BEYOND TRANSNATIONALISM: Lessons from Frantz Fanon

and C.L. R. James

— by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.



My final prayer:

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

–Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Despite his intricately nuanced anatomy of “race” in Black Skin, White Masks and other works, Fanon has been somehow stereotyped as an apostle of the cult of violence. This passage from The Wretched of the Earth seems to have become the touchstone of classical Fanonism: “Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. It frees the native from his inferiority complex, and from his despair and inaction” (94). This free-floating quote, unmoored from its determinant context, exerts a reductive and disabling force. Severed from its body, Fanon’s thought can signify everything and nothing at the same time.

Claiming to rescue Fanon from this tendentious fixation as well as from the pluralism of eclectic interpretations, Henry Louis Gates offers an assessment that at first glance promises to ground Fanon in the context of the “third world.” The Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi seems to provide Gates a pretext for the revisionary intent: Memmi conjures the figure of a black Martinican torn by warring forces who, though hating France and the French, “will never return to Negritude and to the West Indies” (Gates 140). Unwittingly Gates recuperates the canon by ferreting out clues of self-division in Fanon, “an agon between psychology and a politics, between ontogeny and sociogeny, between…Marx and Freud” (141). This postmortem diagnosis pronounces the demise of the author and his authority. By inscribing Fanon more steadfastly in the colonial paradigm, the “disciplinary enclave” of anti-imperialist discourse, Gates hopes to demolish the Fanon mystique. His deconstructive move may strike some as iconoclastic and others as reactionary; Lewis K. Gordon, for example, speculates that Gates may be a surrogate for the European man in crisis. In effect, Gates disables Fanon by arguing that Fanon himself warned us of the limits of the struggle, thus presaging the virtual collapse of “the dream of decolonization.”

Postmodern Cultural Studies (inspired by the poststructuralist gurus Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard) may have taken off from Gates’s premise of skeptical individualism and neoliberal triumphalism. It has so far pursued a nihilistic agenda in rejecting “totality” (such as capitalism, nationalism, etc.), the codeword for theoretical generalizations about social relations of production and historical movements. Contemporary Cultural Studies celebrates heterogeneity, flux, ambiguous hybrids, indeterminacies, accidents, and lacunae inhabiting bifurcated psyches and texts. Suspicious of metanarratives (Hegel, Marx, Sartre), it repudiates utopian thought, including an alleged teleology of anticolonialism informing Fanon’s texts. From this perspective, Fanon is cannibalized for academic apologetics. The version of Fanon who takes off from Hegel and Marx is rejected in favor of the Freudian disciple, thus resolving the dichotomized subject/object which postmodernist critics privileged as their point of departure.

My argument here concerns the relevance of Fanon’s materialist hermeneutics as an antidote to the conservative formalism of the hegemonic discipline exemplified by Gates. I hold that Fanon’s central insights into sociohistorical change is pedagogically transformative and enabling in a way that locates the deconstructionist impasse in the refusal of historical determinations. David Caute perceives Fanon’s serviceable legacy as inherent in his political realism, his prophetic drive to forge “new concepts” from the clash between traditional ways of thinking and novel circumstances. In one of the most astute evaluation of Fanon’s discourse, Stephan Feuchtwang points out that Fanon succeeded in rendering “as history the material of cultural organizations without assuming an original self for recognition,” showing how contingency “is culturally organized and made” and distinguishing cultural process from its multiple determinations in economic forces, political institutions, and ideological relations. By bracketing self-consciousness as totalizing viewpoint, Feuchtwang then suggests that the fundamental questions in cultural studies raised by Fanon are, among others: What people or culture is being constructed? What “social organization of cultural difference, conceived as psycho-affective organization, enhances recognition rather than denial” and “what are the economic and political conditions in which such an organization can exist?” (473).

Overcoming Postcolonial Negritude

We need to remind ourselves that Fanon never entertained any illusion that the revolutionary struggle against colonialism will automatically realize a utopia free from the delayed effects and legacies of hundreds of years of dehumanized social relations. I contend that he was not of two minds regarding the duplicity of Negritude, for example, or the perils of populist and demagogic chauvinism that swept Africa in the aftermath of formal independence (see Fogel; Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting and White). The chapters on “Spontaneity: Its Strengths and Weaknesses” and “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in The Wretched of the Earth are lucid proofs of Fanon’s circumspect and principled realism. The cogent diagnosis of deeply rooted reflexes of character and the habitus of groups displays his acute knowledge of historical contradictions and the variable modalities of finitude in a world of pure immanence. It is certainly an ideological move to transpose the Manichean fixation of colonialism into Fanon’s psyche and infer therefrom that we cannot derive any testable methodology or working hypothesis from Fanon’s oeuvre. That dogmatic attitude forecloses any dialogue with Fanon as alternative or oppositional to the fashionable “incredulity” at metanarratives and the ontological constitution of reality.

One lesson we can extract from the corpus of texts is precisely the avoidance of the “schism in the soul,” what Spinoza calls “sadness” (188). This involves a passage from a diminished to a more heightened or enhanced capacity for action based on ideas adequately subsuming the causes and motivations of what we do. This involves all the social, economic, and political determinants that constitute the mode of cultural revolution in Algeria. To elucidate this mode, Fanon reformulates the archetypal Hegelian drama of sublation (Aufhebung) as “the only means of breaking this vicious circle,” the battlefield within, but this drama is not a solipsistic or monadic affair. Desire involves the mutual recognition of two or more agents juxtaposed in a common enterprise: “I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue something other than life; insofar as I do battle for the creation of a human world–that is, of a world of reciprocal recognitions” (Black Skin 218). Indeed, Fanon’s project goes beyond the formulaic pragmatism of psychoanalysis: “To educate man to be actional…is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act” (222). And this action, by risking life, enables the exercise of freedom which mediates the contingency of the present and the schematism of the future: “The Vietnamese who die before the firing squads are not hoping that their sacrifice will bring about the reappearance of a past. It is for the sake of the present and of the future that they are willing to die” (227). This project of secular redemption reminds me of Spinoza’s axiom of humanity’s finite mode as distinguished by conatus, perseverance in striving to increase one’s power through affiliation and collaboration with others (Lloyd; De Dijn; Parkinson; Yovel, Spinoza: Adventures).

Fanon’s idea of praxis is geared toward realizing the freedom of multitudes via programs of action. His practice-oriented sensibility registers the movement of groups and collectives of bodies interacting in solidarity. What Marx once valorized as philosophy becoming incarnate in the world, that is, the unity of theory and practice, is accomplished by Fanon in envisioning the field of discourse or signification as a range of opportunities for action. In this field, collective power and the rights of individuals associated together coalesce. We move through and beyond the textuality of representation, the iconicity of signs, to its articulation with radical transformative practice. In inventorying the achievement of Cultural Studies thus far, Stuart Hall remarked how the discipline has often succumbed to “ways of constituting power as an easy floating signifier which just leaves the crude exercise and connections of power and culture altogether emptied of any signification” (286). Presciently Fanon anticipated this fetishism of textuality in his conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth: “A permanent dialogue with oneself and an increasingly obscene narcissism never ceased to prepare the way for a half delirious state, where intellectual work became suffering and the reality was not at all that of a living man, working and creating himself, but rather words, different combinations of words, and the tensions springing from the meanings contained in words” (313). A new beginning has to be made, with a new subjectivity predicated on the bankruptcy of Eurocentric humanism and the prospect of creating a “new human being” at the conjuncture where core and periphery, center and margin, collide.

Aside from the malaise of systemic alienation fragmenting sensibilities and psyches, the reason why the discipline of Cultural Studies has consistently failed to confront the problem of reification is its evasion of one of the most intractable but persistent symptoms of late capitalism, racism and its articulation with sexism. It is through confronting this nexus of racism, male supremacy, and commodity-fetishism in the Manichean arena of battle that Fanon was able to grasp the subtle, compromising liaisons between culture and power, between language and value. Like Spinoza, who applied a constructive-hermeneutical method in interpreting religious texts (Yovel, Spinoza: Marrano), Fanon used rhetorical analysis to educate the subaltern imagination and provoke a more rational stance toward everyday happenings. However, there is no unanimous agreement on Fanon’s accentuation of certain aspects of “third world” reality. Renate Zahar has reservations regarding Fanon’s one-sided emphasis on a psychologized notion of violence as a category of mediation, thus ignoring “violence conceived as revolutionary social work” (96). But even a trenchant critic like Jack Woddis had to admit that Fanon “yearned for an end to the wold world of capitalism” (175). The question of social determination and the directionality of change around which orthodox Marxists and the varieties of poststructuralisms have clashed hinges really on the modalities in which capital and the manifestations of its power have continued to renegotiate its recurrent crises and sustain its precarious but resilient hegemony.

Confronting the Racial Imaginary

Fanon’s little known essay, “Racism and Culture,” provides clues as to how Fanon will confront the impasse brought about by the institutionalization, more precisely, the “Americanization” of Cultural Studies. For Fanon, the fact of racism cannot be divorced from the methodology and aims of any cultural inquiry: “If culture is the combination of motor and mental behavior patterns arising from the encounter of man with nature and with his fellow-man, it can be said that racism is indeed a cultural element” (African Revolution 32). With the emergence of industrial and cosmopolitan societies, racism metamorphosed; its object is no longer the individual judged on the basis of genotypical or phenotypical features but “a certain form of existing” (32). Fanon mentions the antithesis between Christianity and Islam as life-forms locked in ideological combat. But what sharply influenced the change in the nature of racism as ideological/political practice, Fanon points out, is the “institution of a colonial system in the very heart of Europe” (33). Racism is part of “the systematized oppression of a people” at the heart of which is the destruction of a people’s cultural values:

For this its systems of reference have to be broken. Expropriation, spoliation, raids, objective murder, are matched by the sacking of cultural patterns, or at least condition such sacking. The social panorama is destructured; values are flaunted, crushed, emptied.

The lines of force, having crumbled, no longer give direction… [The native culture] becomes closed, fixed in the colonial status, caught in the yoke of oppression. …The characteristic of a culture is to be open, permeated by spontaneous, generous, fertile lines of force (33-34).

This mummification of practices and the hardening of institutions once alive and changing attend the loss of the native’s independence and initiative. Culture dies when it is not lived, “dynamized from within.” Exoticism and other modes of objectification (for example, the varieties of Orientalism catalogued by Edward Said) accompany the colonizers’ coercive program of exploitation and subjugation.

What complicates the ever-present visage of racism for Fanon is historical metamorphosis, the shifts of adaptation to evolving social relations. With the development in the techniques and means of production and its elaboration, together with “the increasingly necessary existence of collaborators,” racism loses its overt virulence and camouflages itself in more subtler and stylized appearances, in seductive guises, despite the fact that “the social constellation, the cultural whole, are deeply modified by the existence of racism” (36). But appearances are deceptive, and verbal mystification characterizes the introduction of a “democratic and humane ideology.” Fanon insists that “The truth is that the rigor of the system made the daily affirmation of a superiority superfluous” (37). Alienation worsens. In contrast to the apologists of the neoliberal “free market” system who reduce racism to a case of individual mental illness or syndrome, Fanon asserts the sociohistorical specificity of racism as institutional practice:

Racism stares one in the face for it so happens that it belongs in a characteristic whole: that of the shameless exploitation of one group of men by another which has reached a higher stage of technical development. This is why military and economic oppression generally precedes, makes possible, and legitimizes racism….

It is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization (37-38, 40).

From Mimicry to Subversion

In the process of demystifying the racial imaginary that subtends Eurocentric Cultural Studies, Fanon traces the dialectic of alienation and assimilation binding colonial master and colonized subaltern. He recapitulates the phases of guilt and inferiority experienced by the colonized. Racism becomes normalized when it becomes a matter of personal prejudice, dissimulating the subjugation and oppression of peoples and nationalities. Subsequently, the colonized victims react to racism by revalorizing tradition. Archaic practices and their constellation of values are revived and affirmed. The goal of reconquering the geopolitical space mapped by revolutionary war orients the project of national liberation: “the plunge into the chasm of the past is the condition and the source of freedom” (43). But this “return to the source” (to use Amilcar Cabral’s metaphor) is not nativism but a passage of catharsis. What it purges is the obsession with purity, a symptom of the fetishizing drive. What Fanon emphasizes is the mixed repertoire of weapons or resources that the colonized masses bring into play–“the old and the new, his own and those of the occupant,” resuscitating the “spasmed and rigid culture” so as to conduct a mutually enriching dialogue with other cultures. Here, the Manichean dilemma described in “On Violence” is resolved by the agon of the historical process itself. That is to say, the “universality” achieved with the recognition and acceptance of the “reciprocal relativism of different cultures” on the demise of colonialism necessarily traverses “the experienced realities of the mode of production.” Fanon takes into account the improvement of technical knowledge, perfecting of machines within “the dynamic circuit of industrial production,” the frequent contacts of people “in the framework of the concentration of capital, that is to say, on the job, discovering the assembly line, the team, production ‘time’ ” (39). This historical materialist framework of comprehending the social formation grounds Fanon’s critique of cultural racism in the complex interaction of affects, passions, and appetites that control assemblages of bodies and govern the conduct of the whole body politic.

The theme of cultural metamorphosis broached in “Racism and Culture” is further refined and illustrated in the later essay, “On National Culture” (included in The Wretched of the Earth). What is new here is the inscription of culture in the problematique of the nation and national identity. Fanon shifts gears and plots the genesis of agency from the episodes of victimization and resistance. Fanon underlines the process of change in the cultural responses of indigenous peoples to the violence of the European colonizer, from the poetics of Negritude and the revitalization of Islam to diverse manifestations of nativism. He charts the trajectory of the organic intellectual–organic to the national-popular movement of decolonization–from the initial stage of assimilation to the reactive nativism characterized by humor and allegory to the subsequent third stage, the “fighting phase,” where the artist tries to represent the advent of a new reality and a “new man.” Fanon underscores how tradition changes with the unpredictable mutations of conflict, ushering in a “zone of occult instability” where “our souls are crystallized” with the people. What I would focus on here is not the ambivalence, indeterminacy, or the aura of the apocalyptic sublime, which one can extrapolate between the lines, but the conatus or actualization of potential inscribed in certain moments of the national liberation struggle.

Originating from the Hegelian matrix of the dialectic of master and slave, the routine approach to Fanon’s thought replicates the West’s “civilizing mission.” In this psychodrama, the native develops and matures by undergoing the trials of self-alienation, doubt, and self-recovery; the three stages outlined in “On National Culture” reconfigure the value and function of tradition and all the properties of the indigenous life-forms in a Manichean environment. What Fanon apprehends in these life-forms is their capacity for change and infinite adaptability: “the forms of thought and what it feeds on, together with modern techniques of information, language, and dress have dialectically reorganized the people’s intelligences and …. the constant principles which acted as safeguards during the colonial period are now undergoing extremely radical changes” (225). The affective dynamism of anticolonial struggle explodes the mystifying influence of customs, folklore, and abstract populism associated with “gratuitous actions,” culminating at the stage in which time, agency, and the habitus of creative strategies of intervention coalesce:

The colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope. But to ensure that hope and give it form, he must take part in action and throw himself body and soul into the national struggle…. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence (232-33).

Culture cannot be divorced from the the organized forces of national liberation that “create” peoplehood and sustain its life. For this project of fashioning a life-form, the national territory serves as the concretely determinate framework for shaping that national consciousness (which for Fanon is not equivalent to European-style nationalism) that allows “the discovery and encouragement of universal values.” Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation that “leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history” (247). Fanon concludes this speech with the image of a paradoxical exfoliation of opposites: “It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately only the source of all culture” (247-48).

The Artifice of National Liberation

My contention is that Fanon’s idea of national liberation provides the logic of social constitution and assemblage needed for grasping the dynamics of cultural change in any geopolitical formation. By dissolving the boundaries of self and other, of nation and global ecumene, this new mode of theorizing history undercuts the fashionable postmodernist representation of the body as sheer polymorphous matter charged with desire and presumably a site of resistance against hegemonic capital. In the first place, ensembles of corporeal energies occupy a category different from the isolated, monadic physical body that postmodernists privilege. Moreover, one can argue that bodies are not simply vessels of desire but “a plane of immanence” (to use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion) where power and freedom born of necessity coincide. Fanon’s theory of the praxis of multitudes not only challenges the binary opposition of bourgeois elite aesthetics and an idealized massified culture of everyday life which motivates a trendy version of Cultural Studies (see, for example, Fiske); it also exposes its paralyzing effect on the critical sensorium of ordinary people. Without a collective conatus catalyzed in the ethics of decolonization, the dogma of methodological individualism will continue to vitiate the attempts of Cultural Studies practitioners to move beyond the limitations of Enlightenment thought (racism, patriarchy, class exploitation) and affirm identities in the interstices of difference.

One way of illustrating Fanon’s singular mode of interrogating cultural practice may be sketched here in a brief commentary on his essay, “Algeria Unveiled” (in A Dying Colonialism). A recent appraisal of Fanon by Ato Sekyi-Otu regards this text as Fanon’s finest exposition of the “possibility of expressive freedom” discovered through the instrumentalization of the veil. A phenomenology of existential choice reinterprets Fanon’s discourse as an allegory of Hegelian dialectics: “The measure of freedom is the degree to which space and symbol, area of action and device of self-disclosure, are multiply configurable, open to the agent’s choice of ends and means, and are thus no longer signifiers of a radically compulsory and constricted identity” (226). This flexible disposition of the veil profiles, for Fanon, the eventual “transformation of the Algerian woman.” It is this dialectic of experience occurring in the “public theater of revolutionary action” that, for Sekyi-Otu, embodies the resonance and efficacy of Fanon’s prefigurative hermeneutics.

With the problematique of Cultural Studies as the context of exchange, my reading of Fanon’s mobilization of a cultural motif is somewhat different. I consider Fanon’s programmatic text as a critique of postmodernist ethnography that privileges subjective fantasies, aleatory gestures, cyborg speech, and “travelling” localizations. Fanon in fact subjects psychoanalytic speculations to the actual historic disposition of forces, using the assemblage of “composable” relationships (Hardt 28) on an immanent field of forces as a means of eliminating the need for transcendence implicit in a posited “unconscious” which perverse “Desire” supposedly inhabits. In extrapolating Fanon’s unique critical stance, I deploy some concepts taken from the philosopher Benedict Spinoza in order to illuminate how the “common notion” of national liberation takes shape in the course of an uncompromisingly materialist and anti-empiricist account of the Algerian woman’s role, both spontaneous and constrained, in the productive rationality of the revolution.

Fanon begins with the customary association of the veil as the synecdochic mark of Arab culture and society for the Western gaze. While the masculine garb allows a “modicum of heterogeneity,” the white veil that defines Algerian female society permits no alteration or modification. In the early thirties, French colonialism seized the initiative to abolish “forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality.” Based on the premise that behind the overt patrilineal armature of Algerian society lies a “matrilineal” essence, Fanon seizes on the patriarchal animus of colonial metaphysics. He rehearses the France’s fabled mission civilizatrice: “If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight” (38). Algerian society thus stands condemned as “sadistic and vampirish,” its internal mechanics in need of revamping and overhauling.

This bureaucratic consensus to forcibly emancipate the cloistered Algerian woman became a major policy of the French colonial administration. The rationale is strategic: to overcome the Algerian male resistance to assimilation via the control of women. But up to 1959, Fanon observes, “the dream of a total domestication of Algerian society by means of “unveiled women aiding and sheltering the occupier” continued to haunt the colonial authorities. All schemes to persuade the Algerian intellectual (not just the fellah or peasant) failed. Fanon sums up this attitude to the veil as symptomatic of “the simplified and pejorative way” the French regarded the “system of values” used by the colonized to resist the erasure of their “distinct identity.” Identity here equals culture, and culture as shared history or cohabitation distinguishes the nation. What follows is Fanon’s attempt to describe the sociopsychological causality gravitating around the penetration of indigenous society by the assimilating power. The tropes of aggressive sexuality deployed here mark the scope and latitude of the disciplinary regime France tried to impose, with the weapon of sexual seduction unfolding instead the impotence of the colonizer:

Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of the colonialists horizons until then forbidden, and revealed to them, piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare…. Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defence were in the process of dislocation, open and breached. Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer (42).

But the impression of conquest blurs as soon as Fanon inquires into the West’s cultural imaginary, with its fatal conflation of appearance and essence, phenomenon and reality, generating the Other as guarantee of the Self’s mastery.

Disclosure and Demystification

Fanon understands that for the colonizer in control of the machinery of representation, every mask or disguise assumes that a truth lurks behind it. This translates hermeneutics into technocratic subterfuge. The search for the hidden face is invested with “romantic exoticism,” sexuality, and the will to possess that belies any claim to appreciate the physical beauty of Algerian women so as to share it with others. Fanon argues that the violence of revealing the Algerian woman’s beauty is really directed at something else under the skin, so to speak; the quest is to bare the secret or mystery in order to break her opaque alterity, “making her available for adventure.” What frustrates the European’s desire to possess the Other and fulfill his dream is the habitus attached to the veil: “This women who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer. There is no reciprocity…. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself” (44). The “secret” is then immediately reduced to ugliness and deformation through a rape that evokes a deceptive sense of freedom for the conqueror, a passivity whose real cause escapes his comprehension—hence, the “sad” passions (e.g., humility, pity) shrouding the Manichean metropolis.

What is striking here in Fanon’s commentary is the way the erotic affect produces a disintegration of the Western psyche. This constellation of symptoms, mapped here as “faults” and “ fertile gaps,” appears in dreams and criminal behavior. The rending of the veil then leads to an act of violent appropriation charged with a “para-neurotic brutality” projected onto the victimized: the “timid” woman hovering in the fantasy becomes transformed into an insatiable nymphomaniac. Fanon describes the dream narrative of the colonizer circumscribing a “field of women” (gynaeceum, harem). In the dream, the woman-victim “screams, struggles like a doe, and as she weakens and faints, is penetrated, martyrized, ripped apart” (46).

Apprehending the decomposition that afflicts the colonizer, sign of an ironic pathos in which one’s capacity for grasping causality or the chain of necessity is diminished, Fanon examines next the reaction of the colonized. Initially the conduct of the occupier “determines the centers of resistance around which a people’s will to survive becomes organized” (47). And so the veil, formerly an inert and undifferentiated element in quotidian existence, acquires a new significance: it becomes a taboo or cult object. Contraposed to the Western focus of pedagogical energies to destroy the veil, the Algerians weave a whole universe of affective passions (obscured causalities) around the veil to thwart the colonizer’s attacks, or at least to bring about an “armed truce.” The principle Fanon applies here guides his entire cognitive and didactic mapping of the alignment of political forces, a principle encapsulated in the maxim: “problems are resolved in the very movement that raises them” (48). In other words, the modes and occasions of struggle entail a whole repertoire of ethical choices and tactics. In response to the ferocity of the French settler and “his delirious attachment to the national territory” (48), the Algerian revolutionary leadership decided to mobilize women to the fullest, urging them to summon a “spirit of sacrifice”as they became part of an extended and highly differentiated revolutionary machine. This decision represents the identity of will and intellect posited by Spinoza in his Ethics (II, 49), precipitating joy-passion born from the common notion, the composition of bodies in mutually useful relationships (Deleuze, Spinoza 54-55).

Women were then incorporated into the guerilla combat units mindful of the differential rhythm of their participation. In the process of constituting this new assemblage, the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front) realized how the taboo or cult of the veil undermined the strategy of inventing commonalities across gender and class. Reinforcing tradition as a means of resistance led to women’s loss of ease and assurance, negative affects that attenuated their cooperation with the military forces: “Having been accustomed to confinement, her body did not have the normal mobility before a limitless horizon of avenues, of unfolded sidewalks, of houses, of people dodged or bumped into. This relatively cloistered life, with its known, categorized, regulated comings and goings, made any immediate revolution seem a dubious proposition” (49). Determined by the horizon of war and death by torture, the organization of women partisans (efficient collective agency) accumulates knowledge of the microphysics of bodily motion that eventually precipitates the emergence of a new character “without the aid of the imagination,” the coefficient of play and imitation in art. Before Fanon offers examples of women’s creative actuality, he recapitulates the theme of culture change by acknowledging the advent of a new protagonist who will soon dismantle the Manichean theater of regimented subjects deployed in demarcated zones:

It is an authentic birth in a pure state, without preliminary instruction. There is no character to imitate, on the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a continuity between the woman and the revolutionary. The Algerian woman rises directly to the level of tragedy (50).

Bodies Bearing Stigmata

A hiatus intervenes at this juncture of the essay. Fanon evokes a scenario of passages and shifts of position, maneuvers leading to the urgent decision to involve all women gradually in the daily tasks of the revolution. Attention to the complex architectonics of space, a heuristic cartography of place and environment, where state power and the subject’s right (the conatus of persevering) confront each other, preoccupies Fanon. This allows him to trace the genealogy of freedom and grasp the coextensiveness of natural right (enjoyed by all humans) and power, in a manner close to the spirit of Spinoza’s politics (Spinoza 219-20; Gildin). Ideas of the play of forces replaces passive affects at the mercy of illusion, notions of contingency, and irrationalities that pervade social existence. Freedom inhabits the space of necessity, Fanon suggests, when the mind of the revolutionary organization acquires an idea of the nature of the body politic corresponding to its essence and objective: its affirmation of life, the collective joy of shared agency. This idea becomes manifest in the Algerian masses becoming the subject of revolution in the actuality of combat, in taking political decisions and implementing them.

A geopolitical surveyor, Fanon sketches for us the stage in which the tragic mask or persona assumed by women partisans will demonstrate its irrepressible hubris. It is the revolutionary process that destroys “the protective mantle of the Kasbah,” its “almost organic curtain of safety.” With the fragility of Manichean barriers exposed by decolonizing reason, the Algerian woman sallies forth out of the immobilized quarters into the bare streets of the settlers’ city; in doing so, she destroys the boundaries separating tradition and modernity, the self-reproducing organs of alienation and anomie, established by the colonial state. But even while new linkages are made and new channels of communication and logistics are set up by her own skills and intelligence, a recomposition of internal relations proceeds from within. We witness the shifting velocities of women’s striving to increase her power/right of transforming her place in society. This is the locus where the consensus of national liberation, the power of the multitude expressed to the fullest, transpires:

Each time [she] ventures into the European city, the Algerian woman must achieve victory over herself, over her childish fears. She must consider the image of the occupier lodged somewhere in her mind and in her body, remodel it, initiate the essential work of eroding it, make it inessential, remove something of the shame that is attached to it, devalidate it…. Initially subjective, the breaches made in colonialism are the result of a victory of the colonized over their old fear and over the atmosphere of despair distilled day after day by a colonialism that has incrusted itself with the prospect of enduring forever (52-53).

Embodying Ethics

An ethics of national liberation materializes through the vicissitudes of political antagonisms. Internal relations (compatibilities, elective affinities, disaffiliations) are rearranged on the basis of what promotes the striving for the maximum expression of the collective body’s power. This involves the associative movements of love, desire, and solidarity that generate common notions, purposes, and projects giving direction to the popular struggle. With the overcoming of passions bred by the mystifications and falsehoods that comprise the oppressor’s ideological apparatus, a new agency is born armed for the next phase—the counterhegemonic use of terror. This signals the phase when “the Algerian woman penetrates a little further into the flesh of the Revolution” (54), her actions transvaluing the whole Manichean asymmetry of power. This unprecedented transvaluation inverts the custom-ordained proportion of motion and rest, speed and slowness, that has characterized the position of women’s bodies in urban space. The rationale of this reversal is suggested by Spinoza’s proposition: “Whatsoever increases or diminishes, helps or hinders the power of activity in our body, the idea thereof increases or diminishes, helps or hinders the power of thought in our mind” (Ethics II, P2).

The systematic adoption of political forms of terror cannot be fully understood apart from the qualitative progression of the anticolonial struggle and its corresponding tempo of change. Fanon sums up the stages of deliberation and the nuances of attitudes toward the “circuit of terrorism and counter-terrorism.” He reminds us that from this point on the Algerian woman becomes inseparable from the constitutive force of the militant and conscientized (to use Paulo Freire’s term) multitude. Her “speed” is now synchronized to the momentum of the national-democratic mobilization. This is also the point when Fanon warns against confusing revolutionary terrorism with the anarchist cult of violence, the fetishism of the deed, and the mystique of death. Fanon almost reaches the intensity of Spinoza’s intransigent affirmation of life in the course of defying tyranny, pain, fanaticism, and ignorance: “The fidai [guerilla combatant] has a rendezvous with the life of the Revolution, and with his own life…. To be sure, he does not shrink before the possibility of losing his life or the independence of his country, but at no moment does he chose death” (58). The Algerian woman’s spirit of sacrifice is in fact a commitment to joy identified with an enhanced, active life coincident with the nation’s construction of democratic power, the vehicle for human fulfillment in the decolonized community.

In the section on the reconfiguration of the woman’s body, Fanon sketches an ethics of separation and assemblage that approximates Spinoza’s concept of freedom as the transition from the natural realm (the horizon of war) to civil society where, for Fanon, the nation-people functions as transformative agency. Freedom is the recognition of necessity, of the chain of causality, sparked by intellectual reflection. This passage to freedom is symbolized by the transformation of the Algerian woman’s body as a relation of parts that can be decomposed and reconstituted, parts with proportions of motion and rest regulated by the variety of encounters in life.

In this context, the veil becomes the signifier that actualizes woman’s power/right in a corporeal logic that breaks down the Manichean duality. In the following excerpt, we can discern the motive of Fanon’s conversion of cultural-studies ethnography into an ethical-political reciprocity of body and the world marked by the varying modalities of the expression of woman’s power:

The body of the young Algerian woman, in traditional society, is revealed to her by its coming to maturity and by the veil. The veil covers the body and disciplines it, tempers it, at the very time when it experiences its phase of greatest effervescence. The veil protects, reassures, isolates…. Without the veil she has an impression of her body being cut up into bits, put adrift; the limbs seem to lengthen indefinitely. When the Algerian woman has to cross a street, for a long time she commits errors of judgment as to the exact distance to be negotiated. The unveiled body seems to escape, to dissolve. She has an impression of being improperly dressed, even of being naked. She experiences a sense of incompleteness with great intensity. She has the anxious feeling that something is unfinished, and along with this a frightful sensation of disintegrating. The absence of the veil distorts the Algerian woman’s corporeal pattern. She quickly has to invent new dimensions for her body, new means of muscular control. She has to create for herself an attitude of unveiled-woman-outside. She must overcome all timidity, all awkwardness (for she must pass for a European), and at the same time be careful not to overdo it, not to attract notice to herself. The Algerian woman who walks stark naked into the European city relearns her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion (59).

The organizing skill and resourcefulness recounted here exemplifies not individual ingenuity but the contrapuntal play of bodies and political milieu where what used to be merely accidental encounters of veiled women evolves into organized ethical striving for expression of their united power. This accords with the democratic mobilizing principle expressed by Spinoza: “If two come together and unite their strength, they have jointly more power, and consequently more right against other forces in nature, than either of them alone; and the more there be that join in alliance, the more right they will collectively possess” (Political Treatise, Chapter II, paragraph 13). The multitude as substrate of change now incorporates women, a major component of self-determination or national autonomy, amplifying the potential of the whole nation. Women thus epitomize the power and intelligence of the masses sprung from the inexhaustible matrix of the national-liberation struggle.

Toward Cultural Revolution

The final testimony to how the necessity of revolutionary combat functions as the condition for freedom of the colonized subaltern coincides with the motion of women’s bodies in the streets of Algiers. Fanon describes the way women concealed bombs and weapons, illustrating how the organizing of composable parts fused spontaneous and planned elements, integrating will and contingency. The veil’s combination and permutation of opposites disrupts the conventional dichotomy of tradition and modernity. It also displaces the colonial contract, the normative codes of duty and obligation, into a field of needs and exigencies defined by the overdetermined historical situation:

Removed and reassumed again and again, the veil has been manipulated, transformed into a technique of camouflage, into a means of struggle. The virtually taboo character assumed by the veil in the colonial situation disappeared almost entirely in the course of the liberation struggle….

The Algerian woman’s body, which in an initial phase was pared down, now swelled. Whereas in the previous period the body had to be made slim and disciplined to make it attractive and seductive, it now had to be squashed, made shapeless and even ridiculous. This, as we have seen, is the phase during which she undertook to carry bombs, grenades, machine-gun clips.

The enemy, however, was alerted, and in the streets one witnessed what became a commonplace spectacle of Algerian women glued to the wall, on whose bodies the famous magnetic detectors, the “frying pans,” would be passed. Every veiled woman, every Algerian woman became suspect. There was no discrimination. This was the period during which men, women, children, the whole Algerian people, experienced at one and the same time their national vocation and the recasting of the new Algerian society (61-62).

We witness in this revisiting of a phase in the national-liberation struggle the making of the Algerian masses via the composition of multiple relations between women’s bodies and their circumstantial inscription. Fanon’s “genealogy” is really a recording of the passage of new subjects catalyzed by the “historic dynamism of the veil.” Determined by beliefs associated with tradition, the veil functioned at first as a mechanism of resistance, opposed to the occupier’s design to “unveil” Algeria. This reaction entrenched passive affects sprung from uncomprehended external causes. In the second phase, Fanon summarizes, the veil was instrumentalized to solve the new problems created by the struggle. The veil refunctioned thus unfolds a horizon of composable relations bringing people together, enacting in the process the constitution of social power itself and its consensual legitimacy. Now with the power of acting determined by adequate ideas (knowledge of the nexus of causality), the theology of Manichean polarity dissolves and a new political organism is created that transforms what is “natural” into social history. The ethical striving underwritten by the anticolonial revolution charts the passage from the immobilized “natural” Manichean order of segregated habitats and locations to the free organizing of capacities, exploding the fallacies of bureaucratic representation, the reified market, and the injustice of the imperial social contract.

This Spinozistic reading of Fanon’s text, arguably a hermeneutic thought-experiment never tried before, pursues the line of inquiry made by Antonio Negri in his book The Savage Anomaly. In Spinoza’s political theory, we find the primacy of collective human praxis, an expression of the constitutive modality of the multitude as a determined being.

Fanon’s vision of cultural revolution implicit in A Dying Colonialism testifies to what Irene Gendzier calls Fanon’s evolution from the psychologist to the political militant. The transmogrification of European humanism in the torture of political prisoners triggered this shift. We have seen how in “Algeria Unveiled” and other essays Fanon’s disruption of the separatist, apartheid logic of colonialism harmonizes with a radical transformative politics antithetical to the liberal pluralism of mainstream Cultural Studies practitioners. Given this brief comment on Fanon’s insight into the productive social dynamic of the national-liberation project, one which is extremely relevant to the crisis of the South in our globalized corporate milieu, I venture this hypothesis: Fanon’s value for us today inheres in this discursive practice of a cultural politics that goes beyond the populist articulation of heterogeneous forces along a “chain of equivalence” (insofar as such equivalence is already embodied or contained as a causal motivation and impetus within the semiotics of language, polemical prose, rhetoric and a wide range of speech-acts) to advance and illuminate the ethical drama of the multitude in the actual revolutionary process. For Fanon, culture, not just language or discourse, is key to the revolutionary transformation of the whole communicative situation in which power (potentia), the capacity for joyful experience, is rooted in adequate ideas. By “adequate ideas” is meant the appreciation of the body’s infinite capacities attuned to our reasoning power. The framework of intelligibility for Fanon is the national-liberation paradigm where the recognition of Others overcomes the seemingly permanent alienation of the Manichean world of colonial subjugation. In this trajectory of cultural inquiry, word and deed become one. nAn example of this dialectical fusion of theory and practice may be discerned in the historical investigations of Fanon’s fellow Caribbean intellectual, C.L.R. James.

Beyond Postcolonial Orthodoxy

C. L. R. James is a great West Indian of complex spirit…a unique Marxist thinker whose dialectic is attuned, it seems to me, to necessity for individual originality as much as it is involved in analyses of historical process in the life of the people or the body-politic.

–Wilson Harris

Migrating from the academic periphery to the center, the current orthodoxy of postcolonial studies has advanced to the point at which certain doctrines concerning hybridity, syncretism, ambivalence, and so on, mimic ironically what they are supposed to denounce: the master discourses of hegemonic Europe and North America. To rectify this tendency, the authors of the influential textbook The Empire Writes Back proclaim that imperial suppressions work “through as well as upon individuals and societies” and transcend “the egregious classification of ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World,” thus claiming all space/time as its field of investigation. In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, the same authors–Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin–proceed to revise the old “civilizing mission” of the West by mandating the desideratum of concentrating on lineages. Consequently, the study of settler colony cultures becomes paradigmatic: “Settler colonies, precisely because their filiative metaphors of connection problematise the idea of resistance as a simple binarism, articulate the ambivalent, complex and processual nature of all imperial relations” (1995: 3-4). 1 Following the poststructuralist tenets of Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, the discursive

practices of the colonizer are assumed to limit opposition peremptorily so that all resistance is fated to be complicit in domination, and all we can hope for is what postcolonial guru Homi Bhabha (1995) calls the “Third Space of enunciation,” the “in-between” of Derrida’s ecriture, of translation and interstitial negotiation, the “discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference.” 2

I want to argue here that to the disjuncture between postcolonial undecidability, ethnic/nationalist essentialism, and what Paul Gilroy (1992) hypothesizes as a “black Atlantic” transcendence of boundaries can be counterposed the practice of the diasporic thinker C.L.R. James. His is neither a third way nor a reconciliation of opposites. His body of work illustrates how the political and artistic engagements of a decolonizing subject can refunction the master discourse of “dialectical materialism” without being complicit in restoring or recuperating domination. Such a discourse (the legacy of the European Enlightenment from Spinoza and Hegel to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky) is not just enunciated by the subaltern but remolded to speak to/about circumstances and protagonists beyond those addressed by its originary theoreticians. What James accomplished is not just the invention of a counterdiscourse, a dialogic performance, suitable for “flexible” accumulation. It is a reaffirmation of the theme of “universality” against Cold War bipolarity and the pervasive fragmentation and reification of life in late capitalism. In the wake of the demise of Soviet “state capitalism” and globalized capitalism’s commodification of the whole planet (Magdoff 1992), James’s reconstruction of the materialist dialectic valorizes three motifs in his analysis of culture and society: contradiction as the basis of historical motion, the agency of the masses as creative and transformative force, and the practice of freedom as the embodiment of universality. Of these three, the agency of the masses and how it negates the need for mediation (by the party, bureaucrats, etc.) becomes pivotal to James’s cultural politics. It informs the narrative of complex dynamic forces in The Black Jacobins (1938). It enables James to avoid the perils of economism, class reductionism, voluntarism/sectarianism, and empirical determinism when he reflects on the Cold War conjuncture in the posthumously published American Civilization (1995).

The question of mass agency is linked to a controlling principle that governs James’s project of subverting state capitalism whether Stalinist or liberal: the centrality of movement in everything, in particular the dialectical transition from the old to the new. Transcontinental imperialism cannot be overcome without grasping motion in space and time. Disjunctions or distances in space becomes intelligible when the process of becoming (the ec-stases of human temporality) is reinscribed in the historicist organon that James distills in a sentence: “We can orient for the future only by comprehension of the present in the light of the past” (1994: 168). It took him almost half a century to realize this diasporic orientation in his life and thought, that “it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going, and the rate at which you are getting there” (Paget and Buhle 1992: 39).

Contextualizing Theory

Before examining this principle of becoming and the themes of universality and contradiction in James’s texts, a biographical parenthesis may be useful. A product of British Caribbean colonial education, James’s love of English literature and his devotion to cricket as an art combined with his involvement in Trinidad’s organized labor movement. His first book, The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932), also laid claim to the foundations of West Indian nationalism in the interwar period. When he moved in 1932 to England, he was exposed to the Trotskyist movement and became an independent socialist critical of Stalisnism and the Comintern, as shown in his book World Revolution (1938). In essence, his critique of authoritarian forms of rule centered on the notion of a vanguard party that would substitute for the revolutionary creative energies of the people and of the popular forces of the left around the world. What complicates James’s Trotskyism is his pan-Africanism: his collaboration with George Padmore, Paul Robeson, and the Guyanese activist Ras Makonnen linked him to a historical process begun by W.E.B.DuBois and the Pan-African Congress and by Marcus Garvey; through this James exerted influence on Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. James’s play Toussaint L’Ouverture was sponsored by the League for the Protection of Ethiopia.

Transported to the metropolis, the West Indian colonial subject discovers the African subtext in the palimpsest of world proletarian revolution. James’s book The Black Jacobins (1938) demonstrates his historical-materialist breadth of vision by connecting the French Revolution and the slave uprising in Haiti with the history of the Central African peoples on which the Atlantic slave trade depended. The Trotskyist concept of Bonapartism is applied to L’Ouverture, according to Stuart Hall, so that the Haitian revolution is read “as a mass uprising in which the leader became trapped in bureaucracy and was slowly transformed into a self-effacing dictator who capitulated, contained, and defused the popular revolution” (1992: 9). Hall’s description is not entirely correct; the Haitian masses completed the war of independence by destroying all the whites in the island.3

Imprisoned in Ellis Island at the height of McCarthyism in 1953, James completed his study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. He read Moby Dick as an allegory of power relations, and expounded on how the ship symbolized the social relations of production at a certain period of U.S. history. Like his later work Beyond a Boundary, where cricket assumes the status of an emblematic game in which nature is reshaped into an dramatic artifice and given historical substance by the anti-imperialist struggle, Mariners can be read as a postcolonial discourse in which complicity and resistance dovetail. On the other hand, James’s obsessive concern with the tension between leadership, intellectuals, and masses (between Ahab, Ishmael, and the crew of the Pequod) derives from his preoccupation with historical motion, universality, and contradiction. In his engagement with American popular culture, with sports, carnival and West Indian politics, James applied a totalizing intellect to discern how a cultural practice crystallized the manifold historical forces at work in any given period. Whether it was the rise of the bourgeoisie during Shakespeare’s time, or the emergence of new productive forces at the moment when Melville and Whitman wrote or when Picasso painted Guernica; or the appearance of new mobilized energies of whole peoples, as in Haiti or the Gold Coast of Africa, James had an intuitive sense of the triangular play between historical moment, masses, and artist/intellectual. One might say that he privileged the totality of the revolutionary process of change, the sublation of the old into the new. He valued above all the resourceful, spontaneous, and creative force of the masses, the political energies of the working people, of a collective power mobilized during periods of crisis–this, I think, is the kernel of James’s dialectical materialism. Was this simply appropriated from the Hegelian-Marxist tradition? Is the privileging of mass agency (reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of centralized, bureaucratic leadership) a mere abrogation of Hegelian statism and vulgar Marxist technicist instrumentalism?

The Incarnation of Dialectics

Such questions can be understood better if we see their rearticulation in James’s magisterial review of world history in the 1947 essay, “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity,” and its foregrounding of the telos of universality. Here James rearticulates Hegelianized Marxian themes toward what I would call a “mass line” orientation, which would later on find its historical crucible and incarnation in the 1962 discourse, “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.”

Echoing the Communist Manifesto, the 1947 essay begins with the collapse of capitalist civilization and the bankruptcy of bourgeois thought, humanity finally freed from illusions and faced now with “the real conditions of life.” Not only do Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia personify barbarism, but so do the victorious Allies presumably safeguarding the legacy of Western civilization. Dialectics enables James to grasp the fundamental contradiction between the abundant “possibilities of living” and the increasing “terror of mass annihilation” with the onset of the Cold War. Illustrating the law of the change from quantity to quality, James evokes the antithesis to counterrevolutionary barbarism: “the readiness for sacrifice, the democratic instincts and creative power of the great masses of the people” (1992: 159). Philosophy has not only become worldly but the world faced by either barbarism or socialism has become philosophical–that is, humanity posits freedom and happiness as conceivable only in the integrity of its struggle to transcend its subjection to nature and achieve a truly concrete universality. Such universality is prefigured in Marx’s notion of “species-being” in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

James reviews the worldwide failure to realize the potential of “species-being” from the time of Christianity to the Protestant Reformation. He holds that the dialectic of concrete and abstract embedded in the logical principle of universality has been short-circuited by Hegel’s idea of “mediation.” These mediations are symptoms of the failure to grasp truth as the whole: not only in human actions but also in people’s needs and aspirations. It was Marx who succeeded in theorizing absence and negativity by a historical-materialist method, that is, by resolving the problem of mediation with the intervention of praxis. For Marx, James asserts, “these concrete revolutionary stages are the work of the great masses of the people forever seeking the concretion of universality as the development of the productive forces creates the objective circumstances and the subjective desires which move them” (1992: 166).

Productive forces–are we then caught in a productivist trope or paradigm? No, because James reinscribes development within the orbit of social praxis moving between abstract possibility and concrete necessity. In tracing the development of Western civilization from primitive Christianity through Renaissance humanism to the rise of merchant capitalism, he focuses on slave revolts, peasant insurrections, the agitation of free workers in the medieval guilds, all of which culminated in the establishment of humanism and the national state of the absolute monarchy: “mediations of the mass proletarian desire for universality no longer in heaven but on earth.” This triumph of bourgeois liberalism, however, only sharpened the contradictions in the “mass quest for universality in action and in life,” for James “the moving force of history” (1992: 170). Discerning the contradiction between abstract and concrete in the English Civil War and the French Revolution, James underscores the rupture that suspends the need for mediation (the vanguard party, elite, charismatic intellectuals): “If out of the individual’s responsibility for his own salvation, there had leapt democracy, out of his political freedom, there leapt communism” (1992: 171).

The last mediation to be surpassed is the Hegelian State, Weberian bureaucracy, and the illusion of pluralist/liberal representative democracy under the aegis of capital. James exposes here Hegel’s limitations and the teleological idealism of Absolute Spirit. He opts for Marx’s mode of conceptualizing the “objective movement” in the process of production, an approach that is not “productivist” in the positivistic sense but one that coincides with “the quest for universality in the need for the free and full development of all the inherent and acquired characteristics of the individual in productive and intellectual labour.” Such a process of socialized labor would also abolish the fateful division between manual and intellectual labor, the theoretical foundation of postcolonial notions of interjacency, hybridity, etc. James is uncompromising in affirming that “the quest for universality, embodied in the masses, constituting the great mass of the nation, forbids any mediation” (1992: 173-74). Does this then imply that the subject can no longer be viewed as an effect of difference, whether linguistic or ontological?

Difference as contradiction still exists amid globalization, but the point is to rearticulate it within a differentiated concrete totality. James cites a passage from Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, written a hundred years ago: “Only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the ‘propertyless’ mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones” (1992: 179). If revolutionary politics, for James, requires linking the “needs of the objective situation” with the state of development of the masses, what is needed to renew the “vast wreck of the modern world” is the “total mobilization of all forces in society.”

Toward Concrete Universality

Facing the vast wreckage of imperialism fifteen years after, James, in “From Toussaint to Fidel Castro,” pursues the antinomy between concrete universality and its geopolitical mediations in the specific region of the Caribbean.4 Here Castro’s revolution epitomizes the “ultimate stage of a Caribbean quest for national identity” (1992: 296). The two poles of the antithesis in Caribbean history, the sugar plantation and Negro slavery, become figures in a constellation (to use Walter Benjamin’s term) for the traditional colonial order and for modernity respectively. The Haitian revolution was a mediation whose ambivalence disappeared in 1914 when the U.S. invasion ushered in the need for “Negritude,” a moment in the quest for universality. The rediscovery of Vodun in Haiti marked Negritude as a peculiar West Indian contribution, one supplemented by the invention of Cubanidad after the Platt Amendment subordinated Cuba to U.S. supremacy. In the interwar period, James presents four figures whose mediations embodied the struggle of the West Indian masses for independence: Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Aime Cesaire, and Arthur Cipriani. It was Cesaire’s poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) that exploded the axiom of linear, uniform evolution and introduced the dialectical leap: “that salvation for the West Indies lies in Africa, the original home and ancestry of the West Indian people” (1992: 302).5 Marx’s vision of the beginning of the “real history of humanity” is expressed in Cesaire as the convergence of African and Western worlds and the past and future of mankind, this convergence springing from (in James’s words) “the self-generated and independent being and motion” of the Africans themselves.

While James credits “Negritude” as the key mediation between Africa and the West Indian masses, Africa itself (contingently personified in the persons of Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Lumumba, Nyerere, and others) becomes integrated into West Indian life through the vehicle of mass communication: “There was therefore in West Indian society an inherent antagonism between the consciousness of the black masses and the reality of their lives, inherent in that it was constantly produced and reproduced not by agitators but by the very conditions of the society itself. It is the modern media of mass communication which have made essence into existence” (1992: 307). In effect, it is finance capitalism and the world market that provide the conditions of possibility for the West Indian national community to emerge, for West Indian artists like George Lamming and Wilson Harris to accept “complete responsibility for the West Indies.” James concludes by celebrating popular culture as the incarnation of the new things. In James’s planetary view, West Indians, emerging from “the pass and fell incensed points/Of mighty opposites” that define the Cold War, will contribute to the comity of nations: “In dance, in the innovation in musical instruments, in popular ballad singing unrivalled anywhere in the world, the mass of the people are not seeking a national identity, they are expressing one” (1992: 314). By counterpointing Western imperial barbarism with the rebellious subjectivity of the colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, James rediscovers the germinal Marxist concept of the “people” immanent in “empirically universal individuals.”

Contrary to Sylvia Wynter’s claim that James’s poiesis is exhaustively distilled by a multicultural Caliban who rejects the nationalitarian paradigm or nation model, James himself posits the historical specificity of West Indian revolutions (symbolized by Toussaint, Castro, the struggle against the Chaguaramas U.S. base in Trinidad) as necessary for comprehending the notion of universality. I would argue that the articulation of West Indian identity with global capitalism–eloquently enunciated in the 1966 lecture “The Making of the Caribbean People”–is the move James makes to recover the national-popular (to borrow Gramsci’s terminology) from its subsumption in elite vanguardism and the putative “labor-centric categories of orthodox Marxism.”6 But to delegitimate capital accumulation and its privileging of instrumental rationality over the autonomy of the body, we need to inquire not only into disciplinary regimes of power/knowledge but also more crucially into commodity-fetishism and the ideological apparatus of reification and postcolonial mystification. I think it is untenable to ascribe to James the epistemological presuppositions of Foucault and poststructuralist thought in general. Bourgeois power based on consumption and circulation of goods doesn’t spring primarily from the head/body opposition, just as the tension between the categories of race and class cannot be so easily dissolved by the mediations of jazz, calypso, and the reggae of Rastafarianism. Mass consumerism cannot so facilely displace the labor-centered paradigm Wynter rejects, despite the consensus on the protean virtues of James’s intelligence and the “pluridefined social totem pole” of Trinidad.

Engaging with Heideggerian deconstruction and the translations of alterity in response to the normative texts of Eurocentric “Orientalism,” critics like Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and their followers all privilege the peculiar intimacy between colonizer and colonized. It is instructive to counterpose James’s unabashed totalizing of ethnic difference and contingent diversity immanent in his historiographical practice. I do not mean by this the counterdiscourse of “marvellous realism” (originally broached by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier as “real maravilloso” in El Reine de este Mundo) proposed by Jacques Stephen Alexis, Michael Dash, and others, or the creolized differend of Commonwealth artists. Rather, the deconstruction of European master-narratives is performed through shifting the concern on limits–how human freedom in making history is “limited by the necessities of environment and conjuncture of circumstances.”

Triangulating New Worlds

At this juncture, I would like to call attention to an interview of James in the mid-seventies in which the crucial themes of mass agency and universality are staged conjuncturally. James the historian conceived of his role as studying the struggle of classes (a political, not an economistic, category), which is indivisible with the mass movements–“the emotions, activities, and experiences of the great mass of the population”–from an international perspective. Just as the sliding of signifiers cannot go on forever, the power of the individual, no matter how great, is strictly limited. The Black Jacobins opened the field of inquiry into the subsumption of individuals into race/class within imperialism. James’s point of departure in analyzing the Haitian revolution was his belief that “the center of the Black revolution was Africa, not the Caribbean” (1983: 267). A certain “native” intransigence saved James from succumbing to the temptation of “parliamentarism”; his association with George Padmore and his activities in the International African Service Bureau enabled him to make connections with African nationalists. Anti-imperialist solidarity allowed him to appreciate Cesaire’s “Negritude” as “not only a revolt against assimilation, but a poetical assertion of an African civilization” (1983: 270), analogous to the emancipatory projects of Marcus Garvey and Frantz Fanon.

What James stresses in the African context is not the antiracist or separatist cultural nationalism of the natives but rather the way British capitalism introduced slavery in the sugar plantations and how it brought its own “gravediggers” into its heartland. He insists that it is not economic relations that generate social movements but “the relations between classes,” so that West Indians living in Britain attack bourgeois society not because they are West Indians but because this particular society “trained them to act in the most advanced possible way.” In short, black people in the imperialist metropole have “succeeded in posing the question of the revolution” (1983: 272-73). James can unreservedly take this stance because of his conviction that the Haitian Revolution played a “decisive” role in the destruction of mercantilism and the abolition of the capitalist slave trade. He compares his task of demonstrating the role blacks played in the creation of modern Europe with DuBois’ endeavor to show how black people helped create modern America. In prophesying that capitalism was coming to an end, James might have exceeded the limits of his vocation as historian.

But I think the lesson he was trying to communicate is that the postcolonial strategy of deconstructing subjectivity concedes too much to the schematism of ideological texts and neglects the dynamics of transition whose understanding hinges on an analytic method that he derives from Marx’s Capital: “We learned that when something new takes place, if you want to understand it, you must begin from the highest peak of the previous form” (1983: 271). I think this presupposes again the problem of working through and beyond mediations in order to grasp the imperative of universality. This is the methodological axiom underlying James’s prolegomenon to his study of American civilization, the 1944 essay entitled “The American People in ‘One World’: An Essay in Dialectical Materialism.”

Is James guilty of a populist/demagogic fetishizing of the masses and thus instigating a cult of anarchic spontaneity? I do not think so. In The Black Jacobins, James describes the “remarkable liveliness of intellect and vivacity of spirit” that characterized the slaves in the eighteenth century. But without the leadership of those “who have been able to profit by the cultural advantages of the system” (such as Toussaint, Christophe, Dessalines), their revolt would have suffered the same fate as the Mackandal rebellion and other aborted uprisings. James analyzes not so much the economic status of slaves and plantation aristocrats but rather the changing alignment and disposition of various forces in Haiti at the time before the outbreak of the French Revolution. What he was unfolding was a plot of education in which the slaves learned “how liberty and equality were won or lost” (1963: 82) through mistakes, failures, and the ineluctable pressure of circumstances. James takes into account not just the racial conflicts but the specific maneuvers in which participants registered the limits and possibilities of their actions: “Political treachery is not a monopoly of the white race, and this abominable betrayal so soon after the insurrections shows that political leadership is a matter of programme, strategy and tactics, and not the colour of those who lead it” (1963: 106). Overall James charted the oscillating, complex interactions between leaders and masses, between black slaves and mulattos and their French masters, between the colonial administrators and the bureaucrats in Paris; this triangulation becomes the midwife to the birth of the people, the praxis of universality.

Articulating Masses and Leaders

What I want to highlight here is James’s all-sided, tactfully calculated, dramatic representation of Toussaint’s character, its weakness and strength, in Chapter XI of The Black Jacobins. The class or socioeconomic determinants of Toussaint’s personality are drawn with nuanced deliberation, taking care neither to glorify nor understate. After examining Toussaint’s correspondence, James offers his judgment: Toussaint’s “vision of precisely what is required is unerring, his taste is faultless, and the constantly varying approach is always suffused with revolutionary passion, a large humanity and a never-failing distinction” (1963: 253). But this seemingly static portrait and attributes are then set into motion when Toussaint makes the wrong judgment to execute Moise, his nephew and leader of several insurrections, for his sympathy with the black slaves in the North Province. Toussaint’s rationale then was to assure the French plantatocracy and Bonaparte that he would keep the blacks and mulattos in line. James sharpens the contrast between Moise and Toussaint by transcribing their voices. Moise first:

Whatever my old uncle may do, I cannot bring myself to be the executioner of my colour. It is always in the interests of the metropolis that he scolds me; but these interests are those of the whites, and I shall only love them when they have given me back the eye that they made me lose in battle. (1963: 275)

Toussaint replies to a notable creole of San Domingo:

I took up arms for the freedom of my colour, which France alone proclaimed, but which she has no right to nullify. Our liberty is no longer in her hands: it is in our own. We will defend it or perish. (1963: 281)

James notes the “strange duality” starkly displayed here, the loyalty to France coexisting with the assertion of autonomy and self-sufficiency–an emblem of the law of “uneven and combined development.”

But in the following remarks, we see James again grappling with the drive for universality and how the strategy for national liberation of the colonized has to somehow mediate between class, ethnicity (emergent nationality), and race. James praises Toussaint’s long-range perspective: he is “one of those few men for whom power is a means to an end, the development of civilization, the betterment of his fellow creatures,” a power committed to realizing the full potential of species-being. And yet his disregard of the masses and their level of consciousness, his authoritarian and aristocratic habitus, his failure to critique the abstract universality of the ideals of the French bourgeois revolution, his naivete about Napoleon–all constitute a flaw not tragic enough but still lethal in its consequence:

[Toussaint] could not admit to himself and to his people that it was easier to find decency, gratitude, justice, and humanity in a cage of starving tigers than in the councils of imperialism…. It was in method, and not in principle, that Toussaint failed. The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental (1963: 282-83)

But the irony is that in the last chapter of The Black Jacobins, entitled “The War of Independence,” the error became Toussaint’s grave. This statement of Toussaint’s habit from hindsight becomes double-edged: “in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as he was, could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre and Danton” (1963: 198). That constituted both his virtue and his blindness–his blindness to what was emergent, growing, fighting to be born. Only by seizing race, nationality, and class as “unity of opposites” and rallying the masses of black people (including the mulattos) against the slaveowners and the French Empire could Dessalines and Christophe succeed in liberating the country. And for that it was necessary that Toussaint, the hybrid transcultural mediation, be removed from the scene.

At this juncture, we see that the allegory of The Black Jacobins functions as the residual subtext of both the two aforementioned essays whose purpose is to show the quest for universality immanent in historical experience. Within James’s Marxist framework, “universality” can be concretized only in communism won by a permanent world revolution. While it is true that James (like most postcolonial intellectuals) worked within the Western cultural orbit and expressed the adversarial consciousness of subjugated people of color, it is not quite correct to say, as Edward Said does, that James unqualifiedly identified Europe as his own world, even if James himself stated that “fundamentally we are a people whose literacy and aesthetic past is rooted in Western European civilization” (quoted in Said 1993: 248). James precisely urged their antinomic conjunction; the symbiosis or synergesis of the West Indian and European was, for James, always fraught and contentious, without any guaranteed closure. And contrary to Said’s allegation that James “saw the central pattern of politics and history in linear terms” (253), one has to emphasize the interruptions and returns, a syncopation of unpredictable breaks that precisely rendered unnecessary the mediations by enigmatic, free-floating signifiers or the iron cage of administrators.

A turning point in James’s cultural politics occurred when he broke away from the mainstream American Trotskyist movement in 1950 and, together with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency. From James’s experience in the independence movement of Trinidad, the struggles of African Americans in the southern states and in the factories of Detroit evolved the Tendency’s emphasis on workers’ self-activity; their autonomous rank-and-file revolts made the prerequisite of a vanguard party superfluous. In State Capitalism and World Revolution, James considered the Ford assembly line as “the prototype of production relations in fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia” (Cleaver 1979: 46). The Soviet Union was not just a degenerate worker’s state but thoroughly state capitalist, its bureaucracy nothing else but “American bureaucracy carried to its ultimate and logical conclusion.”

Linking his vision of mass insurrection in Haiti that overtook any conscious design of the leaders or intellectuals to a quasi-anarchosyndicalist trend, James substituted the “disciplined spontaneity” of workers for the mediation of a vanguard party: “The proletariat always breaks up the old organization by impulse, a leap…. The new organization, the new organism will begin with spontaneity, i.e., free creative activity, as its necessity” (Cleaver 1979: 47). This was a drastic revision of the fundamental proposition found in Notes on Dialectics: “The Universal of socialism is the free proletariat” (1980: 152). In a letter to Constance Webb in 1944 while he was studying Hegel, James wrote: “The Marxist prepares the workers subjectively for what history prepares them objectively” (1996: 148). In Modern Politics ten years later, James again privileged the self-activity of the “great masses of people,” participatory radical democracy in action (1960: 42). The sociologist Kevin Anderson points out that in the 1948 study of Hegel, James synthesized Lenin’s ideas on organization and the “spontaneous activity and self-movement” or “free creative activity of the proletariat” within their own mass formations (1995, 200-01). Universality, in James’s hermeneutics, epitomizes the kernel of dialectics, the interpenetration of opposites, multileveled contradictions as the impetus of historical motion (Ollman1993). The search for universality begins and ends with the collective praxis of the people, popular energies unified and harnessed to explode commodity-fetishism and the legitimacy of unequal property/power relations (on “universality” from a critical-realist perspective, see Bhaskar 1993).

Naming the Beast

By the end of World War II, James traced the genealogy of United States imperialism from its beginning, the break with the “triangular trade of mercantilism,” through its intervention in Asia and Latin America, up to its victory against fascist barbarism. The profoundly synthesizing reach of the essay “The American People in ‘One World'” (1944) affords us a foretaste of the prescience invested in the 1947 discourse on “Dialectical Materialism.” It also foreshadows what James speculated as the impending apocalypse of world capitalism rehearsed in the 1962 Appendix to The Black Jacobins, which juxtaposes the figures of Toussaint and Fidel Castro embedded in the tradition of capital’s “gravediggers.” I would like to quote a lengthy passage trom this 1944 essay to illustrate the antipostcolonial unequivocality typical of James’s intellect:

American imperialism there becomes the chief bulwark of the capitalist system as a whole…. The colossal power of American imperialism is the apex of a process–the rise, maturity and decline of the capitalist world market. In the eighteenth century, “our country,” in the triumph of its industrial bourgeoisie, released the great political potentialities of the European proletariat, the mortal enemy of the European bourgeoisie. Today “our country” can release nothing. Driven by the contradictions of its own capitalistic development and of capitalism as a whole, it is now the enemy of hundreds of millions of people everythwere. The appearance of liberator of peoples is a necessary disguise for the essential reality of American imperialism, epitome of decadent capitalism, mobilized for the defense of privilege and property against a world crying to be free.

The laws of dialectics are to be traced not in metaphysical abstractions such as 168 years of “our country,” but in economic development and the rise, maturity, and decline of different social classes within the expansion and construction of the capitalist world market. The greatest progressive force in the eighteenth century, the nationalism of “our country,” is in the twentieth century the greatest of obstacles to social progress. In accordance with a fundamental dialectical law, the progressive “nationalism” of eighteenth-century America is transformed into its opposite, the reactionary “internationalism” of American imperialism…. American imperialism cannot escape its entanglements in foreign class struggles even if it would…. In our compact world, successful revolt in any area will sound the tocsin for the center more violently than the American revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century shook metropolitan Europe. And the social crisis in America must bring onto the scene the American proletariat. (1994: 175-76)

The submerged narrative line of this essay follows the twists and turns found in the 1938 masterpiece, The Black Jacobins. I would like to emphasize three paramount theses enunciated here. First, the rise of the world market converts the whole world into an arena of revolutionary struggle so that the challenge in the periphery immediately registers in the metropolitan center. Second, the mode of imperial accumulation has generated the American proletariat which inherits the international revolutionary tradition and also utilizes “the great American tradition of the past” in the struggle for socialism. Third, the agencies of transformative politics aim for concrete specific objects that eventually generate worldwide repercussions: “The farmers, mechanics and artisans, the workers and Negro slaves, pursued strictly immediate and concrete aims and made world history” (1994, 177). The cunning of Reason becomes immanent in quotidian events, rendering even defeats and reversals stepping-stones in the oppressed people’s quest for universality, i.e., for freedom and happiness.

The universality we confront daily in the twentieth century is that of the world market which has compressed time/space through mass communications and technological innovations in travel. For James, however, that signifies the universality of commodity-fetishism and the totalitarian state. All the same, the phenomenon is constituted by multiple contradictions. James’s unfinished project, American Civilization, is precisely the endeavor to anatomize the universality known as United States imperialism, its essence (only grasped through theoretical practice) and appearances, the phenomenology of everyday life.

The fundamental thrust of American Civilization is “the creation of an integral human being.” This is predicated on the idea of the good life associated with freedom and happiness as revolutionary goals. Closely identified with African Americans and women as social forces, those goals have been compromised, mocked, postponed, sidetracked, or even negated by capitalist “mass production” and its drift toward barbarism. The original ideals of liberty, pursuit of happiness, and free individuality have now been shipwrecked in the economic and social realities of the Depression in the thirties and the relentless barbarism of the Cold War.

In assessing the impotence of American intellectuals, James arrived at the only force that can resist the worldwide barbarism: “the instinctive rebelliousness and creative force of the modern masses” (1993, 226). Unlike Weber and the resort to charismatic leaders, James pits the masses against a world-system of bureaucratic state structures. What climaxes James’s analytic of the contradiction between aspirations and realities is the chapter on “Popular Arts and Modern Society,” in which modern film, newspaper, comic strip, jazz, and radio are seen as “an expression of mass response to society, crises, and the nature and limitations of that response” (1993: 122). This contradiction is embodied in the figure of the gangster, “the persistent symbol of the national past which has no meaning–the past in which energy, determination, bravery were certain to get a man somewhere in the line of opportunity… [The] gangster who displays all the old heroic qualities in the only way he can display them, is the derisive symbol of the contrast between ideals and reality” (1993: 127). The rage and violence one finds in popular film constitute an index of “the mass exposing…its desire to smash the impasse in which it finds itself”–in short, a cathartic release of the repression of the masses by a disciplinary, surveillance system, what Henri Lefebvre (1971) calls the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”

Re-discovering Africa

In 1960, James turned to the dynamics of the revolution in the Gold Coast of Africa and reinstated the conceptual primacy of the term “people” in the lexicon of socialist political theory (1971: 133; on James’s views on Ghana’s Nkrumah, see Marable 1986). Thus when he invokes the American “people” in his brand of reception-aesthetics, James returns to the guiding insight of The Black Jacobins derived from Lenin and Michelet in which the dialectic between leaders and masses is calibrated with astute realism. The dialectical method is premised on the “concrete analysis” of material conditions that determine the limits and possibilities of action. James’s analysis of popular association and mass organizing together with their symbolic expression is thus able to imbue the “national-popular” striving for revolutionary hegemony with the intractable “thickness” of historicity.

But historicism in American Civilization is neither antiquarian nor monumental because it is oriented to present imperatives and agendas. It acquires a prophetic thrust when James underscores its utopian telos: happiness. What distinguishes his socioanalytic of the American character is an abundant faith in its potential: “[The American people] combine an excessive individualism, a sense of the primary value of their own individual personality, with an equally remarkable need, desire and capacity for social cooperative action” (1993: 273). Because this volatile, aggressive individualism has been suppressed by technocratic corporate statism, a profound social crisis has ripened: anger and fear “irresistibly explode in private life.” Such explosions are registered not in refined intellectual exchanges but in popular culture. The twin drive for autonomy and for association, for asserting a distinctive personality and for “intimate communion with his fellows,” cannot be fulfilled within the regime of commodity-fetishism or mass consumerism, hence the crisis and its symptoms in gangster movies, in the private lives of women, blacks, and intellectuals.

In Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953), James pointed out how Melville captured in Ahab’s predicament the crisis of transition, the tension between the masses “seeking a new basis for a sense of community” and the eruption of “the most boundlessly egotistical individual personalities” in the political arena (130). But as always, James finds a resolution to all this crisis in his argument about the overriding importance of “the struggle for happiness” and for self-fulfillment in social reciprocity.7 By “happiness” is meant the integration between individual personality and the larger community, the synthesis of public commitment and private interest, in short, the political life defined and elaborated by James in Modern Politics (1960) and Every Cook Can Govern (1956).

The theoretical framework deployed in this ambitious cognitive mapping of the United States as a “civilization,” its contradictory trends and aleatory tendencies, is what we have already encountered in The Black Jacobins. It is an invention of the diasporic sensibility that apprehends the manifold links between national and the international, the local and global, the singular and the universal. I designate it the triangulation of universality in the capitalist world-system.8 One illustration can be adduced here. In the last chapter of The Black Jacobins, James traced the race war and carnage in Haiti as due to “the greed of the French bourgeoisie” (355). From this he concludes that in contrast to nineteenth-century Haiti, the “blacks in Africa [in mid-twentieth century] are more advanced” in their pursuit of freedom:

From the people heaving in action will come the leaders; not the isolated blacks at Guys’ Hospital or the Sorbonne, the dabblers in surrealisme or the lawyers, but the quiet recruits in a black police force, the sergeant in the French native army or British police, familiarising himself with military tactics and strategy, reading a stray pamphlet of Lenin or Trostsky as Toussaint read the Abbe Raynal. (1963: 377)

What sutures the diverse materials in The Black Jacobins, American Civilization, and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways is a singular theme of universality, this time cognized as the spontaneous, self-directed, inexhaustible power of the masses.

James reworked his Eurocentric education and redefined his identity as “a Man of the Caribbean” by triangulating the regions that configured the African diaspora: Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe.9 Colonialism and the slave trade established the necessity of the Caribbean as a vital, irreplaceable link in primitive capital accumulation. With his adventurous intuition, James could encompass distant points in space that would otherwise remain isolated fragments, enabling him to render not syncretic pastiches or bricolage of semiotic utopia but the actual process of decolonization: “All problems today, particularly the emancipation of the underdeveloped countries, are matters in which the world in general is involved; and at the centre of African emancipation, particularly in the development of ideas and international strategy, are the urban blacks of America” (1992: 376). This passion of the islander for cognitive and geopolitical mapping–an index of the masses’ self-activity and drive for collective self-representation–explains why he considers “Negroes” as Americans, not a separate ethnic community, whose combined segregation and integration epitomize the national crisis, the “modern Americanism, a profoundly social passion of frustration and violence” that distinguishes the United States in the midst of the Cold War.

Socialism or Barbaric Capitalist Racism

A decisive turn in James’s itinerary as an authentic dialectical-materialist thinker occurred in his re-examination of the “Negro question” or the articulation of the categories of race and class in social critique. He had already confronted the race-class nexus in the early thirties in united-front campaigns in support of Abyssinian resistance to Italian imperialism and the campaign for West Indian self-government. Before he returned to the United States by way of New Orleans after his fateful meeting with Trotsky in Mexico in 1939, James invariably subsumed the fact of “racism” in the master-code of class struggle. The encounter with “race”–the recent volume C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question” edited by Scott McLemee documents this fateful encounter–reconfigured his whole way of thinking and generated the praxis of what became the “mass line” in “Third World” people’s war in Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

In 1938, towards the end of The Black Jacobins, C. L. R James reflected on the dialectic between the categories of race and class that framed his narrative of the first black slave uprising in the world: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental” (1963: 283). The reason for the internationalist focus on the class question, according to Paul Buhle (1988), lies in the Trotskyist principle of transcending national specifics for the sake of a grand epic of solidarity between the European proletariat and the “black Jacobins” of the colonies.

James at that time had never paid attention to the condition of the African Americans in the United States, but before his trip he had already been involved in the pan-African movement in England, particularly in the campaign for Abyssinian independence against European imperialism. And yet this concern of people of color for national self-determination of African colonies, and later of Caribbean societies, allegedly did not change his view that the class question predominates over the race question. In a useful review, Tony Martin reiterated this position: “Even when accepting the applicability of Lenin’s ideas on national minorities to the movement for self-determination among Afro-Americans, for example, or when appearing to condone the rhetoric of Black Power, he has never deviated from his view that race is subordinate to class” (1972: 186).

Is it correct to affirm the argument that James never deviated from his 1938 conviction of the priority of class over race? I contend that it is not correct. In the aforementioned collection of writings by James on the “Negro Question” (1996), Scott McLemee also concurs with the idea that James’s final word on the race/class antithesis may be found in the resolution James authored for the Socialist Workers’ Party Convention of 1948. The document entitled “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States” indeed synthesizes scattered thoughts and reflections on the situation of African Americans in the United States that James expressed in voluminous writings. But this synthesis does not indicate the easy, automatic subsumption of race into class. In fact, the trajectory of the argument here implies a move toward a concrete dialectic negotiation of the claims of these two categories.

Elucidating the “Negro Question”

What is striking here, compared to his previous writings on the “Negro question,” is James’s insistence that the vitality and validity of the independent Negro struggle for democratic right “is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.” It has deep historic roots that entitle it to autonomous and integral identity. While James emphasizes that blacks “approach the conclusions of Marxism,” the problematic aspect is the relation between the organized labor movement and the African American demand for equality. James denies that this is “merely a class question,” even though he states that what is involved is “a question of the reorganization of the whole agricultural system” of the country. He invokes Lenin to resolve this impasse: Lenin says “that the dialectic of history is such that small independent nations, small nationalities, which are powerless… in this struggle against imperialism nevertheless can act as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which can bring onto the scene the real power against imperialism–the socialist proletariat” (182). So the black struggle can become the catalyst for the emergence of the socialist proletariat. But it does not mean that because the oppressed minorities, or nationalities, are powerless, therefore they proletariat has got to lead them and that “they cannot do anything until the proletariat actually comes forward to lead them. [Lenin] says exactly the opposite is the case” (182).

James reviews history and concludes: “Such is the situation of the