In the early Seventies, some Maharashtrian Dalits, drawing inspiration from the Black Panthers, founded a radical group known as the Dalit Panthers. A little later Sharadkumar Limbale did his PhD on the connection between the Dalit movement and the struggle of the African American people. Previously, no such connection was thought to exist. It was Socialists- like JP Narayan (who had sold hair straightener to 'Negroes' when a student in the USA)- who were chummy with Leftists like Padmore.
The always hilarious Gayatri Spivak has suddenly decided she is an expert on Pan-Africanism- which is simply the notion of a free and united Africa rising up by the efforts of African people regardless of cultural or geographic differences.
Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism is different from other versions.
All versions of anything at all are different from other versions.
One might focus on four typical but different examples, always reminding oneself that this is by no means an exhaustive taxonomy: Flora Shaw Lady Lugard,
She was an Imperialist, not a Pan-Africanist. She did support Britain's taking over territory in South Africa claimed by Portugal, but wasn't so crazy as to suggest Britain should chuck out other European colonial powers and unite the whole continent under their own suzerainty. However, she had no objection to railways and steamers etc. cross-crossing the continent.
One could say that Mary Kingsley, a travel writer who expressed admiration for traditional African society had some influence on Pan Africanism. Mary Slessor, a missionary, too had gained fame by showing how certain superstitious practices e.g. the killing of twins, could be eradicated by working with the local community.
Edmund Blyden,
who was a Pan-Africanist endorsing the return of African-Americans to their motherland. He also thought highly of Islam. Blyden is generally considered the father of Pan Africanism. Du Bois was respectful to the older man but his own Sociological research led him to see a bright future for his people in America's industrial cities. He did not favor a return to Africa.
Blyden, being from the West Indies, was often at odds with the Liberian ruling elite who didn't think they themselves should become more 'African' or accord equal rights to the indigenous majority. He argued for a British protectorate over Liberia and was forced into exile by the Americo-Liberians who were determined to hang on to their independence.
Marcus Garvey, and George Padmore.
like Blyden, both were West Indian. The former was denounced by Randolph and Du Bois for squandering money collected for his grandiose projects and for his connection to the Ku Klux Klan. He may be considered the pioneer of Black Anti-Semitism in the USA. Malcolm X's father had been an organizer for Garvey's outfit.
Padmore was a Communist who broke with the Kremlin after it sought to ally with Britain and France, both of which had colonies in Africa, in view of Hitler's rising power.
It might appear that Du Bois followed Padmore's trajectory in that he moved to Ghana and joined the Communist party at the end of his life. However, by then Du Bois was very old and under the influence of his more Left wing wife.
Padmore had managed to smuggle some African leaders to Moscow by the end of the Nineteen Twenties. However, Kenyatta and Albert Nzulu became disillusioned with Communism. Moses Kotane however stuck with the party and played a big role in the ANC. In the Sixties, there was some debate as to whether there would be a distinctive African path to Socialism. However, the problem of falling terms of trade for agricultural commodities meant that the Soviet style industrialization would be difficult to finance. This also meant there would be a 'brain drain' as the indigenous economy could not absorb an expanding educated and professional class. They were welcomed by the West where they did well.
Flora Shaw invoked Islamic pan-Africanism combined with racism against the Bantu,
No she didn't. Wilhelm Bleek had introduced the notion of Bantu languages and suggested that the Bantus had displaced the 'Bushmen'. But similarities in African languages had been noticed even in the Seventeenth century. This had nothing whatsoever to do with 'Islamic pan-Africanism' which did not exist.
Blyden and Marcus Garvey incorporated it within the Pan-African argument of diasporic African resettlement within Africa, in quite different ways.
Blyden was pro-British. Garvey wasn't at all. The problem was that the 'diaspora' didn't really want to go back to Africa. The place was a shithole. Don't go there. You will get a horrible disease and die quickly.
Blyden had been the Liberian envoy to the States while, at a later time, Du Bois would be Coolidge's envoy to Liberia. It was in Blyden's interest to present his country as attractive. Du Bois however couldn't pretend the place was a paradise. By then there were reports of how the African American elite were exploiting the fuck out of the natives- to whom they denied the vote.
Du Bois, by contrast, connected Pan-Africanism to the decolonization of all African nation-states,
as did all Black or Communist Pan-Africanists.
and went further to include full international decolonization in that connection.
Blyden died in 1912. Du Bois died in 1963. The world had greatly changed over the previous five decades.
Du Bois is generally seen as the father of Pan-Africanism.
No. Blyden is. He was 36 years older than Du Bois. His big book 'Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race' came out in 1887 when Du Bois was 19.
Blyden's problem was that even President Barclay, a West Indian, had to side with the American-Liberians against the native people- the Kru- whom the elite wanted to tax and 'civilize' by banning polygamy.
Blyden wrote to the British under-secretary for the colonies describing the American-Liberals as being as tyrannical as the Burmese King Theebaw. He wanted a 'veiled protectorate' of the sort the British had established in Egypt. Tellingly, he compared the American Liberians to the Whites in South Africa. The problem was, the Brits had been taught a bitter lesson by the Boer War. They backed down in the face of united resistance by the Americo-Liberians. Blyden's pension was taken away and he died in exile.
I suppose you could compare Ambedkar to Blyden in that he wanted the British to act as an umpire to prevent the upper class elite tyrannizing over the indigenous workers and peasants.
But it is also well-known that it had its origin in Trinidad, in the risk-taking efforts of a diasporic in Britain, Henry Sylvester -Williams
who was the same age as Du Bois. However it took him some time to qualify as a barrister and thus make his mark.
by name, who focused on all Blacks colonized by Britain. Henry Sylvester-Williams organized the Pan-African Association in 1897 and also organized the first International Conference, in London, in 1900, where Du Bois was a guest
Actually, two Haitians played a leading role. One was an ADC to the Ethiopian Emperor.
and began expanding the color line to all colonized countries.
No. Don't be silly. Du Bois had said the 'color line' would be one of the defining issues of the twentieth century. Sylvester-Williams did emigrate to South Africa to practice as a barrister for a couple of years. Sadly, he died at the young age of 42.
Sylvester-Williams died in 1911 and the connection of Pan-Africanism with the British Commonwealth did not remain ideologically foregrounded, although it remained pre-comprehended in the work of C.L.R. James and George Padmore.
Nonsense! Sylvester-Williams had joined the Fabians and been elected a councilor in Marylebone. The idea was that even the non-settler colonies would move towards being self-garrisoning and self-administering in a gradual manner. The 'Pan-African' aspect had to do with promoting an indigenous language- e.g. Swahili- so as to permit the integration of Francophone states into a United African Republic.
To retrieve Du Bois’s track to Pan-Africanism, we must relate it to the activist scholarship of George Padmore (1903-59) who, as a younger Trinidadian, was no doubt touched, however indirectly, by Sylvester-Williams’s opening of seven Pan-African centers in Trinidad.
Du Bois was much older than Padmore. By the time the latter, with backing from the Kremlin, set up his Trade Union for 'negro workers', Du Bois was in his sixties. He appreciated the courage the Communists could show but kept them at a distance. This only changed after his second marriage in 1951.
Even if we consider only Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? (Padmore 1956),
Which was actually quite helpful. American leaders- e.g. Nixon and Kennedy could be friendly with Tom Mboya when he visited in 1959. Sadly, Du Bois had gone in the other direction- but he was very very old and people blamed his wife.
we get a detailed sense of the status of Pan-Africanism in the historically differentiated nation-states of the entire African continent.
Actually, we get the sense that Africa's real problems would begin after Africans took over. After all, Africans had been busy selling each other into slavery for hundreds of years.
Indeed, much of what Padmore locates as problems are relevant to the continent today. His work gives us a sense of the importance of constitutionality, and presents the manifestoes of each of the Congresses. For the purposes of this essay, what is notable is that within each Manifesto, forwarded to colonial governments as a gesture of resistance, Gandhian principles are tabulated as the guiding principle of each Congress.
In other words, they were useless. Still, in 1952, Nkrumah had become Prime Minister of the Gold Coast and negotiations for the formation of Ghana were going well. Had Nkrumah listened to Arthur Lewis and followed sensible economic policies, perhaps a 'Social Democratic' Pan-Africanism would have taken off. As things were, most newly independent countries did join regional trading blocks. The East African Community is an example. It was founded in 1967 but collapsed ten years later. It was revived some twenty five years ago.
In 1946, on the eve of Indian Independence, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a member of the Viceroy’s legal council, and a critic of Gandhi because of Gandhi’s caste-Hindu subject-position of “tolerance,” wrote Du Bois, asking him about the possibility of an African-American petition to the UN, hoping to launch such a petition from the untouchables of India.
Ambedkar hoped that the Americans or the UN might replace the Brits. His pal, J.N Mandal was more foolish yet. He joined hands with Jinnah- becoming his law minister as Ambedkar was Nehru's law minister- but soon had to run away to India.
Incidentally, Ambedkar married a Brahmin woman. He was wrong when he said there was no escape from untouchability. Had he paid a little money to a priest- or joined the Arya Samaj- he could have elevated himself to the rank of Brahmin. He didn't bother, choosing to become a Boddhisattva himself.
Du Bois wrote back, saying he knew about untouchability, but the conversation did not go any further, for the attempt to put together such a petition died in the UN. There is now a strong movement to bring African-American struggles together with the largely South Indian
Mayawati was C.M of the biggest Indian state. It is in North India. Nobody told Spivak. Sad.
(although many Dalit intellectuals are located in well-known North Indian universities) Dalit strike against caste prejudice.
Spivak is Bengali. She doesn't know that high caste Bengali Marxist merrily massacred Dalits at Marichjhapi.
This is a good effort,
It is stupid shite. Obama or Kamala aren't going to bother with it.
but we also need to remember that post-colonialism and Pan-Africanism, efforts at joining struggles, were anterior to the kind of class-specific collaborations that globality produces today.
There are no such collaborations. Obama didn't enlist support from Mayawati or vice versa. Also, race isn't 'class-specific'.
I believe that Du Bois did not go any further with Ambedkar because
the fellow was useless. It was obvious that Ambedkar had been propped up by the Brits. His political career would not long outlast their departure- unless he had an unexpected talent for sycophancy.
his understanding of Pan-Africanism, leading to the visionary world without colonialism,
sadly, that world wasn't 'visionary' at all.
did not offer him an opportunity to get into struggles interior to colonized space.
Du Bois wasn't struggling against colonialism. He didn't say that the White and Black man should fuck off back where they came from. He was the leader of a minority which did have some votes and economic power and there were periods when he appeared to be quite effective.
Du Bois’s novel, The Dark Princess, exoticizes a “noble” India, that is even Aryanist — Brahminism, Buddhism, and Islam mixed up in the stylized spectacular way of a romance that asks the reader to remember A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
No. It's a nice romance which draws on Du Bois's own fond memories of studying in Germany. The hero is an African American Doctor who has a kid with a politically radical Indian princess. His son could be a Maharaja or something of that sort. Du Bois may have been a sociologist but he wrote well and didn't want to bore his readers to death. At a later point there was an African American musician on TV who called himself Korla Pandit. Nothing wrong in that at all. I myself pretended to be Beyonce's daughter when I attempted to enter the Miss Teen Tamil Nadu contest.
It reflects the desire to overcome the class-specific problem of access to the subaltern but does not have the resources to imagine a plausible fulfillment.
Nope. Du Bois hoped to make some money by writing a readable book. Back then everybody had access to the very poor. It wasn't till some Indians had escaped India that they started to pretend that it was very difficult to 'access' their own relatives.
The failed encounter between Du Bois and Ambedkar can be read as a stood-up date or faux-bond. Chandler would no doubt dizzyingly theorize Derrida’s Ja ou le faux-bond where the “yes” is staged as a stood up date between plan and performance.
No. There was no plan and no performance. Also, Ambedkar didn't really want to fuck Du Bois.
I will follow Chandler’s lead as I imagine it and note that because of this anaclitic reading
Ambedkar was emotionally dependent on Du Bois. He would often telegram Girija Shankar Bajpai to ask if Du Bois wanted him to be his his date to the prom.
of “yes,” Derrida urges in that early piece – in order constantly to make the appointment happen? — that we must (il faut – noting the “fault” (faut) line written into the French “must” [il faut] – suggesting that we will always not quite make it while doing what we must – the effort continues indefinitely as the generations change):
Ambedkar and Du Bois weren't utterly useless tossers. They did what they could when the going was good. But their day was over. One ended up in Ghana- which Nkrumah would ruin- the other became a fucking Buddhist.
fight… for a massive transformation of the apparatuses. . . work in several directions, in several rhythms… In order to hold these two unequal necessities together and differentiate systematically a (“theoretical” and “political”) practice, a general upheaval imposes itself: not only as a theoretical or practical imperative, but already as a proceeding under way, one which invests, envelops, overflows us in an unequal fashion. (Derrida 1995, 58-59)
Derrida achieved nothing in politics. Communism in France collapsed all on its own.
That is what a “yes” is like, always a missed date
if you look like Spivak- I suppose so. Fuck. I do look like Spivak. No wonder Ambedkar refused to be my date at the prom.
working at externally generated conjunctural imperatives that change unendingly and must be differentiated as theory and politics.
Neither of which these nutters are actually engaged in.
Theory and politics are the practices involved here, apposite to the Du Bois-Ambedkar situation.
There was no 'Du Bois-Ambedkar' situation. The African American 'talented tenth' liked high caste Hindus. They didn't like low class darkies.
In the space between the appointment and the indefinitely prolonged “missing it,”
they didn't make a date or an appointment. African Americans or Afro-Caribbeans didn't give a fuck about the Kru or the Dalits or their own under-class.
unrolls the historial (the possibility of study as temporal sequence) – not always historiographed (organized into official history) – as it has not been in this particular case.
Why isn't there a Netflix series on the Du Bois/Ambedkar romance? The episode where they have a threesome with Queen Victoria could have won an Emmy.
Both pre-digital and digital efforts at joining struggles are helped when there is a certain degree of class-continuity on both sides. This usually relates to the leadership of the struggles. In Du Bois’s library is a book on Gandhi put together on Gandhi’s 75th birthday, hand-dedicated to Du Bois by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.
Du Bois was a journalist and could give the book publicity.
These are his connections, the connections enjoyed by Joseph Appiah, or Kofi Awoonor.
Neither were important from the Indian point of view. The fact is Nkrumah had written to the British PM asking him not to help India in 1962 when the Chinese attacked. Nobody in India shed a tear for Nkrumah when his own people kicked him out.
Du Bois’s particular friend is Lala Lajpat Rai. His sources for Dark Princess are
his own life, including his sojourn in Germany.
Rai and perhaps Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar,
both of whom were Princesses. Du Bois got them pregnant. Sadly, he could not get Ambedkar pregnant because he was not able to invite him to the prom.
a Cornell PhD who taught at my own university (University of Calcutta) and wrote books among which is a History of Caste in India : Evidence of the Laws of Manu on the Social Conditions in India during the Third Century A.D. Interpreted and Examined : With an Appendix on Radical Defects of Ethnology.[4]
Ketkar married a German Jew.
Ketkar, like Ambedkar in the graduate paper I cite below, concentrates on marriage rules – caste is a way of helping preserve social order through the patriarchal manipulation of gendering.
Spivak's daddy chopped off her dick thus forcing her to be gendered as female.
Although Du Bois is of course deeply aware of rape and miscegenation,
he was aware that women could abort or abandon unwanted babies.
his use of “caste”
Du Bois thought educational segregation would render African Americans a permanent under-class or lower caste. He saw how the American high school and College was enabling immigrants from Europe to rise rapidly from generation to generation.
is much closer to the self-convinced hierarchy half-mockingly described in Marx’s description of so-called primitive accumulation.
'Long, long ago there were on one side a diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite and on the other lazy, ragged characters who blew off all they had and more. The legend of the theological Fall of Man may tell us how man came to be cursed to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow; the history of the economic Fall of Man reveals to us how there were people who did not need this at all. Same difference. So it came to pass, that the former accumulated wealth, and the latter finally had nothing to sell but their own skins. And from this Fall dates the poverty of the great masses, that up to now, despite all their labor, have nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few, that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to labor. (Marx 1977, 1:873)
But this happens over the course of a decade. The thrifty, diligent, rational, risk-taker rises far above the drunken spendthrift within a few years. Plenty of aristocrats had squandered their ancestral fortunes and pauperized themselves. Moreover, a nation unable to defend itself might be enslaved by a foreign power.
This is something like caste, if you like.
No. People from the aristocratic caste may be paupers because an improvident ancestor squandered the family fortune. By contrast, people from the lowliest families may become rich and honored thanks to their own thrift, intelligence or enterprise.
Some people are just not good enough, others, superior to them, must “help” them by letting them serve. That is the story that justifies inequality.
Justifications don't matter. Causation does. Do stupid shit and you may end up very poor. Do sensible things and you and yours may rise up decade by decade, generation by generation.
But that is not the flesh of the three thousand castes (with subcastes) among the Hindus.
The 'flesh' is endogamy. If arranged marriages are no longer possible, this system collapses.
The natural-inequality story is a very general analogy for a hierarchy that is neither race nor class. It is in this sense that Du Bois uses the phrase “color caste” in the Black Flame Trilogy.
No. America had a 'one drop' rule. This affected educational, employment and housing outcomes.
(Rai’s The United States of America: A Hindu’s Impressions is a hardly disguised orientalist-nationalist claim that the caste-system works better than U.S. race-classism.)
Rai was aware that Mexico had taken a different path and, at that time, appeared to be more politically progressive. Obviously, he could not say anything in the social realm which was indigenous to India was superior because India was being ruled by a small number of British officials.
These are broadly class-continuous connections. The class-continuity in the case of Du Bois-Ambedkar is even stronger, Harvard-Columbia-London School of Economics; top administrator and world-class intellectual; neither of them subaltern by birth — Du Bois was in the Black middle class,
his father deserted the family. His Mum had to work for a living. He received scholarships because his family could not afford to pay tuition fees.
and Ambedkar’s father was a Subehdar in the Army
which, back then, was lower than a British subaltern (i.e. second lieutenant). His daddy would have saluted Churchill (who came to India as a subaltern) rather than the other way around.
(although they did of course both suffer from race/caste discrimination when they stepped out into mixed territory).
Things were worse for Ambedkar in rural areas or Princely States.
Perhaps the most important of all the connectivities is that Ambedkar wore his Brahmin teacher’s surname
this was irrelevant. If your surname indicates geographical origin, nobody can tell if you are of high or low class.
and, as Du Bois shows us in his paternal genealogy, the 17th century Chretien Du Bois was white.
So were closer paternal ancestors.
I can think that they quietly acknowledged complicity and allowed their practice to be stronger, not speaking for but coming up against what is not their class origin, in the name of constitutionality.
Nonsense! Neither said they had been complicit in anything done against their own people. On the other hand, Spivak was complicit in her Daddy's chopping off her penis because she continually nagged him to just gender her female already.
This is where Chandler’s reading of Du Bois’s biography of John Brown as an “African American,” the abolitionist white man who gave his life for the “Negro,” is superb.
Du Bois does not show John Brown as an African American though, like his father, he was committed to the abolitionist cause.
Du Bois’s hero, Manuel Mansart, puts it more simply in a bit of free indirect discourse in The Ordeal of Mansart:
'The students talked frankly about white people in the surrounding world; they did not like them; they did not trust them. There were always exceptions, and favorite white teachers like Spence and Freiburg were in some subtle, unexplained way incorporated into their own black race — a method all the easier since they too, suffered under the Southern white world’s ostracism and persecution. (Du Bois 1959, 125-6)
But they were helpless. John Brown wasn't.
(The connections being insisted upon along the conference circuit today are
stupid shit if the pedants concerned teach stupid shit
a version of global “simultaneity,” used to produce thinkers organic to the networking ideology of global capital.)
Did you know that when you make a phone call, you are being forced to accept global capital's vision of 'simultaneity'? That's also why you can't chat on the phone with Queen Victoria.
Internal to the colonized space, Ambedkar is utterly justified in writing of Gandhi, in the preface to the 2nd edition of The Annihilation of Caste: “. . . to many a Hindu he is an oracle, so great that when he opens his lips it is expected that the argument must close and no dog must bark. [4:] But the world owes much to rebels who would dare to argue in the face of the pontiff and insist that he is not infallible.” Gandhi’s erratic racism record in South Africa is now well documented.
Whites and Asians will soon have to flee the place. But the smarter Blacks are already doing so.
And Pan-Africanism, as Padmore shows us, was heart and soul committed to Gandhi’s declared politics in India.
He was lying in a good cause. He knew very well that there had been and would be violent struggles in some places. That's why, his pal, Kenyatta had been in jail since 1952.
Du Bois marked out all the strike-related passages in the Gandhi volume in his library that I have pointed at above.
Gandhi's first strike in South Africa had been financed by the Tatas. Money is the true meaning of 'non-violence'.
The connection, then, between parts joining struggles with caste/class-continuity, is generally metonymic, the leaders and the group focusing on an issue and its ramifications, leaving other items – sometimes perhaps potentially divisive – out of bounds while the struggle is celebrated.
No. You to be 'all things to all men'. The difficulty lies in getting the timing right. You have to know when to launch the agitation and when to call it off- this generally happens when the thing is running out of steam. Gandhi learned this lesson in South Africa. After a few weeks in jail, he did a deal with Smuts so as to regain his freedom. Some Indians thought he had taken a bribe and beat the shit out of him. The lesson here was spend at least a year in jail after each agitation.
In the case of the brief exchange between Du Bois and Ambedkar, class-continuity was the first enabler.
Lajpat Rai was the enabler. He wanted to recruit Ambedkar who politely but firmly refused. Du Bois admired Rai because he spent a lot of time in jail and was finally killed by the police while leading a protest. Ambedkar got on fine with the Brits.
It was the further metonymic obligation – as subjects against race and caste respectively — that backfired because they were both temperamentally and circumstantially in an amphibolic relationship with identitarianism; for both of them, identitarian thinking and acting both built and broke. (Examples are too pervasive to cite.)
No. Du Bois saw Ambedkar in the same way as Nehru. The guy was a stooge for the Brits. Churchill could wax very eloquent about the sufferings of the untouchables.
“I have suffered from racism as you from casteism” did not catch fire, because Du Bois’s anti-colonial connections were with the nationalist dominant.
Du Bois was against Whites ruling over Blacks. Ambedkar preferred White rule. He was like Blyden in that respect.
Du Bois had worked to take Africanity beyond the unique separator of enslavement.
Du Bois knew that Africans sold Africans to Europeans and Arabs.
He took into account, as indeed did Marx, that in colonialism, slavery became an instrument (however out of sync) of the self-determination of capital.
No. Du Bois knew that slavery existed before there was any capitalism to speak of.
This allowed him to write it into the world-historical discourse of Marxism, rewriting the color line, by way of colonialism, into brown, red, and yellow.
No. Du Bois understood that the Left could be a useful source of support but that African-Americans needed to remain in control of their own destiny. This meant they should take a deal offered them by Republicans backed by New England's Capital.
His efforts at making these connections were in sustained evolution, and found literary expression in the Black Flame trilogy. Reading and writing in prison, Antonio Gramsci had tried to understand the Sards (natives of Sardinia, Gramsci’s birthplace) as serfs, from Rome to the 20th century, writing in Book 25 of his prison journals.
Serfdom had been abolished in Sardinia in 1771.
Ambedkar, as a practical politician who had earned his way to the top in a postcolonial situation,
No he fell back to the bottom after India held its first general election under universal suffrage. His mistake was to resign as Law Minister over Parliament's failure to pass the Hindu Code. But, it was his pal, JN Mandal's running away from Pakistan which sealed his fate. Otherwise, India would have had to keep him on as Law Minister.
asked for a separate electorate for the untouchables (and failed, of course).
Muslims lost those separate electorates after Independence. The same thing would have happened to the Dalits.
One must note these contextual imperatives as one equalizes.
Spivak has exhibited no 'contextual imperatives'.
As a youthful graduate student, Ambedkar, in a 1916 essay written for a graduate seminar, was rewriting caste into reproductive heteronormativity – to urge that caste was constituted by the difference in the treatment of surplus-women and surplus-men produced by enforced endogamy —
There were no surplus women. India had polygamy- not to mention prostitution. Ambedkar denied a racial component to Caste. He though defeated polities had given rise to a heterogenous class of 'broken men' (i.e. one's bereft off powerful clan or tribe-based protection) who were assimilated at the bottom level by regionally dominant clans or tribes.
and finally, studying the greatest tools of generalization, as a member of the group that was not allowed to generalize, into the world-historical discourse of constitutionality.
There is no such discourse. America had a Constitution. This wasn't much help to the African American or the First Nations.
This final self-staging was shared by the two,
No. Ambedkar was a lawyer. Du Bois wasn't.
but it was this very thing that did not allow Du Bois to check out the interior color-lines (so to speak) of the progressive bourgeoisie that could unite to call for an end to colonialism.
There were people and political parties which did so. The problem was that the alternative to colonialism might be occupation by a more ruthless enemy. American soldiers helped defend India and expel the Japanese from South East Asia. When China attacked India, Kennedy offered military aid to Nehru.
(Let us once again remember Padmore’s documentation of the intimate connection between Pan-Africanism and Gandhianism.)
But let us also remember that Padmore was being disingenuous in a good cause.
It was Columbia to Harvard, as it were, not a commerce between individual ethnocultures.
Neither Columbia nor Harvard mattered to the 'barristocrats' who dominated the Indian Independence movement. Gandhi, it must be said, was an international celebrity and thus of interest to African Americans. But they were aware that in South Africa he had kept his struggle separate from that of the 'Coloreds'. Indeed, he also abandoned his Chinese allies.
Allison Powers has written on Du Bois’s ferocious critique of U. S. “democratic” travesty of constitutionality (2014: 106-125). I cannot reproduce her complex argument here.
They are crazy. The plain fact is that America has dual sovereignty. If the Supreme Court- as is currently happening- backs 'States' Rights' then that's what American 'constitutionality' endorses even if Capitalism doesn't like it.
I can only point out that she clearly shows that Du Bois’s argument against the “constitution fetich [sic]” is against the fetishization of the original American constitution (Du Bois 1935: 267f).
Because, at that time, it looked anti-FDR and thus anti-progressive. But FDR could pack the Bench if he kept getting re-elected. That's why the two term limit was imposed.
Her conclusion recognizes that Du Bois does not offer a solution to the problem of access to constitutionality but rather quotes “the slight gesture” invoked on the last page. That poetic signal by Du Bois points at the development of imaginative flexibility that comes with what I have elsewhere called “an aesthetic education.” I am not sure that this is a “failure.”
In politics, if you can't get anything you want done, then you are a failure even if you are a great aesthete.
When she contrasts Du Bois and Ambedkar, she needs to recognize that Ambedkar was framing a constitution,
he dismissed his contribution as 'hack work'. Two thirds of the Constitution is taken from the British 1935 Act.
whereas Du Bois was fighting a famously fetishized one
he didn't fight the constitution. He wasn't crazy.
that continues to be fetishized today, for race- and gun-control. Of course Ambedkar finally claimed that he had failed in his task and perhaps this too can allow us to think them together.
Ambedkar, till about the early Nineties, was dismissed in India as a British stooge.
Anupama Rao correctly notices that Ambedkar’s “attempt to redress the inequities [of caste] through political means was at some level an impossible project that emphasized the contradiction between caste and democracy, rather than resolving it” (Rao 2009: 157).
Ambedkar did help take affirmative action away from Muslim Dalits. He sought to advance his own people. Incidentally, Buddhist Dalits were excluded from reservations at the time when he embraced that religion. One reason he wanted a 'sun-set' clause on affirmative action was because he knew that the political leadership of higher Dalit castes- e.g. Mahars and Jatavs- would be challenged by 'maha-dalits' who resented their monopoly over the benefits of affirmative action.
There is a comparable (though not identical) contradiction between race and democracy.
No there isn't. That's why Obama could become POTUS
This is part of the fact that the rational abstractions of the political and the juridico-legal must always be bound to the textuality of life.
Life isn't 'textual'. Even frogs and butterflies live.
The constitutional subject, uniting our two protagonists, is never achieved – keeping open the historiality of the missed date – not yet historiographed, for race or caste.
Ambedkar didn't get to be Du Bois's prom date. Sad.
It is to Du Bois’s phrase “prejudice made flesh” that attention must here be drawn (1935: 323).
Why? It is obvious that a bigot is 'prejudice made flesh'.
It is the fleshliness of the gendered episteme of the racialized and the fleshliness of the indefinitely heteronomous gendered episteme of the casted that cannot be generalized or analogized.
Yes it can- though there is no fucking point doing so.
(I try to norm it at the bottom by teaching democracy as “other people” rather than “my rights” to the poorest of the poor.
Spivak is lying. Her schools in India are shit.
But that too is not generalizable.) This is part of the challenge of the raced universal or the casted universal of the constitutional subject.
When Spivak came to the US, she, like Kamala's mother, would have been classed as 'Caucasian'. This was because Indians had names like Pocahontas and liked scalping people.
Always working toward an impossible appointment between flesh and the law.
If your flesh does not turn up in Court at the assigned time, you may be sent to jail. Buy a watch. Keeping appointments will become easy.
The commerce between Orientalized and claimed ethnocultures has apparently expanded considerably, accompanying the expansion of diasporas, in the U.S. as a direct consequence of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system based on national origins that had been U. S. immigration policy since the 1920s; supplemented by the global accessibility enhanced by the digital.
Asians and Africans who get to the States want their kids to do STEM subjects or gain professional qualifications. They don't want them to study useless shite.
Without deep language learning
which Spivak is incapable of
and awareness of cognitive damage resulting from the generalized exercise of millennial pre-colonial ethnocultural structures of power,
Spivak's brain was damaged by the fact that she didn't have a dick and had to sit down to pee
connected-struggle efforts are good against racism but not against its legitimation by reversal, and do not support or engage with the slow and persistent work for building subaltern agency.
Spivak has built nothing of the sort. Mayawati has.
The fleshliness of the diasporic claiming conference-culture is imagined national-origin rather than active caste-subjectivity at the bottom.
Unless it isn't. There are Dalit organizations in the States.
From his handwritten notes in the pages of the African language related books in the core collection (now neglected and open – literally, in unlocked cabinets in a small unlocked room – to imminent destruction and disappearance) Du Bois took with him to Ghana in his nineties, his awareness of the need to achieve cognitive continuity is impressive for any age.
Did you know that if you don't have cognitive continuity you might end up trying to bite your own head off?
For he imagined the need to achieve that continuity, but did not deny its impossibility.
More particularly after you die.
The effort is restricted to minute handwritten marginalia.
as opposed to a big fat turd.
Here a word to Dalit friends in the academy and the global cultural sphere: we must be able to admit that historical crimes damage the cognitive machine.
No we mustn't. Otherwise nobody will hire female Dalits as Professors because their brains will not be able to work properly.
Exceptional subalterns and/or class-empowered academic members of Dalit struggles do not represent those who remain at the bottom.
They may do. They could set up Trade Unions or other such organizations to help 'those at the bottom'.
Vanguardist struggles do not necessarily consolidate a future.
They may do if they are carried out in a sensible manner. What is not sensible is to say 'my brain has been buggered to buggery because I don't have a dick and my ancestors were ruled by foreigners'.
In Talking to Du Bois, I have tried to show that certain of Du Bois’s texts stage an inability to imagine the subaltern episteme – stateless social groups on the fringe of history – to remind ourselves of Gramsci’s formula – as they prepare to step into citizenship.
It is easy to imagine that such people may be too busy trying to bite off their own heads to become good citizens.
But this inability cannot be imagined or staged in the case of the interiority of the post-colonial.
Sure it can. Just say 'dem darkies are bound to revert to cannibalism. Get your money out of that shithole.'
Lumumba and Fanon, “the tall one and the short,” both of whom came to the 1958 All-African People’s Congress, the first Congress on African space, need to be remembered here.
Fanon's Martinique, very sensibly, decided to remain French. Lumumba's Congo turned to shit.
They were both deeply aware of the internal ethnic problems of the post-colonial nation, and Lumumba was killed by it, albeit with the collusion of the CIA. We need also to remember that Ambedkar could not imagine Palestine.
Sure he could. He knew that Gandhi & Co wanted the Jews and the Brits out of there.
He wrote small interventions comparing the image between slavery and untouchability.
He knew the Brits had got rid of slavery (except bonded labor) but had doubled down on untouchability by excluding his own Mahars from recruitment into the Army.
This is for ourselves to be aware that there are deep historical limitations to the flexibility of our own identities.
Which is why you should not pretend to be Chairman Xi more particularly if you happen to be in Beijing.
This inability to imagine the interiority of a class-fixed postcolonial does not stop “caste” from being a useful word for the Abolitionists through to Pan-Africanism – to describe all the divisions that are not quite race or class, with internal “keep out” rules.
African Americans often complained that they had their own 'brown paper bag' test. If you were darker than that, you might be considered inferior more particularly if you were female. Du Bois's second wife was very fair skinned.
Padmore certainly uses it in many crucial passages, as does Du Bois.
Why? The word was Portuguese or Spanish and thus unlikely to appeal to WASPs.
As I have indicated above, it is a convenient abstraction but cannot grasp the ungeneralizable fleshliness that belongs to the casted subaltern.
Sure it can. In India you can get a caste certificate so as to qualify for various benefits.
The most crucial use of “caste” by Du Bois is in his 1948 rejection of the “talented 10th”– the idea that the most intelligent among African-Americans should take it into their hands to help the rest:
he didn't really turn against it. His new idea was the 'guiding hundredth' which was some some sort of selfless rainbow coalition of minorities. At a later point, his son would claim that he had gone back on his elitist ideas. By then, it was athletes and pop-stars, not professors, who were most influential.
T'urn now to that complex of social problems, which surrounds and conditions our life, and which we call more or less vaguely, the Negro Problem. It is clear that in 1900, American Negroes were an inferior caste, were frequently lynched and mobbed, widely disfranchised, and usually segregated in the main areas of life. As student and worker at that time, I looked upon them and saw salvation through intelligent leadership; as I said, through a “Talented Tenth.” And for this intelligence, I argued, we needed college-trained men. Therefore, I stressed college and higher training. For these men with their college training, there would be needed thorough understanding of the mass of Negroes and their problems; and, therefore, I emphasized scientific study. Willingness to work and make personal sacrifice for solving these problems was of course, the first prerequisite and Sine Qua Non. I did not stress this, I assumed it. I assumed that with knowledge, sacrifice would automatically follow. In my youth and idealism, I did not realize that selfishness is even more natural than sacrifice. I made the assumption of its wide availability because of the spirit of sacrifice learned in my mission school training. (Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth Memorial Address”
The other realization was that a wealthy African American middle class was needed to support their political struggle. Randolph's wife was a successful entrepreneur who could subsidize his activities.
Earlier, in the 1905 meeting which gave rise to the Niagara Movement, number four of the eight-point program drafted by Du Bois was “the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color” (Padmore 1956, 112).
This is traveling theory,
No. It is a long articulated political demand.
expanding the range of the word “caste,”
in the US and Mexico, caste meant race though there was some attempt to describe the emerging plutocracy as a higher caste.
as generalized reaction to the word “race,” not to get into the thick of the word, into the “collective ontic,” to commit a solecism. Analogous – not that one ever escapes analogy – yet we must maintain a differential taxonomy.
Why? You guys are and were useless. Politics isn't about 'theory'. It is about making demands and then compromising so you get 'half a loaf'
A last brutal shift into globality,
Spivak was brutally separated from her parents and shipped off the the States where she was forced to pluck cotton.
the dream of decolonization under a reality check.
The reality was that indigenous leaders might be worse than White officials.
The academic intellectual needs to prepare the ground once again – for an epistemological relocation exorbitant to national liberation – and work for the insertion of the subaltern into constitutionality – the place where Du Bois and Ambedkar meet.
In other words, academics must get Kamala Harris to sanction India because of supposed atrocities against untouchables- e.g. Spivak correcting the pronunciation of a Dalit student.
The constitutional subject is without identity.
No. A constitutional subject must have a univocal identity. Also, don't be dead or imaginary.
Nahum Chandler invokes the idea that all generalities are also caught in particularities.
No. They may fail in a particular case- e.g. some chicks do have dicks- but the generality may remain useful enough.
To consolidate this suggestion, he quotes Spillers’s thought of ambivalence. “But if by ambivalence we might mean that abeyance of closure,” she writes, “or break in the passage of syntagmatic movement from one more or less stable property to another, as in the radical disjuncture between ‘African’ and ‘American,’ then ambivalence remains not only the privileged and arbitrary judgment of a post-modernist imperative, but also a strategy that names the new cultural situation as a wounding.”
Hortense Spiller writes and teaches nonsense. There is no radical disjuncture between African and American. Obama's father was African. He still got to be POTUS.
The gender-race-class-crosshatched person who occupies the empty space of the constitutional subject for each case is irreducible.
No. You have to pick one identity class and stick to it. Currently, there is no 'intersectionality' in the Constitution. Suppose there is one level of benefit for being of such and such gender and another for being disabled. You choose the one which yields you most. You can't make an additive claim.
And today, in globality, we do not need the so-called decolonized citizen to tell us the wound is healed.
Because we are pretending to be disabled by reason of some festering wound inflicted long ago by Patriarchy or Neo-Liberalism or some such shite.
We need to hear the historical subaltern to feel the wound.
No we don't. It is enough to see a picture of a wounded person to know they might welcome any help we give them.
I will quote the speech in Tallapoosa County Alabama by a man named Alfred Gray . . . Gray was speaking at a meeting on the eve of elections for the state constitution, which were to take place on February 4, 1868.
The constitution I came here to talk, 1868, I came here to talk for it. If I get killed, I will talk for it. Am I afraid to fight the white man for my rights? No. I may go to Hell. My home is Hell. But the white man shall go there with me. My father, God damn his soul to Hell, had 300 niggers, and his son’s son, his son, sold me for $1,000. Was this right? No. I feel the damned spirit of damnation in me and will fight for our rights until every rascal who chase niggers with hounds is in Hell. Remember the Fourth of February. We’ll fight until we die, or we’ll carry this constitution. (qtd by Allen 1937, 123-135)
Sadly, the 1883 Supreme Court ruling in Pace v. Alabama, showed that the ex-slave States could impose segregation without triggering Federal intervention. However it was only in 1901 that Alabama got round to reversing the 1868 convention and basing the Constitution solidly on White Supremacy.
Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe.
Is irrelevant. Prior to 1865 Papa could sell of his own son for a thousand dollars.
In this kind of a situation, the fact that it is the mother who becomes the motor of the argument is historically not only acceptable, but necessary.
Spivak thinks that if mummy is a slave, her baby can be sold off.
In that empty position without the mark of legitimacy, we must be able to reclaim the constitutional state
like the one Alabama introduced in 1901?
over against the state that today manages global capital,
no state 'manages global capital'.
so that we walk the walk against my father’s son who, legitimized by capital, knifes me in the back for profit.
But it would be cool if Daddy did it himself or if it was done by his widow- right?
By analogy, remember – as in the case of caste.
Fuck off! A high caste guy who has a baby with a low caste woman can't sell that child.
All the reading required is the daily news.
and completely misunderstanding it
Flint Michigan
which is Black majority
and Lagos Nigeria.
which is 100 percent Black. What is Spivak's point? Black majority places turn to shit?
So, I ask Hortense, do these differences, between the collective ontic
e.g. the Government of Flint, Michigan, or Lagos, Nigeria.
and the differential ontology of social formations,
which is defined by Law
between the ungeneralizable subaltern
which only exists in the minds of useless pedants
and the constitutional subject, qualify as a species of that abeyance of closure, that break in the passage of syntagmatic movement from one more or less stable property to another – two separate differences – in the dream of decolonization and the ruse of globality?
In other words, why should Spivak not claim that her Mummy's baby was sold of by the son of her father and that she has been repeatedly raped and lynched on Southern plantations because of orders sent by Global Capitalism which is based in Davos, Switzerland.
[POSTSCRIPT] In The Republic of Caste, Anand Teltumbde
who married into the Ambedkar dynasty though this didn't save him from a spell in jail
gives a detailed analysis of Ambedkar and the Dalit movement in general, clear out of ancestor worship.
Unless your ancestor is Ambedkar. Nobody would have thrown Prakash Ambedkar in jail.
For the purposes of this brief essay, the point to be noted from within his complex analysis is today’s intense competition among Indian sub-castes to claim state-sanctioned reservation.
They get it if they have the numbers.
As he writes,
on 1 August 2009, the vidvatsabha (council of intellectuals), an initiative led by Prakash Ambedkar [the grandson of B.R. Ambedkar],
in 2014, he demanded the abolition of reservations for SC & ST people- probably because he couldn't get elected.
organized a seminar in Mumbai on the unlikely subject of reservation within reservations. It suggested that reservations for the S[chduled]C[aste]s, which have been disproportionately accessed by a single sub-caste in every state, should be subdivided among all sub-castes in the SC category to ensure that equitable benefit accrues to all of them
This is perfectly sensible. The question is whether 'creamy layer' Dalits will lose affirmative action.
Du Bois knew well that the analogy works through voting block politics – an abuse of constitutionality
why? The plain fact is that the majority of Americans and Indians wanted the Brits gone. That's what they got. Incidentally, Britain still doesn't have a written Constitution.
– I invoke the Black Flame Trilogy once more.
Which has nothing to do with constitutions. The hero is a Doctor, not a lawyer.
Constitutionality, then, is the agenda for this failed date.
Nonsense! Ambedkar knew that Du Bois wasn't a lawyer. If he wanted to talk about Constitutionality, Charles Hamilton Houston (aka 'The Man who killed Jim Crow') was the bloke to ask out on a date. Thurgood Marshall was Houston's student.
We continue to work at it – caste as analogy for the Black diasporic.
Not in America where there was a one drop rule. Indian caste could be compared to what once obtained in Mexico, but the analogy is misleading.
To compute it in African terms, we go to ethnic groups, and we get mired in singularities.
No. We get mired in the fact that various tribes speak different languages and may be engaged in bitter struggles over territory. On the other hand, the Hutu, Tutsi distinction may be compared to an Indian difference of caste.
Ambedkar’s focus on a largish nation-state would get lost upon the vast continent.
By 1947, Nehru was for a unitary state. Ambedkar had originally been a Federalist who thought Dalits could ally with Muslims at the Center. Africa could develop regional economic groupings which ultimately merge with each other so that there is a 'United States of Africa'.
Yet even there a certain generalizability comes through citizenship.
Citizenship is a general, not a particular, concept. What changed in India was that the distinction between British subject and British protected subject disappeared. Ambedkar was cool with that which is why he could be useful to Nehru.
Rest upon those abstract structures if you want to historiograph the historial.
Don't. History is ideographic and so historians must focus on the particular. The Marxist school of History failed utterly. It can't be resurrected by the claim that all sorts of people have been grievously wounded by Patriarchy or Globalization and that they want to go to the Prom together. Still it is true that Palestinians under bombardment in Gaza are bitterly protesting against Spivak's scolding of a Dalit student who mispronounced Du Bois's name.
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