Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation (Get Political) - Softcover

Sivanandan, A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745328342 ISBN 13: 9780745328348

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2008

Synopsis

A. Sivanandan is a highly influential thinker on race, racism, globalisation and resistance. Since 1972, he has been the director of the Institute of Race Relations and the editor of Race & Class, which set the policy agenda on ethnicity and race in the UK and worldwide. Sivanandan has been writing for over forty years and this is the definitive collection of his work.

The articles selected span his entire career and are chosen for their relevance to today's most pressing issues. Included is a complete bibliography of Sivanandan’s writings, and an introduction by Colin Prescod (chair of the IRR), which sets the writings in context.

This book is highly relevant to undergraduate politics students and anyone reading or writing on race, ethnicity and immigration.

About this title

About the Author

A. Sivanandan was the Director of the Institute of Race Relations and the editor of the journal Race and Class.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Catching History on the Wing

Race, Culture and Globalisation

By A. Sivanandan

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2008 A. Sivanandan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2834-8

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Foreword by Colin Prescod, 
Introduction: Unity of struggle, 
I THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL, 
1. The liberation of the black intellectual, 
2. The hokum of New Times, 
3. La trahison des clercs, 
II STATE RACISM AND RESISTANCE, 
4. Race, class and the state: the political economy of immigration, 
5. From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain, 
6. RAT and the degradation of black struggle, 
7. Race, terror and civil society, 
III GLOBALISATION AND DISPLACEMENT, 
8. Imperialism and disorganic development in the silicon age, 
9. New circuits of imperialism, 
10. A black perspective on the Gulf war, 
11. Poverty is the new black, 
Notes, 
Bibliography of writings by A. Sivanandan, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE LIBERATION OF THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL

Wherever colonisation is a fact, the indigenous culture begins to rot. And among the ruins something begins to be born which is not a culture but a kind of subculture, a sub-culture which is condemned to exist on the margin allowed by an European culture. This then becomes the province of a few men, the elite, who find themselves placed in the most artificial conditions, deprived of any revivifying contact with the masses of the people.

Aimé Césaire

On the margin of European culture, and alienated from his own, the 'coloured' intellectual is an artefact of colonial history, marginal man par excellence. He is a creature of two worlds, and of none. Thrown up by a specific history, he remains stranded on its shores even as it recedes. And what he comes into is not so much a twilight world, as a world of false shadows and false light.

At the height of colonial rule, he is the servitor of those in power, offering up his people in return for crumbs of privilege; at its end, he turns servant of the people, negotiating their independence even as he attains to power. Outwardly, he favours that part of him which is turned towards his native land. He puts on the garb of nationalism, vows a return to tradition. He helps design a national flag, compose a People's Anthem. He puts up with the beat of the tom-tom and the ritual of the circumcision ceremony. But privately, he lives in the manner of his masters, affecting their style and their values, assuming their privileges and status. And for a while he succeeds in holding these two worlds together, the outer and the inner, deriving the best of both. But the forces of nationalism on the one hand and the virus of colonial privilege on the other, drive him once more into the margin of existence. In despair he turns himself to Europe. With something like belonging, he looks towards the Cathedral at Chartres and Windsor Castle, Giambologna and Donizetti and Shakespeare and Verlaine, snow-drops and roses. He must be done, once and for all, with the waywardness and uncouth manners of his people, released from their endemic ignorance, delivered from witchcraft and voodoo, from the heat and the chattering mynah-bird, from the incessant beat of the tom-tom. He must return to the country of his mind.

But even as the 'coloured' intellectual enters the mother country, he is entered into another world where his colour, and not his intellect or his status, begins to define his life – he is entered into another relationship with himself. The porter (unless he is black), the immigration officer (who is never anything but white), the customs official, the policeman of whom he seeks directions, the cabman who takes him to his lodgings, and the landlady who takes him in at a price – none of them leaves him in any doubt that he is not merely not welcome in their country, but should in fact be going back – to where he came from. That indeed is their only curiosity, their only interest: where he comes from, which particular jungle, Asian, African or Caribbean.

There was a time when he had been received warmly, but he was at Oxford then and his country was still a colony. Perhaps equality was something that the British honoured in the abstract. Or perhaps his 'equality' was something that was precisely defined and set within the enclave of Empire. He had a place somewhere in the imperial class structure. But within British society itself there seemed no place for him. Not even his upper-class affectations, his BBC accent, his well-pressed suit and college tie afford him a niche in the carefully defined inequalities of British life. He feels himself not just an outsider or different, but invested, as it were, with a separate inequality: outside and inferior at the same time.

At that point, his self-assurance which had sat on him 'like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire' takes a cruel blow. But he still has his intellect, his expertise, his qualifications to fall back on. He redeems his self-respect with another look at his Oxford diploma (to achieve which he had put his culture in pawn). But his applications for employment remain unanswered, his letters of introduction unattended. It only needs the employment officer's rejection of his qualifications, white though they be, to dispel at last his intellectual pretensions.

The certainty finally dawns on him that his colour is the only measure of his worth, the sole criterion of his being. Whatever his claims to white culture and white values, whatever his adherence to white norms, he is first and last a no-good nigger, a bleeding wog or just plain black bastard. His colour is the only reality allowed him; but a reality which, to survive, he must cope with. Once more he is caught between two worlds: accepting his colour and rejecting it, or accepting it only to reject it – aping still the white man (though now with conscious effort at survival), playing the white man's game (though now aware that he changes the rules so as to keep on winning), even forcing the white man to concede a victory or two (out of his hideous patronage, his grotesque paternalism). He accepts that it is their country and not his, rationalises their grievances against him, acknowledges the chip on his shoulder (which he knows is really a beam in their eye), and, ironically, by virtue of staying in his place, moves up a position or two – in the area, invariably, of race relations. For it is here that his skilled ambivalence finds the greatest scope, his colour the greatest demand. Once more he comes into his own – as servitor of those in power, a buffer between them and his people, a shock-absorber of 'coloured discontent' – in fact, a 'coloured' intellectual.

But this is an untenable position. As the racial 'scene' gets worse, and racism comes to reside in the very institutions of white society, the contradictions inherent in the marginal situation of the 'coloured' intellectual begin to manifest themselves. As a 'coloured' he is outside white society, in his intellectual functions he is outside black. For if, as Sartre has pointed out, 'that which defines an intellectual ... is the profound contradiction between the universality which bourgeois society is obliged to allow his scholarship, and the restricted ideological and political domain in which he is forced to apply it', there is for the 'coloured' intellectual no role in an 'ideological and political domain', shot through with racism, which is not fundamentally antipathetic to his colour and all that it implies. But for that very reason, his contradiction, in contrast to that of his white counterpart, is perceived not just intellectually or abstractly, but in his very existence. It is for him, a living, palpitating reality, demanding resolution.

Equally, the universality allowed his scholarship is, in the divided world of a racist society, different to that of the white intellectual. It is a less universal universality, as it were, and subsumed to the universality of white scholarship. But it is precisely because it is a universality that is particular to colour that it is already keened to the sense of oppression. So that when Sartre tells us that the intellectual, in grasping his contradictions, puts himself on the side of the oppressed ('because, in principle, universality is on that side'), it is clear that the 'coloured' intellectual, at the moment of grasping his contradictions, becomes the oppressed – is reconciled to himself and his people, or rather, to himself in his people.

To put it differently. Although the intellectual qua intellectual can, in 'grasping his contradiction', take the position of the oppressed, he cannot, by virtue of his class (invariably petty-bourgeois) achieve an instinctual understanding of oppression. The 'coloured' man, on the other hand, has, by virtue of his colour, an instinct of oppression, unaffected by his class, though muted by it. So that the 'coloured' intellectual, in resolving his contradiction as an intellectual, resolves also his existential contradiction. In coming to consciousness of the oppressed, he 'takes conscience of himself', in taking conscience of himself, he comes to consciousness of the oppressed. The fact of his intellect which had alienated him from his people now puts him on their side, the fact of his colour which had connected him with his people, restores him finally to their ranks. And at that moment of reconciliation between instinct and position, between the existential and the intellectual, between the subjective and objective realities of his oppression, he is delivered from his marginality and stands revealed as neither 'coloured' nor 'intellectual' – but BLACK.

He accepts now the full burden of his colour. With Césaire, he cries:

I accept ... I accept ... entirely, without reservation ...
my race which no ablution of hyssop mingled with lilies can ever purify
my race gnawed by blemishes
my race ripe grapes from drunken feet
my queen of spit and leprosies
my queen of whips and scrofulae
my queen of squamae and chlosmae
(O royalty whom I have loved in the far gardens of spring lit by chestnut candles!)
I accept. I accept.

And accepting, he seeks to define. But black, he discovers, finds definition not in its own right but as the opposite of white. Hence in order to define himself, he must first define the white man. But to do so on the white man's terms would lead him back to self-denigration. And yet the only tools of intellection available to him are white tools – white language, white education, white systems of thought – the very things that alienate him from himself. Whatever tools are native to him lie beyond his consciousness somewhere, condemned to disuse and decay by white centuries. But to use white tools to uncover the white man so that he (the black) may at last find definition requires that the tools themselves are altered in their use. In the process, the whole of white civilisation comes into question, black culture is re-assessed, and the very fabric of bourgeois society threatened. Take language, for instance. A man's whole world, as Fanon points out, is 'expressed and implied by his language': it is a way of thinking, of feeling, of being. It is identity. It is, in Valéry's grand phrase, 'the god gone astray in the flesh'. But the language of the colonised man is another man's language. In fact it is his oppressor's and must, of its very nature, be inimical to him – to his people and his gods. Worse, it creates alien gods. Alien gods 'gone astray in the flesh' – white gods in black flesh – a canker in the rose. No, that is not quite right, for white gods, like roses, are beautiful things, it is the black that is cancerous. So one should say a 'rose in the canker'. But that is not quite right either – neither in its imagery nor in what it is intended to express. How does one say it then? How does one express the holiness of the heart's disaffection (pace Keats) and 'the truth of the imagination' in a language that is false to one? How does one communicate the burden of one's humanity in a language that dehumanises one in the very act of communication?

Two languages, then, one for the coloniser and another for the colonised – and yet within the same language? How to reconcile this ambivalence? A patois, perhaps: a spontaneous, organic rendering of the masters' language to the throb of native sensibilities – some last grasp at identity, at wholeness.

But dialect betrays class. The 'pidgin-nigger-talker' is an ignorant man. Only common people speak pidgin. Conversely, when the white man speaks it, it is only to show the native how common he really is. It is a way of 'classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivising him'.

Or perhaps the native has a language of his own; even a literature. But compared to English (or French) his language is dead, his literature passé. They have no place in a modern, industrialised world. They are for yesterday's people. Progress is English, education is English, the good things in life (in the world the coloniser made) are English, the way to the top (and white civilisation leaves the native in no doubt that that is the purpose of life) is English. His teachers see to it that he speaks it in school, his parents that he speaks it at home – even though they are rejected by their children for their own ignorance of the tongue.

But if the coloniser's language creates an 'existential deviation' in the native, white literature drives him further from himself. It disorientates him from his surroundings: the heat, the vegetation, the rhythm of the world around him. Already, in childhood, he writes school essays on 'the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness'. He learns of good and just government from Rhodes and Hastings and Morgan. In the works of the great historian, Thomas Carlyle, he finds that 'poor black Quashee ... a swift supple fellow, a merry-hearted, grinning, dancing, singing, affectionate kind of creature' could indeed be made into a 'handsome glossy thing' with a 'pennyworth of oil', but 'the tacit prayer he makes (unconsciously he, poor blockhead) to you and to me and to all the world who are wiser than himself is "compel me"' – to work. In the writings of the greatest playwright in the world, he discovers that he is Caliban and Othello and Aaron, in the testaments of the most civilised religion that he is for ever cursed to slavery. With William Blake, the great revolutionary poet and painter, mystic and savant, he is convinced that:

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereav'd of light.

Yet, this is the man who wrote 'The Tyger'. And the little black boy, who knows all about tigers, understands the great truth of Blake's poem, is lost in wonderment at the man's profound imagination. What then of the other Blake? Was it only animals he could imagine himself into? Did he who wrote 'The Tyger' write 'The Little Black Boy'?

It is not just the literature of the language, however, that ensnares the native into 'whititude', but its grammar, its syntax, its vocabulary. They are all part of the trap. Only by destroying the trap can he escape it. 'He has', as Genet puts it, 'only one recourse: to accept this language but to corrupt it so skilfully that the white men are caught in his trap.' He must blacken the language, suffuse it with his own darkness, and liberate it from the presence of the oppressor.

In the process, he changes radically the use of words, wordorder – sounds, rhythm, imagery – even grammar. For, he recognises with Laing that even 'syntax and vocabulary are political acts that define and circumscribe the manner in which facts are experienced, [and] indeed ... create the facts that are studied'. In effect he brings to the language the authority of his particular experience and alters thereby the experience of the language itself. He frees it of its racial oppressiveness (black is beautiful), invests it with 'the universality inherent in the human condition'. And he writes:

As there are hyena-men and panther-men
so I shall be a Jew man
a Kaffir man
a Hindu-from-Calcutta man
a man-from-Harlem-who-hasn't-got-the-vote.

The discovery of black identity had equated the 'coloured' intellectual with himself, the definition of it equates him with all men. But it is still a definition arrived at by negating a negative, by rejecting what is not. And however positive that rejection, it does not by itself make for a positive identity. For that reason, it tends to be self-conscious and overblown. It equates the black man to other men on an existential (and intellectual) level, rather than on a political one.

But to 'positivise' his identity, the black man must go back and rediscover himself – in Africa and Asia – not in a frenetic search for lost roots, but in an attempt to discover living tradition and values. He must find, that is, a historical sense, 'which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal, and of the timeless and temporal together' and which 'involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence'. Some of that past he still carries within him, no matter that it has been mislaid in the Caribbean for over four centuries. It is the presence of that past, the living presence, that he now seeks to discover. And in discovering where he came from he realises more fully where he is at, and where, in fact, he is going to.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Catching History on the Wing by A. Sivanandan. Copyright © 2008 A. Sivanandan. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745328342
• ISBN 13: 9780745328348
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272