Balbir K. Singh

Communication 597: Reading Race

11 May 2009

Alternative Renderings: Laura Chrisman’s “Journeying to Death”

Or, How to Critique an Academic Heavyweight

How do we read postcoloniality in Chrisman’s sustained and comprehensive critique of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)?

What other spaces does Gilroy’s text occupy in terms of disciplinarity and/or fields?

  • Black British Cultural Studies
  • History/ies
  • Modernity Studies
  • Black Transnational Studies

How does Chrisman’s chapter function in the mode of postcolonial studies? Can postcolonial critique be defined by certain critical functions? For example, Gilroy’s exclusion of various forms of black political and social movement as moments of transformation and transnational solidarity is one of Chrisman’s more prominent points of critique. Is this point, in fact, a way to voice the silenced or Othered in the scope of Gilroy’s argument?

Moreover, Chrisman believes that Gilroy falls into the various tropes of Enlightenment modernity/Western thought that he intends to be critiquing? Think back to her argument regarding Gilroy’s nihilism and utopia as botched forms of Adornian and Benjaminian, or the use of death drive, or his reading of Hegel. In my own reading, this is a central feature to postcolonial theory insofar as it is founded by thinkers such as Said, Bhabha, and Spivak, who make the critique of Western Enlightenment modernity as postcolonial studies’ central project, lending agency and voice to the subaltern, colonial subjects.

  1. Critique: 1990s new left politics and culturalism
  2. Critique: Gilroy’s lack of context of 1990s “intensification of diverse national movements”; Gilroy writes it off as a “generalized ethnicist nationalism”
  3. Chrisman’s rendering of BA’s goals: contesting nationalism, intervening in conversations around modernity; Critique: slavery as fundamental to modernity, but what about racial terror?
  4. Critique: Gilroy’s two spheres of terminology in “frozen, almost mysterious association”; Chrisman reads this as an academic “predilection for paradox”
  5. Critique: overarching critique of Gilroy:
    “Gilroy’s formulations become necessarily self-enclosed, hermetically sealed off, resistant to dialogism, dialectical transformation and cross-fertalisation.”
  6. Critique: ‘wage labour’ with ‘labour’; polarization of work and recreation

Alternative: anything but an antimony between work and play in the music, rather a strong affinity among all the activities; how and why such a linguistic interchangeability between spheres can occur

  1. Critique: Gilroy’s anti-economicist approach as “precluding dialectical relations between blackness and labour in expressive cultures”

Alternative: retaining the utility of economic analysis in “conceptualizing black cultural productions”; expansion of class conceptualization; same expansion of the analysis of the nation-state

  1. Critique: denunciation of racialist cultural nationalism rests on a fatalism, overlooking “contested constructions of British nationness and nationalism”, thus replicating cultural determinism

Alternative: comparative analysis of languages and practices of British nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism

  1. Critique: Gilroy’s notion of utopia is aligned only with “outer-national cultural impulses” and an “expression of a fundamentally migratory identity”; Gilroy does not take seriously enough the force of utopianism within Afrocentrism

Alternative: find ways to engage with Afrocentrism, look at it as a symptom, not a cause; counter Afrocentric nationalism by emphasizing “intellectual, political, and cultural cross-fertalisation of black American with the Caribbean…”; counter racial purism of Afrocentrism by emphasizing/exploring mixed race intellectuals and their cultural texts

  1. Critique: Gilroy’s exclusion of black colonialism (to a smaller extent); Gilroy’s conceptualization of the black Atlantic making totalising claims for itself (to a large extent); slavery accorded a primacy which colonialism is not, primacy of deconstructing Enlightenment modernity
  2. Critique: Gilroy’s equation of black art with black social movement; black art as totality; accords no “transfigurative potential” to black political activity

Alternative: Realise the transformational possibility of black political activity

  1. Critique: Gilroy’s manipulation of Douglass’s testimony as an example of the death drive; conflating a “willingness to risk death in a positive orientation, a desire for death”
  2. Critique: Gilroy’s use of nihilism as part of slave cultures; institution of slavery as form of racial terror as rational or based in irrationality?

Alternative: Frankfurt school’s historical-dialectical analysis

  1. Critique: Performance of scientific rationality by slaves not realized by Gilroy; examples pose problems to Gilroy’s previous assertion that slave identity is “opposed to…rational calculation of modern Western thinking”

Alternative(s): Consider the legacy of industrial sabotage; pronounce aesthetics alongside expressive pain and death; black and Jewish humour parallels as response to racial terror and a means of resistance

Laura Chrisman:University of Washington

From UW English: I analyze the cultures of imperialism and of anti-colonialist resistance, and have a particular interest in South Africa. I am also very interested in black Atlantic and black diaspora studies. My current interdisciplinary book project is provisionally titled Nationalism, Modernity and Transnationalism in African Intellectuals. The book focuses on black South African nationalists, and their links with African-American intellectuals of the early 20th century.

Paul Gilroy: London School of Economics; Yale University: Paul Gilroy is the first holder of the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory. His intellectual background is multi-disciplinary and he has extensive interests in literature, art, music and cultural history as well as in social science. He is best known for his work on racism, nationalism and ethnicity and his original approach to the history of the African diaspora into the western hemisphere.