VI

#78, November 22, 2005

Beyond the Whale

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Anthony Appiah speak at Bryn Mawr College. It was the last of several talks he had given at the college, and since I was only able to hear this one, I may not have been able to understand all the finer points he was making. There were many references to his previous lectures and meetings the significance of which I wasn’t able to grasp entirely. However, in his discussion of ethics as a way out of our current malaise I was somewhat troubled by his deployment and non-deployment of culture. Again, I may not have fully grasped the problematic as he was laying it out. Appiah is extremely smart and he knows his stuff, so I may have missed the point.

Yet it did seem to me that he was reifying culture in a way that I found troubling. Early on in the talk he discussed the influence of culture in our lives and how this shaped many of our actions. And what he had to say seemed to fit with his discussion of culture in The Ethics of Identity. But it seemed to me that for him culture was very much something that was traceable to certain things that we do – the language we speak, or the way we talk; the way we worship, or the sports we play. These seemed to be the taken-for-granted-ness of our existence.

What troubled me about this was that there seemed to be nothing contentious embedded in this notion of culture whatsoever. Italians brought with them Italian culture, Jews brought Jewish culture, and so forth. While he recognized that there might be divisions among the people themselves (within the group), he seemed willing to commit to a notion of culture as something pretty real. The old world/new world dichotomy was also pretty apparent, it seemed to me – and it is definitely there in The Ethics of Identity.

In the book, indeed, there is occasional recognition that something is an artifact or product of the American immigration experience, but this is not really made into an important part of the story. The fact that cultural “practices” and the notion of culture itself are products of members of the “modern” world viewing the “old” world through a prism that distorts the objects of analysis doesn’t really get recognized. This is particularly the case in the matter of gender, around which, for my money, most of culture swirls. For it is the breakdown of gender norms – not necessarily cultural norms – that leads to the creation of culture as the means to overcoming the disruption occurring in different communities (particularly in the displacement that brought so many to the shores of the United States). I am not sure whether I can elaborate on this fully now, but suffice it to say that it is the argument on which Histrionyx is founded.

Thus, when Appiah comes to his ethical solution at the end of his speech, suggesting that this entails the need to recognize the humanity in everyone – a very Quaker sentiment, I think – it seems fine in the context of a situation where culture is just a version of the smorgasbord (there are many different cultures and each one deserves respect). Easy come, easy go. We see that people have different cultures and, hey, we can live with that. It is rather like the claim that, in the United States, it doesn’t matter what religion you believe in, just so long as you believe in something; atheism is verboten. There is some truth to this, of course, mainly to the last part; but the first part is problematic. It does actually matter what people believe, and it matters to the degree that it limits our ability to see the act of another person as human and valid (this, it seems to me, is precisely what someone like Chakrabarty is talking about). If culture is just what we practice, it is easy to imagine that we will be able to see it as rational within its own framework and accept it as such. But…what if acts are fundamentally irrational – well, not so much irrational, but founded in power and the response to its diminution? There is nothing rational about killing oneself for a cause; there is also nothing cultural about it (at least in Appiah’s rendering of this concept). But people still seem to be doing it, and martyrdom seems to go beyond expression of culture and its difference. Moreover, culture is frequently oriented towards, or mobilized for the purpose of keeping people within one’s group in their place, when they are seen to be moving out of it; for example, there is nothing cultural about a particular patriarchal familial structure, but in a context of an assault on patriarchy in a particular society, patriarchy very quickly becomes a cultural marker or representation.

The point is that when culture has its roots in such things as anxieties and resentments it doesn’t make for a situation where people can sit around in a seemingly disengaged fashion and recognize the humanity in each other, or understand the expressions of the other as those of humans at the same level as the self. Maybe this is the difference between the optimist (Appiah) and the pessimist (moi),

Pulling out my old review of Appiah’s In My Father’s House, I find that what I may be having a problem with here is perhaps embedded in the early erasure of gender. This was a review that I first wrote for American Quarterly. I wrote to the editor and suggested that this book really ought to be reviewed for a journal that covers American studies, even if it seemed at first glance an unlikely choice. They agreed and let me review it. I even wrote a letter to Appiah and told him that I was reviewing the book, and received a nice letter back – we were both Bryanstonians and we had interviews at Harvard a couple of days apart (his a tad more successful than mine), so I thought I would write to him and say hi. I sent him the review as well, but I am not sure whether he liked it much – at least he never responded. I then reworked the review a little (if I recall correctly, the parts about Emecheta may have been added) for my book Inside Out, Outside In.

For some people, when you say “Timbuktu” it is like the end of the world, but that is not true. I am from Timbuktu, and I can tell you we are right at the heart of the world.

– Ali Farka Touré[1]

C.L.R. James would have insisted that Americanists ask the question, “What do they know of America who only America know?”[2] The importance of asking this question is made clear in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which highlights the contribution of Africa to the formulation of ideas about culture.[3] Such ideas, embodied in particular in the modern concept of race, prevail in both the global academy and American society. To comprehend the genealogy of these ideas, from their invention to their current stranglehold on American political discourse, an understanding of the interaction between Africa and America is vital. Only once such genealogies are delineated and the concepts (such as race) they generate are contested, can we hope to move beyond both that Western Tradition Whale celebrated by William Bennett and his ilk, and its antagonists, ahistorical nationalisms, toward a multicultural and postmodern society. This book, then, is the essential hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy beyond essentialism.

Appiah is an excellent guide because, in his almost unparalleled ability to move back and forth between academic disciplines as wide ranging as philosophy, anthropology, history, sociology, literary criticism and biology, and in his access to a wide range of personal experiences, he can take us beyond so many boundaries. Besides being an allusion to a heaven where there is room enough for all peoples, the house to which Appiah refers in his title is that of his own father in Kumasi, capital of Asante, a kingdom in Ghana. Appiah’s Africa is multilayered, encompassing many different worlds:

Some worlds – the world of the law courts where my father went, dressed in his dark European suits, carrying the white wig of the British barrister... – some worlds we knew of only because our parents spoke of them. Others – the world of the little church – Saint George’s, where we went to Sunday school with Baptists and Copts and Catholics and Methodists and Anglicans, from other parts of the country, other parts of the continent, other parts of the world – we knew inside and out, knew because they were central to our friendships, our learning, our beliefs.(p. vii)

His mother's family house is located in England, where much of Appiah’s education took place, (though his upbringing, the dust jacket tells us, was in Ghana). Now he resides in the United States and has become used “to seeing the world as a network of points of affinity” (p. viii). The author’s ideas about culture emerge as he crosses back and forth over the boundaries demarcating center/periphery, colonial/postcolonial, traditional/modern, and national/transnational, among others. Like James’s Caliban, Appiah “pioneer[s] into regions Caesar never knew.”[4]

The opening essays, “The Invention of Africa” and “Illusions of Race,” explore the role of racial ideology in the development of Pan-Africanism. In these pieces, Appiah focuses in particular on Alexander Crummell and W.E.B. Du Bois, foremost among the African American intellectuals who initiated Pan-Africanist discourse. Appiah finds that “the idea of the Negro, the idea of an African race, is an unavoidable element in that discourse, and that these racialist notions are grounded in bad biological – and worse ethical – ideas, inherited from the increasingly racialized thought of nineteenth-century Europe and America”(p. x). These men, in turn, contributed to the further entrenchment of such notions.

Crucial to Crummell’s assessment of Africans – and something he shared with most of his African American contemporaries (particularly the many African Methodists who traveled to Africa as missionaries for their church[5]) – was an “essentially negative sense of traditional culture in Africa as anarchic, unprincipled, ignorant, defined by the absence of all the positive traits of civilization as ‘savage’; and savages hardly have a culture at all”(21). Providence, via the means of slavery in America, had brought many Africans in contact with both the English language and Christianity, and it was now the duty of the Negro to bring light to ‘darkest Africa’ and, to use Phillis Wheatley’s words, its ‘benighted souls.’[6]

At the core of this vision, according to Appiah, was the concept of race. “Crummell’s ‘Africa,’” he writes, “is the motherland of the Negro race, and his right to act in it, to speak for it, to plot its future, derived...from the fact that he too was a Negro. More than this, Crummell held that there was a common destiny for the people of Africa...because they belonged to this one race”(5). In other words, he countered racism by accepting the category of race and by using it to his benefit. For Appiah, Crummell exemplifies the intrinsic racist; he differentiated morally among members of different races, because he believed that each race had a different moral status, quite independent of the moral characteristics entailed by its racial essence(14). Regardless of whether evidence proved that the connection between race and moral capacity was false, he would have remained committed to his beliefs about race and racial destiny.

While Du Bois transcended such moral fallacies, he was unable to transcend race altogether; he was an extrinsic racist, who made moral distinctions among members of different races because he believed that racial essences entailed certain morally relevant qualities(13). Du Bois moved away from current biological explanations of race toward sociohistorical explanations. In the process, he returned Hegel to the standing position by inverting Marx: “the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races”(28). In this history, Du Bois wrote, “races have a ‘message’ for humanity, a message that derives, in some way, from God's purpose in creating races. The Negro race has still to deliver its message, and so it is the duty of Negroes to work together through race organizations so that this message can be delivered”(30). Appiah’s rendering of Du Bois is consistent with The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, in which the latter placed the Sorrow Songs alongside the works of European poets from Shakespeare and Schiller to Whittier and Mrs. Browning in the pantheon of cultural achievement.[7]

But, Appiah contends, Du Bois’s attempt to “revalue” the race to counter oppression with an “antiracist racism” is both theoretically and practically unproductive. The concept of race “is a hierarchy, a vertical structure, and Du Bois wishes to rotate the axis to give it a ‘horizontal’ reading. Challenge the assumption that there can be an axis, however oriented in the space of values, and the project fails for loss of presuppositions”(46). More practically speaking, while the attempt to highlight certain race abilities might lead to a more equitable estimation of the different contributions of the “races,” “it might just as easily lead to chauvinism or total incomprehension”(94). Stereotyping, defining African Americans as natural athletes, musicians, and so on, would be just one by-product of such an approach. Much like an ideology of Separate Spheres, then, it might leave the system of oppression unaltered.

Having established these origins for Pan-Africanism in Euro-American concepts of race, Appiah moves on to consider post-colonial directions in African literature and philosophy. In the process he contests the Afrocentric (“Egyptian”) reconstruction of Africa with its vision of African literature as “an autonomous entity separate and apart from all other literature [with] its own traditions, models and norms.”[8] For Appiah, the boundaries between literatures have been crossed by imperialism and by diasporas, so that it is no longer possible to turn the clock back, even if we wanted to. “For us to forget Europe,” he writes, “is to suppress the conflicts that have shaped our destinies; since it is too late for us to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us”(p. 72).

With such a perspective in mind, Appiah prescribes reform for both African and American academies. In the African academy, the need is to identify the modern African text as a product of colonial encounters, to stress that the continuity between precolonial forms of culture and contemporary ones are nevertheless genuine, and to challenge assumptions of the cultural superiority of the West (p. 70). In the American academy, Appiah asserts,

the reading of African writing is reasonably directed by other purposes: by the urge to continue the repudiation of racism; by the need to extend the American imagination – an imagination that regulates much of the world system economically and politically – beyond the narrow scope of the United States; by the desire to develop views of the world elsewhere that respect more deeply the autonomy of the Other, views that are not generated by the local political needs of America’s multiple diasporas.(p. 70)

To Appiah’s list, one must also add, the need to move beyond a vision that only one “American imagination” exists. After all, in a country whose history has included “multiple diasporas,” the development of a privileged “American” narrative has led to the denial of the many others within. In short, the study of African literature may also teach us the tenuousness of our own imperial assumptions.

Even when Appiah seems to leave America behind entirely in a discussion of the intricacies and complexities of African culture, as in the chapter entitled “Myth of an African World,” the analysis still has resonance for the Americanist. He argues that “many African societies have as much in common with traditional societies that are not African as they do with each other”(p. 91) and that “what is distinctive about African thought is that it is traditional”(p. 104). As such, the colonial interaction between Western and African discourses takes on the air of a confrontation between religion and magic, or a Thompsonian confrontation between industrial capitalism and the “moral economy.”[9]

While this formulation replicates the old modernization model, Appiah rejects the pessimistic, Weberian outcome to this saga. “The beginning of postmodern wisdom,” he writes, “is to ask whether Weberian rationalization is in fact what has happened”(p. 145). Appiah invites his reader to use the continuing confrontation between the traditional and the modern to raise questions that seem long-buried in Weberian pessimism about the inevitability of modern world to crush any non-bureaucratic, non-monetized, non-Western future; he invites us to swim free of the whale.[10]

In contrast to both Crummell’s and Du Bois’s approaches to Pan-Africanism, Appiah considers the way forward to lie in moving beyond race altogether.

The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us. As we have seen, even the biologist's notion has limited uses, and the notion that Du Bois required, and that underlies the more hateful racism of the modern era, refers to nothing in the world at all.(p. 45)

Appiah is very persuasive on this point, and methodically discredits all racial rationalizations. But, we are left in a quandary. While race may not exist, belief in its existence is pervasive, just as it was in Crummell’s and Du Bois’s day, among both proponents and opponents of racial equality. What is the proper response to racism in a world of such political realities? Can racism be fought through race in the manner attempted by Du Bois?

Appiah proposes that racism be fought by the denial of race. But the danger, which he sees clearly, is that this approach may reinforce the status quo. “It is certainly true,” he writes, “that there must be contexts in which a statement of...truths is politically inopportune. I am enough of a scholar to feel drawn to truth telling, ruat caelum; enough of a political animal to recognize that there are places where the truth does more harm than good.” But Appiah does not feel that we need to choose between these two impulses. “There is no reason to believe that racism is always – or even usually – advanced by denying the existence of races; and, though there is some reason to suspect that those who resist legal remedies for the history of racism might use the nonexistence of races to argue in the United States for example, against affirmative action, that strategy is, as a matter of logic, easily opposed.” After all, he continues, “the existence of racism does not require the existence of races. And, we can add, nations are real however invented their traditions”(p. 175). These last two statements seem, to me at least, to create difficulties for Appiah. While affirmative action may be redressing past discriminations based upon racism, some who use Appiah’s analysis might claim that it also contributes to the continued reification of race as a category (the same argument made about scheduled castes in India). Moreover, if nations can be realized through the invention of traditions, might not races also be?

The problem persists, “as old as political philosophy itself, of when we should endorse the ennobling lie.” Having rejected the work of the “Egyptianists” for endeavoring to root Africa’s modern identity in an imaginary history, and having rejected Du Bois’s “revaluation of the race,” little space remains for the academic philosopher to employ an “ennobling lie.” More’s the pity. Because invented traditions, so fundamental to the longevity of Appiah’s other “house,” the Anglo-American imperium, might be contested both by the invention of competing traditions and by questioning the legitimacy of traditions altogether.[11] But taking the former route ends in difficulties. Today’s political exigencies (or “strategic essentialisms”[12]) may become tomorrow's dogma. To celebrate and endorse “those identities that seem at the moment to offer the best hope of advancing our other goals...and to keep silence about the lies and the myths,” is to depart from the academic imperative from which “societies profit”(178-9). Further, intraracial differences – gender, class, regional, religious and even color conflicts, which are of great significance in their own right – will be downplayed in the service of racial unity.

That counter-myth cannot be used is a pity also because the chances of making advances towards genuinely multicultural societies through the rejection of race seem so slim: “We would need to show not that race and national history are falsehoods but [that] they are useless falsehoods at best – at worst – dangerous ones: that another set of stories will build us identities through which we can make more productive alliances” (p. 175). But, if we cannot ground our responses to racism, such as affirmative action, on grounds other than race, how should we proceed? For, if the imperium remains, and the American economy and military maintain their position in the world, can we not expect those who are excluded from the New Whale Order to want to be swallowed by it on whatever terms, racial or otherwise, that it offers? Will they not profit by doing so? As such, a Pan-Africanism, which Appiah wishes to see founded on an understanding of Africa's “multifarious communities [and] local customs”(p. 180) and not on a yearning for a single African state, is likely to remain elusive. Instead, Africa will remain the province of the “Egyptians.” Even if the imperial center should crumble, hopes for reassessment of Africa and race may be lost in the Balkan-style conflicts that emerge.

Another approach that Appiah appears to sidetrack comes from those dealing with issues of gender. It is readily apparent that the issue of gender would quickly confound questions of race in this work, for better or worse. More importantly perhaps, gender also confounds the presentation of Africa, African culture, and the traditional that Appiah presents throughout. The use of Chinua Achebe’s writings as a source of epigraphs for a number of chapters locates this author’s work as a starting point for Appiah. But, while seeming to concur with the novelist’s presentation of Africa as the traditional culture facing the intervention of the modern and colonial, Appiah wants to evade the Weberian sense that “Things Fall Apart” in the wake of the Europeans. Turning to face the issue of gender, perhaps using Buchi Emecheta as a starting point rather than Achebe, might have helped in this endeavor.

Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood presents a world that has not fallen apart, and forces the reader to wonder whether Achebe was unduly under the influence of William Butler Yeats.[13] From the perspective of Emecheta’s characters, Nnu Ego and Ona, there is no denouement as there is for Achebe’s Okonkwo, who commits suicide. Emecheta’s characters’ struggles are on-going both in the rural village and in Lagos, as they face poverty, the restraints of motherhood, colonialism, and potential ethnic conflict. Moreover, the starting point of Joys is the ending point of Things Fall Apart[14] – a rural village soon after the British have established their control over Nigeria. But while, Achebe describes an intervention of missionaries, good and bad, changing the lives of the Ibo, Emecheta describes a village conforming in most particulars to the one that has already fallen apart. Further, the British are almost nowhere to be seen, and the Christians are largely resident in Lagos. What emerges from Emecheta’s text is a different kind of colonial relationship, one that is not dependent upon the destruction of pre-colonial society. Indeed, as the novel progresses it becomes pretty clear that the availability of a labor supply in Lagos is closely connected to the continuation of traditions in the villages. What better for the reproduction of labor, those joys of motherhood, than having men with several wives creating a labor surplus in rural areas? Colonialism, then, does not necessarily break down traditions; it can establish them more firmly as the basis for a divided labor market.[15]

Out of such a picture a postcolonial critique of both the colonial and the traditional along the lines of gender might emerge. Nnu Ego is oppressed by the joys of motherhood, by other mothers, by her husbands and other men, by the English, by the market, and any number of things. Layers are placed upon layers such that if one of them were to “fall apart,” others might remain undisturbed or compensate for its collapse. Ultimately, the birth that is in process here is that of the new nation; and with the conflict that emerges at the end of the novel between Ibo and Yoruba, there is a sense that the pains of childbirth are accompanied by dreams of future ethnic strife located not in the traditional, but the modern, urban landscape.

With his “reasonableness” on matters of race and his great optimism for the future, Appiah reminds one of the words of another optimist. Salman Rushdie writes:

The truth is there is no whale....However much we may wish to return to the womb, we cannot be unborn. So we are left with the straightforward choice. Either we agree to delude ourselves, to lose ourselves in the fantasy of the great fish, for which a second metaphor is that of Pangloss’s garden; or we can do what all human beings do instinctively when they realize that the womb has been lost for ever--that is, we can make the devil of a racket....Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism; in place of the whale, the protesting wail.

Interestingly, we are returned to the womb and the joys of motherhood which we forget at our peril. The wars, cultural and otherwise, rage on; Rushdie remains in hiding. All we can do is resort to 'the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible.'[16]