as rooted in imperial capitalist, racist, and ethnocentric experiences and abstracted ideas of Englishness (or Spanishness, Frenchness, Germanness, etc.). From the perspective of one colonized at the outposts of the empire, in 1789 an Indian observer comments about the colonizers habit of coming for a number of years, then returning home with as much money . . . as they can, and carrying it in immense sums to the kingdom of England (G. H. Khan qtd. in Ferguson 52). In one decade alone, as much as nineteen million British pounds was transferred from India to Britain by that method. But Ferguson, for one, believes that British colonialists did not merely repatriate wealth from India; the colonial enterprise necessitated two other kinds of political and economic underdevelopments that led to greater hardships for the Indian. Because the colonialist taxed the natives in order to raise and maintain a colonial army, it was also the Indians who funded the conquest of their own country. It is said that the tax burdens were greater than the cost of repatriated money, since the spiraling cost of the Indian Army was the one item of imperial expenditure the British taxpayer never had to pay (Ferguson 42, 4748). There was in fact a connection between capital flight, taxation, and impoverishment of the native. British colonialism in Nigeria during the 1800s suggests that the Indian experience conformed to a general pattern in the colonial processes. Frederick Lugardlater Lord Lugardwas one of the architects and executors of the British colonization of West and East Africa. In his book The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, a handbook on and theoretical justification of colonization, Lugard explains: Let it be admitted that European brains, capital, and energy have not, and never will be, expended in developing the resources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy. England, he argues, is in Africa for the mutual benefit of her own industrial class, and of the native races in their progress to a higher plane (emphasis added). In this gapthe racial gap assumed between Africans and the economic interests of Europe, and in the economic interests of emergent transatlantic capitalism exhibited by the rapid rise in Britains industrial and material needslies what we could call a general colonial compact. The compact, implicitly or explicitly, says: We will bring to the inferior races the true (our) religion and the true (our) culture and civilization. In return for these goods coming from a higher racial plane, however, we will take the land by force; we will use the colonized as paid or unpaid, forced or voluntary labor; and we will tax them to establish a colonial army the lower ranks of whom are to be raised from among the colonized, and this army will ensure that none of the natives chiefs, priests, or kings could successfully reject the colonial re-ordering of their world. In the Americas, Africa, and India, the racial element in the colonial project was not much different. The colonialist generally considered himself a member of a superior and apart race. One of the earliest armed slave revolts, on November 23, 1733, on the Caribbean island of St. John, was racially motivated. On this island as well as on St. Thomas, 878

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the Danish West India and Guinea Company established not only slave trading posts but also lucrative sugar plantations. Although Europeans lived together in every conceivable proximity, it was not enough that the society was divided into hierarchies in the labor relations in a slave economy. Master, slave, manumitted or otherwise was also classified as either Blancken (White) or Bussals (African). Race, thus, was the glue that conferred a new identityand wide privilegeson both rich and poor Europeans against both enslaved and free Africans. Unsurprisingly, the revolt against the slave system on the Danish islands, when it came, was organized as a protest against racial injury. An armed anti-colonial revolt in Jamaica, in October of 1865, was similarly racially fuelled, because the ruling class was exclusively racially white. And the earliest confrontations between colonial settlers and the Bengali had racial roots: between 1872 and 1883, the official policy in India required that no Indian judge could try a white settler, on account of the settlers claim to racial privilege. These and similar racial prejudices fuelled the growth of Indian nationalism. It would indeed be impossible to comprehend the social dimensions of slavery or anti-slavery or colonialism or anti-colonialism without the racial factors. The elements of a racial morality, assumed by the colonizer as universal, could be found in any aspects of formal and informal life in plantation slavery as well as in colonial societies. The morality was based on the slave masters and colonizers belief that slavery or colonization was a form of plantation: a process of domestication of either the slave or the native. The slave plantation and the colonial outposts thus became, in the view of the master and the colonial administrator, literally places where a superior race was surrounded by inferior ones, as good plants by weeds. The slave plantation and the colonial territory were realms of a racially based moral contrast: Good versus Evil. In the ensuing conflicts, skin color was taken as the clearest marker of who belonged to which category. This is why historians like Ferguson believe that in the racist normative colonial cultures, what went on in some of the territories could easily qualify as ethnic cleansing. The natives were supposed to be either enslaved by or cleared away to make room for the settlers (Ferguson 56). Adam Hochschild also richly documented the reach of the racial ideology in the reasons for transatlantic slavery. William Beckford, a Lord Mayor of London, was reportedly known as Alderman Sugar-Cane because he was the richest absentee plantation owner of his time. In fact in the mid-1700s, all the representatives of London in the House of Commons were pro-slavery and all told, several dozen M.P.s owned West Indian plantations (Hochschild 139). Outside of London, Liverpool and Bristol were the most famous of the slave ports. Considered a thriving between-wars decade for the trade, from 1783 to 1793, Liverpool ships would carry more than 300,000 Africans into slavery. Its shipyard built many of these vessels, and some were among the largest of their day, holding up to a thousand slaves each. Carved heads of African elephants and slaves decorated the town hall. When a visiting actor, George F. Cooke, was hissed for appearing drunk on a Liverpool stage, he retorted, I have not come here to be insulted by a set of wretches, every brick in whose infernal town is cemented with an Africans blood. (Hochschild 117)

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In Bristol, in addition to the well-known social habit of wealthy ladies owning African slave servants as a status symbol, both public and private institutions relied on the largesse of entrepreneurs in the slave trade to fund public and private charity. This intertwinement of the slave economy and philanthropy is particularly visible in the acceptance of the trade as a path to respectability: personalities like Edward Colston M.P., who was the best-known philanthropist in Bristol, were also major slave traders (Hochschild 15).2 Imperial Britains general economy depended on slavery and the ancillary business: The ship owner was less the sole proprietor of a business than the manager of a venture capital syndicate . . . Even shopkeepers, carpenters, and tradesmen bought shares in the voyages of some smaller ships, thereby participating, as a local writer put it, in a trade that may be said to pervade the whole town (Hochschild 11718). Bryan Edwards recognized that the plantations in the West Indies were the principal source of national opulence (Hochschild 57). Churches, universities, and private foundations were equally actors in the business of buying and selling slaves, as investors and as absentee owners of plantations. The Church of England reportedly owned the famous Codrington slave estate in the West Indies, holding the estate in the name of the churchs missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The estate had its own brand name, SOCIETY, which it burned onto the chests of slaves with red-hot iron (Hochschild 6768). Members of the governing board included the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge and the head of the church, the Archbishop of Canterbury. When slavery was legally abolished in 1833, and Parliament as a condition of the abolition accepted to compensate slave owners for their property, the Society reportedly received 8,823 pounds, 8 shillings, and 9 pence (or 950,000 US dollars in todays money) for its 411 slaves.3 The outcome of racial slavery and colonization of peoples by European states was thus extensive and immensely rewarding to the slave traders, venture capitalists, and colonial settlers in direct proportion as they cost the enslaved and colonized. Khans study of India and the impoverishment of its population is just one example. About Africa, Lugard claims that when the economic pressure caused by the rapidly increasing population of Europe began to exert inevitable influence, in driving men to seek for new markets and fresh supplies of food and raw material, it was the exploitations of Africa, America, and India that met the demand for several centuries. While Khan calculated the colonial profits by its inverse effect of ruining India, Lugard calculated the benefits of colonialism by the speed of growth of the white population in Europe. Contrary to the then popular Malthusian predictions, Lugard noted that between 1492, when Columbus reached America, and 1494, when Vasco da Gama rounded the African Cape, the relief offered to Europe by the colonial settlements was near miraculous: In the fifteenth century the population of Europe was about 70 million. At the end of the next three centuries it is said to have been 150 million, and additional 10 millions having migrated overseas. But [at] the close of the succeeding centurywhich witnessed the industrial revolution, and the advent of the steam navigationit is estimated at nearly 450 millions, with 100 millions additional emigrants. Thus, while the population of Europe only doubled itself in the three centuries prior to 1800, it more than trebled itself in the following century. (Lugard 3, fn1) 880

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For Britain alone, the figures were 4,800,000 in 1600, 16,000,000 in 1800, and 42,000,000 in 1900.

Race, Religion, and the Colonial Projects of Reason Colonialism, as a mode of imperial expansion, was part of a larger historical process, namely European states self-fashioning into forces of global capitalist modernity. The brutality of this modern economic process is nowhere as evident as in the institution of transatlantic slavery. The antiquities in all societiesfrom the Athenian through the Ashanti to the Romanseem to have known slavery in one form or the other: indentured servitude, religious caste systems, or other forms of extreme class division within a society that render a particular section of a population exploitable, with or without rights of citizenship. But scholars of slavery agree that there was something unique and unrepeatable about modern, transatlantic, and racial African slavery. For the first time in known history the enslaver did not just call the enslaved dog or beast metaphorically: on account of skin color, it was presumed that Africans were a race apart and, regardless of class or caste, considered scientifically an article of trade. In addition to the economic, religious, and cultural reasons for colonizing, dispossessing, and civilizing, it is obvious that a raciology best served to justify transatlantic slavery. For popular examples, consider the thinking of John Newton, the composer of the perennial religious hymn Amazing Grace. After his conversion to evangelical and missionary Christianity, Newton became a successful slave trader, sailing across the Atlantic to bring captured Africans for sale throughout the Americas. In a letter to his wife dated January 26, 1753, a letter composed during one of his voyages with the African cargo, he mused: The three greatest blessings of which human nature is capable, are, undoubtedly, religion, liberty, and love. In each of these how highly has God distinguished me! But here are whole nations around me, whose languages are entirely different from each other, yet I believe they all agree in this, that they have no words among them expressive of these engaging ideas: from whence I infer, that the ideas themselves have no place in their minds. And as there is no medium between light and darkness, these poor creatures are not only strangers to the advantages which I enjoy but are plunged in all the contrary evils. (qtd. in Ferguson 79). As for the gulf between the self-whitened, good, loving, and intellectual Christian of whom Newton considered himself a fine specimen and his blackened, demonized, and chained Africans, enslavement of one by the other seemed the only option: not only possible but also naturally ordained by nature and, it is said, by God himself. That the nature of the African became a basis of the public arguments for and against the slave trade is itself a testimony to the power of the slave lobby to mobilize and monopolize public opinion. Public arguments around this highly charged term could also only have added fuel to the fire that advanced the aims of territorial colonization of the 881

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African continent. (The Berlin Conference of 1884 was, after all, one of the direct consequences of the scramble for legitimate trade of goods with Africans as opposed to what increasingly became considered illegitimate and then illegal trading of Africans.) Because of the arguments of the slave traders, imperial and colonial interests were able to present themselves and their colonial plantation projects as the best alternative to slave trade. One colonized Africa, the imperialists argued, not for reasons of conquest but rather to develop legitimate commerce. At the extreme, David Livingstone and Lugard were able to argue that they went to Africa for the mutual benefit of the colonizer and the colonized precisely because of the already extreme phenomenon of the slave trade: it was assumed that, because of race and the difference race ought to make, colonization of Africa by Europe must be an enterprise whose benefit . . . can be made reciprocal. In what lies this reciprocity? While Europe multiplied and settled America, Africa, and the Pacific, the indigenous populations of these places precipitously declined. The processes of empireslavery, colonization, and racial supremacywere thus an outcome of gradual developments, but developments whose intents and points of acceleration could be easily marked. In the opinion of many historians, in the 1680s, writers were able to distinguish between England and, quite narrowly, the British Empire in America. As late as 1743, it had still been possible to speak, with clear geographical delimitations in mind, of the British Empire, taking together as one body, viz. Great Britain, Ireland, the Plantations and Fishery in America, besides its possessions in the East Indies and Africa. But by 1762, it became possible to think, indistinctly, as Sir George Macartney would, about this vast empire on which the sun never sets and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained (qtd. in Ferguson 35). The consequences of this modern colonial process are, across the globe, and as the 2001 Durban Declaration makes clear, very much part of the history of our world. But the reasons given for imperialism and colonization were more pretexts than arguments. An early entrepreneur of African colonization, Livingstone presented himself to the British public as a heroic missionary on the quest to convert pagan Animist Africans to Christianity. In a recruitment speech he delivered to young men at Oxford before he left the second time for central and southern Africa, it is recorded that he appealed to the idealism of youth, imploring the students: The sort of men . . . wanted for missionaries are such as I see before me. I beg you to direct your attention to Africa. Yet in a letter of May 14, 1858, to a confidant, right before departing on his second missionary journey, he wrote: I take a practical mining geologist from the School of Mines to tell us of the Mineral Resources of the country, then an economic botanist to give a full report on the vegetable productionsfibrous, gummy and medicinal substances together with the dye stuffseverything which may be useful in commerce. An artist to give the scenery, a naval officer to tell of the capacity of the river communications, and a moral agent to lay the foundation for knowing the aim. All this machinery has for its ostensible object the development of African trade and the promotion of civilization but what I have to tell to none but such as you in whom I have full confidence is that I hope it may result in an English colony in the healthy highlands of Central Africa. (qtd. in Ferguson 156) 882

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The highlands of Central Africa, including the head of the Zambezi River surveyed by Livingstone find his team, proved unsuitable for the successful planting of a colony. But the intent was clear, and failure to achieve the intention in this case could be characterized as an exception rather than the rule. How did schemes such as these look from the perspectives of the target populations of the empire? How does one explain the rapid rise in anti-slavery and anti-colonial sentiments not just in Africa and the colonies but also among progressive citizens of the imperial nations? Some historians pretend to be at a loss to explain the forces that led to the demise of the slave trade (and, eventually, the colonialism which justified itself in part by claiming to be a legitimate and morally worthy alternative to the slave trade). Whatever these forces might have been, however, they include numerous failures of the earliest colonial projectsfor example, failures to instantly convert Africans to Christianity. Take, for example, the West African monarch who traveled to London to personally protest what he believed to be the degradation of the Africans character by the degradation of African cultures. In the daily diaries of missionaries and colonial anthropologists, and in anti-colonial writings, there is enough evidence to suggest fierce cultural resistance to conquest and domination. The complaints Livingstone confided in his diaries during his first mission to Africa were typical. After several years of preaching the Gospel in southern Africa, and having learnt the Bakwena language, it appears he made only one convertand a backsliding one at that. In Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart, a novel in which the dominant theme is the British colonial invasion of Eastern Nigeria, we encounter dialogues about religion and culture such as this: If we leave our gods and follow your god . . . who will protect us from the anger of our neglected gods and ancestors? Your gods are not alive and cannot do you any harm, replied the white man. They are pieces of wood and stone. When this was interpreted to the men of Mbanta, they broke into derisive laughter. (Achebe 14446) By all accounts, Africa remained largely unconverted to Christianity until well into the late nineteenth century. This, of course, is a fact difficult for many to imagine, given the number of Christians in Africa today. But modern colonial Christianity got its foothold in Africa only after the strategies of colonization shifted from commerce and evangelization to military conquest.4 Similar to many African examples, one of the first notable revolts against the colonial system in India was a mutiny of Sikh and Muslim soldiers based on rumors about the intent to convert Sikhs and Muslims to Christianity. The processes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that led to the demise of transatlantic slave trade, like the outcome of missionization, were no less nuanced and complex. Some think there was an astonishing volte face in moral sensibility in Europe (a moral switch, it is claimed, flicked in the British psyche).5 Certainly, there was the phenomenon of a widespread evangelical religious awakening, represented particularly in the activism of the Society of Friends. Since for them the Gospel made no distinction between Jew and Gentile, and all are brothers in the Lord, evangelical Quakers, Methodists, and Unitarians constituted a formidable abolitionist movement. Their movement, 883

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headquartered at the Holy Trinity Church in Clapham, London, tirelessly organized campaigns across the country, gathering millions of signatures on numerous anti-slave trade petitions to parliament. A medal designed by the Unitarian Josiah Wedgewood depicting a black man in chains with surrounding letters Am I not a Man and a Brother? became one of the most potent icons of the anti-slavery movement. But there were clearly non-religious forces operating to the advantage of the abolitionists. Prominent British economists, most of them secularist liberals, had warned that, on strictly economic terms, slavery was uncompetitive and, in the long run, less profitable than trade in free labor. Adam Smith, for example, was one of those who advanced what must have seemed the counter-intuitive but scientific argument that free trade in free labor comes cheaper in the end than forced, uncompensated, slave labor. Other Enlightenment thinkers saw that the path to progress in industry was through mechanization of processes of production, and regarded slavery as a backward-looking institution. Although they were by no means opposed to slave trade or slavery on human rights grounds, most Scottish thinkers, including those personally or professionally invested in the institution of slavery, considered slavery woefully inefficient because they understood the economic promise of mechanization. Adam Ferguson, for example, believed that Britain could dominate its economic relations with the revolutionary United States only if Britain relied on science and technology to modernize home industries and constitutionally choked off the supply of African slaves to American plantations. This strategy positioned Britain as the dominant economic power in Europe (e.g. vis-a-vis France and Holland, both of whose international transactions and colonial economies also heavily depended on slave trade and slave labor), while playing a leading role in what was becoming a moral crusade against a barbaric form of economic, political, and cultural bondage. A confluence of forces thus led the British Parliament to ban the slave trade in 1807, and the ban on slavery itself followed in 1833.6

Ambivalence and the Racial Self W. E. B. Du Boiss doctoral dissertation, entitled The History of Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638 to 1870, was one the earliest academic treatises providing usable estimates of the number of Africans bought into slavery in the United States (Du Bois, The History of Suppression). In later works Du Bois would try to reconstruct the processes by which Africans became American Negroes. But the American Negro was yet both legally and socially more Negro than American: along with the native Indian populations, for example, in the formative national documents including the Declaration of Independence (All men are created equal), the un-free status of the Negro existence was stated with obviousness. Opponents of the American Revolution noted the irony.7 Du Boiss earliest studies on the conditions of both un-free and free African slaves in the United States are important in often unsuspected ways. He wrote not only about the peculiar negative processes of integration of Africans into the modern world but also about the racism that informed the reasons produced to justify the continuation of the slave trade and the institutions of plantation slavery within the United States long after these became unlawful in several countries. For example, Du Boiss 884

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statistics on the slave trade in The History of Suppression, like similar data about the expansions of the British empire in Africa and India, tell us much about the economics of the institution of plantations in the United States, about the racial consequences in terms of social and political depravations of the African American, and about the volatile political cultures these conditions created not just between the minority African Americans and the majority white populations but also among pro-slavery and anti-slavery Americans of all races and classes. Similarly, Du Boiss observations about both the global and the specific modalities of racialization of slavery in North America are unsurpassed. In lapidaries (The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line in The Souls of Black Folk) or multi-volume studies of post-Emancipation African Americans existential identity crises in a self-whitened United States (The Philadelphia Negroes), Du Bois is a guide into the labyrinthine historical processes by which slavery and then emancipation fashioned the black experiences not just in North America but generally in the modern Atlantic world. By Du Boiss account, the history of the modernized African in the Americas was, for too long, a history of an original uncertain exclusion. In Du Boiss work we learn that legal racial segregation in the United States was an early example of apartheid, the system of racial separatism eventually perfected by white colonialists in South Africa. What, subjectively, does it feel like to define ones existence as that of inclusion by exclusion? In the beginning paragraphs of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois observes: They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. (Du Bois, Souls 12) But The Souls of Black Folk is just such an answer. Along with his other writings, it gives to a post-slavery racial identity an articulate shape. The work is indeed an autobiography of a race: a key document on the emergence of racial double consciousness in modernity. Because of the documents universality, we must resist the temptation to characterize Du Bois, as easy as it might indeed be to do, as exclusively a race man. Such characterization is too easy because it obscures other truths. For example, like many anti-imperialists and anti-colonialists (notably Gandhi, Cesaire, Fanon, or Senghor), Du Bois played a racial hand that the architects of empire, colonialism, and white supremacy had dealt in the very idea of race. Race, as Todorov and Banton remind, was entirely a modern European idea. The fact is equally obvious, as we saw, in the pretexts presented as arguments to justify in public opinion the African slave trade. When the public conversation was driven by the interests of minority settler populations who needed favorable terms in which to debate their own claims to a slave masters or a colonizers superioritywhich is to say, the inferiority of the slave or the colonizedit must have seemed acceptable to argue that racialism was a divine ordinance, a natural fact, or a moral necessity. Du Bois, in Souls, clearly was confronted by and had to think through an obvious Metaphysics of History: a pseudo-metaphysics generated by racial 885

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supremacists to cement questionable doctrines that everyone should have been able to recognize by its truer disorder. Thus we find Du Bois valiantly trying to make sense of the senseless: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the Mongolian, he ventured, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight. In none of the subsequent arguments of Souls or anywhere elsefor example, in the also famous Conservation of Races, where he offered biological as well as historical arguments to justify the cosmic missions of each supposedly racial type was Du Bois able to convince the reader who did not already believe in the existence of races, as one might believe in religions, that the proclamations in Souls about the races amounted to a scientific proof. In fact, in Americas modernity, one could not, with any measure of conceptual integrity, produce or justify a purely racism-independent process of racialization of the population. If Du Bois were correct, why seven races; why not five, eight, twelve, twenty, or any other number of plausible divisions one could conceive? The strengths of Souls lie elsewhere. In describing the African American as secondsighted, for example, Du Bois was providing an existential and psychological description. Without this description, I believe, one would only superficially understand the depth of the legacies of economic, political, and social policies of slavery, and then racial segregation, in the colonial and postcolonial Americas, Africa, or the Caribbean. In the case of racially blackened slaves or freed Negroes in the whitened nation spaces of the Americas, Souls is a sublime record and testament of a coming-to-racial awareness of the selfan awareness achieved through the revelation of the other world. This revelation, Du Bois famously explained, is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at ones self through the eyes of others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois, Souls 3) Clearly, it is in the interface of original pseudo-scientific and pseudo- metaphysical claims (about racial groups) and the ancillary claims (the racial otheringand orderingof the Negro, as the Hegelian Master names the Slave in an existential dialectic) that there emerges, for Du Bois, in the idea of race, the possibility of a narrative of History as a Racial Cosmic Event: an event within which the African American is expected to define an appropriate subjectivitya subjectivity we could, accordingly, refer to as a Racial Self. This last pointand in fact my general hesitation in accepting Du Boiss would-be metaphysics of racedeserves some elaboration. My critique draws its implicit concerns from the background of a general question: In what sense may the racial self be considered a revolutionary post-emancipation or postcolonial subject? Unlike the now generic criticism of Du Bois on account of raciology, I would prefer to make some more careful distinctions between the kinds of racial post-slavery and postcolonial subjectivities. Certainly, it is not enough to point out the problematic scientific status of race. As we saw in earlier discussion of the methods of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, racialism was founded on, and has successfully anchored itself in, modern societies and histories of ethnicities 886

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and of cultures. It is worthwhile therefore to recognize, as the Durban Declaration has done, that neither the consequences of slavery and colonialism, nor those of racism with which they are intertwined, have been overcome. Recent rulings by the Supreme Courts of many multiracial countries have essentially come to similar positions (e.g. Gratz et al v. Bollinger et al). But it is only fair, looking forward, to press Du Bois on the arguments: What could one mean by a true self? (Or a true self-consciousness?) If the main complaint had been that the African American could not look at himself or herself but through the eyes of selfwhitened fellow citizens, how else, we should ask, does anyone get to know oneself if not through the eyes of others? The truth, of course, was that Du Bois sought to theoretically articulate a psychology of the racialized black selfa blackness presumed by racists to be both physical and moral, but in truth born in the contexts of extreme inequality in economic, political, and social relations. The power of race in the colonial or slave-capitalist contexts is one that Du Boisunlike Lugard who duplicitously dreamt about an imagined uplift of the inferior races by their very subjectionradically problematized and unrelentingly critiqued. What concerned Du Bois could not have been the co -constitution of the races into an American nation. He was clearly irritated, from the point of view of those Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth, by the racialist termsthe racist termsof the national compact. Du Bois saw more clearly than most the contradictions between the flamboyant economic profits and the depraved morality of the slave trade and the plantation: the contradictions deformed the moral processes of formation of a historical self not only the self of the slave or the colonized, but also the self of the master and of the colonizer. Plantation and colonialism are not conditions that could yield true self or true national consciousness not just to the slave or to the emancipated black but also to a young America that, in the contexts of a national Declaration of Independence, was most in need of a true national consciousness. Instead, both the racialized self of the individual and of the nation appeared left with only a strange sensation of two-ness: the African does not wish to be enslaved on account of whiteness, but the American is not an African in disguise.8 In the same way that the strife that tore at the fabric of the new nation must be dealt with, as far as Du Bois was concerned, one must forge a higher self: an African American self. This ideal was achievable because, as far as one could see, only one thingbut a key constitutional questionstood in the way: Was the Negro a citizen or not? If the answer is yes, why was it that the Negro is cursed and spit upon by his fellows and the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face? On the question of the prospect of a post-racial subjectivity, some insights into the background to Du Boiss vocabulary about the self are helpful. His earliest use of the concept of double consciousness derived from a context of modern American medical science. The documentary evidence for this starts in Strivings of the Negro, an essay Du Bois first published in The Atlantic in1897, and reproduced, in a modified title, as the first chapter of Souls: Of Our Spiritual Strivings. In the decade in which the magazine essay was published, as in fact throughout much of the nineteenth century in the United States, double consciousness was a term found only in medical journals. It originally referred to what was regarded by the medical establishment of the day as a Negro Disease, drapetomania. According to the physician Samuel Adolphus Cartwright who 887

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discovered the illness as an epidemic among African American slave populations in the southern parts of the United States, drapetomania was a mental illness defined by an irrestrainable propensity to run away.9 The slaves who ran away were not thus motivated by a love of liberty, but rather were patients whose weakness of mind for liberty was to be medicallyin fact, surgically cured. Gradually, however, drapetomania seeped into general psychological and moral literature. Double consciousness was loosely extended from stricter medical contexts and poetically deployed to describe numerous afflictions suggesting incapacity for absolute self-dedication not just to an institution (e.g. in the original contexts, the economy of slavery) but also to many other questionable regimes of social and political control. In his uses of double consciousness Du Bois, certainly, was aware of its history. He intended to communicate the pain of self-redemption and the moral tragedy of the psychology of a self so divided from within. But he was lucid enough to attribute these painful and moral conditions not to any natural disposition in the slave in the Americas or in the colonized on the African continent. They were the institutions of slavery arid colonization, Du Bois argued, that produced the psychological and moraland in the United States during his lifetime, increasingly nationalsplit personality, a psychological disease that afflicted both individual and country. For Du Bois, redemption and integrity are to be found in the moral and heroic pursuit of a higher self. But he also believed that this is a quest and redemption that could start, for the negro as for the nation, only when the injustices of slavery and colonization, and ideologies of racial supremacy and their legacies, had been recognized and progressively dismantled. The core problem of double consciousness, in Du Boiss hands, therefore became a kind of historical suffering with a moral and metaphysical import to the quest for liberty and national integrity. The negro, rather than mere victim, becomes a revolutionary subject: a person with second sight, a sight that alone could see or bear witness to the truth of a hidden meaning of history. The negro in America or in the colonial contexts acquired for Du Bois a historical mission not just in the Americas or Africa but also in the rest of the world. This mission, first, was to discover and make explicit the gift to the world that only the second-sighted could bringthe gift itself being fruits of wisdom from suffering, survival, and hope. Like the Indians, the Mongolians, the Teutons, and so on, the negro is called in his and her suffering by history to deliver the races specific racial genius, so that it is through the struggle in racial double consciousness that the negro achieves an original, universal compact with providence. The famous Creed prefacing Du Boiss DarkWater indeed captures these sentiments and more: I believe in God, who made of one blood all the nations that each on earth dwell . . . I believe in the Negro Race: in the beauty of its genius, the sweetness of its soul, and the strength in that meekness which shall inherit this turbulent earth . . . I believe in Servicethe humble, reverent service, from the blackenings of boots to the whitening of souls; for the Work is Heaven, Idleness Hell, and Wage is the Well done! of the Master, who summoned all of them that labor and are heavy laden . . . I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder . . . I believe in the Training of Children, black even as white . . . Finally I believe in patience . . . patience with God! 888

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The metaphors from Hegelthe dialectics of the Master and Slaveallow one to see that Du Bois, dialectically, came to a transracial answer to his racialI mean, the racistquestions that modern European colonialism and slavery in the United States had posed. Like Senghor in Africa, Du Bois nursed the idea that in the cauldron of African colonialism and American slavery lay the seeds of emergence of a truly universal liberation of the selfof colonizer as of colonizedfrom nature. It was therefore in the work of pursuit of moral greatness for all races that, for Du Bois as for Senghor, lay the conditions of freedom and integrity for the colonizer and the colonized.

Contested Modernities In theory, one could conceive of a more nuanced, more radical stand than Du Bois assumed on the questions of race, nation, and the self. For purposes of contrast, let us call Du Boiss and Senghors solutions to the problems of double consciousness heroic and romantic. First, in this tradition of thought, a divided soul calls for heroic (whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder), mythical (I believe in God; I believe [in] the Negro Race; etc.), and, ambivalently, ambiguously (patience . . . patience with God) historical acts of reconciliation. We must, of course, first acknowledge the equally obvious: for Du Bois, history, even of race and ethnicity, remained a requirement for any such talk of self or social transcendence and reconciliation. Second, the meta language of such struggle of the soul would not only be entirely removed from the exclusive and questionable domain of medicine or psychiatry, but also from a supposedly pedestrian social morality and transported into the realms of abstract, literary tragedy. By the end of Souls, the soul, for Du Bois, has become not only the spiritual and ethnic material of a quest for a historical racial authenticity and social justice; the quest and the soul itself turns into a search for unity of self, parallel with the larger quest for not only national but also universal union of the raceswhich was also Senghors ideal of civilisation de luniversel. The various theoretical strengths of this heroic and romantic strand in modern African and black thought are quite obvious. I could highlight one more of those strengths. To his credit, Du Bois, operating from a social scientific framework, watered down the concept of self usually entirely dependent on religion and submitted the theological notion, as well as Cartwrights most extravagantly ideological medical schema, to a severe historical test. In W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness, Dickson D. Bruce Jr. points out that Ralph Emerson, too, employed the term double consciousness to describe the struggle of being pulled back and forth between the realm of the divine and the rigors of daily existence. Emerson said: The worst feature of this double consciousness is that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which he leads, really show very little relation to one another: one prevails now, all buzz and din; the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise, and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves (qtd. in Dickson 300). Terri Hume Oliver also notes that Du Boisa careful student of not just Hegels phenomenology but also of Goethecould have had in mind Fausts Two souls, alas! Reside within my breast / And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother. Yet Du Boiss use of the concept of double consciousness in Souls is 889

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thoroughly sociological. It is therefore remarkably distinct not just from the original abuses of the term in racist medicine but also from the uncritical, even sentimental, employment in the religious, poetic, transcendentalist metaphysical traditions. In the particular case of the African Americans conditions of subjection, we should understand, Du Bois wanted one to see that the same conditions beckoned both oppressed and oppressor, though in different ways, to a certain greatness of self and of soul. It was therefore in the pursuit of the spirit of race- historical transcendence that Du Bois would offerin response to the question What does the Negro want?that the African American wants only to take his or her place among others as a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and latent genius. It was an insight into the forces that led to the thwarting of this universal desireby slavery, colonialism, or anti-black racial prejudicesthat Du Bois hoped the reader of Souls would come to appreciate. But there is another, equally modern, scientific tradition of psychological and political understanding of integrity of self that Du Boiss psychology and sociology of race clearly sidestepped. I will call this the Humean option. In contrast to the traditions of the psychology of self in religion or in romantic poetic transcendentalism, consider Humes contentions about self-identity in the Treatise of Human Nature. There Hume argued that the experimental method (i.e. empirical method, which he introduced into moral reasoning), a method Du Bois himself would prefer in his more ethnographic studies (e.g. in The Philadelphia Negro series, where he practiced urban social history and descriptive statistics), could not yield any metaphysics of the self. For Hume the idea of self-identity gives no reliable picture of an authentic unitary substance called self, around which a notion of a metaphysical authenticityracial or otherwisecould be scientifically legitimated. With this historical capacity for self-identification, but with nothing metaphysically or psychologically eternally subsisting on the identification, a Humean could not talk of a divided self, individual, racial, or national except materially, sociologically, and historically. Du Bois, as I read him, could be seen to have been modern in his ethnography and sociology of African and negro histories, but less so if we thought that he was doing a racial theological psychology of the black soul. His lamentations about the anguish and the evil of double consciousnessan anguish and social evil theorized as locatable as well as redeemable in the Afro-modern experiencesuggest this interpretation. For what could the science of this anguish and its moral judgment communicate beyond the historically specific environment within which colonialism and white supremacist cultures distorted the lives of the African slaves, and the slaves quests for freedom as African Americans? Once Souls succeeded in displacing the concept of double consciousness from its ideological framing in the medical and psychological literature as drapetomania, to its meanings as historical practices of freedom against non-natural oppression, Du Bois, it seems, had no further desire to sidestep the consequences of the pseudo-metaphysical characterization of the blackor the whiteracial self. Paradoxically, this pseudo-metaphysics of race, I think, enabled Du Bois, without any contradictions, to compose Souls as a sociology of freedom. But what are the implications of this racial sociology of freedom for modern or postmodern democratic theories? What would be a democratic racial or postcolonial subjectivity? Is there a democratic legacy in the racial idea of double consciousness or postcolonial theories of ambivalence? These questions come up because one wonders whether the 890

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historical saliencenot to say the very ideaof race or the colonial has substantially exhausted itself in the virtues of acts of freedom (yes, the slave did run away) inherent in the modern, postmodern, and postcolonial re-inventions of identitiesof processes that Du Bois himself anticipated, in theory and in practice (in the Niagara Movement in the United States, the self-exile to independent Ghana, the sympathies with communist revolutions, etc.). I will try to come to some answers to these questions, if only indirectly.

The Postcolonial Subject In the essay What is a Muslim? written in the early 1990s, Akeel Bilgrami develops a model of introspection that sheds some light on examples of conflicts of identities. But in a polemic against the clash of civilizations thesis he also isolated a specific example of conflict of identities: There is, he writes, widespread today a more interesting conflict within the hearts of moderate Muslims . . . a conflict made the more excruciating because it is not always explicitly acknowledged by them. This conflict, the essay goes on to explain, requires a careful scrutiny . . . of what the specific demands and consequences of ones particular [identities] are in specific historical or personal circumstances (Bilgrami 82425). Parallel to the hyphenated African-American, what, I ask, is a moderate Muslims religious identity in a capitalist, secular, liberal democracy? Like Du Boiss critical challenge to medical accounts of black double consciousness, accounts that located this consciousness as an illness in the Negros natural or moral character, Bilgrami wants us to understand that no scientific or philosophical warrant grants a priori to capitalist secular liberalism a status of neutrality in the contexts of the moderate Muslims internal, psychological struggles in identity. Even from a liberal perspective, it should be pointed out, there is no rational value in framing these or similar identity conflicts as race versus democracy, or the religious (Muslim) versus the secular (Liberal). This is because neither race blindness, secularism, nor liberalism could automatically confer the right to describe the issue of double consciousness, the ambivalence of postcolonial subjectivity, or the conflict within the moderate Muslim as a conflict between moral truth and falsity. Using the moderate Muslim as an example, liberal and secular values, Bilgrami remarks, have no purely philosophical justification that puts them outside the arena of essentially contested substantive moral and political values (Bilgrami 827). Are we left then with conflicts of values or identities all fundamentally held? One would argue one could hold a substantive identity fundamentally without, for that reason, becoming a fundamentalist. The difference is that saying an identity or a belief is fundamental to a persons identity means only that this persons sense of integrity, or violation of this sense of integrity, is connected to the system of beliefs that underwrites the identity. But nothing here suggests that there is only one such belief system a person could subscribe to or that all the possible fundamental identities underwritten by the system of beliefs are automatically compatible. Even where a set of identities is consistent, it could still be that one holds different members of the set as fundamental commitments at different times and for different reasons. In fact, the moderate Muslim might entertain the idea that one could identify oneself as a Muslim in this place for this length of time, and as something 891

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else somewhere else for another length of time. It is as if one could grade commitments to an identity or identities according to thick or thin: the thicker suggesting proximity to the core of what one considers ones self at any time, and the farther away from this core, the more negotiable, being thinner. But even this idea of coreas earlier suggestedleaves no impression on the moderates interior conflict or introspection that any core is more essential or more abiding than the supposedly peripheral or inessential. Such inessential commitments may, in situational clusters or serially, surprise by revealing themselves, at their own times and in their circumstances, as equally core and thick. The idea of a fundamental commitment for the moderate is, in short, more formal than substantive. In a choice illustration of this and similar arguments, Bilgrami tells a story that bears repeating. The existential, social, and, I would like to believe, political attitude to self, faith, race, and nation that this example highlights conforms closely to the psychological model of identity that I earlier characterized as Humean. I once shared a flat with a close friend, who was an appallingly successful drug dealer. He had made far more money than I thought was decent, and [it] was money made on the steady destruction of peoples lives, some of whom were talented, even brilliant, in the university. One day, while he was out, the police arrived at the door. They said that they did not have sufficient evidence to produce a warrant and search the place, but they were morally certain that he was guilty, and all they needed was for his roommate to express the slightest suspicion. That would give them enough to legally search his premises. I had long quarreled intensely with my friend about his cynical profiteering from drugs and had come to find him utterly reprehensible in this respect. But faced with the question from the police, I found myself turning them away. (Bilgrami 827) It would be an error to read this dilemma as the familiar If I had to choose between my country and my friend, may God help me to choose my friend. The conclusions drawn might be different if, for example, instead of the police, the story had said that our protagonist had been confronted by a delegation from the Ulamma. But the better analogy might be yet another story that illustrates Du Boiss revised concept of double consciousness: an African American professor of philosophy at a New York university remarked that he was very concerned about terrorism in a cosmic way but, on a daily basis, on account of a cross between his gender and his skin color, he believed he should, by objective analysis, be more concerned about the police.10 If these opinions reflect the sentiments of significant segments of racial, religious, or postcolonial minority populations (the second-sighted, in Du Boiss terms) in the United States or elsewhere, the questions implicit in the opinions, and which need answers, bearing classical social and political theories in mind, are obvious. One of these questions must be: What is the function of trusttrust in fellow citizens, in civic institutions and their public spaces of shared lifefor the functioning of a democracy? Is it possible that racial double consciousness and postcolonial or post-fundamentalist religious, liberal ambivalence, even as we celebrate their unarguably social revolutionary potential in modernity and postmodernity, retain some of these revolutionary characteristics as claims to diversity, but claims fuelled by deformations in the social body? 892

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I prefer these sociological and similar readings of the questions to Du Boiss pseudometaphysical or theological arguments for racial or any other forms of difference. Likewise, the core questionsthey should be easy to seedo not permit the luxury of answers that promise a return to any longing for pre-Weberian enchanted sense of community. The issue is not whether or not individuals or communities who form a nation could become committed to something that is fundamentally racial, fundamentally religious, democratic capitalist, democratic socialist, and so on. Plainly, they do. But it would be useful to interrogate in what sense the processes of formation of such fundamental identities, even in their most lucid forms, may be responses to what, following the example in continental philosophy, one might characterize as a different, and differed, order of lack in the subject. Such a lackthe contours of which fundamental commitments to race, religion, the market, or politics might themselves be merely the existential figuresdemands, it seems, more careful historical analysesyes, and wakeful patiencethen the usual rhetoric of the liberal Right or the liberal Left may be willing or able to exercise.

Postracial Subjectivity Modern democracyany true democracypresupposes diversity, both internal and external. But one need not believe that democracy requires this diversity to be always necessarily racial. For what if race did not exist also as a democratic idea? It is obvious that recognition of racial diversity, as we know race to exist today, is not a sufficient condition for democracy. But of course if racial identities exist, then they are and must necessarily be taken into account in any democratic calculation. But our line of argument has been that, in modern societies, racial identities did not, as if by an act of nature rather than events in human histories, have to exist. If we hold this as a hypothesis, is it not possible to contemplate either nonracial democracies or other, more democratic kinds of racial identities: where race serves democracy and the liberty of individuals, peoples, and cultures rather than conscriptsas it has historically done individuals and groups into racial affiliations whose value for freedom has been, at best, ambiguous? Is it possible to think more provocatively about the prospects of a nonracial society, and therefore the possibility of truly nonracial yet culturally pluralistic democratic societies? In his politics, Du Bois may well have been within this liberal, nonracial, democratic ideal. But in his metaphysics of race, he showed himself to be a thinker par excellence of the Middle. Hence the double vision and longing for a third, higher point of view that would, by natural theology, supervise the historical progresses of an idea of race and of the political and cultural geniuses of racial identities. In Africa, the works of Wole Soyinka and Leopold Sedar Senghor are the key counterparts for Du Boiss (African American) cultural metaphysics of the race in the same way as Goethes or Wagners work must have functioned for the Germanic peoples in their constructions of a modern racial identity. Yet Du Boiss racial-liberal tendencies are obvious in the fact that he arguably chose to be black.11 Souls, as I see it, allows one not only to experience what it means to tarry in a world of mid-terms of racialism of cultures and identities (I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil), but also to understand the 893

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existentiality of such tarrying when it is teleologically oriented toward an Absent Third. After insisting that the Negro, to be able to achieve a position in society where he or she could exercise civil liberty, must transcend three temptationsthe temptation of Hate, the temptation of Despair, and the temptation of Doubt Du Bois also offered an unstinting vision of the prize that awaits the victorious. What does the Negro want? he asked, and answers: To be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and latent genius. DuBoisism provides the African American or the Africanin fact, anyone suffering as victim of one kind of racial extremism or anothera platform on which to examine what it means to have or not have the liberty to exercise a choice of life. It could only be from the perch of triumph of consciousness that Du Bois can declare: I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. (Du Bois, The Conservation) It must remain useful to ponder the historical reasons why Du Bois, in addition to his own multiple racial backgrounds, nevertheless chose to identify in the strongest ways with the African or the black. Is it too easy to say that, firstly, circumstances (e.g. the oneeighth blood rule?) forced him to choose as he did and, secondly, that he was too proud to choose other than he did? In the first case, in the United States, he was legally black. In the second, might he not have been too proud to pass? Du Boiss ethical choices (and count in this his communist and African choices, including the exile and eventual death in independent Ghana) are too specific and too symbolic to be glossed over. In Souls Du Bois commits to lasting record the internal and historical agonism of the modern racial black, democratic, and African self. Elsewhere, he notes: My discussion of the concept of race, and of the white and colored worlds, are not to be regarded as digressions from the history of my life; rather my autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world (Du Bois, Propaganda and War 388). That Du Bois became the inaugural voice of a particular brand of black modernism is therefore no accident. By choosing the heroic-tragic- romantic response to the African American racial dilemma, his was an exercise in what Foucault could have called practices of the self. To this extent, as African American, Du Bois remains perfectly in good company with other American metaphysicians of the self, especially Emerson and Whitman. I suggest that it is, ultimately, as artists of the self that both Du Bois and, in Africa, a Senghor or a Soyinka must be understood. It is also only natural to place such understanding in the contexts of the histories of movements for decolonization of the African continent. The dynamic, constructed, plural, and contested character of the modern African self is, literally, put on display periodically by its agents. I remember from only a few years ago the museum exhibit The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 19451994. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, this show in a span of one year travelled from one city to another: Berlin, Chicago, New York, Johannesburg, and so on. The works 894

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displayed were by some sixty-three artists, mainly Africans and African -descendents, but included non-Africans whose works were inspired from within, as well as diasporically outside, the continent. The artists represented at least fifty-four countries; the genres and media were just as encompassing (painting, cloth, poster, political tract, photography, architecture, music, theater, film and video, and the novel). But, cumulatively, their thesis was blunt: the twentieth century ushered Africa into all sorts of modernity, beyond the political and including the artistic. If, for example, a visitor were looking for primitive arts of Africa, the exhibition could not be more disappointing. Likewise, if ones interests in modern African arts or the continent itself were motivated by a desire for the arts or the peoples non-Western features, The Short Century would also disappoint. This, in short, was not an exhibition for the purist. There was no suggestion of a primordial originality or essential authenticity. Everything was focused on and organized around the idea of the modern, and the layouts of the exhibition and accompanying publications went to great lengths to alert the visitor to this fact. The curators major argument seems to be that even the quest for an exclusive and authentic, purist idea of the African is itself a very modern idea. This was a determined celebration of the African artists self-conscious and ironic steps into, and engagements with, the global processes of both postcolonial modernity and postmodernity. In 1947, the poets Aime Cesaire and Alioune Diop, in collaborations with Jean -Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, launched the Negritude movement, including the art house and the journal Presence Africaine. Their declared aim was to explain the originality of Africa and hasten its appearance in the modern world (Diop 1). Fifty years later, The Short Century could be interpreted as evidence that Negritude was a success. Africa and its arts are original, and, it is argued, this originality is to be found not merely in the sociality of race but fundamentally in a political, postcolonial, and postmodern artistic presence. This perspective unsettled, among other things, the expectation that the modern is only or always the European and white, or claims that the ways of the West in arts and culture to modernity are the only universal ones. On that the position of The Short Century could not be clearer: there are many paths to modernity and modernism. While Africas experience of modernity may parallel, and even mirror, the European adventures, Africas inventiveness and originality in anti-imperial and counter -colonial performances of modernity and the processes of postmodernity have, as Negritude intended, initiated, on the continent and in the Diaspora, multiple sites of the modern and postmodern. In light of the fact that Negritude was formally conceived in 1947, it is hardly surprising that The Short Century also chose the year 1945 as a marker of Africas emergence into artistic modernism. Nor is it remarkable that the curator chose to privilege this short (as opposed to a longer) artistic vision of Africas modern century. Undoubtedly, this is a version of the history of Africas engagements with cultures of anti-racist modernization and postmodernization, willfully refusing to separate the works of the artist from the histories of African politics. The Short Century seems to proudly proclaim its own commitments as social and politically engaged art. And Enwezor offers a kind of justification for the epistemological and aesthetic choice: the exhibition, he writes, seeks to demonstrate that the construction of African modernity in the twentieth century is inextricably bound to the defense and legitimation of all and every sphere of African thought and life. If this is the case, it seemed unnecessary . . . to make an argument that does not take the totality 895

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of this manifestationpolitical, social, economic, identity, culture, etc.into full account (Enwezor 14). If we asked how does art how could itaccount for and legitimate all and every sphere of life (e.g. Is not the modern presupposition against precisely such an idea of the totalization of life from the point of view of art?), the question is only a limited challenge to a grand artistic self-conceptionin fact a self-conceit. The conceit is at the heart of all processes of formationand policingof identity, including racial identities. Today, traditional preoccupation with metaphysics of identity or of arta staple of an earlier generation of African writersseems to trouble very few black artists. In the 1960s, for example, Wole Soyinka developed an elaborate metaphysical explanation about why and how African aesthetics differed from the Euro-American. On one occasion, he compared the European artistic mentality to a steam engine which shunts itself between rather closely spaced suburban stations. At the first station it picks up a ballast of allegory, puffs into the nest emitting a smokescreen on the eternal landscape of nature truths. At the next it loads up with a different species of logs which we shall call naturalist timber, puffs into a halfway stop where it fills up with the synthetic fuel of Surrealism, from which point yet another holistic worldview is glimpsed and asserted through psychedelic smoke. A new consignment of absurdist coke lures [it] into the next station from which it departs giving off no smoke at all, and no fire, until it derails briefly along constructivist tracks and is towed back to the starting point by a neoclassic engine. (Soyinka 123) If the occidental creative rhythm appears like a series of intellectual spasms, the African was supposed to be holistic: organic, of cohesive understanding, built on irreducible truth (Soyinka 123). The Short Century does not so much dispute these characterizations of Europe and Africa as much as it plays with the conceptual oppositions. Its own idea of truth is representational rather than essential. Similarly, where an earlier generation of artists found serious divergence between a traditional African approach to art and the modern commodified version, The Short Century seems to go out of its way to welcome commercial and tourist art. Because it presumes and makes explicit arguments about postmodern and postcolonial African creativity and originality in art, The Short Century says nothing about authenticity. If for Soyinka the goal of authentic traditional art is resolution of plenitude, or the work of art as cosmic struggle (Soyinka 123), The Short Century adopts either a cultivated silence or playfulness in the matter. If, to show how his 1960s view of Western epistemology of dramatic art distorted reality when applied to interpretation of traditional African aesthetics, Soyinka traveled Nigeria in search of art festivals at their appropriate time of year . . . on a farm clearing, rather than at some itinerant, commercial variation on the same theme, The Short Century in a similar African quest but this time for the forty postmodern past aesthetic years travels the opposite direction: it puts on display the idea of tradition as a moving target. And if artistic struggle with chthonic presences is essential to the economic, political, and social welfare of the art in or outside Africa, The Short Century seems to accentuate the aspect of the sources of the struggle known to be all too historical, all too representational, and all too mass-mediated. In fact, if there is any difference between the metaphysical and anti-metaphysical racial sensibilities in modern and postmodern art, the postcolonial African art scenes have, The 896

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Short Century seems to conclude, missed all the metaphysics. Similarly, one notices little or no hermeneutical conflicts of interpretation between traditional African approaches to art and modern European approaches, because there is no suggestion that a traditional approach to art and creativity could not be extracted from Africas own or Europes pre-modern cultures. By giving up the defense of metaphysics from either the Right or the Left, most African artists today allow themselves new ethical spaces to play with the idea of the real.
NOTES 1. My empirical references are largely to the British Empire. I have quite liberally presumed Fergusons Empire and Hochschilds Bury the Chains. 2. Hochschild noted that while Colston proudly declared, Every helpless widow is my wife and her distressed orphans my children, and a large bronze statue of him overlooks Bristols Colston Ave., it was not until one night in 1998 that someone scrawled on its base the name of one of the professions in which he made his fortune: SLAVE TRADE. In other places, the cathedral-like library of All Souls College, Oxford, Hochschild notes, was financed by profits from a slave plantation in Barbados. Likewise, family slave estates in Jamaica paid for the elegant house on Wimpole Street where Elizabeth Barrett would be courted by Robert Browning. William Beckford, with a vast fortune based on slave-grown Jamaican sugar, hosted the most sumptuous banquets since Henry VIII and hired Mozart to give his son piano lessons. John Gladstone, a member of Parliament and the father of a future prime minister, owned Caribbean sugar and coffee estates with well over a thousand slaves (346). 3. It was reported earlier in 2006 that the Church hierarchy approved a resolution apologizing for its slave-holding past (We were directly responsible for what happened). It is not known if the Church also intends to pay descendants of those it enslaved a portion of the interests on the profits the church derived from capital investments on slave trading and slave labor. See <http://news. bbc.co.ukl1/hi/ukl4694896.stm> (accessed May 15, 2006). 4. Once the larger political economy had been forcefully reoriented in a global framework that dislocated the Indian or African economies in favor of the British, it was easy for the natives to grasp the direction in which lay the paths to economic and social mobility. To participate in progress one had to be educated in the colonial systems. The catch, of course, was that without exception the colonial formal education systems were founded or staffed by missionaries, as agents of colonial governments. In any colonial schools conversion to Christianity remained the strictest requirement for admission. 5. Ferguson writes: This was an astonishing volte face . . . After the British first came to Sierra Leone in 1562, it did not take long [for them] to become slave traders. In the subsequent two and a half centuries . . . more than three million Africans were shipped into bondage in British ships [alone]. But then towards the end of the eighteenth century, something changed dramatically; it was almost as if a switch was flicked in the British psyche. Suddenly they started shipping slaves back to West Africa and setting them free. (115116) 6. True to the economic predictionsthat though slave trade might be highly lucrative and slave labor very high-yield in the short term, both were in the long run unsustainable systemseconomies that had been heavily dependent on the trade were forced to adapt or collapse because of the abolition. African kingdoms whose economies slavery had distorted were among the first to feel the change. It is reported that a monarch complained: The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery. Can I, by signing . . . a treaty, change the sentiments of a whole people? (qtd. in Ferguson 115). As early as the end of the Haitian Revolution of 1804, it had also become acknowledged that even the task of holding on to existing plantations in the colonies was politically volatile. See also Davis; Dubois. 7. In Taxation No Tyranny Samuel Johnson asks: How is it that the loudest YELPS for liberty come from the drivers of Negroes?

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8. Du Bois writes: The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife . . . to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American. (Souls 3) 9. Records indicate that in addition to being a medical officer in the Confederate army Cartwright was also a professor of diseases of the Negro, in the Medical Faculty of the University of Louisiana. His cure for drapetomania was simple: amputation of the toes. Studies of Cartwrights medical work may be found in Thomas and Sillen; Guillory. 10. This conversation occurred a few days after Ahmadu Diallo, a West African immigrant, was mistakenly shot forty-one times by two New York Police officers. 11. See Du Boiss self-description in The Conservation of Races.

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