When looking through the Trouillot text again this week, I noticed something that had not really caught my attention when I originally read the text for Bill French’s cultural history class, which is who Trouillot is writing for: “This is a story for young black Americans who are still afraid of the dark. Although they are not alone, it may tell them why they feel that they are.” (page 70) Trouillot’s desire to address young black Americans comes from two encounters he had with black students he has taught, one of whom questioned the ability of white scholars to talk about blackness because they “never jumped from a slave ship” (page 70) and another who complained that his course only focused on suffering and never talked about black millionaires (page 71). In both cases, Trouillot says that these students are looking to history as a sort of foundation for their own identities. Trouillot says that currently, “no history book” tells the kind of history his students are looking for, and that it can only be found in the lessons we learn from sources like our parents and poetry. (pages 70 – 71) Trouillot goes on to explain that events that could serve as the base for such black foundational histories are absent, at least in the case of the Haitian revolution, largely because historians have either simply ignored them or in writing about them, have recapitulated ideas found in contemporary European sources which completely rob black actors of agency. Although at the end of the chapter Trouillot gestures at a solution to this problem—combining recent nationalists histories, which restore agency to black Haitian revolutionaries, but often abuse facts, with the traditional accounts he criticizes, which while coming from a biased perspective, are more methodologically sound—he does not provide a detailed framework for how such a work should be written.
The Scott piece we read for this week could be read as picking up where Trouillot left off. In his exploration of The Black Jacobins, Scott asserts that histories of the grand, Hegelian sort can and should be used to create narratives of emancipation. Scott suggests that if we reorient ourselves and look more at history as literature than a normative account of what “actually happened,” we can sidestep many of the issues poststructuralists have with grand narratives while still maintaining the sort of force, which I think would satisfy both of Trouillot’s students and their desires for a foundational history that contains a strong sense of black agency.
My questions for this week are related to this:
1. Should historians write the sort of histories which Trouillot’s students crave? If so, are the “poetic” grand narratives that Scott talks about a good model for this kind of writing?
2. If we decide that it is our place to write such narratives, how do we avoid appropriating the authority that is attached to traditional “propositional” grand narratives and the other dangers that they bring along with them?
For the sake of keeping it to a reasonable length, my post will focus on the Spivak, Chakrabatty and Hill pieces.
On Spivak, first I would like to say that I think she chooses to write in a very esoteric language bound to be inaccessible to most people, and this includes the use of many terms and phrases that, as far as I can tell, she has invented herself (yet does not bother to explain). I always find it ironic when intellectuals who situate their work in an emancipatory project and claim concern with the relationship between knowledge and power engage in what is essentially an elitist and exclusionary tactic. Fortunately the essence of what she is trying to say becomes clearer as the essay progresses.
Moving beyond that…If Spivak’s basic beef is that Foucault, Delueze and others are Eurocentric and have failed to acknowledge how their “intervention” in their subjects of study, with all the baggage they bring along, shapes the products of their intellectual work, she’ll get no argument from me (although I am not familiar enough with Foucault or Delueze to defend them). Beyond that, however, I’m not certain how much she offers. She spends a lot of energy attacking what she sees as flawed discourse without offering an alternative. To use just one example: she chastises Foucault and Delueze for having no “theory of ideology,” but what is her theory of ideology? If she does present one, I missed it.
In the end, she answers her own central question by confirming that the subaltern cannot in fact speak. This seems to situate her essay in a certain tradition of deconstructionist nihilism that is great and attacking the work of others but only leads to a kind of political and theoretical dead-end.
The challenge that Chakrabatty presents, is how do we write history that escapes the hyperreal Europe metanarrative he speaks of, when all these concepts we use to understand the post-colonial world – modernity, development, rights, citizenship, the nation, the nation-state, progress – are European imports, reinforced by both colonialism and third world nationalism? To make matters worse, the discipline of history as we know it and the modern university as we know it are European creations imbedded with Eurocentric concepts and categories.
While I generally agree with these premises (if not the conclusions he draws from them), and I very much sympathize with Chakrabatty’s call for a history that embraces heterogeneity, complexity, has no assumed trajectories and conclusions, etc., he too seems to have taken the deconstructionist path to the nihilist dead end, with his concluding thoughts that the project he advocates must “realize within itself its own impossibility” and “look to a history that embodies this politics of despair” (although then there’s the note at the very end, implying he has reconsidered this acceptance of futility).
As a side note, I think he gives an unfair reading of Marx. Don’t get me wrong, of course Marx was Eurocentric – he was an 18th century European who devoted his life to studying (primarily) the development of industrial capitalism in Western Europe. However another interpretation of Marx’s ape/man analogy is that he was simply stating that a given society’s modes of production contain vestiges of earlier modes of production which shape it’s present. In the Grundrisse where this quote is from, Marx is actually arguing that every societies development will be unique, shaped as it is by its unique history – India is *not* merely waiting to advance along a pre-set linear course on which it trails behind England and France. In my humble opinion, this (mis)reading of Marx was pretty much squashed with the publication of his correspondence with Vera Zasulich, where he says, in as plain a language as you can ask for, that his analysis of the development of capitalism in England and Western Europe was never intended to be taken as some universalist model of how all societies must develop according to some iron laws of history.
A final comment on Chakrabatty and Spivak – some people have accused some of the Sub-alternists of a kind of reverse-orientialism, overemphasizing an East-West binary metanarrative (created by Western imperialism) and falsely constructing the subalterns as something so utterly unique as to be unknowable, in the end leaving us in a kind of anti-humanism. Something to think about…
Stuart Hall is essentially grappling with the question of how Caribbean people can relate to their African heritage in their search for expressing a Caribbean identity in the context of the historical experience of colonialism. (Note the ambiguity here…is he discussing Caribbean people as a whole or just Afro-Caribbean people? He uses the terms black, Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean interchangeably, but he also acknowledges the broader ethnic diversity of the region). Here Hill is offering a politely worded critique of the vulgar ethno-nationalism and its desire to return to an African imaginary or resuscitate a lost, “pure” cultural identity that is in fact, as he points out, impossible. He does a brilliant job of articulating a vision of Caribbean identity as a non-static production in which the complexity, heterogeneity, and contradiction of Caribbean people’s relationship to Africa/African-ness, seen as bound in a rich history to which we might include Garveyism, Rastafarianism, the hybrid, African-rooted spiritual and cultural traditions of various Caribbean societies, etc..
However, there is also a weakness here, related to the ambiguity mentioned above, and that I thinks stems from the tension between his desire to formulate a pan-Caribbean identity that embraces all the diversity and complexity of the region, and his insistence on the “presence/absence of Africa” as the “privileged signifier of new conceptions of Caribbean identity.” The Caribbean in general is a much more diverse place than many assume, and many countries (Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Belize, Cuba, Surinam) are not “overwhelmingly black,” as he describes his native Jamaica. While I completely agree that “Everyone in the Caribbean, of whatever ethnic background, must sooner or later come to terms with this African presence,” it must also be remembered that for many of the more pluralistic Caribbean societies, the Left and broader progressive forces have been working since the beginnings of the anti-colonial struggle to overcome ethno-centric identity narratives that by their nature exclude and divide the working class, and in some cases, have been partly responsible for serious social strife and bloodshed. Another major and closely related weakness of his piece is the absence of any discussion of class. I say that not just because I think any discussion of culture which does address class is extremely limited, but also because it serves to reinforces an unfortunate trend in Caribbean studies as an academic field and an unfortunate legacy of real life politics in the Caribbean to treats ethnic groups as heterogeneous entities with common circumstances and interests, rather than recognizing the way such groups are themselves bifurcated by class. For this reasons, I think his African/European/the Americas concept is flawed. I would also add that I can’t help but see a trace of “the vanishing Indian” concept here; it should be noted that the Amerindians, including the Arawak and Carib people he mentions, are very much alive in Guyana, Surinam and other Caribbean coastal states. By contrast, I find much more progressive CLR James’ notion of the Caribbean reality as being foremost grounded in sugar – as the central force shaping all conceivable aspects of the development of the region, and within it encompassing the histories of all the people who came as slaves, indentured labourers, economic migrants, political refugees and colonists, and of course, the original peoples of the region.
This past spring I presented a short paper at a conference held by my undergraduate English Department. The conference was centered on popular culture as a category of scholarly analysis, and it invited people from English literature, media studies, women’s studies, philosophy, and history to discuss issues of form, medium, gender, consumption, narrative, and so on. My paper, entitled “Hip Hop as Subaltern,” offered a responsive question to Spivak’s “Can the subaltern speak?” This short paper was actually the byproduct of a longer essay that I wrote in a class on masculinities in modern history. The aim of that longer paper was to reveal how the conception of masculinity within Hip Hop culture changed over time (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s).* Even while preparing the shorter paper/presentation, I knew there were several methodological/theoretical issues attached to it: I hadn’t done enough reading within subaltern studies, I took several things to be self-evident, and, perhaps most importantly (as I discovered this past week), I hadn’t read Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. This “lack” of reading (to improperly use one of Chakrabarty’s phrases) meant that, among other things, I hadn’t fully considered a particularly relevant observation that Chakrabarty offers on page 45: that what happens/happened in India (and, by extension, in other locales characterized by subalternity) affects/affected what happens/happened in Britain (or, again, in other locales not characterized—at least not superficially—by subalternity). That this fact was not self-evident to me, but that other “facts” were indeed self-evident, is, in hindsight, quite telling. It reminds me of the historical, cultural, and theoretical baggage that I bring to bear on presumably everything I think/say/do/write. And so, I’ve managed to make two important observations about my own writing thanks to Chakrabarty. First, I can properly acknowledge the process by which I arrived at my responsive question to Spivak, which was “Are we listening?” Second, I can begin to understand that the aim of my original long paper—to track how masculinity in Hip Hop culture changed over time—may not be nearly as important as tracking how those changes within Hip Hop culture affected the self-fashioning of the hegemonic United States. I must consider the changes and the actualities that were wrought in both directions, and I must consider which factors can be classified as internal and/or external for both the hegemony and the subaltern.
Moreover, this leads me to believe that today’s research talk (and Tim Brook’s question for the presenter, Jennifer Wells) is of paramount importance in terms of the claiming of history. After all, I think that process is at the heart of much of this week’s material. Indeed, that may be the only thing that is self-evident from this literature.**
* Shameless plug alert!!! For those interested, a transcribed version of my talk is available here: https://conorwilkinson.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/hip-hop-as-subaltern/. I lay out my argument from both the short and long papers. Also, I really like reading people’s blogs, so let me know if you want to be blog buddies.
** For anyone who wasn’t able to make the talk, I can quickly fill in the gap tomorrow.
I think for this week’s readings I want to concentrate on Trouillot’s contribution, Chapter Three of Silencing the Past, “An Unthinkable History.” There is so much here, and in the book at large, that every time I read it through, it seems like different parts of it stick out to me, or mean new things. Here are a few strands of thought I found myself pulling at:
The idea of events without a conceptual category is interesting. Trouillot argues that Europeans were unable to process the Haitian Revolution properly while it was happening because racism blinded them from according black slaves actual human motivations (90-93). I wondered what other world-historical events could be considered unthinkable, at least to the frameworks of certain people? It made me think of paradigm shifts in knowledge, like the Copernican Revolution, or as I argued two weeks ago, the Deep Time Revolution/ Evolutuionary Revolution of the 1860s. In both of those cases, the events which initiated them were contested, ignored, silenced, and furiously debated for centuries because they were total affronts to the worldview of the powerful (and to many not-very-powerful people too, I’m sure).
Trouillot further argues that a continued focus on external (read: European) forces as the major part of the genesis of Haiti’s Revolution equally afflicts later historians (103-104). That replicates the refusal of contemporaries to see the slave revolution as their own. Trouillot also argues that the genesis of the Haitian Revolution does need to be intellectually decoupled from the French Revolution, or from French influence, or at least that is how I see his argument in this section. As Trouillot so eloquently puts it: “Implicit in that rhetoric [the focus on external actors] is the assumption that the French connection is both sufficient and necessary to the Haitian Revolution. That assumption trivializes the slaves’ independent sense of their right to freedom and the right to achieve this freedom by force of arms. [104]” On that note, Trouillot also warns us not to treat the Haitian Revolution as an “appendix of Bastille day”, and seems to implicate C. L. R. James’ title (The Black Jacobins) as another means of perpetuating French influence on the Haitian Revolution and the trivialization that causes (104). Now some might say it’s not proper to fully separate the two revolutions, but I did take this passage as Trouillot’s attempt to caution against the long intellectual shadow of the French Revolution.
I’m sure he’d acknowledge the influence, but in Trouillot’s comments above and in the general thrust of his critique of the historiography of the Haitian Revolution, I very strongly see the thought of Edward Said.
I also noted a passage on “formulas of silence” (96). Trouillot says they come in two varieties: formulas of trivialization and formulas of banalization and he also posits that these modes of interpreting history recur when discussing subjects like slavery in general or the Holocaust (96-97). I’m not quite sure what I have to say about these yet but it occurred to me that thinking about historiographical tropes makes a lot of sense.
Right at the very end of the chapter, on 107, Trouillot invokes Furet and the “second illusion of truth” which he says suffuses the collective mental map of the West: “what happened is what must have happened.” That, I used to think, was what people meant by presentism (maybe it’s not? Seems like we never resolved what it meant). I think this jumps off the page at me because while we all know the dangers of assuming historical events to be “inevitable”, I’m not sure such assumptions don’t creep in without us noticing. And yes, that’s most likely a function of power, which I took to be the implication of this passage.
To my mind, the ultimate lesson from Trouillot is to be attentive to the myriad ways in which power and historical hegemony seeps into historiography; power impacts source production, collection, preservation, and access. In addition, power affects what questions historians ask about their sources and which ones they choose to use for what purposes (and which ones they ignore). Power is insidious and its tentacles deeply entrenched and hard to see. But by tracing it, can we break free of it? I think his answer would be yes.
The readings from India intellectuals this week reinforce an important issue with which post-colonial historians have been grappling: how to secure some degree of intellectual and ideological independence in a system that is essentially Eurocentric and self-reproducing.
However, in the end, is there a way out of this conundrum? Chakrabarty seems to resign himself to the continued usage of the European intellectual tradition. He is quite pessimistic about producing narratives that purely use native ways of knowing as serious rationale ways of approaching history. He is also quite hesitant to give up the ascensionism and idealism of the Enlightenment inheritance, since it works to promote such admirable things as human rights and sound comprehensible narrative production. One issue he does not touch upon is how, if purely native Indian narratives were used, these historical narratives would be able to engage in dialogue with other histories in different parts of the world. The Western intellectual tradition and its analytical discourses, for all its faults, allow a measure of commensurability between different historical experiences and narratives. If we were to abandon it, would this perhaps be a few steps back? I struggle with knowing how to balance Western intellectual approaches with subaltern approaches. Too much of the former seems like a betrayal of the latter, while too much of the latter seems to sacrifice analytical value. This leaders me to my next point.
I think there are also certain dangers to using a wholly native intellectual approach. Chakrabarty points out that reliance on divinity for historical causality is a big pill to swallow. His demonstration makes it quite obvious, but I think it is worth reflecting on the fact that native ways of knowing too have their own limits. Wang Yuanming in his recent book Harmony and War on Confucianism in interstate politics in ancient China put the received Confucian trope of pacifism to the test, and found it to be wanting. He showed that political leaders were realists and often bent Confucian philosophical rhetoric when it suited them, or abandoned it entirely at times. He finds that political leaders were “structural realists” and less Confucian rulers. The point is that the uses of Confucianism and how political events unfolded would have been obscured if viewed solely through the Confucian lens as much of the histories record. If one were to allow those past voices to speak, they are still past voices with an agenda: the reproduction of their own socio-political power structures and relations at that time.
Spivak frames the problem as whether or not the subaltern can speak. His conclusion is no. In a very circuitous way (a writing style which has surely butchered many innocent brain cells) he argues that in attempting to give the subaltern a voice, the subject(Europe) reproduces itself in the object(subaltern). This is essentially arguing something similar to that of Chakrabarty that enlivening subalterns in any pure sense is a fantasy as the intellectual and post-colonial intellectual tradition is mired in a situation where subjectification is a product of Western capital social relations. This asymmetry necessarily denies an independent voice to the subaltern. However, he does argue that Derrida and his grammatology could be used to deconstruct the subaltern and provide valuable information on its positionality between modernity and tradition. It seems to me– and I have to admit I could not follow everything packed into this dense and somewhat inaccessible article– he is arguing that at least in the case of the subaltern woman, who did not have a hegemonic position, the present-day intellectual can learn to speak OF subalterns, but not FOR them (307-8). I wonder if we can only speak OF them, if that particular emphasis changes how we view their agency in history, or if it is simply a clever semantic twist.
I found Chakrabarty’s critique of the European discipline of history, and the spread of liberalism and nationalism thought provoking. He explains that evidence of the “subalternity” of third-world histories is found in the way that non-Western historians feel the need to refer to works in European history, while European historians do not feel the need to refer to non-Western history. Essentially all histories are known in relation to European history and how they differ from it. I could see his points resonating with the work of Indigenous scholars in Canada, especially his criticism of transition narratives, or narratives of progress, with themes of development, modernization, and capitalism. These narratives are problematic because they cause non-Western history (in this case Indian) to be read in terms of “lack, an absence, or an incompleteness that translates into inadequacy” (32). I have often seen teachers view students’ cultural differences in these terms – students who operate from less individualistic and success driven cultural ways of being. I really appreciated the way Chakrabarty challenges this perspective, suggesting that “plenitude” and “creativity” be read instead of “lack” and “inadequacy.”
He makes clear that the emergence of modern individualism, the introduction of the modern state via imperialism, and its attendant, citizenship, have been problematic, and rather than altogether rejecting modernity or promoting a cultural relativism (or trying to turn back the clock), he pushes for a more creative thinking around how Europe might be displaced from the centre of historical imagination and its repressive strategies and practices be revealed (45). Chakrabarty admits that this is difficult because it is hard to find a voice without using the knowledge, constructs, and systems of Western thought, but that it cannot take place within the University. Although I appreciate Chakrabarty’s call to reimagine the world once again as heterogeneous, the idea that history must look to its own death leaves me unsettled. I wonder if he has written more on this and how his thinking has developed.
This week’s readings were incredibly stimulating and challenging.
Spivak’s work “Can the Subaltern Speak” was particularly impactful as it directly addresses an elusive yet pertinent problematic of academic practice that I constantly struggle with. Her question of “can the subaltern speak?” ultimately turns ironically less on the ability of the ‘subaltern’ female subject herself, but more on if or how the academic can access that voice (represent the subaltern). On p. 294 Spivak suggests that while Foucault’s “mechanics of disciplinarization and institutionalization” remains useful, she is fearful that because Foucault does not link these ideas to any version of imperialism, academics may “allow the complicity of the investigating subject (male or female professional) to disguise itself in transparency.” She then reasserts that “reporting on, or better still, participating in, antisexist work among women of color or women in class oppression in the First World or Third World is undeniably on the agenda. We should also welcome all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is taking place in anthropology, political science, history, and sociology. Yet the assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work and will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization. And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever.” (295)
So there are two big critiques here of academic practice that seem to be wolves in sheeps clothing – namely transparency used as disguise, and the impetus to simply impart consciousness upon colonial subjects while remaining inside an imperial framework, the latter having the opposite effect than was intended.
These are really scary pitfalls, ones which are always ominously close as a Western-trained, white male scholar of both settler and indigenous ancestry. So I would like to pose some questions that firstly try to understand Spivak more fully and secondly looks to some of the other scholars from this week for insight.
– What is the problem of representation for Spivak and what does it mean that it hasn’t “withered away”?
– How does Spivak characterize epistemic violence and why is it important?
– What is the tension between Micrology/Macrology? How does it impact or create epistemic violence?
– What are we to do with the (possibly coincidental, probably not) characterization of subaltern/colonial subjects and histories in this weeks readings as variously ‘mute’ ‘unthinkable’ ‘imaginary’ ‘unspoken’? Can it be shruggingly chalked up to the necessity of naming the oppressive force in order to dismantle it? Maybe more importantly, does the naming actually affect any kind of dismantling? (this latter question is based mostly on the fact that so many of these characterizations are still so relevant to contemporary issues and political concerns.)
I have always struggled with the notion of modernity. The more I try to study it, the harder I find it is to be satisfied with what I am doing. The word itself could take an eternity to unpack, and the biggest problem is coming up with a way to define what someone means when they evoke modernity. I haven’t revisited definitions of modernity for a while, so I might be a bit rusty. When I tried to find a satisfactory definition of modernity, the closest one I could reach was that it was a shorthand for westernization. I felt as though there was no objective truth to the idea of modernity, and the word was largely evoked as a shorthand for “European progress.” This is obviously tied up within ideas of the nation state and nation building. Chakrabarty problematizes the idea of modernity well in his chapter, and if I ever revisit modernity studies I will definitely use him. I have never been too satisfied with the idea that modernity equates westernization because I feel as though national boundaries create differing notions of modernity based on tradition and history-making processes. Chakrabarty complicates modernity in a way that I find accessible, and I would like to revisit his book. I think I’ve begun to criticize my own assumption that modernity is just westernization, and I think this will lead me on the right path to understand modernity.
I find Spivak interesting because of her complicated and inaccessible language. I have heard many good arguments which problematize this because she is using the trope of inaccessibility which is so prominent in academia. I remember my first postcolonial prof explaining that she would use heavy language in her own work as a way to legitimize herself within academic circles. This, however, doesn’t rupture the western roots as much as it perpetuates them. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Should post colonial academics seek narratives and forms which reject conventional academia? I would say yes. Though I realize the consequence would be that this would appear to be less academic. I think Trouillot does this with the italicized narrative, but it was largely absent from all the other work. Is the theory being created here the way to create new tools that are going to dismantle European exceptionalism.
Can the subaltern’s silence be more powerful than speaking? I realize that when Spivak is speaking of this it is more complicated than the historical voice and has more to do with historical inquiry, but I think it is an interesting question nevertheless. My inspiration for this question is based on a historical work by Joan Sangster which tracks indigenous women using silence as powerful anti colonial protests. I think the idea of speaking with historical actors is interesting because I am hesitant to say that anyone can “speak.” I think it is more an issue with contemporary historians rather than historical actors. Is historiographical convention why the subaltern cannot speak?
For this week’s response, I will focus on Trouillot and Scott. Trouillot’s “An Unthinkable History” argues the silence in the Haiti historiography about the history of the Haitian Revolution, because the revolution itself was just beyond people and intellectuals comprehension during that time. I really like the opening passage where he states that “we all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are not in the classroom. They are in the lessons we learn at home….in what is left for history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts” (72). This statement points out the subjectivity of history itself; for as historians, we all write about history, and our history is shaped by our subjectivity and within our comprehension. The author goes on to recall the historiography of slaves and the insurrection itself through time, arguing that because of the existence of “scientific racism”, people just cannot imagine a successful Black revolution followed by an independent Black state: “the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable in its time: it challenged the very framework within which proponents and opponents had examined race, colonialism, and slavery in the Americas” (83). The evidence supports the authors argument about the “unthinkable history” is the very fact of the existence of “scientific racism” among people in Europe; however, I just wonder by looking at their writings back then, how can we determine that for the people in Europe then, the Black revolution is beyond comprehension? What if they noticed the possibility of a Black independent state, but they just do not want to admit that in their writings? Even though he subsequently offers explanations for why this history is beyond people’s time and indeed “unthinkable”, I am not fully convinced by that. (But I do think this new way of looking at the Haitian revolution and the new way of assessing the historiography of Haiti or of world history itself is very thought-provoking).
Scott’s article “The Theory of Haiti: The Black Jacobins and the Poetics of Universal History” is very much in conversation with Trouillot’s. He agrees with Trouillot about the fact that historiography has been ignoring Haiti in many ways: “the more Haiti appears weird, the easier it is to forget that it represents the longest neocolonial experiment in the history of the West” (36). But his argument is from a different angle. He talks about the idea of “theory problem”. I am a little confused about this word. I think it is abstract and everywhere in the article. I do not know how to define it. The author spends a lot of space talking about an “Hegelian world-historical” view: he argues that for Hegel, world history was motivated toward a certain track(a higher universal) and in each period of development, there would always be an individual who “seize upon this higher universal and make it their own end” (43): the gradual self-awareness of reason. Scott uses James’ book The Black Jacobins, to demonstrate the effect of universal history, using the Hegelian model of thinking, demonstrating how the Haitian revolution became part of universal history. In the end, he kind of links everything together by saying that : “what I want us to see is the connection between the construction of Haiti as….a certain kind of theory-problem, and the mobilization of a narrative strategy of universal history that works by showing the unfolding overcoming of the besetting conundrums and the realization of reason in a specific history” (50). However, maybe it is my problem, but this article seems a little bit difficult for me to follow the logic. I hope I could more about other people’s opinions.
However, this week’s reading is very helpful for me. It opens up a new way of re-assessing history and historiography: the part that we all taken for granted for a very long time. Maybe it is time to ask or to challenge the general historiography on world history: on the part that we have long been ignored and we have acknowledged that it is not important. Maybe it was just because it was so important that it surpassed contemporaries comprehension, or maybe due to various reasons, it was ignored on purpose. In any case, I think this possibility is very helpful and thought-provoking for me.
When looking through the Trouillot text again this week, I noticed something that had not really caught my attention when I originally read the text for Bill French’s cultural history class, which is who Trouillot is writing for: “This is a story for young black Americans who are still afraid of the dark. Although they are not alone, it may tell them why they feel that they are.” (page 70) Trouillot’s desire to address young black Americans comes from two encounters he had with black students he has taught, one of whom questioned the ability of white scholars to talk about blackness because they “never jumped from a slave ship” (page 70) and another who complained that his course only focused on suffering and never talked about black millionaires (page 71). In both cases, Trouillot says that these students are looking to history as a sort of foundation for their own identities. Trouillot says that currently, “no history book” tells the kind of history his students are looking for, and that it can only be found in the lessons we learn from sources like our parents and poetry. (pages 70 – 71) Trouillot goes on to explain that events that could serve as the base for such black foundational histories are absent, at least in the case of the Haitian revolution, largely because historians have either simply ignored them or in writing about them, have recapitulated ideas found in contemporary European sources which completely rob black actors of agency. Although at the end of the chapter Trouillot gestures at a solution to this problem—combining recent nationalists histories, which restore agency to black Haitian revolutionaries, but often abuse facts, with the traditional accounts he criticizes, which while coming from a biased perspective, are more methodologically sound—he does not provide a detailed framework for how such a work should be written.
The Scott piece we read for this week could be read as picking up where Trouillot left off. In his exploration of The Black Jacobins, Scott asserts that histories of the grand, Hegelian sort can and should be used to create narratives of emancipation. Scott suggests that if we reorient ourselves and look more at history as literature than a normative account of what “actually happened,” we can sidestep many of the issues poststructuralists have with grand narratives while still maintaining the sort of force, which I think would satisfy both of Trouillot’s students and their desires for a foundational history that contains a strong sense of black agency.
My questions for this week are related to this:
1. Should historians write the sort of histories which Trouillot’s students crave? If so, are the “poetic” grand narratives that Scott talks about a good model for this kind of writing?
2. If we decide that it is our place to write such narratives, how do we avoid appropriating the authority that is attached to traditional “propositional” grand narratives and the other dangers that they bring along with them?
For the sake of keeping it to a reasonable length, my post will focus on the Spivak, Chakrabatty and Hill pieces.
On Spivak, first I would like to say that I think she chooses to write in a very esoteric language bound to be inaccessible to most people, and this includes the use of many terms and phrases that, as far as I can tell, she has invented herself (yet does not bother to explain). I always find it ironic when intellectuals who situate their work in an emancipatory project and claim concern with the relationship between knowledge and power engage in what is essentially an elitist and exclusionary tactic. Fortunately the essence of what she is trying to say becomes clearer as the essay progresses.
Moving beyond that…If Spivak’s basic beef is that Foucault, Delueze and others are Eurocentric and have failed to acknowledge how their “intervention” in their subjects of study, with all the baggage they bring along, shapes the products of their intellectual work, she’ll get no argument from me (although I am not familiar enough with Foucault or Delueze to defend them). Beyond that, however, I’m not certain how much she offers. She spends a lot of energy attacking what she sees as flawed discourse without offering an alternative. To use just one example: she chastises Foucault and Delueze for having no “theory of ideology,” but what is her theory of ideology? If she does present one, I missed it.
In the end, she answers her own central question by confirming that the subaltern cannot in fact speak. This seems to situate her essay in a certain tradition of deconstructionist nihilism that is great and attacking the work of others but only leads to a kind of political and theoretical dead-end.
The challenge that Chakrabatty presents, is how do we write history that escapes the hyperreal Europe metanarrative he speaks of, when all these concepts we use to understand the post-colonial world – modernity, development, rights, citizenship, the nation, the nation-state, progress – are European imports, reinforced by both colonialism and third world nationalism? To make matters worse, the discipline of history as we know it and the modern university as we know it are European creations imbedded with Eurocentric concepts and categories.
While I generally agree with these premises (if not the conclusions he draws from them), and I very much sympathize with Chakrabatty’s call for a history that embraces heterogeneity, complexity, has no assumed trajectories and conclusions, etc., he too seems to have taken the deconstructionist path to the nihilist dead end, with his concluding thoughts that the project he advocates must “realize within itself its own impossibility” and “look to a history that embodies this politics of despair” (although then there’s the note at the very end, implying he has reconsidered this acceptance of futility).
As a side note, I think he gives an unfair reading of Marx. Don’t get me wrong, of course Marx was Eurocentric – he was an 18th century European who devoted his life to studying (primarily) the development of industrial capitalism in Western Europe. However another interpretation of Marx’s ape/man analogy is that he was simply stating that a given society’s modes of production contain vestiges of earlier modes of production which shape it’s present. In the Grundrisse where this quote is from, Marx is actually arguing that every societies development will be unique, shaped as it is by its unique history – India is *not* merely waiting to advance along a pre-set linear course on which it trails behind England and France. In my humble opinion, this (mis)reading of Marx was pretty much squashed with the publication of his correspondence with Vera Zasulich, where he says, in as plain a language as you can ask for, that his analysis of the development of capitalism in England and Western Europe was never intended to be taken as some universalist model of how all societies must develop according to some iron laws of history.
A final comment on Chakrabatty and Spivak – some people have accused some of the Sub-alternists of a kind of reverse-orientialism, overemphasizing an East-West binary metanarrative (created by Western imperialism) and falsely constructing the subalterns as something so utterly unique as to be unknowable, in the end leaving us in a kind of anti-humanism. Something to think about…
Stuart Hall is essentially grappling with the question of how Caribbean people can relate to their African heritage in their search for expressing a Caribbean identity in the context of the historical experience of colonialism. (Note the ambiguity here…is he discussing Caribbean people as a whole or just Afro-Caribbean people? He uses the terms black, Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean interchangeably, but he also acknowledges the broader ethnic diversity of the region). Here Hill is offering a politely worded critique of the vulgar ethno-nationalism and its desire to return to an African imaginary or resuscitate a lost, “pure” cultural identity that is in fact, as he points out, impossible. He does a brilliant job of articulating a vision of Caribbean identity as a non-static production in which the complexity, heterogeneity, and contradiction of Caribbean people’s relationship to Africa/African-ness, seen as bound in a rich history to which we might include Garveyism, Rastafarianism, the hybrid, African-rooted spiritual and cultural traditions of various Caribbean societies, etc..
However, there is also a weakness here, related to the ambiguity mentioned above, and that I thinks stems from the tension between his desire to formulate a pan-Caribbean identity that embraces all the diversity and complexity of the region, and his insistence on the “presence/absence of Africa” as the “privileged signifier of new conceptions of Caribbean identity.” The Caribbean in general is a much more diverse place than many assume, and many countries (Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Belize, Cuba, Surinam) are not “overwhelmingly black,” as he describes his native Jamaica. While I completely agree that “Everyone in the Caribbean, of whatever ethnic background, must sooner or later come to terms with this African presence,” it must also be remembered that for many of the more pluralistic Caribbean societies, the Left and broader progressive forces have been working since the beginnings of the anti-colonial struggle to overcome ethno-centric identity narratives that by their nature exclude and divide the working class, and in some cases, have been partly responsible for serious social strife and bloodshed. Another major and closely related weakness of his piece is the absence of any discussion of class. I say that not just because I think any discussion of culture which does address class is extremely limited, but also because it serves to reinforces an unfortunate trend in Caribbean studies as an academic field and an unfortunate legacy of real life politics in the Caribbean to treats ethnic groups as heterogeneous entities with common circumstances and interests, rather than recognizing the way such groups are themselves bifurcated by class. For this reasons, I think his African/European/the Americas concept is flawed. I would also add that I can’t help but see a trace of “the vanishing Indian” concept here; it should be noted that the Amerindians, including the Arawak and Carib people he mentions, are very much alive in Guyana, Surinam and other Caribbean coastal states. By contrast, I find much more progressive CLR James’ notion of the Caribbean reality as being foremost grounded in sugar – as the central force shaping all conceivable aspects of the development of the region, and within it encompassing the histories of all the people who came as slaves, indentured labourers, economic migrants, political refugees and colonists, and of course, the original peoples of the region.
This past spring I presented a short paper at a conference held by my undergraduate English Department. The conference was centered on popular culture as a category of scholarly analysis, and it invited people from English literature, media studies, women’s studies, philosophy, and history to discuss issues of form, medium, gender, consumption, narrative, and so on. My paper, entitled “Hip Hop as Subaltern,” offered a responsive question to Spivak’s “Can the subaltern speak?” This short paper was actually the byproduct of a longer essay that I wrote in a class on masculinities in modern history. The aim of that longer paper was to reveal how the conception of masculinity within Hip Hop culture changed over time (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s).* Even while preparing the shorter paper/presentation, I knew there were several methodological/theoretical issues attached to it: I hadn’t done enough reading within subaltern studies, I took several things to be self-evident, and, perhaps most importantly (as I discovered this past week), I hadn’t read Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. This “lack” of reading (to improperly use one of Chakrabarty’s phrases) meant that, among other things, I hadn’t fully considered a particularly relevant observation that Chakrabarty offers on page 45: that what happens/happened in India (and, by extension, in other locales characterized by subalternity) affects/affected what happens/happened in Britain (or, again, in other locales not characterized—at least not superficially—by subalternity). That this fact was not self-evident to me, but that other “facts” were indeed self-evident, is, in hindsight, quite telling. It reminds me of the historical, cultural, and theoretical baggage that I bring to bear on presumably everything I think/say/do/write. And so, I’ve managed to make two important observations about my own writing thanks to Chakrabarty. First, I can properly acknowledge the process by which I arrived at my responsive question to Spivak, which was “Are we listening?” Second, I can begin to understand that the aim of my original long paper—to track how masculinity in Hip Hop culture changed over time—may not be nearly as important as tracking how those changes within Hip Hop culture affected the self-fashioning of the hegemonic United States. I must consider the changes and the actualities that were wrought in both directions, and I must consider which factors can be classified as internal and/or external for both the hegemony and the subaltern.
Moreover, this leads me to believe that today’s research talk (and Tim Brook’s question for the presenter, Jennifer Wells) is of paramount importance in terms of the claiming of history. After all, I think that process is at the heart of much of this week’s material. Indeed, that may be the only thing that is self-evident from this literature.**
* Shameless plug alert!!! For those interested, a transcribed version of my talk is available here: https://conorwilkinson.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/hip-hop-as-subaltern/. I lay out my argument from both the short and long papers. Also, I really like reading people’s blogs, so let me know if you want to be blog buddies.
** For anyone who wasn’t able to make the talk, I can quickly fill in the gap tomorrow.
Pardon me…in the above paragraph I meant to say “any discussion of culture which does *not* address class is extremely limited.”
I think for this week’s readings I want to concentrate on Trouillot’s contribution, Chapter Three of Silencing the Past, “An Unthinkable History.” There is so much here, and in the book at large, that every time I read it through, it seems like different parts of it stick out to me, or mean new things. Here are a few strands of thought I found myself pulling at:
The idea of events without a conceptual category is interesting. Trouillot argues that Europeans were unable to process the Haitian Revolution properly while it was happening because racism blinded them from according black slaves actual human motivations (90-93). I wondered what other world-historical events could be considered unthinkable, at least to the frameworks of certain people? It made me think of paradigm shifts in knowledge, like the Copernican Revolution, or as I argued two weeks ago, the Deep Time Revolution/ Evolutuionary Revolution of the 1860s. In both of those cases, the events which initiated them were contested, ignored, silenced, and furiously debated for centuries because they were total affronts to the worldview of the powerful (and to many not-very-powerful people too, I’m sure).
Trouillot further argues that a continued focus on external (read: European) forces as the major part of the genesis of Haiti’s Revolution equally afflicts later historians (103-104). That replicates the refusal of contemporaries to see the slave revolution as their own. Trouillot also argues that the genesis of the Haitian Revolution does need to be intellectually decoupled from the French Revolution, or from French influence, or at least that is how I see his argument in this section. As Trouillot so eloquently puts it: “Implicit in that rhetoric [the focus on external actors] is the assumption that the French connection is both sufficient and necessary to the Haitian Revolution. That assumption trivializes the slaves’ independent sense of their right to freedom and the right to achieve this freedom by force of arms. [104]” On that note, Trouillot also warns us not to treat the Haitian Revolution as an “appendix of Bastille day”, and seems to implicate C. L. R. James’ title (The Black Jacobins) as another means of perpetuating French influence on the Haitian Revolution and the trivialization that causes (104). Now some might say it’s not proper to fully separate the two revolutions, but I did take this passage as Trouillot’s attempt to caution against the long intellectual shadow of the French Revolution.
I’m sure he’d acknowledge the influence, but in Trouillot’s comments above and in the general thrust of his critique of the historiography of the Haitian Revolution, I very strongly see the thought of Edward Said.
I also noted a passage on “formulas of silence” (96). Trouillot says they come in two varieties: formulas of trivialization and formulas of banalization and he also posits that these modes of interpreting history recur when discussing subjects like slavery in general or the Holocaust (96-97). I’m not quite sure what I have to say about these yet but it occurred to me that thinking about historiographical tropes makes a lot of sense.
Right at the very end of the chapter, on 107, Trouillot invokes Furet and the “second illusion of truth” which he says suffuses the collective mental map of the West: “what happened is what must have happened.” That, I used to think, was what people meant by presentism (maybe it’s not? Seems like we never resolved what it meant). I think this jumps off the page at me because while we all know the dangers of assuming historical events to be “inevitable”, I’m not sure such assumptions don’t creep in without us noticing. And yes, that’s most likely a function of power, which I took to be the implication of this passage.
To my mind, the ultimate lesson from Trouillot is to be attentive to the myriad ways in which power and historical hegemony seeps into historiography; power impacts source production, collection, preservation, and access. In addition, power affects what questions historians ask about their sources and which ones they choose to use for what purposes (and which ones they ignore). Power is insidious and its tentacles deeply entrenched and hard to see. But by tracing it, can we break free of it? I think his answer would be yes.
The readings from India intellectuals this week reinforce an important issue with which post-colonial historians have been grappling: how to secure some degree of intellectual and ideological independence in a system that is essentially Eurocentric and self-reproducing.
However, in the end, is there a way out of this conundrum? Chakrabarty seems to resign himself to the continued usage of the European intellectual tradition. He is quite pessimistic about producing narratives that purely use native ways of knowing as serious rationale ways of approaching history. He is also quite hesitant to give up the ascensionism and idealism of the Enlightenment inheritance, since it works to promote such admirable things as human rights and sound comprehensible narrative production. One issue he does not touch upon is how, if purely native Indian narratives were used, these historical narratives would be able to engage in dialogue with other histories in different parts of the world. The Western intellectual tradition and its analytical discourses, for all its faults, allow a measure of commensurability between different historical experiences and narratives. If we were to abandon it, would this perhaps be a few steps back? I struggle with knowing how to balance Western intellectual approaches with subaltern approaches. Too much of the former seems like a betrayal of the latter, while too much of the latter seems to sacrifice analytical value. This leaders me to my next point.
I think there are also certain dangers to using a wholly native intellectual approach. Chakrabarty points out that reliance on divinity for historical causality is a big pill to swallow. His demonstration makes it quite obvious, but I think it is worth reflecting on the fact that native ways of knowing too have their own limits. Wang Yuanming in his recent book Harmony and War on Confucianism in interstate politics in ancient China put the received Confucian trope of pacifism to the test, and found it to be wanting. He showed that political leaders were realists and often bent Confucian philosophical rhetoric when it suited them, or abandoned it entirely at times. He finds that political leaders were “structural realists” and less Confucian rulers. The point is that the uses of Confucianism and how political events unfolded would have been obscured if viewed solely through the Confucian lens as much of the histories record. If one were to allow those past voices to speak, they are still past voices with an agenda: the reproduction of their own socio-political power structures and relations at that time.
Spivak frames the problem as whether or not the subaltern can speak. His conclusion is no. In a very circuitous way (a writing style which has surely butchered many innocent brain cells) he argues that in attempting to give the subaltern a voice, the subject(Europe) reproduces itself in the object(subaltern). This is essentially arguing something similar to that of Chakrabarty that enlivening subalterns in any pure sense is a fantasy as the intellectual and post-colonial intellectual tradition is mired in a situation where subjectification is a product of Western capital social relations. This asymmetry necessarily denies an independent voice to the subaltern. However, he does argue that Derrida and his grammatology could be used to deconstruct the subaltern and provide valuable information on its positionality between modernity and tradition. It seems to me– and I have to admit I could not follow everything packed into this dense and somewhat inaccessible article– he is arguing that at least in the case of the subaltern woman, who did not have a hegemonic position, the present-day intellectual can learn to speak OF subalterns, but not FOR them (307-8). I wonder if we can only speak OF them, if that particular emphasis changes how we view their agency in history, or if it is simply a clever semantic twist.
I found Chakrabarty’s critique of the European discipline of history, and the spread of liberalism and nationalism thought provoking. He explains that evidence of the “subalternity” of third-world histories is found in the way that non-Western historians feel the need to refer to works in European history, while European historians do not feel the need to refer to non-Western history. Essentially all histories are known in relation to European history and how they differ from it. I could see his points resonating with the work of Indigenous scholars in Canada, especially his criticism of transition narratives, or narratives of progress, with themes of development, modernization, and capitalism. These narratives are problematic because they cause non-Western history (in this case Indian) to be read in terms of “lack, an absence, or an incompleteness that translates into inadequacy” (32). I have often seen teachers view students’ cultural differences in these terms – students who operate from less individualistic and success driven cultural ways of being. I really appreciated the way Chakrabarty challenges this perspective, suggesting that “plenitude” and “creativity” be read instead of “lack” and “inadequacy.”
He makes clear that the emergence of modern individualism, the introduction of the modern state via imperialism, and its attendant, citizenship, have been problematic, and rather than altogether rejecting modernity or promoting a cultural relativism (or trying to turn back the clock), he pushes for a more creative thinking around how Europe might be displaced from the centre of historical imagination and its repressive strategies and practices be revealed (45). Chakrabarty admits that this is difficult because it is hard to find a voice without using the knowledge, constructs, and systems of Western thought, but that it cannot take place within the University. Although I appreciate Chakrabarty’s call to reimagine the world once again as heterogeneous, the idea that history must look to its own death leaves me unsettled. I wonder if he has written more on this and how his thinking has developed.
This week’s readings were incredibly stimulating and challenging.
Spivak’s work “Can the Subaltern Speak” was particularly impactful as it directly addresses an elusive yet pertinent problematic of academic practice that I constantly struggle with. Her question of “can the subaltern speak?” ultimately turns ironically less on the ability of the ‘subaltern’ female subject herself, but more on if or how the academic can access that voice (represent the subaltern). On p. 294 Spivak suggests that while Foucault’s “mechanics of disciplinarization and institutionalization” remains useful, she is fearful that because Foucault does not link these ideas to any version of imperialism, academics may “allow the complicity of the investigating subject (male or female professional) to disguise itself in transparency.” She then reasserts that “reporting on, or better still, participating in, antisexist work among women of color or women in class oppression in the First World or Third World is undeniably on the agenda. We should also welcome all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is taking place in anthropology, political science, history, and sociology. Yet the assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work and will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization. And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever.” (295)
So there are two big critiques here of academic practice that seem to be wolves in sheeps clothing – namely transparency used as disguise, and the impetus to simply impart consciousness upon colonial subjects while remaining inside an imperial framework, the latter having the opposite effect than was intended.
These are really scary pitfalls, ones which are always ominously close as a Western-trained, white male scholar of both settler and indigenous ancestry. So I would like to pose some questions that firstly try to understand Spivak more fully and secondly looks to some of the other scholars from this week for insight.
– What is the problem of representation for Spivak and what does it mean that it hasn’t “withered away”?
– How does Spivak characterize epistemic violence and why is it important?
– What is the tension between Micrology/Macrology? How does it impact or create epistemic violence?
– What are we to do with the (possibly coincidental, probably not) characterization of subaltern/colonial subjects and histories in this weeks readings as variously ‘mute’ ‘unthinkable’ ‘imaginary’ ‘unspoken’? Can it be shruggingly chalked up to the necessity of naming the oppressive force in order to dismantle it? Maybe more importantly, does the naming actually affect any kind of dismantling? (this latter question is based mostly on the fact that so many of these characterizations are still so relevant to contemporary issues and political concerns.)
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I have always struggled with the notion of modernity. The more I try to study it, the harder I find it is to be satisfied with what I am doing. The word itself could take an eternity to unpack, and the biggest problem is coming up with a way to define what someone means when they evoke modernity. I haven’t revisited definitions of modernity for a while, so I might be a bit rusty. When I tried to find a satisfactory definition of modernity, the closest one I could reach was that it was a shorthand for westernization. I felt as though there was no objective truth to the idea of modernity, and the word was largely evoked as a shorthand for “European progress.” This is obviously tied up within ideas of the nation state and nation building. Chakrabarty problematizes the idea of modernity well in his chapter, and if I ever revisit modernity studies I will definitely use him. I have never been too satisfied with the idea that modernity equates westernization because I feel as though national boundaries create differing notions of modernity based on tradition and history-making processes. Chakrabarty complicates modernity in a way that I find accessible, and I would like to revisit his book. I think I’ve begun to criticize my own assumption that modernity is just westernization, and I think this will lead me on the right path to understand modernity.
I find Spivak interesting because of her complicated and inaccessible language. I have heard many good arguments which problematize this because she is using the trope of inaccessibility which is so prominent in academia. I remember my first postcolonial prof explaining that she would use heavy language in her own work as a way to legitimize herself within academic circles. This, however, doesn’t rupture the western roots as much as it perpetuates them. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Should post colonial academics seek narratives and forms which reject conventional academia? I would say yes. Though I realize the consequence would be that this would appear to be less academic. I think Trouillot does this with the italicized narrative, but it was largely absent from all the other work. Is the theory being created here the way to create new tools that are going to dismantle European exceptionalism.
Can the subaltern’s silence be more powerful than speaking? I realize that when Spivak is speaking of this it is more complicated than the historical voice and has more to do with historical inquiry, but I think it is an interesting question nevertheless. My inspiration for this question is based on a historical work by Joan Sangster which tracks indigenous women using silence as powerful anti colonial protests. I think the idea of speaking with historical actors is interesting because I am hesitant to say that anyone can “speak.” I think it is more an issue with contemporary historians rather than historical actors. Is historiographical convention why the subaltern cannot speak?
For this week’s response, I will focus on Trouillot and Scott. Trouillot’s “An Unthinkable History” argues the silence in the Haiti historiography about the history of the Haitian Revolution, because the revolution itself was just beyond people and intellectuals comprehension during that time. I really like the opening passage where he states that “we all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are not in the classroom. They are in the lessons we learn at home….in what is left for history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts” (72). This statement points out the subjectivity of history itself; for as historians, we all write about history, and our history is shaped by our subjectivity and within our comprehension. The author goes on to recall the historiography of slaves and the insurrection itself through time, arguing that because of the existence of “scientific racism”, people just cannot imagine a successful Black revolution followed by an independent Black state: “the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable in its time: it challenged the very framework within which proponents and opponents had examined race, colonialism, and slavery in the Americas” (83). The evidence supports the authors argument about the “unthinkable history” is the very fact of the existence of “scientific racism” among people in Europe; however, I just wonder by looking at their writings back then, how can we determine that for the people in Europe then, the Black revolution is beyond comprehension? What if they noticed the possibility of a Black independent state, but they just do not want to admit that in their writings? Even though he subsequently offers explanations for why this history is beyond people’s time and indeed “unthinkable”, I am not fully convinced by that. (But I do think this new way of looking at the Haitian revolution and the new way of assessing the historiography of Haiti or of world history itself is very thought-provoking).
Scott’s article “The Theory of Haiti: The Black Jacobins and the Poetics of Universal History” is very much in conversation with Trouillot’s. He agrees with Trouillot about the fact that historiography has been ignoring Haiti in many ways: “the more Haiti appears weird, the easier it is to forget that it represents the longest neocolonial experiment in the history of the West” (36). But his argument is from a different angle. He talks about the idea of “theory problem”. I am a little confused about this word. I think it is abstract and everywhere in the article. I do not know how to define it. The author spends a lot of space talking about an “Hegelian world-historical” view: he argues that for Hegel, world history was motivated toward a certain track(a higher universal) and in each period of development, there would always be an individual who “seize upon this higher universal and make it their own end” (43): the gradual self-awareness of reason. Scott uses James’ book The Black Jacobins, to demonstrate the effect of universal history, using the Hegelian model of thinking, demonstrating how the Haitian revolution became part of universal history. In the end, he kind of links everything together by saying that : “what I want us to see is the connection between the construction of Haiti as….a certain kind of theory-problem, and the mobilization of a narrative strategy of universal history that works by showing the unfolding overcoming of the besetting conundrums and the realization of reason in a specific history” (50). However, maybe it is my problem, but this article seems a little bit difficult for me to follow the logic. I hope I could more about other people’s opinions.
However, this week’s reading is very helpful for me. It opens up a new way of re-assessing history and historiography: the part that we all taken for granted for a very long time. Maybe it is time to ask or to challenge the general historiography on world history: on the part that we have long been ignored and we have acknowledged that it is not important. Maybe it was just because it was so important that it surpassed contemporaries comprehension, or maybe due to various reasons, it was ignored on purpose. In any case, I think this possibility is very helpful and thought-provoking for me.