Prediction, Proximity, and Cosmopolitanism in Global Spectacles: Kamau Brathwaite's \"Xango\"

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PRediCtion, PRoxiMity, and CoSMoPolitaniSM in GloBal SPeCtaCleS

Gaurav Majumdar

Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. It is thus that English literature will survive this war and cross the gulf—if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and to write, how to preserve, and how to create.—virginia woolf, “The Leaning Tower”

Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus.—edmund de waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes

the production of spectacle frequently plays tricks with the rela-tions between language and time, and between proximity and distance. The offer of a spectacle may involve the proleptic dis-

cussion of a spectacle, the selection of temporal parts as a temporal

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whole, and the conflation of physical objects and circumstances that share no apparent closeness or conjunction. Such tricks, as well as their political and narrative implications, are the focus of the arguments that I offer here, mainly through a discussion of prediction and its attendant problems within scenes from contemporary postcolonial politics and lit-erature, and their treatment of future spectacles. In particular, I discuss the production of spectacles through the skepticism about proleptic declarations and immediacy within novels by Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie, the theater of the Arab Spring, and (for most of the discussion here) the poignant certainties shaping the repeatedly announced return of a divine presence, spectacular and of global scope, in Kamau Brath-waite’s poem “Xango.” Further, I read the physical and temporal imme-diacy or proximity offered in these spectacles as a catalyst for solidarity through spectacle, a catalyst that encourages cosmopolitanism in a newer, electronically mediated version of Enlightenment cosmopolitan politics that neglects, and yet demands, cosmopolitanism as a revision of the self’s ability to fuse its sympathies perfectly with those of others.

Spectacles and anticipation

The assumption behind such a demand is, of course, that we can read representations of scenes elsewhere as entirely available for one’s accu-rate understanding or affective intuition. That assumption shaped (and continues to shape) not only the justifications of colonial enterprises, but also the spectacles that colonial representations stage. A common-place in postcolonial studies is that maps wreak epistemological violence through the suppression of alternative viewpoints, territorial claims, and histories of ecological devastation that went into map making.1 Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda adds a different view to the vio-lence of mapping by linking it with an act of anticipation. In the book, a man named Jeffris leads an expedition that seeks to build a glass church in the Australian Outback. Glass, the narrative reveals, is a catalyst for physical and spiritual violence that colonialism visits on Australia: Jeffris hacks his way through foliage and human beings during the transporta-tion of the glass for the church to the town of Bellinger. According to Jeffris, the glass brings a spectacular historiography with it: “Each pane of glass . . . would travel through country where glass had never existed


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before, not once, in all time. These sheets would cut a new path in his-tory. They would slice the white dust covers of geography and reveal a map beneath, with rivers, mountains and names. . . . He felt the axe in his hands, the cut scrub, the harsh saw-teeth of mountains giving up their exact latitude to his theodolites.”2

In other words, for Jeffris, colonial progress would make anticipated knowledge manifest through its violence—this is an expected vision posited as existing fact, an instance of prolepsis that Jeffris takes to be prediction fused with demonstration. By revealing the topographic secrets that the vegetation concealed, “glass” (which, here, works as a metonym for the colonial expedition itself, because of the violence it brings to Australia, because of its role in lenses for surveillance, because of its associations with Christian proselytization, and because of its own fragility) would make Australia available for mapping, and would bring clarity and insight into the landscape that the indigenous population did not earlier possess. All of these claims hinge on declarations that propel the colonial machine because of predicted wonders under the surfaces of Australia, which lie, it promises its various constituencies, on “a map beneath” that will lay bare the complexities of colonized topog-raphy for imperial understanding. Colonialism, thus, predicts a palimp-sestic spectacle—a subterranean, or past, or already existing, spectacle that awaits discovery in the present or the future.

Moral Prediction

John Ruskin makes such a predictive colonial spectacle the centerpiece of his inaugural lecture as the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University. In the lecture, Ruskin issues a widely celebrated reminder to England’s youth in 1870: “There is a destiny now possible to us, the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused.”3 This destiny is for England to avail, because the English “are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood,” and, free of degener-ate influence, young England must use its racial advantage to decide an issue that science itself has placed across the nation’s path: “Within the last few years we have had the laws of natural science opened to us with a rapidity which has been blinding by its brightness; and means of tran-sit and communication given to us, which have made but one kingdom


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of the habitable globe. One kingdom;--but who is to be its king.” (ibid., punctuation Ruskin’s).

If scientific technology has made the world navigable and habitable for England, the answer is obvious. However, as a predestined gift, the opportunity to rule the world comes with specific demands for the English youth. Ruskin offers them the following mission and challenge, asking, “Will you youths of England make your country again a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a center of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts?” (ibid.). The exhortation desires an epistemological and aesthetic colonization—England must choose if “she” will rule the world and bring it light, and, if she does, she must also be “mistress of Learning and of the Arts.” The choice is not merely important; it is crucial for England’s very survival: “And this is what [England] must either do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of the most energetic and worthiest men; seizing any piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea” (ibid., 70). The appropriation of land is to be comple-mented by the co-optation of people into faithful colonial servitude. Both forms of subordination signal an aesthetics of expansion that relies on individuation, which is, at the same time, an ethical marker—a sign, the “chief sign,” of “virtue.”

With almost syllogistic certainty, Ruskin goes on to propose that, “if we can get men, for little pay, to cast themselves against cannon-mouths for love of England, we may find men also who will plough and sow for her, who will bring up their children to love her, and who will gladden themselves in the brightness of her glory, more than in all the light of tropic skies” (ibid., 70). That these colonized peoples will be ready to work and care for England, and to bask vicariously in its glory, is a fore-gone conclusion for Ruskin. The greater challenge lies in England’s own preparation of itself as a model for the colonized world:

She must make her own majesty stainless; she must give them thoughts

of their home of which they can be proud. the England who is to be mis-

tress of half the earth cannot remain herself a heap of cinders[;] she must

yet again become the England she was once, and in all beautiful ways


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more; so happy, so secluded, and so pure, that in her sky—polluted by no

unholy clouds—she may be able to spell rightly of every star that heaven

doth show; and in her fields, ordered and wide and fair, of every herb that

sips the dew; and under the green avenues of her enchanted garden, a

sacred Circe, true daughter of the Sun, she must guide the human arts,

and gather the divine knowledge, of distant nations, transformed from sav-

ageness to manhood and redeemed into peace. (ibid., 70–71)

Endorsing a drive for seclusion, the passage orders that England “must yet again become the England she was once” and then exceed that con-dition to be “so happy, so secluded, and so pure.” Desire for temporal sameness shapes the first instance—the paradisiacal scene is a function of nostalgia for origins or prior glory—and desire for a sealed physical condition shapes the second—insularity and purity are its sources of happiness. If such temporal continuity, isolation, security, and purity are the conditions of any paradise, the “enchanted garden” of “sacred Circe” enlarges the role of unity and conformity: it operates on propri-ety (its light enables the goddess to “spell rightly”) and on harmony between heaven and earth. Ruskin concludes his views on the imperial program by making it an aesthetic one—the English colonial mission must be such that the once-Hellenic-now-English goddess must remove from her sky the pollution of “unholy clouds,” conduct the global arts, arrogate the world’s knowledge, and finally provide both aesthetic and moral redemption.4 (Ruskin obviously overlooks—or presumes no con-tradiction in—his characterization of the knowledge of the colonized as simultaneously “divine” and in need of English guidance.)

Ruskin’s rhetorical hinge-move—the one that enables him to unfurl his grand imperialist vista—is his emphasis on the single forms of both empire and ruler, state and sovereign, in his ringing statement that there is “one kingdom;--but who is to be its king?” (69). Ruskin does not care to explain how science provides the evidence that recent techno-logical change necessitates the transformation of the world into a single empire—in fact, for his rhetorical evidence to stand, he needs to cancel or occlude scrutiny of that claim within his presentation of his globe-conquering spectacle. As long as his logic of the unitary (one kingdom, one king) holds, so do his colonizing plans and his aesthetics for co-optation and expansion—there is, for Ruskin, an unquestionable need


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for a single kingdom and its single monarch; England should satisfy that need. The desired conquest has its vital goad in the moral urgency and implied global obligation of the English youth within Ruskin’s predic-tive spectacle.5

Of course, spectral, hidden, and projected images drove (and con-tinue to drive) much of colonialism—witness the lure of gold and dia-monds encouraging the colonization of Southern Africa, or the perpetually deferred spectacle of “weapons of mass destruction” propel-ling the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Rather than spectacle already on display, then, it is the strange promise of veiled spectacle that justifies invasion in such cases. This promise that prospectively justifies the imperial enterprise seems to share an impulse with scientific inquiry and brings me to questions related to the arguments of Salman Hameed in this collection: Is the revelation of palimpsestic spectacle—a con-cealed spectacle that awaits discovery—also not a common aim of sci-ence (and, if you like, of religion)? What cautions might science observe in its pursuit of such spectacle, especially in concert with religious reform and what Hameed calls “the reintellectualization of the Islamic discourse”?6 What kinds of temporal complications does this kind of spectacle bring? Does the idea that the spectacle-to-be-discovered is an extra-temporal fact not license a presumption on the part of its prospec-tive viewers? If so, then such license would suggest that global spectacles shape not only our experience of time and space, but also our very expec-tations. Intuitions or hypotheses about such spectacle would, logically, confound description—the related description would have to limn what we expect but have not seen or experienced. The effects that this would have on language would require something akin to simultaneous regis-tration and narration. How can we hope to describe precisely the expe-rience of historical spectacles that pass us by in quick time?

Spectacle in the Present

A famous metaphor in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children suggests that our subscriptions to historical truth are a function of our distance from past spectacle (or the past-as-spectacle), because “the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.


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Suppose yourself in a large cinema sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually, the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality.”7

Our proximity to historical moments gives us a sense of a more inti-mate experience of them, which, according to the logic of the passage, thwarts our language. It is the impossibility of detaching oneself from current circumstances to attain a panoramic view of them, and the sheer surplus of possibilities in current circumstances, that overwhelms histo-riography at such times. The imperative for the simulation of immediacy in narrative, especially in the age of “instant” television, coerces a radical change in narrative conventions in the explanation of spectacles of the present. In the second volume of Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur points to “emplotment,” the act of reflection that submits chronologically orga-nized events to an act of gathering and arranging various plot compo-nents that yields a coherent story.8 For Ricoeur, such gathering necessarily means that “the configurating act presiding over emplotment is a judica-tive act, involving a ‘grasping together’” that contributes plot- or genre-based coherence (ibid., 61).9 Ricoeur contends that such an act “belongs to the family of reflective judgments” and that, therefore, “to narrate a story is already to ‘reflect upon’ the event narrated. For this reason, nar-rative ‘grasping together’ carries with it the capacity for distancing itself from its own production and in this way dividing itself into two” (ibid., 61). This division is the gap between the event narrated and narrating a story that is frequently drastically reduced—or, rather, removed from being apparent in an overt way—in global spectacles and their dissemination, producing the minimization of reflection to which I have pointed earlier. Ricoeur proceeds to ask:

Could we not say that the preterite [in conventional narratives] preserves its

grammatical form and its privilege because the present of narration is under-

stood by the reader as posterior to the narrated story, hence that the told

story is the past of the narrative voice? is not every told story in the past for

the voice that tells it? Whence the artifices employed by writers of other

ages, who pretended to have found the diary of their hero in a chest . . .

or to have heard the story. Such an artifice was intended to simulate, in the


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latter case, the signification of the past for memory, and in the former,

its signification for historiography. (ibid., 98–99, emphases Ricoeur’s)

When representative of the present (in live television broadcasts and so on), the global spectacle bars—or attempts to hold at bay—the distance between the past and the present through its attempted conflation of the story it tells (“the past of the narrative voice,” as Ricoeur puts it) and an emphasis on its display of images signaling events “as they unfold” (the putative present of the spectacle). The spectacle, thus, shrinks the temporal lapse between the narrating present and the narrated past—or, at least, it simulates such a reduction of the gap in time between them. There is, frequently, the implied or overt claim to a minimal lapse of time among the staging or eruption of global spectacles, the “live” verbal reportage on these spectacles, and the transmission of its images worldwide. Even when the narrative is manifestly a sustained reference to events in the past—events that took place, say, an hour before the moment of narration—the global telecast of the event insists on the simultaneity of the telecasted representation and the event, almost always under the aegis of the word “LIVE” in all capitals. It is the illusion of simultaneity that often provokes the sense of exhilarated solidarity—a euphoric empathy—that catalyzes hyperbolic optimism in diagnoses of events such as the overthrow of governments in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011. The limits on description and perception at such moments may invite an initially pure, and even purely joyous, vision of definite aims and virtu-ous social forms within the recent Tunisian or Egyptian uprising’s suc-cess. However, the excess or the historical supplements to ideological purity or joy in such success require a wariness or a demystification of the triumphs of the “Arab Spring.” While fresh starts, celebration, linear progress, and drives for greater freedoms may well be the “proper” responses to such success, the opportunities that unanticipated or non-normative methods might afford seem to stay off television screens and out of radio broadcasts worldwide.

transnational Sympathy and disappointment as Solidarity

In her contribution here, Shiloh Krupar notes the urgency of calls for an environmental ethics “that de-ontologize[s] spectacle—in order to


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encourage responsibility and active engagement, that is, a relational-material ethics.” In the stress she places on aesthetic revisions of that which is normatively unwanted because it is deemed “unnatural,” Kru-par endorses the aesthetic potential in the de-ontologized or the trans-natural as the potential of the “improper,” as an instance of forms con sidered inappropriate, undesirable, unnecessary, and therefore super-fluous. By virtue of that sequence of qualities, it is a variety of waste. Let us consider, juxtaposed with Krupar’s views on the “de-ontologizing force” of such ethics, an argument that two very different philosophers— Stanley Cavell (in Cities of Words) and Simon Critchley (in Infinitely Demanding)—have offered within the last decade: the argument that disappointment is the ignition for philosophy.10 How can we employ (or even make spectacular) the transnatural to express our disappoint-ment as international solidarity and cosmopolitan critique? What resources and restrictions do we obtain when we employ irony and polemic for such ends? Do newer media afford new opportunities for ironic or skeptical dissent, or, at least, for the greater global dissemina-tion of spectacles that contest the might of state-sponsored or hege-monic spectacles?11

While such representation would itself, of course, be part of the ideo-logical machinery, how can it offer critical representation? How can it depict global solidarity without sentimentalizing it or offering it as sub-lime? Sublimity (a topic to which I will return in my concluding com-ments in this chapter) seems to be the condition exploded in a wide range of contemporary literature and film that explores global condi-tions through the presumption of an intimacy with elsewhere. The bourgeois viewer might now enjoy assumptions about unprecedented visual access (even though that is itself often edited), as well as an imag-ined solidarity with populations and political resistance in places other than where he or she might happen to be. Within the last two decades, there has been a spectacular cartography of global connections in films like Night on Earth (1991), Chinese Box (1997), Traffic (2000), Syriana (2005), and Babel (2006). Each of these films employs montage to depict a kind of affective simultaneity: their characters seem to be feeling or express-ing similar emotions at the same time.

The dangers accompanying such representation—the risks of assum-


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ing an oceanic feeling—feed a presumptuous cosmopolitanism, one that takes for granted a kind of universal access to the world, assuming, at least, the world’s availability both for scrutiny and empathy. As such, it manufactures a kind of leveling—a worldwide uniformity of feeling, as theorized vibrantly by Bruce Robbins in Feeling Global.12 Preferring a more cautious form of interest and sympathy, I use the word “cosmopoli-tanism” here to convey two senses of the term at the same time:

1. a strong interest in cultural practices across national boundaries, and

the viewing of the world with resistance to national attachments or prej-

udices; and

2. a critical alertness toward—and awareness of—multiple affiliations.

The word “cosmopolitan” comes from the Greek kosmopolites, which, in turn, derives from kosmos (“ornament,” “order,” “world”) and polites (“cit-izens” or “the body politic”). As this etymology makes apparent, the word originally suggested an “ornamentation” or “ordering” of the world or its citizens, and gradually, after theorizations of the world- citizen by Diogenes, Zeno, and Kant, it came to suggest perhaps its most common meaning: “citizen of the world.”13 However, as Robbins has noted, the priority of the sense of “ornament” in the term’s etymology is signifi-cant. Extending the logic of this etymology, cosmopolitanism orna-ments the world or world citizenship. It offers an alternative to existent, nationally or territorially bound allegiances with unbound or deterrito-rialized forms of affiliation and interest, and with new combinative pos-sibilities and unfamiliar metaphors for solidarity.

Cosmetics

I would like to underscore that the word “cosmetic” is etymologically resonant with “cosmopolitan.” The latter derives from kosmos and metic (a “foreigner” resident in the Athenian city-state). The metics were an active part of the daily workings of the city-state, but not recognized as full citizens, and, therefore, never officially afforded a sufficient sense of inclusion.14 The word “cosmetic,” then, initially signified a literal condi-tion of “almost-belonging”—evoking an ornamental form of citizen-


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ship, a form of civic embroidery: being in, but not of. The etymological suggestion that cosmopolitanism—like cosmetics—ornaments, embroi-ders, or augments surfaces also suggests that, like metics, the cosmopoli-tan never fully belongs to a single social, national, or cultural fabric: embroidery is both of the surface and offset from it.

In moments of the epistemological excess of the present and a series of complex, mobile solidarities—such as those that the “Arab Spring” generated and that Rushdie’s metaphor of the cinema screen indicates—the anticipation in (and of) exhilarating spectacle aggravates a long-standing tendency of commentators expressing or seeking solidarity with movements for change on a massive scale. This is the obverse of the colonial fondness for predicting glories and spectacular success, which shares several attendant risks with the colonial habit of putting on dis-play things not yet found, obtained, or realized. Postcolonial literary expressions of such “showing before” include a crucial dimension of melancholy that anticipatory narratives subsume in utopian visions, whether of a great revelatory, architectural, or emotive success—or com-binations of each of those factors.

In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud notes a crucial quality that differentiates mourning and melancholia: “The distinguish-ing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings. . . . [W]ith one exception, the same traits are met with in grief [or ‘mourn-ing’]. The fall in self-esteem is absent in grief; but otherwise the features are the same.”15 Such melancholy fall in self-esteem is a recurrent attri-bute in postcolonial narratives of failed emulation or the recuperation of modular cultural forms. (It is evident in platitudes like “There will not be another Mandela, Atatürk, or Nkrumah” or “We suffer because we have betrayed Gandhian ideals.”) The power of those revered cul-tural models exceeds that of representation and resources currently available to the postcolonial (and therefore in need of reconstitution)—forms lost, partly because of the postcolonial’s inability to preserve or reinforce its models for cultural self-assertion or resistance. Frequently, the need to recover such forms is constituted through an identification of figures representing indigenous or race-specific power for the post-


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colonial, linking the need to recuperate with a desire for second com-ings and returns.16

Offering a prospective spectacle and announcing both the liberation and solidarity of the colonized in different parts of the world through the return of the god Xango, Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Xango” reworks that simple form of identification, sometimes unwittingly.17 In Brath-waite’s poetry, such melancholy identification is paradoxically staged through a pronounced narcissism. This chapter explores this melan-choly in conjunction with the idea of the return as a trope for revision and relocation in “Xango.” Within the logic of the poem, Xango is a numinous figure for the African diaspora whose presence itself func-tions as both global spectacle and cultural solidarity (I will discuss his religious significance more specifically, in a moment). This collabora-tion between the generic connotations of the words “cosmetic” and “cos-mopolitan” hints at the collaboration between the aesthetic and the political in “Xango.” The story of one part of the poem ornaments that of the others, working as a vital accessory to stories that could just as easily have been unrelated and underscoring the collaboration between the cosmetic and the cosmopolitan in the poem. In this sense, tones and identities are involved in mutual ornamentation here. Within its intu-itions and declarations of Xango’s spectacular presence worldwide, the poem interrogates tensions between the authentic and whole, on the one hand, and the partial and performative, on the other. These are, further, tensions between metaphor and literalism, between modernity and orthodoxy, and between departure and arrival.

a disembodied Voice

Brathwaite’s interrogation of such tensions expresses itself via a dis-placed, disembodied voice, trying to re-place (relocate) and recover its lost power in verses that seek to announce the global spectacle of that power (embodied in the figure of Xango), thus expressing a desire forbidden within colonial norms. The confidence and brio with which the speaker’s voice goes about constructing this spectacle in “Xango” conceals the voice’s melancholic qualities, but we gain some ancillary clues to its melancholy argument from the textual context in which Brathwaite places it. The poem is the last, climactic text in Brathwaite’s


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collection X/Self—the title of which signals a recognition of the multi-plicity of the self (gesturing to the existence of a former, or “ex-,” self, pertinent still and constructed genealogically). This enlarges a crucial argument and a constitutive impulse in much of Brathwaite’s poetics and scholarly work. In his historical study The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, Brathwaite melancholically describes the cul-tural impoverishment of the West Indian subaltern as a function of his-torical neglect: “Blinded by the wretchedness of their situation, many . . . slaves . . . failed, or refused, to make conscious use of their own rich folk culture (their one indisputable possession), and so failed to command the chance of becoming self-conscious and cohesive as a group.”18

Attempting precisely such cohesion by means of a folkloric genealogy, Brathwaite’s poem takes its title, “Xango,” from the West Indian version of “Shango,” a spirit or deity in Yoruba spirituality and religion. Shango is a “Sky Father,” the bearer of thunder and lightning, and, for some commu-nities, the god of music in general, as well as of entertainment, drums, and dance. Shango is revered as a regal ancestor, the third king of the Oyo Kingdom. In the pantheon of the Caribbean Lukumí religion, Shango occupies the center, representing the adherents’ West African Oyo ances-tors. From these ancestors’ initiation ceremonies, slaves in the Caribbean derived all Orisha initiations (including those performed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela for several centuries). The title of Brath-waite’s poem could also be linked to “Sango,” a trade language widely used in Chad. The title’s link with trade is significant for the poem’s staging of a language of exchange and dissemination. Brathwaite’s map-ping of dissemination extends through the figure of another important divinity, Erzulie, who is relocated to the Caribbean from Dahomey and invoked in the middle of the poem. Erzulie is a voodoo cluster of female spirits, sometimes represented as the goddess of love and elemental forces. The line evoking her—“ . . . my love / . . . my Africa”—signals a displaced voice, trying to re-place or relocate itself (107). 19

Visual Metaphors

Brathwaite signals the poem’s rage at displacement and dispossession by deploying various visual strategies in the text, particularly by using blank space as an index of absence. For much of the first part of the


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poem, the arrangement of lines, estranged from one another through two lines of blank space, allows us to read the blank space in connection with the text’s proclamations of a subversive power. (This arrangement recurs, albeit less frequently, in the other sections of the poem.) Propel-ling the text’s desire for Xango’s reappearance, the blank spaces in the text point to his currently incoherent, unavailable, or damaged pres-ence. While Brathwaite points to the performance of culture, this is text as a performative event that underscores its signaling of this presence. Noting in their introduction to The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry that Brathwaite takes his models from “the griots of West Africa, the jazz and blues men of the American South, the calypsonians and the ‘folk songs’ of the plantation experience,” Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown say, “Brathwaite set out to ‘break English.’”20 Alongside its formal signs of damage-by-colonization, the poem makes that postcolonial assertion in Brathwaite’s poetics: it tries to “break English” through its aggressive orthographic appropriation of grammar and standardized language (“riddim” for “rhythm,” “un” for “one”) and through its flexing and reconfiguration of normative language in lexical and visual puns:

the earth on which he breaks furl

in rain

bow

tears.21

This section of the poem triggers a strange semiotic weaving and unweav-ing in anticipation of the poem’s later processes. The word “unfurl” becomes “un . . . furl,” signaling an interruption as well as an emergence—an “unfolding”—into the world. Additionally, the words “furl” and “tears” produce a visual pun: the lines themselves “furl” meaning, com-pacting it into parts of words that bring out the polysemy of the words “rain bow,” both visual and lexical (“rainbow,” “rain bow”—which could be read literally or as “bowing, subservient rain”). The “furling” of mean-ing continues, through new formulations: “the tiger clue” (pugmark? urine scent? broken claw?) and “conjur man” (does this signal a conjurer or magician, or is the formulation “conjur” a verb, an injunction to con-jure up a man with the powers of Xango?) (108, 110). Manifestly disrupt-ing standardized meaning, the blank spaces in the poem, then, work as


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visual metaphors for the overt disruption of belonging, of language, and of racial, epistemological, and psychological coherence.

Recuperation and historical Montage

As marks of absence, however, the blank parts of the page can also be read as the unoccupied or freshly opened space of potential: a sign of what may be. Later, the poem suggests that “time and bomb and cricket,” which were instruments for different kinds of colonial violence, now function as, potentially, the postcolonial’s weapons (110). Timothy Reiss notes that, in the poem’s Biblical reference to sparrows (“whose fall god would heed as much as a human’s”), the sparrows are meek and trauma-tized, but “we have also seen them become something mightier: victims who turn against the oppressors their own instruments to be free to occupy their own geography and make their own history.”22 The poem’s broken, floating lines, then, demarcate spaces that have the potential to be filled with a resistant eloquence, a new anticolonial language, an inaugural version of which the poem itself attempts.

Recognizing new forms of (and metonyms for) colonialism, the poem sets itself against the names of colonizers and neocolonial forces and institutions. As it evokes the colonial aggressions of the conquistadors and explorers Hernando de Soto and Francisco Coronado, it conflates these figures with those of John Ford, J. P. Morgan, and Coca-Cola (109). The formal counter to the neocolonialism (of Hollywood and multina-tional corporations) implicit in the latter set of names is staged through the percussive, assertive rhythms of Brathwaite’s language, but also through montage and switches in perspective. As its focus moves from “my gold/en horn my africa,” to “over the prairies now” where “coman-che horsemen halt,” before winding its way to the locale of Xango’s “high life/ing in abomey,” the poem expands its network of resistance to the United States, in solidarity with Native Americans, and then to Benin (ibid., 107, 108, 109). The resistance of the displaced has its cir-cuits in these contaminated associations. The poem’s subversive, global affiliations with a series of figures announce diffuse, dispersed points of resistance for displaced populations. Tracing these, the poem maps the vast territory where the language of resistance—the voice of Xango—lies submerged. This language—taken from its English moorings


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and refashioned into a hybrid, affiliated series of political ripostes—announces the capacity of the language of the colonized to combat the authority of its supposed purity. Short sonic bursts of defiance—like “hah” and “huh”—punctuate the text’s assertions and are often privi-leged so much that they form an entire line of the text. In their tattoo of monosyllables, in their meter, and in their rhythm, the lines underscore global solidarity, enacting a recuperation of the blues (with their tradi-tion of monosyllables that cap a sentence or a claim), while also evoking older West African musical traditions that nourished the blues.

Melancholic Bravado and accumulating Returns

Even as the text accretes various traditions (the blues, Yoruba expres-sions, Native American legacies) and mythic figures into the figure of Xango, it disturbs the bravado and hyperbole of its announcement of Xango’s return: “Your thunder has come home.” It is not Xango, but a metaphor for Xango—or (more precisely) a mixture of synecdoche and metonymy—that has returned: the thunder both is a part of Xango and is associated with him. It is thunder, but it is not Xango entire. The hyperbolic last lines offer the suggestion that Xango is unbound, cross-ing international boundaries to form a composite identity, a collective that manifests his enormous, global force.

Returning to Freud, I would like to note Freud’s comment in Civiliza-tion and Its Discontents that feeling global—“feeling as of something limit-less, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic’”—suggests, as Bruce Robbins has it, “infantile pretensions to divine ubiquity, if not of omniscience or omnipotence.”23 Commenting on such a fantasy in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud refines an idea that he derives from a letter that he received from Romain Rolland. The letter identifies “something like the restoration of limitless narcissism” in an “oceanic feeling” connected with the religious sense of a union with the universe through communi-cation with a divine sovereign.24 Freud observes that this “oneness with the universe” constitutes “the ideational content” of the oceanic feeling, “as though it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego realizes as threatening it from the outside world” (ibid., 21). Instead of disclaiming that danger, “Xango” seems to enlarge the vulnerability of the ego through its apparent subscription to Xango’s universal (or, at


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least, transcontinental) presence. However, its various recognitions of the dispersal of Xango—through its various representations of break-age, partiality, and damage—concede that Xango cannot be reconsti-tuted as a whole. The exercise functions proleptically, announcing a recuperation of racial and individual pride that is possible and potential, but proclaimed as already achieved in its very articulation. Therefore, given the asymmetries of global power and the pain of its colonization, even the assertion that Xango’s “thunder has come home” is hyperbolic, its hyperbole a hint of its overcompensatory melancholy. The veneer of narcissism in this demonstrably dubious claim is already qualified in the poem’s gestures to the difficulty of Xango’s task.

Brathwaite’s poem seems to acknowledge the need to engage the par-ticular (forms like the blues, the Yoruba tradition, and Native American music) and, at the same time, not to lose the movement toward an inter-national, transracial solidarity of the oppressed. But how do we do this without “feeling global”? The impasse produces the poem’s melancholy, tracing affiliations in various places that are the sites of devastation and resistance simultaneously. In The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, Brathwaite argues: “My own idea of creolization is based on the notion [that within] inter-related and sometimes overlapping orien-tations . . . people in the West Indies tend towards certain directions, positions, assumptions, and ideals. But nothing is really fixed and mono-lithic. Although there is white/brown/black, there are infinite possibili-ties within these distinctions and many ways of asserting identity.”25 Because the trauma of one such group reflects those of others, the voice in the poem affiliates each in its call for a reprise of Xango’s force. As such, these affiliations declare the possibility of multiple, accumulating—but fragile—metaphors for the return of Xango. The return must be achieved as a form of cultural liberation, but, as things stand (amid the legacies of colonialism and in the face of neocolonialism), it cannot incar-nate Xango adequately. The move, therefore, underscores the text’s rec-ognition of the fused urgency and impossibility of return. In a wider theoretical gesture, it disturbs the notion that a return constitutes a lit-eral arrival at a (geographical or temporal) point of departure.

The very modes that sustain these poetics are those that sustain more alert, inclusive versions of cosmopolitanism: celebration of alliances and multiple combinations, without the demand for permanence or strict


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definition. The poem opens to doubt individual identity—and, there-fore, the very collection of people who comprise a nation—as metaphor-ical and in flux, by adopting hyperbole as its mode to question actions that the poem itself sees as hyperbolic. In short, hyperbole mirrors, and colludes with, the poem’s cosmopolitanism, tracing several eccentric—and even self-contradictory—paths. Thus, it involuntarily amplifies a sense of what Bruce Robbins has called “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”—versions of cosmopolitanism that do not align with any form of perfect belonging.26 At odds with the belief that cosmopolitanism is either a tool for various practices of detachment or as a gesture grounded in cautious nationalism, Robbins’s emphasis on “discrepancy” in cosmopolitanism derives from what he sees as the “phantasmatic” character of belonging in the very concept of the cosmopolitan, which reinforces my discussion here (ibid., 261). It is precisely this “discrepancy” in cosmopolitanism that contrasts Robbins’s view of cosmopolitanism with the cosmopoli-tanism that Brathwaite presumably seeks. The gestures that “Xango” makes toward Pan-Africanism or an eventually synthesized African leg-acy are precisely what place it at odds with history.

The poem’s rapid listing of exploited landscapes to evoke violent his-tories furthers its practice of simultaneous deflection and suture, a prac-tice that Brathwaite seems to see only as the latter (as suture), but not as the former—not, in other words, as a redirection of current conditions into a hypothetical, spectacular, and unrealizable future As we read the poem, we seem to be perpetually in a moment very much like Gayatri Spivak’s version of a “vanishing present.”27 The text’s use of metaphor—of carrying objects beyond their boundaries—is clearly an act of rela-tion. For Jacques Derrida and for Gayatri Spivak, the acknowledgment of the relatedness of the world is expressed through the process of what Derrida calls mondialisation, or “worlding.”28 In her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak defines “worlding” as “the reinscription of a cartography that must (re)present itself as impeccable” (ibid., 228).29 If it is a rein-scription, it is a revision, and—in an important sense—a corruption, of this cartography. Corruption and contamination operate as forms of “worlding,” denying spaces the illusions of hermetic distance and sanc-tuary from outside influence. The poem’s deflections of its scenes of action, and its ostensibly exuberant support for a version of the corrup-tions of “worlding,” signal the longing for solidarity that “Xango” repeat-


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edly announces. Its triumphal apostrophe in the line “Your thunder has come home” points to an ecstatic declaration of the selective kind of worlding. The declaration bears a utopian ecstasy: a form of mobility produced by the unshackling of institutionalized, orthodox, and nation-ally bound pressures.30 If we are to enter the utopian “country of litera-ture” that is the primary focus of my epigraph from Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Leaning Tower,” we are forced to make a metaphorical and imaginative leap: we leave behind the coincidence of the literal, paro-chial circumstances into which we are born. Making a claim for such lib-eration, Brathwaite’s poem seems on the verge of performing an aleatory gesture—the simultaneously self-affirming and identity-dissolving gam-bit of the cosmopolitan. However, it stops just short of such radical self-revision and swerves toward membership in the epic, continent-spanning identity of Xango. That is to say, it subsumes itself to the spectacular identity it evokes—in short, it subscribes to the interpellation of a mythic self that is the engine behind the calls for a spectacular global collec-tive, whether it be a Pan-African identity, an Arab brotherhood, or an embodiment of Hindutva or European values. If the display of colonial power relies on self-legitimizing violence, followed by an enforcement of formal continuity, Brathwaite’s poem seems to both resist such vio-lence and practice it, at the same time. Like the careening metaphysics of the poem’s speaker in “Xango,” colonization embraces unity and amplitude—or, more precisely, amplification—as its aesthetic modes, equating the production and maintenance of these modes with great-ness.31 The manufacture of immensity (either in scales of production or in the scale of the product itself) is the overriding concern in each case.

intimacy and Spectacle

Confronting such immensity, the viewer of global spectacles meets the seductions of the large that produce the overwhelming effect that gives or catalyzes the sense of belonging within the immense that the speaker of “Xango” clearly has. What does this sense of belonging, attached to the immensity of global spectacles, do to our experience of intimacy—within our private spaces, with participants in spectacular events, or with the spectacle itself? As my quotation from Rushdie’s novel suggests, language evaporates in the overwhelming semiosis of the apparently


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immediate spectacular moment. The absence of language abets the epistemological disorientation that makes the speaker of “Xango” iden-tify (partly, but crucially) with a global community and that, according to Guy Debord, encourages the viewer of the capitalist spectacle to assume intimate relations with the commodity. As Debord puts it in thesis 67 in The Society of the Spectacle, “Reified man advertises the proof of his inti-macy with the commodity. The fetishism of commodities reaches moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism. The only use which remains here is the fundamental use of submission.”32 There is a call to relations—an interpellation of intimacy—in the paternalism of the tyrant, a claim to affection born of repeated displays of violence, which itself mauls both language and fact.33 This failure of language was prominent, but in a very different way, at a juncture like the one that we might term “Hosni Mubarak’s Darth Vader moment”—Mubarak’s reiteration of what he saw as a rhetorical trump card (apparently for years): “I am your father!”—his reminder of his paternal role toward Egypt at large, even as the number of protestors swelled in Tahrir Square in early 2011. The abjuration of any precise or reliable language was prominent in the dual function (a call to relations and an interpellation of intimacy) of Mubarak’s rhetoric. Instead of Skywalker-like stupefaction and initial silence in the face of that reminder, the famous gesture of shoes raised toward the sky (and, tellingly, toward TV cameras)—as well as chants of “Get out!”—instantly met Mubarak’s evocation of his paternity.

An engrossment in imaginative spectacle plays a decisive role here. In Braithwaite’s poem, the intensity of immersion in recalled (or evoked) spectacles is an index of the conviction of its hyperbole. Discussing the importance of such engrossment in Western Spectacle of Governance, Mika Aaltola explains such certainty in her gloss on John Dewey’s theory of “combinatorics”:

the art of seeing new connections allows for the recognition of knowledge

of the what-if type. the ability of this type of knowledge to convey certainty

derives from the intensity of the accompanying experience. When the inten-

sity reaches a high point, the term “revelatory” seems appropriate. . . . the

poignant and momentous revelatory moments carry with them a particular

sense of certainty about what is taking place. the sense of reality can be


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seen as a function of being engrossed with events in a particular way.

interpreted in this way, the sense of reality becomes a quality attached

to circumstances; certain ways of being engrossed with events produce

a sense that a situation is especially real and true.34

Douglas Kellner argues in this volume that media spectacle itself is a “contested terrain,” and that it “is now becoming a major feature of political opposition and resistance and a major force against repressive regimes.” These contentions provoke speculation about whether spec-tacular complications and contests do not feed the wider play of images forming the social relations that constitute the spectacle for Debord. If they do, does Debord not know that? Does his view of social relations not include a view of such relations as contests that are mediated by images and representations, but that are contests, nonetheless? What, then, are the significant differences between what Kellner sees as con-testations and what Debord sees as contests within social relations?

In the events of the “Arab Spring,” such contestations overtly pro-duced social overhauls and disorientation, but they were, occasionally, disorienting in the very form of their performance. The protestors in various images of the “Arab Spring” appear euphoric, almost delirious. Despite their exuberance, their ecstatic faces are also and obviously indignant. This kind of ecstatic protest hints at the optimism, of what-ever size, that defies current conditions in anticipation of the future in all acts of protest. I would offer as evocative theorizations of this strange, recurring fact the etymologies of the words “ecstasy” and “protest.” Ety-mologically, the word “ecstasy” has a subtext suggesting displacement: it derives from the Latin ex (“out,” “out of,” or “former”) and stasis (“stand-ing” or “position”): in other words, it signals being “out of customary position or place.” The word “protest” comes from the Latin pro (“for,” “on behalf of,” or “in support of”) and testari (“be a witness” or “assert”): in other words, it connotes being “witness for, on behalf of, or in support of” but also being “witness before”—with obvious nuances of optimism and hope in the latter. To “witness before” has a temporal dimension, obviously; here, that connotation almost means to “show before.” The processual spectatorship involved in showing or seeing before demands the ability to pierce the armor-clad spectacle that the state or any enforcer of power both produces and privileges.


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Conclusion: a Metic’s Perspective

In Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell defines a “dialectical” relationship between “illusionism and realism”: “Taken together, spectacle and sur-veillance epitomize the basic dialectic between illusionism and realism in contemporary visual culture: they might be thought of as the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ technologies for the formation of subjects in our time, whether we characterize that time as the age of mass culture, trium-phant international corporate capitalism, or in familiar rubrics like the postindustrial and the postmodern. Spectacle is the ideological form of pictorial power; surveillance is its bureaucratic, managerial, and disci-plinary form.”35 Mitchell’s commentary implies that these two different, but collaborative, ways of shaping state narratives dramatize (but also contain) a conflict in narratives within global spectacles. There is, thus, a conflict between “illusionist” narratives that seek to produce fantasies of belonging or identification within larger collectives and “realist” nar-ratives that seek to expose the private or covert practices through an enforcement of literalism or rigid “reality”—in short, this is a conflict between literary sub-genres (ibid., 327).

Should we consider this a contested spectacle (as Kellner might describe it), or a moment in which parts of a spectacle feed a larger spec-tacle? Is it one in which the spectacle of the chanting crowd at Tahrir Square, facing television cameras, dilutes the force of state-sponsored spectacle, or are they all tiles in the mosaic of the conflict in Egypt? Does the intimate—but also public—trauma of the CBS reporter Lara Logan, who faced an orchestrated sexual assault from approximately two hun-dred men, undercut the spectacular success of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt? Shiloh Krupar reminds us in this volume that every truth generates “remainders.” Of what kinds of biopolitics might Logan’s trauma be a remainder? Does its narration in the global media qualify it as spectacle or event? Does the fact of Logan’s citizenship give the assault a horrible global tinge?

The assault on Lara Logan is not only a fact that adds to the dramatic complexity of the global spectacle and its optimistic transmission from Egypt. The violence of such an act also reinscribes the borders of the private and the public, conflating a euphoric moment with a sordid attack, a public space into a stage for a concealed—or, at least, covered—locale


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to enact presumably private desires, and a moment of cosmopolitan suc-cess into one that fed racial anxieties. It is a muted form of, perhaps, the most widely circulated spectacles of violence that feed such anxieties in a more manifest way and on a larger scale: spectacles of terrorism. Ter-rorism operates as a kind of biopolitics precisely through a reinscription and appropriation of such global spectacle. As W. J. T. Mitchell recently noted, “The main weapon of terror is the violent spectacle, the image of destruction, or the destruction of an image, or both, as in the mightiest spectacle of them all, the destruction of the World Trade Center, in which the destruction of a globally recognizable icon was staged, quite deliberately, as an icon in its own right.”36 This latter icon has now been transformed into a visual record of a traumatic event and a figure for the various meanings and interpretations that coalesce—however uneasily—in that record. It is an ignition for trauma and per-haps, in some parts of the world, for euphoria; an icon for the pain, loss, mourning, and melancholia of various communities and individuals. It is, by extension, an icon for the sustenance and manipulation of fear.

I would like to close by putting in conjunction with this icon the word that forms the grounds for Stefan Al and Shiloh Krupar’s inspired coin-age, “atmosfear.”37 In its gesture to the generalized fear that anxious spectation involves, the term “atmosfear” engages older notions of the sublime. The form of the sublime that forces us into spectation is, in canonical views of the sublime (such as Kant’s or Burke’s), already a com-bination of pleasure and pain. It is, therefore and in significant part, a masochistic exercise, if you will. Its masochism is frequently manifested in the excitement and fascination that accompanies speculation about the elusiveness of sources of violence (the unknown reasons for the rise or fall of the Bush government’s color-coded “terrorist-threat” levels, the long-mysterious whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, the unpredictable date for the seismic shocks of the “big one” that will devastate much of the western United States, and so on). Such an “atmosfear” feeds specta-cle. Its evocation in Shiloh Krupar’s paper suggests the strong links between a persistent anxiety in the reception of the spectacle and the etymology of the word “atmosphere.” This word comes from the Greek, signifying “ball” or “sphere” of “vapor”: its etymology promises visible form, but, as “vapor,” its substance is not available to spectation. This gap


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mirrors the constitutive paradox of the global spectacle—the bulk of its substance is always elsewhere, even as it offers visual access and so stages proximity for its audience.

In a fertile note for psychoanalytic discussions of postcolonial (or postmodern) melancholy, Freud locates as “one striking feature of mel-ancholia, the manifestations of dread of poverty.”38 The fuel that global spectacles feed melancholia has its source in a form of epistemological “poverty,” because that melancholia stems from the visual lack that the “elsewhereness” of the spectacle brings. Thus, the melancholia in Brath-waite’s “Xango” is a function of an apparently willful drive to refuse the elusiveness of (if not the impossibility of locating) continuous, whole structures, forms, ambitions, and identities. Therefore, this melancho-lia refuses a version of cosmopolitanism that operates as a strong inter-est in difference not subsumed within a main textual, national, cultural, or social fabric, but as part of it, nonetheless. The epic, global vision in the construction of the global spectacles that I have discussed here overlooks various irreducible, particular, or lyric impulses within the local: in the case of Ruskin and Jeffris, its presumptions are overt; in the case of the speaker in “Xango,” it is a melancholy correlative of an underconsidered cosmopolitanism. While agreeing with Robbins that “no one . . . can be a cosmopolitan in the sense of belonging nowhere,” my argument evinces an awareness of incomprehension and revisions of solidarity as crucial for a critically energetic cosmopolitanism.39 A cosmo-politan consumption of global spectacles would involve a self-conscious, bifocal effort: instead of accept ing conventional notions of success, it would require revising conventional notions of failure in a mass, global movement—the failure not of solidarity, but of a kind of utopian unity. The recognition of that gap makes it necessary that the viewer of such spectacle recognize a simultaneous nearness to, and distance from, the spectacle, a recognition that encourages a preferred vantage—something like a metic’s perspective. The cosmopolitan processing of global spec-tacles, thus, involves a recognition of the cosmetic self that any cosmo-politan perception demands. To paraphrase that claim: the cosmopolitan processing of global spectacles demands a recognition that the tempo-ral space of a spectacle and the temporal space of a spectator may be linked by affective solidarity, but even the most well-intentioned solidar-


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ity and predictions implied—or overtly made—in global spectacles cannot have a proleptic narrative unifying them. In short, the cosmo-politan eye involves a recognition of its own discrepancy from global spectacles.

notes

1 For a scrupulous overview of such violence, see Matthew H. Edney, Map-ping an Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Norman Etherington, ed., Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2007).

2 Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (New York: Vintage, 1988), 374. 3 John Ruskin, The Two Paths (New York: Chelsea House, 1983), 69. 4 The co-optation of the Hellenic, and the absorption of the world’s

knowledge, as rightfully English feeds an especially strange contradic-tion in the colonial drive for the unitary. As Homi Bhabha suggests in reference to Jeremy Bentham’s colonial views, Bentham sees the small group as representative of the whole society—the part is already the whole. Colonial authority requires modes of discrimination (cultural, racial, administrative) that disallow a stable unitary assumption of collectivity. The “part” (which must be the colonialist foreign body) must be repre-sentative of the “whole” (conquered country), but the right of representa-tion is based on its (superior and) radical difference. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 111.

5 A version of this discussion of Ruskin’s speech appears in Gaurav Majum-dar, Migrant Form: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce, Rushdie, and Ray (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 5–7.

6 Salman Hameed, “Navigating Modernity: Islam, Science, and Global Media.” Presentation at the Whitman College Global Studies Sympo-sium, “Global Media, Global Spectacles,” February 2011.

7 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Random House, 2006), 189.

8 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

9 Within Hayden White’s genre classification in Metahistory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), the four generic types of “emplotment” are romance, satire, comedy, and tragedy.

10 Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2–3; Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 1.


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11 The importance of “the media” in the “Jasmine Revolution” has received extensive commentary, which stresses the role of Facebook, Twitter, and especially the Al-Jazeera new networks as venues for dis-sent and forbidden information, as evident in the following new report: “The Libyan government has attempted to impose a near-total news blackout on the country. Foreign journalists are not permitted to enter the country. Internet access has been almost totally cut off, although some protesters appear to be using satellite connections or telephon-ing information to news services outside the country. Al-Jazeera . . . has been taken off the air in Libya.” David D. Kirkpatrick and Mona El-Naggar, “Qaddafi’s Son Warns of Civil War as Libyan Protests Widen,” New York Times, February 13, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/africa/21libya.html (accessed February 20, 2011). The media’s trans-cultural and transnational power makes it the crucial wielder of cues for sympathy, but it also makes a resource for the protection and con-cealment of sources of agitation. I offer the following piece of journal-ism as a striking illustration of this new resource for self-protection during the expression of dissent: “The source of the call was not known, but authorities moved to halt its spread online. Searches for the word ‘ jasmine’ were blocked Saturday on China’s largest Twitter-like micro-blog, and the website where the request first appeared said it was hit by an attack.” Associated Press, “China Cracks Down on Call for ‘Jasmine Revolution,’” IBN Live, February 20, 2011, http://ibnlive.in.com/news/china-cracks-down-on-call-for-jasmine -revolution/143796-2.html (accessed February 20, 2011).

12 Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

13 For a succinct history of political theories of cosmopolitanism, see Rob-ert Fine and Robin Cohen’s essay “Four Cosmopolitan Moments,” in Con-ceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

14 See David Whitehead, The Ideology of the Athenian Metic (Cambridge: Cam-bridge Philological Society, 1977), and Fine and Cohen, “Four Cosmo-politan Moments,” for larger commentaries on the role of metics in the city-state.

15 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in General Psychological Theory, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 165.

16 The Celtic Revival movement in Ireland is a prominent instance of such desire.

17 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Xango,” in X/Self (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1987), 107–110.


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18 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 204.

19 Brathwaite’s notes to the poem identify Xango as the “Pan-African god of thunder, lightning, electricity and its energy, sound-systems, the loco-motive engine and its music; a great horseman. Appears also as Shango.” Erzulie is described in the notes as “Fon (Dahomey [sic]/Haitian) god-dess of love and fertility” (Brathwaite, X/Self, 130). For a detailed discus-sion of African gods translocated to the Caribbean, see Kenneth Anthony Lum, Praising His Name in the Dance (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Pub-lishers, 2000).

20 Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown, eds., The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (New York: Heinemann, 1992), xv-xvi.

21 Brathwaite, “Xango,” 108.22 Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 320.23 Robbins, Feeling Global, 170.24 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, ed. and trans. James Stra-

chey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961), 20.25 Brathwaite, “Development of Creole Society,” 205.26 Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitics:

Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Rob-bins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 259.

27 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a His-tory of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Spivak contends that, in the moment of the “vanishing present,” the world exists in complicity (which doesn’t carry the usual connotations of the term: “complicity” implies both positive and negative actions; it is the condition of being folded together). Here, you are not in a symbiotic condition, but you are in a condition of adjoining or adjacency, where the needs of the needy might coincide with the wants of the greedy. Wealthy multinationals cannot exist without sweatshops (82).

28 Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. and ed. Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2001). In a 1999 speech to UNESCO, Derrida offers the French word mondialisation as one that should resist its translation and its supposed English and German equivalents: globalization and Globalisier-ung. Mondialisation is a term that has gained bloated and blunted signifi-cance through casual use, which necessitates a reconsideration of it and a contract for a new education about it. It conceals a paradox that is both against the vilification and beatification of the term mondialisation. Cer-tain unprecedented, unchallengeable factors justify the concept of glo-


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balization and are marked by massive techno-scientific change, includ-ing the circulation of people, commodities, modes of production, and socio-political models and the more-or-less regulated opening up of the world economy. However, and at the same time, the opening of borders,; the progress of legislation, especially the practice of international law,; and the displacements of sovereignty that globalization “calls forth” depend less than ever on techno-scientific knowledge or power as such (373). That is to say, mondialization is the preferred term because, under the triumphalist heading of “globalization,” the homogenization, or sup-posedly equal spread of opportunity worldwide, hides historic and new inequalities and hegemonies (what Derrida calls homo-hegemonizations).

29 Spivak, Critique, 228.30 Compare Bruce Robbins’s commentary on Freud’s arguments about the

impulse for “oceanic” ubiquity in Feeling Global, 171.31 See the discussion of the aesthetic modes of greatness in Edmund

Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 125–126.

32 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), thesis 67.

33 The words “show of force” convey precisely the sense of spectacle in the exercise of governance or assertions of punitive law.

34 Mika Aaltola, Western Spectacle of Governance and the Emergence of Humani-tarian World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 177.

35 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 327.

36 W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 64.

37 Shiloh Krupar and Stefan Al, “Notes on the Society of the Spectacle/Brand,” in Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012).

38 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 171.39 Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” 260.


Documents

Prediction, Proximity, and Cosmopolitanism in Global Spectacles: Kamau Brathwaite's \"Xango\"