The Sixties and the World Event (Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture)

Introduction: The Still Vacillating Equilibrium of the World

Christopher Connery and Hortense J. Spillers Roberto Retamar began his work on Jose Martí—appearing here for the first time in English—in the middle of the revolutionary sixties, at a time when the course and character of the Cuban Revolution were still difficult to discern. Retamar, like Fidel Castro, turned to Martí to find language and meaning not only for the revolution, but for the evolving character of Cuban socialism and for Cuba’s place in the world revolutionary upheavals of that time. In turning to a poet, thinker, and revolutionary who had died in an 1895 battle, before Cuban independence had been won, Retamar and Castro were signaling the deeply rooted national-liberationist character of the Cuban Revolution, and the capacity of a national liberation movement to have universal political import—in “our America” and beyond. They were also reminding us that interventions into “the still vacillating equilibrium of the world”—Martí’s words—will demand new and distinctive temporalities, new histories. We would like to thank Paul Bové and the editors of boundary 2 for their encouragement and support. Special thanks go to John Beverley, sixties man, not only for his work as author, editor, translator, and facilitator for this issue, but for an exemplary and inspiring career of committed, critical, and self-critical scholarship. boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-020  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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This as yet irresolvable problem of temporality and history is foregrounded in many of the essays here. Was there a world sixties? Christopher Connery’s essay follows from that premise, but also registers that the claim of a world sixties is a political, and not merely historiographical, act. This problem of period identity is registered most forcefully in Wlad Godzich’s essay, for the question of Poland puts us squarely within the historical problem of synchronicity. Where and when is Poland? The uprising of 1968 was, in addition to its political eventfulness, an act of historical sense making, giving narrative sense not only to the struggles of the midfifties, but to the solidarity movement as well. The sixties presents a challenge to a host of temporalities, and making sense of the sixties will require a periodic revisiting and resituating, a reconstellating and a regenealogization, as long as human liberation remains a dream and not a reality. “Nostalgic commemoration of the glories of the 60s or abject confession of the decade’s many failures and missed opportunities are two errors which cannot be avoided by some middle path that threads its way in between.” Thus wrote Fredric Jameson in 1984, in what remains the strongest essay in English on the sixties, an essay which ends, as have many essays marking the decadal anniversaries of the project, with a view toward a renewed oppositional force on the horizon, in Jameson’s case a resurgent and reorganized working class, coming on the heels of an attenuated class-based politics in the sixties movements. We know what became of that. One would think that now, at the fortieth anniversary of the events, a more sober and defeatist mood might be expected. But what strikes one, above all, is the very different tone, from the “long time” hopefulness of Hortense Spillers’s essay, to the liberationist energy of Anthony Bogues’s, to the perduring creativity of rebel art examined in Silvia Spitta’s piece. Even Boris Kagarlitsky’s essay, describing what he judged to be a failed, defeated, or co-opted group of oppositional thinkers and activities, on whose energies the post-perestroika Soviet government would in the eighties vampirically feed, ends with the assertive claim that newly emergent oppositional forces, many shouting the same slogans as in the earlier period, would be more successful than their predecessors. It would be easy to criticize this tone as utopian, wishful thinking, but it is also the sign of a battle engaged. The Right has never deviated from its explicit struggle to defeat six. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in The 60s without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 178–209.

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ties energies, and the ranks of the powerful—from Barack Obama to Hu Jintao—are filled with those who proclaim the era’s end or transcendence. But there is surely some element of fear and discomfort on the right in particular, in its continuing and explicit struggle to defeat sixties energies, to, as Nina Power and Alberto Toscano quote Nicolas Sarkozy, “liquidate” the sixties. All of the essays in this issue, whether they directly engage that polemic or not, are written against the historical current that seeks the liquidation of the sixties. Most often, the project of reaction and restoration is clear and explicit. Given that African American liberation struggles were at the center of the U.S. sixties, Spillers’s examination of the various forces that sought to neutralize that struggle and negate its gains—Clarence Thomas is one of Spillers’s primary foci—is a necessary register of the depth of that reaction. John Beverley’s essay, meanwhile, analyzes a trope of sixties containment practiced by veterans of Latin American armed struggle who have rejected armed struggle from a standpoint of “maturity.” Sober reflections on youthful idealist abandon—a trope that Beverley traces to the Baroque picaresque novel—risk more than simply throwing out the baby with the bathwater. This position foregrounds a retrograde temporality, whereby political transformation becomes unthought and unthinkable. Beverley’s reconsideration is not suggesting a renewal of armed struggle but a consideration of Latin American armed struggle as a fundamental orientation, one that allowed for a variety of political, social, and artistic innovations. The contemporary success of the Latin American Left, many of whom were veterans of the armed struggle, could be viewed, if not as a vindication of the earlier period of armed struggle, certainly as a development of its original milieu. Power and Toscano’s essay centering on Alain Badiou, meanwhile, provides a different way of thinking those forces of reaction, containment, and obscurantism, by analyzing their dependence, in Badiou’s sense, on revolutionary truth. Containment and continuation become more difficult to sort out. As many of these essays make clear, we remain in a postsixties era: many of the forces that arose to combat the sixties remain in power. These forces understood the challenge of the sixties. We should, too. Badiou once described his entire philosophical project as an attempt to answer, in Power and Toscano’s words, “how and why many of his generational peers could betray their revolutionary convictions.” It remains important to trace the dynamics of movement and reaction, to consider the varied forms of containment and opposition. This is another register of the most fundamental, and still unanswerable, question, “What happened?” For the present time, the sixties remains the singular event in the twentieth

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century to pose the question of what happened. Analytical engagement with the sixties over the past few decades, then, is not simply an opportunity for academic exercises in historical revision; it is the continuation of the period’s dynamic. “What happened?” is a question of burning import for our present and future. It is no accident or surprise, then, that engagement with this question brings new light on “old” issues—Beverley’s armed struggle or Bogues’s Black Power—that allow a thinking beyond the current situation. This engagement also finds resources for the present in the projects of a range of sixties thinkers. Walter Rodney, for example, in Bogues’s piece, is not simply, in intellectual genealogy and life trajectory, emblematic of what happened in the Caribbean sixties. He becomes, as Martí was for Retamar and Castro, a node in the construction of a new temporality. Several of the essays note our particular historical relationship to the period—many of the participants in the struggle are still living and active, just as several of the authors in this issue were active participants in the events. Spitta’s consideration of the project of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater, a group that arose in the sixties and remains one of the few practitioners of explicitly political art, is among many essays that make clear that the period has not wholly ended. But we are entering the period—the fortieth, fiftieth, and perhaps sixtieth anniversaries of the events—when discussion, reconsideration, and furtherance of the political project will no longer include so many participants of the earlier struggle. What legacy will this “middle period” of reconsideration leave to the future? Many of these essays are speculative, provocative, or experimental in character; their judgments are provisional, with the understanding that further, more important chapters remain to be written. The fortieth anniversary of the sixties movements is, as Connery’s essay suggests, perhaps a particularly difficult vantage point for an appreciation of the period’s yetto-emerge truth. That difficulty will give us, and those who were born later, much to work on in the coming years, and we hope that these efforts will continue in the pages of boundary 2. boundary 2 itself was a sixties product, emerging out of that confluence of new, post-metaphysical thinking in literature, poetry, and what was coming to be known as “theory”—the first issue, in 1972, had an essay on Foucault by Edward Said—with a nascent worldliness that grew from the conviction that a U.S.-based intellectual project had to face the nature of U.S. power in the world. In addition to Said’s essay, the first issue contained a dossier of poems introducing, to an English-speaking audience, the revolutionary and antijunta Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, who had been imprisoned as soon as the military junta, to

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the delight of U.S. anticommunism, took power. In the intervening years, the journal has built on that sense of purpose, both in its critical stance and in its broadened geographical reach. We, the issue’s coeditors, are grateful for this venue, which has deepened and strengthened our own fidelity to the event. More to come . . .

. William Spanos, one of the founding editors of boundary 2, has, in his forthcoming memoir, made clear the connections between the intellectual moment and his Greek encounters with the geopolitical. An excerpt was published as “Eis tin Polis: Istanbul, December 1969,” boundary 2 35, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 127–68.

March 1968 in Poland

Wlad Godzich A date is not a name and certainly not a concept. To continue to refer to “the sixties” as we do is to acknowledge that we do not know what “the sixties” were about. Historical phenomena, once identified and described, have names, however contested. These names may even include calendric information: “the October Revolution” or “the Ides of March”; but they are rarely reduced to it except as a shorthand notation: “the Fourth of July.” The case of “the sixties” is different. For one thing, the term encompasses many different phenomena, ranging from “May 1968” to the “Prague Spring” (and its end in “August 1968”); the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy; the Summer of Love; the antiwar movement; the Six-Day War; Woodstock; the Mexico City Olympics massacre; to name but just a few. “The sixties” may then well be a shorthand name for a plethora of phenomena that occurred during this decade. But this raises an even more important question: what are the relations between these various phenomena? What is it about them that produced their near synchronicity? What sort of world event were “the sixties”? All translations are my own. boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-021  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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It is this aspect of near synchronicity that I wish to explore in this essay, and I will focus my attention on a set of events that occurred relatively early in 1968, in March of that year in Poland, known to this day as “the Polish March 1968.” The Polish 1968 is particularly suitable for an inquiry into near synchronicity because Polish twentieth-century history is constantly grappling with the problem of its relation to broader European history, sometimes running against its main trends, sometimes anticipating them, sometimes lagging behind them. Since synchronicity produces the impression of stable form, a Polish perspective on the twentieth century, and in particular on “the sixties,” may tell us a little about the process of historical formation. It is well known that synchronicity emerges as a practical problem with the construction of large railroad networks in the nineteenth century. Privately built and often running on the astronomical time of their originating city, the railroads faced nightmarish problems of coordinating schedules as they began to form freight transportation networks vital to the development of the Industrial Revolution. The problem proved particularly acute in Poland as the country was re-formed following the end of World War I. The partitions of Poland that broke up the largest country in Europe in the eighteenth century took place before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. When the country was reconstituted in 1918, one of the many tasks it faced was how to synchronize and how to standardize the 519 different railroads that had been built under the differing regimes of Russian, AustroHungarian, and Prussian partitions. The unification of the railroad system, which required the adoption of a single gauge standard, among many other tasks, came to symbolize the arduousness of achieving national unity. Polish intellectuals, most of them living in Parisian exile, had clamored throughout the nineteenth century for the restoration of the Polish state on the ground of the existence of a unitary Polish nation. The Polish nation of their pamphlets and representations was indeed a nation of native Poles, Catholic, committed to the noble principles of the Constitution of May 3, 1792, the oldest state constitution in Europe. The reality of the renascent Polish state in 1918 was quite different: it was a large and unwieldy aggregate of Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Ruthenians, and other minorities, speaking several languages, and affiliated with a variety of faiths and churches as well as agnostics and atheists. Many Poles subscribed to the romantic ideal of Polish nationalism fostered by writers such as the Nobel Prize–winning Henryk Sienkiewicz,

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whose masterpiece, the Trilogia, showed the Poles fighting off the Muslim Turks, the Protestant Swedes, and the Orthodox Muscovites in defense of a Polish Catholic nationhood. The term romantic is to be understood here in its original sense of “deriving from romances.” The novels of the Trilogia are indeed romances, but Polish critics and readers have treated them as epics in spite of the sentimental love stories and the comic episodes involving Falstaffian characters interwoven within them. This error of reading is characteristic of subordinated partitioned Poland, and it will persist with the advent of restoration. Equally romantic, though more influenced by Herderian ideals of nationhood, was the romantic poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s foremost Romantic poet, a Lithuanian by birth and a patriot of both countries (joined in the famous Jagellonian Commonwealth), who was to play such a fateful role in the events of March 1968. If anything, this error of reading will become more virulent with the two major political formations weighing somewhat differently the importance of Mickiewicz and Sienkiewicz. Witold Gombrowicz believed that Poland was in thrall to the vision of the nation produced by these two authors, acclaimed as the bards of the nation, and saw the problem as one in which the emergent Polish subject had to be tailored to the Procrustean form produced by their reading. He saw the process as one in which the emergent subject, legitimately seen as maturing, is cast into infantilism for failure to live up to the mature ideal of the national form. He tried valiantly to argue in favor of immaturity, carefully distinguishing it from puerility, against the mortiferous worship of form. It should be noted that Gombrowicz undertook this struggle as early as the late 1920s and saw no reason to abandon it until his death in 1969, and this despite the Second World War and the imposition of Communist rule in its aftermath. Some continuities trump the discontinuities of history. It is precisely with the overcoming of historical discontinuity that the two major political formations of the 1920s were concerned. In a gesture that would be blithely repeated after the implosive collapse of the Soviet Union, the immediate past was ignored and a link to romanticized pre-partition Poland was sought. The virtues ascribed to that Poland were asserted as flourishing in its resurrected self, as in, for example, the invocation of the remarkably progressive (for its day) policy toward Jews under King Kazimierz IV (1427–1492) to mask the increasingly fascistic anti-Semitic policies of the new Polish State, with the imposition of numerus clausus in the universities, and especially in the law and medical faculties. Jews were largely assimilated to capital and the mercantile class, even though they formed the backbone of the labor movement since both Tsarist Russia and Imperial

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Prussia fueled the Industrial Revolution in Poland with Jewish workers, particularly in the textile and machine tool industries. Jewish workers, and their unions, were acknowledged only in the thirties when they were depicted as agents of the Soviet Union and alien to the Polish nation. The appeal to pre-partition Poland as a model for Poland reborn had a number of significant consequences. Industrial modernity was seen as part of the exploitative policies of the partitioning powers and was regarded as somehow alien. Peasants were considered more authentically Polish than workers; agrarian political movements had to be accommodated in the various coalitions that initially governed the country. The various uprisings of the nineteenth century, including those of 1848, were cast as national or national-Catholic in character, and their class dimension ignored. António de Oliveira Salazar’s corporatist state in Portugal was seen as an appropriate model for Poland—a view shared by many Catholic social movements across Europe in the twenties and thirties. The French Revolution was seen primarily through Napoleon’s failure to restore the Polish Kingdom in spite of his promise to do so and the valiant exploits of the Polish Legions under his command. The two dominant political leaders of the immediate postwar period considered themselves progressives and were remarkable individuals. Józef Piłsudski, a Pole of Lithuanian origin, had a remarkable military tactical sense. He formed his own troops in the Austro-Hungarian part of Poland and used them against Russia, turning against the other two partitioning powers at the end of the war. He waged war on the nascent Soviet Union, inflicting a series of defeats upon it and forcing it to cede considerable lands on the Polish eastern border in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Promoting himself to the position of marshall, he proved to be a failure as an elected leader and took power in a military coup. Oddly refusing to hold power directly, he preferred to pull the strings of a number of puppets who became increasingly authoritarian and ruled in quasi-fascistic fashion, going so far as to establish their own political detention camp (Bereza). The regime was known as the “sanacja,” from the Polish term for “public salvation.” Piłsudski’s chief opponent was Roman Dmowski, an equally charismatic leader, who had been a member of the Russian Duma before World War I. Dmowski almost single-handedly undertook to lobby the French and English allies in favor of the restoration of the Polish state following what he saw as the inevitable defeat of the Central Powers. Less focused on Russia as Poland’s chief enemy than Piłsudski was, Dmowski saw Prussia as the greater danger. Imperial Germany pursued a policy of assimilation in

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the Polish lands under its control to a far greater extent than the two other partitioning powers, with Austro-Hungary proving the most benign. Polish nationalists made a great deal of the “martyrdom” of the “Wreschenkinder,” the children of the small Western Polish town of Września (Wreschen, in German) who were beaten daily by their schoolmasters for refusing to say their prayers in German (and beaten by their parents if they did). Dmowski taught himself English, in addition to the Russian, German, French, Italian, and Polish he knew, to convince the British to recognize him as the legitimate representative of Poland at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations. His political party, the National Democrats, known as “endecja,” was opposed to Piłsudski’s self-styled Polish Socialist Nationalism. It was openly Catholic and enjoyed the support of leading prelates of the church. Dmowski was openly anti-Semitic and wrote a scurrilous novel arguing the incompatibility of Jews with genuine Polishness. What was remarkable about both of these political formations was their lack of synchronicity with the general European Zeitgeist. Some of this is easily comprehensible and is indeed the product of Poland’s peculiar relation to European history at this particular moment. The two major Allies, Britain and France, came out exhausted and severely bled from the war; the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been broken up; the German Empire was seeing uprisings and repressions, and was going through economic collapse; the Russian empire was in the midst of a civil war that was being won by the Bolsheviks. By contrast, Poland was renascent. The gloom of other European countries was inappropriate in a country experiencing the exhilaration of its rebirth. Even though Poland was not alone to achieve or recover independence at the end of the war, it differed from others, such as Czechoslovakia or Romania, by the sense of historical continuity with its pre-partition past. The partitions were to be treated as a hiatus in the destiny of the nation, much like the “Communist episode” would be more recently. Whereas the other countries sought to grapple with new possibilities, Poland would measure the new against the yardstick of historical authenticity. Affectively, the Poland of the early 1920s was closer to the American postwar euphoria of what became known as “the Roaring Twenties” than to the prevailing European gloom. This lack of affective synchronicity was deeply felt by a small but significant group of Polish intellectuals who are the ancestors of the actors of the Polish March 1968. Many were involved in vanguard artistic movements, others in vanguard left politics, some in both. Unlike most of their compatriots, including a large number of nationalist intellectuals, who were

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interested in the vertical filiations of history, these intellectuals, artists, and activists were interested in their immediate environment. Almost all were fluent in French, German, and Russian, in addition to their native Polish. Many knew Italian and English as well, and quite a few knew Lithuanian or Ukrainian. The knowledge of these languages and their sensitivity to what was going on in the various countries where they were spoken produced a powerful sense of dissonance, which manifested itself in their art, their thinking, and in their political stances. At the risk of great oversimplification, this dissonance could be described as follows. All of these intellectuals were deeply happy to witness the rebirth of Poland, but they asked themselves what it was that was being brought back to life. It was not the old pre-partition Kingdom, to be sure. It was a heterogeneous state with very arbitrary and unstable boundaries, apparently relying on a nationalist ideology that would exclude perhaps as much as a quarter of its population to forge unity. The partitioned country had been deeply integrated within the economies of its master powers. For instance, the formidable textile works of Łódz depended on cotton from the Russian Caucasus as its raw material and on Germany as its market. The former was in the midst of a civil war and the latter in the middle of economic collapse. Unemployment in Łódz was soaring. The great factories, modeled upon Manchester, were being denounced for being owned by patrician Jewish families such as the Polanskis; the German workers, now unemployed, were returning to Germany; Polish workers were not being hired because of lack of skills but also lack of markets and sources of raw materials. Similar problems affected the steel works and the coal mines of Silesia, itself divided between Poland and Germany. There were ample reasons for pessimism. But there were even more fundamental questions concerning the nature of the state, its relation to nation and to class. And these questions were magnified by the embrace of the nihilism that swept through large parts of Europe. Although there had been little fighting on Polish soil during the war, Polish soldiers fought in the armies of the three empires and suffered considerable losses. The horrors of the war were well known, and many Polish intellectuals embraced the view that the Great War marked the collapse of Western civilization. The barbarism of the war; the extension of its horrors to the civilian populations; the massive scale of death dealt by poison gasses and by the new artillery and machine guns; the perception that the objectives of all sides in the war were irrational and had more to do with dynastic considerations than democratic interests all produced a revulsion

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toward prewar beliefs and values. The artistic vanguards reinforced the process, casting doubt upon the very bases of the realism that had prevailed as the dominant aesthetic since the Congress of Vienna. Nihilism in Poland took two forms: one was quite similar to its German counterpart as exemplified in the work of Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West). It deplored what was lost and painted a vision of the future that was even more bleak. Thus a leading Polish intellectual of the period, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), relayed the old Russian idea of the Yellow Peril, to describe a West that not only was collapsing from self-inflicted wounds but would soon be overrun by barbaric Asian hordes. The second form, rarer in Germany, saw this collapse of the West as an opportunity for genuine transformation and urged a hastening and deepening of the process. Even here there was a further divide. On the one hand, there were those who treated the matter ironically and aesthetically, such as Witkiewicz and others influenced by Dada and surrealism, and those who committed themselves to revolutionary political action. The story of the latter is not particularly well known, and many of them continue to be vilified to this very day. This is not the place to provide a full account of their beliefs, analyses, and actions, but they cannot be ignored, because their experience, and the reflection it precipitated, have been essential contributors to subsequent Polish history to this very day. Their history is very complex because of the segmentary character of oppositional politics under the partitions and in the first decade of the new state: groups were organized on linguistic, national, religious, as well as ideological grounds, so that one could have Ukrainian Uniate (who recognize the authority of the Pope but follow Greek rites) Socialists allied with Yiddish-speaking Socialist Zionists and Lithuanian independentists, and, of course, these would have different organizations in each of the partitions. Much energy was devoted to the overcoming of this segmentarization. On the other hand, under the partitions, the Polish sections, however further subdivided, were often part of much larger ensembles that covered all of an empire, while, at the same time, by virtue of their shared sense of Polishness, maintaining often secret relations with organizations in the other empires. In effect, internationalism was a given, and almost all organizations had both official and legal fronts and underground structures. This state of affairs lent itself to conspiracies, betrayals, infiltration by the secret police, and often a certain ideological confusion as well as a strong reliance on the personalities of leaders. A case in point is provided by Rosa Luxemburg. Born in a Germanand Polish-speaking family in Russian-dominated Poland, she became

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convinced that an independent Poland, which she championed, could be achieved only through socialist revolutions in Germany, Austria, and Russia. She broke with the Polish socialists when they embraced nationalism; she was a cofounder of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and brokered its merger with its Lithuanian counterpart. The resulting Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania rejected, at her urging, the idea of national determination under socialism, challenging Lenin on this score. She was not taken with the proclamation of Polish independence following the defeat of the Central Powers. For her, the real struggle was against capitalism, and she was more than suspicious of the Bolshevik line emerging in Russia. A workers’ revolution was the prime objective, and post-Imperial Germany was the most important battleground. She helped found the German Communist Party, and despite considerable misgivings about the wisdom of its timing—she was in favor of working within the framework of the newly proclaimed Weimar Republic— she joined the Spartacist uprising of 1919, led by her husband, Karl Liebknecht, in which she lost her life. To Polish nationalists, Róża Luksemburg, as she was known in Polish, was the epitome of a rootless Jewish cosmopolitan without commitment to the country of her birth. To the intellectuals whose genealogy I am trying to trace, she was the very embodiment of resistance to the false promises of nationalism, a commitment that went so far as to reject what they perceived as the national orientation of the October Revolution in Russia. We have here another instance of the Polish problem with synchrony. Progressives and revolutionaries in Poland were exhilarated with the fall of the Russian Empire and the advent of a Republic of Soviets. They saw in it a resounding rejection of the nihilism that they believed was being embraced in the West. They were as much taken with the artistic expressions that flourished in the wake of the Revolution, particularly with Russian Futurism and its emblematic figure, Vladimir Mayakovsky, but, at the same time, they were deeply suspicious of the nationalism that they detected even in Lenin’s conception of socialism, trusting Luxemburg more than the Bolsheviks. The Polish Communist Party would never manage to shake off its suspicion of latent Russian imperialism in the emerging institutions of the Soviet Union; nor would it manage to dispel the suspicions of the leaders of the Soviet Union, and particularly Stalin’s, about its acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Polish Party and its leadership would be repeatedly purged in the thirties, accused of Trotskyism—it was not particularly fond of Trotsky, either, with most of its

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leaders killed or condemned to die in Siberian detention. For Polish Communists the situation was tragic: banned and persecuted at home, they readily acknowledged the leading role of the CPUSSR, but they could not embrace wholeheartedly the latter’s line, which they saw as serving Russian imperial interests. Unwilling to renounce their own commitment to an international workers’ revolution, they accepted their own extermination, preferring faithfulness to their ideals to survival by accommodation. Among those who survived, almost all spent some time in the Gulag. The historical experience of these individuals was difficult to capture in the terms available to them in contemporary philosophy. They accepted a form of Nietzschean nihilism as a way of breaking away with positivism; they embraced Marxism and the possibility of a new humanism built upon a socially just society, but they were wary of the agents of the revolution they supported. They had abandoned faith in God, but most were convinced of the continued existence of the Devil. In fact, the reference to this existence is one of the common links among them. It explains the role played by Aleksander Wat (1900–1967) between the two wars. Wat, born Aleksander Chwat in a wealthy Jewish family with a pious scholarly father, was drawn to Futurism and other vanguard movements. In 1927, he published a collection of stories later translated into English under the title Lucifer Unemployed in which he tells a number of tales where the Devil discovers he is superfluous: human beings are quite capable of doing evil without his incitement. Left with nothing to do, the Devil goes to Hollywood, where he becomes known as Charlie Chaplin. The acknowledgment of the reality of evil, and then its treatment through comedy or irony, is one of the hallmarks of these two generations of Polish intellectuals, from Wat to Leszek Kołakowski (Conversations with the Devil), and including the nearly unbearable This Way to the Gas Chamber, Ladies and Gentlemen of Tadeusz Borowski. In his memoir, a set of conversations with Czeslaw Milosz recorded shortly before his death, Wat says the following with respect to the reality of evil: I knew that this was a phenomenon arising out of history, that it was a sickness of European civilization, of world, Christian, Western civilization, whatever you want: it was a deeply rooted sickness. That is, the presence of the devil, it was the presence of the devil in history to put it in mythological terms. I came to consider all this group of people, I mean those who collaborated with the Bolsheviks, as servants of the devil. From there on, I believed that literary collaboration . . . was treason, not treason in the easy patriotic sense of the

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term, but an essential, fundamental treason, not against Poland but against the principle of the good. Wat was a product of Warsaw café society. He was a fellow traveler of the Communist Party who ran a Marxist literary journal, Miesięcznik Literacki, during the Piłsudski years, when the Communist Party was banned. He soon discovered that the Devil was not content to stay in Hollywood. Polish Communists were appalled by Moscow’s stance with respect to the Nazis in the 1933 German elections. They were purged once more in 1938, and the survivors saw the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that they knew meant imminent war and a double invasion of Poland. Wat fled Warsaw to Eastern Poland when the Germans attacked and found himself in then Polish Lwów as Soviet troops entered the city. He was jailed, as were most of his Marxists friends, and eventually transferred to Lubyanka prison. No charges were ever proferred against him, but he was continuously interrogated about the views and attitudes of other Polish individuals. He was sent to Kazakhstan, where a large colony of Poles was being set up. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Poles were asked to join the Soviets in fighting “the common enemy.” Nearly all accepted, though some insisted on doing it on the Western Allies’ side (the Anders’ Army), while others joined Soviet brigades. The terms on which Poles joined synchronicity were very bitter. But they were soon surpassed by the horrors of the war itself, with the destruction of Polish Jewry, the elimination in Katyń of Polish elites on the orders of Stalin (with the Soviet Union adamantly refusing to acknowledge its responsibility and ascribing it to the Nazis, with the truth finally admitted after the collapse of the Soviet Union). The Devil was still at work when the Red Army stopped just short of Warsaw and let the Germans exterminate the Poles who had risen in anticipation of imminent liberation, destroying Warsaw in the process. The instauration of a Communist regime in Poland produced further dissonance. Most of the intellectuals who joined the new government and its institutions were convinced Marxists and fervent supporters of a workers’ revolution, but they knew that the government and the regime were not the products of such a revolution; they also had seen firsthand the workings of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. Some went west, but a surprising number stayed, to be condemned by those who left and to be consigned to permanent denigration in contemporary history books. There were opportunists and petty careerists among them, but there were . Aleksander Wat, Mój Wiek, 2 vols. (London: Polonia, 1981), 2:136.

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also some whose commitment to Marxism overcame their distrust and frequently open disgust with Stalinism. In spite of all the difficulties, and the waves of repression that were unleashed against them, they persisted in keeping the revolutionary idea alive. Their efforts took two major forms. One of them was the attempt to elaborate a doctrine of Marxist humanism. The philosopher Adam Schaff was the leader of this group. It sought dialogue with Marxists in the West, and it entered the debates on humanism that prevailed then among existentialists, phenomenologists, and Christian personalists. They were relatively ineffectual and did not develop any significant following, thereby gaining the benevolence of the party. The other group, whose intellectual leader was Kołakowski, was more radical. It reexamined Marx’s writings with scholarly thoroughness and attempted to produce an understanding of the Marxist revolutionary experience in the twentieth century. It was viewed with suspicion by the party, had no support in the West, except among marginalized Marxists, was occasionally drawn upon in internal party struggles, and then severely repressed following the events of March 1968, of which it was seen as the intellectual instigator. The point of departure for this group of intellectuals had to be what was being most severely repressed in the new postwar regime: the repeated destruction of the Polish Communist Party, and more generally the trials. Both raised the crucial issue of revolutionary violence, which had to be solved in order to insure that the transformation of Polish society that became possible under the new regime would be legitimate. Given their long historical experience of repeated uprisings against their oppressors and the subsequent repressions, Poles are not squeamish about violence. The national culture is filled with stories of self-sacrifice; if anything, many Poles have come to feel that they may have grown excessively prone to shed their lives for political causes, a sentiment most strongly expressed by Gombrowicz, earning him the contempt and reprobation of nationalists, all too ready to attribute his lack of “manly courage” to his sexual orientation. Many, especially on the left, deeply steeped in nineteenth-century revolutionary thought, believed that the pertinent question is whether the violence under consideration was itself revolutionary, that is, whether it was intended to bring about new human relations. Polish communist intellectuals believed that Marxism was, in this respect, fully congruent with other revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, and notably with anarchism. Violence, in this view, has to do with the contingency of history. History is not a Hegelian unfolding of a predetermined Reason but the achieve-

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ment of new meanings in human relations. The pursuit of individual projects is always shrouded in uncertainty with respect to their actual outcomes, and the meaning of the actions will always transcend the intentions that presided over them. Responsibility cannot therefore be measured by what was intended but by what was actually achieved by the action undertaken. This is the basis of Marxist objectivity. The tragic dimension of politics, which Kołakowski and his friends readily acknowledge, lies in the discrepancy between intentions and actions, in a drama that frequently pits subjective honesty against objective betrayal. Revolutionary action cannot be approached through such tragic or dramatic prisms. It cannot be judged on the basis of the intentions or the motives of its agents. The only legitimate judgment is the one that bears on the results of the actions from the point of view of a universal history that is still in the making. The invocation of the judgment of history is neither a mantra nor a cop-out. It is an integral part of revolutionary practice. It suggests that only revolutionaries can judge revolutionaries. Revolutionary trials are thus legitimate within the logic of a revolution. What is not legitimate, however, is to present revolutionary trials as ordinary trials in which the accused are said to be spies or saboteurs. Revolutionary justice must not pretend to be criminal justice, and it must not treat political defendants as criminals, not least because to do so is to convert revolutionary violence into institutional violence, which is de facto counterrevolutionary violence. Revolutionary violence is carried out in the name of truth. But if this truth takes the form of a political line worked out by party theorists or party leaders, it cannot, according to proper Marxist logic, be imposed upon proletarians against their will. Their resistance or rejection means that it is not the truth but institutional power claiming, and usurping, the status of truth. The dilemma of Communism in immediate postwar Poland is thus joined. Revolutionary violence is legitimate because it contributes to the advent of a better future for humankind; it is, in this respect, humanist violence. But much present-day violence is indistinguishable from other forms of violence. Stalinist terror is not proletarian terror but state terror; it will never turn into a new humanism. The gap between Marxism and Communism is too broad to be breached. The task of Marxist intellectuals is now very difficult: how to maintain the idea of revolutionary violence in an apparatus that has become counterrevolutionary. The fundamental error of the Moscow trials was that the accused were judged from the perspective of a meaning of history that was not taken as the product of the present

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but as having been written once and for all. The trials violated Marxist dialectic inasmuch as they treated the meaning of history as something to be discovered ready-made as opposed to something that was accomplished in practice. The task of revolutionary Marxist intellectuals must remain the discernment of history in the making and active contribution toward its accomplishment. This sense of history in the making is crucial to the next stage of the analysis. Marxism views as inseparable the three dimensions of revolutionary practice: the initiative of the masses, internationalism, and the construction of new economic relations. The Soviet model fails on at least two accounts: it remains national, and the masses have no power of decision, which remains the prerogative of the party. The economic dimension alone remains. There results a dangerous imbalance between an overestimated objective set of economic conditions and an underestimated subjective dimension of the proletarian masses. Revolution has been reduced to a matter of the will of the party, a form of collective Bonapartism. The dialectic no longer has anything to do with theory and praxis; it functions as a claim of knowledge with respect to universal history, while it is itself outside of any history. This analysis of the state of Soviet Communism was not unique to Polish intellectuals, although they carried it out with unusual rigor. Maurice Merleau-Ponty would subscribe to much of what has been described so far, although he would employ a more phenomenological vocabulary and would rehabilitate some of Weber’s theses in the process. The Poles would not follow him, however, when he concluded that the dialectic itself contained the seeds of its own hypostatization into a transhistorical form of knowledge. For the Poles, it was precisely the return to the dialectic that could prevent the hypostatization of the revolution, that is, its transformation into bureaucratic communism. The discernment of history in the making and its active promotion put the problem of synchronicity in the center of preoccupations. Its analysis would proceed as follows. For synchronicity to be a goal and a problem, one must posit the existence of diverse processes, fluxes, movements, all animated by different celerities. Plurality is a precondition of synchronicity. Synchronicity must not be equated with homogenization but rather with convergence and emergence, and, inevitably, divergence. The meaning of the historical process would become apparent only at the fleeting moments of accomplished synchronicity, otherwise it would always be caught in partial approximations, more in a form of bets on the future than actual instances

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of discernment. Such an understanding of synchronicity suggested a specific form of political practice. Kołakowski, who had studied the rise of heresies and other forms of oppositional thought within the Christian churches of the seventeenth century, revived a term coined in Poland in 1752 to designate an individual who professes a religious belief other than the official one—the dissident—and he proposed that the dissidents of Communism be viewed as forming part of what he called “leftist socialism,” a term that had the advantage of drawing attention to the prevalent right-wing nature of actually existing socialism. The fact that socialism in Poland was turning to the right was evident. Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party on February 25, 1956, denouncing Stalin’s Cult of Personality, threw the Polish Communist Party (PZPR) into disarray. Its own leader, Bolesław Bierut was gravely ill and would shortly die. The party printed twenty thousand copies of the translation of Khrushchev’s speech and distributed them to party leaders. Inevitably, the document was leaked and provoked intense discussion. To most Poles, whether party members or not, the denunciation of the Cult of Personality was no mere rejection of the cult of Stalin. The Cult of Personality was a fractal property of the entire system: the factory manager, the head of an office, the university department chair, the union steward; all asked for a form of the Cult of Personality adjusted to the scale of their position. To revoke this cult was thus far more than to abandon social piety toward Stalin. It was the promise of a change in social relations on the largest possible scale. It is change of this nature that the workers of Poznan’s largest factory expected. When they were told by the factory manager that they had to boost productivity with minimum compensation for their efforts, they saw his action as contravening the announced new order and they went on strike, demanding the direct intervention of the prime minister. When he tarried in responding, they took to the streets. The demonstrations had economic objectives, not political ones, and the workers sang “The Internationale” and the Polish national anthem. When local authorities sent the militia against them, the situation turned insurrectional: the workers, over one hundred thousand strong, seized city hall, party headquarters, and several militia stations. They also seized arms and began to formulate political demands. They were joined by students. The Soviet general, Konstantin Rokossovski, who was then deputy prime minister of Poland and minister of defense, as well as marshall of the Polish Armed Forces, was not sure he could count on the loyalty of Polish troops in the repression of the Poznan

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workers. He relied on so-called Warsaw Pact troops, mostly Soviet, to put down the uprising in June 1956. Some seventy-three workers were killed and over three hundred wounded. The party knew it had to move quickly to prevent a repetition of the movement in other places. Near Warsaw, at the Źeran automobile factory, the workers, under the charismatic leadership of a union leader, Lechosław Goździk, had gone on strike, occupied the factory, organized a workers’ council, and set up a workers’ militia, which they armed with weapons seized from the government militia. The demands of the workers were primarily economic, and again they sang “The Internationale” and the Polish national anthem, but quickly they demanded the lifting of censorship, the achievement of full sovereignty (no more Soviet generals in the Polish government), and the organization of workers’ councils. Khrushchev, who flew in to Warsaw to oversee the negotiations, viewed this last demand as particularly dangerous. At Tito’s urging, he had initially agreed to the setting up of Yugoslav-style workers’ councils in Hungary, but, when it became clear to him that the Hungarian workers had different councils in mind, he reneged on the agreement. He was now facing a similar demand in Poland, and he was as adamant in its rejection. The solution was to gain time: Władysław Gomułka, an old-time Communist, was pulled out of prison and made first secretary of the party. Gomułka proclaimed his allegiance to the principles of the Secret Speech—something he could do with a great deal of credibility, given his many years of persecution by Stalin. He also obtained the withdrawal of Marshall Rokossovski and all other Soviet officers embedded in the Polish armed forces, as well as a signed pledge that the Soviet Union would not move troops into, or through, Poland without prior permission of Polish authorities. Gomułka lifted a certain amount of censorship, granted large pay raises, and went into deficit spending importing food stuffs and consumer goods. He became very popular, and October 1956 became known as the Thaw. It was not to last. The country could not sustain the large-scale imports it had committed itself to, and the Soviet Union could not deliver the goods required. Gomułka himself was not committed to the reforms expected from him. He did accomplish a number of important things: an amnesty for many political prisoners; an improvement in relations with the Catholic Church; the lifting of some forms of censorship, especially in the arts; the attempt to bring the security apparatus within the legal sphere, among others. But Gomułka did not take long to denounce such “revisionism” and slowly started eroding the gains of October 1956. Things moved

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much more quickly in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The Polish government followed the Soviet Union in breaking relations with Israel, and anti-Jewish sentiments were freely expressed in government circles, among army leaders, and in at least one lay Catholic organization (PAX), although the head of the Polish Church expressed continued support for Israel. Small pro-Israeli demonstrations took place in several cities, and they included slogans against the Soviet Union. Gomułka went to the VI Congress of Labor Unions to denounce the existence in Poland of a “Zionist fifth column.” The claim was so outrageous that the government’s own censors prevented its appearance in the press, but the remark circulated widely and was further disseminated by Radio Free Europe. Gomułka was in fact ceding part of his power to the nationalists gathered around General Mieczysław Moczar, then minister of the interior, and as such, head of the state security apparatus. These nationalists, who called themselves the Partisans, invoking the name of the Communist resistance to the Nazis, formed goon squads that attacked “Zionists” at demonstrations and gatherings that opposed the government. These actions led to the purge of “pro-Zionists” from the party, the armed forces (two hundred senior officers, including fourteen generals), and other state apparatuses. The universities were not spared: a large number of professors were dismissed either because they were of Jewish origin, had pro-Israeli sympathies, or were openly against the purges. The party organized numerous meetings in factories and other work places to denounce the alleged “pro-Zionists” but also to insure that the workers would not join the protests and view the protesters as a spoiled elite. Various slogans were used, the most famous of which was: “Studenci do nauki, literaci do pióra, syjoniśći do Syjonu” (Students, to your studies; writers, to your pens; Zionists, to Zion). Things came to a head from an unexpected quarter. The year 1967 was the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, and a number of celebrations were planned. One of them was to be the staging of Poland’s most famous Romantic play, Dziady, by Mickiewicz. Dziady is a monstrous and unwieldy play, almost never performed in its entirety. It is often compared to Goethe’s Faust, and is as long as the two parts of this play. The title refers to a religious folkloric holiday celebrated in eastern Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. It is generally translated as Forefathers’ Eve. On this day, which was set at different times of the year (Belarus had as many as four per year, with one official one), ancestors were recalled. In Mickiewicz’s play, a formidable dramatic monologue against the exactions of Tsarist Russia upon

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the people of Poland and Lithuania is the high point of the representation. Given the relations between Poland and the Soviet Union at the time, the choice of the play may appear surprising. It has been suggested that it was an attempt to draw a distinction between Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, ascribing oppression to the former and liberation to the latter. If this was indeed the case, and accounts are still highly confusing, the choice of the play would have represented something akin to the distinction between revolutionary justice and criminalization of antirevolutionary behavior discussed above. The play was to be performed in the National Theatre in Warsaw, the nation’s preeminent stage. Kazimierz Dejmek was assigned the task of directing it. Dejmek was a well-regarded figure of the Polish theater; he had started out as an actor, turned director, and worked his way through the important stages in the provinces before heading to Warsaw. He had been an orthodox follower of Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski, and, until 1954, had followed strict socialist realism aesthetics. He tended to mount plays that had become part of the national canon, and his repertoire avoided the more controversial contemporary plays. Although his career was temporarily derailed by the events of 1968, he would bounce back from them and would even serve a short stint as minister of culture in the 1990s. In other words, he was seen as a safe choice. His staging of the play was quite bold and organized around the famous monologue. His choice of Gustaw Holoubek, one of Poland’s best actors of the postwar period, to play Gustaw-Konrad, the protagonist of the monologue, was inspired. The play was an instant success, and the monologue received prolonged applause. The Soviet legation was not amused. It complained officially to the Polish government, pointing out that antiRussian lines from the monologue were being shouted by the audience as it was leaving the theater, and that anti-Soviet ones were being added. It particularly objected to the fact that performances were being planned for school children. The Polish government acted quickly: Dejmek was told that the play could be performed only once a week, that school children would not be entitled to discounted tickets and would be limited in number, and finally that he had to keep track of audience reactions and report them to the authorities. In mid-January, he was further told that the play had to close after its eleventh performance on January 30, 1968. Students packed the theater, some hiding signs, and kept on interrupting the play with prolonged applause. When the play finally ended, they unfurled their signs and shouted the slogan: “Independence without censorship.” A cortege of some two hundred persons formed and proceeded to the nearby Adam

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Mickiewicz monument, where a sign proclaiming a demand for continued representations was hung. The militia, which had allowed the demonstration until then, charged them with batons and arrested thirty-five demonstrators. Nine were referred to an administrative hearing at the university, and two, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer, were expelled at the behest of the minister of education for allegedly having provided an account of the events to members of the French press. Michnik would play a leading role in Solidarność and is the editor in chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s most important independent daily newspaper. Szlajfer was nominated to be the ambassador of Poland to the United States in 2005 but withdrew his name after bloggers alleged he had spied for the secret police upon Michnik, among others, in the 1970s. Reaction to these sanctions was swift. Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, who were to play important roles in Solidarność (Modzelewski came up with the name), wrote a scathing pamphlet against party leaders (both were party members). Their position was supported by the Union of Polish Writers, which condemned the cultural policy of the government and demanded the lifting of censorship and the proclamation of freedom of creativity. Authorities responded by arresting Kuroń, Szlajfer, Modzelewski, Michnik, and several others on March 8 (Michnik, on March 9), the day for which a large meeting of support was scheduled at the University of Warsaw. The meeting went forward nonetheless, but it was broken up by the riot branch of the militia, supported by several busloads of so-called workers’ action groups, armed with staves, from local places of employment. The following day, demonstrations of support were held at the Warsaw Polytechnic, and the movement spread to all other places of higher education in Warsaw, and then to the rest of the country. The movement was limited to students, with the exception of Gdańsk, where some workers joined them. The government and the party organized meetings in factories and other businesses to denounce “elitist students,” stressing the “foreign-sounding” names of a number of their leaders and explicitly linking their movement to the alleged “Zionist Fifth Column.” Gomułka himself intervened publicly and attempted to clear the anti-Zionist campaign of charges of anti-Semitism. Others in the party were not equally careful. Students replied with even more vigorous protests and were then joined by some faculty members, who had been rather quiet until then. The Polish episcopate called for the end of repression. On March 25, the government announced that leading professors, Zygmunt Bauman and Kołakowski among them, were fired. Students mounted an even greater protest on March 28. Authorities responded

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by eliminating six courses of studies at the university, including the philosophy division in which sociology, economics, and psychology were taught. Several dozen students were expelled. Classes were suspended until late May, and a number of students were drafted into the military. These measures effectively squelched the student movement. The authorities did not stop there, however: some eight thousand members of the party, mostly of Jewish origin, were purged. The anti-Semitic campaign drove some fifteen thousand people from Poland; they were asked to surrender their passports, were stripped of citizenship, and issued a travel permit valid for exit from Poland. In 2008, citizenship is slowly being restored to these individuals. The events of March 1968 plunged Poland into a period of deep depression, further reinforced by the repression of the “Prague Spring” in nearby Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Polish troops participated in the military intervention that brought down the Alexander Dubček government. Bauman and Kołakowski headed into British exile, but their younger colleagues, Kuroń, Michnik, and Modzelewski, drew the lessons of the March experience. Any future movement would have to have the support of the workers, or rather, as Kuroń put it early, students and other intellectuals would have to learn to support workers in their protests. This realization would form the intellectual basis of Solidarność. The events of March 1968 had another important effect: even though they were marked by failure, and the country did succumb to depression, they signified the end of the nihilism that had hung over its intellectual life for most of the century. Poland had once again found itself out of synch with the rest of Europe, its student movement coming to an end as those of other countries were breaking out, but in spite of its lack of success, it would lay the seeds of the most successful mass movement of the last part of the twentieth century. Two final observations: One of the characteristics of the Polish asynchronicity is its repudiation of the notion of utopia. Whereas much of Marxist and Communist imagination was oriented toward utopian modes of thinking, the Polish political imagination had no such interest. The persistent figure of the Devil, which has caused puzzlement and even consternation among Western readers of Polish political literature, represents this repudiation. But it should not be taken as marking a substitution of dystopian thought for utopian modes. What is being rejected is the “u-topian” mode as such, that is, the mode of a quest for another space. Twentieth-century Polish political thought is not oriented toward another space or another time, it is oriented toward the real. It feels its absence, its evanescence under the assaults

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of ideology and propaganda. Poland was not a party to the grand design of the Vienna Consensus that sought to define rules of behavior for postrevolutionary and post-Napoleonic Europe. That consensus rested upon a specific notion of the real, so that violations of the consensus could be construed as forms of pathology, since they could be shown to be in violation of the real as defined by the consensus. For Poles, this was unacceptable, since the reality thus defined obliterated their national and cultural existence. They came to recognize early that definitions of the real, and the intellectual apparatus on which they rested, were instruments of political domination. Just as the artistic and literary vanguards of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would challenge the consensual notion of the real by showing its bourgeois rootedness, Poles would seek to reveal the real under official reality, the real in which they existed. This suspicion of utopia extended to all the talk of the New Man that was so prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century. The New Man was supposed to be the product of the utopian vision and the replacement for the type of Man that had been advanced by humanism. Polish thinkers are very reluctant to join in the critique of humanism. Or rather, when they do join in, it is on the specific issue of its normative character. It is for this reason that they do not invoke the abstract notion of humanity, preferring to speak of humanness. Humanness is a condition of human beings in a world where the Devil still roams after the death of God.

The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May

Nina Power and Alberto Toscano Liquidate ’68 “In this election,” Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed in 2007, “we’re going to find out if the heritage of May ’68 is going to be perpetuated or if it will be liquidated once and forever.” With the voicing of political principle and its antagonistic distillates an increasing rarity in the capitalist core— where enmity is naturalized (and racialized) by the imperatives of “national security” or violently, if antiseptically, outsourced to lands failed and threatening—some might have found it heartening to see the French revel yet again in the performance, if not always the reality, of political antagonism. Instead of pragmatically honing in on interest rates or pensions to prod the inevitable swing voters into action, Sarkozy saw it fit to evoke the specter of ’68 to dramatize the stakes of the then imminent second round of the French presidential election. It was as if the tiresomely descried stagnation, Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own. . For Sarkozy’s statements and their intellectual precursors, see Serge Audier, La pensée anti-68: Essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 5–16. boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-022  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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or worse degeneration, of the French polity rested on the inexhaustible effects of that fated date. “Sarko” advertised his presidency as an opportunity, forty years on, retroactively to cleanse (or “karcheriser,” to use the infamous expression he used during the banlieue riots of 2005) the mutinous streets of the Latin Quarter, with all their unruly and malevolent connotations. Witness his catchy slogan: “I want to turn the page on May 1968.” His political biographers even tell us that it was only his mother that held Sarkozy back, at the age of thirteen, from joining in the massive pro–de Gaulle march against the students and workers which paraded down the Champs Elysées on May 30, 1968. It might be tempting simply to regard Sarkozy’s tirades as an obligatory rite for a French politician of the Right, and an attempt to swing Paris back, after the banlieue riots, the protests against the proposed contrat de première embauche (CPE, “first employment contract”), and mobilization against the European Constitution, to its status as “the capital of European reaction,” to cite Perry Anderson’s famous dictum. But Sarkozy’s wish to liquidate ’68—to repave the French political imaginary and erase the very memory of those events in anticipation of their (predictably melancholy) fortieth anniversary—seems to bespeak a harsher form of subjectivity than a merely reactionary one. Despite the presence of the intolerable André Glucksmann, epitome of reactionary subjectivity in Alain Badiou’s recent Logiques des mondes, alongside Johnny Hallyday and, alas, Charlotte Rampling, in Sarkozy’s entourage, the figure of the reactive subject—which we will examine more closely below—is still too mild to properly identify la singularité Sarkozy. Taking François Furet as emblematic of this kind of subjectivity, Badiou sees reaction as a manner of starkly denying the necessity of rupture embodied in a political event (e.g., the French Revolution) but nevertheless incorporating some of the novelties it carries within a narrative where radical subjectivity and collective action are simply hysterical and catastrophic gestures which, at best, give rise to changes that the gradual and reasonable unfolding of historical development would have led to anyway. In the final analysis, from the vantage point of reaction, the event and the implacable fidelity to its consequences are a hindrance to the very principles that motivate it. But Badiou’s recent thought, as we shall see in more depth below, introduces another figure of the subject, whose relationship to novelty and fidelity is more extreme, less mediated: the obscure subject. The aim of this subject is not to neutralize novelty by incorporating some of its effects and

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despairing of its needless excess. Rather, political obscurantism is aimed at radically negating the new present that a faithful or militant subject of truth (an egalitarian subject) has arduously brought into being. As Badiou puts it in Logiques des mondes, the obscure subject “systematically resorts to the invocation of a transcendent Body, full and pure, an ahistorical or anti-evental body (City, God, Race . . .) whence it derives that the trace will be denied (here, the labour of the reactive subject is useful to the obscure subject) and, by way of consequence, the real body, the divided body, will also be suppressed.” In this respect, Sarkozy’s gambit is that the very act of liquidating the divided body of ’68 may help in conjuring up the full body of a morally rearmed French nation. His ultimately sinister “Ensemble, tout est possible” (insofar as the body of this tous is brought together by the exclusion of immigrants, soixante-huitards, racaille, and so on) is thus infinitely distant from the slogan of the 1995 French protests: Tous ensemble. While Sarkozy is still functioning well within the ambit of reactive politics (capitalist parliamentarianism), his tendencies, following Badiou’s useful formalization, are obscure. As Badiou notes, It is crucial to gauge the gap between the reactive formalism and the obscure formalism. As violent as it may be, reaction conserves the form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful rupture (which it calls “violence” or “terrorism”) is useless for engendering a moderate, that is to say extinguished, present (a present that it calls “modern”). . . . Things are very different for the obscure subject. That is because it is the present that is directly its unconscious, its lethal disturbance, while it disarticulates within appearance the formal data of fidelity. The monstrous full Body to which it gives fictional shape is the atemporal filling of the abolished present. [It entertains] everywhere and at all times the hatred of any living thought, of any transparent language and of every uncertain becoming. (LM, 69) Sarkozy’s thirst for negation of course can’t be directed at political novelty itself—which in any instance has been squandered by much of the Left and systemically nearly obliterated in these years of neoliberal Restoration—and . Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 69. This work has been translated into English by Alberto Toscano, as Logics of Worlds (London: Continuum, 2009). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as LM; page numbers refer to the French edition. . See Stathis Kouvélakis, La France en révolte (Paris: Textuel, 2007).

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much less at a living political subject; on the contrary, in a typical manifestation of the obscurantist mind-set, it is directed at an eclectic set of noxious predicates and phenomena, a “divided body” indeed—“division” being the ominous specter that haunted much mainstream political discourse around the 2007 election. Thus 1968 is the proverbial “quilting point,” the Lacanian point de capiton for (to quote from a Sarkozy speech) “welfare dependency, fraud, thievery, egalitarianism,” “moral and intellectual relativism.” It is the deep cause of a “moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc.” In order to bury the body of political principles and subjects, what better than to portray 1968 as the very absence of principles? Also sprach Sarko: “The heirs of May ’68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent.” Values, hierarchy, morality— all moribund, all to rise again into the full Body of the Republic once the canker of 1968 is finally excised. In order to mobilize the electoral hordes for his counterrevolutionary revolution, Sarkozy was even willing to depict ’68 as a kind of ethical catastrophe that made possible the “excesses of financial capital,” “golden handshakes” and “rogue bosses.” Sarkozy’s blessed rage for order did indeed seem to confirm one of Badiou’s hunches, to wit that an event and the faithful subject it catalyzes do not just generate an independent political trajectory, a truth, but that they reshape the whole of “subjective space,” forcing both reactionaries and obscurantists to develop their positions in relation to it. But what of Sarkozy’s defeated contender, Ségolene Royal, her camp, and the culprits of this decades-long moral malaise, the soixantehuitards? On one level, Royal responded to Sarkozy’s thirst for annihilation by laying claim to that legacy, having earlier in her campaign even flirted with the thought of Jacques Rancière and with proposals for participatory democracy. Hers was, after a fashion, a show of fidelity, declaring that “May 1968 is 11 million workers who obtained the Grenelle accords, the right of women to access contraception, a wind of freedom against a totally closed society.” Leaving aside the fact that the Grenelle accords, negotiated by . Alas, this take on 1968 has been put forward by less obnoxious sources: the otherwise excellent Adam Curtis, for instance, in his spurious attack on R. D. Laing’s antipsychiatry in the recent BBC documentary series The Trap; or Régis Debray, who, in the New Left Review ’s issue on the tenth anniversary of 1968 famously portrayed it as a vanishing mediator of sorts for American hedonistic capitalism. . This quote, and the one from Cohn-Bendit below, is taken from a pro-Royal Weblog,

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Chirac, were held in contempt by much of the union rank and file and by the entirety of the Maoist and Trotskyist Left, another statement of Royal’s should also be kept in mind: she in fact accused Sarkozy of trying to provoke “another 1968.” In this second sense, closer to the reactive one in Badiou’s terminology, 1968 stands in for disorder, crisis, anomie, and a conflict that must be averted at all costs by the efforts of a stalwart reformism. It is not in any way the cipher for a moment of political invention, for the possibility of a radical restructuring of society. The tenor of the “Left” ripostes to Sarkozy in the French media were also symptomatic. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a rather self-regarding European parliamentarian, predictably rehashed his long-time anticommunism to brand Sarkozy’s liquidationism as “Bolshevik” and, in faultless Euro-liberal form, praised ’68 for its “liberation of the autonomy of individuals.” Many others emphasized the “values” of freedom and autonomy, but in the guise of a salutary infusion of joy, pleasure, and mobility into the polity, not in terms of a radical alternative to the status quo. available at http://desirsdavenir11.over-blog.net/article-6524006.html (last accessed September 15, 2008). . This section was composed during the French elections and prior to the publication of Badiou’s De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, the fourth volume in his Circonstances series. In that text, Badiou, drawing on a different aspect of his Logiques des mondes, presents Sarkozy as the latest incarnation of a “Pétainist” transcendental. As is clear from the following quote, taken from an excerpt recently published in the New Left Review, the Pétainist transcendental is a peculiar amalgam of reaction and obscurantism: “the unconscious national-historical roots of that which goes by the name of Sarkozy are to be found in this Pétainist configuration, in which the disorientation itself is solemnly enacted from the summit of the state, and presented as a historical turning-point. This matrix has been a recurring pattern in French history. It goes back to the Restoration of 1815 when a post-Revolutionary government, eagerly supported by émigrés and opportunists, was brought back in the foreigners’ baggage-train and declared, with the consent of a wornout population, that it would restore public morality and order. In 1940, military defeat once again served as the context for the disorientating reversal of the real content of state action: the Vichy government spoke incessantly of the ‘nation,’ yet was installed by the German Occupation; the most corrupt of oligarchs were to lead the country out of moral crisis; Pétain himself, an ageing general in the service of property, would be the embodiment of national rebirth.” This politics of restoration under the simulacrum of rebirth is one in which “capitulation and servility” (to foreign occupiers or Capital) “are presented as invention and regeneration” (Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49 [January–February 2008]: 32–33). See also Peter Hallward’s perspicuous comments and criticisms in “L’hypothèse communiste,” Le revue internationale des livres et des idées 5 (2008): 28–30, a longer version of his review of Badiou’s Sarkozy book in Radical Philosophy 149 (2008): 50–52.

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“I Fail, Therefore I Am.” As testified by the French controversies—especially in the pages of the daily Libération—around Badiou’s Circonstances 3 (his collection of interventions on Israel, Zionism, and Judaism, now in English in Polemics) and his best-selling screed against Sarkozy, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, the “antitotalitarian” credo of the nouveaux philosophes and the anticommunist philosophies of finitude, liberalism, and human rights are still enduring ideological forces, at least as far as the dreaded figure of the “media intellectual” is concerned. On a broader scale, the intellectual and philosophical suspicion of emancipatory philosophies—of any prospect of creating a “new man” or a new society—still pervades much political and ethical thought, whether in the guise of a concern with ineffable alterity or in an emphasis on precariousness and vulnerability pitted against any notion of the radical transformation or transvaluation of society. Whether they find their sources in Habermas or Levinas, many contemporary ethical and political philosophies are defined, explicitly or otherwise, by their reaction either to a supposed totalitarian hubris or to the “left-fascist” excesses of la pensée 68 (it is interesting that this Habermasian category has resurfaced in Peter Sloterdijk’s recent post-Nietzschean anticommunist tome, Zorn und Zeit). Aside from its assertive advocacy of philosophical speculation against any affectations of critical humility, the fortune of Badiou’s philosophy can be chalked up to his marked opposition to any intellectual approach that takes its cue from the supposed defeat of revolutionary aspirations. Indeed, for some time, the political philosophy of the “lesser evil” has been one of his specific adversaries. In a 1987 article, tellingly entitled “Down with Existing Society!” he railed against the “intellectual coma” that stems from treating the self-interested preference for living in parliamentary democracies rather than authoritarian states as the basis for a political doctrine. This ambient hedonistic defense of liberalism finds its sophistic apotheosis in the idea that the destiny of “the West” (itself one of the categories of the anti-’68 Restoration) is to fight radical Evil, and that its perdition lies in any project that would be predicated on an idea of the Good. In the . For the diagnosis of an emblematic case in this regard, see Daniel Bensaïd, Un nouveau théologien: Bernard-Henri Lévy (Paris: Lignes, 2007). Deleuze’s seminal analysis of the nouveaux philosophes, “A propos des nouveaux philosophes et d’un probleme general” (1977), now in Two Regimes of Madness (New York: Semiotext[e], 2006), remains one of the most acute dissections of this phenomenon.

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nouveaux philosophes’ apologia for local resistances to Evil over against revolutionary projects for the Good, Badiou discerns an ultimate conservatism, distilled into the motto “let’s hold on to what we have, since there is worse elsewhere.” Such a perspective forbids any immanent evaluation of one’s own political conjuncture, and more importantly prohibits the formulation of any political thinking worthy of the name. These observations lead Badiou to a sardonic remark that could be seen as an emblem for his whole philosophy: If the lamentable state in which we find ourselves is nonetheless the best of all real states this simply proves that up to now the political history of men has only given birth to restricted innovations and we are but characters in a pre-historic situation. . . . If, in terms of political thought and practice, of forms of collective life, humanity has yet to find and will not find anything better than currently existing parliamentary states, and the forms of consciousness associated with them, this proves that as a species, said humanity will not rank much higher than ants and elephants. The communist idea at least had the merit of announcing a fate that would be a little more capable of inscribing itself in the annals of the Universe. Badiou recognizes that the “lesser evil” argument is bolstered by its key subjective correlate, one that from a very different perspective had already been identified and condemned by Hannah Arendt in her 1950’s criticisms of “ex-communist” cold warriors—what Badiou encapsulates in the thesis “we tried, and it was a catastrophe,” or, more pithily: “I fail, therefore I am.” He paints an unforgiving portrait of those who—having learned the ropes of politics and strategy from their revolutionary commitment—now censure their previous fidelity as a youthful diversion which merely delayed their rise to positions of power and prestige. Badiou heaps contempt on the form of reasoning that underlies these comfortable conversions: “Imagine a mathematician who, having toiled with few results on a problem, would declare that since he failed, the problem no longer exists! Note that such a mathematician would not, because of his declaration, be propelled into the Academy of the Sciences, whilst it seems that having failed in revolutionary politics, if one flaunts it loudly enough, justifies the greatest hopes in journalism. I fail, therefore I am.” But for Badiou the political problems that . Alain Badiou, “À bas la société existante!” Le Perroquet 69 (March 23, 1987), 2. . Badiou, “À bas la société existante!” 2.

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called forth revolutionary commitment abide, and their seemingly intractable difficulty is only a spur for further investigation. The supposed combination of morality and realism promoted by the likes of the nouveaux philosophes is but a confession of incapacity, and a commitment to opposing society as it stands demands ever-renewed conceptual and practical innovations, which no cozy abdication can ever dispel. In a recent conference in Paris devoted to Logiques des mondes, the sequel to his meta-ontological magnum opus Being and Event, Badiou made a strange but very telling confession: he explained that all of his work, including or even especially his most forbiddingly abstract philosophical investigations, stems from the need to answer how and why many of his generational peers could betray their revolutionary convictions, namely those convictions that came forcefully to the fore after May ’68. This avowal is odd for a number of reasons. To begin with, it almost suggests that militant fidelity—the putative cornerstone of Badiou’s constantly revised theory of the subject—albeit rare is itself not mysterious, or even that, from Badiou’s own point of view, it is its abandonment or perversion that stands as an enigma, not its emergence as such. Furthermore, though Badiou’s philosophy, especially in books such as Saint Paul, appears to propose a model of subjectivity that wrests it away from any continuity with everyday experience—where “subject” stands for a process of purifying subtraction from worldly entanglements and from embodied individuality, and for the construction of a singular truth—the role of betrayal in eliciting philosophical speculation suggests that subjects other than militant ones have a role to play in Badiou’s thought.10 In what follows, we would like to investigate some of the figures taken by these other subjects in Badiou’s thought, from its inception in the late sixties onwards. The object of this bestiary—which does not include just revisionists, reactionaries, and renegades, but also Thermidorians, democratic materialists, obscurantists, sophists, antiphilosophers, social-fascists, and opportunists, among others—is to explore the subjective aspect and the internal periodization of the phase that Badiou in The Century defines as the Restoration, that period of triumphant cynicism whose beginning in France he dates to the late seventies and early eighties, and which significantly overlaps with his mature philosophical production. This will allow us to give a sense of the cultural and polemical context whence Badiou’s 10. See Alberto Toscano, “The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or, The Other Subjects of Politics,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 2, no. 1–2 (2006): 15–38.

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thought arises, and some of the political motivations that lie behind his rather Althusserian treatment of philosophy as an activity not of critique or totalization but of polemical demarcation. Hopefully, a number of the lessons that may be drawn from Badiou’s rather singular trajectory will be of interest for a broader reckoning not just with the legacy of ’68 but more specifically with the many forms taken by its repudiation, disavowal, and negation. Much of the attraction of Badiou’s thought in the current conjuncture may be said to stem from the verve and precision with which he revives philosophy’s combative vocation. In Logiques des mondes, as we shall see and as we’ve already suggested, he even provides a transhistorical formalization of the subjective space in which militancy coexists with reaction and obscurantism. But what in the more recent work takes an often formal guise, in Badiou’s earlier writings, especially his Maoist pamphlets from the 1970s, is filled with very specific content. We will thus begin with a treatment of Badiou’s polemical view of the ideological field in the wake of ’68, proceed to his understanding of the philosophies of the Restoration in the 1980s and 1990s, and conclude by considering the place of antiegalitarian or nonuniversal subjects in Badiou’s formal theory of the subject, as set out in Book 1 of Logiques des mondes. The Revisionist Foe Arguably the key plank, as well as the source, of Badiou’s later ventures into polemology and demarcation is his discussion of revisionism in the early 1970s. In a number of texts principally concerned with outlining the stance of his Maoist organization, the UCFML (Groupe pour la fondation d’une Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste), toward the major French unions (CGT and CFDT) and the French Communist Party (PCF), Badiou engages in a seemingly orthodox application of the terminology of the Sino-Soviet clash, and its intensification in the period of the Cultural Revolution, to the context of post-’68 French politics. The epithets of social-imperialism, social-colonialism, and even the social-fascism of the “Third Period” Third International make their appearance (one could criticize these appellations using Badiou’s own refutation of notions like Islamic fundamentalism or “Islamofascism” in Infinite Thought,11 where the adjective-noun complex is deemed to hide the vacuity or vagueness 11. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and the ‘War against Terrorism,’” in Infinite Thought, trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), 141–64.

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of the two terms). The strategic horizon is provided by what Badiou calls a “revisionist counter-offensive,” the PCF project for state power after the weakening of the revolutionary upsurge of ’68. Whereas other MarxistLeninist groups (PCMLF, Gauche prolétarienne) are targets of derision for their merely “ideological” criticism of the PCF line, Badiou depicts a situation in which the drive for emancipation is stuck between one bourgeois project (liberal capitalist) and another (that of the PCF, or what Badiou in his Maoist idiom calls “the state-bureaucratic monopolistic fraction of the French imperialist bourgeoisie,” whose aim is “an imperialist bourgeois state of a new type”—Badiou even goes so far as painting the PCF as a party whose intrinsic logic pushes it to a coup d’état scenario . . .). In this wholly militant period of Badiou’s production, it is not just political criteria that serve to identify and oppose antiegalitarian projects: revisionist subjectivities are also grounded in a class analysis of sorts. Though Badiou opposes the idea according to which the PCF is a petty-bourgeois party, he does seek its organizational basis in an elitist, hierarchical, and technical “labor aristocracy,” and reiterates that the diagnosis of social-fascism is founded on regarding the PCF from the perspective of its project: the seizure and administration of state power.12 The “social” in the term social-fascism thus refers to the instrumentalization of a mass base of working-class supporters and the employment of a counterfeit Marxist ideology, for the sake of a project that would propose to solve the crisis of capitalism through a nationalist, statist, and organic centralization of power within a bureaucratic apparatus. Viewed from the standpoint of Badiou’s own political line, the field is thus one of complex antagonism: the position of the UCFML is not only faced with two enemies juxtaposed to one another (classical monopolism and bureaucratic monopolism), but within the union movement itself it is confronted with revisionism (the CGT as pro-PCF union) and opportunism, that form of anarchosyndicalist unionism which promotes self-management and repudiates state-power but in the end is perfectly compatible with the parliamentary order (the CFDT and other organizations). We thus have an opposition between state projects, as well as an antagonism between different types of struggle. Finally, as Badiou’s 1978 pamphlet on the contestation within the PCF makes clear, where he lambastes Althusser and his ilk for their political debility, revisionism, and opportunism, all find their ultimate reason 12. See Alain Badiou, “Édification du parti et question syndicale,” Théorie et politique 3/4 (1975): 114–18; “Syndicalisme et révisionnisme moderne,” Théorie et politique 5 (1975): 58–87; La « contestation » dans le P.C.F (Paris: Éditions Potemkine, 1978).

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in the manner that they react, however implicitly, to the “real” they are trying to repress: egalitarian revolutionary politics (needless to say, this “real” is Badiou’s own politics). The Philosophical Front As the decade of the 1970s proceeds, and the political context becomes even less favorable to the kind of struggle promoted by Badiou’s group, it is in the ideological field that his efforts and those of his comrades are most insistent. The key text in this respect, a remarkable precursor of his more recent polemics, as well as a valuable compass for orienting oneself around Badiou’s antagonistic image of philosophy, is the 1977 collective text published by the Groupe-Yénan Philosophie of the UCFML, The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front.13 The purpose of this book is to identify and drastically undermine those forms of post-’68 thought which are predicated on the revolutionary upheaval of May and its aftermath but which neutralize, pervert, or counter the political “real” whence they emerge. The role of philosophy here is depicted as an extreme version of Althusser’s “class struggle in theory.” Philosophy is a “distillate of antagonism” summoned by history and “the servant, not of science, but of weapons.” It is the “decisive figure of the actual, the divided, of class.” Lacan, Althusser, and Deleuze—the targets of this left attack on a certain pensée 68—stand as the masks of philosophical novelty. There is only one great philosopher . . . Mao, as the emblem of a confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution. Most importantly, and in sharp contrast to the avowed wish in Badiou’s later thought to “desuture” philosophy and politics (see Manifesto for Philosophy), the division between revolution and counterrevolution is anterior to every philosophy, and what matters is the frontline. Philosophy follows the periodization and confrontations of political struggle, and appears at the hinges of historical struggle. The philosophical front is here defined in terms of one simple question: What did May ’68 signify? The period ’68 engenders a kind of philosophical and subjective space, within which philosophical production takes place. This space is also matched by a periodization. For Badiou, the period ’68–’71 is one of the simplification of struggle, of a concrete fighting philosophy married to practice, devoid of speculation and subordinated to the “immediate density of content.” From 1972, incapable of holding the 13. Groupe-Yénan Philosophie, La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie (Paris: F. Maspéro, 1977).

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line, many turn to terrorism (the hyper-leftist option), or decadence (the rightist one). It is the capitulation of those who didn’t accept the demanding labor—rather than the revelation—of suppressing oneself as a bourgeois intellectual, leading to the return to the “vengeful virtues of philosophy.” Philosophy appears here as a kind of revenge against history. Incapable of attaining Power, the likes of the nouveaux philosophes try to show that Power is Evil, snatching the victory of reprobation from the defeat of their previous designs. As Badiou quips, “Since they were no longer allowed to have the starring roles, they would show that the play itself was bad and that its protagonist (the proletariat) is guilty of a villainous fiasco.”14 The position of the nouveaux philosophes is accordingly synthesized in these theses: masses (revolts) are good; the proletariat (Marxism) is bad; Power (the State, whatever it may be) is Evil. For these renegades, revolt must be stripped of any organization, guidance, and roots in a class project. By repudiating the theme of dictatorship, or the very struggle for power, this intellectual petite bourgeoisie refuses politics and descends into metaphysics, nihilism, and so forth (thus laying the ground for the politics of the lesser evil that Badiou would later condemn). It is thus that a movement disarticulated from organization becomes morality and eventually a pretext for restoration. A certain sociologism is still present in these analyses—allowing Badiou, for instance, to contend that the “poststructuralist” themes of Bodies, Writing, and Jouissance are merely hypostases of the immediate social practice of the intellectual petite bourgeoisie. Finally, the analysis of the various ways in which the philosophies of Deleuze, Lacan, and Althusser disavow or suppress the “real” of revolt is linked to the strictly political and strategic analysis of the two bourgeois projects (capitalist-fascism and social-fascism, as it were), in a political cartography of French philosophy which gives some sense of how Badiou and his comrades conceived of the force field linking reaction to speculation. We reproduce below a diagram of the political topology of revolt and reaction and its conjunctural “fluctuations,” as ideological hegemonies are unsettled (Figure 1). The UCFML’s concentrated point of Maoism lies at the base, whence stem two lines, leading on the one hand to “nihilist fascist anti-Marxism” (the fascisme du pomme de terre or potato-fascism of the fans of the rhizome), on the other to the “social fascists false Marxism” which captures Althusserianism in its submission to the PCF. 14. Groupe-Yénan Philosophie, La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, 11.

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Figure 1. Diagram taken from La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, 20. This picture is made more intelligible if we consider, following Bruno Bosteels,15 the centrality for Badiou of the concept of deviation, which identifies as immanent possibilities of any universalist, emancipatory philosophy a “leftist” penchant for pure force or act (as might be present in Deleuze’s vitalism) and a “rightist” affirmation that there is no exception, only structure (as might be argued of “high” structuralism). Though born of Badiou’s own diagnosis of the Maoist camp (the Gauche prolétarienne as leftist spontaneist deviation, the rigorously orthodox PCMLF as rightist dogmatism), this is a logic that will remain central to his later conceptualizations of subjectivity as well. This period of Badiou’s work leaves a number of questions pending if we consider it in terms of his later figures of polemic and enmity: Are there specific forms of philosophical antagonism that do not depend on the prior 15. See, among several important articles he has devoted to Badiou’s politics, Bruno Bosteels, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics,” positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 575–634.

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delineation of a political and ideological front? If politics and philosophy are desutured, do notions such as reaction and revisionism remain purely political, or are their analogs present in all “truth procedures”? And what happens to the analysis of political reaction when the fundamental parts played by class perspective and the prospect of state power are so radically recast in Badiou’s later work? Thermidoreans, or, The Betrayers of Generic Humanity In an essay originally published in 1996, translated as “What Is a Thermidorean?”16 Badiou updates his continued polemic against the nouveaux philosophes by returning to an older French Revolutionary trope. In contrast to the postrevolutionary historical reaction of the original Thermidor, Badiou speaks of the “personal Thermidor” that characterizes many of the attitudes taken by the nouveaux philosophes to the narrative of their own supposed political development. This self-narration takes the form of positing a putative earlier “radical” self—in the French case, usually of a Maoist bent—with the supposedly “adult” realization that one must reconcile oneself to the existing order. Noam Chomsky has made a similar point, showing that this kind of retroactive political storytelling about oneself usually involves a fair amount of exaggerating—I was chucking bricks through windows and beating up cops!—when nothing of the sort had in fact taken place. The concept of the “personal Thermidor” promotes the idea both that the political affiliations one holds in one’s youth are the stuff of folly, but also that one is reconciled to the status quo in a more profound way, having been “on the other” side in an earlier incarnation. The idea that “there is no alternative” receives its justification from the supposed failure of the idea that at some earlier point there might have been one. For Badiou, “Thermidorean”—as one concept appropriate to the forms of reaction in the previous few decades—means, then, “the concept of the subjectivity constituted through the termination of a political sequence.”17 This consists of, according to Badiou, “statification”—rallying behind the political process, calculable interest, and the belief that all politics is motivated by the drive for power and prestige—and what Badiou calls “placement,” that is, the contrasting of Western democracy with the purported totalitarianism and the lack of human rights of the “elsewhere.” 16. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005). 17. Badiou, Metapolitics, 128.

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Badiou’s attack on the use and abuse of the language of human rights is amongst his most trenchant of recent critiques, most particularly in his Ethics, from 1993. There he claims that the “return to the old doctrine of the natural rights of man is obviously linked to the collapse of revolutionary Marxism”18 and professes his fidelity to the line of French antihumanism that includes Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan. However, the question of Badiou’s relationship to the humanism-antihumanism debate is a much more complex one than his apparently straightforward attack on ethical and human rights discourse might suggest. Against the evacuation of any positive use of the term in Althusser’s work and its reduction to mere ideological effect, it is clear that Badiou wants to retain a post-Sartrean conception of the “subject,” and that this has been the case from his earlier, more heavily political works (Théorie du sujet, 1982), to his later exercises in meta-ontology and a theory of truth (Being and Event, 1988, and Logiques des mondes, 2006). However, we can immediately complicate this claim by noting that the later Badiou does take on board one aspect of the Althusserian claim that there are no extant “subjects” qua autonomous agents, alongside the seemingly opposed Sartrean idea that subjectivation is possible and, indeed, desirable. Badiou’s relationship to the claims and vicissitudes of the so-called humanism-antihumanism debate plays out over the question of how and why he retains and defines, not just a question of who or what the collective political subject might be but also what the significance of the “subject” might be for philosophy in toto. His work is an attempt to merge and go beyond the two terms of the debate, in which structuralism “opposes” humanism, by entering into a topological discourse that nevertheless permits the continued possible existence of the subject (indeed, we could say that Badiou’s preservation of the “subject” is the most consistent element of his work). Whilst Badiou seeks to align himself with the antihumanism of Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser, against both a “return to Kant” in human rights discourse and the “bad Darwinism” of a contemporary conception of man as finite animal, there are hints, both explicit and implicit, of his belonging to a longer trajectory of “political humanism.” Indeed, we see this in particular in Badiou’s mathematico-political deployment of terms such as generic, and its political correlate generic humanity. We don’t wish to argue that Badiou’s “mathematical turn” is necessarily over-determined by his politics, as some have suggested, but 18. Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 4.

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rather that the mathematics and politics coimplicate each other in ways which entail that when Badiou uses terms like revolution the resonances are intended to be heard at both levels, scientific and historico-political. The major claim made here is that Badiou’s use of the term humanism is, however, evidence of a political struggle whose vicissitudes have lent the philosophical implications of the word a different sense at different points between the original “debate” of the 1960s and the contemporary era: the story here with regard to Badiou’s work is how the impossibility of using the term in the era of Stalin (“a ‘Soviet humanism’ through which we can glimpse the well-heeled dachas and the black Mercedes,” he writes19) has been transformed into the possibility of equating the quasi-Feuerbachian term generic humanity with the politics of an egalitarian communism (“Equality means that the political actor is represented under the sole sign of his specifically human capacity”20). The rationalist insistence that “people think” appears everywhere in Badiou. In an article titled “Democratic Materialism,” excerpted from Logiques de mondes, Badiou asks “what do we think, today?”21 We should not, of course, understand this as a Heideggerian worry that thought is not yet happening, but rather as the persistent claim that thought itself has been betrayed, in the various revisionist and reactionary antipolitical formations. Badiou’s claim in this piece that the status quo can be summed up by its “natural” belief that “There are only bodies and languages”22 conveys his contempt for identity politics and the superficial investment in cultural and linguistic differences. For Badiou, difference is not something to be dragged up and hailed, but rather the banal stuff of human life; to reify difference is to deny that sameness is also possible—the sameness of a political project, a shared commitment to a political goal (and here Badiou is extremely Sartrean). Against this democratic materialism, Badiou proposes a materialist dialectic—as he freely confesses, a rather old and unfashionable phrase—which adds the important proviso to the phrase “there are only bodies and languages” except that there are truths to the phrase “there are only bodies and languages.” This exception is precisely 19. See Alain Badiou, “Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution,” trans. Alberto Toscano with Lorenzo Chiesa and Nina Power, positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 635–48. 20. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Politics,” Radical Philosophy 96 (1999): 29. 21. Alain Badiou, “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic,” Radical Philosophy 130 (2005): 20. 22. Badiou, “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic,” 20.

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what “democratic” materialism wishes to foreclose. In this return to a kind of Althusserian language, fused with Plato and Descartes, we see Badiou’s ambivalent struggle with an old vocabulary and a new subjective horizon; often he’ll speak of having to move beyond the logic of classical Marxism—the party, classes, et cetera—but the question of what might replace it remains open. Meta-physics of the Political Subject: Reactionaries and Obscurantists How are these various notions of enmity and polemic formalized in Badiou’s most recent work? Pitted against hermeneutic, moral, and ideological models of subjectivity, it is worth reiterating that Badiou’s theory is not interested in the experience of subjectivity but simply in its form. Nor is Badiou particularly concerned with the subject as a source of statements, a subject of enunciation capable of saying “I” or “we.” Rather, the subject is depicted as what exceeds the normal disposition and knowledge of “bodies and languages.” The theory propounded in Book 1 of Logiques de mondes, however, brackets the body (which is why Badiou dubs it a “meta-physics”), and provides the general parameters for thinking how subjects exceed the situations from which they arise. The notion of subject therefore “imposes the readability of a unified orientation upon a multiplicity of bodies” (LM, 58). The subject is thus viewed as an “active and identifiable form of the production of truths” (LM, 58). The emphasis, evidently, is on form. But does this entail that the only subjects deserving of our theoretical attention are subjects of truth, of the one truth that may affect and dislocate any given situation? The particular inflection of Badiou’s definition tells us otherwise: “Saying ‘subject’ or saying ‘subject with regard to truth’ is redundant. For there is a subject only as the subject of a truth, at the service of this truth, of its denial, or of its occultation” (LM, 58). This “with regard to” already indicates that there are, indeed, different subjective positions or comportments, determined by a subject’s stance toward the irruption of the event and the truths that may follow from it. Badiou himself presents this theory as a self-criticism of sorts, arguing that his earlier work (he is thinking of the Théorie du sujet in particular and its denial that there was such a thing as bourgeois subjectivity) stipulated an all-too-firm and drastic opposition between the new and the old. In this new formal theory he wishes instead to confront the existence, amongst others, of what he calls “reactionary novelties.” To resist the new, to deny it, one still requires

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arguments and subjective forms. In other words, the theory of the subject needs to countenance the fact that reactionary forms of subjectivation exist—which for Badiou unsurprisingly take the shape of the anticommunist antitotalitarianism which spurred the backlash of revisionist historians (Furet) and the renegade nouveaux philosophes (Glucksmann) to the emancipatory innovations arising in the wake of May ’68. In the place of an earlier reliance on class analysis and political partisanship, the dependence of subjectivity on the event permits Badiou to propose a philosophical argument as to why “other” subjects are radically dependent on a subject of truth. As he writes, “From a subjective point of view, it is not because there is reaction that there is revolution, it is because there is revolution that there is reaction” (LM, 71). This Maoist thesis of the primacy of revolt, which Badiou had already formulated as early as his 1975 Théorie de la contradiction, is now philosophically articulated in terms of the key “temporal” category of Badiou’s theory of the subject, that of the present. In responding to the trace of a supernumerary, illegal event, and in constructing the body that can bring the implications of this event to bear on a given world, a faithful subject is involved in the production of a present. Indeed, the only subjective temporality, which is to say the only historicity, envisaged in Badiou’s system derives from such an irruption of generic universality into the status quo. But if the present, as a kind of rigorous and continued sequence of novelties belongs to the subject of truth, how can “other subjects” partake in it? Badiou’s contention is that they do so in a strictly derivative and parasitic (albeit by no means passive) manner. As he puts it, subjective “destinations proceed in a certain order (to wit: production → denial → occultation), for reasons that formalism makes altogether clear: the denial of the present supposes its production, and its occultation supposes a formula of denial” (LM, 71). Given the arduous and ongoing production of a truth, reactionary subjects seek to deny the event that called it into being, and to disaggregate the body which is supposed to carry the truth of that event. It is for this reason that reaction, according to Badiou, involves the production of another, “extinguished” present. The thesis of reaction, at base, is that all of the “results” of a truth procedure (e.g., political equality in the French revolution) could be attained without the terroristic penchant of the faithful subject, and without the affirmation of a radically novel event. As Badiou recognizes, this constitutes an active denial of truth, which demands the creation of reactionary statements and indeed of what we could call

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reactionary anti-bodies. Think, for instance, of the elaborate strategies of cultural organization, admirably narrated by Frances Stonor Saunders, with which the CIA and its proxies sought to incorporate some of the innovations of aesthetic radicalism in order to deny their link with communist politics, invariably borrowing many formal traits and discursive dispositions from their nemeses. While the reactionary suspends or attenuates the present produced by an event, denying its novelty but absorbing many of its traits, the second type of “unfaithful” subject, what Badiou calls the obscure subject, entertains a far more severe relation to the new present that the faithful subject had given rise to. Rather than denying its novelty, the obscure subject is focused on actually negating the very existence of this new present. As we already noted above, the obscure subject, in order to occult novelty, “systematically resorts to the invocation of a transcendent Body, full and pure, an ahistorical or anti-evental body (City, God, Race . . .) whence it derives that the trace will be denied (here, the labour of the reactive subject is useful to the obscure subject) and, by way of consequence, the real body, the divided body, will also be suppressed” (LM, 68). The obscure “anti-body” is thus very different than the reactive one. While the latter may be repressive, it is also aimed at persuading the faithful that “it’s just not worth it,” that they should resign themselves to a “lesser present” and enjoy its diminished but secure rewards. The transcendent body conjured up by the obscure subject is instead a kind of “atemporal fetish” (LM, 69), writes Badiou, under whose weight novelty must be thoroughly crushed and silenced. Most importantly, Badiou suggests that the faithful subject, the subject that produces a new present by drawing the worldly consequences of an event, must entertain a differentiated relationship to the other figures who inhabit the new subjective space that his fidelity has opened up. This is why, as quoted above, he thinks that it “is crucial to gauge the gap between the reactive formalism and the obscure formalism.” While the reactive or reactionary subject incorporates the form of faithfulness, the obscure subject seems to be defined by the twofold movement of laying waste to the immanent production of the new and generating a transcendent, monolithic novelty, essentially indistinguishable from the most archaic past. This logical geography of subjective space marks an important step in Badiou’s work, as well as a significant contribution to developing a political theory of reaction and betrayal—a theory which is of crucial importance if we are to truly confront the “subjective space” arising not just from the Parisian May ’68 but from the “world sixties,” especially in terms of the

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myriad figures of reaction and obscurantism that currently occupy much of the global political scene. Badiou is of worth here inasmuch as he moves beyond the violent identification of rivals and enemies to trying to account, at least at a formal level, for how attempts at emancipatory politics are not merely quashed by external powers but determine the very forms that reaction takes, for how the traces of a generic politics may be read in the strategies of authority and oppression, and, finally, how the attempt to undermine egalitarianism can take radically different forms, which demand different evaluations and responses on the part of militant subjects, especially from those subjects which, in his meta-physics, Badiou suggestively calls the subjects of the resurrection of a truth.

Rethinking the Armed Struggle in Latin America

John Beverley The most cynical verdict on the sixties I am aware of is a remark attributed to Régis Debray: “We thought we were heading to China, but we ended up in California.” But at least the juxtaposition preserves something of the—admittedly often wildly incongruous—utopian impulses behind that era. Much more characteristic (and morose) is this comment in an op-ed piece in a major Buenos Aires newspaper by Beatriz Sarlo, one of Argentina’s leading public intellectuals, apropos the armed struggle in her own country: “Muchos sabemos por experiencia que se necesitaron años para romper con esas convicciones. No para simplemente dejarlas atrás o porque fueron derrotadas, sino porque significaron una equivocación.” [Many of us know from experience that it took years to break with these beliefs (in armed struggle). Not simply to leave them behind or because they were defeated, but because they were in error.] Sarlo’s comment comes in the context of a critique of the governUnless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. . Beatriz Sarlo, “Kirchner actua como si fuera un soberano,” La Nación, June 22, 2006. Available at www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/nota.asp?nota_id=625386. boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-023  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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ment of Néstor Kirchner and what she sees as his demagogic neo-Peronist populism, whose roots, she suggests, are in the same illusions that fed the armed struggle (a criticism she has also made more recently of the new presidency of Kirchner’s wife, Cristina Fernández). Sarlo speaks from having held herself a position close to the armed struggle in Argentina at one time, so there is a sense of personal miscalculation or folly behind her stance. Similarly, the Venezuelan writer Elizabeth Burgos, who was Debray’s wife during the period of his collaboration with Che Guevara (and who subsequently worked with Rigoberta Menchú in the creation of her famous testimonial narrative, I, Rigoberta Menchú), has sought to combine a posture of disillusion with the armed struggle and her active involvement today in the opposition to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, a position she shares with one of the most famous Venezuelan guerrilla leaders, Teodoro Petkoff. These examples could easily be multiplied. What they suggest is that the question of the armed struggle is not only about the Latin American past but also about its political present and future. Part of the problem of rethinking the armed struggle is that while there are adequate histories of the armed struggle in this or that country, there is no history—at least none that I am aware of—that deals with the armed struggle as a general historical phenomenon or epoch in Latin America. Debray himself began such a history in a project called Crítica de las armas (The critique of arms) back in the seventies but abandoned it as his own political career shifted rightwards (there are, nevertheless, remnants of that critique in the recent volumes of his autobiography). The most influential attempt in Latin America itself to sum up the experience of the armed struggle was probably Jorge Castañeda’s book Utopia Unarmed, which featured interviews and portraits of some of the major guerrilla leaders. But Utopia Unarmed turned out to be a somewhat superficial and premature obituary of the armed struggle (the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas broke out two years before its publication), and it would serve more as a launching pad for the author’s opportunistic ambitions as a neoconservative politician in Mexico than as an anticipation of the new forms of left politics that were gestating in Latin America in the nineties. North American readers may also recall anthropologist David Stoll’s much publicized book about Rigoberta Menchú and the armed struggle in Guatemala, which caused something of a stir in the U.S. “culture wars” when it appeared in 1999 with . Jorge Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1993).

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its charge that Menchú had misrepresented aspects of her story in order to shore up support for the guerrillas. What I offer here, then, are some very tentative and partial ideas that I hope may suggest an alternative to what might be called the paradigm of disillusion with the armed struggle represented by Utopia Unarmed, Sarlo, Stoll, et cetera. My underlying assumption is that while there are plenty of reasons to be critical of or skeptical about the armed struggle, a vision of it as an “error,” even when it is produced from the Left, as in Sarlo’s case, has sustained neoliberal hegemony in Latin America in the same way that an antisixties narrative underlay the neoconservative turn in the United States. That hegemony is on the wane, and the Latin American Left—sometimes in novel forms that are not always seen with sympathy by sectors of the traditional Left—has made significant gains in the last five years. At the moment, a majority of the population of Latin America lives under governments that consider themselves left-wing in one way or another. To put this another way, the only region of the world today where socialism is on the agenda, even as a rhetorical possibility, is Latin America. Many of the people involved in these governments or in the movements that brought them to power, cut their political teeth in the period of the armed struggle. The new forms of radical thought, like Chavismo, that correspond to this tectonic shift in Latin American politics, and that point to a different future for the continent and its peoples (including the 40 million plus Hispanic Americans in the United States), cannot be articulated without recovering and reassessing the heritage of the armed struggle. Yet, except for a partial rehabilitation of the figure of Guevara in recent years—for example, in Walter Salles’s popular film version of Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries— the armed struggle has been effaced or bracketed away from public memory in Latin America today, almost like the strike of the plantation workers in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is effaced because young people in Latin America have no direct biographical connection to it. But that inevitable problem is aggravated in turn by the fact that the representations of the armed struggle they might have . David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999). Stoll argued among other things that rural guerrilla strategies “are an urban romance, a myth propounded by middle-class radicals who dream of finding true solidarity in the countryside,” and have “repeatedly been fatal for the left itself, by dismaying lower-class constituencies and guaranteeing a crushing response from the state” (282).

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access to, like Castañeda’s Utopia Unarmed, give on the whole a negative image of it. This negative image rests on a generalized coming-of-age narrative which describes the generation of the sixties and seventies that figures like Sarlo, Burgos, Castañeda, and I belong to—a generation, or a significant part of it, that defined itself, both in the United States and Latin America, as being committed to or in solidarity with the armed struggle. The portrait in the third part of the Mexican film Amores perros (mistranslated for the U.S. release as Love’s a Bitch) of the former university professor who abandoned his wife and child to become a guerrilla in the wake of the 1968 massacre of students in Mexico City, spends twenty years in prison as a consequence, and who has been reduced to working as a hired killer in the present is one particularly striking example that comes to mind; but the paradigm is deep within hundreds of novels, testimonial narratives, histories, memoirs, poems, and films about and from Latin America in the sixties and seventies. According to this narrative, the illusion of the revolutionary transformation of society that was the inspiration for armed struggle was our Romantic adolescence. It was a generous and brave adolescence, but also one prone to excess, error, irresponsibility, and moral anarchy. By contrast, our biological and biographical maturity, represented by our role and responsibilities as parents and professionals, corresponds to the hegemony of neoliberalism in the eighties and nineties (the implication in Amores perros, for example, is that the man was morally deficient in deciding to abandon his career and family to become a guerrilla, an act that he tries to compensate for now that his daughter has grown up). Some of you will recognize in the paradigm of disillusion a variant of the model of the Baroque picaresque, especially what was the most widely read novel in both Spain and its colonies in the seventeenth century, Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599/1605). As he approaches maturity, the pícaro repents of his wicked life, betrays his former comrades to the authorities, makes his peace with the state and the law, and sits down to write his story, which will be instructive—ejemplar—for others. The repentant guerrilla—the guerrillero arrepentido—has become in effect the version of the pícaro in contemporary Latin American culture. . One of the things I find refreshing about the stories and novels of the late Roberto Bolaño is that he didn’t buy into this narrative. His semiautobiographical (and sometimes neo-picaresque) characters are, like himself, leftists who have been defeated, and have to make do, sometimes nihilistically or violently, in a world not of their choosing, but unlike the failed father figure at the end of Amores Perros, they are not repentant, and some-

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However, there is a second, and more deeply entrenched, narrative paradigm at work in the way the armed struggle is remembered, or, perhaps more pertinently, forgotten, in Latin America today. This has to do with the commonsense, but ultimately deeply ideological view of history that identifies forward movement in time with progress. Very roughly, one can say that the period of armed struggle in Latin America as a whole begins in the early sixties, in the wake of the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and extends in South America up to the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the imposition of the Southern Cone dictatorships in 1973 and after, and in Central America, which had a different regional dynamic, to the counterinsurgency campaigns of the early and mideighties in Guatemala and El Salvador, the Contra war, and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in February 1990. Since neoliberalism and regional economic integration under U.S. auspices come after this period of revolutionary upsurge, they appear as in some sense or other inevitable—a historical stage that transcends a previous stage, creating new constraints and conditions of possibility, such that even the Left, if it is to reemerge, would have to start from there. There can be no going back. What happens in what I am calling the paradigm of disillusion in the representation of the armed struggle (and of the sixties generally) is that the biographical narrative of personal maturation and success or failure is mapped onto this underlying narrative of historical transition between one stage and another. There is no question that in the last thirty or so years, counterrevolutionary state violence, the weakening of the welfare state by neoliberal policies, and the effects of globalization have changed the terrain of political struggle in Latin America dramatically. And this in turn has affected the nature of the Latin American Left and its short- and long-term goals. Arguably, if globalization represents a new stage of capitalism with its own particular contradictions and dynamics, then it requires a new form of socialism, in the same way that Lenin held that imperialism, as the new stage of capitalism emerging with the dawn of the twentieth century, required a times they find ways to get revenge on their victimizers. Representative of the narrative of disillusion, by contrast, are, for example, Jorge Volpi, El fin de la locura (Mexico: Seix ­Barral, 2003); and Santiago Roncagliolo, La cuarta espada: La historia de Abimael Guzmán y Sendero Luminoso (Barcelona: Debate, 2007). . Some readers may recall that it was against such a “historicist” conception of history, then championed by the Left rather than, as today, by the Right, that Debray’s own mentor, Louis Althusser, argued lucidly in now largely forgotten books like For Marx or Reading Capital.

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different strategy than the socialism of the Second International, rooted in labor unions and parliamentary Social Democratic parties. Something like this is, of course, the basic idea behind Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s well-known manifesto, Empire. However, whatever its other merits, Empire is not a particularly illuminating or useful guide to the different kinds of social movements and left-populist parties or coalitions that now occupy center stage in Latin America (for one thing, they have made winning and using state power a central goal, which is quite different than the amorphous postnational and postpolitical “multitude” Hardt and Negri see as the new subject of radical change). In my view, the historical paradigm that is more immediately pertinent to the Latin American case is not the idea that globalization under neoliberal auspices represents a new historical stage for Latin America as for everyone else, but rather that of a restoration, on the model of the period between the Congress of Vienna and the revolutionary upsurges of 1848 that follows the waning of the radicalizing impulse of the French and Haitian Revolutions. A restoration represents the blockage of a historical process, rather than its transcendence. It is thus itself a consequence of that process, which it seeks to turn back, limit, and/or co-opt to the greatest extent possible. It is to be expected, then, that the process will reemerge, albeit in new and sometimes unexpected forms, as the force of the reactionary coalition that produced the restoration in the first place begins to wane over time. Between Metternich and the Congress of Vienna and 1848 in Europe are thirty-four years—roughly a generation. Similarly, roughly thirty years separate the defeat of the Left in South America in the midseventies, orchestrated by the contemporary disciple of Metternich, Henry Kissinger, and its recent resurgence. It would be nice to say that, with the advent of democratization, the long historical sequence of violence in Latin America which the armed struggle of the sixties and seventies was certainly one form of is over, that politics is now completely absorbed by civil society and the parliamentary electoral system. And it is not my intention here in taking up the question of armed struggle to advocate it as a strategy in the present. As I noted above, it is clear that politics and social activism have moved onto a new terrain in Latin America. However, that terrain is articulated in several important ways by the heritage of the armed struggle. And it is not exactly true to say that armed struggle is completely something of the past in Latin America. It continues unabated in large parts of Colombia, as the recent controversy about the kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt and others by the FARC guerrilla movement revealed; it reappeared in southern Mexico

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with the Zapatista uprising of the early nineties in Chiapas, in part as a response to the implementation of the NAFTA accords; and it has broken out again also in Guerrero and other parts of Mexico. The Mapuche people in Chile have recently resorted to violent protests in their efforts to prevent encroachment by state and private projects on their communal lands. Nor do I think it irrelevant to mention in this regard that rural armed struggle has reappeared in Nepal and some states of the Indian subcontinent, in spite, or perhaps because, of the Indian “economic miracle.” The disappearance of extrastate violence in Latin America will depend not so much on the will of the state to impose order, or on an understandable desire for order and stability, as on the ability of the state to produce more genuinely prosperous, egalitarian, and inclusive economic and social conditions. But for that to happen will require a different kind of state, which is what the armed struggle aspired to create in the first place. In retrospect, it seems like the armed struggle was fated to defeat from the start: that recognition is behind Sarlo’s judgment that the very idea of armed struggle was a catastrophic error. But it did not seem so at the time; in fact, it was the armed struggle and the apparent historical logic it was connected to—the spread of socialism and “wars of national liberation” internationally—that seemed “irreversible” (to use the language of the time). There is no question that many individual projects of armed struggle were ill conceived and doomed—the Argentine experience that Sarlo refers to among them, in my opinion. But that does not justify the claim that they were all ill conceived or doomed, that victory was impossible from the start: in fact, victory was achieved in at least two countries, Cuba and Nicaragua, and armed struggle came close to taking power in several other countries. Perhaps not in Argentina (although that too is subject to debate), but the revolutionary movement could plausibly have won, for example, in El Salvador. And if it had, things would have been quite different in Central America and Mexico, and thus in the Americas generally, including Argentina, and perhaps in the world. Although the dynamics of armed struggle were (and are) often local and specific, its eventual defeat was certainly deeply connected to the overall waning of the force of the socialist bloc, with the Soviet Union entering in the seventies a period of deep economic stagnation (which also overtook Cuba after the failure of the 1969 sugar harvest), and with China wrestling with the effects of the Cultural Revolution and moving decisively after 1972 toward détente with the United States. Pertinent here too is the prospect that even if the armed struggle had succeeded in other countries of Latin America, it might have

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produced at best something like Cuba, Vietnam, or some of the African countries “liberated” by armed struggle in the sixties, with all their welldocumented problems today. Maybe, the guerrillero arrepentido will say, it was better that we did not win. But that melancholy sense of a historical “inevitability” ultimately confirmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union concedes something it does not have to: that the armed struggle in Latin America depended on the fate of Soviet Communism. It is thus a form of historicism, rather than an objective appraisal of historical necessity. Maybe it would be more true to say the opposite, in fact: that the fate of the Soviet Union depended on the possibility of Latin America becoming socialist. For one of the things that was most original and attractive about the armed struggle in Latin America was precisely that it portended a new form of socialism that would have differed from the Russian and Chinese models—already perceived at the time as deeply problematic (Guevara spoke derisively of “goulash communism”)— on the one hand, and West European social democracy, on the other. In the Cuban Revolution in its glory days, before it became heavily dependent on the Soviet Union, or in Allende’s parliamentary strategy of a “Chilean road to socialism,” or in the “liberated zones” of this or that region of the countryside, or in the Sandinista experience in Nicaragua, with all its ambiguities and contradictions, what was being gestated were uniquely Latin American forms of socialism, in the same way, say, Chinese communism or European social democracy were specific to their respective societies. Those new forms of socialism, had they prospered and begun to sustain and influence one another, would have served in turn as an inspiration and a basis of material support for other processes of liberation (and here one must remember, for example, Cuba’s crucial role in supporting the Vietnamese and the eventually successful struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa). And not only in third world or peripheral countries: I note in passing from personal experience the tremendous influence the Latin American revolutionary Left had on the New Left in the United States. There is no question that the Soviet Union, China, and the European social democrats tried hard to contain the Latin American movements, including both armed struggle as well as other strategies like Allende’s, within their respective formulas, but the movements kept breaking out of those formulas with great theoretical and practical originality and daring. Would the collapse of socialism internationally have been inevitable if one after another country in Latin America had followed in the path of Cuba in the sixties? Or if the Guatemalans and Salvadorans had been able to fol-

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low in relatively short order the Sandinistas in the early eighties? If Allende could have made good on his promise of a democratic “Chilean Road to Socialism”? And would Cuba itself have lapsed into authoritarian rigidity and economic stagnation if other Latin American countries had been in a position to have fraternal ties with it? I raise here in particular the question of democracy, which was and is without doubt one of the weak points of the Cuban example. It was part of the cold war strategy of counterinsurgency (as today in Iraq) to put into opposition formal democracy and armed insurrection. But, in fact, many, perhaps even most, of the armed struggle experiences in Latin America arose precisely against military dictatorships (e.g., Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argentina, Brazil) or in situations of deep crisis and/or corruption of political institutions, such as is happening in Mexico today, where legal electoral options were choked off. At the same time, however, it is clear that, with the exception of the Chilean Popular Unity, the Latin American revolutionary Left, based as it was on the notion of a small vanguard or elite, did not give enough thought or credence to the question of mass democracy and political hegemony expressed in electoral or cultural terms. Still, I would argue that, on balance, the experience of armed struggle in Latin America went in the direction of democracy, and brought into politics a new spirit of hope for change that had been missing since the thirties. It also raised the prospect of moving beyond the often restrictive and highly manipulated forms of electoral politics and trade unionism to new, more comprehensive and representative forms of democracy and political participation. Part of the originality and promise of the armed struggle in Latin America was embodied in its cultural superstructure. For example, while I don’t mean to downplay what is happening today in Latin American film, understanding that each new generation has to find its own path of expression, I see nothing that rivals in scope or ambition the great Cuban films of the late sixties and seventies; or the Brazilian Cinema Novo, particularly the work of Glauber Rocha; or the massive documentary reconstruction of the rise and fall of Allende’s Popular Unity government, La Batalla de Chile; or the Argentine masterpiece La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), one of the most daring and original films produced anywhere in the world in the sixties and early seventies, now almost forgotten. All of these films and many, many more were deeply related to the impulse of the armed struggle. In similar fashion, the novelists of the Latin American Boom, like García Márquez or Julio Cortázar, were fond of declaring the coincidence of their modernist narrative techniques with the vanguard function of the

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guerrilla foco. And there was the influential Colombian teatro de creación colectiva; a strong strain of “committed” poetry (poesía militante), ranging from established figures like Ernesto Cardenal, to the politicized pop songs of the Cuban nueva trova, to anonymous poesía de taller, written by peasants and workers in their own workplaces; a politicized and dynamic Pop Art; and testimonial narrative (testimonio), whose emergence and authority as a narrative form was deeply connected to the armed struggle. It is not only that many musicians, artists, and writers became fellow travelers of the revolutionary movements, as had been the case in the thirties with figures like Pablo Neruda or Diego Rivera. The guerrilla movements and their extensive support networks provided a context in which, as happened in the French Resistance during World War II, intellectuals, artists, musicians, and middle-class professionals often found themselves working together in close proximity with workers and peasants from the popular sectors (not always unproblematically, but that is another story). I mention in this regard the figure of Roque Dalton in El Salvador, that country’s greatest modern writer, who became a guerrilla cadre and was killed in an obscure internecine struggle between factions of his own organization, but only as an indication of a much wider phenomenon. Like the cultural expressions related to it, the armed struggle was still dominated by what we would call today, after postcolonial theory, a creole-mestizo model of Latin American cultural identity. The most politically consequential theoretical articulation of that model was perhaps the idea of “narrative transculturation” (transculturación narrativa) advanced by the Uruguayan literary critic and activist Ángel Rama. In Rama’s view, the function of artists, writers, and cultural workers was, in analogy to the catalyzing function of the political vanguard, to bring together the heterogeneous elements of the national reality and to fashion an inclusive cultural identity appropriate to the process of national and regional liberation. That conception, also anticipated in Roberto Fernández Retamar’s famous essay “Caliban,” was both empowering and limiting, as the sometimes problematic relation of the revolutionary vanguards to indigenous populations or to women and gays revealed. One instance of this is the heart-sinking . The relation between political militancy and modern Latin American literature is the theme of Jean Franco’s book, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). . One of the great anthologies of modern Latin American poetry is a collection of poems by writers killed or “disappeared” in the armed struggle: Mario Benedetti, ed., Poesía trunca (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1977).

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but also Orientalist moment in Guevara’s Bolivian Diary, where he registers as a kind of unwitting foreshadowing of his own death the unwelcoming, impenetrable stare of the Aymara-speaking peasants he is supposed to be fighting for. All the armed struggle movements articulated themselves as movements of national liberation. Debray noted that the key feature of the Latin American armed struggle was its roots in radical nationalism: “Fidel read Martí before reading Lenin.” At the same time, there was a deep questioning of the adequacy of a traditional sense of the Latin American nation as a vehicle for popular insurgency. The state, “a bourgeois contrivance,” in Frantz Fanon’s phrase, in particular was seen as incommensurate with the radical heterogeneity of the popular sectors. The tension between affirmation and critique of the nation-state—a critique that eventually led to postcolonial theory—however, was already present in the debates within the armed struggle itself between national, regional, and continental strategies. Something similar happened with the “identity politics” of the new social movements. As Margaret Randall has pointed out apropos the contradictions between the Sandinistas and the women’s movement in Nicaragua, it was often only within the context of the revolutionary movements that issues of ethnic or women’s liberation could begin to be posed as demands in the first place. Moreover, political practice often provided norms for theory, rather than the reverse. Women, gays, regional interests, the vast semiemployed and thus technically “lumpen” populations of the urban slums, and indigenous or Afro-Latin groups began to acquire new identities and agency in the context of their participation in the guerrilla movements or their support networks. In Guatemala, for example, the theoretical premises of an orthodox Marxism, which held that the solution of the so-called Indian question was industrialization and proletarianization, were challenged from the armed struggle as indigenous groups actually became involved with it. Guevara may have been overly idealistic, but he was not completely wrong in seeing the human relations created among the members of the guerrilla group as a model for a more liberated, pluralistic, multicultural, and egalitar. Régis Debray, The Long March in Latin America: Guerrilla Movements; Theory and Practice, Pamphlet (Somerville, Mass.: New England Free Press, n.d.), 41. This essay originally appeared in New Left Review (September–October 1965). . Margaret Randall, Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994). Also Ileana Rodríguez, Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

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ian Latin American identity. The problem, which Guevara himself was never able to solve, was in translating that model to the population as a whole (Guevara’s basic strategic idea was that the guerrilla would be the “small motor” that would activate the “large motor” of society). I don’t mean to downplay the persistence of residual colonial prejudices, voluntarism, authoritarianism, sublimated machismo, and even racism within the revolutionary Left of the sixties and seventies—my own involvement with the project of subaltern studies was in part an attempt to come to grips with some of those problems within the revolutionary movement I most closely identified and worked with, the Sandinistas. But rather than seeing the new social movements of the last two decades in Latin America as something clearly separate from the armed struggle, it would be more accurate in my opinion to see them as outgrowths of the same contradictions, impulses, and sometimes even organizational frameworks involved in the armed struggle that have now come around full circle to pose the same question: how to join together to take over and begin to transform the state, and how to begin to transform society from the state. In a famous passage in a letter to his parents, Guevara likened himself to Don Quixote. But Don Quixote was notably both a hero and a fool. A more comprehensive rethinking of the armed struggle would have to involve a critique of the misconceptions, arrogance, and just plain foolishness often involved in both its theory and practice. Even so, with all its flaws and sometimes lethal illusions, the armed struggle revealed Latin America in its most generous, creative, courageous, and diverse aspects. Like the sixties in the United States, with which it was closely bound up, the promise of the armed struggle pointed to the possibility of a more egalitarian and joyful future. It did not fail because of its internal contradictions—although there were many—nor was it condemned to defeat from the start; it was defeated by what turned out to be in the end a stronger, more ruthless enemy. The human cost of that defeat was high. The number of people killed in the course of the Latin American armed struggle, mainly by counterrevolutionary violence, has to be measured not in the tens but in the hundreds of thousands. By a rough, but I think conservative, estimate, between four hundred fifty and five hundred thousand people were killed in Latin America between 1959 and 1990 in the effort to contain the revolutionary upsurge in the continent. That is a level of political genocide approximating that which occurred in Indonesia after the right-wing coup that installed the Suharto dictatorship, with the support of the CIA, in the midsixties. Some two hundred thousand of these deaths are represented by Guatemala alone, where

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the struggle between the guerrillas and the army was particularly intense, but there were also very high levels of killing, in multiples of tens of thousands, in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, and in multiples of thousands in Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Santo Domingo, Mexico, and Uruguay. To these figures must be added the millions of others imprisoned, tortured, thrown out of work, dislocated from their villages and lands, or forced into exile. This tremendous level of repression can serve to strengthen the argument of those like Sarlo or Stoll who view the armed struggle as a dangerous folly whose price was paid by ordinary folk. But it can also suggest that there was a high level of actual or potential support for the armed struggle that was turned back only by repression in some cases of near genocidal proportions. Whatever position one takes on the ultimate wisdom or folly of the armed struggle, it is clear that it needs to be recuperated and represented as a deeply agonistic, but also momentous historical stage in modern Latin American history. In my own view (and I write from the position of someone who, like Sarlo, also identified with the armed struggle), it should be seen as a flawed and often tragic enterprise, but also a brave and generous one, that had at its core much of what Latin America still wants and aspires to become. I don’t think the task of recuperating the armed struggle will be an easy one—like trying to remember a dream, it recedes as you get closer to it. My generation—the generation of the sixties—is probably the last that can undertake this task in terms of personal memory or recollection, but, as I have noted here, it is often more inclined to see where we went wrong than what we did right. That is what I have called the paradigm of disillusion in the representation of the armed struggle. But in a way, our disillusion has not been thorough enough: it has not worked through the melancholia of defeat. As a result, it leaves a residual guilt that shades into an acceptance of, or identification with, the powers that be—something like a Latin American version of the neoconservative turn in postsixties U.S. culture.10 In that way, it has not prepared us to accept that the possibility of radical social change has opened up once again in the Americas, North and South.

10. I have written on this in “The Neoconservative Turn in Latin American Literary and Cultural Criticism,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (March 2008): 65–87.

Martí in His (Third) World

Roberto Fernández Retamar Translated by John Beverley, with Miguel Llinás

Preface for boundary 2 In its initial version, this essay was written between 1963 and 1964 to introduce an Italian anthology of José Martí’s texts (which, in the end, never saw the light of day). It was published for the first time, partially, in the journal Cuba Socialista in January 1965, and then, in its completed form, as the prologue to an edition of the selected works of Martí at the end of that same year, to mark the meeting of the Tricontinental Conference in January 1966, which brought together in Havana delegates from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Since then, the essay has been republished numerous times, and has been translated into French and Italian. But this will be its first appearance in English. Which inspires me to add a few things. As I have said, this essay was originally intended for a non-Cuban Translators’s note: Footnotes are rendered here as they appeared in the Spanish original. Given the age of the essay, it was not possible to update them to correspond to current editorial standards. boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-024  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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audience. To write it, I reread, and in some cases read for the first time, what were then considered the complete works of Martí, and I set out to explain the significance of those works, and of Martí’s political activity, to readers who were not already familiar with either Martí or Cuba. Cuba had attracted much attention after the triumph of the revolution in 1959, but few had the knowledge to understand the special character of that revolution. If Gramsci could write that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a revolution against Marx’s Capital (which, in the view of the reformists of the Second International, implied that socialism could only arise in the central capitalist countries and by parliamentary action), the Cuban Revolution of 1959 also broke with prevailing schemes. Moreover, the leader of that revolution, Fidel Castro, affirmed from the start (and has always repeated) that his fundamental guide was José Martí, then quite unknown outside of the Spanish American sphere. Complicating matters still more, in 1961 Fidel proclaimed the socialist character of the revolution, and Martí was not a socialist, though even less an antisocialist, a point noted by G. D. H. Cole in the fourth volume of his vast History of Socialist Thought, published in 1956 (that is to say, three years before the Cuban Revolution). In 1957 and 1958, I taught at Yale University, and I had agreed to leave my country again to offer classes in 1959 at Columbia University in New York, a city I have loved since I first visited there in 1947. However, I found myself in Cuba during the unforgettable revolutionary victory in January 1959, which made it possible for me to share intensely in what the French journalist Claude Julien, in a series of articles that appeared in Le Monde, called at the time “la ferveur contagieuse.” Declining the offer to teach at Columbia, but without abandoning what I was (a writer and a professor of literature at the newly reopened University of Havana), I became a journalist, an editor, and a miliciano. That year of 1959 was the beginning of the real independence of my country, the year of the anticorruption campaign, and the year of the Agrarian Reform; it also witnessed the first hostile acts of the United States government against the revolution. Less than five years earlier, that government had strangled the democratic process in Guatemala (where a young doctor from Argentina, Ernesto Guevara, found himself) for daring to propose an agrarian reform that, inevitably, as in our case as well, affected U.S. interests. In that dawning year of 1959, there was also talk of a conference, to be held in Havana, of the underdeveloped or underindustrialized countries, which, in the end, never transpired. Many challenges arose to confront a Cuban intellectual such as myself. Those challenges multiplied for me when I was sent by the revolution to

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Paris, where I had studied in the past, as a cultural attaché. I lived in Paris for almost all of 1960. From that vantage point, I contemplated the rapid (though incomplete, as would become clear later) decolonization of Africa, the emergence of Patrice Lumumba, the development of the war of liberation in Algeria, Fidel’s great speech to the United Nations, and the appearance of the French journal Tiers Monde. I offered to translate the small but useful book by Yves Lacoste, Les pays sous-developpés, for a Cuban publisher. My offer was not taken up, but all of these experiences were united by the theme of underdevelopment the title of Lacoste’s book announced, which involved for me nothing less than an anagnorisis: a real illumination of our present and past life. Meanwhile, dramatic events were taking place in Cuba; understanding them fully was not the easiest thing in the world. The Cuban Revolution had generated, along with its admirable practice, a coherent and bold thinking. In those early years, however, things came at us in a rush, often without a sufficient theoretical basis. In September 1960, the First Declaration of Havana became known; in April 1961, Fidel announced that our revolution was socialist; in December of the same year, he specified “Marxist and Leninist”; and in February 1962, he delivered the Second Declaration of Havana. Some, overwhelmed by the changes, were left confused; others, content with obsolete formulas, also failed to grasp what was happening, because it was a matter of trying to understand a unique reality (as are all realities) by means of a thought that would be adequate for that purpose. This thought was implicit in the practice, and from time to time explicit in the political positions assumed by leaders such as Fidel and Che. It was necessary to capture and give form to this thought while at the same time, as the poet and writer that I am, attempting to come to terms with other matters of cultural life in general. Returning to Cuba during the feverish years of 1961 and 1962, my association with the great Argentine writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, who was living in Havana at the time, helped me confront this double task. In the meantime, the country was going through events such as the predictable mercenary invasion, which would be defeated at the Bay of Pigs; the development of the socialist stage of the revolution; the literacy campaign; the meeting of writers and artists with members of the government, led by Fidel, at the National Library; the struggle against sectarianism; the Missile Crisis of October 1962. In days, we lived years. If there still remained any doubt, it was the October crisis, above all, that made evident the autonomous, original character of our revolution.

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While I sought to find a poetic language to give voice to these new realities, I also wrote some works of criticism intended to defend the role of creative art in the midst of the revolution. Given the existence of the aberrant Socialist Realism implanted in the Soviet Union, this was one of my central preoccupations. It was in this context, between 1963 and 1964, as I mentioned earlier, that I wrote the essay on Martí you will be reading. I had returned to our great author, who since childhood had dazzled me, as he has so many Cubans. I understood that his work had acquired its real meaning in the light of the revolution. But what exactly was that meaning? How could I explain the apparent paradoxes of his work, and arrive at what the ancients would have called his “secret”? I considered these questions, also keeping in mind that I had to frame my answers for readers who were not necessarily (as is usually the case with Cubans) admirers of Martí, the most important thinker and writer born in our country, and who also knew little or nothing about our history, our context. I must confess that one day, while reading, rereading, taking notes, I understood something I then considered a revelation but that now simply goes without saying. Martí is, for us, the key to our history. To understand him is central to understanding ourselves. And Martí was a radical, who, while he admired Marx, objected to the idea of the class struggle. He was also a spiritualist. He brought together in his person a surprising variety of roles, and his thought, at first glance, seems like an amalgam of diverse philosophical positions. These considerations favored, among others, two different interpretations of Martí, both of which nevertheless ended up disconnecting him from the revolution. Given his non-Marxism and spiritualism, some, from a pretended revolutionary orthodoxy, defined Martí as a reformist or as “merely” a bourgeois-democratic revolutionary; others, in open or veiled hostility to the revolution, suggested the impossibility of Martí as an inspiration for a revolution which had officially declared itself Marxist and Leninist. Both positions stemmed from the apparently indisputable fact that Martí was, chronologically, post-Marx and had proffered a critical judgment of Marx. However, Castro himself, in both his self-defense of 1953, History Will Absolve Me, and the two Declarations of Havana, had unequivocally indicated that the origin of the revolution was José Martí. I became aware that those who, for one reason or other, considered Martí a post-Marxist revealed in that way their adherence to a linear conception of history: and not just the history of a particular tribe, but that of the Western world. They had, therefore, the perspective of the colonizer or the colonized. But what if there were no homogeneous, linear history, and what if Martí were the first—or one of the first—to completely understand

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this? If so, then Martí was not so much a post-Marxist, as it seemed at first glance, as a para-Marxist. In speaking of a non-linear history, I am not thinking of the familiar ideas of “cultures” (Spengler) or “societies” (Toynbee) that develop as living organisms more or less independently. Rather, I am thinking, from the perspective of Martí, of two separate histories: that of civilization and that of barbarism, the terms in use in his time. The great Argentine nineteenthcentury liberal Domingo Sarmiento had mistakenly come down on the side of “civilization,” that is, the violent imposition of that history on ours. For that reason he became pro-yanqui and an Indian killer. Sarmiento had praised the young Martí; but the Cuban disavowed him, despite his greatness. In choosing instead the side of the so-called “barbarian,” Martí anticipated Fanon and our revolution. Of course, these two histories (as became more apparent in the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries) have a dialectical relationship: “underdeveloped” countries exist because “underdeveloping” countries exist. It is not a question of trying to deny either of the two histories but of defining their relationship more precisely. For example, it does not matter how advanced Marxist thought was in the nineteenth century on the nature and problems of “developed” societies; the crude transfer of its scheme of capitalist development to other societies amounts to yet another form of dependency. A mode of thought is not an autonomous object but functions in relation to a determined circumstance. Martí understood this completely. The concrete circumstances of Cuba, Latin America, and the Caribbean, taken together, just as those of the underdeveloped countries of Asia and Africa, were, for Martí, the measuring stick. He was the giant voice of another world. Put in that perspective, Martí’s singularities cease to seem eccentric and come to occupy orbits in something like another solar system, orbits illuminated, of course, by his own genius. This essay has undergone many revisions over the years. The version I offer here is, for now anyway, the definitive one. Bowing to the opinion of the editors of this special issue of boundary 2, I present it in an abbreviated form, without the biographical sketch of Martí and the overview of his literary oeuvre. I should add that I consider this essay the point of departure from which I began my ulterior intellectual work, represented in part by my 1971 essay “Caliban,” and my books Introducción a José Martí (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2001), Algunos usos de civilización y barbarie (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2003), and the collection in English Caliban and Other Essays (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), translated by Edward Baker with a foreword by Fredric Jameson. All are indebted to the profoundly origi-

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nal thought of Martí, a thought that is indispensable for understanding not only what I have written but also, and much more importantly, the intellectual foundations of the Cuban Revolution. I had the great honor of a chance encounter with Che Guevara in March 1965, in Europe. On that occasion, we exchanged texts. He gave me to read the manuscript of his essay “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” and I gave him the issue of the journal Cuba Socialista in which this essay first appeared, alerting him that it involved ideas influenced by his countryman Martínez Estrada. Afterwards, we shared impressions. Che was generous with my pages, telling me that they seemed influenced more by Fanon than Martínez Estrada. In reality, we were both correct, because at the end of his life Martínez Estrada was himself drawn to the author of The Wretched of the Earth, whom Che, needless to say, greatly esteemed. Many things have changed since I originally wrote this essay. Not long after the meeting I describe here, and after trying to organize a guerrilla front in the Congo, Che traveled, inspired by a similar goal, to Bolivia, where he was captured and killed in October 1967. Between 1970 and 1973, Salvador Allende, who had come to power through democratic elections, attempted to lead his country along a “Chilean path to socialism,” which resulted in his tragic death on September 11, 1973, when the Chilean armed forces, pressured by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, installed the brutal military dictatorship that Costa-Gavras pictured for U.S. audiences in his film Missing. Other bloody military dictatorships, with similar forms of repression, were installed in the countries of the Southern Cone of Latin America. In 1970, I was in Vietnam, participating in the making of a film titled Third World, Third World War. In 1975, Vietnam emerged victorious over the United States. Between the 1970s and 1980s, the Cuban presence in Africa served to guarantee the independence of Angola, obtain the independence of Namibia, and help extinguish apartheid in South Africa, an accomplishment generously recognized by Nelson Mandela. But, of course, the most telling event of the last decades has been the evaporation of so-called Real Socialism in Europe (also called “Unreal Socialism” by more than one person), an event that was grotesquely read as the “End of History.” For Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant our own passage into the so-called Special Period in Time of Peace, a period of extreme austerity and emergency measures such as might be imposed in wartime, aggravated by the intensification of the blockade, which, under the name of a trade embargo, successive governments in the United States have imposed on Cuba for nearly half a century, and which is annually

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repudiated, almost unanimously, by the General Assembly of the United Nations. I will mention in this respect three other—more recent—clusters of events. The first corresponds to the invasions, clearly colonialist in character, of several Third World countries (with military threats to sixty or more) carried out by the Bush administration after the fateful events of the other September 11, 2001, under the false pretense of combating terrorism. The second consists of the massive demonstrations against neoliberal globalization and war that have shaken the planet in recent years. The third has to do with the fact that in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (all of which, with the exception of El Salvador, now enjoy diplomatic relations with Cuba), there is a growing number of governments that, in differing degrees, reject what, once again, is being called U.S. imperialism. In the face of this new political landscape, does an essay that represents an argument from the sixties still make sense? I believe that these new developments, which include the postcolonial critique of the civilization/barbarism polarity, and give rise to the corresponding forms of political practice in the world, confirm rather than refute the portrait of Martí I sketched here. I cannot end without alluding, however briefly, to the ties between Martí and the United States. The not quite fifteen years that he lived in New York City permitted him a deep understanding of that nation, its virtues and dangers, and an identification with its radical thinkers. Martí called John Brown, for example, “that madman made of stars.” Martí contributed to making known in Latin America the work of writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Helen Hunt Jackson, Twain. He praised the creators and workers of the United States. And at the start of the Cuban-Spanish-American War—a war which would have been our war of independence had it not been for the U.S. intervention of 1898—Martí had a portrait of Wendell Phillips, the great abolitionist, hanging on the wall of his study. I am especially pleased, then, that this issue of boundary 2 on the sixties includes this somewhat aging text on Martí. For just as Martí is the voice of “our” America, he is also part of the best cultural heritage of the United States. Havana, December 7, 2007

. As registered, for example, in José David Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); The Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. M. J. Buhle, P. Buhle, and D. Georgakas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); or The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

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The Colonial and Semicolonial World To understand Martí, the necessary first step is to situate him within the family to which he rightly belongs. Let us begin by excluding some possibilities: that family does not include his apparent contemporaries in Western Europe and the United States. “Western Europe” and “United States” are used here as Martí would have: that is, as synonyms for “developed capitalist nations” (we have grown accustomed to that label, though I prefer to call them “underdeveloping” capitalist nations). In Europe, though— beyond those nations, for example, England, France, and Germany—there were other countries susceptible to comparison with the Latin American countries of that time. Lenin, in his draft notes for Imperialism, would do just that, when, attempting to classify the countries of the world, he indicates three groups: (1) Western Europe, the United States, and Japan; (2) Eastern Europe, and its extension into Central Asia, and South and Central America; (3) the semicolonies and colonies. Later, he suggests a different classification, in which some Latin American countries are situated in a second group, together with some of the less-developed European countries, and others in a fourth group, together with the colonies and semicolonies. Finally, in Imperialism itself he mentions, together with “the two fundamental groups of countries—those who possess colonies and the colonies themselves—” other “various forms of dependent countries that, from a formal perspective, enjoy political independence, while in reality they remain wrapped in the webs of financial and diplomatic dependence.” Lenin adds, “one of these forms, the semicolony, we have previously designated. Another is Argentina, for example.” Much more could and needs to be said about this, of course. Let it serve here simply to explain why early on Martí, the spokesperson of a manifestly colonial country and a continent in a state of dependence, could have been compared with democratic revolutionaries of the other Europe (if I am right, the first person to suggest this comparison was Enrique José Varona in his 1896 lecture “Martí y su obra política”). Indeed, one can find Europeans similar to Martí in the “backward,” semifeudal European countries of the nineteenth century (some of which also shared with Cuba the . V. I. Lenin, Obras completas, vol. 39, Cuadernos sobre el imperialismo (Buenos Aires, 1960). Throughout this essay, unless otherwise specified, I refer to this edition of Lenin’s texts, which are cited parenthetically as OC, with the particular volume followed by page numbers. . Lenin, OC, 39:746. . Lenin, OC, 22:277.

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fact that the conquest of their national independence lay ahead of them): similar in the tasks they faced, their thinking, and the drama of their personal lives. Such were the cases, for example, of the great poets and political leaders Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849) in Hungary, and Hristo Botev (1848–1876) in Bulgaria, who both died, like Martí, fighting for the liberty of their people, and who both supported a position of maximum radicalism in their respective historical circumstances. They were revolutionary democrats who were no longer bourgeois ideologues, who openly censured the evils of the developed capitalism of the “West,” without becoming spokespersons of a proletariat that was still incipient in their respective countries. It is proper to compare Martí with such Europeans. If we make the mistake, however, of using the dominant capitalist countries of his era as the standard of comparison, for instance, if some of the poetic innovations of Martí cause us to confuse him with the post-Romantic and Symbolist poets in France or England, we quickly become aware that his family line is a different one. Consider Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rossetti, or even Rimbaud, and remember that Martí, simultaneously more ancient and more modern than them (and, above all, other), was organizing a war, dialoguing with the poor, seeking to destroy an empire, anticipating the imposition of another, and galloping on horseback toward his death in battle. And if, taking into account that Martí was a conspirator and politician as well as a poet and essayist, we try to find his equal in one of the great Euro–North American political figures of his time, we only succeed again by comparison, for Martí was someone who was interested in the Impressionist painters and in Wilde (and at the same time, and above all, in Whitman); who published four years before starting the revolution a superb collection of poetry; who confessed to a close friend: “I want to always see color, brilliance, grace, and elegance around me: an ugly object hurts me like a wound; a beautiful object consoles me like a balm.” And this sense of the beautiful is present in all moments of his life: on the battlefield, in the days before his death, he wrote feverishly of his awe before nature, before the immensity of the night, before the miniscule details of life. Martí does not fit, then, with the way of life of the “Westerners” of his time. In fact, he is not one of them. There is no question that the extraordinary wealth and quality of what Martí accomplished is due to his prodigious personal genius; but the meaning of his writing, just as the plurality of his roles, is attributable to an extrapersonal factor (if such a distinction between the personal and the social is valid, and then only with reservations). It is enough to situate Martí within his real family for this to become clear. Martí belongs, by chance and

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by conscious choice, to another world: he must be positioned in that world in order to truly understand his work, his proposals, and his character. As I have said, we should not compare Martí with the “great men” of the “underdeveloping” capitalist countries but rather with those of the “underdeveloped” colonial and semicolonial world. When Martí is situated within his proper family, we can readily understand much about him that seems surprising, from the perspective of the “developed” capitalist countries, not only in his time but in our own as well. In the developed countries, a more acute division of labor, unknown before the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the bourgeoisie, has resulted in the specialization of human functions. The great figures of the Renaissance, by contrast, found it natural to occupy multiple roles, at times difficult to reconcile. Something similar happens in the underdeveloped countries, which lack the degree of specialization and fragmentation that is characteristic of Western Europe and the United States, just as they lack an Industrial Revolution and the corresponding development of an industrial bourgeoisie. Moreover, they are countries that have been or are in the process of being colonized or semicolonized. Therefore, they cannot be mechanically compared to nations that appear as contemporaneous. One part of their intelligentsia places itself in the service, either direct or indirect, of the metropolitan power and tries to mimic its forms; another part, more truly representative, utilizes the knowledge available to it, however limited and inadequate, given the nation’s economic underdevelopment and its colonial condition, to serve the people. This knowledge is concentrated among a small group of men who are simultaneously writers, teachers, politicians, and scientists (scientific studies, not required by preindustrial societies, follow behind the other fields). These figures appear as dilettantes in the eyes of their metropolitan contemporaries, who are already specialized, such that one is not only a critic but an art critic or a literary critic, or a historian, a scientist, a politician. Martí’s calling, his embodiment of a whole people, contrary to what some might think, served precisely as a spur for the diversity of his activities. He brought together a sum of different forms of knowledge and roles, not at the expense of his political activity, nor vice versa, but as essential parts of a whole. He was a founder, a sage, and a poet because he was a revolutionary. So we cannot take his work in fragments, but try to view it as a totality. The concrete task of Martí’s life was to reject, both in theory and in practice,

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the pretext that civilization, a vulgar name for the current state of European man, has the natural right to take possession of the lands belonging to the barbarians, the name that those who desire those lands give to the actual state of all people who are not European or European-American: as if, face to face and heart to heart, an oppressor of the Irish or a killer of Indian Sepoys was worth more than those prudent, romantic, and magnanimous Arabs, who, impervious to defeat, and undaunted by the size and strength of their enemy, defend their homeland trusting in Allah, with a spear in each hand, and a pistol between their teeth. Among the countless examples of how Martí militantly took the side of the colonized—Native Americans, Africans, Indians, Irish—consider that as an adolescent he identified himself in a poem with Abdala, the Arab hero of Africa, and in the first published collection of his poetry (dedicated to his infant son) is entitled Ismaelillo, an obvious allusion to Ishmael, the legendary founder of the Arab people. Consider, too, his powerful and prophetic article about Vietnam, “A Walk through the Land of the Annamese,” in La Edad de Oro. That other great creator of Latin America, Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), had argued that “we [Latin Americans] are a small species of the human”: that is, not an extension or an echo of Western Europe but something else, another world. Martí went even further than Bolívar, noting not only that difference but also the structural affinity that unites us with other societies across the planet. Martí was probably the first to draw attention to a common human condition that is “not European or European-American,” at a time when this was far from being accepted, as it is today. It is enough to recall in this regard the different terms which capitalism has employed to designate the colonial and semicolonial countries. In Martí’s own time, these countries were simply “barbarian.” At the beginning of the so-called First World War, they had become the “colored races.” They emerged from the so-called Second World War as the “underdeveloped countries,” and then the “Third World,” a name which, confused and confusing as it may be (though less so than the idea of “proletarian nations,” which never caught on), supposes a slow but evident improvement in the degree of appreciation bestowed on us. . José Martí, “Una distribución de diplomas en un colegio de los Estados Unidos” (1884), in Obras completas (Havana, 1963–1973), 8:422. Hereafter, this work is cited as JM, with the particular volume followed by page numbers. . José Martí, “Un paseo por la tierra de los anamitas,” JM, 18:459–70.

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These labels—originating from the developed/underdeveloping capitalist countries—involve, of course, interpretations pro domo sua, which divert our attention away from the central fact: that these are, quite simply, labels for the countries of the world devastated by colonialism and imperialism. The most recent of them, “Third World” was created by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy (1898–1990) in 1952, by analogy to the French “Third Estate” of 1789, as Sauvy himself explained to me in Havana in 1971 (noting that he was quite unsatisfied with the end result of that metaphor). In a 1962 essay entitled “The Other World?” I spoke of the impossibility that this “Third World” was situated between capitalism (the “First” world), at one end, and socialism (the “Second” world), at the other. Socialism was, at the time, the path taken not only by certain European countries but also by other non-European countries, including some in the “Third World” which were attempting to escape underdevelopment. At the same time, it could be said of other countries of the “Third World” that they were at the margin of capitalism: they formed (and form) part of the capitalist system, they suffered (and suffer) exploitation by diverse metropolitan centers, which they provided (and provide) with an “external proletariat”—to use, with a different sense, the equivocal expression of Arnold Toynbee. The Third World, then, might indeed recall for us the French Third Estate, but it was not, as some desired, a nonexistent “third road” between capitalism and socialism. The countries of the Third World face the same choice as the rest of the world: the choice between capitalism or socialism, although, naturally, with their own national features. Would that we could do without these confused terms that have been thrust upon us. Would not Martí have done without them, as the great verbal decolonizer that he was? He had thrown in his lot “con los pobres de la tierra” (with the wretched of the earth), and therefore saw with perfect clarity the snare implicit in the false dichotomy of “civilization” and “barbarism” (simple masks, referring respectively to the exploiting and exploited countries). Confronting the racism that this dichotomy supposed, he spoke instead with pride of “our mestiza America.” Who were, then, his contemporaries, his equals? Not just the revolutionary democrats of the “other” Europe but also non-European leaders, roughly contemporary with him, such as Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) in China, or some of the radical leaders of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Per. “. . . I am less and less happy with this term which is something convenient, a way to avoid the question. . . . To me, the expression ‘Third World’ is employed for convenience, which I regret.” Alfred Sauvy, “El inventor de ‘Tercer Mundo,’” Casa de las Américas 70 (1972): 188.

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haps above all, though, it is the figure of Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) who casts the sharpest retrospective light on Martí. In contrast to the radicals of the European periphery, who lived at a time when capitalism was less developed and who fought against now nonexistent empires (the Tsarist, Austro-Hungarian, and Turkish), Martí and Ho Chi Minh confronted, in their anticolonial and popular struggle, not only the metropolitan centers of the so-called Old World, but North American imperialism as well, that same imperialism that today continues to be our enemy and that represents the most advanced stage of global capitalism. But the great Vietnamese leader—like Martí, a political organizer, propagandist, theorist, and poet— unlike Martí could go beyond the idea of revolutionary democracy, because his work came in the wake of Leninist theory and practice and the October Revolution, twenty-two years after the death of Martí. Nevertheless, many scholars of Martí tend to overlook this essential relationship, which throws much light on his work, a light necessary in a way for its full appreciation. Martí’s mission was, in the short run, to win independence for Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish hands, completing the secession of Spanish America: which makes it seem simply the last chapter of the story of Spanish American independence begun by Bolívar. But the long hiatus between the South American wars of independence in the early nineteenth century and the war that Martí organized did not pass in vain. Neither was the class base of the Cuban war of independence the same, nor were the proximity and growth of the United States without consequence. The revolutionary classes in Cuba were no longer, in 1895, the same as those who unleashed and fought the wars against Spain in South America. Their equivalents in Cuba had fought for independence between 1868 and 1878, unsuccessfully. From that point on, the Cuban agrarian bourgeoisie withdrew from the struggle, even dreaming of a modus vivendi with Spain, or, if it came to that, with the United States. In Cuba, the burden of the popular war prepared by Martí was borne by the petite bourgeoisie, the small proprietors, the professionals, tobacco farmers, the incipient working class, the poor peasants, and the recently freed slaves. This gave the Cuban war of independence a character more like that of the Mexican and Chinese revolutions in the early twentieth century. Moreover, Martí aspired to detain, with the independence of Cuba, the onslaught of U.S. imperialism on the continent, and thence around the world. “Cuba and Puerto Rico,” he writes, “enter freedom with a different composition, in a distinct epoch, and with much greater responsibilities than the other peoples of Spanish America.” He adds,

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In the center of the Americas lie the West Indies, which, as slave republics would have served as pontoons in the war of an imperial republic against the envious and superior world [Europe] that seeks to negate its rise to power—mere outposts of the American Rome. As free republics, entitled to that status by virtue of the principles of equality and labor, they will serve the continent instead as a guarantee of stability: for Spanish America, they constitute a line of defense for an independence that is still threatened; for the great republic of the north, which has expanded territorially into lands that are still feudal and riven by violence, they offer a more secure greatness than the ignoble conquest of minor neighbors, and an alternative to the vicious war that its possession of them would inevitably give rise to in the international political sphere. . . . It is a world that we bring into equilibrium: we are not merely liberating two islands. On the eve of his death, less than a year after writing this, Martí confides to his close friend, the Mexican Manuel Mercado, I am daily in danger of losing my life for the sake of my country and in fulfillment of my duty—which I understand and have the will to carry out—to make sure that Cuban independence does not permit the extension of the United States into the West Indies, and, with even greater force, into the lands of our America. Everything I have done until now, and will do, is directed to that end. I have had to proceed silently and indirectly, because certain things must remain hidden if they are to be done, whereas to make them public would invite difficulties too strong to overcome. These words underlay the generous and unconstrained ambition of the Manifesto of Montecristi, in which, on March 25, 1895, Martí and the commanding general of the revolutionary army, Máximo Gómez, announce to the world Cuba’s war: “Cuba’s war of independence, the knot binding together the bundle of islands where, in the times that lie before us, the commerce of the continents will cross, is a far-reaching event for humanity, and a timely service that the prudent heroism of the West Indies provides to the security and just treatment of the American nations, and to the still vacillating equilibrium of the world.” Martí’s death at the beginning of the war precluded him from witnessing the momentary frustration of these grand designs. Even so, the . José Martí, “El tercer año del Partido Revolucionario Cubano. El alma de la Revolución y el deber de Cuba en América” (1894), JM 3:141–42.

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independence of Cuba, while limited, was obtained. Without that independence, it is likely that Cuba would today be, instead of a socialist country, a colony of the United States, like our fraternal neighbor, Puerto Rico, whose independence Martí’s Cuban Revolutionary Party had also been founded to “promote and assist.” Cuba, as Martí had feared, would serve as a bridge for the expansion of the United States, which, not satisfied with crippling Cuba’s independence, seized directly for itself other former Spanish colonies, including Puerto Rico and the Philippines, which had also waged a powerful war of national liberation. The North American intervention in the Cuban war of independence, in 1898, inaugurated a new historical period. For the first time until the present revolution, in the eyes of the world Cuba became a central reference point. The modern imperial adventure begins on its territory. The first lines of Lenin’s Imperialism already speak of the “Spanish-American War” as the opening of an era. In the estimation of Rubén Darío (1867–1916), Martí—perhaps the only Spanish American whom Darío admired without reservation—had sacrificed his life for a minor cause, the independence of an island where, simply by chance, he had been born. How would the great Nicaraguan poet have reacted if he had realized that, in fact, Martí was proposing nothing less than the redemption of an entire continent, and an intervention in “the still vacillating equilibrium of the world”? Probably nobody in his right mind, and with such slender means at his disposal (Cuba had, at the time, just over a million and a half inhabitants), would have proposed such immoderate goals. Martí dreaded the possibility that the other Spanish American countries would not support (or even understand) those goals; in that same letter—his last, and as such, an invaluable document—to Mercado, he confides, The petty and public obligations of those nations, like yours [Mexico] and mine, most vitally interested in preventing in Cuba . . . an outcome that would open the path to the annexation of the peoples of our America by the restless and brutal North that disdains them, a path which must be blocked, and which we are blocking with our blood, have impeded them from providing any assistance to or expression of support for this sacrifice, which is being made in their own inmediate interest. . . . I have lived in the monster, and I know its entrails—and my sling is that of David. Martí’s tasks (and therefore his thought) exhibit, then, a universality that derives from the singularity of his situation. While the Cuban war of independence was directed immediately against Spain, in the longer run it

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was also directed at preventing the expansion of the United States; if it was the last of the Spanish American wars against the old colonialism of Spain, it was also the first tangible movement against the new imperialism led by the United States in the contemporary era. This gives a special breadth to the revolutionary process unleashed by Martí, and to his thought, which opens out in a wide arc. Martí lived a historic tension that no other Latin American before him had experienced: he concluded the work of the nineteenth century and inaugurated the struggles of the twentieth; he finalized the political secession of Latin America and heralded the new goal of economic independence and social justice; he embraced the entire material and spiritual experience of our peoples, he represented them in their true historical dimension, and he led them. It is impossible to imagine Martí outside of this specific conjuncture—a utopian and “uchronic” Martí, as some have suggested. That person does not exist. Our America The universal character of Martí’s thought is not just a vague abstraction that takes for the form of the human as such what are finally no more than the forms of a particular class or nation. On the contrary, the challenge it poses stems from the different, unique character of its concrete historical context. Martí did not view this context as limited to his Island. Rather, it was the fragmented condition of Cuba itself that forced Martí to consider how it was articulated by a manifold of larger forces. “Homeland is humanity,” he would say. Martí, however, did not confuse that sense of internationalism with the hypostasis of a capitalist Europe boasting of its universality. Unlike Sarmiento, he avoided the error of taking for “civilization” institutions and habits that properly belong to other contexts, those of the dominant capitalist countries, and that had been imposed on our lands by blood and fire (the same error, after all, as that of the European conquistadores). Confronting Sarmiento’s misleading contraposition of “civilization” against “barbarism,” Martí would say that “there is no battle between civilization and barbarism, but rather between false erudition and nature.” Where the debate was not between two positions internal to Latin America—here Sarmiento’s and his own—but instead between two worlds, Martí responded with equal clarity. Thus, in his address, known as “Mother America,” to the delegates at the Pan-American Conference in Washing. José Martí, “Nuestra América” (1891), JM, 6:17.

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ton held between 1889 and 1890 that concerned him deeply, Martí says, “As great as this land [the United States] might be, and as sacred as the America in which Lincoln was born is for free men, for us, in the depths of our hearts, the America in which Juárez was born is greater, because it is ours, and because it has been less fortunate, a sentiment nobody should begrudge us or condemn us for.” The twentieth century would hear, often, similar words in Latin America, Asia, and Africa—something which, at first glance, is still surprising. “The America in which Juárez was born” (Juárez, let us not forget, was the Indian who vanquished the Europeans) “is greater because it is ours, and because it has been less fortunate.” This is a reasoning peculiar to the colonial subject, the person whom the colonial powers have tried to humiliate, a reasoning which illuminates not only Martí’s political thought but also his ethics, and which is characteristic of the underdeveloped countries generally. The wars of national liberation such as the one Martí himself launched suppose a defiant and a sometimes poignant selftrust: a need to emphasize the authentic, the indigenous, against colonial and imperialist penetration. The authentic, closest to hand, for Martí, was Cuba, whose history and qualities he praised extravagantly; and, in a larger context, the American continent south of the Rio Grande: “our mestiza America.” In all Martí’s work there is a constant reference to this idea, but it acquires its maximum expression in the essay, a veritable Magna Carta of his project, pointedly titled “Our America” (1891). In this essay, his most explicit affirmation of the originality of our lands is found. The performative gesture that the “Our” embodies is a crucial one; it constitutes the primary foundation of Martí’s ideology, for it is around this declaration, this confidence, this challenge, that his political thought is articulated. Martí did not overlook the achievements of the metropolitan countries, but he also did not overlook what he must have felt in his own flesh— their limitations and crimes. And poised to create a new country, free from their tutelage, Martí wished to incorporate, on one hand, everything that would fit its own nature, and on the other hand, all that was living in the culture of the metropolitan countries, while breaking with what was dead and harmful in them: “The European university has to cede to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught by heart, even if the history of the Greek lawgivers is not. Our Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours. [. . . We must] graft the world to our republics, but the trunk is our republics. And let the vanquished

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pedant be silent; for there is no country where a person can feel more pride than our anguished American republics” (“Nuestra América”). It was necessary, above all, to recognize the autochthonous character, the singularity of this America he called mestiza, this America where descendents of Europeans, Indians, and Africans coexisted and mixed. The indigenous peoples, as the original possessors of the land and the creators of unique civilizations on that land, entirely their own, not developed but rather despoiled by the Europeans, were of enormous importance for Martí. What America would become had to involve for him, in a crucial manner, their contribution. “Our” America could not be that grotesque bourgeois caricature of the Indian “with a French coat and barefoot” which our countries have had to suffer. The best side of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 is true to this insight of Martí’s. Even where the indigenous cultures were defeated, reaffirming those cultures is a way of defending what is ours—“nuestro”—against the colonialist. And the new African nations that have emerged in the wake of decolonization, or the Cuban Revolution itself, have they not also affirmed the African roots of their nationality? Perhaps no text about decolonization supersedes in force and prophetic insight “Our America,” which joins together the penetrating gaze of the scientist with the poetic flight of a creator of myths. But once the special or autochthonous character of our America is recognized, the question arises: which parts of the heritage of the past are reconcilable with its future, and which need to be rejected as negative in themselves or in their consequences? Making this distinction is one of the most important contributions of Martí. As regards Spain, the answer was not hard to come by. Spanish America came into being in contradiction with Spain, against which our leaders fought both militarily and intellectually. Spain was so ramshackle in the eyes of our America that, in the ideological battle, Martí rid himself of it with a handful of wounding phrases, speaking, for example, of the “irredeemable ineptitude and corruption of the government of Spain.” When he was twenty, he wrote a brief treatise that showed at the same time his growing radicalism and his roots in the best tradition of Cuban independence thought: La República Española ante la Revolución Cubana (The Spanish Republic and the Cuban Revolution) (1873). He would have to modify very little of what he said there afterwards. With official Spain there was nothing to discuss; it was enough to fight and defeat Spain, and to install a republic, which, of course, would become its own master. His answer was less clear when he dealt with other European nations

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characterized by a more advanced capitalist development, such as France or England, whose influence on Latin America was both omnipresent and negative, either because they were attempting, sometimes with success, to openly or indirectly colonize parts of the continent themselves, or because they sought to impose forms of government that were not appropriate to our reality. In expressing these cautions and reservations about the role of Europe, however, there were many other Latin American thinkers who anticipated or accompanied Martí. But where Martí is perhaps the first is in discerning fully the potential danger of the United States for our America.10 The rapid growth of that country had impressed not only Europeans such as Alexis de Tocqueville but also perhaps even more significantly many Latin Americans, such as Sarmiento, who came to think that their Southern lands, despite their distinct origins and components, could and should repeat the history of the North, which was the direct offspring of the Industrial Revolution and forms of bourgeois development that Spain had not experienced and so was unable to leave as an inheritance to her ex-colonies. Drawn to admire, in the first years of his exile, the triumphal course of U.S. history from Washington to Lincoln, Martí quickly understood that a similar prospect was impossible, but above all undesirable for Latin America, given the inequalities and injustices that accompanied the road that the United States had taken. Moreover, having lived in the “entrails” of the United States at a moment that it was changing from a republic of free producers into a monopolist and imperialist state, Martí anxiously understood that its next step, having conquered the West, seized half of Mexico, and passed through the deeply scarring experience of the Civil War, would be to thrust itself on the rest of America: and in the first place, on Cuba. To prevent this, he thought, required hastening the independence of the island and building that independence on a firm and socially progressive foundation. It also required showing the Spanish 10. This is not to say that since Bolívar there have not been other vigorous proponents of this idea. For example, the Chilean Francisco Bilbao, in his “Iniciativa de la América: Idea de un Congreso federal de las repúblicas,” which he presented in Paris in 1856, revives the Bolivarian dream of a confederation of Latin American nations as a means of preventing the continued absorption of “fragments of [Latin] America into the Saxon jaws of the magnetic boa constrictor, which uncoils its torturous rings. Yesterday Texas, tomorrow the north of Mexico and the Pacific, salute a new master.” Bilbao ended up prefiguring the sentiment Martí would express in 1889: “The historical moment of the unity of South America has arrived; it heralds a second battle, to add to the independence they have won the association of our peoples.” F. Bilbao, La América en peligro: Evangelio americano; Sociabilidad chilena (Santiago de Chile, 1941), 145.

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American public the deep internal deficiencies and contradictions of the United States, and warning against the adoption of its model of development by the countries south of the Rio Bravo. Although this task would occupy the better part of his life, beginning when, at the age of twentyeight, he first came to live in the United States, it is the subject above all of that part of his writings called North American Scenes, Escenas norteamericanas. He began writing these articles in 1881 for the newspaper La Opinión Nacional in Caracas, which soon, however, canceled his collaboration, because, among other things, its editor objected to his critical portrait of the United States. When in 1882 he sent his first article to La Nación of Buenos Aires, it was mutilated by that newspaper’s editor, Bartolomé Mitre, who, concerned with the intensity of Martí’s attacks on the United States, on September 26, 1882, wrote him as follows: The suppression of one part of your first letter [Martí wrote his chronicles in the form of letters] prior to its publication was in response to the need to protect our newspaper from the consequences of your ideas. . . . Without ignoring the deeper truth of your judgments, and the sincerity behind them, we have come to the conclusion that their extremely radical character and the unqualified nature of their conclusions does not accord with the lines of conduct that, in our opinion . . . should be observed in the new and important foreign correspondence service we have just inaugurated. . . . The section of your letter that was suppressed, though it contains undeniable truths, could lead readers into the error of believing that it proposes a campaign of “denunciation” against the United States as a political body, a social entity, an economic center . . . Your letter would have been cast into shadow had it been published as you sent it.11 Martí responded in a skillful letter, and from then on proceeded in these articles, as in his address to the first Pan-American Congress, in a more indirect or subtle way, taking advantage, for example, of British–North American contradictions in order to raise questions about the United States. But there is no doubt as to his intention in writing these North American Scenes: without denying the positive aspects of a people who had created the richest nation in the world up to that time, and the excellence of some of its men and women (such as Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Lucy 11. Letter to José Martí from Bartolomé Mitre y Vedia, Papeles de Martí, vol. 3, Miscelánea (Havana, 1935), 84.

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Parsons, Whitman, Longfellow, Helen Hunt Jackson, Twain), Martí wanted to make known the defects of that country and the dangers it implied for Latin Americans. He was obsessed with making visible how “this republic, because of its excessive cult of wealth, has fallen, without any of the constraints of tradition, into the inequality, injustice, and violence of the monarchic countries.”12 In one of his first Scenes, of 1881, he speaks of “this country, in appearance the master among all the peoples of the earth, and in reality the slave of all the lower passions that perturb and pervert other peoples. And it is the only nation that feels the absolute duty to be large. Those peoples that inherit storms must live in them. That people [the United States] has inherited calm and greatness: in that state it should remain.”13 Later the same year, he warns that “the nation [is] now in the hands of a handful of contemptible merchants,” and that a political aristocracy has been born from an aristocracy of money, and dominates the newspapers, the elections, and usually prevails in the legislative assemblies. . . . [It] poorly dissimulates the impatience with which it awaits the hour in which the number of its followers will permit it to seize hold of the sacred book of the nation [the Constitution], and reshape to the benefit and privilege of one class that Magna Carta of generous liberties, liberties which permitted these vulgar men of power to build the fortunes that they aspire to use now to gravely curtail.14 Years later, in the newspaper Patria, created to support the war against Spain, Martí dedicated a section, “Notes on the United States,” with the sole object of making known there, by means of news items taken directly from the North American press, “those constitutive qualities [of the United States] that, given their constancy and authority, demonstrate two useful truths to our America: the crude, unequal, and decadent character of the United States, and the continued existence, in that country, of all the forms of violence, discord, immorality, and disorder that it imputes to the Hispanic American peoples.”15 If we were not already familiar with the double mission that Martí took on, we would find surprising his creation of a section dedicated to 12. José Martí, “Un drama terrible. La guerra social en Chicago” (1887), JM, 11:335. 13. José Martí, “Carta de Nueva York” (1881), JM, 9:27. 14. Martí, “Carta de Nueva York,” JM, 9:97 and 108. 15. José Martí, “La verdad sobre los Estados Unidos” (1894), JM, 28:294.

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this purpose in a newspaper whose only apparent goal was to serve as a vehicle for the Cuban Revolutionary Party in its war for independence from Spain. But, as we have seen, for Martí it was not a question of mechanically rejecting, as a whole, the United States. He tried, rather, to expose the negativity that was at its core (“perhaps it is a law that in the roots of giant trees nest worms”) and the immense danger that it represented for Latin America. For the rest, in the United States, as in Western Europe, there were many useful things for our America. In the first place, knowledge: science, technology, and a vast wealth of art and literature, which Martí was at pains to make known to a Spanish American public. Here, as in everything, Martí was true to his own maxim: “[We must] graft the world to our republics, but the trunk is our republics.” And this principle became more urgent still when he discussed education, and the social, political, and economical questions of the day. In these matters, he admitted only those things that faithfully responded to the demands of his people. What Martí praised or censured in this regard was always a function of the concrete circumstances of the Latin American countries, and particularly of Cuba. For example: No social thinker elicited more generous praise from him than Henry George (1830–1897), the author of Progress and Poverty (1879). What Engels said of Marx in 1883, before his recently sealed tomb, Martí says four years later of George: “Only Darwin in the Natural Sciences has left a mark on our times comparable to that of George in the science of society.”16 It is almost certain that Martí considered George’s theory of land rent especially pertinent to the problems of Cuba, obliged, before anything else, in his view, to reform its agricultural system once it had gained its independence. George, a minor figure, also exerted an influence on Sun Yat-sen, for similar reasons.17

16. José Martí, “El cisma de los católicos en Nueva York” (1887), JM, 11:146. 17. See Lenin’s commentary on the influence of George on Sun Yat-sen and in general on his hope to “avoid the capitalist road in China” and realize a “radical agricultural reform,” in “Democracy and Populism in China” (1912), OC, 18:161–62. Lenin concluded that a future Chinese Marxist party “at the same time that it criticizes the petite-bourgeois utopianism and the reactionary conceptions of Sun Yat-sen, will also undoubtedly preoccupy itself with emphasizing, maintaining, and amplifying the democratic-revolutionary nucleus of his political and agricultural program.” This is, in fact, what happened, and Sun Yat-sen himself enthusiastically welcomed, up to his death in 1925, the accomplishments of the October Revolution.

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The Social Battle It is in this light too that we need to consider the vision Martí gave of the proletariat as an emerging force. But before going on to do that, even summarily, we need to keep in mind several things: how the question of the proletariat was seen in the United States, his social context for the better part of fifteen years; how Martí’s own thought evolved on this point (because, as all thinkers, Martí underwent an evolution in this regard often forgotten by those who indiscriminately cite his texts);18 and, of course, how that evolution in his own ideas together with events in the United States influenced, decisively, the goals Martí proposed for Cuba and “his” America. In relation to the first of these questions, Engels left us an observation of great value. He writes, “. . . in February of 1885, public opinion in the United States was nearly unanimous concerning this point: that in the United States there existed no working class, in the European sense of the word; that as a consequence, there was no class war between workers and capitalists, such as the one that tears European society apart, nor was such a war possible in the North American republic; and that socialism was, therefore, a matter of foreign importance, incapable of establishing roots in that country.”19 But in the months that followed the dramatic events of May 1886 in Chicago, which end in the execution of five working-class fighters with anarchist affiliations, there appeared “in North American society,” Engels would also say, the possibility of “a revolution that would require at least ten years in any other country,” which implies the sudden eruption of a class war that could spread “like a prairie fire . . . and shake the foundations of North American society” (395–96). Yet not even then was a significant Marxist movement able to constitute itself in the United States: only European immigrants appeared interested in it and debated in their various languages European questions. In 1887, speaking of the newly formed Socialist Workers Party, Engels recognized that “it is a party that exists in name only, because in no part of the United States has it been in the position of 18. Good studies of the stages of Martí’s political and intellectual evolution can be found in Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, “La idea de liberación nacional en José Martí,” Pensamiento Crítico 49–50 (1971); and Isabel Monal, “José Martí: del liberalismo al democratismo antimperialista,” Casa de las Américas 76 (1973). 19. Friedrich Engels, “Prologue to the U.S. Edition of 1887,” The Condition of the Working Class in England. I use here the version in La situación de la clase obrera en Inglaterra (Havana, 1974), 395.

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affirming itself as a political party. Moreover, to some extent it remains a political organization foreign to the United States, until only recently made up almost exclusively by German immigrants, who use their own language, and, in general, do not speak English” (401). Knowing this allows us to appreciate better the degree of Martí’s radicalism when, in 1882, disagreeing with that North American public opinion which, according to Engels, as we have seen, was “nearly unanimous concerning this point,” he writes of the labor movement in the United States, In this land will be decided, even though this may appear as a premature prophecy, the new laws that are to govern the person who works and the person who profits from that labor. In this colossal theater the colossal problem [of the relation of labor and capital] will arrive at an end. Here, where the workers are strong, they will fight and win. The problems are delayed, but they are not dispelled. To fail to deal with a problem that can have negative consequence is to leave a legacy of evils to our children. We need to live in our times, battle in them, declare the truth bravely, fight against an impure prosperity, and live fully, to enjoy with a sense of accomplishment and repose the reward of death. In other lands, there are battles over race and politics. And in this land will be fought the tremendous social battle.20 Yet, how is it possible to ignore that Martí was thinking as he said this of his own country, whose war of independence he was preparing (“war,” he would say later, coinciding with Clausewitz, “is a political process”)21 and which therefore still experienced “political battles”? Would not Cuba, eventually, also have to wage “the tremendous social battle,” that battle which presented itself, in Martí’s own time, only in the advanced capitalist countries? Martí knew of Marx, and spoke warmly of him, but he was not familiar with his work: in his writings there is not one title of Marx’s. But if he did not coincide with Marx’s analysis of the class struggle (which, again, we should consider in the light of the concrete reality of his country), in 1883 he says the following in his eulogy for Marx before an audience of North American workers: 20. José Martí, “Carta de Nueva York” (1882), JM, 9:277–78. 21. José Martí, “Nuestras Ideas” (1892), JM, 1:317.

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Karl Marx has died. The way in which he took the side of the weak deserves honor. But it is not enough to show the wounds, and to be inflamed by the generous desire of finding a cure for them; what is needed rather is one who teaches the cure for that pain. The task of inciting man against man is a fearful one. So is the dehumanization of some men in the interest of others. But there has to be an outlet for indignation, so that the beast in man is calmed, without overflowing into violence and fear. Look at this hall: the portrait of that ardent reformer presides over it, surrounded by green leaves, a unifier of men from different peoples, and a forceful and tireless organizer. The International was his work: and now men from all countries come to honor him. His gaze moves and comforts the multitude, made up of brave working men, who display more muscles than jewels, honest faces rather than silk cloth. Labor beautifies. A farm worker, a blacksmith, or a sailor is a renovating sight. It is from controlling the forces of nature that they take on the beauty of those forces. . . . Karl Marx studied the methods of positioning the world on new foundations, and awoke the sleepers, teaching them how to throw down the broken idols. But he was in a hurry, and lived very much in the shadows, without understanding that healthy children will not be born from the heart of a people, nor from the breast of a woman in the home, unless they have had a natural and long process of gestation. Here are the friends of Karl Marx, who was not only a titanic mover of the rage of the European workers, but also the profound seer of the forces behind human misery and the destinies of man, and a man consumed by the desire to do good. He saw in everything what he carried within himself: rebellion, the highest ideals, struggle.22 Consider the case of Martí’s Cuba in 1895. Cuba still faced a period of “political battles.” The concrete problems Martí needed to resolve were, immediately, gaining the independence of Cuba from Spain, and, at the same time, stopping the imperialist expansion of the United States. Both things were not possible without counting on a broad national front (necessarily multiclass) to combat the foreign enemy, as the Cuban Revolutionary Party proposed. Exacerbating at the wrong time “the social battle” would be, in that context, to break up the front and make impossible the first step toward those goals. The May Day demonstrations and the subsequent execution of the anarchist workers in Chicago, as expected, would radicalize 22. José Martí, “Carta de Martí” (1883), JM, 9:388.

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Martí’s vision of class struggle;23 yet, when the question of class struggle was raised among the leadership of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, he pushed it aside for the time being in the interests of revolutionary unity. But that is not all. Even though he spoke of “the classes that have justice at their side,” and even though he held no doubts, because he repeated it many times that he wanted to throw in his lot “con los pobres de la tierra” (“with the wretched of the earth”), it appears Martí thought—in a way also common to leaders of other national liberation movements—that not only the exploitation of one class by another but the very division of society into antagonistic classes was the disastrous consequence of developed capitalist society. Lamenting the historical course of the United States, he says in 1888, “the popular republic is transforming itself into a class republic.”24 His real work, in this sense, was to reject this tendency of capitalist society and to create a “popular republic” which, from its birth, would prevent the division of society which was corrupting the United States, transforming it into a “class republic.” How Martí expected to achieve this goal we do not know. He was a practical man, who did not shy away from “the necessary war,” which was not an “easy cure” and was surely “the task of inciting men against men” he saw in Marx. It would have been necessary to see him confront, with his magnificent idealism, the concrete realities of power. In every case that we know of, when something similar has been attempted in countries such as his, of a colonial or semicolonial character, the result has been the revelation of the certainty of the existence of classes and the inevitable conflict between them (as inevitable as the conflict between colony and metropolis), with the consequent radicalization of the revolutionary process. For this reason, it is not by chance that, in countries where the leaders of the national liberation movement have pursued deeply its political problematic, it has been possible to develop an openly socialist revolution. Martí was still not (and could not have been) the leader of that 23. This radicalization is evident in the various newspaper articles Martí dedicated to the events and their consequences. If at the beginning Martí disapproved of the violent conduct of the workers, he gradually modified his stance until he wrote his extraordinary article of November 13, 1887, in which he openly identifies with the position of the workers. Between the first and the last of these chronicles intervene those months in which, in the words of Engels, there was room in the United States for “a revolution” that had the power to “shake [North] American society to its foundations.” North American progressives like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain experienced a similar radicalization, and for similar reasons, at this time: see Philip S. Foner, Mark Twain, Social Critic, 3rd ed. (New York, 1972), esp. 230. 24. José Martí, “La religión en los Estados Unidos” (1888), JM, 11:425.

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socialist revolution. But that does not mean that it is acceptable to present him as a reformist and a moderate: he fought to achieve, in his circumstances, the most radical goals permitted by his historical moment and process.25 A more “socialist” position was not historically feasible in a colonial country; it would have been no more than a crude copy of a metropolitan formula. To brand Martí as a reformist is therefore a kind of idealism. In history, overall, there have been more radical positions; in the history that Martí actually lived, there was not—and there could not have been—a more radical position than his. This was understood by his comrades-in-arms who openly declared themselves socialists, like Carlos Baliño (1848–1926), Diego Vicente Tejera (1848–1903), and Martí’s own close friend Fermín Valdés Domínguez (1852–1910). Martí was a revolutionary democrat who lived at the extreme limit of possibilities of his time, and even anticipated some of the future tasks that, as he understood clearly, it was not possible for him to address at that moment. To Baliño, a declared socialist, Martí says, “Revolution? The revolution is not what we will initiate in the jungles, but what we will develop in the Republic.”26 Martí was the embattled and militant ideologue of the popular classes (among which the Cuban proletariat was still only an incipient force), while the agricultural bourgeoisie of the country saw itself represented by the Autonomist movement, which sought a détente with Spain. Enrique Collazo, Martí’s comrade and a witness to his times, writes, speaking of an internal debate in the Cuban Revolutionary Party, “the working masses gave their support with absolute confidence and blind fanaticism to their idol Martí.”27 From the members of the Cuban bourgeoisie (or pre-bourgeoisie), on the other hand, Martí received nothing but attacks and insults. They did not have even the minimal generosity to honor his literary genius. Their class hatred impeded their vision. They saw well that, when all was said and done, Martí was their irreconcilable enemy, even though Martí himself was not one to unleash his extraordinary verbal violence, its devastating force, unnecessarily. 25. This is how Martí was and is understood (and assumed) by his most important and most radical followers: Julio Antonio Mella and Fidel Castro, the founders, respectively, of the first Communist Party of Cuba in the 1920s and the new Communist Party born out of the revolution of 1959. Important suggestions in this respect have been made by other authors or political leaders, such as Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Blas Roca, Juan Marinello, Raúl Roa, Leonardo Griñán Peralta, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Sergio Aguirre, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, and Armando Hart. 26. Quoted in Julio Antonio Mella, “Glosas al pensamiento de José Martí” (1926), Documentos y artículos (Havana, 1975), 269. 27. Enrique Collazo, “José Martí,” Cuba independiente (Havana, 1900), 51.

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One notable example of how Martí’s ideological enemies saw him may be found in the words of José Ignacio Rodríguez, written at a time when (with the island still occupied by North American troops, and the neocolonial formula that the United States would impose still undecided) Martí’s message constituted the most immediate danger to the cause Rodríguez was championing, the annexation of Cuba by the United States. Speaking of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, he says, The heart and soul of this Party, who thereby assumed the supreme authority and declared as disobedient anyone who manifested a view distinct from his own, was the Cuban Don José Martí, a comparatively young man in those days, in whose person were joined together in abundance many of the necessary conditions to be an apostle of this class. Favored by heaven with a clear intelligence and a fervid imagination, but undisciplined to the extreme often seen in many of the French revolutionaries of 1789 and 1793, he appeared often, to the eyes of those who were not his disciples or who were not drawn by the personal magnetism which he exercised with such power on his immediate circle, as though he were of unbalanced mind. His words were fluid, ringing, and copious, imbued with a feverish passion that swept through certain groups, though grammatically incorrect and full of bizarre constructions. . . . His activity was tireless, and there was nothing that could daunt him, either in magnitude or in difficulty, when he lent himself to a task that he thought would benefit the ideals to which he was dedicated. To the Cubans who were closest to him, especially the poor and the uneducated, he provided help and gave free classes at night, teaching them to read, to write. . . . And to everyone and in every way, whenever he could he preached hatred toward Spain, hatred toward the autonomist Cubans, whom he berated by saying: “it is not only the vault of the bank that we must defend, nor is our homeland a checking account, a matter of balancing debits and credits, nor will a few dozen Creoles in the seats of government silence the desire to win a regime of dignity and justice, in which, without pushing from above or below, all are captains in the palace of justice.” [Martí preached] the hatred of the rich, cultivated, and conservative man, introducing into the problem of Cuba an element that before then had been absent, since all of the political movements of the country had always originated from the higher, established classes; and hatred toward the

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United States, which he accused of egoism, and which he saw as the prototype of an insolent race, against which those who governed the other countries of the American continent would have to struggle without rest.28 It is worth noting that Rodríguez, who ended up speaking of an “eminently socialist and anarchic” spirit in Martí and his party, gave us here, despite his evident desire to denigrate him, an image of Martí that is more real than the saccharine one championed for more than half a century by the pro-bourgeois scholars of his work. Because when he wrote those lines, there was an immediate possibility of a direct annexation of Cuba by the United States, and Rodríguez, who favored that goal, felt he had to try to disarm the radicalism of Martí directly. Two years later, however, the neocolonial Republic emerged (the astute political formula that U.S. imperialism rehearsed on the island), and another, more indirect, way had to be found to neutralize that radicalism. Thus began the process of the salonization of Martí’s work. But the implications of that thought continued to be unequivocally radical, as both Julio Antonio Mella, a founder of the first Cuban Communist party, and Fidel Castro proclaimed. For this reason, in the fourth volume of his History of Socialist Thought, in 1956, three years before the Cuban Revolution, the English historian G. D. H. Cole writes, The Cuban revolutionaries [of 1895] were not socialists. Nor did their principle theorist, José Martí, express a specifically socialist doctrine. He was a revolutionary nationalist more than a socialist: but his nationalism was very radical, and rested in a conception of racial equality normally associated with the later developments of socialism and communism in Latin America. He recognized the need to found his revolutionary movement in the working classes. . . . He was a strong opponent of “colonialism,” and during his residency in New York he wrote vigorously, condemning U.S. capitalism, essentially in its imperialist aspects. His politics, nevertheless, involved a collaboration between the working class, in which he principally confided, and the nationalist middle class which could be induced to unite with the working class, against the landowning aristocracy, based on the eradication of racial discrimination. He also defended 28. José Ignacio Rodríguez, Estudio histórico sobre el origen, desenvolvimiento y manifestaciones prácticas de la idea de la anexión de la isla de Cuba a los Estados Unidos de América (Havana, 1900), chap. 29.

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an advanced social legislation, and for all of this, deserves a place in our history.29 On Martí’s Thought Martí was not a philosopher, in the common sense of the word, but he was certainly, without a doubt, a “thinker,”30 indeed one of the master thinkers of our world. His work frequently poses philosophical questions but leaves these open, merely sketched. I have already outlined the most immediate aspects of his “thought”: those which have to do with political and social issues, which, for him, occupied a central place. Even more, the whole of his world of ideas cannot be disassociated from his politics: his theory is constituted, we might say, by the force and goals of his practice. “Expression,” he says himself, “is the female of action.” The most subtle way of betraying him, then, would be to stick to the letter of the text, which kills—even though in his case it also fascinates. It is not a question of trying to arrange his fragments in a coherent theoretical system but of situating them, taken together, in relation to this practice, so that each—thought and action, theory and practice—mutually illuminates the other, in that dialectic copulation that his own metaphor announces. It is by reference to that practice, and its circumstances, that we can best understand Martí, rather than by hunting down the European or North American “sources” of his ideology: these, nevertheless, were numerous. But there is room for doubt as to the nature of these “sources” for Martí. We might better call them, since we are already dealing in metaphors, ideological weapons. His real sources were the concrete problems he faced and the body of beliefs that emerged from the direct heat of that confrontation. Again, here as in other matters, it is enough to situate Martí within his proper family to understand this. What normally happens with the thinkers of colonial and semicolonial countries, who, as do many, study in and are shaped by their experience of the developed capitalist countries? Some become patient or tenacious repeaters of alien formulas, effectively denying any relation to their concrete reality, and they evaporate from history. Others, by contrast, (the great leaders) use instrumentally what they learn in the developed countries, and in that way keep intact the ideological heri29. G. D. H. Cole, Historia del pensamiento socialista, vol. 4, La Segunda Internacional, 1889–1914, trans. E. González Pedrero (Mexico, D.F., 1960), 287. 30. I follow José Gaos in this use of the term thinker: see “Introducción,” Antología del pensamiento de la lengua española en la Edad Contemporanea (Mexico, 1945).

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tage of their own countries and their own realities. It was not until well into the twentieth century, in the midst of the ongoing process of decolonization, which first verged on and then in some cases merged with the world socialist revolution, that the coincidence of a form of thought originating “outside” the periphery—dialectical and historical materialism—with the heritage of the colonial country, became possible, without requiring the depreciation of local traditions and beliefs. Yet, it is also true that Latin America finds itself in a special situation in this regard. While the “Westerner” is a mere intruder in the greater part of the colonial world he has ravaged, in our America he is also one of the components, and not the least important, that gives rise to the mestizo (and not only the racial mestizo, of course). If the “Western tradition” is not the whole of the mestizo’s tradition, it is part of his or her tradition. There is, then, a more delicate counterpoint in the case of the Latin American thinkers, in contrast with the majority of those from other colonial and semicolonial zones. Also, Latin America is the first of these zones that achieves a sort of independence from Europe (I do not include “European America” in this group) and therefore had already been dealing with these issues for the better part of the nineteenth century. It would be just as arbitrary to reduce Martí to the sum or the common denominator of the numerous European and North American thinkers that he knew as to disregard them completely. But those references, in themselves, help us very little: Platonism and Stoicism, Krausism, Emersonian Transcendentalism, Darwinism, a certain Positivism. Apart from the fact that some of these lines of thought tend to mix together, become mestizo or hybrid, here—as occurs too with European models in our literature—whereas they are irreconcilable there, why these in particular? Remember something we noted before in dealing with ­ Martí’s social and economic thought: a minor author, like Henry George, can attract his attention more, and elicit greater praise from him than a genius like Marx. As was the case too for Sun Yat-sen; both the Cuban and the Chinese leaders saw in this modest North American author not an “important” thinker (what does that mean, anyway?), but someone who did seem to offer solutions for the immediate agricultural problems of their respective countries. They were not praising intellectual constructions but formulas whose practical usefulness they trusted. In other words, they used the specific problems of their people, at that moment, as their intellectual measuring stick. The same, with some qualifications, can be said of Martí’s thought generally. For example, his ethics: in appearance, a vague eclecticism; in reality, a code of conduct that always keeps in view the concrete situation

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of his country, racially divided, submitted to colonial plundering, and sunk in a general marasmus. His ethics must be understood in relation to the historical and collective task of national liberation. As a young man, he writes, in his dramatic poem “Abdala,” Mother, love of country Is not the ridiculous love of the land, Nor of the grass trodden by our feet; It is the invincible hatred of those that oppress her, It is the eternal rancor toward those that attack her . . . It is much more than a word game that Martí displays, unadorned, in these verses placed in the mouth of an adolescent alter ego: “Love . . . is . . . hatred . . . is . . . rancor.” I do not mean, of course, to now present Martí as a hater, which he never was,31 but to explain the source of his love. This combative love (like Valéry’s lion with respect to the lamb) was born, dialectically, out of hatred and rancor.32 Martí was a genius born in a modest home and in the midst of a colonized people. One cannot imagine more favorable circumstances to make him acutely sensitive to the historical condition in which he lived, to precipitate in him a sense of being the human subject of an underdeveloped country. And that subject was characterized by being pillaged, marginalized from history, rendered folkloric. The young Martí, as anyone conscious of his or her self-worth in a colonial country, felt hatred and rancor, and expressed these emotions through a character in his fiction (which, for him, was also life). But these feelings, which arose from the wounds of his own personal history, were not sufficient to inspire the people. The people required positive goals, concrete achievements, to 31. “Place [Martí] under a microscope, scrutinize his harangues, proclamations, or letters, and not one stain or one freckle of hatred will appear.” Gabriela Mistral, La lengua de Martí (Havana, 1934), 39–40. 32. To better understand this anguished relationship of love/hate in the revolutionary, it is useful to refer to the extraordinary example of Ernesto Che Guevara, whose similarities with Martí are evident. This man, who writes that “the real revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to imagine an authentic revolutionary without this quality,” is the same person who postulates “hatred as a factor in the struggle: the intransigent hatred toward the enemy, that gives a driving force greater than the natural limitations of the human being and converts it into an effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machine. Our soldiers have to be that way: a people without hatred cannot triumph over a brutal enemy” (“brutal enemy,” parenthetically, was also Martí’s name for the Spanish military). See Nils Castro, “Che y el modo contemporáneo de amar,” Casa de las Américas 58 (1970); and Jesús Sabourin, “Martí en el Che,” Amor y combate (Algunas antinomias en José Martí) (Havana, 1974).

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awaken them from their state of despondency. They required that hatred and rancor generate not only things to be destroyed but things to be created. So Martí offered, each time in greater number, goals, horizons. At the same time as, in his politics, he designed the space of “Our America,” simultaneously real and mythical, in his ethics he advanced an all-embracing Dostoyevskian confidence, which also prefigured Vallejo, in the subalternized yet potentially radiant human being; he preached equality over artificial racial distinctions; he cast his lot “with the wretched of the earth”—and all this within a dynamic conception of humanity, which led him to feel bound by the very highest sense of personal duty: the only way his people could realize itself as a historical subject. That sense of duty reached real incandescence in his thinking: it pulled away from its historical context and constituted something like a death wish (“others lament necessary death: I believe in it as I believe in a pillow and in yeast, and in life’s triumph”) and a process of spiritual perfection that makes us think that Martí probably would have accepted certain ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. That imperative toward perfection led him to accept Darwin, for example, but to also censure him for denying transcendence: Others, with desolate eyes filled with sweet tears, desperately look on high. And Darwin, with fixed eyes and penetrating hands, not consumed with the anxiety of knowing where he was going, bent over the earth, with a serene will, to ask where he had come from. There is truth in thinking that there is no reason to deny anything that is held for certain in the solemn world of the spirit: not the noble anguish of being, alleviated finally by the pleasure of giving of oneself in life: nor the ineffable dialogue with the eternal, that leaves a solar force and a nocturnal peace in the spirit; nor the real certainty, real because it provides real joy, of an afterlife in which we will experience fully the penetrating delights which, with the knowledge of truth, or the practice of virtue, inspire the soul; but in what pertains to the construction of worlds, there is no better way to gain knowledge than to ask it of those worlds. He who saw this, in spite his mistakes, which came from his seeing only part of being, saw well. . . .33 We come upon here, then, Martí’s spirituality, which exists beyond any doubt, even though it was joined with his rejection of institutionalized religion and his militant anticlericalism. How do we weigh this spiritualism 33. José Martí, “Darwin ha muerto” (1882), JM, 15:380.

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against Martí’s violent, radical political stances? Both these extremes—his spiritualism and his political radicalism—are in fact far from incompatible in the interior of colonial and semicolonial countries fighting for their liberation. In the developed capitalist countries, radicalism and irreligiosity usually go together, as in the case of the French Revolution. So it is not as a representative of revolutionary bourgeois thought that Martí could conciliate both points of view; on the other hand, in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century, in the Arab world on many occasions, in Ireland, in Gandhi’s India, or among African peoples, a certain religiosity (not of the metropolitan kind) is found, in some form, as a motivation for the struggle for national independence, as an ideological bastion against the oppressor. Even though that is not entirely the case with the anticlerical Martí, we cannot view his religiosity as something detached from his ethics or his political and social thought; and all of these are aspects of his concrete agency as a subject in a colonial, underdeveloped world, which knows the survival of prebourgeois structures and ideologies. Perhaps the major form of mestizaje in our countries is the mixture of times. I would venture to say that Martí’s aesthetics are similarly attached to his politics. Martí saw in art “the shortest way for truth to triumph, and to simultaneously reach hearts and minds in a way that both sparkles and endures.” The idea of utility occurs frequently in his thought; indeed, it is possibly its central term. It runs through his social thought, his politics, his ethics, his spiritualism, and his aesthetics alike. The idea of utility is directed toward the accomplishment of urgent tasks and in turn is born of them. Martí’s thought was the consciousness of his actions. As in all true thinkers.

1960s East and West: The Nature of the Shestidesiatniki and the New Left

Boris Kagarlitsky Translated by William Nickell

Translator’s Introduction The deep-seated antagonism of the cold war has oriented our historiography of the twentieth century to the dramatic differences in policy and culture in the USSR and the United States. But as we gain perspective on the twentieth century, we can also identify intriguing similarities: the flapper and NEP (New Economic Policy) cultures of the 1920s, the large public works projects championed by Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, the roles of the two nations in World War II and their emergence as superpowers in its aftermath, a period of relative prosperity and progress in the 1950s, the unrest of the 1960s. In spite of their contradictory political and economic platforms, the two countries “aged” in similar ways. Beneath the tensions of the cold war there are clearly deeper cultural layers in motion, vast changes in technology, economics, and culture that have profound impact upon the surface of history but are less visible than the political and cultural topography. boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-025  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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Boris Kagarlitsky’s account of the dissident movements of the 1960s offers a more “plate tectonic” view of this movement. The Soviet sixties generation (the shestidesiatniki) passes through the terror and World War II into the prosperous post-Stalin period of the “thaw,” an age of optimism produced by victory in the war and auspicious internal reforms. The dissidents of the 1960s are motivated by the appearance of limits to the freedom of thought and opportunity offered by the thaw. On the American side, a generation that has lived through the Depression and World War II considers itself fortunate to be able to settle into nuclear family units in comfortable suburban homes. The “baby boom” likewise produces a generation of dissidents when it is unable to extend this opportunity across social, racial, and economic boundaries. The trajectory is the same in both cases, and in both cases it produces a confrontation between those wanting to protect prosperity and those wanting to realize it more fully and equitably. The New Left and the Soviet shestidesiatniki both belong to the second category. Their unawareness of one another, despite their common principles and objectives, points to the subterranean aspect of their shared experience. They do not occupy common ground so much as they experience similar shifts and dislocations, produced by the tectonic movement of history. Kagarlitsky’s essay reveals both dimensions of this movement—profound shifts that affect both hemispheres, East and West, and the countermotions on the surface that render our more immediately recognizable history of the cold war as a time of dramatic confrontation and difference. William Nickell

The 1960s have a certain cult status. The decade became legendary in its own time, as it were. For those living in the former Soviet bloc, the substance of that period, of course, was somewhat different than for people in the West. If 1968 in Western Europe was first and foremost the barricades of Paris and student unrest, among Eastern Europeans we think first of Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague. The war in Vietnam, affecting both East and West, is for Europeans and Americans a part of their history, while for citizens of the former USSR it is nothing more than a backdrop on which their personal dramas turned. Nonetheless, there is much in common between West and East—much more than is usually realized. For several decades people had been preparing for war, fighting wars, building new weapons, and threatening each other with the prospect

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of a new war. And now suddenly all of that was in the past. A new world was arising where it was possible to simply enjoy life, love one another, listen to music, and look around without a feeling of anxiety. It appeared that an era of everyday prosperity was beginning. In the USSR, this was a time of unconditional optimism. Indeed, the country, having won the most terrible and heroic war, found in itself strength not only to withstand this aggression and rebuild itself after unprecedented losses and destruction, but also to liberate itself from totalitarianism. It is clear that after the death of Stalin the Soviet Union did not become a democracy, and people at that time did not even understand very well what democracy is. But totalitarianism ended in 1953 together with the death of the “leader and teacher.” Official criticism of the past opened the possibility of sufficiently open discussion of the present and future. And did not the overturning of the “cult of personality,” together with the victory in the war, serve as proof that the Soviet system was viable—that it could develop, improve itself, correct its own mistakes, and change? The 1960s were, in their own way, a “golden age,” and not only for Soviet society, which could finally exist without war, repression, and turmoil. For the Western world also this was a period of well-being. Life was improving everywhere. Inexpensive automobiles, washing machines, refrigerators, and televisions (in which you could finally make out the picture) all became symbols of the early 1960s. Millions of people discovered how much the potential for a new and happy life remained unrealized, and happiness ephemeral. And they rebelled against that which stood in the way of happiness. In the final analysis, those years are remembered in history as a time of barricades, rock music, the antiwar protest of the New Left, and discussions of Marxist philosophy. What happened during that time in the East? The Soviet Union had their own 1960s: the final, brightest moments of the Khrushchev thaw; the bold publications in the journal Novy Mir, which became a symbol of intellectual freedom; the first samizdat manuscripts and the origin of the dissident movement. For Russia, the shestidesiatnik (member of the sixties generation) became just as much a cult figure as the New Left in the West. And if we read the ideological declarations of our shestidesiatniki we discover a striking similarity with the ideas of the New Left. One and the other stood up for “socialism with a human face” and appealed to Marxist tradition, attempting to clarify its fundamental humanist sense. Both rejected Stalinism and its cult of organization, criticized bureaucracy, and demonstrated the value of individual self-expression. If we compare, for instance,

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the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov with the American social philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm, the similar formulations and parallel train of thought are apparent at first glance. Does this mean that the shestidesiatniki were analogous to the New Left movement? If that is true, then why didn’t they feel this likeness? Why didn’t they notice the similarity? Why were the events in Paris and West Berlin alien and incomprehensible to them? This seems all the more striking given the sharp interest in everything Western that captivated Soviet society by whatever measure the iron curtain was opened. They read books, watched films, and listened to records. The books of Jean-Paul Sartre were passed from hand to hand. But somehow his political ideas did not reach readers. Che Guevara became a cult figure for young people only in the post-Soviet years, when his image came from the West, disseminated on millions of posters and T-shirts. In the 1960s, only a few in the Eastern bloc knew the real meaning of his struggle and the drama of his political search. And lesser-known figures, like Western student leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke, were generally of no particular interest to anyone in the East. A misunderstanding? Or did this lack of recognition have its own logic, some deep meaning hidden beneath the surface of cultural images and ideological declarations? Alas, the Soviet “1960s,” in their psychological foundations, represent something quite contrary to the sixties movement in the West. In the latter’s criticism of the system was a specific task—the subversion of the establishment. They rejected it. They refused to live according to its rules. They dreamed about revolution. By contrast, the shestidesiatniki did not consider themselves enemies of the system. They were not trying to overthrow anything. They could sing nostalgic songs about “commissars in dusty helmets” as much as you please, but the revolution was romanticized precisely as something belonging to the irretrievable past. The Soviet intelligentsia constantly criticized leadership. But that same leadership was supposed to become their main audience. They appealed to those in power to look at themselves and feel ashamed. They didn’t imagine themselves as an alternative. They tried to prove their right to give advice and to formulate workable orientations precisely for that system and for those leaders. The New Left was a mass movement. Not only in terms of the number of participants but also in the sense that its participants were, or at least considered themselves, subjects of a movement. The Soviet 1960s had a wide social base in the form of a mass intelligentsia, reading Novy Mir, copying recordings of the bold songs of Aleksandr Galich and the demon-

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stratively apolitical lyrics of Bulat Okudzhava. Nevertheless, the movement was essentially elitist. The “best minds” spoke and the rest listened. The struggle for free speech did not presuppose dialogue. The “forward thinkers” were supposed to take the podium. The Western movement was a youth movement. That does not at all mean it was composed of only young people. The main “gurus” of the 1960s—Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Fromm—were far from young. They had undoubted moral and intellectual authority, but their young audience did not recognize this division. In order to teach the new generation, they were supposed to collaborate with them, to answer their questions. They could teach, but not lecture. It was precisely the younger generation that determined the style, spirit, and dynamic of the movement. There were a lot of young people involved in the Soviet 1960s as well. But it was not at all a youth movement in style. The typical figure was a man of about thirty who had finished the university soon after the war. The main moral authorities were those who had managed to fight in the war. Experience at the front gave them weight. The young “sympathizers” looked at the older ones and accepted their way of thinking and style of behavior. The shestidesiatniki had short haircuts and wore jackets; the height of abandon was a loosely knotted tie and a cigarette in the corner of the mouth. Jeans and miniskirts appeared in the Soviet Union only in the 1970s, becoming the fashion for the next generation that accepted the style and musical passions, but not the ideology, of Western radicals. This was already a generation of cynics who had broken no less with the sixties than with the official ideology of the Communist Party. They called themselves “children of the Twentieth Congress.” When at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union the new leader Nikita Khrushchev made his denunciatory criticism of Stalin, he not only put an end to the cult of personality, replacing an old orthodoxy with a new one. Without knowing it himself, he provoked critical reflection about the recent past on a national level. Of course, the personalities of many of the shestidesiatniki were shaped long before the Twentieth Congress. In essence, we are talking about not one but two generations at once, united by common values, ideals, and aspirations, and by common political experience. The older shestidesiatniki had been through the war. They typically returned from the front as lieutenants or, perhaps, captains. They managed to survive, to endure the trials of the war in the trenches, but had usually not served as infantry soldiers. After their return from the war, they entered (or returned

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to) the universities. But life in peacetime was not at all what they expected. The end of the 1940s brought a new wave of repression and the campaign against the “cosmopolitans.” (This term usually referred only to intellectuals with Jewish last names.) By 1956, when Khrushchev came out with his denunciatory report on Stalin’s “cult of personality,” the older shestidesiatniki were already mature people with rich life experiences. To a large extent, the denunciation by the new party leader corresponded with their own individual observations and evaluations, though these were perhaps not directly formulated, fully thought out, or by any means openly expressed. By contrast, the younger shestidesiatniki had not been through the war. This was the first generation of Soviet people who, despite having been touched by the war in their youth, had the possibility of living in peace. Their views were formed under the influence of the ideas of the Twentieth Congress and the experience of the older shestidesiatniki. The New Left movement achieved its height in 1968 at the barricades of Paris, and continued through the “hot fall” of 1969 in Italy. In West Berlin it was absorbed into the everyday life of the squatters who occupied the city’s run-down neighborhoods. At the beginning of the 1970s its participants still believed in impending revolution, looking for signs that were no longer coming from the main European capitals, but instead from the periphery and the semiperiphery—Portugal, Angola, Chile. In 1972, the cult books of Andre Gortz and Herbert Marcuse were still appearing. A year later, the reversal in the war in Chile destroyed the hope for revolution in Latin America. Likewise, the hopes tied to the Portuguese revolution were lost. The period of storm and onslaught ended. There began, as Dutschke put it, a “long journey through the institutions.” The New Left had no alternative but to enter the old left-wing parties in order to change them from within. The former revolutionaries became deputies, professors, and functionaries. Our shestidesiatniki intended “to change the party from within” from the very beginning. They believed in socialism and in authentic Leninism, which they contrasted to the cult of personality or, more precisely, the entire complex of experiences of the thirties and forties that had received the name Stalinism. The official ideologues did not like to talk about Stalinism, preferring to limit themselves to “criticism of the cult of personality”—in other words, connecting the problem to the personality of Stalin and the behavior of his closest comrades in arms. The intellectuals of the sixties went further. They looked for the deeper reasons why the 1917 revolution, begun under the banner of freedom, led in the final analysis to totalitarian

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degeneracy. They never questioned, however, the ideals of socialism themselves. And it was not because, as more cynical representatives of the next generation believed, the intelligentsia at that time did not want to or was afraid to critique the ruling ideology, trying to stay within its framework in spite of their critical fervor. No, the cause lay in a completely different sphere: the ideology of socialism and the revolutionary and Marxist tradition were the bases for their dialogue and polemic with those in power, and for their hope for a more free and just society. Yes, they grew up in the tradition of socialist thought, but it was because of this that they became critics of this system, nonconformists, and dissidents. It should be said that in their majority, the sixties generation did not know Marx well. Mikhail Lifshitz, Evald Ilyenkov, and the younger Grigorii Vodolazov were exceptions in this respect. The majority limited themselves to the works of Lenin that had entered the obligatory course of every humanist (but not only) discipline. Nevertheless, this was enough to allow them to see the tremendous gap between theory and practice in Soviet society, between ideal and reality. This ideal, of original Leninist socialism, needed to once again be upheld and confirmed in contradistinction to the bureaucratic degradation of the system—to be restored to its former meaning, rethought and made into the governing principle for the further development of society. Their political project collapsed in a single day, when, on Kremlin orders, Soviet tanks entered reformist Czechoslovakia. By the evening of the next day, a large number of advocates of “socialism with a human” face already knew quite well that democratic socialism was an absurd utopia. In general, the attempt to suppress an idea by arms says something of its strength. In sending forth their tanks in order to rectify ideology, the Soviet leaders proved only that they had no better arguments. Precisely because of this, August 1968 was a tragedy for leftists throughout the world—but it was by no means a complete collapse. It was not socialist ideas that were ruined but the illusions of the shestidesiatniki who believed in humanitarian reform under the support of more conscientious leadership. The defeat of the ideology of the 1960s, oddly, did not signify the failure of the corresponding generation in real life. On the contrary, this generation achieved its greatest success and glory precisely after the decisive defeat of its own ideas. It was doomed, however, to lose its coherence. The relationship of the shestidesiatniki to power was also duplicitous. They criticized and argued with it, demanding recognition, or sometimes just answers to their questions. Difficulties with censorship became

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a necessary episode in the biography of any self-respecting author, cinematographer, theater director, or literary critic. (This affected artists, philosophers, and historians to a lesser extent, but it still affected them.) On the other hand, the authority with which they argued was the same as that which freed millions of people from the camps, exposed “the cult of personality,” and allowed the campaign for freedom of thought in the journal Novy Mir, with its millions of readers. Finally, many of the representatives of the ruling bureaucracy had gone through the experience of the war together, on the same fronts, with the critically minded intellectuals. There was a growing mutual irritation, but not a complete break. There was no sense of class conflict. Those in power needed to be shamed, persuaded, and convinced. A mirror needed to be placed in front of them so that they could see their own unsightly features and be horrified by them. It was a completely utopian project from the point of view of what we know now, but completely understandable and natural for that time. After 1968, those who favored the “correction of the system” split into two groups. Some, to a greater or lesser extent, became conformists. They continued to climb the ladder of success, completing that same “long passage through the institutions,” only without any political project or distinct ideology—simply by inertia. They were far from renouncing their personal past and even more so their present connections, remaining a more or less united group. They were distinguished precisely by this comradely cohesion in the complete absence of a common program. They had only recently been revolting against the system, announcing at the same time that they shared its fundamental principles. Now they stopped revolting, contemptuously discarding the same principles. Others who were bolder, or sometimes just more naïve, became dissidents. They broke with the system that they had at one time dreamed of reforming, and thus also abandoned their positive program. Legalistic principles replaced the ideology of social reform, providing at least a moral basis for opposition to the government. It must be noted that Western leftists constantly hoped to see something like themselves in this dissident movement. It seemed to them that the dissidents of Eastern Europe should be similar to those fighters for democracy who were being thrown into torture chambers by the hundreds of thousands in the countries of Asia and Latin America. The Western leftists anticipated encountering if not likeminded people, then at least partners in a dialogue. But when the dissident movement extended a hand toward them, they either did not notice or pushed it

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away in confusion. Nature does not sustain a vacuum, and the ideologically neutral legalistic principles were gradually displaced by other ideas. Among the Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia, dissidents and conformists alike were marked by sympathy for Mrs. Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and especially for General Pinochet. Perestroika disturbed the shestidesiatniki. The Soviet leadership in the middle of the 1980s unexpectedly accomplished that which young intellectuals had dreamed of twenty years before. Looking in the crooked mirror of glasnost, the leadership was horrified at its own bared teeth and summoned the “democratic intelligentsia” to help. And it was done. The sixties generation was finally summoned to take power. Dissidents soon returned from exile, camps, and even from abroad. It is true that they were provided with primarily decorative roles. In the final analysis, it was not the dissidents but the conformists who emerged victoriously. Their “long path through the institutions” ended with complete victory. Ideas and slogans from twenty years ago were brought forth from some sort of archives, but they were not used for long. Even those who mouthed these slogans no longer believed in them. The generation of the 1960s was called upon not to rejuvenate and cleanse “the original” Soviet ideology but to decisively destroy it. And the shestidesiatniki shared the glory of victory with the corrupted functionaries. Those who had promised to renew the system now without hesitation acknowledged their role in the matter of its destruction. In an amusing way, the “long journey” of Western intellectuals came to an end at the same time. They also achieved positions of responsibility in governments, parliaments, and international organizations. But the institutions turned out to be stronger than the young radicals had thought at one time. The system successfully digested the former rebels and only became stronger. It needed “fresh blood”! And so our shestidesiatniki and the New Left in the West accomplished something quite contrary to what they had promised. The principles of hierarchy and subordination were victorious, and the ideology of privilege triumphed. The utopia of social injustice was realized to the fullest possible extent—and not without the help of those who promised to struggle for the ideal of a just world. Does this mean that the struggles of the 1960s were senseless? Not at all. The fate of ideas is richer and more interesting than the fate of the generation that produces them. The books of the decade of dissent again came into fashion at the very moment when those same young rebels finally turned into elderly bureaucrats and dejected prae-

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torians. A new generation of young radicals came out onto the streets with very familiar slogans. Does this mean that everything will just go through another round? Far from it. Today’s movement is much deeper, stronger, and widespread than that which took place in the 1960s. That was the first, unsuccessful draft; every new attempt at liberation will be more serious and more successful.

Revisiting the Sixties and Refusing Trash: Preamble to and Interview with Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater

Silvia D. Spitta If culture does not help liberate people, then it is merely another stumbling block. And a stumbling block is only useful when you overcome it. It is not about throwing something into the trash; you have to remember that it is we who are in the trash. —Candelario Reyes, Método de la basura Reeling from relentless attacks and the neoconservative dominance of the last decades, we trawl the sixties in search of the magic formula that allowed for disparate forces to converge in wild and socially explosive exuberance across geopolitical borders and racial, sexual, and class divides. Whence did the bonds of solidarity that allied people, uniting the first and the third worlds both in action and in theory, come from? And where are they today? Unlike the riveting photographs of the Vietnam I thank Peter Schumann for having so kindly agreed to the interview, and Alberto SandovalSánchez, Diana Taylor, Annabel Martin, and Klaus Milich for providing many inspiring suggestions about this topic. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-026  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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War that mobilized people worldwide, the war in Iraq has triumphed as a visual vacuum, yet we are surrounded by images that represent everything except the things that matter. Despite radical lyrics, even music seems to have lost its former capacity to move people to action. And while the Cuban Revolution flounders in uncertainty, Liberation Theology, so instrumental in galvanizing resistance in churches across the world, has gone underground—as the one responsible for the most virulent attacks against activist priests triumphs in Rome. While today millions of people are forced to leave their homes in search of work, arriving in the first world as so much trash washed up on foreign shores, millions of others exist as the refuse of globalization. Despite many attempts to revive the sixties social agenda, we look around us, bereft. Shocked by exponential atomization, we feel powerless in our inability to imagine tackling the endless array of ills spawned by the Chicago Boys and the Bush regime’s extreme forms of deregulated capitalism. As our own financial system is close to collapse, we are reminded that Latin Americans, who have for long borne the brunt of these excesses, renamed this new form of brutality “savage capitalism.” What is perhaps even worse, we seem unable to face the imminent threat to the planet posed by global warming—and much less to come together to do something about it. Indeed, almost forty years have gone by since the first Earth Day was held and sweeping environmental protection legislation such as the Clean Air Act and the Resource Recovery Act were passed under Nixon’s watch. Yet despite the fact that climate change has become a fearful reality, we have actually managed to turn back the clock and are nowhere near to replicating the environmental consciousness of the sixties. In the meantime, we nostalgically revisit the sixties every time “our” music is played on the radio as our children’s, and we remain frustrated by our inability to feel, much less instill in our students, the bonds of solidarity so essential in the struggle for human dignity. We find it hard to understand, much less explain, how the uprisings on campuses and cities spread from one to the other, making it impossible to pinpoint where the movement itself started. While for some it started with the civil rights movement in the United States, for others, solidarity with Vietnam and Cuba spread . See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). . Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York and London: New Press, 2005), 133.

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from the world to the United States. Between 1968 and 1969, according to The State of the World Atlas, there were major student disruptions in virtually every city in the entire world (excepting the Soviet Union). There were unparalleled mobilizations all across Europe and famously in cities such as Prague, Paris, and London. Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Central and South America all also saw massive rioting. Many of these “disruptions” rallied together more than 500,000 people, and many more gathered between 200,000 and 500,000 at a time, particularly in India, France, Italy, and the United States. It seems from this that people viewed citizenship in global terms viscerally understanding that what happened in Prague affected people in Mexico City, that oppression experienced in Africa affected people in Europe, et cetera. In response, whenever a socially progressive agenda is imagined anywhere, conservative fears of a “domino effect” (or what some have called a global “contagion”) have been invariably raised as a specter, while the ability of the sixties to speak to so many different constituencies remains systematically understudied, constituting “a moment of neglect in inverse proportion” to its significance (INL, 3). Indeed, the heady days of solidarity across national borders have become reduced to sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. In one of the more sustained attempts to seriously come to terms with the period in its wild complexity, George Katsiaficas traces the history of the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left. As part of this daunting project, he came up with the notion of an “eros effect” to explain the very real, yet unnameable, impulse driving the massive waves of protests that spread across the globe. Commonly referred to as “people power,” or in Herbert Marcuse’s words, a “global movement” (INL, 21), the origin of these often spontaneous uprisings baffles us even today. Having turned subsequently to study the uprisings across East Asia (Burma, 1988; China, 1989; Nepal, 1990; Thailand, 1992), the 1994 Zapatista uprising, and the 1999 antiglobalization riots in Seattle, he defines the eros effect as those “moments when thousands or even millions of people surge into the streets and refuse to leave to return to their everyday lives until significant shifts are made in the social order. These moments accomplish in days what history takes years and even decades to accomplish.” Despite the fact that . George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 20. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as INL. . Katsiaficas cites Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).

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many can lose their lives, when the eros effect is operant, great paradigm shifts occur and people experience exhilarating moments of freedom and liberation across national boundaries. “Patriotism, hierarchy, and competition are discarded overnight, as people’s love for one another triumphs.” While Katsiaficas’s notion of the eros effect describes a transformative social phenomenon, it is hard to understand how it comes about or when it will occur. However, his notion of an underlying eros effect points us in the right direction. It was, after all, the “genius” of the sixties to intuit the power that lay in a return to theater’s roots in ritual, music, and performance and to mobilize these for political purposes. This radical coupling of art and politics allowed for theories (of oppression, underdevelopment, et cetera) to be viscerally experienced as the coming together in protest and celebration of students and workers, the privileged and the downtrodden. If one were forced to name the single most important factor in helping to explain the global spread of the sixties, it would, then, have to be music (jazz, blues, rock in the United States and Europe) as well as the Nueva Trova in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America. Music voiced politics in massive concerts, as dance and as song, allowing protest to be experienced viscerally. “We Shall Overcome,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and Sam Cooke’s now legendary “A Change Is Gonna Come” were sung as secular hymns to revolution and freedom. They were known across the globe, regardless of whether people spoke English or not. Moreover, the worldwide solidarity with the suffering of the Vietnamese people, particularly after the Tet Offensive (INL, 29), with the Cuban Revolution, and with other liberation struggles constituted exhilarating moments of unity between subject and object where the eros effect is evident (INL, 220). While hard to pinpoint, that Katsiaficas may be onto something important is made clear by testimonies by Sandinistas as they took Managua in 1979. The intense joy that accompanied the moment, some recalled, was actually visible as streams of joy emanating from people’s bodies as they gathered in the central square during those first hours of euphoria and triumph. Indeed, the radical, transformative power of music and performance to free the body shaped the period and is perhaps that which we should actively try to reclaim. The sixties illumination that freedom lay first and foremost in the liberation of the body and, what is more, the understanding of the body as a site of knowledge led to the radical inseparability of knowledge and . http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=240945485861016019&hl=en. . See the documentary Fire from the Mountain, directed by Deborah Shaffer (1987).

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action, theory and practice. During the strikes in France in May 1968 and two years later those across the United States, “millions of people spontaneously,” Katsiaficas writes, “joined together and not only imagined a new reality but lived one. Their day-to-day lives were based on international solidarity rather than nationalistic pride; on self-management of the factories, universities, and offices rather than top-down decision-making; and on cooperation, rather than competition” (INL, 22). Rallies followed one another in quick succession: when members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Germany were attacked, students in Paris protested; and when students went to the barricades in Paris in May 1968, students in Rome marched in solidarity, burning an effigy of de Gaulle (INL, 41). That is, solidarity was a praxis that shaped everyday existence. The aim, of course, was in tune with Che Guevara and other leftists’ calls for the transformation of people and the creation of a new socialist human being (INL, 36). With this utopian “new man” [sic] in sight, sit-ins, teach-ins, happenings, and the massive occupation of university buildings and public space became the preferred forms of voicing and staging dissent. Indeed, largely thanks to the wide dissemination of the teachings of the Frankfurt School, a “massive fusion of culture and politics” defined the sixties (INL, 24). Given that ritual is a practice that gives rise to feelings of communitas, the sixties genius may perhaps well have resided in their reaching back to the origins of ritual and the profound understanding that protest songs and street theater should be the prominent vehicles for the articulation of vindicatory demands. Indeed, theater’s emphasis on the body-in-action would prove a formidable exponent of New Left ideals. However revisionist, then, studies that portray this period exclusively in terms of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll at the expense of political organizing and artistic innovation are inadvertently onto something when they see the liberation of the body as the site of political rebellion. Because theater practitioners best exemplify and mobilize the embodied forms of knowledge that I fear have most come under attack since the sixties, I will focus here on two theaters that have been working as collectives for almost forty years: the Honduran Teatro de la Basura (Trash Theater), and Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater. Indeed, rallies in New York City were dominated by the giant puppets of the Bread and Puppet Theater swaying above the crowds. The smell of handmade loaves of freshly baked bread made by Peter Schumann and fellow practitioners in improvised ovens wafted in the air. The enormous, arresting, and profoundly evocative puppets marching down Fifth Avenue were ever present in anti–

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Vietnam War demonstrations starting in 1966. For Grace Paley, no demonstration seemed complete at the time without Bread and Puppet. “They brought beauty, and truth, and unending labor” to the peace movement, she recalls. And they were not alone. On the West Coast, in California, the United Farm Workers organized the 1966 Delano March and grape boycott, backed by the Teatro Campesino’s consciousness-raising efforts through didactic theatrical pieces emphasizing action known as Actos. Likewise, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, with its light-handed touch, voiced New Left critiques of the establishment across the country. Utterly new at the time, puppets have now become a staple of street protests. And, needless to say, puppets have dominated recent antiglobalization rallies worldwide. Aware of the immense role of culture and the power of the arts (music, art, performance, and theater) in political activism, neoconservatives seem to have learned and benefited more from the sixties artistic interventions than the Left has. Already in the late sixties, violent repression went hand in hand with mass media co-optation of the movement. The women’s movement was trivialized as bra burning while radicalism was transformed into fashion. Successful bands, such as the Grateful Dead and the Doors, were offered million-dollar contracts. “In the face of their celebrity status,” asks Katsiaficas, “is it any wonder that Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix chose to exit from rather than sing for the society which raised The Money Game to number one on the 1968 Best Seller List; or any wonder that in 1968, LSD gave way to heroin in Haight-Ashbury and to speed in the East Village?” (INL, 81). More recently, economic and religious fundamentalists have systematically continued to privatize the public sphere and . Peter Schumann, David Cayley, and Bernie Lucht, Puppet Uprising: Peter Schumann’s Bread and Pupper Theater (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2003), 4 audio compact discs. This fabulous four-hour audio CD includes extensive interviews with Peter Schumann and some of the theater’s most important puppeteers. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as Puppet Uprising. . Signaling the threat puppets pose to the establishment, seventy-five puppeteers were arrested in a West Philadelphia warehouse on the suspicion that they were making bombs. They were actually making giant puppet cockroaches to use in demonstrations against the death penalty during the 2000 Republican National Convention. See Doreen Carvajal, “Close Your Eyes, Punch and Judy. It’s Too Scary! A Dark Universe of Puppets Is Luring Adults with Tales of Bizarre and Profound,” New York Times, September 20, 2000. . In a recent editorial comment in Theatre Journal, Jean Graham-Jones sees hope in the radical potential of theater in its continued and growing use in grassroots antiglobalization movements. See Jean Graham Jones, “Theorizing Globalization through Theatre,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 3 (October 2005): viii–xvi.

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to gut the vitality of grassroots cultural production in bogus “culture wars” designed to stifle education and demote culture to the status of entertainment. Ironically, they are the ones who have succeeded in folding the art trade into lucrative private deals. Even music—eros-based and underlying the most important and intense forms of communication, bonding, and social activism—has most recently been radically reduced to the spatial dimensions of a single individual and commodified by the iPod. How far from the Woodstock Festival’s celebration of eros and communitas in 1969! Even radical churches, formerly dominated by progressive Catholic priests working in favor of the poor and attempting to reconcile Marxism with religion (Liberation Theology), have been supplanted by U.S.-based evangelicals—operating with particular vigor in Latin America—with diametrically opposed agendas. Given the exponential privatization of public space, it should have come as no surprise to the Left that conservative churches dominate our time, given that churches are among the few spaces left for people to gather in action and spiritual engagement. The closest we have come to a sixties-style political engagement and agitprop tactic may have been Act Up activism in the fight against AIDS in the nineties. And telling of the extent of the neoconservative success, the massive antiglobalization marches have not managed to cause a blip on the screens—and much less the reality—controlled by the handful of conglomerates that now own the mass media. While the worldwide spread of the sixties, then, can be largely attributed to the power of protest music and street theater to bring people together in massive concerts and street demonstrations that helped galvanize students and workers across the globe against the Vietnam War, it is harder to answer why we are unable to feel bonds of solidarity great enough to force us to action in the present. That we are incapable of devising alternative strategies was brought home to me in the most vivid manner when I gave the class I was teaching last spring, “Latinos/as in the Sixties: Beyond Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll,” the option of coming up with a protest commensurate to our time in lieu of writing a term paper. Despite the fact that I would have been at a loss myself, I was somewhat taken aback when the only thing my students came up with merely reproduced a well-tried sixties strategy: They started a campus-wide boycott of Coca-Cola. Are we merely doomed to repeat the sixties, I wondered? In the end, while they learned a valuable lesson in the difficulties of and the work involved in organizing, and while the boycott provocatively resonated across campus, the students’ solidarity with oppressed Coca-Cola workers ended (and the

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boycott ended) with the term. Pedagogically, I felt I in turn had failed in this class to reproduce the sixties radical premise that knowledge and action have to be linked. What is more, I should have taught them that movement and song liberate the body’s energies in creative ways that arrest others’ attention much more effectively than handing out pamphlets. Indeed, I had experienced this intimacy with and mobilization of the body when I had invited Teresa Ralli, founder and main actress of the renowned Peruvian theater collective Yuyachkani, to work with my students in previous classes. The embodiment and performance strategies that she teaches students socialized into shying away from their own bodies and most forms of physical contact invariably proved truly exhilarating. The political abyss that separates us from the sixties, then, may perhaps lie in the fact that people inhabited their bodies very differently. The important illumination that you have to know through the body seems to be disappearing as our bodies disappear behind computer screens. And despite the fact that the invention of the Internet has made it possible to be interconnected globally with much greater ease than ever before, virtually disembodied we spend increasingly more time alone and detached from social interaction. Even when we join organizations such as MoveOn, we move on with a click of the mouse, unaware of the fact that virtual action, potent as it can be, has to be coupled with active grassroots organizing in order to be ultimately effective.10 With hindsight, then, I wished I had suggested that my students perform their protest rather than merely pass out leaflets at an informational table at the student center.11 I realized, too, that we should have read Paulo Freire’s manifesto of and for social change that so shaped sixties pedagogy and the protest 10. MoveOn and the Obama campaign, understanding the need to break down people’s sense of isolation and the power that lies in coming together, are calling for people to get together in each others’ homes to make phone calls or to view the coming debates. These house “parties” are proving an immensely effective way of reaching one another and reaching out to others. 11. My colleague Francine A’ness describes grappling with these very issues in the classroom. She writes that “theatre, as an embodied practice, can also be used as a method of study, one that not only promotes authentic language production and situated practice within an engaged community of learners, but one that also gives students the opportunity to use both their minds and their bodies to explore the dynamics of difference that exist between cultures. . . . intercultural awareness can be enhanced when we teach critically about and through the body.” See “Towards an Embodied Pedagogy in the Teaching of Latin American Theatre,” in Dramatic Interactions: Teaching Language, Literature, and Culture through Theatre (New York: Modern Language Association, forthcoming).

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movement. Despite the fact that forty years have passed since its publication, the power of the coupling of knowledge, agency, and social action are nowhere more evident than in a rereading of as fundamental a text as Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1967–68). While Pedagogy poignantly gives expression to certain underlying assumptions of the sixties, at no point in time have the opening lines of Freire’s book been more apt than today, nor has any other radical program had more continued resonance— whether underlying theatrical strategies or educational reforms. (Among many others with a similar agenda, one thinks of bell hooks’s 2003 Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope and her earlier Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.) Having begun to write his influential book during the five years that he spent in exile in Chile, Freire produced a book that was a compendium of all that he had learned after years of activist pedagogy, and one that followed his earlier “Education as a Practice of Freedom” (1965) but in a much more radical form. The basic notion of Pedagogy—that education is a preeminently creative and, perhaps more importantly, that it is a dialogic process—is premised on mutual respect. Its special appeal lies in its committed, hands-on approach and the ideologically potent critique of the “banking” system of education that purports to merely “deposit” knowledge without teaching critical thinking and in creating active participants in the production of new knowledge and solidarity. This form of dead-end pedagogy tends to overcome school systems whenever authoritarianism looms (for example, No Child Left Behind), just as bodies (usually women’s and queer bodies) come under attack.12 More strikingly, perhaps, and showing us how much ground we have lost, when read today, it is clear that Pedagogy takes two things absolutely for granted: the masses’ gut-level familiarity with New Left ideological critique and the reader’s unquestioned solidarity with downtrodden others. Both of these things, of course, have been blasted from our horizon of expectation, making the book difficult to read, if not impossible to teach. Despite this, Pedagogy continues to inform liberatory practices everywhere around the world, and in Latin America in particular, where most of its ideological framework underlies consciousness raising, community empowering efforts, and protest theater. Given that the main thrust of Freire’s pedagogy is to create local ways of knowing, and given that target populations are the 12. Sadly and altogether predictably, Bush’s No Child Left Behind is in fact leaving more and more children behind, including girls. Predictably, teenage pregnancy is on the rise, reversing a decades-long trend in the other direction.

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marginalized poor, it should come as no surprise that his pedagogy often ends up using theater as an experiential, communal form that starts out with the humble materials at hand. The most well-known of these experimental theaters is of course Augusto Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed in Brazil. Much more local but important for its method is Honduran Teatro de la Basura. It was founded by Candelario Reyes, who actually started out as a teacher in literacy campaigns in rural areas in the early eighties. Working with peasants in a region both marginalized and militarily and economically occupied, he was searching for a pedagogy commensurate to his students’ reality. In an area with rates of upwards of 84 percent illiteracy, and despite being relegated to the trash bin of history by the global economy, national pedagogy only reinforced peasants’ marginalization with its understanding of “education” as the mere parroting of foreign epistemologies. In his efforts to create an indigenous, and therefore culturally relevant, way of learning and knowing, Reyes read Freire when his works were finally allowed into Honduras. As with Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, created in exile, but implemented in Brazil at around the same time, Reyes’s pedagogical leanings soon evolved into the founding of a campesino theater collective, based on techniques that he calls the “trash method.”13 It is noteworthy, but not altogether surprising, that given Freire’s wide-reaching reflections on embodied pedagogy, in these two cases, educators intent on combating illiteracy ended up founding community-based, collective, experimental theaters. What Reyes realized from his reading of Freire is that knowledge only comes about in relation to and in discussions with others. It is intrinsically tied to the body, to the other, and to action; that is, knowledge is knowledge only when transformed into action (“pues el pensamiento no se da por sí mismo. Está ligado a los sujetos al realizar esos sucesos concretados en acciones”) (MB, 12). Furthermore, motivated by a profound antiauthoritarianism, and saying NO to chalkboard and desks, to school desks lined in rows, to foreign books unless taught in conjunction with an equal number of Honduran books, and lastly, but perhaps most importantly, a rotund NO to the policies of the agents of foreign debt implemented by the 13. Candelario Reyes, Método de la basura: Una manera de hacer teatro campesino [Trash method: One way of doing peasant theater] (Honduras: Ediciones Centro Cultural Hibueras, 1992). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as MB. Reyes also founded the Hibueras Cultural Center in Santa Bárbara, Honduras, with the aim of combating the profound inequalities generated by globalization by educating children, promoting the arts, local ways of subsistence (agriculture, weaving, et cetera), day care facilities, women’s centers, and staging an annual arts festival to promote peace.

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Ministry of Education, Reyes was left without much with which to start. The only way out was to take learning to the streets and the woods. With his emphasis on knowing through the body, theater proved to be the most radically democratic form that produces local knowledges and demystifies foreign and alienating epistemologies. Aspiring to a theater that “humanized rather than greedily appropriated . . . a theatre envisioned as a creative act and not a repetitive or schematic one like soccer” [que humanice y no que acapare, que sea un acto creativo y no repetitivo, o esquematizado como el fútbol] (MB, 23), Reyes found his inspiration in a forgotten Honduran playwright. The most prominent playwright in the twenties, José María Tobías Rosa had nevertheless used the pen name Juan Basuro, or Juan Trash. The adoption of this “pejorative pseudonym” proved to be, Reyes remarked not altogether without bitterness, “an interesting aberration in a country where real trash smelled of perfume and true essences were stomped underfoot” [Un seudónimo peyorativo, contrasentido interesante, en el país donde la verdadera basura huele a esencias de apariencia fina, y las verdaderas esencias se pisotean] (MB, 13). Illuminated by Juan Trash’s focus on the insignificant, Reyes appropriated trash as method, devising a sequence of theatrical exercises where participants were asked to name the most useless thing in their midst (whether an idea, a thing, a concept, a form of behavior, a gesture, a smell, a spot, et cetera) in order to create a performance around the useless object.14 Using recycled trash as props, his theater produces new meanings by giving prominence to the most insignificant item in their midst (“Va de lo insignificante y hace emerger nuevos significados . . .”) (MB, 24). As he states, his theatrical practice is to take whatever is discarded and transform it into an artistic and conceptually useful element (“desechos que vamos transformando en elementos artística y conceptualmente útiles”) (MB, 21). In Spanish, this making do, this creating something oftentimes magical out of literally nothing, is called “hacer de tripas corazón.” This saying, which could be roughly translated as “to make heart out of guts,” alludes to some 14. “Every day we stir the moss of forgetting, reviving the nostalgia for that which falls by the wayside: traditional games, theater, marionettes and puppets, poetry, the sackbut, the coyote spinning top, kites, that is, words and actions. We aim to make central everything that we are made to believe is marginal” [Cada día vamos revolviendo los musgos del olvido y reviviendo las nostalgias de lo que se va quedando tirado por allí: los juegos tradicionales, el teatro, las marionetas y títeres, la poesía, el sacabuche, el trompo coyote, el papelote, en fin, las palabras y los hechos, de volver central todo aquello que nos dicen es marginal] (Candelario Reyes, 2007, http://www.comparte.org/ noticias/noticias06.htm).

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of the strategies of recycling, making do, cannibalizing, that is, to all the processes of transculturation that take place in colonial contexts. It also highlights the importance of the local in generating true meanings, that is, valuable in situ epistemologies that speak to one’s reality much more than imposed knowledge systems. Trash as a theater system, then, operates on many levels, none more important than the creation and promotion of local epistemologies. In a similar fashion, the Bread and Puppet Theater, still active after more than forty years, arrived at a similar method of center staging the marginal, but their artistic performance strategy is diametrically opposed. Whereas Teatro de la Basura creates bounty out of nothing (making art out of trash), Bread and Puppet discards the excess surrounding us, leaving sheer essences. A dancer, sculptor, and artist, Peter Schumann started the theater in the early sixties in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to comment on the problems and poverty of the neighborhood. Nevertheless, he started out stripping the material and cultural wealth around him since art “is the reduction of reality” (Puppet Uprising). In contradistinction to the workings of capitalism that abstracts reality by creating excess and mountains of garbage,15 the artist’s job is to simplify things, to press the extremes out of things, and to select a “few notes out of all the noise.” Trash informs Bread and Puppet’s practices on two levels: first, from the recycled materials used to make the puppets to signal the theater’s political and ideological resistance both to capitalism and communism’s depredation of nature (it is “art out of the garbage can,” says Schumann), and second, from the garbage diving the collective participates in while on the road (“it is an art,” says Schumann).16 Schumann turned to puppetry in an attempt to preclude audience identification with actors and the cult of personalities. What defines Bread and Puppet can be summarized as follows: its collectivity and individual actors’ anonymity (despite Schumann’s prominence), its Brechtian antisentimental and epic thrust, and its appeals to ritual and a secular religiosity. Most importantly, its desire is for art not to “disguise its illusion and pretend to reality,” because this would mean “pacifying” the audience. Moreover, identificatory forms of art disempower the audience, training them “for other passive consumer roles” (Puppet Uprising). Aiming to enhance reality, not 15. For an illuminating analysis of the connection between capitalism and trash, see Rogers, Gone Tomorrow. 16. Peter Schumann, interview with author, January 30, 2008.

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to reproduce it, giant puppets dance through the streets. The intrinsic playfulness and ridiculousness of these awkward figures forces the audience to “get it,” but through a thoroughly makeshift object. (“It is ridiculous, the idea of papier-mâché puppets fighting against atomic bombs and machine guns,” says Schumann [Puppet Uprising] .) The giant puppets with their long flowing robes moved by sometimes dozens of members of the theater walking on stilts look like “naked souls”; with their sheer size and simplicity, they are able to concentrate the onlooker’s emotion. But they also give the actors an immense amount of freedom. Indeed, as Amy Trumpeter, one of the theater’s most devoted practitioners, explains, the masks are almost archetypical in that the audience seems to recognize themselves in them as if in a dream. A street theater, Bread and Puppet rarely charges admission and refuses to enter the rarified ranks of the art world. It is interested in creating an art of the moment, appropriate only to that moment and thus “claims the fullest freedom to tell the truth” (Puppet Uprising). Rather than being rarified, every performance is evanescent, different from every previous one (despite arduous preparation, the performances follow a bare-bones script and continually metamorphose). The main goal is to create a ritual commensurate with the times. A profound secular religiosity pervades the performances; there is always hope and resurrection. Indeed, besides using theater to protest, Schumann’s aim is also that of rescuing religion from religious authoritarianism and fundamentalisms of all sorts. After the Lower East Side became too dangerous with the influx of drugs, Schumann and his family moved to Glover, Vermont, in 1975, where they bought a farm and continued to be independent of any kind of corporate sponsorship. The Schumanns and theater practitioners and apprentices practice a true communal lifestyle, with some members living on the farm year round. Continuing to adhere to the sixties environmental countercultural ethos, the collective tries to live with the land and off the grid. Schumann’s house has electricity, but it has no heat other than a wood-burning stove. True to the theater’s name, bread is made everyday from hand-ground wheat, and it is baked in a wood oven. The farm, with its wooded hills and natural amphitheater, became the set for the immensely successful annual summer Domestic Resurrection Circus, which attracted upwards of thirty thousand people. During the long July weekend, thousands camped on the hillsides of surrounding farms. During the day, people were free to attend any of the many performances in the woods. Everyone would congregate in the evening for the daily Resurrection Pageant, when

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a huge puppet representing the earth used to come over the hills in the outdoor amphitheater, “in the evening sun collecting all the dead bodies destroyed by evil and bringing hope to the world” (Puppet Uprising). A victim of its own success, the Circus closed about ten years ago, but Bread and Puppet continues to be active, training puppeteers and staging weekend performances all summer long. On January 30, 2008, I made my own pilgrimage to Glover, literally to talk to the mountain, to meet Schumann, and to ask him to clarify some of the questions I had about the sixties, how they spread, and where the roots of solidarity lay. I must thank Teresa Ralli, of Peru’s theater collective, because every time she came to Hanover, she always asked me to take her to visit Schumann. We never had the time, but the urgency of her request struck me. I asked her why Peter Schumann was so important to her, and how she had gotten to know the collective. Giving me a first glimpse of how the sixties traveled, she replied that in Lima she had seen photos of Bread and Puppet marching in the streets of New York City at a time when she and Miguel Rubio were founding Yuyachkani. Seemingly at the other end of the globe, the sight of those photographs made them suddenly realize that Yuyachkani “was part of a movement happening in the USA” [tomamos consciencia de que éramos parte de un movimiento en USA]. Later, both theaters met at the Horizonte-Festival in Germany, and at other theater festivals in Latin America and Europe. Most recently, Ralli’s son (Sebastián) spent a summer with Bread and Puppet in Glover as an apprentice.

•  •  •  •

SS: When did Bread and Puppet meet Yuyachkani? PS: We met Yuyachkani in the 1980s in Colombia, in Cali, but it could also have been Bogotá for theater festivals, and we had friends in Cali, Buenaventura. Germán Moore had a theater in Bogotá and a whole bunch of people . . . campesino theater. But it is so long ago now I no longer remember. But we used to go almost every year. SS: Can you talk about how the sixties spread to Mexico City and across Latin America and to Prague, Tokyo, Paris, et cetera? PS: Well, I tell you, the sixties . . . When we came to New York in ’61, we lived on Avenue D and 4th Street on the Lower East Side, and opposite us was a public school, opposite our building, and the Puerto Ricans had just moved into that area that used to be Polish, Ukrainian, Hassidic Jews. The

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Puerto Ricans were new to that area, and the Puerto Rican high school kids would stand all night long in the hallways and the entrances to the school and harmonize, and that became a very famous style of music in Puerto Rico. But these kids practiced there at night, all the boys and girls would stand together, and it lasted, no words, just practicing harmonies . . . gorgeous! And we started doing street shows in the city, and I learned to know a Puerto Rican neighborhood leader, his name I remember: Byrd Aponte, a stout little man with glasses and always very properly dressed. And he would say, “Well, let us translate it into Spanish so that you do it in English and I do it in Spanish.” We would take a Puerto Rican and an American flag—he would do that, I wouldn’t do that—and hold them up for a public speech. Then I invented what we called crankies (like the forerunners of movies—it is a paper scroll that you paint on and you crank it), and we told stories about rats and fire departments and stuff like that in the street. And it was all very lightweight, so when the cops came we could walk away very quickly. And the garbage cans that were in New York then were just the right size to put the cranky box on—and so that was our first street performances in New York, and they were all done in English and Spanish. Because that was the neighborhood—because the neighborhood became very strong Spanish speaking. SS: So how did the sixties spread to Tokyo, Paris . . . ? There were uprisings everywhere. How did that happen? PS: In what way did they spread? Culturally, do you mean, or politically? SS: Both. PS: In the sixties, there were uprisings of different kinds. There were ghetto uprisings of poor people, and black people, and Hispanic people against the ruling classes. Real traditional riots, summer riots, usually instigated by terrible heat in the summertime. And I remember slogans from that time that they smeared on the walls on the Lower East Side: “Stealing is Human. Looting is Divine” [laughter]. And there were lots of places looted. These were anarchist groups that we were partially working with, that helped us with our protest parades against . . . when there were problems in that neighborhood. That was sort of our first street activities. And then the war in ’63 became known, and we started walking out in ’64 against the war in Vietnam, and that sort of culminated in the late sixties, where it looked like a totally political and social united big movement, where even big unions participated and large groups of students participated. The SDS even par-

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ticipated. And that all peaked in ’68 with riots in Paris, and riots in Berlin and Frankfurt, and riots in New York. Columbia University was occupied by the students, and we played for them. We went to Milano in ’68 or ’69—I forget—and there were riots. The students had occupied the Technical University, and we were playing in a fancy theater, the Piccolo Theatre, and the prices were so high we tried to negotiate and let the students in for free or something, but they didn’t yield. So we stopped playing in the Piccolo, and we went to the occupied Technical University and performed there for free. In France, the trouble was in a suburb of Paris, in Aubervilliers. It started with high school students . . . but it became very big very soon, and it ended up in real street warfare, with barricades built, cobblestones torn up, and the cops chasing us all around, like warfare in the streets. The students in Nanterre and Aubervilliers, the students and universities participated very strongly. They were occupying the offices of the administration, and we participated in a lot of those occupations. SS: My students recently staged a Coca-Cola boycott. Do you think boycotts are still a viable form of protest? PS: There is a hell of a lot more they could boycott! Tell them to look around. Maybe they will find more to protest! But boycotting is one of the basic ideas. And actually, the grape strikers . . . Chávez instigated grape strikes from the West Coast traveling to the East Coast, and in those years, the late sixties, that became very important in New York, because people stopped buying grapes. That’s how it worked. So grapes were protested until Chávez won, basically. And the calories went up for the Mexican grape workers. SS: So you think boycotts are still viable today? PS: Totally. I think that is what we should say: boycott Wal-Mart, boycott the big stores, boycott these giant conglomerates, yeah! Boycott them. That is the one thing they feel. That is the one way they are vulnerable. More than inventing pistols . . . or trying to shoot them. You cannot outshoot them, you cannot uprise in arms—the Black Panthers proved that, the Panthers were all killed. But you can organize to boycott them, and that is still a viable form of fighting capitalism. SS: If you were to come to my class, what would you say to my students? PS: To step outside of the thing. You have to invent ways of doing it. What made us successful in the streets was that there were so many people who

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wanted to protest. And all they knew was “Okay, you print a leaflet and you go and you hand it out to people. Or you paint a poster and you say what you want to say and you carry it in the street.” And we said “NO, you can do much more. Come and join us, and we will make a giant spectacle.” And we had hundreds of people marching down Fifth Avenue. SS: That was your role . . . to channel that desire to protest? PS: Yes, to make it creative, to make it big. To make it noisy, to make a big spectacle out of it. To make a big thing out of it. Instead of this subdued bourgeois mannerism of distributing a little leaflet that nobody reads because every commercial person does that also. So it doesn’t say enough. But when you shout it, when you scream it, when you make music with it, when you make a giant airplane that goes around and mows down giant puppets in the street and then they get pulled up by skeletons and it goes around and around again and again and this is what people see . . . and feel . . . SS: We’re saturated with images—you don’t have a television here, and you don’t even have the Internet, but those of us who do and are plugged in are completely saturated with images, and images don’t work anymore. PS: Well, I don’t think so. There is a very big difference between images on a little screen the size of a human arse and the real thing out in the streets. And actually, when you take a look at the protests in the last ten years—the antiglobalization marches—they were largely influenced by our methods of building big things. They found that very useful; to make it big they started learning to make big puppets—to make them big. SS: Do you mean that creating a spectacle is what is important? PS: It appeals not only to rationale but also irrationally to people, to their feelings, to their visual capacity—you can wrap people into it, you make them part of it, in a way. So it is a much broader, bigger thing than a little bit of language. It is a gigantic language. So I think these things are not finished yet. . . . When we started doing it in the streets in New York in the sixties, people had never seen such a thing . . . and the cops did not know how to behave with it . . . so it was all new again. Now people know this kind of thing. So now it’s possible to do it. SS: But now what we are lacking is the strength and links of solidarity between workers and students. Now the workers are voting for Bush.

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PS: But the workers are not workers per se anymore, because they are often prevented from having unions or their unions are not relevant anymore. The whole idea that labor needs to be organized has changed into something else. It needs to be organized, yes, but it is not apparent that that is the main force anymore. SS: But what created the possibility for links of solidarity? Why are they lacking today? PS: Oh, I don’t think they are not there! They are lacking. But that does not mean they are not possible. They are possible, these things. It is just that . . . Look at what the banking system has achieved. In American families today, it is not just the man working anymore, it is man and woman working to raise kids, and when the children want to go to school, they first have to go to the bank to get a loan, and then they spend the rest of their lives paying off the loans. So they are completely tied to the system. How can they go out and be free and work in fields that are directed against the system if they are themselves completely tied to the banking system? SS: But how was it then, in the sixties? PS: I don’t think education was the big problem yet, you know, lots of city schools were free, tuition was free. Tuition started when they threw out communism, which, after all, had free education and free lots of this and that, and when that disappeared, what you wanted to achieve in the society disappeared with it. Now the aim is to enslave people as much as possible—that’s the goal now—and to keep the underclasses in good enough shape so they can work for you, whether it is in Africa or Asia or wherever. That’s what capitalism needs: big massive amounts of people who do the work for it, and some people who can get as rich as possible. That is the goal of the whole project. Started in the Middle Ages . . . still working. SS: Were you aware of Liberation Theology? PS: Totally. We made a lot of shows in conjunction with liberation theologists in Colombia and Venezuela, and we entered Nicaragua. Ernesto Cardenal was a liberation theologist. We worked with him. We did shows that he arranged, and we worked with the Sandinistas and campesino organizations in Nicaragua. They still come and visit us, and when we can, we go. We worked in the villages and small towns, and made Easter shows that were glorifying the Sandinistas—that kind of thing [laughter].

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SS: Were you traveling more in the sixties? Or is the theater? You are getting older, so I understand that you might not want to, but is the theater? PS: Oh, yes! I was traveling more than now. Less now, because we get fewer invitations, and we don’t go on the road anymore. In the sixties, we had a habit: someone called us from North Carolina, and we hopped in our little VW bus and we went there and we performed. Now we have to pay people, so now we have to wait to line up enough jobs to pay people. SS: But how did you live then? PS: Well, we worked. We came home, and I did painting jobs or . . . We started making money off it in ’68, I think, then we became fashionable in Europe, and then we made very good money and we could buy this place . . . Yes, there was a time when it was not hard to make money with shows. Then it went downhill again. SS: And now? PS: Well, at home we play for free and when we go somewhere else we charge them, depending. But when we travel to Europe, which we used to do much more, they have to pay for transportation, housing, et cetera. We travel much differently now. In the late sixties, early seventies, we traveled with the whole company of thirty or forty people. Now we travel only with three or four or five, and we get community engagement to put more people in the show. Now we also don’t travel with so much luggage, we take a little bit of luggage and the rest we make when we are there . . . [a] different technique now, easier, and more work. SS: I just read a book about Teatro Campesino. One member explained that the collective allowed them to produce inexpensive shows because they shared food stamps, child care, cooking, et cetera, but that he resorted to pick pocketing when things were really tight. Did you ever resort to that? PS: Our puppeteers go through the garbage cans and eat out of the garbage cans. Actually, now more so than a few years ago. We have more people in the company who are interested in cultivating that sort of skill. Where to go for the garbage cans, how to go, when to go, what to pick, et cetera. And when we were in New York last, every meal was from the garbage can.

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SS: So keeping everything as cheap as you possibly can. PS: Yes, that’s the only way. We want to stay independent. We don’t want to write for the arts councils’ grants and so on, so on. We make it with our product. SS: Did you have a more active collaboration with Yuyachkani and Teatro Campesino than simply meeting them? PS: Not really. With Yuyachkani, we did parades together. We saw them do “Los músicos ambulantes” [a variation of the Bremer City Musicians]. That was fabulous. They had a large band. And also Teatro Campesino—they came to us in the early seventies. And the San Francisco Mime Troupe—we met off and on . . . We did performances in the park together, and we had panel discussions, and we had arguments . . . whether to beat up the cops or not or whatever [laughter]. SS: Do you still think that theater has such a crucial role? PS: Totally, yes. One of the few things that makes any sense whatsoever. It is better than furniture [laughter]. SS: Anything is better than furniture. PS: Almost as good as dentistry [laughter]. SS: Anything is better than dentistry! And one last thing. Why are you not connected to the Internet? PS: There is enough machinery already in our life. Why? What for? What’s so good about it? More information is bullshit. We have too much. I cannot read all my books anyway. And to sit in front of a little . . . is not dignified. I find that inhuman in a way. SS: Any last thoughts on how the sixties spread? PS: Well, I don’t know. That description I gave you is pretty accurate. How it jumped the ocean—that I do not know. But a lot of it was through the student movement. My brother was head of the German SDS in Frankfurt. He was in the Sociology Department led by the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, very famous sociologists. That whole class then instigated street movements. That, I think, explains a lot of things. Academia was internationalized, both in America and in Europe; in Italy, in France, and in Germany it was very, very strong, and it went over to Denmark and Swe-

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den, which had very strong anarchist movements that also aligned themselves with that; and naturally it also went over to South America. And I remember very much in the seventies a meeting at Connecticut College of South American theaters. A lot of them clandestine theaters. The Open Theater of Argentina, working under dictatorship and figuring out how to perform meaningful stuff. Augusto Boal, he hadn’t started the Theatre of the Oppressed yet. So you were clandestine. Then there was the ICTUS theater of Chile. We met many, many South American companies at that workshop. It must have been called an All Americas Theater Workshop or something like that . . . Those were theaters of the art of clandestine art under dictatorships, which aligned them with theaters in the Eastern Bloc. But in New York, the movement picked up on movements that existed of summer riots and racial riots. So it was a major upheaval that looked like a revolution. The connectedness then was the issue of antiauthoritarian methods. The Frankfurt School was crucial and [so was] Herbert Marcuse in the United States, and the translations of their works. And Brecht plays were performed—never as much as during that time. Brecht was performed as much as Shakespeare. Always the same concerns: capitalism stinks, communism stinks, what do we do? And that’s when the civil rights movement became very strong. SS: One last question: the bread making . . . why? PS: I grind my own grain. I have 140-year-old sourdough. I do it all the time. And when we travel, we make ovens with four hundred bricks. It takes about three hours to bake. SS: But why? It is so much work. PS: Because people don’t know what bread is. They have terrible eating habits. They don’t know where food comes from. Kids grow up not knowing that milk does not come from the supermarket but from an animal. People don’t know what bread is, even. They think it is something that you use as a sponge to put in the meat sauce. But in Germany, bread is a meal, what you live on. In the eighteenth century, people got paid in bread, not in money. The meaning of bread, in slang, is “money.”

Black Power, Decolonization, and Caribbean Politics: Walter Rodney and the Politics of The Groundings with My Brothers

Anthony Bogues The Setting The police officer raised his baton, then, in a moment of hesitation, paused and grabbed the young boy by the waistband of his khaki pants. He grabbed him hard and lifted him up so that the boy stood on his toes, and then the baton came crashing down. The young boy, for he was only thirteen years old, cried out in a voice already shaped by pain, “no lick mi sah, a beg you sah, no lick mi!” The policeman swung the baton again, and the boy moved his hands to protect his face. He was shirtless. He had come to this summer school, located in the middle of the black poor working-class district of Trench Town, to learn more English and arithmetic. He wanted to keep himself off the streets, away from possible trouble. His mother had encouraged him to come. She had made his younger brothers do his chores: going to the shop at midday to get the rice and Brunswick sardines for dinner that day. He had been happy to come to this school and stayed around for the afternoon classes in which the student teachers, most of them not much older than him, taught black history. But this afternoon was like a bad dream. He had learned from an early age not to boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-027  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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get into trouble, to stay away from these black policemen, the ones in the red seams and the government boots. He had seen the consequences of police beatings, had heard about beatings in which people were crippled for life. Both he and his mother thought school was a safe place. But they were wrong. Here was a policeman beating him while draping him in the waist. As the baton came down a third time, the policeman shouted, “This is a Black Power school. We going shut it down and all of you must go home.” Black Power! He had never heard of it before. What was the policeman talking about? The teachers had spoken about black history, about Africa; no one talked about Black Power. But it was too late to go on thinking as the baton crashed on his head and he passed out. A thirteen-year-old black boy, beaten into a state of semiconsciousness by a black police officer in a politically independent country where the majority of the population was of African descent. The cause of beating . . . attending a class in black history. What circumstances could give rise to such an episode? And under what conditions could there exist the apparent incongruity of a black policeman beating a black child while cursing Black Power?

•  •  •  • Prologue

The year is 1968 in Kingston, Jamaica. Since 1962, the island of Jamaica, with a human population comprised primarily of the descendents of African slaves, had been politically independent. After enduring over four hundred years of colonial domination and racial slavery, first by Spanish and then by British colonial power, the island’s political independence had been celebrated with the traditional protocols of formal political equality. There was a new flag, a seat at the United Nations, local festivals to celebrate heroes newly named, and a constitution manufactured at Whitehall in London. Then there was the proclamation of the island’s first prime minister, Sir Alexander Bustamante—that Jamaica was with the West. Jamaica’s constitutional political independence could be called anticolonial sovereignty. Colonial power had constructed forms of rule in which local sovereignty was absent. In mimic-like fashion, constitutional decolonization manufactured a sovereignty that, while advancing anticolonialist and nationalist positions, drew many of its discursive frameworks from coloniality. Thus the apparent incongruity of a black police officer beating a black young boy while cursing Black Power. For anticolonial sovereignty, the new nation-state was the

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apex of nationalism. A nation-state constituted institutionally as much as possible in the image and likeness of the “mother country.” A nation-state constructed in a fashion whereby, as Frantz Fanon noted, the new native elite would become the “transmission line between the nation and capitalism, [and] puts on the mask of neo-colonialism.” In 1968, Jamaica and the other eighteen anglophone islands in the region were either colonies or neocolonies. In the Jamaican case, the commanding heights of the economy were controlled by foreign capital. The vast tracts of arable land continued to be in the hands of the British company Tate and Lyle. On these lands labor cultivated and reaped sugar in conditions not far removed from the racial plantation slavery of previous centuries. Michael Manley, a trade unionist before becoming the leader of the People’s National Party in 1969, observed that the relationship between workers and employers in the 1960s was one in which “the working classes did not exist as human beings for the privileged. He went on to note that so total was the cumulative effect of history that the average members of the privileged groups were incapable of perceiving the common humanity which made the worker.” It was this cumulative history which the police officer was acting out. At the level of global polity, the process of anticolonial politics, beginning with the political independence of India and Ghana in the wake of World War II, shattered the European colonial empires while structuring conditions for new forms of domination by the West. In the Caribbean, the 1959 Cuban Revolution demonstrated that it was possible to stand up to the might of U.S. power. Decolonization opened up the possibility for a new terrain for politics and, by the 1960s, new political phrases had made their way into mainstream political lexicon; “the third world,” “Bandung,” “nonaligned.” This fact is often ignored in the debates and discussions about the meaning of ’68 and the sixties. Radical political thinking tends to ignore the centrality to global politics of the decolonial moment and the way in which it created new political spaces. For example, one cannot think of the period without reflecting on the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba. This conference brought together delegations from the entire non-Western . Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 152. . See Catherine Sunshine, The Caribbean: Survival, Struggle, and Sovereignty (Washington, DC: EPICA, 1988), 4–5, for a date map of when each Caribbean island became politically independent. . Michael Manley, A Voice at the Workplace: Reflections on Colonialism and the Jamaican Worker (London: Andre Deutsch, 1975), 54.

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world. The conference participants discussed and planned, in the words of Amilcar Cabral, the “liquidation of imperialism and old and new colonialism.” The emergence of tricontinentalism as a program of radical solidarity and internationalism marked a critical moment. At the global level, Black Power became connected to this internationalism. In the United States, between the years 1965 and 1968, there emerged the Black Power movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and the women’s movement. However, in Jamaica and the other independent Caribbean states, by the late 1960s, political independence had turned sour, a mood captured by the lyrics of the very popular song “Everything Crash,” sung by The Ethiopians. In the midst of this crash appeared the political banner and cry of Black Power. Central to Black Power’s public articulation in Jamaica was Rastafari and the political ideas and praxis of Walter Rodney. If in the United States Black Power was a response to the inadequacies of liberal legal legislation to end racial oppression, then in Jamaica and the Caribbean it was the political, cultural, and social response to the floundering of the formal constitutional decolonization project of political independence. As a political slogan, Black Power emerged from the organizing work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. When Willie Ricks shouted “Black Power,” it reverberated not just in the American South but throughout the African diaspora. Like many political ideas throughout the history of black radical diasporic activity, however, as the slogan traveled, it adapted to local conditions. Black Power and the Caribbean Black Power was not a sudden political cry in Jamaica and Caribbean society in the late 1960s. Radical twentieth-century political and social Caribbean history has had swirling throughout it practices and ideas that range from the black internationalism of the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey, to the black religious nationalism of Rastafari, to small radical groups who have mixed Marxist, anticolonialist, . Amilcar Cabral was perhaps the most important political thinker in the African national liberation movements. He was murdered by Portuguese colonialism. For an introduction to his writings, see Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle (London: Heinemann, 1980); and, for an excellent description of the movement he led, see Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guiné: Aspects of an African Revolution (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1969). . Cited in Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 213.

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and black nationalist ideas, and of course the ideologies of pan-Africanism. In July 1969, in the British Caribbean colony of Bermuda, C. L. R. James delivered the opening speech to what was called “the first regional conference on Black Power.” He noted that although the world had changed since the early twentieth century, the emergence of Black Power, alongside the national liberation struggle in Vietnam, was an important part of the activities of those who were seeking “power against those who are ruling the world.” James also made the point that Black Power was a radical moment in the twentieth century, which, if successful, would rupture the configurations of global power. This moment of Black Power was a global one configured by rebellions in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, and the emergence of forms of black consciousness. Its political practices were not simply the connective tissues of black diasporic radicalism but, rather, sought new grounds for political knowledge and action. How to think about this new ground from a Caribbean angle of vision is the main thread of this essay. C. L. R. James recognized the world significance of Black Power when, in 1967, while delivering a lecture simply titled “Black Power,” he argued that Black Power was destined to become one of the “great political slogans of our time.” James noted that Black Power was “a political slogan and yet not a political slogan: rather a banner.” I would argue that a banner not only rallies but organizes political thought. It gives flesh to political speech and praxis. Black Power as a form of politics in the postindependence period of Caribbean society was political speech and practice in which politics was organized not as a drive for power but as a fundamental disruption, one in which the very idea of hierarchal classifications and their dispositions inherited from colonialism were challenged. In other words, . C. L. R. James, “Opening Speech to the First Regional Black Power Conference: Hamilton, Bermuda, 10–13 July, 1969.” Photocopy in author’s possession. . There is currently a burst of scholarship on Black Power; in particular, see Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006). . C. L. R. James, Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 223. . Indeed, I would argue that the electoral victory of the People’s National Party in 1972 under the leadership of Michael Manley and with the slogans “Time for a Change” and “Power for the People” (note here the slippage in the latter slogan from “power to the people”—a popular Black Power slogan—to “power for the people,” a slippage that represented a political shift) brought into mainstream Jamaican politics critical individuals from the Black Power movement. This in turn created the conditions within the party for a

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Black Power in the Caribbean represented the drive for a rupture between the colonial past and the then present of the independence moment. No text more clearly articulates this than Walter Rodney’s The Groundings with My Brothers. Rodney and Black Radical Politics Rodney himself was a pivotal figure in the twentieth-century black radical tradition, and his political trajectory combined many elements of twentieth-century black radicalism, making him well suited for the role he was to play in Jamaica.10 Guyanese by birth, he came of age in the early 1960s; as he puts it, “I was at the University of the West Indies (UWI) at a time when the university had begun its nationalist pilgrimage.”11 At university, Rodney recalls that two books were critical to his intellectual and political formation, Black Jacobins, by C. L. R. James, and Capitalism and Slavery, by Eric Williams. Both texts were and still are framing ones in Caribbean historiography, with Black Jacobins viewed as the central radical text and Williams’s as the text that rewrote the historical account of the abolition of slavery, giving weight to economic factors in opposition to the conventional academic narratives at the time, which argued for the dominance of moral factors in nineteenth-century British abolitionism. After graduating from UWI, Rodney did graduate work in African history at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). However, perhaps more importantly for this essay was his relationship with C. L. R. James. During the midsixties, while in London, Rodney joined a study group led by James. Reflecting on his experience in the group, Rodney observes that “one of the most important things which I got out of that experience was a certain sense of historical analysis . . . it was not enough to study Lenin’s State and Revolution. It was important to understand the specific period of serious debate and internal political convulsions between 1972–1980. Currently in Jamaican society, the seventies have become a specter. But perhaps that spectral figure is 1968 and the formal bursting on the political scene of Black Power. 10. For an excellent study of the life and political ideas of Walter Rodney, see Rupert Lewis, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 11. Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual, introduction by Robert Hill, foreword by Howard Dodson (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990), 13.

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contextual nature of discussions that were going on in Russia at the time.”12 This study group, led by C. L. R. James and Selma James, was an incubator for radical political and social ideas for many Caribbean scholars who had journeyed to England to study. Norman Girvan, the noted Caribbean political economist, who was a member of the group, observes that “he [James] gave us his unique interpretation of the many subtleties of Hegel, Heidegger, and Wilson Harris. At a subsequent stage we ourselves prepared papers. . . . Walter Rodney further honed his view about the relationship between Marxism and democracy in a review of Facing Reality.”13 The relationship between James and Rodney is a crucial one. James, we may recall, in 1937, along with George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey, and others, had established the International African Service Bureau (IASB) and published for several months in 1938 the International African Opinion, a black diasporic newspaper. This newspaper and the organization advocated both the political independence of Africa and the Caribbean as well as world revolution led by all colonial subjects rather than the European working class.14 A decade later, in 1948, while living in the United States, James proposed in his essay “Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem” a theoretical and political position that posited the independence and vitality of Black Struggles in America as an important current in the struggle against American power and constitutively required for the socialist revolution. Thus, when Rodney participated in the London study group with James, he was in direct conversation with a figure who was central to black radicalism in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. 12. Walter Rodney Speaks, 28. 13. Norman Girvan, foreword to Tribute to a Scholar: Appreciating C. L. R. James, ed. Bishnu Ragoonath (Kingston, Jamaica, West Indies: Consortium Graduate School of Social Sciences, 1990), ix. Facing Reality was an important text in James’s political thought. In this text, James and his colleagues deployed the Hungarian Revolution and the emergence of workers’ councils as a new moment in working-class radical history. The text further theorizes from this event the ways in which Marxist groups now had to practice a different kind of politics that would not be focused on the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. C. L. R. James, Facing Reality (East Lansing, Mich.: Garvey Institute–Black Liberation Front International, 1968). 14. For a discussion of this group and its political ideas, see Anthony Bogues, “The Notion and Rhythm of Freedom: The Anti-Colonial Internationalism of the International African Service Bureau,” in Internationalismen: Transformation weltweiter Ungleichheit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Karin Fischer and Susan Zimmermann (Vienna: Promedia, 2008), 129–46.

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After graduating from SOAS, Rodney briefly lived in Tanzania, teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam. There he became engaged with the fertile activities around Tanzania’s attempt to construct a postcolonial society. It was during this period as well that he came into contact with the armed African national liberation movements. So in 1968, on his return to the Caribbean, Rodney embodied a set of experiences that linked him to the past political experiences of early twentieth-century black radicalism, as well as the most radical segments of the African national liberation struggles. Rodney’s return to the Caribbean from Tanzania was an important moment in the twentieth-century history of African diasporic radicalism. If in the early twentieth century many Caribbean radicals who participated in the different forms of black diasporic radicalism moved to either the colonial metropole or Africa, Rodney’s Caribbean return reversed this trend. He himself makes the point in an interview that there was a need for the “certain localization of the revolution . . . for many years citizens of the Caribbean have become engaged in one revolutionary process or another . . . however the present generation recognizes much more that it is extremely difficult to make any of these ideas come to fruition except in the Caribbean context itself.”15 Rupert Lewis is therefore accurate to remind us of James’s comment, which located Rodney in an intellectual genealogy that was West Indian, Pan-African, and Marxist.16 What is of importance in this essay is that by 1968, within the Caribbean, like many other locations in the “Black world,”17 this intellectual genealogy crystallized into the politics of Black Power.

15. Colin Prescod, “Guyana’s Socialism: An Interview with Walter Rodney,” in Race and Class 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1976): 127. 16. Lewis, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought, xv. 17. I am using this phrase in the ways it was used by Vincent Harding and those associated with the Institute of the Black World (IBW). The IBW, based in Atlanta, was an extraordinary intellectual and political grouping of black scholars in the late 1960s and 1970s. They brought together within an institutional framework radical thinkers and activists from the United States, Caribbean, and Africa for a series of debates and discussions about the world at that time. Rodney participated in some of these discussions, and so did Sylvia Wynter and, of course, James. For a discussion about the history and some of the central ideas of this grouping, see Derrick White, “New Concepts for the New Man: The Institute of the Black World and the Incomplete Victory of the Second Reconstruction” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2004).

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The Rodney Riots: The Making of Groundings October 16, 1968, is a historical marker in Jamaican and Caribbean political history. On the afternoon of October 15, 1968, Walter Rodney was refused reentry into Jamaica. He had been in Jamaica from January of that year and during the period spent a great deal of time teaching African history courses on the UWI campus as well as moving amongst groups of unemployed youth and Rastafari. Known as a gifted speaker and very knowledgeable about Africa, Rodney was, for nine months, primarily engaged in what could usefully be called a radical political education program on African history, radical politics, and society. On October 15, he was returning from the Congress of Black Writers, held in Montreal, Canada.18 On October 16, students from UWI marched in protest against the government’s ban. What began as a student protest quickly turned into a oneday riot, as the unemployed youth and others who lived in the capital city, Kingston, rioted. The government of the Jamaica Labor Party, then led by the late Hugh Shearer, argued in the country’s parliament that the riot was evidence that Rodney was actively working to “promote a Castro type revolution in Jamaica.” Prime Minister Shearer then suggested that this activity was the primary reason for banning Rodney. Shearer announced as well that a revolution in Jamaica was being organized “under the guise of a Black Power movement which to him and other well thinking Jamaicans does not mean rebellion but rather the dignity of the Black man.”19 The riots had profound consequences on Jamaican society and became a watershed in the island’s postcolonial history. One important consequence was the emergence of the radical newspaper Abeng and the group which grew up around it.20 It was from within this crucible of events that The Groundings with My Brothers was published. 18. For a discussion of this conference and its importance to black radical diasporic politics, see Alfie Roberts, A View for Freedom: Alfie Roberts Speaks on the Caribbean, Cricket, Montreal, and C.L.R. James, introduction by David Austin, afterword by Robert Hill (Montréal, Canada: Alfie Roberts Institute, 2005), 75–78. The theme of this conference was “Towards the Second Emancipation: The Dynamics of Black Liberation.” Some of the participants other than Rodney included C. L. R. James, James Foreman, Stokely Carmichael, and Harry Edwards. 19. Daily Gleaner, October 18, 1968. 20. Abeng was a radical grouping of Rastafarians, academics, students, unemployed youths, workers, and disaffected members of the Jamaican middle class who became active politically after the Rodney riots. In 1969, for several months, the group published a newspaper that reflected the international political character of Black Power. The articles

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The text is a slim volume of sixty-eight pages. It is comprised of speeches Rodney delivered in Jamaica, an introduction by Richard Small (in the first published version), Rodney’s statement of response to his banning orders, and a preface by Ewart Thomas, who edited the volume. The cover design was drawn by the artist Errol Lloyd and depicts the faces of three black men, the most distinctive face being that of a bearded black male figure with a headdress that invokes the image of Rastafari. The text’s title conveys the gendered perspective of radical Caribbean politics at the time, but it also speaks to how Rodney viewed his political activity. In response to the Jamaican government’s allegations that he was trying to lead the Rastafarians and other disaffected forces in plotting the revolutionary overthrow of the Jamaican state, Rodney proclaims, “I had public lectures. I talked about Black Power. . . . I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of Black People were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because, that is Black Power. That is one of the elements, a sitting down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the Brothers say.”21 The process of “grounding” gives the text its title, but what was it, and how could it be a political practice? In writing previously about this subject, I note that in “Rastafari language and wordplay, ‘ground’ became a site of sociality . . . an equal [site] of meeting that breaks . . . constructed barriers of race, class, and education.”22 By invoking the practice of “grounding,” Rodney was illuminating a possibly different practice of political leadership than that which still dominates Caribbean politics. His invocation of “groundings” at the level of political ideas sought to create a radical political grammar that was routed through the immediate experiences of those who were formally excluded from Jamaican society. It was an important move in the decolonization process. ranged from news and essays from the Black Power movement and political personalities in the United States to stories about the African liberation movements as well as Caribbean and local stories. The editor of the newspaper was Robert Hill, who later became the editor and historian of the massive documentary history project, the Garvey Papers, currently located at UCLA. For a discussion of the political ideas of the newspaper, see Anthony Bogues, “The Abeng Newspaper: The Radical Politics of Post-Colonial Blackness” (paper presented at the University of the West Indies, Mona Conference on Black Power, February 2008). 21. Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1969), 63–64. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as GMB. 22. Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), 129.

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The Political Ideas of Black Power In the first chapter of Groundings, Rodney identifies the system of imperialism as the main structural power that dominates Jamaica and the Caribbean. He observes that the beneficiaries of the 1937–38 workers’ revolts in the entire Caribbean were “a narrow middle-class sector whose composition was primarily brown . . . [and] of late, that local ruling elite has incorporated a number of blacks in positions of prominence” (GMB, 12). The formal ending of colonialism and the granting of constitutional political independence meant some change in Jamaican societal dynamics. However, for Rodney, two things were important. The first was the fact that the structure of the island’s political economy had not fundamentally changed, and, second, that “throughout the country black youths [were] becoming aware of the possibilities of unleashing armed struggle in their own interests” (GMB, 15). Rodney’s prognosis that black youths were moving in the direction of armed struggle grew out of the various meetings that he had had with unemployed black youth in the inner-city neighborhoods of Kingston. These meetings were conducted in places that he himself described as “dungle rubbish heaps,” where he “sat on a little oil drum, rusty and in the midst of garbage” (GMB, 64).23 Not only Rastafarians attended these meetings, but also young men belonging to the Rude Bwoy cultural formation that had developed during this period in the urban centers of Kingston. Garth White, in perhaps the most perceptive essay on this cultural formation, writes, “The Rude Bwoy is that person, native, who is totally disenchanted with the ruling system; who generally descended from the ‘African elements’ in the lower class and who is now armed with ratchets, other cutting instruments and with increasing frequency nowadays, with guns and explosives.”24 The Jamaican postcolonial state was very aware of this formation and its possible political logic. The government’s intelligence service in their reports stated, as Michael West has written, that Rodney “sought the support of the ‘Vikings,’ a gang of violent robbers, thieves and bully boys active in Kingston and at one time 50 strong.”25 The Vikings were a complex group 23. One should also note how the word dungle was constructed. During the period of slavery, the slaves used a dung basket to carry manure to the sugar plantations. Dungle became the popular moniker for the site where the refuse of the city was dumped. 24. Garth White, “Rudie, Oh Rudie!” Caribbean Quarterly 13 (September 1967): 39–44. 25. Cited from Jamaican Security Intelligence reports, in Michael West, “Walter Rodney and Black Power: Jamaican Intelligence and U.S. Diplomacy,” African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies 1, no. 2 (November 2005): 11.

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of young black unemployed men in the western part of Kingston. Adorning the walls of their cardboard and wooden shacks were large portraits of Che, Malcolm X, and Haile Selassie. Their reading materials consisted of banned books on Black Power and socialism, Black Panther newspapers, Malcolm X’s autobiography, or Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power.26 The Vikings were young men disenchanted by the lack of social transformation in the immediate postindependence period. They acted in rebellious and contradictory ways. The Jamaican state was very aware of their potential for revolutionary action; it remembered a group of young men, composed of Rastafarians and radical African Americans, who made a valiant attempt to overthrow the Jamaican colonial state in a Cubainspired guerrilla-like operation in 1960. This rebellion, known as the “Henry Revolt,”27 remained for some time a forceful symbolic event in the minds of many radical and unemployed young men. If Rodney could persuade a group like the Vikings to become openly politically active in consistently radical ways, then the Jamaican state figured that it would soon face armed conflagrations. So how did Rodney conceptualize Black Power as a political ideology that would free Jamaica and the Caribbean from imperial rule? Rodney had two central conceptions of Black Power, and both rested on this central claim: “Black Power is a doctrine about black people, for black people, preached by black people. I’m putting to my black brother and sisters that the color of our skins is the most fundamental thing about us. I could have chosen to talk about people of the same island, or of the same religion, or the same class—but I have chosen skin color as essentially the most binding factor in our world” (GMB, 16). Very quickly, as he postulated this definition, Rodney qualifies it, for he goes on, “The black people of whom I speak, therefore, are non-whites—the hundreds of millions of people, whose homelands are in Asia and Africa, with a few million in the Americas” 26. One of the repressive actions that the first independent government did in Jamaica was to ban books, carrying on an old colonial tradition. These banned books included books on Marxism as well as all the major radical books and newspapers that emerged out of the U.S. Black Power movement. The banning of books was part of an attempt to inoculate the Jamaican nation from “foreign” influence, which could corrupt the young independent nation. This inoculation included the banning of travel to Cuba and the seizing of passports of those who did travel. 27. For a discussion of this revolt, see Brian Meeks, Narratives of Resistance (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2000); and Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets, chap. 6.

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(GMB, 16). This qualification was important for two reasons. First, Rodney was setting up an argument which would allow him the space to engage politically with the Indo-Caribbean population with its history of indentured servitude in the Caribbean from the mid-nineteenth century. Secondly, keenly aware of the realities of global anticolonial struggles and decolonization, Rodney recognized that his definition had to be flexible enough to allow room for a historical narrative in which one could chart a genealogy of global domination through both race and colonial power. Thus, Rodney continues, “we live in a section of the world under white domination—the imperialist world . . . the Russians are white and have power, but they are not a colonial power oppressing black people” (GMB, 18).28 For Rodney, colonial power was historically central to any understanding of the postcolonial world. This was an important understanding, since in the late sixties and early seventies, colonial power had already morphed into imperial power. Thus he observes, “There is a mistaken belief that black people achieved power with independence, but a black man ruling a dependent state within the imperialist system has no power. . . . It is the nature of the imperialist relationship that enriches the metropolis at the expense of the colony, i.e. it makes the whites richer and the blacks poorer” (GMB, 18–19). If colonial power was central to Rodney’s political ideas, then, with regard to the United States, Rodney considered a different configuration of power. Turning his attention to the United States in the text, he notes that the present “Black Power movement in the United States is a rejection of hopelessness and the policy of doing nothing to halt the oppression of blacks by whites. It recognizes the absences of black power, but is confident of the potential of black power on this globe” (GMB, 20). He followed this line of argument by highlighting the ways in which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee established its foreign affairs department and engaged in serious political discussions with Cuba, African national liberation movements, and Vietnam. This engagement, he suggested, marked a new stage in the struggles against racial oppression and was a demonstration of the awareness of African American political leadership that antiracial struggles required “the necessity and the desirability of fighting white 28. Of course, Rodney was also reflecting at this time a conception fairly widespread at the time that the Soviet Union was a progressive international force. This view on the black radical Left eroded particularly when, in some African countries, the then Soviet Union developed certain kinds of economic relationships of resource extraction.

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power simultaneously at home and abroad” (GMB, 21). Rodney then notes that one of the debates in the United States about Black Power was about violence. He discusses this issue, paying some attention to the historical violence of slavery and the systemic violence of racial oppression. From this ground, he argues that radical violence as a response to the violence of racial power could not be ruled out. In this regard, Rodney echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 observation that the struggle to end racial oppression in the United States created “frustrations” which could not continue indefinitely. Du Bois noted at the time, “Some day it may burst in fire and blood. Who will be to blame? And where the greater cost? Black folk, after all, have little to lose. . . . This the American black man knows . . . he will enter modern civilization here in America as a black man on terms of perfect unlimited equality . . . or he will not enter at all. Either extermination root and branch, or absolute equality . . . this is the last great battle of the West.”29 For Rodney and many other black radicals of the period, the black freedom struggles in the United States were a high point in world history. These struggles created a political language and established a set of iconic figures who still continue to resonate in black diasporic politics. There was a two-way flow between the black struggles in the United States and global anticolonial struggles. In their political analysis of white racial power, many African Americans drew on the language of national liberation struggles, comparing the conditions of the black population to that of an internal colony within the United States. All this, of course, has deep historical roots in various forms of early twentieth-century black diasporic radicalism and the creation of various transnationalist political platforms created by different black diasporic collectivities.30 The point is that Black Power was the 1960s instantiation of this historical current. Radical twentieth-century black politics circled around issues of colonial power and racial power. Black Power, as it emerged, linked these issues around a series of global solidarities between formerly colonized peoples and racial oppression in the United States. From within the United States, the revolutionary intercommunalism advocated by the Black Panther Party represented one stream of transnational black radicalism. 29. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 703. 30. For a mapping of the black radical diasporic activities, see Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 258–59.

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While acknowledging the specific African American roots of the 1960s call for Black Power, Rodney made it plain that Black Power was relevant for the Caribbean. He observes that the “West Indies have always been a part of the white capitalist society. We have been the most oppressed section because we were a slave society and the legacy of slavery still rests heavily upon the black man” (GMB, 25). Rodney understood that Black Power in the Caribbean ideologically negated the status of ontological inferiority established by colonial and racial power. He made the point that “Black Power recognizes both the reality of Black oppression and self-negation as well as the potential for revolt” (GMB, 25). Conducting a historical analysis, Rodney outlined a historical narrative of Caribbean society, periodizing the region’s history into five phases. He notes that in the second phase, “white West Indians” imported Indian labor under indentured arrangements to maintain the system of plantation order. This was possible, he observes, “because white power controlled most of the world and could move nonwhite people around as they wished” (GMB, 26). The obvious reference here is to global colonial power and again illustrates how race and colonial power worked in Rodney’s political thought at the time. The coercion of labor that Rodney suggested made the Caribbean a “unique place for suffering in the world” (GMB, 26). The notion of suffering offered here is also an important one for Rodney’s thinking. In the first place, it produced a political affect in which the human is at the center. In other words, Rodney’s attention was on the concrete effect of racial and colonial power, not as a categorical abstraction but as human consequences.31 Secondly, although he was speaking the language of Black Power, Rodney wanted to invest this slogan/banner with the ideas of class and labor. Thus, one of the adaptations of Black Power to the Caribbean in the 1960s was the fusion of explicit class connotations with the slogan. For Rodney and other Black Power advocates in the Caribbean, Black Power was about: “(i) the break with imperialism which is historically white racist; (ii) the assumption of power by the black masses in the islands; (iii) the cultural reconstruction of the society in the images of the blacks” (GMB, 31). While these political objectives were clear and precise as a banner 31. It is also important to note that in the Jamaican Nation Language in the 1960s and 1970s sufferer was the word often used by the dispossessed groups themselves to describe their own condition. In the Caribbean, both suffer and sufferation are words deployed to mean extreme material hardship. For a description of this, see Richard Allsopp, ed., Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 538.

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under which to mobilize segments of the Caribbean population in popular struggles, there were other aspects of Rodney’s political thought that were original. In Groundings, these ideas revolved around the relationship between intellectuals and the mass of the population. It is this dimension that allows us to see how Rodney was beginning to grapple with one of the most central issues of revolutionary politics and action. Intellectuals and Masses Observing how the elites of the newly independent nations had tied themselves to imperial power, Rodney suggests that “Black Power in the W.I. must aim at transforming the intelligentsia into the servants of the black masses” (GMB, 32). To achieve this, he calls for the Caribbean intellectual to rethink both the content and purpose of higher education and to play a leading role in the “redefinition of the world from our own standpoint” (GMB, 34). For Rodney, the “black educated man in the West Indies is as much a part of the system of oppression as the bank managers and the plantation overseers. . . . How do we break out of this Babylonian Captivity?”32 he asks. He offers three ideas: “I suggest first that the intellectual, the academic, within his own discipline, has to attack those distortions which white imperialism, white cultural imperialism, have produced in all branches of scholarship. . . . My second point is that the black intellectual has to move beyond his own discipline to challenge the social myth which exists in the society as a whole. . . . Thirdly, the black intellectual, the black academic must attach himself to the activity of the black masses” (GMB, 62–63). These three suggestions construct a view of radical intellectual work that might be useful for the contemporary moment. When the Black Power movement in the Caribbean eventually folded into different versions of Marxist and left political formations, none of these movements and political formations posed the question about the specific relationship between “masses” and intellectuals. Indeed, in the arc between the Black Power moment in the Caribbean and the emergence of a Marxist Left, an arc that included the Trinidad Black Power Revolt of February 1970, the Grenadian Revolution of 1979, and finally the implosion of that revolution in October 1983, two critical questions haunted radical politics of the period, none of 32. Again, note the language. By referring to Babylon, Rodney is deploying the language of Rastafari. He is making an attempt to work with and develop a new language of radical politics that would be rooted in the Afro-Caribbean experience.

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which were adequately theorized. The first question was about political language: In what political language should we think about radical politics? The issue here was not about the making of revolution (there was a great deal of debate and practice about this in the Caribbean at the time); rather, it was about thinking about revolution and imagining it in forms of political languages that resided in the experiences of the population. The second question was about the relationship of the intellectual to the act of revolution and revolt. Rodney’s answer to the second question suggests that the conventional idea of a radical intellectual as simply one who speaks truth to power is limited. Radical intellectual labor requires a different kind of activity, one in which a key move is the clearing of space, of finding new grounds for thinking in which doxas are overturned. In constituting the social body, power produces, circulates, and accumulates both knowledges and discourses. Radical intellectual work requires puncturing these knowledges and discourses and opening new frames to think differently. Inspired by Rodney’s political practice, we might well ask, how might we do radical intellectual work today? Perhaps one part of a different frame in which we must think today may be found in Fanon’s writings, again illustrating the centrality of the decolonial moment to current radical thinking. In this regard, we begin from Fanon’s notion that the “real leap consists in introducing invention into existence.”33 This allows us to start from the perspective that human life and the world we live in constantly create themselves. This creation means that there is no telos. However, to bring invention into existence means that change and transformation is possible. From this stance, the leap is not a quotidian reality; it is double rupture of the normal, one which occurs and then lives on, and even when mediated, its effects linger, leaving vivid traces. It is when we forgo our moorings and search for new possibilities, not as a move to end all possibilities but to open up new paths to alternative horizons, that new thinking emerges. For critical intellectual work, the important enterprise is to recognize these moments of leap, their contingent character and the knowledges that flow from such moments. These moments are historical hinges. One element of our critical intellectual labor may consist of working through previous leaps and grappling with how historical flows form and re-form themselves to constitute power. Rodney’s pursuit of a radical intellectual practice points us in this direction and to an understanding of what can be called “effective history.” 33. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 229.

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Effective History A general feature of the period of Black Power, wherever it was found, was the preoccupation with the examination of African history. Given his academic training, Rodney was in a good position to teach African history, a subject not taught at either the secondary or university levels in the Caribbean at the time. Within the black intellectual tradition, history is a matter of much contestation. In part this resides in the fact that the Western intellectual tradition organizes its historical practices around acts of epistemic erasures about history and historical knowledge of Africa and the African diaspora. Always within the black intellectual tradition there has been an effort to rewrite historical knowledge from the stance of those who have been formally excluded. Sometimes this attempt to rewrite history follows the narrative lines of Western historiography, particularly in the ways some historical categories are deployed. On the other hand, for Rodney, historical knowledge, particularly African history, was “a weapon in our struggle” (GMB, 51). In his view, although knowledge of African history was important, it was secondary to concrete revolutionary action. Holding a different view from the black vindictionist perspective, Rodney argues that “if there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be by revolutionary means” (GMB, 51). I would suggest that, in part, Rodney’s view of history was driven by his sense that the moment of leap was possible and on the immediate horizon. Thus, all activity had to be subordinated to working for this event. Rodney ends Groundings with a musing essay on Jamaica, summarizing his experiences. He observes that the Jamaican government at the time was “terribly afraid of the question of color . . . they would much rather you talk about Communism. . . . They are afraid of that tremendous historical experience of the degradation of the black man being brought to the fore” (GMB, 61–62). He noted the ways in which the neocolonial government constructed black oppression and then ends the slim volume with reflections on his meetings with Rastafari. He writes, I got knowledge from them, real knowledge. You have to speak to Jamaican Rasta and you have to listen to him, listen and then you will hear him tell you about the Word . . . and when you get that, know you get humility, because look who you are learning from. The system says they have nothing, they are illiterates, they are the dark people of Jamaica . . . it is a miracle how these fellows live. They live and they are physically fit and have a vitality of mind . . . and they create, they are always saying things. You know that some of the

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best painters and writers have come out of the Rastafari environment. (GMB, 67–68) Rodney’s reflections signal his intellectual and political position that subaltern voices speak but they do so in languages which intellectuals needed to learn. His deployment of “the Word” is of enormous importance here. Aimé Césaire, in a 1945 essay, “Poetry and Knowledge,” makes the claim that if in the beginning was the word then increasingly the “word . . . risks appearing as an algebraic notation that makes the world intelligible.” Cé­saire then calls for “the original handling of the word [to make] a new science . . . when the study of the word will be the condition for the study of nature.”34 My own interpretation of this call suggests that language is constitutive of ideas. Thus, Rodney’s reference to “the Word” in his reflections on Rastafari is about listening to a subaltern group and learning both the new language in which they speak as well as the ideas they promulgate. This, I would suggest, is perhaps at the core of grappling with the ways that invention in our human self plays out in preludes of alternative possibilities. Rodney did not return to Jamaica after his banning until 1976, when a group of writers, artists, and journalists petitioned the government of the People’s National Party to allow him to enter the country as a visitor to a major Caribbean festival of arts. From Jamaica, in the late 1960s, he returned to Africa and then to Guyana, his native nation, when he was appointed to head the History Department at the University of Guyana. Even though his formal appointment was blocked by the Guyanese state, Rodney returned to Guyana as an independent researcher and continued his political work until he was brutally assassinated in 1980. In many ways, Rodney’s political life mirrors political currents of the times. If, in 1968, he advocated Black Power, by the mid-1970s he was an advocate of a politics of emancipation shaped by Marxism. His Marxism drew its sources from African national liberation movements, the history of radical Caribbean thought, and the black struggles in the United States. These sources gave him insights into questions about democracy, making him disagree with the ways in which regional Leninist parties operated within the Caribbean region. His murder occurred the year it became obvious that the global shift to the Right had begun its march toward the temporarily successful implementation of neoliberalism as an economic system and a set of political and social ideas. These ideas would in turn facilitate the current drive and 34. Aimé Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge,” in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism in the Caribbean, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1996), 140.

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ambition of power to finally dominate the human species in ways which we have yet to name. Conclusion Césaire, in a remarkable essay written in 1955, notes that “colonization = Thingification.”35 So did racial power. What the Black Power moment did was to frontally confront this “Thingification.” Black Power was a complex political set of ideas, of political practices, that had at its core the desire for radical equality, an equality which would transform the newly independent nations and the social structures of America. It was also internationalist. Stokely Carmichael, in his speeches to the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) conference in Cuba and the Dialectics of Liberation conference in London in 1967, proclaimed, “Black Power means that we see ourselves as part of the Third World, that we see ourselves as closely related to liberation struggles around the world.”36 This dimension of the Black Power banner was integral wherever the movement emerged. The sixties have been described by some as the period in which we might say “something was near.”37 It is that “something” which needs to be named and retrieved. However, for the former colonized and human populations under racial domination, that something was not a mystery—it was the ontological appearance of their humanness. And here the issue should not be conflated with debates about the anthropological humanism of Sartre nor the antihumanism of Foucault. Rather, the Black Power moment named a moment of rupture, the clearing of a new space in which politics began with radical speech in a language that overturned all previous political normativity. Such moments typically appear through a dramatic shift in the concatenation of forces. They are moments of historical interruption that force hegemony open. These moments are not leaps. They do not bring “invention into existence.” When the moment of historical interruption becomes the leap, then the impossible becomes the possible and the doable. I would argue that the moment of Black Power in 1968 constituted a historical interruption. As such, it did not last, but its imprint shaped the ways in which power reasserts itself and leaves poignant questions for us to think about 35. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42. 36. Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power,” republished in London Bulletin (London: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1967) 2 (September 1967): 11–16. 37. Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 173.

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today. As a moment of historical interruption, Black Power deserves our present attention, as do the life and ideas of Walter Rodney.

•  •  •  • An End to the Setting

He awakes slowly, and his hands reach for his head, trying to hold down the pain that takes over his senses. Slowly he opens his eyes and becomes aware of people in the room and his body on white sheets that cover a metal bed. He had seen these sheets and bed before, when he visited his father at the public hospital. He remembered them very well, their many folds and funny smell. But he also associated these sheets with death, with the disappearance of a loved one. Was he going to die? First it was his eyes, then, now it was his ears, and now he heard from somewhere outside of the room—from where he did not know—shouts of . . . Freedom!!! Down with police brutality!!! Down with the Babylon system!!! The shouts got louder and louder, but he could not go to them as his head kept pounding. So he sank back to the bed on white sheets, closed his eyes, and allowed the sounds to transport him. I wonder what they mean by Freedom, he thought, as he drifted back to sleep.

“Long Time”: Last Daughters and the New “New South”

Hortense J. Spillers 1 On Friday, June 29, 2007, the front page of the nation’s newspaper of record carried in bold face a four-column, two-inch headline: “Justices, Voting 5–4, Limit the Use of Race in Integration Plans.” Beneath it, the iconic alignment of Supreme Court justices (to which we’ve become accustomed) featured two rows of head shots, five of them arrayed along the top row (“The Majority”) and four of them symmetrically positioned along the bottom (“Dissent”). For good measure, the title of the right-hand column subtends the sense of drama—“A Bitter Division”—as Chief Justice John Roberts is conjoined in the victorious opinion with Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and the Bench’s youngest member, Samuel Alito, opposed by Associate Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer. But what year was this, one wondered, because a little over a half century ago, that particular lay. Linda Greenhouse, “Justices, Voting 5–4, Limit the Use of Race in Integration Plans,” New York Times, June 29, 2007, A1. boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-028  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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out would have shown an exact reversal. At that moment, May 17, 1954, Associate Justice Thomas, the fourth head shot, reading top row left, was five weeks shy of his sixth birthday, the second child of M. C. and Leola Thomas. The sole African American currently installed on the high court, and only the second in the entire two-hundred-year history of the judicial body, Thomas might have been expected to vote with the dissenters, in which case the latter would have been a dissent no longer, but we are well over such expectations by now and so much so that their fulfillment would have been an enormous shock! By now, African Americans, I suspect, have settled down into the discomfiting belief for some that whatever this conservative court majority decides, no matter what, our man from Pin Point is going to join it with the unflagging fidelity of a lunar phase. There can be little question, in my view, that the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in America’s public schools not only helped set the stage for the 1960s in the United States and the next chapter in the historical apprenticeship of Americans, especially African Americans, but also opened the way to the advent of the U.S. version of postmodernity, one achievement of which has been the instauration of the new “New South.” In this avatar of the American South, race sometimes translates as “race”; green is the color of your true love, hair and all; and local culture, dispersed into “popular culture,” is essentially rendered mute. In other words, if we remain on the surface of things, which the speed of the new information technologies insists that we do, then Atlanta looks occasionally like Manhattan, and the annual Nashville Film Festival closely resembles the one that takes place anywhere else. Eating out now means exposure to fusion and the globalization of the board, just as the landscape evinces a synonymity of corporate brands and marques from Jackson, Mississippi, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Having a pretty good caffe latte in Faulkner’s hometown tickles the imagination, and if the country were not aware that it was more unified in its tastes and assents than it was obliged by regional PR to admit, then it certainly knows it now, thanks to a triumphal neoliberalism (the captive voice of both Democratic and Republication Parties) and the pervasive architectonics of late capitalism. One might say that the sixties really ended with the Supreme Court reversing itself and the Thurgood Marshall seat, let’s call it, having painlessly slid into the places of . Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher, Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically as SD.

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the mighty, but such a conclusion calls forth a narrative, not conventionally pursued, that I would like to offer here. 2 Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher’s Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas is described as the “definitive biography of the most controversial justice on the Supreme Court” (SD, 11). Both journalists at the Washington Post, Merida and Fletcher report that their several attempts to secure an audience with Thomas were spurned, despite the urgent intervention of the justice’s friends, black and white. That the authors “worked for the Post (considered a liberal organ by many conservatives), and were black, and were interested in exploring with him the complexities of race seemed to be too unsavory a combination for [Thomas]” (SD, 11, my emphasis). Nevertheless amiable whenever he saw them in public, Thomas assured them that his refusal was “‘nothing personal’” (SD, 11). The journalists, therefore, had to rely on the witness of others—the justice’s close friends, family members, former law clerks, colleagues on the high court, as well as other court employees—in order to flesh out the public record of a career forcefully driven to national attention from early July 1991 forward. The sustained focus on the career of Thomas is little merited by the justice’s intellectual achievements, scanty enough from the point of view of his scholarship and writings, as well as his impact, or lack of it, on the demanding vocation of the highest court in the land, but no instance of African American biography is more salient or central for tracing the web of contradictions engendered by black Americans’ time-honored struggle for human rights from the end of World War II to the turn of the century. In that regard, the study of the life and career of the associate justice is both nettlesome and rewarding precisely because it simultaneously disappoints and fulfills the logic of freedom: disappointing, insofar as Thomas appears to misapprehend the moral imperatives of historic justice in the African American instance, and fulfilling in a negative sense, insofar as his constituencies have no warrant to circumscribe whatever the individual truth may be for him. The dilemma that is foregrounded as a result may be described this way: for the associate justice, the “principal problem” that he confronts is that others assume that he has no right to think the way he does because he is black (SD, 22). When asked in a television interview to parse this sentiment, the late Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, who had been chief judge emeritus of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit,

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tersely replied, “‘He’s got a right to think whatever he wants to, but he does not have a right to be free of critique’” (SD, 22). Shortly after Thomas’s confirmation hearings during the fall of 1991, in what remains the most sensational transaction of the kind in recent memory, Judge Higginbotham, the author of In the Matter of Color, penned an open letter to Thomas, dated November 29, 1991: originally published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, January 1992, this document is partially didactic in matters of law, and personal and admonitory in making certain of its claims not simply explicit but an onus of responsibility devolving on the Court’s new man. Thomas is urged here to an act of “capable imagination”: “‘You . . . must try to remember that the fundamental problems of the disadvantaged, women, minorities, and the powerless have not all been solved simply because you have ‘moved on up’ from Pin Point, Georgia, to the Supreme Court.’” Higginbotham links Thomas to the “‘visions and struggles’” of a phalanx of embattled pioneers, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman leading the line, “‘who dedicated much of their lives to create the America that made [Thomas’s] opportunities possible.’” If the sequence of affiliations outlined by Judge Higginbotham invites resentment and rebellion in Thomas when he is summoned by it, then ressentiment has performed its work quite effectively in generating an answering contempt in many black Americans. In any case, this agonizing repulsion and retortion (or back-at-you), and the controversy that to this day fires it, supplied the impulse for the writing of this book, as Merida and Fletcher describe such an “occasion” in the prologue of Supreme Discomfort. To their mind, “antipathy toward Thomas among African-Americans is wide and deep and persistent,” as “no other figure in American life [has] had the ability to spark such intense passions among blacks—if not seething anger, then the restless need to analyze him, to come up with some piece of sideline sociology to explain the vast gulf between arguably the most powerful AfricanAmerican in the land and so many members of his own race” (SD, 3–4). In plain style and occasionally colloquial accents, Merida and Fletcher pursue their subject from birth to the present, careful to amass evidence in support of their theory that the associate justice evinces “a welter of conflicting personas” (SD, 6). In short, the authors’ view of the . Higginbotham’s letter is reprinted as the lead article in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. with an introduction by Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 3–39. Quotations cited are from 15–16.

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convergence of contradictions drawn out in Thomas’s biographical profile may be pursued as an exemplary instance of narrative instability: capable of great charm, Thomas is said to express an interest in children (SD, 3), often inviting school tour groups to his offices at the Court. Well liked by the cohort of black service employees there—the cooks, the janitors, the elevator operators—Thomas allegedly “takes time to have meaningful conversations with them” (SD, 24), but he also displays a tendency “to be judgmental and inflexible,” holding himself to “high standards” as well as showing impatience with flaws and shortcomings in others (SD, 5). But within this repertory of contradictory postures, Thomas’s attitude toward “race-based” employment, or employment perceived as such, carries the marks of emergent allegory, insofar as it appears to distinguish black ideologues and conservatives of the hard Right; quite obviously the beneficiaries of civil rights struggle in the United States over decades of post-Reconstruction effort, a good deal of it waged in the context of police- and state-sanctioned violence and deliberate and malicious neglect, black conservatives choose a modus operandi that is so insistently negative that it comes to resemble a kind of delusional pathology. Thomas credits his grandfather, for example, as the “guy” who “got [him] out,” and not “‘all these people who are claiming all this leadership stuff’” (SD, 21). Doubtless, Thomas’s maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, as the “most important figure of Clarence’s life” (SD, 57), must have wielded a powerful hand in altering his grandson’s biographical trajectory, but it seems, nevertheless, a peculiar absence of imagination, or even the simple ability to synthesize, to see how things hang together in complementary fashion, for Thomas to miss the impact of 1954, say, on the elaboration of the concept of equality before the law. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater in this instance is not simply mistaken but obscene in its attempt at revisionist history. Furthermore, how Thomas reads a historical progression for himself, in reference to himself, is one thing, and how he interprets it for others is quite another: vowing not to accept any job proffered to him on the grounds of race, Thomas became “the longest-serving chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC] in the agency’s history” (SD, 6–7). The irony here is not overlooked by Merida and Fletcher, inasmuch as “the career path that led him to the most prestigious tenured position in America is one he discourages other blacks from following” (SD, 7). Some of what was already known about the associate justice is rehearsed in Supreme Discomfort but systematically named and placed within the wider context of American social practices that have done as

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much to shape and define Thomas and, indeed, African American personality, more broadly speaking, as any individual feature (as in one’s grandfather) of a “sentimental education.” According to the book’s closing chapter, “Expectations,” the Thomas syndrome, I would call it, is predicated on the very novelty of publicly empowered blackness, as well as its belatedness, although the fall 2008 presidential election—only one month away at this writing—might radically alter the script. Merida and Fletcher observe, by way of contrast, that Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, both Jewish members of the Court, follow a handful of Jewish justices, starting with Woodrow Wilson appointee Louis Brandeis, in 1916. But the Court’s “Jewish seat” may now be thought of as a kind of relic in mothballs, they point out, as no one refers to it that way. But Thomas “is not given that luxury” (SD, 374). It is just as noteworthy, however, that Justice Ginsburg, in a lecture at Brandeis University in 2001, explained her concept of law as “‘protector of the oppressed, the poor, the minority, the loner’” (SD, 373). Similarly, Justices Felix Frankfurter and Arthur Goldberg both related their understanding of the law to the heritage of the Jewish community and its passionate defense of “freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution” and a “concern for justice, for peace, for enlightenment” (SD, 374). Formed in the penumbra of official culture, the cultures of African diasporic communities are no less challenged by the historical record. But if we have learned anything about expectations since Thomas’s arrival at the Supreme Court, it is to doubt the universal efficacy of the historical record in determining individual choices. As frankly stunning as this revelation is, one is forced to accept it, which simply means that a historical sequence does not yield a transparent reading, does not flatter one’s wishes, and does not reveal itself in any comprehensive way to a single generation, to say nothing of a single voice or investigator, however commendable she might perceive her individual and collective values to be. What I have designated here as the Thomas syndrome cannot be confined to a single personality, but, rather, appears apposite to a landscape of human and social relations that have emerged in the postsixties era with the full force of paradox and contradiction—the problematic of the “black conservative.” At the same time that American race relations have assumed an enormous complexity—the cosmopolitan and multicultural ambition is no longer confined to the metropolis of the North—the critical space that Herbert Marcuse addressed several decades ago seems . Herbert Marcuse, “Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture,” Daedalus (Winter 1965): 190–207.

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to recede as a historical possibility year by year, just as the black reconstruction of American democracy, as W. E. B. Du Bois sketched it across his career, appears either hopelessly stalled or thrown well ahead into the future. The recovery of utopic possibilities, at least in its progressive configuration, would not inscribe an act of nostalgia, if we are reading through a Du Boisian lens, but would define a historical mission oriented toward the future, an orientation in time, in which case the transformation anticipated by the sixties and the postracial world that the 1954 Supreme Court ruling set in motion would instead mature. From that angle, the decade of transformation and the time that followed it could not be called a “failure” but, rather, in light of longer time, a not quite yet. We may take the South as exemplary measure here because it is on the pulse of the nerve that we have seen radical change occur in this region. Within my own lifetime, I have witnessed the social map of the region of my birth so drastically redrawn that the Memphis of my childhood and my youth and that of my nieces and nephews inscribe two dramatically different loci. That other Memphis that I remember now seems from this vantage to have been something that one might have hallucinated in certain respects. But it is within the parameters of a misprision—the distorted mirrors that official apartheid held up to its world—that change was possible, because the ideal was rendered a necessity, an opening in the chain of necessity, as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have described the concept of hegemony. But this new New South, with its collapsed racial regimes of old and its revised cultural diversity, has doubled back on a politics that does not match the progressive outlook of its expanded markets and its enlarged public sphere. This peculiar political juncture, figuratively summed up as the electoral phenomenon of the “red” states, the “blue” states, and their even stranger kin, the “purple” states, aligns with the “confused” identities that a biography like Supreme Discomfort makes visible to a public imagination that has no precedent for grasping it; that is to say, we do not know how to understand a temporal formation that is both pre– and post–civil rights. A little tale explicates it in other words: you cannot bring the international Olympic Games to your hometown if your racial protocols are retrograde, but you can throw a brick and hide the offending hand by supporting a political party that puts a majority in place on a Supreme Court that supposes to attack racism by making it impermissible to name or combat. I would regard this intersection, then, as a kind of “return” with a . W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1962).

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difference. Could we say, for that reason, that an analogy on the sixties (or something like it) lies far ahead? It was widely believed that the presidential election of 2004 would render the nation a single justice away from the reversal of Brown and, consequently, certain ethical gains of the sixties, and the conjecture proved accurate. Though it remains too early to tell what impact the 2007 ruling will exert on the nation’s school districts, it is, perhaps, not too soon to imagine that it will, in time, dampen the psychological appeal of notions of equality before the law. If Brown essentially mooted Plessy (1896), which enshrined the doctrine of “separate but equal,” then the reversal of the decision will not restore, one hopes, the late-nineteenth-century practices that legally installed “Jim Crow” for the two succeeding generations, but for sure, it will open the way to the most subtle tactics of evasion that will instigate a new norm of civic behavior; in other words, if Brown were translated into a paradigm of response that mimetically pressured all facets of social relations in American society toward greater social justice—even more effectively doing so along a general alignment of practices than for the nation’s primary and secondary schools, per se—then it is not difficult to imagine that its abdication will discourage reconstructed attitudes toward the problematics of race. From this angle, any pretext to excuse promotes a step backward, as its legality virtually assures it. The Times reported that Associate Justice Thomas, in concurring with the 2007 majority opinion, wrote that “If our history has taught us anything . . . it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.” We recognize the coded meanings embedded in “elites,” as, ironically, the term now signals in contemporary parlance the center left political persuasion and the entire repertoire of semiotic elements that the democratic voter is believed to toss off. But the “elites” for whom the associate justice and the majority are presuming to speak in their collective opinion are bearers of “racial theories” as well, now reprised from the century of Plessy. In Associate Justice Breyer’s view, the new ruling “is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.” There was, of course, no Thomas on the Taney Court, and if there had been, he’d have voted with the majority! Interestingly, Thomas, on the occasion of delivering the commencement address at the Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2004, was asked (by one of the graduates) his opinion on Brown. As Merida and Fletcher describe it, the . Greenhouse, “Justices, Voting 5–4,” A20. . Greenhouse, “Justices, Voting 5–4,” A21.

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associate justice did not answer the student’s query but “launched” instead “into an impromptu lecture” on Plessy, when he “singled out the lonely dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan” (SD, 249). For Harlan, “‘In the eye of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens. . . . There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind’” (SD, 249). In Thomas’s view, Harlan’s dissent “was a lesson in perseverance and faith in the Constitution despite widespread ridicule” (SD, 249). What Thomas admired in this case was the romantic heroism of Harlan’s lonely stance: “‘It was not reported,’” Thomas pointed out, adding, “‘There were no contemporaneous articles. No law review articles. Just one guy,’ one guy . . . whose view eventually was embraced by an entire nation” (SD, 250). The feints of a persecutory self-understanding rehearsed in this episode are nothing short of stunning: Thomas would like to imagine, fast-forward, that he is a type of the “one guy,” the crusader standing just and alone before an erring world. This quite remarkable performance of a supremely individualistic self-fashioning would suggest a biographical trend that gives the reader pause: Merida and Fletcher contend that in looking back to the time of his decision to quit the [Immaculate] Conception Seminary in northwest Missouri, where he’d studied briefly for the priesthood between 1967 and 1968, Thomas saw himself on the verge of the “‘great abyss of anger, frustration, and animosity’” (SD, 102). But that is not the end of it—Thomas compares himself to Bigger Thomas of Richard Wright’s Native Son, one of his favorite novels, in order to paint a picture of his anguish during the summer of 1968: “‘Just as Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas had been consumed by the conflagration of prejudices, stereotypes, and circumstances beyond his control and understanding, I felt myself similarly consumed’” (SD, 102). One might well wonder, though, what Bigger’s “Fate” would have amounted to, poised before a Judge Thomas at the bar of justice; readers will recall that the fictional Thomas would be consigned to fry in the electric chair for the murder of Mary Dalton, and we cannot imagine the least mitigation of discipline and punishment to be meted out by his real-life namesake, despite the alleged sympathetic identity that the associate justice might claim. That he possibly still sees himself like, or as, a self-justifying character in a novel interpolates a degree of fictional fancy running alongside a judicial career. Two little boys, watching their house on fire, travels mythemically from Richard Wright’s Black Boy to Merida and Fletcher’s Supreme Discomfort; four months after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling, Thomas enters the first grade at Haven Home School in Pin Point, Georgia, and shortly thereafter,

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“a tragedy occurred that would reshape his life” (SD, 51). Thomas’s brother Myers, attempting to light a fire in a stove, catches the curtains instead (SD, 51). Thomas verifies this account in his memoir. Recalling his excitement at the prospect of riding the bus to the black grammar school in Pin Point, Thomas portrays walking to the pick-up point with his sister Emma Mae, whom he would publicly mock and ridicule many years later. That fall “was the year when Myers and Little Richard, our cousin, burned down Sister Annie’s ramshackle house, in which we still lived.” These symptoms of narrative, so successfully mirrored and circulated by political figures, became a staple of public appeal in the first Bush administration’s campaign to win a seat for Thomas on the high court. Some of the terrible toll of that victory might be gleaned from Anita Hill’s account. But in any case, Thomas, as much as his sponsors, indulges in motives of self-narration so completely that the public tends to know him as the associate justice with a personal story rather than one who participates in the exacting demands of judicial thought and the articulatory powers that drive it. For instance, Stephen Breyer, Thomas’s seat mate on the Bench (SD, 318), is a familiar face to C-SPAN viewers, and on the occasions when I have watched him, he has been addressing, without exception, certain intricate points of law. By contrast, Thomas, when I have listened to him, appears to be obsessively taken with aspects of the personal, as it also seems to be the case that his audience is keenly moved by the autobiographical Thomas in lieu of Thomas the lawgiver. And while the autobiographical key is undeniably central to our understanding of the world and our comings and goings through it, it appears peculiarly ill-suited and self-serving as a substitute for the specific work of the courts. In short, Thomas’s auto bios graphe might legitimately inform his judicial opinions—the personal story certainly provokes the attention of literary and cultural criticism—but a wider public interest would be served by the associate justice’s adroitness at negotiating his way through such opinion and not his indebtedness to his grandfather. The personal tale does not identify a calling that is unique to the members of the Court. What counts in this instance is precisely their uniqueness—their “only-ness”—which only these nine persons can perform as the final arbiters and readers of the U.S. Constitution for generations to come. Thomas, however, mines the personal, as My Grandfather’s Son . Clarence Thomas, My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007), 6. Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically as MGS.

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attests. The early pages of the work show substantial evidence that Thomas and his editors are well acquainted with the “up from” literary motif, the hallmark of a range of narrative performances, from ex-slave accounts and the American Dream “success” tale, to the powerful writings of redemption and transformation, Richard Wright’s and Malcolm X’s among them. The ensemble of tropes that sets the reader on the road to epiphany and transcendence not only shapes the memoir but in doing so subtly intrudes an apologetic motive, designed to draw out a sympathetic response—the origins tale, the abandonment of children by the father, incompetent mothering, the frequent changes of residence, grinding hunger and poverty, the crossgenerational transmission of cruelty and abandonment, themes related to what Thomas calls “the foulest kind of urban squalor” (MGS, 6), and finally reconciliation with the father’s law. We know from myriad sources that literacy in these accounts bobs up as the salvific stroke of amazing grace that delivers the spirit from its benighted capture. In Thomas’s case, Merida and Fletcher report that Savannah’s Carnegie Library on the black side of town, where Thomas was raised by his maternal grandparents, became a central place for him, but that he gained access to the newly integrated library on Bull Street only as a teenager (SD, 1). In his memoir, Thomas makes special note of his acquaintance with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which he read at Holy Cross, and an independent study course in black novelists, completed in his senior year at the Worcester campus, when he revisited Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, both texts that he had tackled in high school. Now Wright’s work “meant even more” to him, just as Ellison’s Invisible Man “made perfect sense” (MGS, 62–63). Apparently, what Thomas extracts from Ellison reinforces certain lessons driven home by his grandfather Anderson—doing the right thing, no matter how “heterodox” (his word for it) it may be: “How could a black man be truly free if he felt obliged to act in a certain way. . . . How could blacks hope to solve their problems if they weren’t willing to tell the truth about what they thought, no matter how unpopular it might be?” (MGS, 63). The only thing about “truth” is that it is no one’s particular friend and is sharp as hell, cutting left and right. The single most important chapter of Thomas’s biography is itself a test of the truth, and that is to say, the Justice’s relationship with Hill and whether or not the sensational charges leveled against him were true; Hill’s Speaking Truth to Power, her own apologia, contextualizes the problematic . Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power (New York: Doubleday, 1997).

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of sexual harassment and the dirty little secret allegedly buried in it that nearly derailed the Thomas nomination. Like the Justice’s memoir, Hill’s narrative confirms her angle of the story, diametrically opposed to his own, both testimonies that a national audience vividly recalls with something of the voyeur’s sense of guilt. Merida and Fletcher entitle the chapter that examines the 1991 Senate Confirmation Hearings on the case “Who Lied?” Placed at the center of Supreme Discomfort, chapter 8 neatly divides the text into halves—as in a “before” and an “after”—and conducts the reader through a chronology of the events, as well as the chief players on both sides of the fray. To their credit, Merida and Fletcher do not appear to be invested in any particular outcome, do not offer an answer to the question that they pose, nor assign motives beyond the inferences that a reader might draw on her own. One suspects that we will never actually know “who lied,” and perhaps who did is quite a lot less crucial than what the episode revealed of the underbelly of power: turned up to the light, it showed the red rawness of manipulation, with the rags of protocol and the pieties of family television stripped away. For sure, the hearings engendered a sea change in the United States Senate. After having served on the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals for only fifteen months, from March 1990 to July 1991, Thomas was chosen as the successor to Justice Thurgood Marshall, who announced his retirement plans in June 1991 (SD, 169). As it turns out, Thomas’s name had actually appeared on a short list of candidates at least a year before, when William Brennan had expressed his intentions to retire in the summer of 1990. But David Souter, instead of Thomas, was tapped for the Brennan vacancy (MGA, 207). With Marshall’s retirement transpiring so soon after Thomas’s confirmation hearings for the D.C. Circuit, the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate was already familiar with his positions on school prayer and affirmative action, as well as his disagreements with civil rights leaders on various issues (SD, 167–68). Thomas was, therefore, no stranger to Senator Joseph Biden, the committee chair, and his senatorial colleagues, when the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination opened on September 10, 1991. After seventeen days of deliberations, encompassing Thomas’s testimony, the Judiciary Committee, despite a deadlocked vote, 7–7, sent the nomination to the full Senate for an up-or-down vote (SD, 180). But at that very moment, set off by the intricacies of rumor and the persistent rumble of unexplored allegations, Hill’s four-page fax, outlining charges of sexual harassment against Thomas, was wending its way to the Senate Committee (SD, 180–81).

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Having decided myself not to watch television, from about 1980 on, as a kind of one-woman protest vote against the presidential election of Ronald Reagan (and, except for watching the British royals’ most celebrated wedding in recent memory, I succeeded in doing so), I humorously remember now a fall afternoon shopping spree that season at Research Triangle Park’s Circuit City, intent on the purchase of not simply a television, but a good-sized one, in color, because my peace of mind had been quietly shattered by all the noise about the case. I gained access to local cable just in time to hear Hill’s testimony and Thomas’s rebuttal. By contrast, what unfolded was not very funny at all, but, rather, brought me into the harshest confrontation with the stark facts of the intersection of “race” and “gender” in the post–civil rights period. What I learned blew up my own “separate peace” so thoroughly that I was forced to acknowledge what, once I grasped it, I had wanted to escape: the “movement” was not only over, but had entered a hairpin curve. From that angle, Reagan’s election had not been an accident, quickly correctible, just as his vice president’s succession to Reagan’s own eight years in office signaled a lock on the national imaginary that would not soon be sprung. Among the detritus from the fallout of the years between 1979 and 1992 was the changing face of American politics that essentially destroyed public discourse; there still is such a thing in American society, but it is so mocked and mangled and distorted that it troubles the mind like a nightmare. In short, we have been harmed by those years that culminated, to my mind, in the regime of Bush II, ushered in by the very Supreme Court on which Thomas is installed, in which case night is day, and day is night, and the truth long departed. Except for Washington insiders, the American public did not know a great deal about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, if anything at all. But we would be fast learners. Selected reels play back over the mind—Hill’s calm under the grueling interrogation of Senators Specter, Simpson, and Hatch; the Coke can, the pubic hairs, the “deep throat,” “the Long Dong Silver,” and all the rest of it. But that sad moment of adolescent aspect would be rent by the enunciation of the unspeakable. On the morning of October 11, 1991, the Judiciary Committee opened the public investigation of Hill’s charges, with Thomas the first to address them. Hill’s testimony followed, beginning at 11 a.m. that day, and would run over the hours, with thirty minutes of alternating query between the Democratic and Republican members of the body. Nine hours later, with only a break for lunch, Hill was done, as she recalls: “I was exhausted, my head ached, and the pain in my side from the tumors [later discovered to be benign] was excruciating

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after sitting in one position for hours. Underneath my suit, my body was drenched with perspiration from both the tension and the pain. Emotionally, I was numb but relieved.”10 At nine o’clock that evening, an angry Thomas returned to the Caucus Room of the Senate, and at one point, eyes shuttling rapidly from left to right and back again, he would release what might as well have been an improvised explosive hurled into the midst: “The Supreme Court is not worth it. No job is worth it. I am not here for that. I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. . . . This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to have different ideas, and unless you kowtow to the old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.” (MGS, 271) Never mind that the caricature would have to come before the lynching, Thomas still imagined himself addressing the “liberals” of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and they were the ones of the “old order,” intent on destroying those “uppity blacks.” The shock that broke over the proceedings and the millions of viewers out in the land would eventually come to rest on an ineluctable outcome: Thomas’s “testimony had been well received” and the “tide of opinion was turning definitively. (The opinion polls that came out on Monday [after the Hearings] would all be tilted decisively—even lopsidedly—in [Thomas’s] favor” [MGS, 275].) Merida and Fletcher write of that riveting moment that Thomas had evoked “the starkest reminder of a racially gruesome past . . .” (SD, 191). And by simultaneously exploiting white guilt and black rage, he had “unnerv[ed] his inquisitors” (SD, 191). Thomas’s palpable anger, which struck me on the spot as tasteless theatrical overkill and therefore a transparent falsehood, did nothing to diminish the authors’ or this viewer’s sense that “what came tumbling out of his mouth was not unscripted,” as the passage cited from Thomas’s memoir demonstrates (SD, 191). On October 15, 1991, the U.S. Senate would vote to confirm the Thomas nomination, and what we are left with is the shameful and shaming conviction that that 52–48 Senate vote was induced by guilt in the majority. Whatever the polls might have declared at the time, the following fall’s national elections of four more women, one 10. Hill, Speaking Truth to Power, 196.

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of them black, to the U.S. Senate and the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter, spoke another tale. If it is true that there are several ways that one might perform “blackness,” then Merida and Fletcher contend that Thomas exemplifies the notion better than anyone: “. . . as a poor, abandoned child awed by the stern, illiterate grandfather who took him in; as a teenager wounded by teasing about his dark skin [called by his young peers “‘ABC’: America’s blackest child”]; as a confused college student who collected recordings of Malcolm X’s fiery speeches; as the darling of white conservatives who summoned the phrase high-tech lynching when his seat on the Supreme Court was about to slip away” (SD, 376). Few ironies would exceed this one: the personality who had denied the efficacy of black struggle to his own arduous climb had deployed the most heinous vision of it in a pinch. 3 As far as one can tell, no event in recent U.S. history has done more to expose the fault line in the black life-world than the Hill-Thomas controversy. Tommy Shelby penetrates to the heart of the matter in the sixth chapter of We Who Are Dark,11 when he observes that the intervention of “gendered experiences and interests” are “often wrongly seen as a divisive attempt to embarrass black men or as an imprudent move that threatens to worsen the public image of blacks” (WWAD, 227). Shelby specifically notes the “mixed reaction among black Americans, and especially black women, to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court” (WWAD, 227). Embedded in Shelby’s interrogation of the problematics of black solidarity in the turn-of-the-century world, the Hill-Thomas case is only the most poignant recent example of a historic question, raised to the nth degree of significance by the shattered homogeneity of black American life in the post–civil rights era. We Who Are Dark plants its stakes in that ground—what now is the value of “social identity and group solidarity” in light of America’s radically altered race relations on the intramural level? Fractured as much by class as gendered interests and investments, as well as by matters of sexual practice and alignment, religious faith and commitment, the African American community faces uncharted territory, as Shelby 11. Tommy Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2005), 227. Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically as WWAD.

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attempts not only to describe the emergent circumstance but also to evaluate it and put down certain critical markers for navigating through it. Shelby advances an array of arguments here with admirable clarity and patience, although the distance between the conceptual ground that he purports to traverse and what the work actually does appears to be rather considerable. For the reader with an ear for allusions, Shelby’s title offers an intriguing semantic splice of motives—on the one hand, “we who are dark,” in its poetic echo (Langston Hughes comes vividly to mind), looks forward to the ontological moves of a soliloquizing agony, while on the other, the subtitle, “the philosophical foundations of black solidarity,” seems to draw back toward the exacting horizon of a conceptual rigor, abstracted from the messy battleground of contending consciousnesses. In short, “we who are dark” is situated in the realm of reflecting mirrors. “Philosophical foundations” would know how the light is thrown to the ground. It turns out that the former, from one of two epigraphs that front the text—the other is taken from James Weldon and Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” widely regarded and beloved as black America’s “national anthem”— is excerpted from Du Bois’s 1926 “Criteria of Negro Art,” wherein Du Bois questions whether or not it is enough for black Americans to “want simply to be Americans,” as the country’s “present goals and ideals” are constituted. Toward the end of the introduction, Shelby explains that his focus on philosophical foundations “is not a search for fundamental premises that are self-evident or beyond criticism and revision . . . but a self-conscious critical engagement with basic conceptual and normative questions” (WWAD, 20). To my mind, what actually unfolds in the text is a method of reading akin to the literary/cultural theoretician’s primary stand—“close reading”— deployed against a spate of positions along the American political spectrum and in particular reference to black writing, thinking, and historicizing. In that regard, Shelby’s keen attention to the ways and means of words, and especially their symbolic resonance on a timeline of thought, inadvertently raises, by the way, the specter of competing disciplinary claims. But what makes a question “philosophical,” and how can you tell? Is it the vocabulary of the author’s choice? The selection of one bibliographical context and not another? And most crucially, what conclusions and routes to conclusion does a “philosophical” inquiry articulate that are distinctive in the entire field of critical investigation? As long as one remembers not to worry overmuch about how this work is “philosophical,” to say nothing of the relationship that it adumbrates between “applied philosophy” and “African American philosophy,” and both of these to “Western philosophi-

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cal tradition,” then he or she is poised to benefit from the quite substantial achievements of the work at hand. Unlike what seems to be, for some commentators, a too-quick rapprochement with the new orthodoxy on “race,” partially fed by “essentialist” anxiety and the postmodern desire to be “late,” Shelby does not denounce notions of black solidarity, adopted in the first instance to wage warfare against racial injustice and human cruelty. Rather, Shelby wishes to provide a “reconstruction and defense of the underlying principles of black solidarity” (WWAD, 3). The contrast that he draws between “classical black nationalism” and “pragmatic nationalism” constitutes the cornerstone of that defense, and the latter is defined early on as the key component of a revised solidary commitment. “Pragmatic nationalism” yields “the view that black solidarity is merely a contingent strategy for creating greater freedom and social equality for blacks, a pragmatic yet principled approach to achieving racial justice” (WWAD, 10). “Classical black nationalism,” read here as the urge to voluntary separation—by community and patterns of living—is, for Shelby, now indefensible, as he offers “pragmatic nationalism” “as an alternative” (WWAD, 10). In six chapters, Shelby presses the case against “identity” as a basis for group action and, as a result, exercises considerable skepticism toward “identity politics.” If the “as a people” thematic is consonant with the chords of “identity,” as it appears to be, then he objects to that, too, the formation of which poses an unnecessary and coercive burden to be ambitiously borne by individuals. It must also be said that Shelby maintains a good deal of generosity toward his “bête noire” and reaches the end of his pursuit of it in a surprising gesture of argumentative reconciliation. But saying so gets a little ahead of things: the book’s opening chapter examines the two conceptions of black nationalism, moving to the foreground the work of the radical nineteenth-century abolitionist Martin Delany. It is in this context that Shelby introduces the twin identities of classical and pragmatic nationalisms by way of “strong” (the classical version) and “weak” (the pragmatic version), which terms match up with “thick” and “thin” “blackness,” elaborated in the closing chapter of We Who Are Dark. These complementary pairs lend the text its keywords as the powerful and persistent features of black political culture from U.S. emancipation forward. Known primarily as a novelist, Delany, the political activist, is closely scrutinized here, as he is in Wilson Moses’s seminal work The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, as a significant voice in the development of African American political thought and destiny. In beginning the survey with a representative instance from

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the “golden age,” Shelby is poised to trace the critical nuances and transitions that conduct the reader on a course of study that culminates in the twentieth-century civil rights movement and its aftermath in the career of “Black Power.” The Delany that emerges here can be said to function as a paradigmatic example of a checkered pattern of nationalist response, insofar as Delany was both a militant and a pragmatist, urging, on the one hand, the creation of a modern black nation-state, to be situated on the SubSaharan African Continent (WWAD, 42), and, on the other, making a case “for a pragmatic nationalist vision” (WWAD, 43). The latter “openly rejects racial and ethnic ‘essences’ and has no need to deploy them, strategically or otherwise, in order to carry out its emancipatory aims” (WWAD, 59). But the “[p]ragmatic black political consciousness . . . does not ultimately seek the destruction of all black identities, just those that are stigmatizing, rigid, and reactionary” (WWAD, 59). In that regard, Delany’s (and ultimately Shelby’s, for that matter) pragmatic nationalism was entirely compatible with the emancipatory project. Du Bois’s “most basic political ideals” provide the fulcrum for Shelby’s second chapter—“Class, Poverty, and Shame”—which invites the reader to conceptualize Du Bois along the lines of contrastive, if not contradictory, motivations as Delany. In his cultural outlook, Du Bois, Shelby argues, was a classical nationalist, but on politics a pragmatic one (WWAD, 67). The central text examined in this chapter is Du Bois’s 1948 “Talented Tenth: Memorial Address,” which takes up the question of the specific responsibilities of black leadership; inevitably, such an inquiry leads “to the problem that intraracial class differences pose for black American solidarity” (WWAD, 85). Du Bois’s notions of a “talented tenth” are often criticized, if not excoriated, but Shelby finds sufficient room for autocriticism called for in Du Bois’s theory of the elite. Perhaps Du Bois’s own skepticism of “black leadership” as an inherent right or privilege is brought out in his view that black people of the working classes and among the urban poor must compel their leaders to “embrace and demonstrate their commitment to progressive political and economic principles of justice, not just to black cultural pride and militant rhetoric” (WWAD, 99–100; my emphasis). I emphasize “progressive” in this formulation because it is, for me, the single most missing demand, incumbent on itself and its leaders, of the black body politic. I can recall that certain black public figures, for example, supported the Thomas nomination more than a decade ago because the subject of it was black and embodied, in narrative terms, the powerful tale of personal overcoming that is so foundational to the emancipatory theme. On more

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than one occasion, however, this semiotic economy has brought the African American community to grief because it advances only half of the story. Ultimately, one has to take into account what the black person stands for, not only in what he says but also by what he actually does. This benefit of the doubt, based on the assumption that one will do the right thing because he or she is sensitive to the historical angle, has proven especially flawed and inadequate in the postsixties era, but it is also true that such calculation is itself a response to racialized perceptions of identity that have aided the dominance of Anglo-American political interests since the founding of the Republic. To my mind, one of the “common political principles that all can reasonably accept” across lines of a variegated heterogeneity (WWAD, 100) is the extent to which the leadership or would-be leadership is “committed to a progressive economic agenda that would work to the benefit of all, not just the privileged few” (WWAD, 95). If Du Bois were consistent along any axis of thought, then it was certainly this one. In chapters 3 and 4 of We Who Are Dark, Shelby elaborates in greater detail on his view of the workings of such principles in the era of Black Power and beyond. In short, in light of the radical fracturing of black life, pursuant to the confirmation of constitutional guarantees extended to African Americans between 1954 and 1965 (“the geographical dispersal of the greater black community and the residential segregation of its most disadvantaged members” [WWAD, 136]), the content of black political solidarity must be rethought “if [it] has a future in the United States” at all (WWAD, 137). At this point, the racially exclusive press for racial justice is futile, Shelby believes, because it runs the risk of “increasing an already tense racial divide and isolating [black people] from needed progressive allies” (WWAD, 137). “Organizational centrality” is no longer promising because it “would threaten the legitimate interests of women and other marginalized groups within the broader black population” (WWAD, 136–37). Consequently, the stability of the “bonds of political solidarity” would be difficult to sustain within the broader framework, now cross-cut by “divergent interests, values, and priorities” (WWAD, 136–37). What is needed in light of that, Shelby urges, is a “transinstitutional solidarity” (WWAD, 137). Even though he concedes that autonomous black institutions still have a place “within the larger social reform effort,” he maintains that this energy should be “supplemented with greater black participation in multiracial associations that are sympathetic to black political interests” (WWAD, 137). No longer defined by institutional autonomy, black political unity might now be achieved by “a joint commitment on the part of individual blacks to maintain

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solidarity with one another regardless of the racial composition of the political organizations in which each participates” (WWAD, 137–38). For the record, Shelby does not believe that pragmatic nationalism (I suppose that we could also call it strategic black nationalism) is a “group-undermining form of ‘liberal individualism,’” but, rather, that it is “the form of black political solidarity most appropriate to the twenty-first century” (WWAD, 141). The last two chapters of the book are perhaps its most challenging and contentious, because they attempt to demolish the concept of “identity” on philosophical grounds, which bases, I believe, are not alone adequate to what we need to know about this question. For the last two decades, “identity politics” has been exposed to unrelenting scrutiny by both postmodern critical investigation more generally speaking as well as Africana critique that have both come to focus on the faulty premises of the concept of “race.” But the disparity between the academic fate of the identitarian and what one might observe of its career path out in the “real world” might as well be oceanic. In other words, racial and gender identity, for example, is simultaneously muted and expressed today, depending on the stakes. Both instances of the identitarian were as if the white elephant in the room this past U.S. primary election season, for example, as Barack Obama’s presumed racial identity, or Hillary Clinton’s presumed gender identity, was sometimes remarkable, sometimes not. The onus of trying to figure out the occasion of the appropriateness of the evocation of either was analogous to being suspended a few miles above the earth on a tight rope, as we painfully recall that some of our favorite and most adroit democrats plummeted to the ground, symbolically breaking their neck. Perhaps we could say, then, with a great deal of justification that the identitarian, though it splinters its primary and secondary “existence” among the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real,12 and is rather notorious for turning up late to philosophy class, or not showing up there at all, is nothing to play with. 12. For an introductory explanation of these key terms in Lacanian studies, see The Language of Psychoanalysis, ed. J. LaPlanche and J.-B. Pontalis, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973), 439–44 on “the Symbolic”; 210 on “the imaginary.” For an explanation of “the real” (das Reale), see Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan, trans. with notes and commentary by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968); discussion of “the real” throughout Wilden’s text. On the Freudian primary and secondary processes, see LaPlanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 339–41; the argument that I pursue in “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother” is that any attempt to apply

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It is fair to note that Shelby’s “identity” tends to follow its current rhetorical and dramatic presentation as the “wayward child” of personality, though this crude formulation is my own, not his. In “Race, Culture, and Politics,” Shelby addresses identity as “one of the principal claims of black cultural nationalism” (WWAD, 162), insofar as the distinctiveness of black culture, as the nationalists would have it, is predicated on the necessity to identify with the culture. Outlining eight tenets of the cultural nationalist position (WWAD, 163–67), Shelby seems to elide “black racial identity” and “black cultural identity” (WWAD, 175), which are both read as an obligation under the auspices of black nationalist formulas: “The trouble with the position under consideration is not that blacks are not a people but rather that it does not follow that blacks have a duty to embrace black culture simply because they are racially black” (WWAD, 175). Conceding that such identification is the “birthright” of black people (a strange authority to call on, under the circumstances, I should think), Shelby argues that this birthright “does not entail that blacks cannot fully participate or find fulfillment in white culture” (WWAD, 175). Those African Americans who do not strongly identify with black people or entertain a proprietary disposition toward the culture “have no special obligation” to take it up (WWAD, 176). One is all for individuals assuming whatever postures they might like, but the problem with the discussion here and elsewhere is that the processes of identification/identity are only partially available to choice. In other words, the idea that we choose identities as a kind of costume that is taken off and put on like makeup is not especially useful. I would suggest that aspects of the psychoanalytic literature might shed some light on how we come to form the shifting, varied, and often bombarding properties of identity by which we are constituted. On the ground of the real politic, where we live our lives, certainly some fraction of identity is ascribed to us, whether we choose it or not. And certainly we might be wary of claiming that racial and cultural identities collapse on each other, as it seems to me that these asymptotic “events,” we might call them, do not necessarily share the same genealogical or etiological trace, and certainly both are, in a sense, prior to the individual moment by virtue of the very fact that we come into “worldness” the assumption of the universality of the European subject must be checked by historical context and specificity. In the essay, I am referring to a psychoanalytic critical posture that might be apposite to New World Africanity. See my Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 376–428.

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as the next bang—something preceded us. To say so does not rule out the possibility of the emergence of the “double consciousness,” or a “second birth” over and above the first one, nor is it to say that we lack the capacity to alter, even radically so, the world as we find it, but it is to insist that we take up the question of identification/identity as a problematic that wavers always between the full light of day and the half-light of fantasy. While we agree with Shelby that what is at issue concerning black political unity in the coeval period is not so much “expressive culture but the cultivation of a repertoire of economically and politically valuable skills” (WWAD, 187), we may regard the two prongs of this formulation as complementary axes, instances of a “both/and” rather than mutually exclusive attainments. To his credit, Shelby joins the conflicting issues in the final chapter of the book with great energy and generosity, two of the hallmark features of his style. In exploring his own question, “Is Pragmatic Black Solidarity (Still) Too Black?” (WWAD, 240ff), he draws the following conclusions: the struggle against racism mandates solidarity “between antiracist blacks and nonblacks,” which places a premium on “anti-racist solidarity and coalition building” (WWAD, 240). But prudence suggests that blacks “hold on to their narrower commitment to each other as well, at least for the time being” (WWAD, 240). The voice of prudence might be heeded because (1) “antiblack racial injustice,” like other forms of such injustice, “has features that make it unique as a form of racial subjection in the United States” (WWAD, 240); (2) the black experience with racism “makes it difficult for many blacks to fully trust non-blacks when it comes to fighting against racism, for they have too often been victimized by the racism of non-blacks, even by some who are racially oppressed themselves” (WWAD, 241). Other ethnoracial minority groups, with solidaristic commitments of their own, have occasionally used the latter “to exploit the economic and political disadvantages of African-Americans as a group” (WWAD, 241). Finally, (3) because the common experience of antiblack racism “has for centuries provided a firm and well-recognized basis for mutual identification and special concern among blacks,” black people “understand one another’s burdens and empathize with each other on this basis” (WWAD, 242). As African Americans form “stronger interracial forms of solidarity in our fight against social injustice, we should not underestimate or devalue the social bond among blacks” (WWAD, 242). And even if such bonding, under the program of pragmatic solidarity, is not alone enough to bring racism to an end, then at the very least it “affords blacks a limited form of collective self-defense against some of the more burdensome kinds of racial injustice” (WWAD, 242). We concur

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with Shelby in the belief that even the yield from a limited engagement, as we keep an eye on coalitional possibilities, “would be sufficient to make the effort worthwhile” (WWAD, 242). 4 If the sixties provided an instance of intergenerational disharmony, among other features of description that we may adduce, then the era can hardly be said to have been unique in that regard. But just as the global youth movement of the time bespoke the distinctive political engagement of that generation born in the shadows of Auschwitz, racial apartheid and genocide, as well as the first massive use of the atomic strike, the sixties also marked a convergence of intergenerational energies—to difference and conflict, then, may be added the notion of “cooperative antagonism” in the American case that created, at least from today’s vantage, what appears to have been a broad front of divergent interests, all homed in on an emancipatory thematic and outcome. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Black Panther Party, for instance, could at least agree on the latter, even though these same organizations, entering a common context at varying punctualities and in the generational sharpness of distinction that they each embodied, would define their respective strategies and tactics along differential lines of stress as well as constituencies. In the apparent collapse of “movement,” what we are witnessing now is the absence of a “joining thing,” in which case youth and their elders have discovered or devised no common language of engagement and critique. In fact, rumor has it that the critical disposition, no longer necessary, is itself moribund, as though it were the subject of the comings and goings of fashion rather than the lifeblood of the social order. Shelby’s We Who Are Dark attempts to overcome the vanities and blindnesses of youth and age, insofar as it implicitly addresses historical continuity in black political thought as well as the “break” in the transition to what he identifies as “hip-hop nationalism” (WWAD, 29). “The community nationalism” that had been attractive to Black Power advocates reappears in the “culture of hip hop” (WWAD, 104) at the same time that a “consensus on the aesthetic worth of hip hop is not on the horizon” (WWAD, 228). But this debate at least twenty years current is precisely the kind of topic that brings into sharp relief the very texture of contradictions that the critical posture is designed to remark— in other words, the withholding of agreement, or the refusal to put doubt in abeyance works on content, which will change and undergo metamor-

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phosis over time. For example: Shelby points out that record sales from hip-hop music have created millionaires among certain rappers overnight because corporate America has generated a “global market” for the genre (WWAD, 194). These nouveaux riches, given their erstwhile “lack of access to capital” (WWAD, 194), now fully participate in the GDP along the growth dimension in lieu of that of deficit and failure. The question that the critique would mobilize is not whether or not it is right and proper that the rappers make their millions, but, rather, what are the aims of a general economy of practice,13 certainly inclusive of economy more narrowly intended, in a democratic pluralist order? Wlad Godzich suggestively argues (in this special issue) that to continue to refer to the “sixties” as such quite simply means that we do not yet know what “‘the sixties’ were about.’” The assertion is both persuasive and shaming, insofar as giving names to things, or to “world events,” as he calls them, denotes what the thinker/writer regards as his/her prime time. Furthermore, the era fuzzes out in a Janus-like configuration—could we lay claim, in one direction, to a “long” sixties, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall proposes an expanded dating for the civil rights movement,14 that might back up as far as 1945 (the year that Western time began again and to which historians of Germany refer as “Stunde Null” or “zero hour”) and an Allied victory that announces its ascent (and consequently the English-speaking world) to the status of global leadership, with the incipient markings of what Saskia Sassen calls “global assemblages”?15 And in the other direction, could we declare a punctuation of the sixties in the resignation of Richard Nixon, or even as late as the 2007 Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation, as I have suggested here? It seems that the only certainty that we might feel justified to assert about these complex phenomena, which we cannot even 13. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 14. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–63. This informative writing argues quite persuasively that the sixties movement should be examined “in the context of a longer story” that is generated by a narrative of “multiple sources” (1235); a “truer” account of the movement—the “long” one—is predicated on the “liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s” and is intricately linked to the politics of the “New Deal” (1235). Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically as Hall. See also Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Mobilizing Memory: Broadening Our View of the Civil Rights Movement,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 27, 2001; B7–B11. 15. Saskia Sassen, Territory Authority Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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name yet, is that they persist as a historic conundrum whose spatiotemporal reach exhausts any particular and individualistic perspective. In other words, the sixties were, in fact, world transformative, though incomplete, and precisely so because the central question of the aims of a general economy of human and social practices subtended all the engagements that were peculiar to myriad local forms, expressed in the national signature: because not only can we trace the affects of the era across national borders, as well as inside them, but also their stunning similarity, despite differences of culture, language, and outlook, some of the success in doing so attributable to popular electronic media, the sixties may well name the first inkling of a new globality, in which the racialized perception of identity, for example, is systematically exposed as a massive fraud. Perhaps we may even go so far as to say that the interior violence of the sixties—the not uncommon difficulty, if not outright inability, of some members of the sixties generation to deal with the aftermath of the “movement”—may be directly ascribed to an entire repertory of more or less stable identitarian properties spinning into oscillations of instability, from national belonging to sexual alignment. We can, therefore, measure the transformative weight of the time by the size and gravity of the enormous reactionary waves that followed its wake in many parts of the world, which commotions continue to this day. The dialectic between movement and reaction not only embodies the primary stage of our political culture, but the latter, in truth, in its variegated complexion, is our only news today. At least we know this: although the U.S. movement would come to focus on the southern tier in the early phases of the civil rights struggle, it would not be confined to the region, ultimately stretching far beyond it (Hall, 1235). Moreover, despite the fact that one’s coeval awareness of the international and transnational dimensions of the “movement of movements” was itself slow to blossom, the sixties demarcate “the first global generation” in “the birth of satellite communications” and the mass consumption of television.16 An era of “firsts” in many respects, the times would generate “news” as a matter of choice, it seems, or, in other words, it was entirely possible for one to have lived the sixties selectively, according to a single focus, a concentrated desire, that would have given the impression that only the latter mattered—if, for example, one’s music was Motown rather than the “new rock music,” called the “‘first music born in the age of instant 16. Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2005), 107.

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communication,’” then the Beatles’ performance of the “first live international concert broadcast by satellite” might have been a topic of sheer indifference.17 There can be little doubt that an occurrence that we barely marked in its actual context—between 1963 and 1968, the expansion of the television news broadcast from a format of fifteen minutes to that of thirty minutes, then the shift to an hour18—might have lent the straw that broke the back of southern interposition and lawlessness. The constant bombardment of the public imagination by violent images, scrolling across television screens in living rooms, night after night, in news reports from the southern heartland, as well as the battleground of Vietnam, is not a lesson that today’s Pentagon leaders would have forgotten in severely limiting footage pertaining to military operations in Iraq and the outright prohibition on the filming of remanded military casualties. So far as American network and cable news is concerned, there is no war. Intricately associated, then, with an inquiry into the uses of the intellectual technologies of its day, the sixties staged an experiment in popular culture that proved to be not only accessible in the highest degree to the public eye, but actually dangerous in its powers of revelation and engagement: it was, perhaps, the first time that officially sanctioned violence could be witnessed, more or less firsthand, in its national and international character. Mark Kurlansky’s moving evocation of the awful massacre at Tlatelolco, Mexico City, in the fall of 1968,19 reinforces the general sense that the status of “student,” divested of its innocence, exposed the subject to the extremes of horror, that “unmaking” the world when one fears for her body, in her body, the traumas of assault; and so it was at Paris, Prague, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Oxford, Cambridge, Tokyo, New York City, Selma, Memphis, Montgomery, and a place they still call Money, among them, that the mythos of the “nation as family” came radically undone across every measure of division. And in theory and practice, it was televised, our bright new gerund that enters the lexis of American English about the year that I passed to third grade.

•  •  •  •

One afternoon that year, nearly a lustrum before Brown v. Board of Education, I crossed a major artery, running through the heart of my 17. Kurlansky, 1968, 182. 18. Kurlansky, 1968, 294–95. 19. Kurlansky, 1968, 339ff.

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neighborhood, with loud, high-spirited, boon companions, all of us wildly advancing toward home under the keen protective gaze of two safety-patrol boys, ceremoniously plumping out their bright-red semaphores either way. The memory plays with my mind, quite possibly deceives me, because that day might have occurred a few years later, when, safe on the other side of the crossing, I turned around and momentarily looked out at the traffic for reasons that I cannot recall. Two white kids on a motorcycle had sped up to the twirling banners and stopped. Perhaps all that noise had arrested me, but in any case, I am intrigued by the memory, as years, still later, I think I remember that one of the faces precisely matched photographic impressions of the figure that the world would come to recognize as Elvis Presley. That alone would have been sufficient to rack or pull the focus of the image as the scene imprinted my mind later on, but at the moment, the pair on the cycle, whoever they might have been, stood out in bold relief because it was as if they had brought the entire white world of Memphis with them to Orange Mound where we lived. No one could say that any rules had been violated, at the same time that it was true that the presence of white people in black neighborhoods (and most assuredly vice versa) was not an altogether common occurrence. The unwritten social text, reinforced by police power, had made provisions for the exceptional—you were either selling something on the one hand, or working for someone in another neighborhood on the other. Under urban conditions, we were not isolated, yet nevertheless a white face bore the marks of a stranger, dictated by demography, aided by class, and custom in conformity with fear. The races converged downtown on Main Street and dispersed—like bubbles of oil exploding in liquid—to coordinates precisely defined by race. On the day in question, not even the adults suspected, I believe, that we were living through the swan song of the New South. There is a paradox here that still riddles the descriptive powers: some accounts of the southern black life-world in the United States prior to the 1960s paint a picture that one does not quite recognize. For all the useful, subtly crafted information provided by this study, for example, the author’s summation of black life in the context of cold war culture seems to run aground: Public facilities were segregated. Concerning education, southerners saved money at the black schools, which often were shacks where teachers made about a third of white counterparts. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, officials spent $179 on every white stu-

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dent in 1950 and $43 on each black one. . . . The few blacks who remained in school and graduated faced the same situation in higher education. By Texas law, three-fourths of federal land grant funds were spent at white Texas A&M while a quarter went to Pairie View A&M. This was the South’s interpretation of “separate but equal.”20 Certainly Anderson’s observations are not wrong in a general sense, or else U.S. history from around 1876–1964 would have been radically different, but they do urgently contravene the nuances of dailiness that southern black life sustained, as far as I can tell. Even though I would claim neither exceptionalism nor representability in this matter, I still cannot imagine what “the few blacks who remained in school and graduated” means, when, according to my own family archives, high school and college year books, stretching from 1945–1960, representing two out of six black high schools in the city of Memphis at the time and two black colleges in the cluster of institutions that belong to the United Negro College Fund today, would all suggest that several hundred subjects were granted diplomas and the baccalaureate degree during the era. My oldest sibling went off to college in 1945, graduated in 1949, pursued graduate and professional training afterward, and was followed in the early fifties by the two middle children. So how many are “few”? Schools as shacks? Didn’t see a one, to say nothing of “often.” Shotgun houses—yes, but the people owned them, occasionally built them, as did my maternal grandfather, who, making a wedding gift for his daughter and her groom, constructed the house, still standing eight decades later, in which I was born. The paradox, then, is that for all its badness and terror of conception and execution, segregated life, designed to maim and destroy, was, in practice, a complicated instrument of fine-tuning, of the pursuit, for all that, of historical possibility, of the imperatives of humanitas, bleeding through the airtight fire walls of southern cruelty and inhumanity, as the pluriform fabric of narratives that make it up shows the most tensile resilience and resistance. It was not meant to be that way, we know, but the sixties were partially enabled by an error in the “design,” the kinks, which could not have been anticipated and closed off, mucking up the machinery, and by subjects who might take that $43 and double its energy. Another name for this crisis of representation and nomination is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, or the prophetic face of ministry 20. Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 26.

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and engagement to which historical tradition Martin Luther King Jr., among others, could well lay claim. In my junior or senior year in high school, I sat in English class one morning and simply, brazenly stared at a middleaged gentleman who had come down to Memphis from Haverford College, recruiting students, because a classmate of mine from across town had gone off the charts on the math SATs. Recruiters from the University of Oregon would also come sometime in search of linebackers, but the athletic men had had to compete for the time of day with the messengers from Case-Western Reserve and MIT because of those fellows with the outrageous math and physics scores. In these cases, it seems that those fortythree pitiful bucks, not to justify the disparity, made a fair yield. From the point of view of segregation’s social engineers, the beauty of these arrangements inhered in their quite awesome psychological reserves as much as their economic afflictions—the power to instigate in black people the belief that their culture, their institutions, their communities, and the products of their hands and minds were naturally and inherently and sempiternally inferior; but somehow the sense of deficit was not wholly internalized and appeared at times to have been abstracted as some alien property that one could simply look at, having little to do with herself. The deficient sense was always shadowed (and vice versa) by something else, and that is to say, the prideful, often visible evidence of a spirited and lived collectivity; one’s first human contacts were varied and complete. The doctor, the postman, the football coach, the practical nurse, the teacher and preacher, the sleeping-car porter and industrial laborer often lived down the block from the wino, the husbandless mother of three children, each one with a different dad, the gambler, the ragman, and the shell-shocked old WWI veteran who talked and laughed out loud to himself—long before cell phones would make such an act performed in public ambiguous in meaning. In other words, the black community of my childhood, drawn together by bonds that were not then even understood as sympathetic, as well as coerced, was ripe for the kind of intervention that Tommie Shelby describes as a “geographical dispersal”21 and with it the dialectical engagement that had rendered the post-Plessy world at once impenetrable and defenseless for that very reason. We might call the interruption that Brown intruded a prelude to the sixties, when black community forces open the public sphere, 21. See my analysis of a “demographic dispersal” in “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post Date,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays in American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 428–70.

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starting with the capitalist order’s most vital resource (whether it knows it or not)—and that is the advent of the future in the education of the young. If we take the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 decision as a social paradigm shift, then it is clear that the break that it effects with the national past is momentous all the way down, even though it would not reconfigure the Memphis city schools, for example, or redirect the school system’s ways and means of resource allocation and teacher/pupil placement at all—would not touch it—for at least the next decade and a half. But most immediately, even precipitously, it demolished the psychological impacts of a legally sanctioned racial code that was as responsible as any other factor for a regional culture that had come to a dramatic halt. It is rarely noted, but should be as often as possible, that segregation’s social, spiritual, mental, and material arrangements impelled human underdevelopment right across the racial divide, and perhaps most shockingly, stunted the mind of white children even more effectively in certain respects than the black young, given that the instruments of cultural measure in white communities tend to concentrate in material gain. In any case, I would regard Brown as a kind of crossing of the Rubicon in an American application—for the first time in my short life, either on the basis of what little I had experienced then or had even heard tell of, the U.S. Supreme Court, so inimical in its long history to the legal personality of African American juridical subjects, had handed down a ruling that would conform in spirit to Associate Justice Ginsburg’s view of the law—“‘protector of the oppressed, the poor, the minority, the loner.’” Whatever the justices themselves might have thought they meant—after all, the ruling had allowed for at least a bit of wiggle room in calling for school “desegregation” (a new term at the time) “with all deliberate speed”—the black and white South understood perfectly well that it marked, in theory, a latter-day emancipation. The very next year, in refusing to relinquish her seat in the “whites only” passenger section of a Montgomery bus, Mrs. Rosa Parks might not have been thinking about Brown, but both the superb act of civil disobedience and the courageous 1954 Supreme Court ruling may be regarded as the cornerstone of the modern civil rights movement that launched the defining moments of the following decades. In effect, these events touched off a kind of mimetic social logic that would, in turn, effect an exact reversal of great expectations in the South’s symbolic pairing. I believe that the new New South and its still irreconcilable racial resentment were engendered the very day that the Warren Court ruled on Brown so that by the moment that Richard Nixon tossed his hat in

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the big political ring for the second time, the white South, solidly democratic since the close of Reconstruction and in light of the massive and unconstitutional disenfranchisement of the black ballot, was trending Republican. But it was no longer the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation, nor would it be again right across the threshold of the twenty-first century. Hall argues that the well-defined, well-financed countermovement to the sixties “arose in tandem with the civil rights offensive in the aftermath of World War II and culminated under the aegis of the New Right” (Hall, 1235). For all intents and purposes, the New Right not only inhabits the national Republican Party but can justly be said to have implemented its ideological capture and allegiance. The most distinctive feature of New Right orthodoxy—instaurated by “an alliance of corporate power brokers, old-style conservative intellectuals, and ‘neo-conservatives’ (disillusioned liberals and socialists turned Cold War hawks)” (Hall, 1237)—eschews racism quite adroitly, which robs the antiracist movement of its most immediate target, as it, ironically, stages the New Right “as the true inheritor of the civil rights legacy” (Hall, 1237). The trick of this political performance—inasmuch as it genuinely defines and delimits political culture as a “theater” of deftly expressed lines and moves—embodies the nightmare of the nation’s progressive forces precisely because it has not managed so much to turn the civil and human rights agenda upside down, but, rather, because it primarily succeeds in mimicking the rhetorical costumes of the Left (to wit, Ward Connally’s California “Civil Rights Initiative”) and delinks particular motivations from their broader social and political context. Hall’s analysis of the outcome is gracefully apposite to our moment: Reworking [the civil rights] narrative for their own purposes, these new “color blind conservatives” ignored the complexity and dynamism of the movement, its growing focus on structural inequality, and its “radical reconstruction” goals. Instead, they insisted that color blindness—defined as the elimination of racial classifications and the establishment of formal equality before the law—was the movement’s singular objective, the principle for which King and the Brown decision, in particular, stood. (Hall, 1237, my emphasis) Admitting that racism once existed, “‘in the distant past’” (Hall, 1237), Hall mocks, the New Right today swings with antiracist aims, as one of its principal achievements, which morphs into a brand new face, is the fostering of a (perhaps) growing cadre of the black New Right, of which Associate

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Justice Thomas is a certified member, in excellent standing, of this informal political alignment. The most visible elaboration of New Right performance may be observed in the advent of commercial “talk Radio” and the proliferation of cable television in the wake of Ted Turner’s genial invention—the twenty-four-hour news cycle by way of CNN. The emphasis on “commercial” in the current juncture is right, inasmuch as the all-controlling commercial interest is the more felicitous twin of a schizophrenic national landscape in the embarrassing gyrations of political meltdown: The Democrats look rather like the Republicans—even assuring them and the nation at large that the 2006 congressional elections were essentially harmless, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi, almost on the very first day of assuming the office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, puzzlingly, stupidly asserted that “impeachment [was] off the table”—and the Republicans subsist in stunning implosion mode. The current election cycle has taken far too long, cost far too much money, has surrendered to far too much celebrity “brown-nosing,” as the polls shoot up and down and back again. Americans might well be worried that our politics as spectacle has rendered coeval U.S. political culture the most gravely unserious field of play in its entire history and probably the most ludic and ludicrous on the globe, given the nation’s standing in the world. But perhaps it is also true that there is not an ensemble of consumers happier on earth today than Americans, who, just prior to the earthquake that struck our financial markets this past September, really did rejoice in the maxim “shop ’til you drop.” Having bought the politicians outright, “mavericks” and “first” this, that, and the other included, the commercial interest has ushered in a new prosperity in the South, fuelled primarily by the region’s reconstructed racial code; black people who occupy the middle and upper classes might enjoy unprecedented freedoms as a result, since their participation in civic and corporate-run culture is no longer challenged. New patterns of immigration have done their work by fracturing the old symbolicity of “black” and “white,” scattering the racial focus into multiple niche markets on the one hand and eviscerating the concept of race itself on the other, except that the latter can be felt to be lurking at all times just beneath the glittering new surface of the order of things. But these gains have been partially offset by trend lines that would check one’s already modest optimism—among them, suburban growth, several decades old by now, encouraged in the first place by “white flight” from the inner cities and hustled on by cheap petrol (getting scarce and not so cheap), and the American superhighway, which cluster of motivations has, in turn, promoted not only the collapse of the nation’s

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public schools, but also essentially gutted the very notion of the common school and public education itself. Is it true that some of the nation’s largest cities, once they have been evacuated of their wealth and no longer all that fit to live in, can then be turned over to minoritarian leadership? As usual, there are parables all around us, but it takes awhile to decipher them: the motto of Atlanta, Georgia, perhaps the capital city of the new New South, seems to inspire reprised boosterism all over the southern tier, from the Mason-Dixon to the Florida Keys. “The city too busy to hate” has buried the memory of Lester Maddox, with his silly pickaxe handles, in formaldehyde and gets on with the frenetic business at hand—“growth,” speed, glamour, “profiling,” entertainment. With traffic patterns as atrocious as anything one has witnessed in Chicago or Philadelphia or Boston and housing prices soaring out of reach for most until the latest bubble deflation, Atlanta looks two ways—toward its crucial civil rights inheritance and to its fairly recent brouhaha over the Confederate flag. Now host to one of the world’s busiest airports, renamed in honor of the late mayor Maynard Jackson, figurative legatee to the Coca-Cola fortune, inherited by Emory University, and site of the first black-woman-big-city mayoralty in the history of the United States, democratic Atlanta—just as democratic Nashville by the “red” of the state of Tennessee—is surrounded by white Republican Georgia. This outfit, spearheaded by one Senator Saxby Chambliss, brought us the unsurpassed nastiness of a political campaign during the 2002 election season, when the countenance of democratic Senator Max Cleland (who lost the race that year to Mr. Chambliss) was translated into a well-known still shot of a supposed Osama bin Laden. My beloved old neighborhood rots in decline, along with other black districts in the city of Memphis, under the watch of black leadership for the last two decades, and the beat of unbridled greed and expansion in the rising pulse rate of global warming goes on. But while we dance, there comes the gnawing sensation that the structural inequalities, which King was on the verge of addressing on the eve of his assassination and which solution the sixties did not finish before they were transmuted into the pabulum of an unprincipled political reaction, still persist in the most obscene parallelism we might imagine to an economy so developed and rich that even its deficit is counted in the trillions. What clouds over the clarity of new new southern realities is supplemented by the commemorative gesture itself. Adolph Reed pauses over the seductive politics of memory and invites us to do so with him, as he observes “that even elites in the Mississippi Delta, down to the level of the Cotton

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Museum in Lake Providence, LA, and the blues museums that dot every hamlet on US 61 in Mississippi between Greenville and Memphis, have come to appreciate the political and commercial benefits of multicultural celebration and even civil rights heritage tourism, without destabilizing the underlying relations of racialized subordination.”22 We well know now that the sixties agenda, only partially achieved, is not at all moribund, as some have argued, nor should we count the period as a “failure,” but, rather, think of it as the mantle of a radical and progressive democratic initiative to be recovered. In order to do so without the cynicism of the aging, we would have to take the humbler view of the “long time”: as the last child born to my parents, well after the close of the Great Depression and within earshot of the Yalta Conference, I used to think that it was very funny that my maternal grandfather marveled that so many years had passed between my birth and that of the family’s first daughter, between my birth and that of the last son; for all that, he laughed and called me “Long Time.” So it goes down like that: long after the sixties, we are there again, with our best hopes fixed on the historical possibility and the future, coming on.

22. Adolph Reed Jr., “Where Obamaism Seems to Be Going,” available at blackagenda report.com; July 22, 2008, 3 of 105.

The End of the Sixties

Christopher Connery Periodization enables the imagination of an ending—the end of the bad times, the end of the systemic monolithicity to which the word glacial used to be applied, before glacial became synonymous with the evanescent and fragile. There is also a productive anticipatory dimension in positing a variety of emergences or epochalisms, present or past. Here I take some inspiration from German Democratic Republic historian Jürgen Kuczynski—who late in life, after German reunification, published Asche für Phönix: Aufsteig, Untergang, und Wiederkehr neuer Gesellschaftsordnungen (Phoenix in the ashes: the rise, fall, and return of new social orders), three linked essays on the transitions from antiquity to feudalism, feudalism to capitalism, and capitalism to socialism. Kuczynski, who had earlier described himself as a “dissident loyal to the Party line,” saw in the events of 1989 not the end of socialism but a point in what might one day prove to be a longer transition than we can now imagine, reminding us that social and systemic transformations commonly proceed by false starts, reversals, Thanks to Antonis Balasopoulos, Alberto Toscano, Lin Chun, Gail Hershatter, Wang Hui, Bali Sahota, Tim Brennan, and others who commented on versions of this essay. boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-029  © 2009 by Duke University Press

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and deviations before finally establishing themselves. What distinguishes many revolutionary epochs (the English seventeenth century, the 1840s, the late teens and twenties) and the global sixties—and I take that expansive view of the sixties as the global explosion of world making lasting from the midfifties through the midseventies, including decolonization and national liberation struggles; anticapitalist antisystemic revolt; counterculture in the overdeveloped world; and new political energies in the socialist world, from the Cultural Revolution to the Prague Spring—is the foregrounding of new time, a time toward futurity. At stake in thinking the global sixties—and the global reaction that sought, and still seeks, to contain, erase, combat, or deny the sixties—is futurity itself. How, then, to approach the sixties from within this particularly dark and deep ontological hole, distinguished above all by the relative absence of futurity as a structuring element in the political or cultural imagination. Many of us in education know the generally bleak or apocalyptic view of future times that our students hold. As Francis Fukuyama and others have intuited, the end of history and the end of futurity are twinned, and our access to the politics of sixties temporality is necessarily a difficult one. One can imagine a different orientation toward one’s past and present. Four hundred years from now, by which time one can predict with near certainty that capitalism will be no more, might it be that, humans having awakened from the nightmare of history, historical thinking itself will be no more, and that all of the present’s recent history—the cold war, the 1960s, revolution, and reaction—will rest nowhere in the minds of women and men; that thinking will have, as perhaps it should, some new relationship to time? Wishful thinking; but as long as some version of historical thought survives, it’s likely that our current period will have joined the ranks of dead time, interregna, “transitions,” or ghostly returns—the wreckage upon wreckage (Trümmer auf Trümmer) of years of no significance. For surely this sense of the present time animates some of the current interest in eventfulness— . Jürgen Kuczynski, Asche fur Phönix: Aufsteig, Untergang, und Wiederkehr neuer Gesellschaftsordnungen: Eine Vergleichende Studie zu Feudalismus, Kapitalismus, und “Realen Sozialismus” [Phoenix in the ashes: The rise, fall and return of new social oders: A comparative study of capitalism, feudalism, and “real socialism”] (Cologne: PapyRossa Verlag, 1992). The “dissident loyal to the Party line” is the title of his memoirs: Ein linientreuer Dissident: Memoiren, 1945–1989 (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1992). A useful book on the sixties very much in this spirit, from which I learned of Kuczynski’s work on periodization, is Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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this sense that nothing is happening, that depoliticization is our period’s dominant. While it would be foolish to ignore the failures and defeats of the sixties, we must recognize the political stakes in a linear historical continuum wherein the sixties future is simply the present. Thinking current depoliticization as the outcome or result of that past—and judgments of the period from Regis Debray to Richard Perlstein’s Nixonland support that understanding—is profoundly antagonistic to that period’s politics of temporality. Perhaps a different engagement with the end of the sixties, with the time of things turning into their opposites, is a necessary step in a reconsideration of a politics of futurity in a period when that absence characterizes today’s politics or lack of politics. Perry Anderson’s essay “The Ends of History,” a consideration of posthistoire discourse centered on Fukuyama, holds that the only convincing response to Fukuyama’s strong argument of neoliberal triumph is to insist on the continued relevance of the socialist project— for its necessity, given the unsustainable social and ecological trend lines within the current order. A broader mobilization of that project—whatever name it is given—will depend on a future-directed temporal politics. Here the sixties can be of use. For futurity is ripe for reclaiming: its most recent hegemons—millenarian religionists, who, in D. H. Lawrence’s words, lust after the end of the world, and the financialists, who have been riding the derivatives markets—are finding themselves washed up on the strange and only vaguely intuited shores of present time. But the commitment to futurity demands a sober and an imaginative understanding of futurity’s own historical vagaries. I want here to consider the trajectory of the sixties alongside the cold war trajectory of Sino-Soviet rivalry and the attendant U.S.-Chinese rapprochement, with a coda on the mainstreaming and commercialization of U.S. counterculture, and conservative reactions to that mainstreaming, as the period ended in the United States. An examination of the dynamics of these two periods of transition, where “the sixties” in China and the United States turned into something else, might provide broader insight into the sixties and its relation to our current period. The dominant descriptor of our era—“globalization”—primarily sig. Regis Debray, Modeste contribution aux discours et cérémonies officielles du dixième anniversaire [de mai 68] (Paris: F. Maspero, 1978). A shortened version of this text was published in English as “A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary,” New Left Review I/115 (May–June 1979): 45–65. . In Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (New York: Verso, 1992), 279–376.

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nifies the end of the cold war and the removal of all barriers to neoliberal capitalist expansion. While resistance to globalization—in the new social movements or in various strategies of de-linking—has been a common oppositional “political” position in recent years, the concept of globalization itself is generally considered a mark of the postpolitical. If globalization’s discursive and conceptual emergence indeed depended on the end of the cold war and its geopolitical and ideological rivalries, how should we gauge the relationship of the cold war to trajectories of politicization and depoliticization? How did the course of the cold war itself contribute to the era of postpolitics that is said to have commenced upon its end? The global sixties—cutting across the temporality of the cold war—was an irruption of the political, in the first, second, and third worlds. Sixties movements affected the course and character of great power rivalry, and complicated the binary logic of U.S. cold war strategy, and the relationship of these movements to the cold war—temporally, historiographically, ideologically, politically— is antagonistic and disjunctive. The sixties ended fifteen years before the cold war finally did. The depoliticizing tendencies that ended the sixties—in China, Eastern Europe, the overdeveloped world, and elsewhere—were linked in a variety of ways to the cold war dynamic. It may prove to be the case that the cold war was not simply, as some critics have claimed, an aberrant distortion of the scene of the political but a central component of a more sustained process of depoliticization, whose logic has in the post1990 period assumed a more pure form. The epochalist view of 1989/90 that sees in the end of the Soviet Union an opening of new space for new oppositional subjectivities, new forms of the political, new globe-wide political strategies, then, acquires a different character when viewed in relation to the cold war context of the end of the sixties. Considered through the lens of depoliticization, 1989/90 is an accelerant, not a pivotal point. The claim that 1989/90 was the postwar period’s significant epochal shift generally tends to underplay the importance of, and even the global character of, the 1960s, a de-emphasis we might want to resist, given the antagonism to the sixties—and to its sense of politics—that still animates dominant power in nearly all parts of the world. Three Worlds Industrial capitalism brought speed to the world and to politics. And although Walter Benjamin likened the revolution to putting a brake on the rapidly speeding engine of capitalist development, few twentieth-century

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revolutionaries thought in terms other than celerity. Central to the Bolshevik Revolution’s dynamic, as Žižek and others have reminded us, was acceleration, a seizing of the time. Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev all spoke this language of celerity: Soviet development, for a variety of reasons, had to be rapid. Mao, too, spoke the language of speed, and although official Chinese discourse had considerable space for the longue durée, a language of stage-skipping and immediatist development animated Mao’s vision of the future. This temporality was especially salient in third worldism. As Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah wrote, The dependent territories are backward in education, in agriculture, and in industry. The economic independence that should follow and maintain political independence demands every effort from the people, a total mobilization of brain and manpower resources. What other countries have taken three hundred years or more to achieve, a once dependent territory must try to accomplish in a generation if it is to survive. Unless it is, as it were, “jet-propelled,” it will lag behind and thus risk everything for which it has fought. The rise of third world liberation movements was at the heart of the sixties global conjuncture. Third world revolution, in its practice and in the writings of thinkers such as Che Guevara, Amílcar Cabral, and Mao, brought into revolutionary discourse a range of thought on the conscious transformation of everyday life, expanding the field of revolutionary imagination. Although Moscow was a key presence in revolutionary movements worldwide throughout the period, the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had brought into the world a new model and a new dynamic for revolutionary transformation, one with great appeal to third world and anticolonial struggles. Indeed, in its identification of the third world with the proletariat, and in identifying itself with the third world, China elevated the third world to a vanguard position in revolutionary historical character. Moscow, too, saw in the rise of third world movements considerable justification for its view of accelerated historical dynamics. As I will discuss below, deterio. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Nelson Press, 1957), x. . In 1974, Mao, in an interview with Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, gave his own version of the three worlds, with the United States and the USSR occupying the first world, “middle elements” of Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia in the second world, and all other Asian and African countries in the third world. By this time, he had already sought rapprochement with the United States.

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rating relations with China moved the Soviet Union much closer to a third worldist orientation than it may have otherwise taken. But even in the days of closest Sino-Soviet solidarity, Moscow, too, appreciated the epochalist emergence of the liberation movements. Still, the thirdness of the third world complicated cold war binary logic. This took most salient form with the Sino-Soviet split. The appearance worldwide of Maoist organizations, parties, and movements challenged Moscow’s unquestioned global authority within communist or socialist movements and parties, and revived focus, in a variety of contexts, including in the Soviet Union itself, on questions of revolutionary identity and revolutionary practice. At certain periods and in certain areas, Moscowidentified communist parties suffered loss of prestige. In the Indian and the Filipino sixties, for example, revolutionary momentum shifted to those parties identified with Beijing, or with cultural revolution in general. Even in Cuba, which publicly affirmed its solidarity with Moscow, there was much favorable discussion of China, as well as protestations of the distinctiveness of the Cuban path. The Sino-Soviet split, as I will argue throughout this essay, had a double dimension: it had consequences that were disastrous for China and the Soviet Union, for socialism in general, and especially for many third world liberation movements. Yet it was also a locus and stimulus of repoliticization worldwide, even within the Soviet Union, producing a wide range of theoretical, political, social, and strategic advances. It contributed to the end of the cold war on terms unfavorable to socialism, formed the precondition for the emergence of capitalist globalization, but was also central to the real political explosion that characterized the period. Although my work and a small number of other writings on the sixties centers the period dynamic on the third world, most academic discussions of the “global” sixties center on Europe and the United States. Less commonly connected in an integral way to the period’s logic are the transforma. Tomás Diez Acosta, October 1962: The “Missile” Crisis as Seen from Cuba, trans. Steve Clark and Mary Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2002). . See, for example, Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007). For a third world–centered history of the cold war that draws extensively on recently available Soviet archives, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Christopher Connery, “The World Sixties,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, ed. Rob Wilson and Christopher Connery (Santa Cruz and Berkeley, Calif.: New Pacific Press/North Atlantic Press, 2007), 77–108.

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tions within the Soviet bloc. Prague Spring in 1968 and the Polish strikes of 1980/1981, to say nothing of earlier workers’ movements in Poland and Hungary, are now commonly seen as harbingers of 1989/1990. Yet it was once fairly common to view the Prague Spring as a revolutionary moment within socialism. Georg Lukács wrote Demokratisierung Heute und Morgen (translated as The Process of Democratization) in the autumn of 1968, in response to the Prague Spring and to the student movements worldwide of that year. It was a call for a renewal of Marxism, beginning with theoretical work, which would constitute a way forward founded on the irruption of social praxis attendant on the long and differentially incomplete process of de-Stalinization. Lukács analyzed socialist society as having “objectively demolished and made impossible any exploitation of man by man, but developed in such an economic and social manner that its political structure was not capable—not yet—of calling socialist democracy into being. Socialist society has not politically empowered socialist man.” Lukács’s exhortation to put politics in command—a repoliticization of the disaffected and dispirited masses—referred primarily to the liveliness of subterranean political culture in the Soviet Union and in aboveground efforts such as the Dubček reforms, but was also based, as the passage above indicates, on the material conditions for deliverance from the bureaucratogenic strictures of the economic as such.10 The social ontological project that is at the center of this work, and of his other late, unfinished project, The Ontology of Social Forms, revolves precisely around the question of revolutionary or socialist social being. Lukács had the inattentiveness to actually existing China that one might expect from his formation, but the politics of the Demokratisierung essays are clear calls for a mass line, taking some formal and organizational inspiration from the soviets (workers councils), but in a form adequate to the new historical stage. In its reexamination of the properly differentiated spheres of party and state, it was a call, effectively, for the end of the party-state, for the emergence of new extraparty forms, for theoretical renovation. It was a call for Cultural Revolution. This irruption of the political that came to fruition in the global sixties alarmed the capitalist hegemons. U.S. policy in the third world was uni. See Wlad Godzich’s essay in this issue for a more nuanced take on this historical trajectory. . Georg Lukács, The Process of Democratization, trans. Susanne Bernhardt and Norman Levine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 153–54. The book appeared in Hungary and East Germany briefly in 1986 before being confiscated. 10. See Boris Kagarlitsky’s essay in this issue.

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formly hostile to the liberation movements, viewing all such developments through the lens of cold war anticommunism. This had not been the initial U.S. position. Sukarno’s move against Indonesian communists in 1948 led U.S. policy makers to imagine that an anticolonial nationalism favorable to U.S. interests could be a workable worldwide model for the postcolonial period. Reacting to many domestic critics who opposed U.S. aid to the decolonization effort, NSC 51 (March 1949) stated that that position has its roots in ideological negativism. Now the essence of our struggle with the USSR is ideological. And the crucial issue in Southeast Asia is clear-cut—colonial imperialism vs. militant nationalism. In such circumstances to attempt evasion of an obvious ideological issue is (1) objectively, to yield much of the field of conflict to our adversaries, and (2) subjectively, to subvert our own ideological integrity—that is, to deny subconsciously the heritage and philosophic concepts which are inner reasons that we are, for all our shortcomings, not only great but good, and therefore a dynamic force in the mind of the world.11 These ideological and philosophical fronts would not be sustained: the dominant formula from the Carter period through the Clinton-Bush years— that the ideological and philosophical center of the Western world could be expressed in something as simple as elections—was not as apparent at the dawn of the cold war. There were good reasons for this: the confidence in elections as engines of social regression had not yet matured, and the Truman administration feared the electoral triumph of communists in Europe and elsewhere. In fact, Sukarno gave very temporary hope that decolonization would produce more sympathetic new national regimes than would electoral democracy in the European heartland. But the Chinese revolution, and a growing fear of communism in the Eisenhower years, strengthened the more long-term U.S. geopolitical strategy that distrusted leftism of any kind. Mohammed Mossadeq, Iranian anticommunist nationalist, had much in common with Sukarno in 1948. But 1953 was already far from 1948, so Mossadeq fell to cold war U.S. adventurism. Modernization theory—the temporality that posed itself against revolutionary futurity—filled in the ideological void and became the discourse of U.S. universalism in the cold war years. Walt Whitman Rostow, whose Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) remained 11. Quoted in Westad, The Global Cold War, 113.

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the bible for modernization theorists until that effort’s final collapse, had in the midfifties surveyed the world scene and written, We are in the midst of a great world revolution. For centuries the bulk of the world’s population has been politically inert. Outside America and Western Europe, and even in parts of the latter, until recently the pattern of society remained essentially fixed in the mould of lowproductivity rural life centered on isolated villages. The possibility of change for most people seemed remote. . . . Today, unfortunately, the danger is that increasing numbers of people will become convinced that their new aspirations can be realized only through violent change and the renunciation of democratic institutions. The danger . . . is greatly increased by the existence of Communism—not because of any authentic attractions in its ideology but because the Communists have recognized their opportunities to exploit the revolution of rising expectations by picturing communism as the road to social opportunity or economic improvement or individual dignity and achievement of national self-respect.12 The perception of American ideological weakness—that strange sense of vulnerability revealed in the writing of all U.S. cold warriors, despite overwhelming U.S. strategic superiority—is here given succinct form: the fear of politics itself. Although Rostow views politics wholly through the lens of material development, it is the political awakening of the third world that produces the need for capitalist ideological coherence. In articulating this fear that overwhelming military and strategic superiority might not compensate for ideological weakness, Rostow and his fellow cold warriors seem close to 1950s Mao, famously contemptuous of the nuclear near-monopoly held by the world’s paper tiger. Politics, Geopolitics, and the Sino-Soviet Split The development of a party into a State reacts upon the party and requires of it a continuous reorganization and development, just as the development of the party and State into a conception of the world, i.e. into a total and molecular (individual) transformation of ways of thinking and acting, reacts upon the State and the party, 12. Max F. Millikan and Walt Whitman Rostow, A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 2–9.

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compelling them to reorganize continually and confronting them with new and original problems to solve. —Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Mao and others in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership judged, in the first decade of the PRC, that the socialist world possessed global historical/political momentum. There were objective reasons to find this so, within the socialist world and, in consideration of the liberation movements, worldwide. Post-Stalin, early-Khrushchev enthusiasm for socialist construction was also palpable throughout the USSR’s technical, productive, and administrative sectors, and the emergence of the PRC contributed to Soviet optimism in significant ways. This emergence raised issues in the ideological sphere. If the socialist world possessed the political momentum, what would the character of those politics be? This was the question throughout the fifties and sixties, and it was posed at different levels of intensity, and at different political/social levels, in the Soviet Union, the PRC, and elsewhere in the socialist world.13 The Sino-Soviet split, SinoSoviet rivalry in the third world, and the campaigns against “revisionism” both formed and deformed this political/ideological emergence. Dominant schools of thought on interstate relations—realism in all its varieties, liberalism, constructivism, culturalism, et cetera—have little to contribute to the analysis of relations between socialist states. John Mearsheimer makes clear the incompatibility between realist statecraft and ideology, claiming that states behave as states whatever their ideologies.14 But we should also note the more fundamental ideological and political disjuncture between revolutionary politics and interstate relations as such. Echoes of “the workingman has no country” are seen in an incredulous remark of Lenin’s, in October 1917—“What, are we going to have foreign affairs?”—or in Trotsky’s plan of action when appointed Commissar of Foreign Affairs in that same year—“I shall issue some revolutionary proclamations to the peoples and then close up shop.”15 Stalin’s 1924 doctrine of socialism in 13. For a comprehensive survey of Soviet attitudes toward China, see Gibert Rozman, A Mirror for Socialism: Soviet Criticisms of China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). Chinese-language criticisms of the Soviet Union are collected in Zhongsu lunzhan wenxian: “Jiuping” yu qita [Documents of the Sino-Soviet debate: The “nine criticisms”] (Hong Kong: Wenhua ziliao gongyingshe, 1977); and in a supplementary volume to the above collection from the same publisher in the same year entitled Zhong gong fanxiu wenxian [Documents of Communist Chinese antirevisionism]. 14. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001). 15. Quoted in Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

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one country, a doctrine that first appeared in a preface to an edition of his early writings on the 1917 revolution, would win the day, with unfortunate consequences for the international. Even this development, however, did not wholly alter the particularity of socialist interstate relations. The disastrous course of Soviet foreign and interstate relations between the October Revolution and the Second World War could be attributed in part to simple error and misjudgment. But perhaps these errors stemmed in part from the conceptual underdevelopment of socialist interstate relations, which, after 1924, were made subject to Comintern authority.16 There have been a host of publications on Sino-Soviet relations over the last twenty years, and the opening of Soviet archives has added considerably to our understanding. We have transcriptions of many conversations, interviews, and a host of new documents that have allowed for significant advances over the earlier voluminous literature on the split, and studies of Sino-Soviet relations since the reforms of the post-Mao or Gorbachev periods have allowed for a more coherent perspective on the earlier period.17 The picture that emerges is a complex and often contradictory one, full of contingencies and anomalies. The new behind-the-scenes view of the Sino-Soviet relationship throughout the 1950s, however, does not reveal the hidden hand of a cynical and purely geopolitical logic; the realists do not always get the last word. Although by the last years of Mao’s life something like a realist model of state power politics becomes dominant, the earlier period of the break—from the late fifties through 1967—is centered, particularly on the Chinese side, on ideological questions, and criticism of Soviet “revisionism” continues for several years after Mao’s death. Differences on the questions of the nature of socialist society and the nature of conflict and authority within it, the speed of social transformation, and the fundamental character of capitalism and capitalist states divided the two powers, and, during the Cultural Revolution, came to constitute everyday politics within China. The antagonism between politics and geoPress, 1996), 129. The best history of the Communist International remains Pierre Broué, Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste, 1919–1943 (Paris: Fayard, 1997). 16. See Broué, Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste. 17. See, for example, Odd Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998). The Working Paper series published by the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars includes numerous translations from Russian, Chinese, and other languages, and is an important resource. For the reform period, see Gilbert Rozman, The Chinese Debate About Soviet Socialism, 1978–1985 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).

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politics is particularly evident in this period, and it is not coincidental that the height of the Cultural Revolution marks the near eclipse of “foreign relations” as such. Red Guards occupied the Foreign Ministry, destroying many records, and many diplomats were recalled to China for political work. The political questions opened within the Cultural Revolution were enormously influential worldwide, and were easily translated into local contexts and concerns. This global transmission was facilitated in large part because of the context of the Sino-Soviet split and the multiple roads to socialism. But in Africa, India, the Middle East, Cuba, as well as in the overdeveloped world, China’s influence was achieved without “policy” or effort on the part of the PRC leadership.18 Maoism spread internationally as communists had always imagined socialism would spread—by example. As the Cultural Revolution ended (see Alessandro Russo’s work on this) and as energies of depoliticization became hegemonic, China reacquired “foreign relations,” whose character was not only predictably realist and opportunist, but highly retrograde. The Sino-Soviet split was a boon to U.S. cold war ideologues, and it also gave credence to the realist position in the West. We read, in the initial assessments, much about the recrudescence of an age-old enmity between China and Russia, or China and Vietnam. This analysis became unsustainable. Chinese admiration of Stalin has always seemed somewhat curious—he had advised cooperation with the Guomindang, and told Mao not to move south of the Yangtze, arguing for the same kind of partition he had advocated in Iran, and would advocate in Korea and Vietnam (the Stalinist geopolitical strategy of socialism in half a country). He referred to the CCP during Mao’s 1949–1950 visit to Moscow as a national revolutionary democratic government rather than a communist government, and said, on signing the 1950 treaty with China, that “if they were genuine communists they would not last long in power in a country at China’s level of development. If the Beijing government seemed stable and secure, that in itself was evidence of its non-communist character.”19 Although Mao said in 1956 that if he had followed Stalin’s advice he would have been dead, the attitude toward Sulian laodage (big-brother Soviet Union) was not hostile, nor was the kinship term used ironically. Mao acknowledged Stalin as the leading figure in the communist world, and the deference paid seems to have been real and uncynical. The midfifties compromise judgment that Stalin 18. Kim Il-sung, Ho Chi Minh, and others were quite hostile to the Cultural Revolution. 19. Westad, The Global Cold War, 65.

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had been 70 percent positive and 30 percent in error remained in force throughout the seventies and beyond. The PRC’s first public discussion of revisionism was not aimed at the Soviet Union, in fact, but at its usual target: Tito’s Yugoslavia. When the Cominform expelled Yugoslavia in 1948, the CCP approved wholeheartedly. Stalin later admitted that he had been wrong in urging China to go slow in the revolution. He had, toward the end of his life, little reason to be displeased with China, particularly given China’s willingness to bear so much of the burden of the Korean War and to take the front line in the struggle against the United States. The energies of world revolution were gathering steam, in China, the USSR, and elsewhere. Many in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev especially, were inspired by the speed and thoroughness of revolutionary transformation in China, particularly given the more disappointing character of Eastern Europe. The conjuncture of this developing socialist energy, the successful (in China’s view) conclusion of the Korean War, and the death of Stalin gave Mao the idea that even given China’s subordinate position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union—China depended on and valued Soviet aid and Soviet advice, and Soviet aid to China in the early fifties constituted 7–10 percent of the Soviet gross domestic product—Mao could emerge as the world’s foremost communist. Ideological prestige was not a negligible factor in relations between socialist states— Max Weber’s discussion of prestige in international relations probably has greater relevance in the socialist world than anywhere else. The midfifties were the golden years of the alliance. It is often forgotten today that Mao and the CCP reacted favorably to the Soviet Union’s Twentieth Party Congress, the occasion of Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin, and the beginning of wide-scale de-Stalinization. In Mao’s view, this could secure a revision of Stalin’s condescending China policy. The major theoretical statement on de-Stalinization appeared in the Renmin Ribao in April of 1956: “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”20 This essay acknowledged the dangers of a personality cult, affirmed Stalin’s Marxism, and concluded that self-criticism was at the heart of communist theoretical practice. Indeed, although the Soviet Union advised against communization and the Great Leap Forward, Soviet official statements professed admiration for Chinese eagerness to build socialism quickly. Many of the Soviet advisors in China in the fifties—and the program has been revealed to be far 20. Renmin Ribao, April 5, 1956, p. 1.

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more important and widespread than once realized—considered it the best time in their lives.21 The appearance of the PRC necessitated a new version of the international, and given China’s importance to the dynamic of world revolution, the CCP’s views on international developments were important. China’s reaction to the 1956 uprisings in Poland and Hungary—in Poland, the workers in Poznan established workers’ councils, a movement that eventually led, against Soviet threats, to the ascension of Gomułka—was indicative of the CCP’s ideological consistency and relative independence. It judged the Polish uprising as anti-USSR but not anticommunist. Noting the spontaneous outbreak of procapitalist and anticommunist energies in Hungary, despite the dominance of councilism in the reformed party itself, it saw the Hungarian movement as anticommunist. The CCP announced that it would protest Soviet intervention in Poland and would also protest a failure to intervene in Hungary. Hungary, in fact, convinced Mao of the continuing salience of class antagonism within socialist societies. This would feed into his later critique of the Soviet Union and of the situation in China itself. Sino-Soviet ideological differences were most salient in relation to the United States and its position in world history. Khrushchev and Mao continually averred, in the midfifties, that the United States was, politically, socially, and ideologically speaking, a spent force, that U.S. power was on the decline, and that history—as revealed in the rise of the third world, emblematized by Ho Chi Minh, in whose revolution Mao in particular had tremendous hope—was on the side of socialism. Mao scoffed at U.S. nuclear superiority, and it seems that his disregard for U.S. nuclear attack was genuine. Khrushchev, on the other hand, had a more tactical side. Constantine Pleshakov writes that Khrushchev “was the last Soviet leader who was captivated by the classical Stalinist paradigm [geopolitics plus ideology]; hence his inconsistent foreign policy. His exotic cocktail of nuclear age realism and revolutionary idealism, calculating brinkmanship, and a utopian view of the future of humankind can be explained only by the ideological luggage that he was left by his predecessors.”22 This twinned character of ideology and geopolitics led Khrushchev to seek détente with the United States. Though convinced that history was on his side, Khrushchev feared that the United States might react to its own weakness with nuclear 21. Deborah A. Kaple, “Soviet Advisors in China in the 1950s,” in Westad, Brothers in Arms, 117–40. 22. Constantine Pleshakov, “Nikita Khrushchev and Sino-Soviet Relations,” in Westad, Brothers in Arms, 228–45.

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warfare, about whose results he did not share Mao’s sanguine views. Khrushchev never understood why the CCP did not view this alliance as the strategic move it obviously was rather than an ideological deviation. The CCP’s rejection of geopolitical strategy, however, was precisely the point. When Khrushchev scrapped nuclear cooperation with China ostensibly because he wanted Asia as a “nuclear free zone,” followed quickly by negotiations with Eisenhower over arms limitation, Mao wrote that Khrushchev was a right-deviationist, that he was afraid of two things: imperialism and Chinese communism. Khrushchev was, in fact, retreating from the revolutionary enthusiasm that had marked his initial ascendancy. At the end of the 1950s, he was open about his belief in the possibility of peaceful coexistence, of the multiple paths to socialism besides revolution, and on the capacity of the Soviet Union to expand its power in this environment. At the same time, the Chinese view held that the Soviet Union had not adopted the spirit of reform and reradicalization called for in “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” In China, it appeared that the Soviet Union’s turn to strategy, tactics, and geopolitics was nothing but an abandonment of politics. In April of 1960, Hongqi (Red flag) published “Long Live Leninism,” which made the most sustained ideological critique of revisionism and of any effort toward peaceful coexistence with the United States.23 Revisionism refers first and foremost to the strategy of peaceful coexistence. As “Long Live Leninism” makes clear, though, this is not primarily a geopolitical critique but a theoretical, historical, and political difference. Its opening section drew a direct line from the Paris Commune to the revolution’s fruition in the Bolshevik Revolution, suggesting a long revolutionary epoch that might not be visible to those in its midst. Though it didn’t mention “Soviet revisionism” per se (Tito remained the stand-in for the revisionist tendency), a primary revisionist error was one of incorrect periodization—of confusing the historical epoch, of not understanding that the United States cannot but be doomed. The idea of a revolutionary trajectory from the Paris Commune to the Bolshevik Revolution echoed periodization concerns throughout the document. The correct periodization, the correct understanding of historical tendencies, allowed for the proper political response to a particular global conjuncture. “Long Live Leninism,” although not a particularly innovative document, shows the political commitment to that continuum of party-state23. Available at http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LLL60.html (accessed March 26, 2007).

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world in the Gramsci quotation beginning this section. It was the key signal of the ideological division between China and the USSR, and the message was received clearly in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev’s impulsive removal of the Soviet advisors in the summer of 1960, following what he thought was particularly insulting Chinese behavior at a meeting of Workers’ Parties in Bucharest, led to a steady decline in relations, which reached a further depth when Khrushchev went ahead with the test-ban treaty in 1963. Chinese radical internationalism was at its height between 1960 and 1965, and it is this period, more than the Cultural Revolution, when China is most identified as the model for national liberation. This was the era of deepening ties with third world communist parties—notably the Indonesian Communist Party under Aidit, who became a fierce critic of the Soviet Union—but also with Algeria, Ghana, Egypt, and other countries. An apotheosis of sorts was reached in plans for the second Afro-Asian Conference, scheduled for March 1965, ten years after Bandung. A repetition of the first Bandung meeting was impossible—third world politics had changed, and there were significant divisions between radical leftists allied with China or the USSR, allies of the United States, and aspiring modernizing powers. The Algerians were unwilling to invite South Korea or South Vietnam; the Soviet Union first insisted on attending, then Khrushchev pulled out, then his successors renewed the effort to attend. China initially fought a widespread effort to postpone the conference. Suddenly, in September of 1965, two months before the rescheduled date, Chen Yi argued in a press conference that the Afro-Asian Conference should denounce U.S. imperialism, exclude the USSR and any representatives of the United Nations, or else be postponed indefinitely. This was the furthest reach of China’s radical internationalism, and we could speculate on what might have happened had such a global delinking gathered force. But for China the focus would now turn to the domestic. As the Cultural Revolution approached, Mao and the CCP leadership deepened the commitment to fighting revisionism at home and preventing a Soviet-style death of the revolution. Vietnam was a test. There were significant elements in China’s political and military leadership who wanted PRC military involvement in Vietnam against the Americans. Although one can observe a somewhat contradictory posture toward the Vietnamese struggle throughout the period, Mao maintained that massive military involvement would sap China’s capacity to carry out its own revolution, and the die was cast. Recently published transcriptions of conversations between Chinese and Vietnamese leaders during the war years reveal Chinese determination to put priority on deepening the revolution; as

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the party leadership explains the goals of the Cultural Revolution, and its necessary priority, the Vietnamese delegation seem uncomprehending and unable to respond.24 Although the Vietnamese revolution had been one of Mao’s most abiding concerns from the 1940s on—even more central than the Korean communist movement—the Cultural Revolution took priority. Throughout the Sino-Soviet friendship, Liu Shaoqi had been the leader most involved with the relationship, and the most friendly toward the USSR. During the Cultural Revolution, he came to be branded as “China’s Khrushchev,” and Soviet-style revisionism became the ultimate term of opprobrium. As mentioned earlier, the CCP had first used the charge of revisionism against Tito’s Yugoslavia. It was an all-purpose charge: Khrushchev used it against Mao, Tito himself used it, and it filled the writings of Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu in Albania. Revisionism was a serious charge: it suggested a deceleration, a wrong historical direction, an abandonment of revolutionary temporality. Still, its political and ideological content was also malleable and unclear. The discourse of revisionism revealed some theoretical difficulties within the socialist world. Edouard Bernstein, who brought the concept of revisionism into prominence in the late nineteenth century, and whose name became associated with all who, in the eyes of party-state thinkers in the socialist world, had abandoned Marxist-Leninism, is infamous for envisioning a “peaceful transition” to socialism along the parliamentary path. The sixties attack on Khrushchev’s revisionism focused especially on his evocation of peaceful transition, one manifestation of which was his interest in nuclear deescalation with the United States. Bernstein, whose summa Evolutionary Socialism is considered by all critics to be a fairly incoherent theoretical work, came to his view of peaceful transition through what he considered to be empirically verifiable faults in Marx’s understanding of the course of capitalism. He cited late-nineteenth-century phenomena such as the growth, rather than shrinking, of the middle class, growth in worker wages, and the decrease in monopolistic concentration of capital in order to link the social democratic project to the bourgeois-democratic process. Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin both attacked revisionism as not only antirevolutionary but blind to the crisis dynamic of capitalism. The term was used under Stalin to stigmatize a variety of positions that were deemed bourgeois in essence, and 24. Odd Arne Westad, 77 Conversations between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964–1977, Working paper no. 22 (Washington, D.C.: Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 1998).

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was one term of opprobrium used for enemies in the class struggle that had supposedly continued in the socialist state. Lukács, in his Demokratisierung essays, ascribes the atrophy of political culture in socialist societies to the inadequate development of political theory. In Lukács’s view, Lenin’s concept of habituation, a product of his Taylorist phase, precluded the development of a theoretical account of political formation of socialist subjectivity within the socialist state. Politics was further retarded under Stalin. Stalin’s concept of continued class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat seemed, to many observers, to have purely tactical, rather than political content. Indeed, the dominance of the tactical and the strategic over the political-theoretical led, in Lukács’s view, too easily to authoritarianism. The failure of Soviet political culture to develop under de-Stalinization, Lukács maintained, derived from Khrushchev and his successors’ inability to alter the fundamental terms of politics. The intraparty class-struggle model had produced apparatchik factionalism and conservatism, as well as authoritarianism. As mentioned above, those sectors of the Soviet intelligentsia and policy apparatus most directly connected to third world revolutionary movements showed the greatest theoretical and analytical innovativeness, and this is not coincidental. Lukács seemed not to have followed third world developments but was attentive to other forms of political innovation, seeking repoliticization in theory-driven innovations of democratic political forms—workers’ councils, a Dubček-like reformation of the party, et cetera. Bernstein’s revisionism was the product of a perceived disjuncture between theory and practice. The later discourse of revisionism, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in socialist societies, inhabited that disjuncture and expressed the disrupted link between socialist theory and the organizational forms for revolutionary practice.25 Endings As Russo has documented, the end of the Red Guard phase of the Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1968 was marked by an effort, on the part of Mao and his allies, to preserve something of the subjective political energy that had come into existence in 1966 in extraparty organizations all 25. In a way, it is curious that “revisionism” became the chief political fault in the sixties. The Chinese word xiuzheng, on which xiuzhengzhuyi is based, has a long history, with no pejorative overtones.

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over the country.26 This initially involved, Russo notes, an effort to translate that energy into other institutional forms, particularly the university. Politics in the socialist world commonly irrupted or was transformed through these translations or relays of organizational forms, modes, and concepts from one scene to another. The translation of the language and politics of class struggle from the prerevolutionary to the postrevolutionary situation, which had politicizing and depoliticizing consequences at different historical points, was one example of this. The translation of political energy from the interstate to the subjective sphere had a similar character. What was at stake, we might ask, in the massive mobilization of anti-U.S. and antiSoviet sentiment among the populace? Was the figure of the United States necessary for the identification of proletarian revolutionary subjectivity with anti-imperialism, for the struggle against the capitalist road, for an object lesson in the essential insubstantiality of capitalist power? Was the antagonism against the USSR necessary, at the subjective level, to mobilize the struggle against backsliding, bureaucratization, and the capacity of political positions to turn into their opposite? The functionalist or manipulationist explanation is the easiest one and should be rejected. The formation of socialist subjectivity is, as Marx, Gramsci, Lukács, and others made clear, at one with a particular kind of worlded and world-historical version of revolutionary being. This is, I would argue, also at the heart of radical first-world identification with third world revolutionary energies, as well as in positions expressed by slogans from the period, such as “Vietnam is in our factories” and “Bring the war home.” In China during the Cultural Revolution, the project of forming revolutionary subjectivity and the question of revolutionary identity was central to politics. The Sino-Soviet split allowed the simultaneous thinking of this revolutionary formation at the individual and group level, and at the geopolitical level, but it required an analytical clarity and consistency that was difficult to sustain. The course of the world sixties shows the fragility of relay between different levels of the political and the vulnerability of revolutionary subjectformation to geopolitical interference. I have focused here on the Chinese case, but among the factors that influenced the waning of antisystemic energies at the close of the U.S. and European sixties was the end of the Vietnam War. Antiwar protest movements in the United States and Europe 26. Alessandro Russo, “The Conclusive Scene: Mao and the Red Guards in July 1968,” positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 553–74.

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had quickly led to broader political/subjective concerns. The end of the war, the removal of that seemingly necessary worlded relay, was a significant weakening element. The decade that marked the end and containment of the sixties in China—1969–1979—was punctuated by two military outbreaks of the geopolitical: the exchange of fire between Chinese and Soviet forces at the Ussuri River in 1969, which deepened the conviction in the Chinese and Soviet leadership about the inevitability of war between the PRC and the USSR, and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, the latter a textbook case of realist interstate strategy, albeit one with unforeseen bad consequences for China. The intensification of conflict in the late sixties had led to the resolute turn to the geopolitical, in the labelling of the USSR as “fascist” or “social-imperialist”—the latter, despite the volume of words expended on it, a wholly incoherent concept—and the turn to the United States. This geopolitical turn, rather than the political-ideological division between the USSR and China, led China into an alliance with Portuguese colonialism and white South Africa in Angola against the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), and a third world strategy that was determined largely by the friend-enemy logic of interstate triangulation.27 Relations with the Soviet Union would improve in late 1981 and beyond, especially as a consequence of early Reagan-era anticommunism and the final triumph of U.S. containment of its own sixties energies. It is perhaps not fortuitous that the early 1980s engagement with socialist theory and questions of socialist subjectivity in China—the discussions of humanism, alienation, et cetera—were coincident with a lessening of Sino-Soviet tension. As reform deepened in China, and as Gorbachev pursued glasnost, the Sino-Soviet relationship, and all else, “normalized,” quickly contradicting those who had found in the earlier Sino-Soviet split evidence of a fundamental civilizational divide (and these included, in addition to U.S. cold warriors, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Emmanuel Levinas).28 The Sino-Soviet split affected Moscow’s international posture as well. Because the split damaged Khrushchev in the crucial area of socialist international prestige—he could no longer automatically claim to be the 27. The construction of the Tan-Zam railroad in the 1970s seems like the product of an earlier time. 28. Emmanuel Levinas, Les imprévus de l’histoire (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994). This citation from Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule,” available at http:// www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm (accessed June 10, 2008). Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, East and West (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).

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leader of the socialist world—he and his successors expanded their efforts to aid third world revolutions, mindful of the limits imposed by the U.S. relationship. It wasn’t until the sixties and seventies, in fact, that Khrushchev’s enthusiasm for third world revolution was translated by his more conservative successors into a more radical international presence. Somewhat paradoxically, Moscow’s aid prolonged the period of third world revolution, and thus the world sixties itself. Those sectors of the Soviet foreign affairs occupied with third world matters represented some of the most important and politically innovative intellectual production in the USSR during the period. The work of Karen Brutents, Viktor Tiagunenko, Lev Klochkovsky, Oleg Dreyer, and others in the Foreign Ministry or associated institutes remains some of the most astute analyses of third world revolutionary development and prospects.29 The deepening of the Sino-Soviet split was also accompanied, however, by an admixture of Soviet disenchantment with third world prospects. Anticommunist coups in Ghana, Indonesia (this was blamed on China), and Algeria showed the fragile character of socialist achievements there. The U.S. defeat in Vietnam briefly revived Soviet estimations of third world prospects, but further discouragement followed political defeats in Iraq—where Saddam Hussein, earlier a recipient of Soviet aid, liquidated the Iraqi Communist Party—South Yemen, and Afghanistan. Khomeini’s revolution in Iran had signified to the world that another kind of revolution had appeared on the historical scene—perhaps suggesting the end of secular revolutions. Finally, in 1988, Andrei Kolosovskii, deputy minister of Foreign Affairs under Gorbachev, who would become Russia’s first diplomatic representative to the United States under Yeltsin, wrote, We need a view of the developing countries that is to a considerable degree deideologized, and that recognizes the uniqueness of processes at work there, and their independence of the rivalry between the two socioeconomic systems. . . . Experiences demonstrate clearly that by no means does every regime that has quarrelled with the Americans follow a course of social progress, justice, and democracy. . . . The image of socialism will become immeasurably more attractive when the outside world sees that the criteria of democracy and respect for human rights are invariably present in 29. English translations of these scholars’ works can be found in the Problems of the Third World series published by Progress Publishers in Moscow between 1974 and 1977. See also Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Soviet Perspectives on African Socialism (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969).

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our evaluation of events in other regions, and in our choice of friends and allies.30 This final de-ideologization of Soviet foreign policy came immediately prior to the collapse of the socialist party-state. By that time, the outside world itself had, by a related historical logic, no longer sought “an image of socialism.” By the middle of the 1980s, the third world was also no longer salient as a concept. The first Asian “economic miracle” had begun, and the nature of China’s integration into international capitalism was becoming more clear. The new order of globalization would neutralize a host of earlier antagonisms, a neutralization whose consequences to the political have been profound.31 Given that Chinese political life in its sixties was structured by antagonism, it is unsurprising that the end of the Chinese sixties was marked by actual political defeat. Many observers who had been sympathetic to some of the Cultural Revolution’s politics doubted the danger to the revolution posed by those purported “capitalist roaders” within the party leadership, who were objects of political campaigns as late as the early months of 1976. And yet, these were in fact the leaders who took China, shortly after Mao’s death, on the capitalist road, defeating the radical energies that had arisen ten years earlier. I have argued here that this defeat was coterminous with a contradiction in the global character of Cultural Revolution radicalism and the depoliticizing emergence of the geopolitical, and to this must be added the general exhaustion with factional struggle. Defeat—on the battleground, in elections, in social and labor struggles—was a major factor worldwide. The end of the Vietnam War removed a focal point for anti-U.S. and antisystemic energies, but the Vietnamese victory, by contrast, did little to strengthen international resolve. The most salient defeat in the United States was the multileveled strikeback against African American and related liberation movements, through assassinations, FBI infiltration, and the continued implementation of the “southern strategy”—the mobilization of white racism and of white resistance to African American gains, which, in the emerging dominant logic of the “zero-sum society,” were viewed solely at the white workers’ expense. At the level of white populism, one sign of the end of the U.S. sixties was the massive movement against school integration, of which Boston right30. Quoted in Westad, The Global Cold War, 385. 31. See Gopal Balakrishnan’s introduction to his collection Antagonisms (New York: Verso, forthcoming).

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wing politician Louise Day Hicks, founder of ROAR—Restore Our Alienated Rights—was emblematic. In other respects, however, the end of the U.S. sixties witnessed the passage into the mainstream of many elements associated with sixties oppositional or counterculture energies: sexual freedom and changes in gender dynamics, “lifestyle” experimentation of various kinds. There are various ways of narrativizing this period—“the seventies.”32 In Regis Debray’s view, the sixties were an initiation rite on a global scale, an initiation into the higher and more intense stage of bourgeois consumer capitalism that was fully in evidence in 1978 when he wrote his polemic. This is also historian Arthur Marwick’s judgment: the Western sixties changed everything but had negligible political or revolutionary impact.33 Conservative journalist/theorist/historian and Bush speechwriter David Frum (coiner of the phrase “axis of evil”) opposed the radical politics of the sixties, but his version of the Debray/Marwick consensus gives it a different spin. His How We Got Here: The 70’s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life (for Better or Worse), published in 2000, argues that the seventies, not the sixties, were the truly transformative decade, for it was the seventies that witnessed the mainstreaming and massification of sixties modalities, and finally the victory of what Frum views as the affective core of the sixties, which was individualism. This seventies battleground was recognized by nearly all conservative engineers of the antisixties reaction, some of whom are still with us today. Curiously, then, while left criticism sees the mainstreaming of sixties energies as a defeat for the Left, the Right sees that mainstreaming as a defeat for the Right. All sides would agree that the eventual victor, at the end of the seventies, was the Right: the rise of evangelical Christianity and its version of social conservatism; aggressive moves against unions and against the egalitarian gains of the recent past; and, attendant on the long downturn of the late Carter and early Reagan years, the triumph of free-market capitalism, the hegemony of the finance, 32. Studies of the seventies include Edward Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70’s, the Decade that Brought You Modern Life—For Better or Worse (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001). 33. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector of the economy, with unfettered accumulation for the economic elite. It may be analytically and politically more productive to view the defeat of the U.S. sixties in stages: first, the crushing of its vanguard or revolutionary elements, particularly in the African American community; second, a conservative mobilization of reaction to the seventies-era mainstreaming of sixties oppositional popular cultural forms. In relation to this second defeat, it might be useful to take more seriously the claims for the political character of the sixties counterculture, even when it was unrecognized as such by its central participants, and to consider the place of the counterculture within the broader context of radical subjective politics. Most of the thinkers on subjective politics since Herbert Marcuse have not shared this view of the counterculture, not coincidentally perhaps because the bulk of the better thinking on subjective politics came from France, where youth culture only developed in the postsixties period. The Debray/ Marwick consensus, I would argue, is not simply incorrect: sixties politics of subjectivity can be seen to have foreshadowed their own containment. But these politics might also be part of a process whose final chapter might not yet have arrived. Just as a source of what was most radical about the Chinese revolution turned into its opposite, so might this grand game of reversal do its work on another unlikely place, and bring into dominance what was foundational, though latent, in this other scene, in an appeal to a temporality not structured by success and failure—though these kinds of judgments are necessary and productive—but perhaps with more humility about the historical process and the place of our present within it. Dazed and Confused In the current period, where collective being itself is under siege, perhaps Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, and other sixties thinkers can remind us of countercultural promise. Alain Badiou cautions against “celebration”: What were the century’s dominant forms of collective materiality? Let me suggest that this century was the century of the demonstration. What is a “demo”? It is the name of a collective body that uses the public space (the street, the square) to display its power. The demonstration is the collective subject, the we-subject, endowed with a body. A demonstration is a visible fraternity. The gathering of bodies into a single moving material form is intended to say “we” are

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here and “they” (the powerful, the others, those who do not enter into the composition of the “we”) should be afraid and take our existence into consideration. Throughout the century, the demonstration can only be understood against the subjective horizon of a conviction that WE could change everything. The demonstration outlines the totality aspired to by a collection of isolated individuals. Yet the century’s conception of celebration, governed as it was by the paradigm of demonstration and insurrection, always required the celebration to brutally interrupt the ordinary state of affairs. Today celebration—harmless and consensual—is what typically distracts us from every political concern.34 Badiou refers to contemporary celebrations—he mentions the crowds on the streets following France’s world cup victory—as effectively counterdemonstrations—the political opposite of the earlier moment. Badiou is one of our most important thinkers of the political, and of the disappearance of the political during our period. But it might be useful to consider another view of youth culture, and the character of its mass life, politics of enjoyment, and creation of social space. The American sixties witnessed the emergence of new and utopian forms of mass social space. This included not only demonstrations of which even Badiou would approve, but love-ins, human be-ins, and rock festivals, Woodstock being the most well known. Might we, following Fredric Jameson, consider collective social spaces as allegorical—as period-specific allegories of a communism to come, the content of a political unconscious? U.S. youth culture—and its history, along with the history of efforts to contain, combat, and commercialize it, going back to the 1890s—was one of the most volatile products of the age of industrial capitalism. A full historical consideration of the importance and character of this social dynamic remains to be written.35 But although U.S. youth culture signifies globally today primarily through the massive industry that has grown up to feed and distribute it, the sixties was one time when it was at its most uncontainable, and that historical stratum remains sedimented within its constantly morphing and increasingly global character. The consensus view of the period’s truth—and this is the consensus of Debray, Marwick, Frum, and even Eric Hobsbawm—is of an era of consumption-based individuation and decollec34. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2007), 107. 35. See Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (New York: Viking, 2007).

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tivization, the precondition for the universally decried “me decade” with its universal culture of narcissism. If one grants this cultural dominant, couldn’t one choose to view this development not as the emergence of an immanent sixties tendency but rather as the result of the emerging hegemony of free-market conservatism and neoliberalism? Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused, written and filmed when it was imagined that the hegemony of the antisixties reaction of the Reagan-Bush years might be ending, is a snapshot of U.S. youth culture in 1976, at the center of the seventies transition. In most respects it conforms to youth-film generic requirements—it features moral dilemmas, coming-ofage, and the triumph of an antiadult youthful élan. It is set in Austin, Texas, with scrupulous attention to period accuracy, depicting the socially leveling effect of sixties marijuana culture, breaking down the divisions between jock, society, intellectual, and other subcultures as it penetrates into the mainstream. It celebrates sybaritism with passion: one of the film’s narratives centers on the big party at the end of the school year, held in a kind of liminal space—neither commercial, nor private, nor public park—around one of the Austin moonlight towers. Other main plot elements feature the character Pink, charismatic long-haired and bead-wearing football star, pondering whether or not to sign a no-drugs pledge for his coach (he ultimately refuses) and the coming-of-age—into sex, drugs, and rock and roll—of the younger character Mitch. Key to the film’s sense of historical accuracy is the sound track, all of which was taken from the summer of 1976. Sixties rock music, as Nick Bromell reminds us, not only had meaning for psychic exploration, ego transformation, and new subjectivity, but also served as a kind of collective sound track for life—rock songs are always reheard and remembered in their situational context. In this sense, the content or intention of a song can be exceeded by the sense of the social that comes from its period specificity: the summer of 1976, as Linklater reminds us, is the summer of “Sweet Emotion” or “Slow Ride.”36 Commercialization of rock music had come a long way since the sixties—the film’s sound track also featured Peter Frampton, corporate rock pioneer. But other music from the film—Foghat, ZZ Top, and War, for example—highlighted the movement of sixties rock sensibility into the mainstream at one of the last times that a truly universal audience existed for rock music, prior to the emergence of a proliferation of musical subcultures that grew dominant in the late seven36. Nick Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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ties and which remain active today. The Texan location—Austin is Linklater’s hometown—is also significant. As Michael Lind, among others, has shown, Texas has long been a politically divided state, and the emergence of Texan neoconservatism should be contextualized within the long history of struggle with progressive and populist minority energies. To this would be added the national hegemony of the “southern strategy” first developed in the Nixon years.37 Dazed and Confused gives a picture of an emergent and dangerous postsixties mainstreaming—this could happen even in the South!—against which the conservative reaction mustered all its force. The party at the Austin moontower showed a space of collective celebration neither privatized nor commercialized, where all were welcome. This was not exactly Marcuse’s Great Refusal. The overt political energy of the sixties had been spent and the global relay had been broken, but some force still remained in the generational openness to psychic and social liberation. Anyone who wants an explanation of the force to which Reagan-era U.S. conservatism reacted might turn to this film rather than to the more overtly political mass irruptions of the sixties. The sixties had given to youth culture both the refusal of the adult world and the joy of occupying the present. This was a fairly potent combination, and although it was a force that could be combated, commercialized, co-opted, and trivialized—and Dazed and Confused does some of that as well—perhaps the Right understood correctly that its interests were threatened. The global sixties had activated the relay between world politics and revolutionary subjectivity at the level of the everyday. It was the last time this link has been achieved. Recent radical formulations for a new politics are united in the call for a new international—but one decentered this time, in clear contrast with the forces motivating the Moscow-Beijing rivalry. The recent notion of the “movement of movements” remains fairly abstract. Bolivarism, and other developments in Latin America, suggests that in an era of U.S. decline there could be a revival of transformative energy at the regional level, and this is a development that is important to track. Meanwhile, in the United States, the assault on and containment of the world sixties goes on—as in George Bush’s August 22, 2007, speech to the U.S. Veterans of Foreign Wars, where for the first time he embraced the parallel between Iraq and Vietnam, his lesson, however, being that the United States should have strengthened its resolve and remained in Vietnam until 37. Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

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the war was won. Or in the ease with which political campaigns in this country descend to the level of “the culture wars.”

•  •  •  •

We live in a postsixties world, and this is especially salient in China and the United States. The rise of Chinese capitalism was a reaction to and containment of the Cultural Revolution, but in continuing and redirecting the social and subjective energies that the period had released, it has also propelled forward some kernel of the earlier time, about whose future there is no certainty. And today, as the midseventies crisis dynamics of U.S. capitalism seem to be reasserting themselves, we cannot say for certain that the reserves of radical subjective energy will not erupt in unexpected ways. We cannot not periodize. Although I feel it is necessary and important to mark the particularity and specificity of the sixties irruption, which must include an analysis of its ending, it is the nature of narrative to be rewritten. The defeats of the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 in Europe seemed permanent to all but a few who observed them in the 1850s and 1860s but acquired a new character, and a new meaning, in the revolutionary years of the early twentieth century. The sixties ended, but the sixties also—to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre—took place—a place that will doubtless be part of a different history than that of our present.

Books Received Abeysekara, Ananda. The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2008. Bartkowski, Frances. Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone under 30). New York: Penguin Group, 2008. Beckman, Karen, and Jean Ma, eds. Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Bernstein, Charles. Girly Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Bersani, Leo, and Adam Phillips. Intimacies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Campbell, David, and Morton Schoolman, eds. The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Cartwright, Lisa. Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008.

212  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009 Ciccoricco, David. Reading Network Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. Davis, Kathleen. Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Davis, Lennard J. Obsession: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Diment, Galya, and Zoran Kuzmanovich, eds. Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Approaches to Teaching World Literature. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Dussel, Enrique, Carlos A. Jáuregui, and Mabel Moraña, eds. Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Espinosa, Gastón, and Mario T. García, eds. Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Eyerman, Ron. The Assassination of Theo Van Gogh: From Social Drama to Cultural Trauma. Politics, History, and Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Falkoff, Marc, ed. Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2008. Feldman, Illana. Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Franke, Damon. Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883–1924. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Gow, David D. Countering Development: Indigenous Modernity and the Moral Imagination. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Harding, Sandra. Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Hearn, Adrian H. Cuba: Religion, Social Capital, and Development. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Howson, Richard, and Kylie Smith, eds. Hegemony: Studies in Consensus and Coercion. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Books Received  213 Hughes, Linda K., Mary Lago, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, eds. The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster: A Selected Edition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Jarrar, Randa. A Map of Home: A Novel. New York: Other Press, 2008. Johnson, Barbara. Persons and Things. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. Jones, Stephan Graham. Ledfeather. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: FC2, 2008. Jonsson, Stefan. A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions. Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. King, Thomas A. The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750. Vol. 2. Queer Articulations. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Kovačević, Nataša. Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies. New York: Routledge, 2008. Kraus, Natasha Kirsten. A New Type of Womanhood: Discursive Politics and Social Change in Antebellum America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Louie, Kam, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge Companions to Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Maguire, Elizabeth. The Open Door: A Novel. New York: Other Press, 2008. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Marashi, Afshin. Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940. Studies in Modernity and National Identity. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. McGrath, Jason. Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. Michaelsen, Scott, and David E. Johnson. Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Miller, Ruth A. The Erotics of Corruption: Law, Scandal, and Political Perversion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Morris, Robert. Have I Reasons: Work and Writings, 1993–2007. Ed. Nena TsoutiSchillinger. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008.

214  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009 Patterson, Anita. Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Place, Vanessa. La Medusa. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: FC2, 2008. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Ethics of the Lie. Trans. Suzanne Verderber. New York: Other Press, 2008. Radhakrishnan, R. History, the Human, and the World in Between. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Redhead, Steve, ed. The Jean Baudrillard Reader. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Rotman, Brian. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Rowe, Aimee Carrillo. Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Scandura, Jani. Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Schaub, Thomas, ed. Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” and Other Works. Approaches to Teaching World Literature. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Scott, Joan Wallach, ed. Women’s Studies on the Edge. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Sillman, Ron. The Alphabet. Modern and Contemporary Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. Slavishak, Edward. Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh. Studies of Objectifying Practice. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Spanos, William V. Herman Melville and the American Calling: The Fiction after “Moby-Dick,” 1851–1857. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Suter, Rebecca. The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008. Vachani, Nilita. HomeSpun: A Novel. New York: Other Press, 2008. Wahlberg, Malin. Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology. Visible Evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. White, Bob W. Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance in Mobutu’s Zaire. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Williams, Linda. Screening Sex. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008.

Books Received  215 Willmot, Glenn. Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Wills, David. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics. Posthumanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Winkiel, Laura. Modernism, Race, and Manifestos. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Zhang, Xudong. Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Zurawski, Magdalena. The Bruise. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: FC2, 2008.

Contributors John Beverley teaches in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a member of the editorial collective of boundary 2. He coedits the University of Pittsburgh Press series Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas. His own recent publications include Subalternity and Representation (1999; Spanish translation 2002); “From Cuba,” a special issue of boundary 2 (2002); and Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (2004). Forthcoming in 2008–2009 are two new books: Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America, and La interrupcion del subalterno. El latinoamericanismo despues de 9/11. Anthony Bogues is Harmon Family Professor at Brown University, where he is professor of Africana studies, political science, and modern culture and media. He is an associate director of the Center for Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies, Mona, and Honorary Professor at the Center for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. His latest books are Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom (2009) and Caribbean Thought: History, Literature, and Politics (2009). Christopher Connery teaches history, literature, and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he codirected the Center for Cultural Studies for ten years. His coedited volume, The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, which included his essay “The World Sixties,” was published in 2008. His first book, The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China, appeared in 1998. In addition to work on the global sixties and imperial China, he has published a number of articles on the ideologies of oceanic space in world capitalism and precapitalism. Wlad Godzich is Distinguished Professor of general and comparative literature, and critical studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is also the director of the Knowledge Society Center. He has taught in many countries around the world and has written extensively on the theory of literature and on emergent phenomena.

218  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009 Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements (IGSO) in Moscow and a fellow of the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam). He is the author of several books, including Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System (2008). In 1982–1983, he was a political prisoner in the Soviet Union and served as a deputy to the Moscow City Soviet in 1990–1993. He is a columnist at the Moscow Times and Vzglyad. Miguel Llinás is pursuing a master’s degree in library science at Drexel University and is currently employed with the Henry Charles Lea Library at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. William Nickell is the Licker Research Chair in Cowell College at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he lectures on Russian literature and culture. He publishes regularly on Russian cultural history and on the life and work of Tolstoy. Nina Power is a lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University in London. She is the author of several articles on Feuerbach, contemporary French thought, and theories of the subject, and the coeditor of Alain Badiou’s On Beckett (with Alberto Toscano). Her writing has appeared in Parrhesia, Cosmos and History, Cabinet, New Humanist, and other publications. Roberto Fernández Retamar has directed for many years the Cuban cultural center, Casa de las Américas. His early career was connected to the influential Cuban literary group, Origenes. He is perhaps best known in the field of literary and cultural criticism for his 1971 essay “Caliban,” one of the foundational statements of postcolonialism (together with other essays, it is available in English, with an introduction by Fredric Jameson, in Caliban and Other Essays). Retamar has also published widely on problems of Spanish and Latin American literary history. He is also known for his poetry, which was part of the movement known as Conversational Poetry (poesia conversacional ) in the 1960s and 1970s. Retamar has taught at, among other institutions, Yale, Columbia, and the University of Havana, and he has served as a cultural representative of the Cuban government in a variety of capacities. Hortense Spillers holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in English at Vanderbilt University, where she has taught since academic year 2006–2007. She is currently at work on a project entitled The Idea of Black Culture. Her new initiative in higher education, to be launched in 2009–2010, is called Issues in Critical Investigation (ICI), which will support the development of scholarship on various aspects of the African diaspora. She recently lectured in Berlin at the Free University, the Center for North American Studies, and at the Humboldt University, as well as Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. Silvia Spitta is professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Dartmouth College and chair of the Comparative Literature Program. She is the author of Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas (forthcoming), Más allá de la ciudad letrada: Crónicas y vivencias urbanas, with Boris

Contributors  219 Muñoz (2003), and Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America (1995, 2006). She is currently working on narratives of theft and the U.S.Mexico border. Alberto Toscano is a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (2006), and the editor and translator of several books, including Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, The Century, and Theoretical Writings (with Ray Brassier), and Antonio Negri’s The Political Descartes (with Matteo Mandarini). He is an editor of the journal Historical Materialism. He is currently writing a book on the political and philosophical history of the concept of fanaticism.