Eze Emmanuel OnDoubleConsciousness

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On Double Consciousness

Emmanuel C. Eze

Callaloo, Volume 34, Number 3, Summer 2011, pp. 877-898 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0162

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877Callaloo 34.3 (2011) 877–898

ON DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS*

by Emmanuel C. Eze

What are the historical origins of the Du Boisian notion of “double consciousness”? Whatexplains the enduring existential resonance of the notion in various literatures on the black

diaspora, particularly in what Paul Gilroy has rendered poignant as the Black Atlantic? Thereare unmistakable echoes of the notion of double consciousness in the wider vocabulary ofpostmodern and postcolonial criticism, particularly in concepts such as “ambivalence” or,increasingly, the religious and cultural identity of the “modern Muslim.” What relationsmight we, today, draw across these existential and historical dispersals in the senses of theAfromodern? With no aspirations to the exhaustive, I intend to accomplish the followingthrough these and similar questions: a) explore the double roots of double consciousness inthe histories of capitalist racial slavery and colonial modernity; b) examine the motives forcurrent practices of characterizing identities by the psychological and cultural conditionsof double consciousness; and c) ask in what ways the identities so characterized may ormay not be compatible with key features of sociality and transnational conviviality thatcould be marked as democratically progressive and universal.

Reasons of Empire

In 2001, the United Nation’s Durban Declaration of the World Conference against Racism,

Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance declared: “Colonialism has led toracism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and . . . Africans andpeoples of African descent, and people of Asian descent and indigenous peoples were

victims of colonialism and continue to be victims of its consequences.” The contexts of thearguments in the declaration can be found in studies of modern imperial expansions. Forexample, Niall Ferguson has noted the fact that at the beginning of 1625, the British Isleswas an economically unremarkable, politically fractious, and strategically second-classentity, but in a mere two centuries transformed itself into Great Britain—the “largest empirethe world had ever seen.”1 The transition from a small island to an imperial power wasmarked by colonial expansion: by the mid-twentieth century, the British Empire consistedof forty-three colonies on ve continents. The clues to the reasons of this development areobvious: the British relieved the Spaniards of colonial territories, “copied the Dutch, beat

* Professor Emmanuel C. Eze submitted this article to Callaloo before 2007, the year he died. The editorialstaff has made every effort to supply missing page numbers for passages cited and bibliographic informa-tion for works cited.



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. . . the French and plundered the Indians.” But it is also true that “commerce and conquest

by themselves would not have sufced to achieve” the phenomenal imperial expansion.“No matter what the strengths of British nancial and naval power,” Ferguson argues,“there had also to be colonization” (Ferguson 51–52, emphasis added). Just as empire wasinstrumental in the denition to the colonial identity of British modernity, so was, accordingto the Durban conference, the experience of colonial racism. The double consciousness ofthe (post)colonially modern is historically integral to the emergence of modern racialism/racism. If double consciousness is a phenomenon of racial ambivalence, it has to be seenas rooted in imperial capitalist, racist, and ethnocentric experiences and abstracted ideasof Englishness (or Spanishness, Frenchness, Germanness, etc.).

From the perspective of one colonized at the outposts of the empire, in 1789 an Indianobserver comments about the colonizers’ habit of “coming for a number of years,” then

returning home with as “much money . . . as they can, and carrying it in immense sums tothe kingdom of England” (G. H. Khan qtd. in Ferguson 52). In one decade alone, as muchas nineteen million British pounds was transferred from India to Britain by that method.But Ferguson, for one, believes that British colonialists did not merely repatriate wealthfrom India; the colonial enterprise necessitated two other kinds of political and economicunderdevelopments that led to greater hardships for the Indian. Because the colonialisttaxed the natives in order to raise and maintain a colonial army, it was also the Indianswho funded the conquest of their own country. It is said that the tax burdens were greaterthan the cost of repatriated money, since “the spiraling cost of the Indian Army was the oneitem of imperial expenditure the British taxpayer never had to pay” (Ferguson 42, 47–48).

There was in fact a connection between capital ight, taxation, and impoverishment ofthe native. British colonialism in Nigeria during the 1800s suggests that the Indian experi-ence conformed to a general pattern in the colonial processes. Frederick Lugard—laterLord Lugard—was one of the architects and executors of the British colonization of Westand East Africa. In his book The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa , a handbook on andtheoretical justication of colonization, Lugard explains: “Let it be admitted that European

brains, capital, and energy have not, and never will be, expended in developing the re-sources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy.” England, he argues, “is in Africa forthe mutual benet of her own industrial class, and of the native races in their progress to ahigher plane” (emphasis added). In this gap—the racial gap assumed between Africans and

the economic interests of Europe, and in the economic interests of emergent transatlanticcapitalism exhibited by the rapid rise in Britain’s industrial and material needs—lies whatwe could call a general colonial compact. The compact, implicitly or explicitly, says: Wewill bring to the inferior races the true (our) religion and the true (our) culture and civi-lization. In return for these goods coming from a “higher” racial plane, however, we willtake the land by force; we will use the colonized as paid or unpaid, forced or voluntarylabor; and we will tax them to establish a colonial army the lower ranks of whom are to

be raised from among the colonized, and this army will ensure that none of the natives’chiefs, priests, or kings could successfully reject the colonial re-ordering of their world.

In the Americas, Africa, and India, the racial element in the colonial project was notmuch different. The colonialist generally considered himself a member of a superior andapart race. One of the earliest armed slave revolts, on November 23, 1733, on the Carib-

bean island of St. John, was racially motivated. On this island as well as on St. Thomas,



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the Danish West India and Guinea Company established not only slave trading posts but

also lucrative sugar plantations. Although Europeans lived together in every conceivableproximity, it was not enough that the society was divided into hierarchies in the laborrelations in a slave economy. Master, slave, manumitted or otherwise was also classiedas either Blancken (“White”) or Bussals (“African”). Race, thus, was the glue that conferreda new identity—and wide privileges—on both rich and poor Europeans against bothenslaved and free Africans. Unsurprisingly, the revolt against the slave system on theDanish islands, when it came, was organized as a protest against racial injury. An armedanti-colonial revolt in Jamaica, in October of 1865, was similarly racially fuelled, becausethe ruling class was exclusively racially white. And the earliest confrontations betweencolonial settlers and the Bengali had racial roots: between 1872 and 1883, the ofcial policyin India required that no Indian judge could try a white settler, on account of the settlers’

claim to racial privilege. These and similar racial prejudices fuelled the growth of Indiannationalism.

It would indeed be impossible to comprehend the social dimensions of slavery oranti-slavery or colonialism or anti-colonialism without the racial factors. The elements ofa racial morality, assumed by the colonizer as universal, could be found in any aspects offormal and informal life in plantation slavery as well as in colonial societies. The moralitywas based on the slave master’s and colonizer’s belief that slavery or colonization wasa form of “plantation”: a process of domestication of either the slave or the native. Theslave plantation and the colonial outposts thus became, in the view of the master and thecolonial administrator, literally places where a superior race was surrounded by inferior

ones, as good plants by weeds. The slave plantation and the colonial territory were realmsof a racially based moral contrast: Good versus Evil. In the ensuing conicts, skin colorwas taken as the clearest marker of who belonged to which category. This is why historianslike Ferguson believe that in the racist normative colonial cultures, what went on in someof the territories could easily qualify as “ethnic cleansing.” The natives were supposed to

be either enslaved by or cleared away to make room for the settlers (Ferguson 56).Adam Hochschild also richly documented the reach of the racial ideology in the rea-

sons for transatlantic slavery. William Beckford, a Lord Mayor of London, was reportedlyknown as “Alderman Sugar-Cane” because he was the richest absentee plantation ownerof his time. In fact in the mid-1700s, all the representatives of London in the House of Com-

mons were pro-slavery and “all told, several dozen M.P.’s owned West Indian plantations”(Hochschild 139). Outside of London, Liverpool and Bristol were the most famous of theslave ports. Considered “a thriving between-wars decade for the trade,” from 1783 to 1793,

Liverpool ships would carry more than 300,000 Africans into slavery.Its shipyard built many of these vessels, and some were among thelargest of their day, holding up to a thousand slaves each. Carvedheads of African elephants and slaves decorated the town hall. Whena visiting actor, George F. Cooke, was hissed for appearing drunk ona Liverpool stage, he retorted, “I have not come here to be insulted

by a set of wretches, every brick in whose infernal town is cementedwith an African’s blood.” (Hochschild 117)



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In Bristol, in addition to the well-known social habit of wealthy “ladies” owning African

slave servants as a status symbol, both public and private institutions relied on the largesseof entrepreneurs in the slave trade to fund public and private charity. This intertwine-ment of the slave economy and philanthropy is particularly visible in the acceptance ofthe trade as “a path to respectability”: personalities like Edward Colston M.P., who wasthe best-known philanthropist in Bristol, were also major slave traders (Hochschild 15).2

Imperial Britain’s general economy depended on slavery and the ancillary business:“The ship owner was less the sole proprietor of a business than the manager of a venturecapital syndicate . . . Even shopkeepers, carpenters, and tradesmen bought shares in thevoyages of some smaller ships, thereby participating, as a local writer put it, in a trade that‘may be said to pervade the whole town’” (Hochschild 117–18). Bryan Edwards recognizedthat the plantations in the West Indies were “the principal source of national opulence”

(Hochschild 57). Churches, universities, and private foundations were equally actors inthe business of buying and selling slaves, as investors and as “absentee owners” of plan-tations. The Church of England reportedly owned the famous Codrington slave estate inthe West Indies, holding the estate in the name of the church’s missionary arm, the Societyfor the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The estate had its own brand name,SOCIETY, which it “burned onto the chests of slaves with red-hot iron” (Hochschild 67–68).Members of the governing board included the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford andCambridge and the head of the church, the Archbishop of Canterbury. When slavery waslegally abolished in 1833, and Parliament as a condition of the abolition accepted to com-pensate slave owners for their “property,” the Society reportedly received 8,823 pounds,

8 shillings, and 9 pence (or 950,000 US dollars in today’s money) for its 411 slaves.3

The outcome of racial slavery and colonization of peoples by European states wasthus extensive and immensely rewarding to the slave traders, venture capitalists, andcolonial settlers in direct proportion as they cost the enslaved and colonized. Khan’sstudy of India and the impoverishment of its population is just one example. About Af-rica, Lugard claims that “when the economic pressure caused by the rapidly increasingpopulation of Europe began to exert inevitable inuence, in driving men to seek for newmarkets and fresh supplies of food and raw material,” it was the exploitations of Africa,America, and India that “met the demand for several centuries.” While Khan calculatedthe colonial prots by its inverse effect of “ruining” India, Lugard calculated the benets

of colonialism by the speed of growth of the white population in Europe. Contrary to thethen popular Malthusian predictions, Lugard noted that between 1492, when Columbusreached America, and 1494, when Vasco da Gama rounded the African Cape, the reliefoffered to Europe by the colonial settlements was near miraculous:

In the fteenth century the population of Europe was about 70 mil-lion. At the end of the next three centuries it is said to have been150 million, and additional 10 millions having migrated overseas.But [at] the close of the succeeding century—which witnessed theindustrial revolution, and the advent of the steam navigation—it isestimated at nearly 450 millions, with 100 millions additional emi-grants. Thus, while the population of Europe only doubled itself inthe three centuries prior to 1800, it more than trebled itself in thefollowing century. (Lugard 3, fn1)



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For Britain alone, the gures were 4,800,000 in 1600, 16,000,000 in 1800, and 42,000,000

in 1900.

“Race,” Religion, and the Colonial Projects of Reason

Colonialism, as a mode of imperial expansion, was part of a larger historical process,namely European states’ self-fashioning into forces of global capitalist modernity. The

brutality of this modern economic process is nowhere as evident as in the institutionof transatlantic slavery. The antiquities in all societies—from the Athenian through theAshanti to the Roman—seem to have known slavery in one form or the other: indenturedservitude, religious caste systems, or other forms of extreme class division within a societythat render a particular section of a population exploitable, with or without rights of citi-zenship. But scholars of slavery agree that there was something unique and unrepeatableabout modern, transatlantic, and racial African slavery. For the rst time in known historythe enslaver did not just call the enslaved “dog” or “beast” metaphorically: on account ofskin color, it was presumed that Africans were a “race” apart and, regardless of class orcaste, considered “scientically” an article of trade. In addition to the economic, religious,and cultural reasons for colonizing, dispossessing, and “civilizing,” it is obvious that araciology best served to justify transatlantic slavery.

For popular examples, consider the thinking of John Newton, the composer of the peren-

nial religious hymn “Amazing Grace.” After his conversion to evangelical and missionaryChristianity, Newton became a successful slave trader, sailing across the Atlantic to bringcaptured Africans for sale throughout the Americas. In a letter to his wife dated January26, 1753, a letter composed during one of his voyages with the African “cargo,” he mused:

The three greatest blessings of which human nature is capable, are,undoubtedly, religion, liberty, and love. In each of these how highlyhas God distinguished me! But here are whole nations around me,whose languages are entirely different from each other, yet I believethey all agree in this, that they have no words among them expressiveof these engaging ideas: from whence I infer, that the ideas themselves

have no place in their minds. And as there is no medium betweenlight and darkness, these poor creatures are not only strangers to theadvantages which I enjoy but are plunged in all the contrary evils.(qtd. in Ferguson 79).

As for the gulf between the self-whitened, good, loving, and intellectual Christian of whomNewton considered himself a ne specimen and his blackened, demonized, and chainedAfricans, enslavement of one by the other seemed the only option: not only possible butalso naturally ordained by nature and, it is said, by God himself.

That the “nature” of the African became a basis of the public arguments for and againstthe slave trade is itself a testimony to the power of the slave lobby to mobilize and mo-

nopolize public opinion. Public arguments around this highly charged term could alsoonly have added fuel to the re that advanced the aims of territorial colonization of the



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African continent. (The Berlin Conference of 1884 was, after all, one of the direct conse-

quences of the scramble for “legitimate” trade of goods with Africans as opposed to whatincreasingly became considered illegitimate and then illegal trading of Africans.) Becauseof the arguments of the slave traders, imperial and colonial interests were able to presentthemselves and their colonial “plantation” projects as the best alternative to slave trade.One colonized Africa, the imperialists argued, not for reasons of conquest but rather todevelop legitimate commerce. At the extreme, David Livingstone and Lugard were ableto argue that they went to Africa for the mutual benet of the colonizer and the colonizedprecisely because of the already extreme phenomenon of the slave trade: it was assumedthat, because of race and the difference race ought to make, colonization of Africa byEurope must be an enterprise whose “benet . . . can be made reciprocal.”

In what lies this reciprocity? While Europe multiplied and settled America, Africa,

and the Pacic, the indigenous populations of these places precipitously declined. Theprocesses of empire—slavery, colonization, and racial supremacy—were thus an outcomeof gradual developments, but developments whose intents and points of accelerationcould be easily marked. In the opinion of many historians, in the 1680s, writers were ableto distinguish between England and, quite narrowly, “the British Empire in America.” Aslate as 1743, it had still been possible to speak, with clear geographical delimitations inmind, of “the British Empire, taking together as one body, viz. Great Britain, Ireland, thePlantations and Fishery in America, besides its possessions in the East Indies and Africa.”But by 1762, it became possible to think, indistinctly, as Sir George Macartney would,about “this vast empire on which the sun never sets and whose bounds nature has not

yet ascertained” (qtd. in Ferguson 35). The consequences of this modern colonial processare, across the globe, and as the 2001 Durban Declaration makes clear, very much part ofthe history of our world.

But the “reasons” given for imperialism and colonization were more pretexts thanarguments. An early entrepreneur of African colonization, Livingstone presented himselfto the British public as a heroic missionary on the quest to convert pagan Animist Africansto Christianity. In a recruitment speech he delivered to young men at Oxford before heleft the second time for central and southern Africa, it is recorded that he appealed to theidealism of youth, imploring the students: “The sort of men . . . wanted for missionaries aresuch as I see before me. I beg you to direct your attention to Africa.” Yet in a letter of May

14, 1858, to a condant, right before departing on his second missionary journey, he wrote:

I take a practical mining geologist from the School of Mines to tell usof the Mineral Resources of the country, then an economic botanistto give a full report on the vegetable productions—brous, gummyand medicinal substances together with the dye stuffs—everythingwhich may be useful in commerce. An artist to give the scenery, anaval ofcer to tell of the capacity of the river communications, anda moral agent to lay the foundation for knowing the aim. All thismachinery has for its ostensible object the development of Africantrade and the promotion of civilization but what I have to tell tonone but such as you in whom I have full condence is that I hope it

may result in an English colony in the healthy highlands of CentralAfrica. (qtd. in Ferguson 156)



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The highlands of Central Africa, including the head of the Zambezi River surveyed by

Livingstone nd his team, proved unsuitable for the successful planting of a colony. Butthe intent was clear, and failure to achieve the intention in this case could be characterizedas an exception rather than the rule.

How did schemes such as these look from the perspectives of the target populationsof the empire? How does one explain the rapid rise in anti-slavery and anti-colonialsentiments not just in Africa and the colonies but also among progressive citizens of theimperial nations? Some historians pretend to be at a loss to explain the forces that led tothe demise of the slave trade (and, eventually, the colonialism which justied itself inpart by claiming to be a legitimate and morally worthy alternative to the slave trade).Whatever these forces might have been, however, they include numerous failures of theearliest colonial projects—for example, failures to instantly convert Africans to Christian-

ity. Take, for example, the West African monarch who traveled to London to personallyprotest what he believed to be the degradation of the African’s character by the degrada-tion of African cultures. In the daily diaries of missionaries and colonial anthropologists,and in anti-colonial writings, there is enough evidence to suggest erce cultural resistanceto conquest and domination. The complaints Livingstone conded in his diaries duringhis rst mission to Africa were typical. After several years of preaching the Gospel insouthern Africa, and having learnt the Bakwena language, it appears he made only oneconvert—and a backsliding one at that. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart , a novel inwhich the dominant theme is the British colonial invasion of Eastern Nigeria, we encounterdialogues about religion and culture such as this:

“If we leave our gods and follow your god . . . who will protect usfrom the anger of our neglected gods and ancestors?”“Your gods are not alive and cannot do you any harm,” replied thewhite man. “They are pieces of wood and stone.”When this was interpreted to the men of Mbanta, they broke intoderisive laughter. (Achebe 144–46)

By all accounts, Africa remained largely unconverted to Christianity until well into thelate nineteenth century. This, of course, is a fact difcult for many to imagine, given thenumber of Christians in Africa today. But modern colonial Christianity got its foothold in

Africa only after the strategies of colonization shifted from “commerce” and evangelizationto military conquest.4 Similar to many African examples, one of the rst notable revoltsagainst the colonial system in India was a mutiny of Sikh and Muslim soldiers based onrumors about the intent to convert Sikhs and Muslims to Christianity.

The processes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that led to the demise oftransatlantic slave trade, like the outcome of missionization, were no less nuanced andcomplex. Some think there was “an astonishing volte face” in moral sensibility in Europe(a moral switch, it is claimed, “icked in the British psyche”).5 Certainly, there was thephenomenon of a widespread evangelical religious awakening, represented particularlyin the activism of the Society of Friends. Since for them the Gospel made no distinction

between Jew and Gentile, and all are brothers in the Lord, evangelical Quakers, Method-ists, and Unitarians constituted a formidable abolitionist movement. Their movement,



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headquartered at the Holy Trinity Church in Clapham, London, tirelessly organized cam-

paigns across the country, gathering millions of signatures on numerous anti-slave tradepetitions to parliament. A medal designed by the Unitarian Josiah Wedgewood depictinga black man in chains with surrounding letters “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” becameone of the most potent icons of the anti-slavery movement.

But there were clearly non-religious forces operating to the advantage of the abolitionists.Prominent British economists, most of them secularist liberals, had warned that, on strictlyeconomic terms, slavery was uncompetitive and, in the long run, less protable than tradein free labor. Adam Smith, for example, was one of those who advanced what must haveseemed the counter-intuitive but scientic argument that free trade in free labor “comescheaper in the end” than forced, uncompensated, slave labor. Other Enlightenment think-ers saw that the path to progress in industry was through mechanization of processes of

production, and regarded slavery as a backward-looking institution. Although they were by no means opposed to slave trade or slavery on human rights grounds, most Scottishthinkers, including those personally or professionally invested in the institution of slavery,considered slavery woefully inefcient because they understood the economic promiseof mechanization. Adam Ferguson, for example, believed that Britain could dominate itseconomic relations with the revolutionary United States only if Britain relied on scienceand technology to modernize home industries and constitutionally choked off the supplyof African slaves to American plantations. This strategy positioned Britain as the dominanteconomic power in Europe (e.g. vis-a-vis France and Holland, both of whose internationaltransactions and colonial economies also heavily depended on slave trade and slave labor),

while playing a leading role in what was becoming a moral crusade against a barbaric formof economic, political, and cultural bondage. A conuence of forces thus led the BritishParliament to ban the slave trade in 1807, and the ban on slavery itself followed in 1833.6

Ambivalence and the Racial Self

W. E. B. Du Bois’s doctoral dissertation, entitled “The History of Suppression of theAfrican Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638 to 1870,” was one the earliest

academic treatises providing usable estimates of the number of Africans bought into slav-ery in the United States (Du Bois, “The History of Suppression”). In later works Du Boiswould try to reconstruct the processes by which Africans became American Negroes. Butthe American Negro was yet both legally and socially more Negro than American: alongwith the native Indian populations, for example, in the formative national documentsincluding the Declaration of Independence (“All men are created equal”), the un-freestatus of the Negro existence was stated with obviousness. Opponents of the AmericanRevolution noted the irony.7 Du Bois’s earliest studies on the conditions of both un-freeand free African slaves in the United States are important in often unsuspected ways. Hewrote not only about the peculiar negative processes of integration of Africans into themodern world but also about the racism that informed the reasons produced to justifythe continuation of the slave trade and the institutions of plantation slavery within theUnited States long after these became unlawful in several countries. For example, Du Bois’s





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supremacists to cement questionable doctrines that everyone should have been able to

recognize by its truer disorder. Thus we nd Du Bois valiantly trying to make sense of thesenseless: “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and theMongolian,” he ventured, “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and giftedwith second-sight.” In none of the subsequent arguments of Souls or anywhere else—forexample, in the also famous “Conservation of Races,” where he offered biological as wellas historical arguments to justify the cosmic missions of each supposedly racial type—was Du Bois able to convince the reader who did not already believe in the existence ofraces, as one might believe in religions, that the proclamations in Souls about the racesamounted to a scientic proof. In fact, in America’s modernity, one could not, with anymeasure of conceptual integrity, produce or justify a purely racism-independent processof racialization of the population. If Du Bois were correct, why seven races; why not ve,

eight, twelve, twenty, or any other number of plausible divisions one could conceive?The strengths of Souls lie elsewhere. In describing the African American as “second-

sighted,” for example, Du Bois was providing an existential and psychological description.Without this description, I believe, one would only supercially understand the depth ofthe legacies of economic, political, and social policies of slavery, and then racial segrega-tion, in the colonial and postcolonial Americas, Africa, or the Caribbean. In the case ofracially blackened slaves or freed Negroes in the whitened nation spaces of the Americas,Souls is a sublime record and testament of a coming-to-racial awareness of the self—anawareness achieved “through the revelation of the other world.” This revelation, Du Boisfamously explained,

is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of al-ways looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuringone’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contemptand pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; twosouls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring idealsin one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from beingtorn asunder. (Du Bois, Souls 3)

Clearly, it is in the interface of original pseudo-scientic and pseudo-metaphysical claims(about racial groups) and the ancillary claims (the racial othering—and ordering—of

the Negro, as the Hegelian Master names the Slave in an existential dialectic) that thereemerges, for Du Bois, in the idea of “race,” the possibility of a narrative of History as aRacial Cosmic Event: an event within which the African American is expected to denean appropriate subjectivity—a subjectivity we could, accordingly, refer to as a Racial Self.This last point—and in fact my general hesitation in accepting Du Bois’s would-be meta-physics of race—deserves some elaboration. My critique draws its implicit concerns fromthe background of a general question: In what sense may the “racial” self be considered arevolutionary post-emancipation or postcolonial subject? Unlike the now generic criticismof Du Bois on account of raciology, I would prefer to make some more careful distinctions

between the kinds of racial post-slavery and postcolonial subjectivities. Certainly, it isnot enough to point out the problematic scientic status of “race.” As we saw in earlierdiscussion of the methods of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, racialism was foundedon, and has successfully anchored itself in, modern societies and histories of ethnicities



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and of cultures. It is worthwhile therefore to recognize, as the Durban Declaration has

done, that neither the consequences of slavery and colonialism, nor those of racism withwhich they are intertwined, have been overcome. Recent rulings by the Supreme Courtsof many multiracial countries have essentially come to similar positions (e.g. Gratz et al

v. Bollinger et al).But it is only fair, looking forward, to press Du Bois on the arguments: What could one

mean by a “true” self? (Or a true self-consciousness?) If the main complaint had been thatthe African American could not look at himself or herself but through the eyes of self-whitened fellow citizens, how else, we should ask, does anyone get to know oneself if notthrough the eyes of others? The truth, of course, was that Du Bois sought to theoreticallyarticulate a psychology of the racialized black self—a blackness presumed by racists to be

both physical and moral, but in truth born in the contexts of extreme inequality in economic,

political, and social relations. The power of race in the colonial or slave-capitalist contextsis one that Du Bois—unlike Lugard who duplicitously dreamt about an imagined “uplift”of the “inferior” races by their very subjection—radically problematized and unrelentinglycritiqued. What concerned Du Bois could not have been the co-constitution of the racesinto an American nation. He was clearly irritated, from the point of view of those FrantzFanon called the wretched of the earth, by the racialist terms—the racist terms—of thenational compact.

Du Bois saw more clearly than most the contradictions between the amboyanteconomic prots and the depraved morality of the slave trade and the “plantation”: thecontradictions deformed the moral processes of formation of a historical self—not only

the self of the slave or the colonized, but also the self of the master and of the colonizer.Plantation and colonialism are not conditions that could yield true self or true nationalconsciousness not just to the slave or to the emancipated black but also to a young Americathat, in the contexts of a national Declaration of Independence, was most in need of a truenational consciousness. Instead, both the racialized self of the individual and of the nationappeared left with only a “strange sensation” of two-ness: the African does not wish to

be enslaved on account of whiteness, but the American is not an African in disguise.8 Inthe same way that the strife that tore at the fabric of the new nation must be dealt with,as far as Du Bois was concerned, one must forge a higher self: an African American self.This ideal was achievable because, as far as one could see, only one thing—but a key

constitutional question—stood in the way: Was the Negro a citizen or not? If the answer is“yes,” why was it that the Negro is “cursed and spit upon by his fellows” and “the doorsof Opportunity closed roughly in his face?”

On the question of the prospect of a post-racial subjectivity, some insights into the background to Du Bois’s vocabulary about the self are helpful. His earliest use of theconcept of “double consciousness” derived from a context of modern American medicalscience. The documentary evidence for this starts in “Strivings of the Negro,” an essayDu Bois rst published in The Atlantic in1897, and reproduced, in a modied title, as therst chapter of Souls: “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” In the decade in which the magazineessay was published, as in fact throughout much of the nineteenth century in the UnitedStates, “double consciousness” was a term found only in medical journals. It originallyreferred to what was regarded by the medical establishment of the day as a “NegroDisease,” drapetomania. According to the physician Samuel Adolphus Cartwright who



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discovered the illness as an epidemic among African American slave populations in the

southern parts of the United States, drapetomania was a mental illness dened by “an ir-restrainable propensity to run away.”9 The slaves who ran away were not thus motivated by a love of liberty, but rather were patients whose weakness of mind for liberty was to be medically—in fact, surgically—cured. Gradually, however, drapetomania seeped intogeneral psychological and moral literature. Double consciousness was loosely extendedfrom stricter medical contexts and poetically deployed to describe numerous afictionssuggesting incapacity for absolute self-dedication not just to an institution (e.g. in theoriginal contexts, the economy of slavery) but also to many other questionable regimesof social and political control.

In his uses of “double consciousness” Du Bois, certainly, was aware of its history.He intended to communicate the pain of self-redemption and the moral tragedy of the

psychology of a self so divided from within. But he was lucid enough to attribute thesepainful and moral conditions not to any natural disposition in the slave in the Americasor in the colonized on the African continent. They were the institutions of slavery aridcolonization, Du Bois argued, that produced the psychological and moral—and in theUnited States during his lifetime, increasingly national—split personality, a psychologicaldisease that aficted both individual and country. For Du Bois, redemption and integrityare to be found in the moral and heroic pursuit of a higher self. But he also believed thatthis is a quest and redemption that could start, for the negro as for the nation, only whenthe injustices of slavery and colonization, and ideologies of racial supremacy and theirlegacies, had been recognized and progressively dismantled. The core problem of double

consciousness, in Du Bois’s hands, therefore became a kind of historical suffering with amoral and metaphysical import to the quest for liberty and national integrity. The negro,rather than mere victim, becomes a revolutionary subject: a person with second sight, asight that alone could see or bear witness to the truth of a hidden meaning of history. Thenegro in America or in the colonial contexts acquired for Du Bois a historical mission not

just in the Americas or Africa but also in the rest of the world. This mission, rst, wasto discover and make explicit the gift to the world that only the second-sighted could

bring—the gift itself being fruits of wisdom from suffering, survival, and hope. Like theIndians, the Mongolians, the Teutons, and so on, the negro is called in his and her suffer-ing by history to deliver the race’s specic racial genius, so that it is through the struggle

in racial double consciousness that the negro achieves an original, universal compactwith providence. The famous Creed prefacing Du Bois’s DarkWater indeed captures thesesentiments and more:

I believe in God, who made of one blood all the nations that each onearth dwell . . . I believe in the Negro Race: in the beauty of its genius,the sweetness of its soul, and the strength in that meekness whichshall inherit this turbulent earth . . . I believe in Service—the humble,reverent service, from the blackenings of boots to the whitening ofsouls; for the Work is Heaven, Idleness Hell, and Wage is the “Welldone!” of the Master, who summoned all of them that labor and areheavy laden . . . I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is

Murder . . . I believe in the Training of Children, black even as white. . . Finally I believe in patience . . . patience with God!



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The metaphors from Hegel—the dialectics of the Master and Slave—allow one to see that

Du Bois, dialectically, came to a transracial answer to his racial—I mean, the racist—ques-tions that modern European colonialism and slavery in the United States had posed. LikeSenghor in Africa, Du Bois nursed the idea that in the cauldron of African colonialism andAmerican slavery lay the seeds of emergence of a truly universal liberation of the self—ofcolonizer as of colonized—from nature. It was therefore in the work of pursuit of moralgreatness for all races that, for Du Bois as for Senghor, lay the conditions of freedom andintegrity for the colonizer and the colonized.

Contested Modernities

In theory, one could conceive of a more nuanced, more radical stand than Du Bois as-sumed on the questions of race, nation, and the self. For purposes of contrast, let us callDu Bois’s and Senghor’s solutions to the problems of double consciousness heroic and

romantic. First, in this tradition of thought, a divided soul calls for heroic (“whose doggedstrength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”), mythical (“I believe in God”; “I believe[in] the Negro Race”; etc.), and, ambivalently, ambiguously (“patience . . . patience withGod”) historical acts of reconciliation. We must, of course, rst acknowledge the equallyobvious: for Du Bois, history, even of race and ethnicity, remained a requirement for anysuch talk of self or social transcendence and reconciliation. Second, the meta language

of such struggle of the soul would not only be entirely removed from the exclusive andquestionable domain of medicine or psychiatry, but also from a supposedly pedestriansocial morality and transported into the realms of abstract, literary tragedy. By the end ofSouls , the “soul,” for Du Bois, has become not only the spiritual and ethnic material of aquest for a historical racial authenticity and social justice; the quest and the soul itself turnsinto a search for unity of self, parallel with the larger quest for not only national but alsouniversal union of the races—which was also Senghor’s ideal of civilisation de l’universel.

The various theoretical strengths of this heroic and romantic strand in modern Africanand black thought are quite obvious. I could highlight one more of those strengths. To hiscredit, Du Bois, operating from a social scientic framework, watered down the concept of

self usually entirely dependent on religion and submitted the theological notion, as wellas Cartwright’s most extravagantly ideological medical schema, to a severe historical test.In “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,” Dickson D. Bruce Jr. pointsout that Ralph Emerson, too, employed the term “double consciousness” to describe thestruggle of being pulled back and forth between the realm of the divine and the rigors ofdaily existence. Emerson said: “The worst feature of this double consciousness is that the twolives, of the understanding and of the soul, which he leads, really show very little relationto one another: one prevails now, all buzz and din; the other prevails then, all innitudeand paradise, and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition toreconcile themselves” (qtd. in Dickson 300). Terri Hume Oliver also notes that Du Bois—acareful student of not just Hegel’s phenomenology but also of Goethe—could have had inmind Faust’s “Two souls, alas! Reside within my breast / And each withdraws from, andrepels, its brother.” Yet Du Bois’s use of the concept of double consciousness in Souls is



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thoroughly sociological. It is therefore remarkably distinct not just from the original abuses

of the term in racist medicine but also from the uncritical, even sentimental, employmentin the religious, poetic, transcendentalist metaphysical traditions.In the particular case of the African American’s conditions of subjection, we should

understand, Du Bois wanted one to see that the same conditions beckoned both oppressedand oppressor, though in different ways, to a certain greatness of self and of soul. It wastherefore in the pursuit of the spirit of race-historical transcendence that Du Bois wouldoffer—in response to the question “What does the Negro want?”—that the African Ameri-can wants only to take his or her place among others as “a co-worker in the kingdomof culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers andlatent genius.” It was an insight into the forces that led to the thwarting of this universaldesire—by slavery, colonialism, or anti-black racial prejudices—that Du Bois hoped the

reader of Souls would come to appreciate.But there is another, equally modern, scientic tradition of psychological and politi-

cal understanding of integrity of self that Du Bois’s psychology and sociology of raceclearly sidestepped. I will call this the Humean option. In contrast to the traditions of thepsychology of self in religion or in romantic poetic transcendentalism, consider Hume’scontentions about self-identity in the Treatise of Human Nature. There Hume argued thatthe “experimental method” (i.e. empirical method, which he introduced into moral rea-soning), a method Du Bois himself would prefer in his more ethnographic studies (e.g.in The Philadelphia Negro series, where he practiced urban social history and descriptivestatistics), could not yield any metaphysics of the self. For Hume the idea of self-identity

gives no reliable picture of an authentic unitary “substance” called self, around which anotion of a metaphysical authenticity—racial or otherwise—could be scientically legiti-mated. With this historical capacity for self-identication, but with nothing metaphysicallyor psychologically eternally subsisting on the identication, a Humean could not talk of a“divided” self, individual, racial, or national except materially, sociologically, and histori-cally. Du Bois, as I read him, could be seen to have been modern in his ethnography andsociology of African and negro histories, but less so if we thought that he was doing aracial theological psychology of the black soul. His lamentations about the anguish and theevil of double consciousness—an anguish and social evil theorized as locatable as well asredeemable in the Afro-modern experience—suggest this interpretation. For what could

the science of this anguish and its moral judgment communicate beyond the historicallyspecic environment within which colonialism and white supremacist cultures distortedthe lives of the African slaves, and the slaves’ quests for freedom as African Americans?Once Soulssucceeded in displacing the concept of double consciousness from its ideologicalframing in the medical and psychological literature as drapetomania, to its meanings ashistorical practices of freedom against non-natural oppression, Du Bois, it seems, had nofurther desire to sidestep the consequences of the pseudo-metaphysical characterization ofthe black—or the white—racial self. Paradoxically, this pseudo-metaphysics of race, I think,enabled Du Bois, without any contradictions, to compose Souls as a sociology of freedom.

But what are the implications of this racial sociology of freedom for modern or post-modern democratic theories? What would be a democratic racial or postcolonial subjectiv-ity? Is there a democratic legacy in the racial idea of double consciousness or postcolonialtheories of ambivalence? These questions come up because one wonders whether the



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historical salience—not to say the very idea—of “race” or “the colonial” has substantially

exhausted itself in the virtues of acts of freedom (yes, the slave did run away) inherentin the modern, postmodern, and postcolonial re-inventions of identities—of processesthat Du Bois himself anticipated, in theory and in practice (in the Niagara Movement inthe United States, the self-exile to independent Ghana, the sympathies with communistrevolutions, etc.). I will try to come to some answers to these questions, if only indirectly.

The Postcolonial Subject

In the essay “What is a Muslim?” written in the early 1990s, Akeel Bilgrami developsa model of introspection that sheds some light on examples of conicts of identities. Butin a polemic against the clash of civilizations thesis he also isolated a specic example ofconict of identities: “There is,” he writes, “widespread today a more interesting conictwithin the hearts of moderate Muslims . . . a conict made the more excruciating becauseit is not always explicitly acknowledged by them.” This conict, the essay goes on to ex-plain, “requires a careful scrutiny . . . of what the specic demands and consequences ofone’s particular [identities] are in specic historical or personal circumstances” (Bilgrami824–25). Parallel to the hyphenated African-American, what, I ask, is a moderate Muslim’sreligious identity in a capitalist, secular, liberal democracy? Like Du Bois’s critical challengeto medical accounts of black double consciousness, accounts that located this consciousness

as an illness in the Negro’s natural or moral character, Bilgrami wants us to understandthat no scientic or philosophical warrant grants a priori to capitalist secular liberalisma status of neutrality in the contexts of the moderate Muslim’s internal, psychologicalstruggles in identity. Even from a liberal perspective, it should be pointed out, there is norational value in framing these or similar identity conicts as race versus democracy, orthe religious (Muslim) versus the secular (Liberal). This is because neither race blindness,secularism, nor liberalism could automatically confer the right to describe the issue ofdouble consciousness, the ambivalence of postcolonial subjectivity, or the conict withinthe moderate Muslim as a conict between moral truth and falsity. Using the moderateMuslim as an example, “liberal and secular values,” Bilgrami remarks, “have no purely

philosophical justication that puts them outside the arena of essentially contested sub-stantive moral and political values” (Bilgrami 827).Are we left then with conicts of values or identities all fundamentally held? One would

argue one could hold a substantive identity fundamentally without, for that reason, becom-ing a fundamentalist. The difference is that saying an identity or a belief is “fundamental”to a person’s identity means only that this person’s sense of integrity, or violation of thissense of integrity, is connected to the system of beliefs that underwrites the identity. Butnothing here suggests that there is only one such belief system a person could subscribeto or that all the possible fundamental identities underwritten by the system of beliefs areautomatically compatible. Even where a set of identities is consistent, it could still be thatone holds different members of the set as fundamental commitments at different timesand for different reasons. In fact, the moderate Muslim might entertain the idea that onecould identify oneself as a Muslim in this place for this length of time, and as something



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else somewhere else for another length of time. It is as if one could “grade” commitments

to an identity or identities according to “thick” or “thin”: the thicker suggesting proxim-ity to the core of what one considers one’s “self” at any time, and the farther away fromthis core, the more negotiable, being thinner. But even this idea of “core”—as earliersuggested—leaves no impression on the moderate’s interior conict or introspection thatany core is more “essential” or more abiding than the supposedly peripheral or “ines-sential.” Such “inessential” commitments may, in situational clusters or serially, surprise

by revealing themselves, at their own times and in their circumstances, as equally coreand thick. The idea of a “fundamental” commitment for the moderate is, in short, moreformal than substantive.

In a choice illustration of this and similar arguments, Bilgrami tells a story that bearsrepeating. The existential, social, and, I would like to believe, political attitude to self,

faith, race, and nation that this example highlights conforms closely to the psychologicalmodel of identity that I earlier characterized as Humean.

I once shared a at with a close friend, who was an appallingly suc-cessful drug dealer. He had made far more money than I thoughtwas decent, and [it] was money made on the steady destruction ofpeople’s lives, some of whom were talented, even brilliant, in theuniversity. One day, while he was out, the police arrived at the door.They said that they did not have sufcient evidence to produce awarrant and search the place, but they were morally certain that hewas guilty, and all they needed was for his roommate to express the

slightest suspicion. That would give them enough to legally searchhis premises. I had long quarreled intensely with my friend abouthis cynical proteering from drugs and had come to nd him utterlyreprehensible in this respect. But faced with the question from thepolice, I found myself turning them away. (Bilgrami 827)

It would be an error to read this dilemma as the familiar “If I had to choose between mycountry and my friend, may God help me to choose my friend.” The conclusions drawnmight be different if, for example, instead of the police, the story had said that our protago-nist had been confronted by a delegation from the Ulamma. But the better analogy might

be yet another story that illustrates Du Bois’s revised concept of double consciousness:

an African American professor of philosophy at a New York university remarked that hewas very concerned about terrorism in a cosmic way but, on a daily basis, on account ofa cross between his gender and his skin color, he believed he should , by objective analysis,

be more concerned about the police.10

If these opinions reect the sentiments of signicant segments of racial, religious, orpostcolonial minority populations (the “second-sighted,” in Du Bois’s terms) in the UnitedStates or elsewhere, the questions implicit in the opinions, and which need answers, bearingclassical social and political theories in mind, are obvious. One of these questions must be:What is the function of trust—trust in fellow citizens, in civic institutions and their publicspaces of shared life—for the functioning of a democracy? Is it possible that racial doubleconsciousness and postcolonial or post-fundamentalist religious, liberal ambivalence,even as we celebrate their unarguably social revolutionary potential in modernity andpostmodernity, retain some of these revolutionary characteristics as claims to diversity,

but claims fuelled by deformations in the social body?



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I prefer these sociological and similar readings of the questions to Du Bois’s pseudo-

metaphysical or theological arguments for racial or any other forms of difference. Likewise,the core questions—they should be easy to see—do not permit the luxury of answers thatpromise a return to any longing for pre-Weberian enchanted sense of community. Theissue is not whether or not individuals or communities who form a nation could becomecommitted to something that is fundamentally racial, fundamentally religious, democraticcapitalist, democratic socialist, and so on. Plainly, they do. But it would be useful to inter-rogate in what sense the processes of formation of such fundamental “identities,” even intheir most lucid forms, may be responses to what, following the example in continentalphilosophy, one might characterize as a different, and differed, order of lack in the subject.Such a lack—the contours of which fundamental commitments to race, religion, “the mar-ket,” or politics might themselves be merely the existential gures—demands, it seems,

more careful historical analyses—yes, and wakeful patience—then the usual rhetoric ofthe liberal Right or the liberal Left may be willing or able to exercise.

Postracial Subjectivity

Modern democracy—any true democracy—presupposes diversity, both internal andexternal. But one need not believe that democracy requires this diversity to be alwaysnecessarily racial. For what if race did not exist also as a democratic idea? It is obvious

that recognition of racial diversity, as we know “race” to exist today, is not a sufcientcondition for democracy. But of course if racial identities exist, then they are and mustnecessarily be taken into account in any democratic calculation. But our line of argumenthas been that, in modern societies, racial identities did not, as if by an act of nature ratherthan events in human histories, have to exist. If we hold this as a hypothesis, is it notpossible to contemplate either nonracial democracies or other, more democratic kinds ofracial identities: where “race” serves democracy and the liberty of individuals, peoples,and cultures rather than conscripts—as it has historically done—individuals and groupsinto racial afliations whose value for freedom has been, at best, ambiguous? Is it possibleto think more provocatively about the prospects of a nonracial society, and therefore the

possibility of truly nonracial yet culturally pluralistic democratic societies?In his politics, Du Bois may well have been within this liberal, nonracial, democraticideal. But in his metaphysics of race, he showed himself to be a thinker par excellence ofthe Middle. Hence the double vision and longing for a third, higher point of view thatwould, by natural theology, supervise the historical progresses of an idea of race and ofthe political and cultural geniuses of racial identities. In Africa, the works of Wole Soyinkaand Leopold Sedar Senghor are the key counterparts for Du Bois’s (African American)cultural metaphysics of the race in the same way as Goethe’s or Wagner’s work must havefunctioned for the Germanic peoples in their constructions of a modern racial identity.Yet Du Bois’s racial-liberal tendencies are obvious in the fact that he arguably chose to be

black.11 Souls , as I see it, allows one not only to experience what it means to tarry in a worldof mid-terms of racialism of cultures and identities (“I who speak here am bone of the

bone and esh of the esh of them that live within the Veil”), but also to understand the



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existentiality of such tarrying when it is teleologically oriented toward an Absent Third.

After insisting that the Negro, to be able to achieve a position in society where he orshe could exercise civil liberty, must transcend three “temptations”—”the temptation ofHate,” “the temptation of Despair,” and “the temptation of Doubt”—Du Bois also offeredan unstinting vision of the prize that awaits the victorious. “What does the Negro want?”he asked, and answers: “To be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both deathand isolation, to husband and use his best powers and latent genius.” DuBoisism providesthe African American or the African—in fact, anyone suffering as victim of one kind ofracial extremism or another—a platform on which to examine what it means to have ornot have the liberty to exercise a choice of life. It could only be from the perch of triumphof consciousness that Du Bois can declare:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line Imove arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men andwelcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of eve-ning that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery ofthe stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, andthey come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wedwith Truth, I dwell above the Veil. (Du Bois, “The Conservation”)

It must remain useful to ponder the historical reasons why Du Bois, in addition to hisown multiple racial backgrounds, nevertheless chose to identify in the strongest wayswith the African or the black. Is it too easy to say that, rstly, circumstances (e.g. the one-

eighth blood rule?) forced him to choose as he did and, secondly, that he was too proudto choose other than he did? In the rst case, in the United States, he was legally “black.”In the second, might he not have been too proud to “pass”? Du Bois’s ethical choices (andcount in this his communist and African choices, including the exile and eventual death inindependent Ghana) are too specic and too symbolic to be glossed over.

In Souls Du Bois commits to lasting record the internal and historical agonism of themodern racial black, democratic, and African self. Elsewhere, he notes: “My discussion ofthe concept of race, and of the white and colored worlds, are not to be regarded as digres-sions from the history of my life; rather my autobiography is a digressive illustration andexemplication of what race has meant in the world” (Du Bois, “Propaganda and War”

388). That Du Bois became the inaugural voice of a particular brand of black modernismis therefore no accident. By choosing the heroic-tragic-romantic response to the AfricanAmerican racial dilemma, his was an exercise in what Foucault could have called practicesof the self. To this extent, as African American, Du Bois remains perfectly in good com-pany with other American metaphysicians of the self, especially Emerson and Whitman.

I suggest that it is, ultimately, as artists of the self that both Du Bois and, in Africa, aSenghor or a Soyinka must be understood. It is also only natural to place such under-standing in the contexts of the histories of movements for decolonization of the Africancontinent. The dynamic, constructed, plural, and contested character of the modern Afri-can self is, literally, put on display periodically by its agents. I remember from only a fewyears ago the museum exhibit The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in

Africa, 1945–1994. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, this show in a span of one year travelledfrom one city to another: Berlin, Chicago, New York, Johannesburg, and so on. The works



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displayed were by some sixty-three artists, mainly Africans and African-descendents, but

included non-Africans whose works were inspired from within, as well as diasporicallyoutside, the continent. The artists represented at least fty-four countries; the genres andmedia were just as encompassing (painting, cloth, poster, political tract, photography,architecture, music, theater, lm and video, and the novel). But, cumulatively, their thesiswas blunt: the twentieth century ushered Africa into all sorts of modernity, beyond thepolitical and including the artistic.

If, for example, a visitor were looking for “primitive” arts of Africa, the exhibitioncould not be more disappointing. Likewise, if one’s interests in modern African arts orthe continent itself were motivated by a desire for the art’s or the people’s “non-Western”features, The Short Century would also disappoint. This, in short, was not an exhibition forthe purist. There was no suggestion of a primordial originality or “essential” authenticity.

Everything was focused on and organized around the idea of the modern, and the layoutsof the exhibition and accompanying publications went to great lengths to alert the visitorto this fact. The curator ’s major argument seems to be that even the quest for an exclusiveand authentic, purist idea of the African is itself a very modern idea. This was a determinedcelebration of the African artist’s self-conscious and ironic steps into, and engagementswith, the global processes of both postcolonial modernity and postmodernity.

In 1947, the poets Aime Cesaire and Alioune Diop, in collaborations with Jean-PaulSartre and Pablo Picasso, launched the Negritude movement, including the art house andthe journal Presence Africaine. Their declared aim was to “explain the originality of Africaand hasten its appearance in the modern world” (Diop 1). Fifty years later, The Short

Century could be interpreted as evidence that Negritude was a success. Africa and its artsare original, and, it is argued, this originality is to be found not merely in the sociality of“race” but fundamentally in a political, postcolonial, and postmodern artistic presence.This perspective unsettled, among other things, the expectation that the modern is only oralways the European and white, or claims that the ways of the West in arts and culture tomodernity are the only universal ones. On that the position of The Short Century could not

be clearer: there are many paths to modernity and modernism. While Africa’s experienceof modernity may parallel, and even mirror, the European adventures, Africa’s inventive-ness and originality in anti-imperial and counter-colonial performances of modernity andthe processes of postmodernity have, as Negritude intended, initiated, on the continent

and in the Diaspora, multiple sites of the modern and postmodern.In light of the fact that Negritude was formally conceived in 1947, it is hardly surpris-ing that The Short Century also chose the year 1945 as a marker of Africa’s emergence intoartistic modernism. Nor is it remarkable that the curator chose to privilege this short (asopposed to a longer) artistic vision of Africa’s modern century. Undoubtedly, this is a ver-sion of the history of Africa’s engagements with cultures of anti-racist modernization andpostmodernization, willfully refusing to separate the works of the artist from the historiesof African politics. The Short Century seems to proudly proclaim its own commitmentsas social and politically engaged art. And Enwezor offers a kind of justication for theepistemological and aesthetic choice: the exhibition, he writes, “seeks to demonstrate” that“the construction of African modernity in the twentieth century is inextricably bound tothe defense and legitimation of all and every sphere of African thought and life.” If this isthe case, it seemed “unnecessary . . . to make an argument that does not take the totality



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of this manifestation—political, social, economic, identity, culture, etc.—into full account”

(Enwezor 14). If we asked how does art—how could it—account for and legitimate alland every sphere of life (e.g. Is not the modern presupposition against precisely such anidea of the totalization of life from the point of view of art?), the question is only a limitedchallenge to a grand artistic self-conception—in fact a self-conceit. The conceit is at theheart of all processes of formation—and policing—of identity, including racial identities.

Today, traditional preoccupation with metaphysics of identity or of art—a staple ofan earlier generation of African writers—seems to trouble very few black artists. In the1960s, for example, Wole Soyinka developed an elaborate metaphysical explanation aboutwhy and how African aesthetics differed from the Euro-American. On one occasion, hecompared the European artistic mentality to

a steam engine which shunts itself between rather closely spacedsuburban stations. At the rst station it picks up a ballast of allegory,puffs into the nest emitting a smokescreen on the eternal landscapeof nature truths. At the next it loads up with a different species oflogs which we shall call naturalist timber, puffs into a halfway stopwhere it lls up with the synthetic fuel of Surrealism, from whichpoint yet another holistic worldview is glimpsed and asserted throughpsychedelic smoke. A new consignment of absurdist coke lures [it]into the next station from which it departs giving off no smoke at all,and no re, until it derails briey along constructivist tracks and istowed back to the starting point by a neoclassic engine. (Soyinka 123)

If the “occidental creative rhythm” appears like “a series of intellectual spasms,” the Africanwas supposed to be holistic: organic, of “cohesive understanding,” built on “irreducibletruth” (Soyinka 123). The Short Century does not so much dispute these characterizationsof Europe and Africa as much as it plays with the conceptual oppositions. Its own ideaof truth is representational rather than essential. Similarly, where an earlier generation ofartists found “serious divergence between a traditional African approach” to art and themodern commodied version, The Short Century seems to go out of its way to welcomecommercial and tourist art. Because it presumes and makes explicit arguments about post-modern and postcolonial African creativity and originality in art, The Short Century saysnothing about authenticity. If for Soyinka the goal of authentic traditional art is “resolution

of plenitude,” or the work of art as “cosmic struggle” (Soyinka 123), The Short Centuryadopts either a cultivated silence or playfulness in the matter. If, to show how his 1960sview of Western epistemology of dramatic art distorted reality when applied to interpre-tation of traditional African aesthetics, Soyinka traveled Nigeria in search of art festivalsat their “appropriate time of year . . . on a farm clearing,” rather than at some itinerant,commercial “variation on the same theme,” The Short Century in a similar African quest

but this time for the forty postmodern past aesthetic years travels the opposite direction:it puts on display the idea of tradition as a moving target. And if artistic struggle with“chthonic presences” is essential to the economic, political, and social welfare of the artin or outside Africa, The Short Century seems to accentuate the aspect of the sources of the

struggle known to be all too historical, all too representational, and all too mass-mediated.In fact, if there is any difference between the metaphysical and anti-metaphysical racial

sensibilities in modern and postmodern art, the postcolonial African art scenes have, The



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Short Century seems to conclude, missed all the metaphysics. Similarly, one notices little or

no hermeneutical conicts of interpretation between traditional African approaches to artandmodernEuropean approaches, because there is no suggestion that a traditional approachto art and creativity could not be extracted from Africa’s own or Europe’s pre-moderncultures. By giving up the defense of metaphysics from either the Right or the Left, mostAfrican artists today allow themselves new ethical spaces to play with the idea of the real.

NOTES

1. My empirical references are largely to the British Empire. I have quite liberally presumed Ferguson’sEmpire and Hochschild’s Bury the Chains.

2. Hochschild noted that while “Colston proudly declared, ‘Every helpless widow is my wife and herdistressed orphans my children,’ and a large bronze statue of him overlooks Bristol’s Colston Ave.,it was not until one night in 1998 that someone scrawled on its base the name of one of the profes-sions in which he made his fortune: SLAVE TRADE.” In other places, “the cathedral-like library ofAll Souls College, Oxford,” Hochschild notes, “was nanced by prots from a slave plantation inBarbados.” Likewise, “family slave estates in Jamaica paid for the elegant house on Wimpole Streetwhere Elizabeth Barrett would be courted by Robert Browning. William Beckford, with a vast fortune based on slave-grown Jamaican sugar, hosted the most sumptuous banquets since Henry VIII andhired Mozart to give his son piano lessons.” John Gladstone, a member of Parliament and the fatherof a future prime minister, owned Caribbean sugar and coffee estates with well over a thousandslaves (346).

3. It was reported earlier in 2006 that the Church hierarchy approved a resolution apologizing forits slave-holding past (“We were directly responsible for what happened”). It is not known if theChurch also intends to pay descendants of those it enslaved a portion of the interests on the prots

the church derived from capital investments on slave trading and slave labor. See <http://news. bbc.co.ukl1/hi/ukl4694896.stm> (accessed May 15, 2006).4. Once the larger political economy had been forcefully reoriented in a global framework that dislo-

cated the Indian or African economies in favor of the British, it was easy for the “natives” to graspthe direction in which lay the paths to economic and social mobility. To participate in “progress”one had to be educated in the colonial systems. The catch, of course, was that without exception thecolonial formal education systems were founded or staffed by missionaries, as agents of colonialgovernments. In any colonial schools conversion to Christianity remained the strictest requirementfor admission.

5. Ferguson writes:

This was an astonishing volte face . . . After the British rst came to Sierra Leonein 1562, it did not take long [for them] to become slave traders. In the subsequenttwo and a half centuries . . . more than three million Africans were shipped into

bondage in British ships [alone]. But then towards the end of the eighteenth cen-tury, something changed dramatically; it was almost as if a switch was ickedin the British psyche. Suddenly they started shipping slaves back to West Africaand setting them free. (115–116)

6. True to the economic predictions—that though slave trade might be highly lucrative and slave laborvery high-yield in the short term, both were in the long run unsustainable systems—economies thathad been heavily dependent on the trade were forced to adapt or collapse because of the abolition.African kingdoms whose economies slavery had distorted were among the rst to feel the change. Itis reported that a monarch complained: “The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people.It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lullsthe child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery. Can I, by signing . . . atreaty, change the sentiments of a whole people?” (qtd. in Ferguson 115). As early as the end of theHaitian Revolution of 1804, it had also become acknowledged that even the task of holding on to

existing “plantations” in the colonies was politically volatile. See also Davis; Dubois.7. In Taxation No Tyranny Samuel Johnson asks: “How is it that the loudest YELPS for liberty come from

the drivers of Negroes?”



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8. Du Bois writes:

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife . . . to merge hisdouble self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of theolder selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has toomuch to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in aood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message forthe world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negroand an American. (Souls 3)

9. Records indicate that in addition to being a medical ofcer in the Confederate army Cartwright wasalso “a professor of diseases of the Negro,” in the Medical Faculty of the University of Louisiana.His “cure” for drapetomania was simple: amputation of the toes. Studies of Cartwright’s medicalwork may be found in Thomas and Sillen; Guillory.

10. This conversation occurred a few days after Ahmadu Diallo, a West African immigrant, was “mis-takenly” shot forty-one times by two New York Police ofcers.

11. See Du Bois’s self-description in “The Conservation of Races.”

WORKS CITED

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor, 1994.Bilgrami, Akeel. “What is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity.” Critical Inquiry

18.4 (1992): 824–25.Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” American Literature 64.2

(1992): 299–309.Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.Diop, Alioune. Presence Africaine 1 (1947): 1.

Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Conservation of Races.” African Philosophy: An Anthology. Ed. Emmanuel C. Eze. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. 269–74.

———. “The History of Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870.”Diss. Harvard U, 1895.

———. Preface. DarkWater.———. “Propaganda and World War.” W E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York:

Henry Holt, 1995. 388–408.———. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam, 1989.Durban Declaration of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related

Intolerance , 2001. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Transcendentalist.” 1843. The Emerson Reader.Enwezor, Okwui, and Chinua Achebe, eds. The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in

Africa 1945–1994. New York: Prestel, 2001.Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modem World. New York: Penguin, 2003.Gratz et al v. Bollinger et al. No. 02615. 23 June 2003.Guillory, James Denny. “The Pro-Slavery Arguments of Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright.” Louisiana History 9.3

(1968): 209–27.Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves. New York:

Houghton Mifin, 2005.Lugard, Frederick John Dealtry. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. London: Frank Cass, 1965.Oliver, Terri Hume. “’Double Consciousness’ in The Souls.” The Souls of Black Folk. Ed. Henry Louis Gates,

Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.Soyinka, Wole. Myth Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972.Thomas, Alexander, and Samuel Sillen. Racism and Psychiatry. Carol Publishing Group, 1974.

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