Abstract
The authors summarize their theory of disaster as a sign continuum through which monsters—mythic agents of divine warning—raise questions of the meaning of political speech in the wake of colonialism. Unlike prior ages, where monsters had the social function of specialized speech, their warnings are ignored in the age of modern colonialism. Thus, instead of focusing on whether subalterns can speak, the authors ask, Can they be heard? This question is examined through explorations of the challenges racism poses for distinctions between moral and political speech.
This chapter is based on ideas from the fourth chapter of our book, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 2009).
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Notes
- 1.
See Euripides, The Cyclops (580–590).
- 2.
Although colonization precedes the twentieth century, we have chosen to focus on the cinema of that century because of its influence over the images and widespread iconography that gave popular justification to political decisions and norms that preceded them and that set the grammar for their presence.
- 3.
Frankenstein’s creature, we are told, moaned at the sight of his own reflection. What was striking about this moment was that he, who was so articulate about so many other themes, could not find words to express his own feelings about his ugliness. His groan was the exception to a rule of embracing and working at the art of speech , to being so skillful with its use that his creator Victor warned his friend Walton that is creation’s rhetorical abilities might elicit sympathies that Victor felt the creature did not deserve. See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (New York: Dover Thrift, 1994).
- 4.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W.W. Norton, 1932), 71–74.
- 5.
Although we are here focusing on cultural perception and political practices that construct groups of people into monsters , our use of the term subaltern draws upon Gayartri Spivak’s formulations in Leon de Kock’s “Interview with Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa,” A Review of International English Literature 23(3) 1992: 29–47, and the poststructural problematic of muteness in her famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–316. For a critical discussion of the latter essay, see Warren Montag, “Can the Subaltern Speak in Other Transcendental Questions,” Cultural Logic 1, no. 2 (Spring 1998): http://eserver.org/clogic/1-2/montag.html.
- 6.
The story of Prospero and Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest is subverted in Africana postcolonial literature, where Prospero is read as the colonizer of Caliban’s island. See, e.g., Paget Henry’s Caliban’s Reason (New York: Routledge, 2000), and the prescience of Mary Shelley’s work, in which she anticipated what much political struggle has achieved more than a century later—a world in which “monsters ” speak for themselves about the world that brought them into being as such.
- 7.
See Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
- 8.
Carole Pateman, “The Settler Contract,” in Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007), chapter 2.
- 9.
Examples of this first requirement can be found in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). When explaining pre-contractual property, or periods when all land was held in common and labor alone entitled one to claim it, Locke writes, “in the beginning, all the world was America” (Chapter V, § 49). He goes on to explain that reason and industry as evidenced by domesticated agricultural land was patently absent in what would become the American colonies. For more discussion of English conceptions of civilization as the cultivation of land, see Jill Lepore, The Name of War : King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), chapter 3.
- 10.
For more detailed discussion of Worcester v. Georgia, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 238–239. He suggests that the decision depicted the Cherokee Nation as examples of Emmerich de Vattel’s “dependent ‘tributary’ or ‘feudatory’ states” that exchanged some of their sovereignty for the protection of a stronger state.
- 11.
It was soon after, in 1849, that the main government office in charge of dealings with Native Americans, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was moved from the War Department into the then new Interior Department. Rogers Smith writes, “indicating that the tribes now posed the challenge of development, not conquest.” See Civic Ideals, 236–237.
- 12.
Pateman, 78. This problem of those who either cannot, or will not, consent to what are framed as democratically-conceived social contracts that pertain to them is a problem that runs throughout this tradition. The objection was dispensed with most easily by Thomas Hobbes when he argued that the consent of the vanquished—whose choice amounted to consenting to the terms of the new sovereign or death—could legitimately be presented as a choice. Locke’s effort turned on combining the civilizational arguments to which we have already referred along with the distinction between full and express and tacit and partial members. Rousseau, who attempted most rigorously to honor a coherent view of consent insisted that while opponents of an original contract did not violate it, that they could not be forced to be included in it. Their refusal would make them foreigners rather than citizens. Once the state was constituted, however, if a free state—one in which inhabitants were not kept by force—their residency implied consent. See On the Social Contract, Book I, chapter 7 in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
- 13.
What constituted “civilized speech ” was an ongoing and heated debate. Consider, for example, Bartolomé de Las Casas’ account of his refutation of the arguments of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda concerning whether the Catholic Church could claim jurisdiction in the Spanish New World colonies over “the barbarians” that lived there. Las Casas considered each standing theological and colloquial definition of the barbarian in turn. The second of these included those “who do not have a written language that corresponds to the spoken one, as the Latin language does with ours, and therefore do not know how to express in it what they mean.” Las Casas rejected this claim, pointing to the existence of precisely such a written language as well as countless other outward signs of civilization among Native Americans. He insisted that it was marauding Spanish conquistadores who had chosen to be Christians, and therefore taken on that religion’s commandments as their own, who were heretics and barbarous, deserving of sanction and punishment by the church. See Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole, C.M., foreword by Martin E. Marty (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 30.
- 14.
It is striking that Griffith did not hire any black actors when making his film (that employed an incredibly large cast for its time). The only black people who appeared in the film were in marginal, backdrop roles, parts that comprised the scene and landscape but that were not full fledged subjects of the story.
- 15.
Jan Van Pieterse has demonstrated that pictures of slaves were not widely available in Europe until the rise of the abolitionist movement, that “If slaves were depicted it was often incidentally and as part of some other subject represented.… Invisibility,” he writes, “was one way in which slavery was kept psychologically at bay.” Images chosen by abolitionist artists were carefully designed to convey that emancipation was conditional and not equivalent to an end to racism. Their central icon was “a black kneeling, hands folded and eyes cast upward.” For further discussion, see White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 57–63.
- 16.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War : Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 239.
- 17.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau likened enslavement to war in On the Social Contract, where he wrote of the enslaved and vanquished, “In taking the equivalent of his life, the victor has done him no favor. Instead of killing him unprofitably he kills him usefully. Hence, far from the victor having acquired any authority over him beyond force, the state of war subsists between them just as before…[F]ar from destroying the state of war, [this convention] presupposes its continuation.” See On the Social Contract, Book I, Chapter IV.
- 18.
In other words, we here reject Carl von Clausewitz’s claim that “War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means…[It is] a mere instrument of politics.” See his On War, trans. Col. J.J. Graham. New and Revised edition with Introduction and Note by Col. F.N. Maude, in Three Volumes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & C., 1918), Vol. 3, Chapter B, “War as an Instrument of Policy.”
- 19.
See Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, 152.
- 20.
Arendt insisted, against the nihilistic forms of equality, that the condition of politics is plurality, the fact of all human beings’ similarity in our distinctiveness. If we were identical, the speech and action at the core of politics would be incoherent. It is our equality that suggests that we might reach each other through word and deed. It is our differences that make us want and need to do so. See The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958/1998), 7 and 175–176.
- 21.
Agamben claims that the state of exception represented by the “sacred man” has increasingly become the rule in modern states that regularly suspend democratic rules of governance. Henry Giroux adds subtlety to this claim through his own exploration of Hurricane Katrina, when he insists that although states of emergency have increasingly become the norm of neoconservative politics, that not all lives are treated as equally disposable. Those most readily allowed to suffer and die are those who are already marginalized by historic lines of race and class inequality. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8 and State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 6 and Henry A. Giroux’s Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO: Routledge, 2006), in particular, 21.
- 22.
For a related, fascinating discussion, see Ellen Feder’s exploration of the shame experienced by many intersex patients in the face of the difficulties caused for their physicians by their bodily ambiguity. They, much like the colonized people whose presence suggests illegitimate origins, raise questions about the very categories of sex that would otherwise seem to promise an easy resolution. Ellen K. Feder, Making Sense of Intersex: Changing Ethical Perspectives in Biomedicine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
- 23.
This passage is from “The Ethics of the Negro Question” in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper (Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 206.
- 24.
For an exploration of colonized people as the damned, and the damned as the political category of equal significance to more familiar ones including the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing: Thinking through Fanon, Disaster, and the Damned of the Earth,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-KnowledgeV, nos. 3 & 4 (Summer 2007): 5–12, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, op. cit.
- 25.
One is reminded of this phenomenon when one hears education researchers who reject assessments of the U.S. education as in crisis. They point to the many products of public elementary and high schools who are in elected offices or teaching in universities, and frame troubled, failing schools as the radical anomalies.
- 26.
One can compare here the readiness to offer university courses, to purchase, read, and listen to the “experiences” of people from marginalized groups rather than to study the thought that emerges from them. For further discussion of this see chapter 2 of Lewis Gordon’s Existentia Africana: Understanding African Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000).
- 27.
W.E.B. Du Bois’ reflections on the contribution of African slaves to U.S. cultural life come to mind. See, in particular, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: McClurg & Co., 1903) and also Leroi Jones’/Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), Anténor Firmin’s Equality of the Human Races, trans. Asselin Charles and introduction by Carolyn Fleuhr-Lobban (New York: Routledge, 2000), and Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture” in Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1994).
- 28.
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. I, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, with revisions and a foreword by Howard A. Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 19.
- 29.
Michael Alexander’s Jazz Age Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
- 30.
Ibid., 149.
- 31.
Ibid., 171.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid., 179.
- 35.
Recall our previous discussion of Carole Pateman. Efforts to coerce consent continue to change with shifting political circumstances, from an effort to make illegitimate foundations legitimate to encouraging Native and Black participation in disavowing the failures to do so.
- 36.
Consider here Steve Biko’s defense of the need for black-run student anti-Apartheid organizations and his criticisms of most white liberals. He suggested that white students who participated in student activism were able to have it both ways: simply by being born white in South Africa a substantially higher quality of life was available to them. Still, their participation in anti-Apartheid organizations enabled them to feel that they were different from other, less critical whites and to move among them as if they were qualitatively different, morally superior. See Steve Bantu Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings, ed. Aiered Stubs, preface by Desmon Tutu, intro. by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana, and foreword by Lewis R. Gordon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), particularly, “Black Souls in White Skins?”
- 37.
Leopold Senghor and Frantz Fanon, among others, have noted the ways in which the Manicheanism of colonialism seeks to divide up human characteristics and abilities racially. For Senghor this clearly illustrated the need of European values for the complementary contributions of other races and continents to revitalize and fertilize them. Our point here is that “the whigger” is not content with being able to claim the attributes designated white—rationality , intelligence, innovation, order—he must have those attributed to blacks—soul, emotion, musicality, eros—as well.
- 38.
See Irvin Kristol’s autobiography, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995) and Houston Baker’s critical discussion of it in Baker’s Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 52–54, 60–61.
- 39.
For a more developed discussion of this form of exoticism, see Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 117–123.
- 40.
Booker Taliaferro Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address, September 18, 1895,” in The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan et al., vol. 3 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 584–587.
- 41.
There were a quarter of a million people at the event, and, adding television and radio coverage, documentaries, translations, and subsequent discussions worldwide, millions if not billions of viewers. For a history, see Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (New York: Viking, 1987).
- 42.
Corey D. B. Walker, A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 24.
- 43.
This move has required a radical act of forgetting depictions of King in his day as divisive and violent. Many advocates of the Black Power movement framed its militancy as a response to the failure to heed the divine warning of more integrationist approaches, ones that had framed racism in the U.S. as a tenacious anomaly that the best of American principles and politics contradicted.
- 44.
For a recent history of Du Bois and Robeson and their relationship with each other, see Murali Balaji, Professor and the Pupil: The Politics of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson (New York: National Books, 2007).
- 45.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told by Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964), 381.
- 46.
For more discussion of King’s influences, see Greg Moses, Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Philosophy of Nonviolence, foreword by Leonard Harris (New York: The Guilford Press, 1997). The documentary history of white, especially mob violence on blacks, is widely available. See, e.g., Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond, ed. by Anne P. Rice, foreword by Michele Wallace (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), especially, for additional references, the bibliography of documentary texts.
- 47.
See the first chapter of Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre, preface de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: François Maspero éditeur S.A.R.L./Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1991; originally 1961). The debates on this chapter are many, including Hannah Arendt’s famous polemic, On Violence (New York: Harvest Books, 1970).
- 48.
Cf., e.g., William R. Jones, “Liberation Strategies in Black Theology: Mao, Martin, or Malcolm?,” in Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917 (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1983), 229–241.
- 49.
Obama’s speech has been translated into many languages and readily available worldwide, see, e.g., “Obama Race Speech : Read Full Text,” The Huffington Post (March 18, 2008): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-the_n_92077.html. King, similar to Obama, had eventually distanced himself from Bayard Rustin, one of his mentors and organizers of the famous 1963 March on Washington. In addition to his remarkable civil rights works, which included the struggle for full employment, Rustin’s background as a former member of the Communist Party USA and his being a socialist and a homosexual became a liability to the version of King that was becoming more palatable to the American public. See, e.g., Larry Dane Brimmer, We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustin (Honesdale, PA: Calkins Creek, 2007) and Mathew Forstater, “From Civil Rights to Economic Security: Bayard Rustin and the African American Struggle for Full Employment (1945–1978),” International Journal of Political Economy 36 no. 3 (Fall 2007): 63–74.
- 50.
This challenge returns us to our previous mention of Birth of a Nation, a film that insisted that black political power could only be exercised as anti-white revenge, that black people could not see and govern in pursuit of the common, American good.
- 51.
See Søren Kierkegaard, “Fear and Trembling” and “Repetition,” ed. and trans. with introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
- 52.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and John Stauffer, “A Pragmatic Precedent,” The New York Times (January 19, 2009): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/opinion /19gates.html.
- 53.
Richard Cavendish, A History of Magic (London: Arkana, 1990), 2. Cf., Also, Max Weber’s sociological considerations of this phenomenon in the charismatic politician: “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128.
- 54.
For Hannah Arendt on power, see her classic, The Human Condition, especially 198–201 and 234–235. Our remarks on Obama’s talents compared to the mediocrity of George W. Bush offered much to consider when he faced Mitt Romney as a contender in what became his re-election.
- 55.
Though, as his second inauguration attested, Obama was in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation when he received criticism for adding Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible. See, e.g., Cornel West’s response that week on CSPAN: http://www.upworthy.com/why-martin-luther-king-jr-might-have-been-offended-by-barack-obamas-second-inaug.
- 56.
For a rich discussion of the ways in which far-right American pro-business conservatives who initially supported the Apartheid regime’s resistance to liberal currents effecting their own country and the view that “communists are everywhere and liberals are their ‘useful idiots’ ” made the transition to criticizing the same regime through the rearticulation of their original commitments, now as a libertarian attack on big governments, see “From Paranoia to Privatopia by Way of Pretoria” in Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008).
- 57.
See Steve Bantu Biko, I Write What I Like.
- 58.
See Lewis R. Gordon, “Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness ,” in Biko Lives!: Contestations and Conversations, ed. by Amanda Alexander, Nigel Gibson, and Andile Mngxitama (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 83–93. See also Mabogo P. More, “Biko: Africana Existential Philosopher,” same volume, 45–68.
- 59.
In “Biko Lives,” Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson describe contestations over Biko’s memory of South Africa since 1994. The first, they argued is expressed by members of the black business class who claim to be entitled to white wealth generated by colonialism and apartheid. The second, characteristic of political and bureaucratic classes suggests that they have mobilized a version of Black Consciousness by privileging blackness in hiring selection so that job demographics better reflect those of the nation. It is in the third, in “everyday struggles of black masses for dignity and freedom ,” they write, that the “living Biko finds expression,” in Biko Lives!, edited by Alexander et al., 18.
- 60.
See, e.g., Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements and the Quest for a New Humanism in Post-Apartheid South Africa, edited by Nigel C. Gibson (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006) and Ashwin Desai, South Africa Still Revolting (Johannesburg, SA: Impact Africa Publishing, 1999).
- 61.
The frustrations of many blacks in the new South Africa expressed itself in xenophobic violence against black immigrants and visitors that compelled Nelson Mandela, while visiting England in celebration of his 90th birthday, to criticize their actions along with ongoing brutal strife in Zimbabwe. For work on how crime is read in postcolonial societies of the new millennium, see Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, edited by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). For discussion of the shackdwellers’ movement, see Nigel C. Gibson, “Introduction: A New Politics of the Poor Emerges from South Africa’s Shantytowns,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 43, no. 1 (February 2008): 5–18; Richard Pithouse, “A Politics of the Poor: Shack Dwellers’ Struggles in Durban,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 43, no. 1 (February 2008): 63–94; Ashwin Desai, The Poors of Chatsworth: Race, Class and Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Durban, SA: The Institute for Black Research/Madiba Publishers, 2000).
- 62.
The shackdweller’s movement itself is highly articulate, full of very clear political proposals for what would enable the sign continuum of which they are a part to come to an end, as attested to in the following two published talks of one of its leaders, S’bu Zikode: “The Greatest Threat to Future Stability in Our Country is the Greatest Strength of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement (SA) (Shackdwellers),” and “Sekwandel! Sekwanele! (Enough Is Enough!),” Journal of Asian and African Studies 43, no. 1 (February 2008): 113–125. Unlike the would-be vampires with whom we end this chapter, the shackdwellers want full citizenship and recognition as political agents, not monsters .
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Gordon, L.R., Gordon, J.A. (2016). When Monsters No Longer Speak. In: Jung, H., Embree, L. (eds) Political Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 84. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27775-2_19
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