Cultures of decolonisation

Transnational productions and practices, 1945–70

Ruth Craggs, Claire Wintle

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784996246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Irische Geschichte

Cultures of decolonisation combines studies of visual, literary and material cultures in order to explore the complexities of the 'end of empire' as a process. Where other accounts focus on high politics and constitutional reform, this volume reveals the diverse ways in which cultures contributed to wider political, economic and social change.This book demonstrates the transnational character of decolonisation, thereby illustrating the value of comparison – between different cultural forms and diverse places – in understanding the nature of this wide-reaching geopolitical change. Individual chapters focus on architecture, theatre, museums, heritage sites, fine art and interior design, alongside institutions such as artists' groups, language agencies and the Royal Mint, across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Europe. Offering a range of disciplinary perspectives, these contributions provide revealing case studies for those researching decolonisation across the humanities and social sciences.

PART I

Decolonising metropolitan cultures?

CHAPTER ONE

Black America and the overthrow of the European colonial order: The tragic voice of Richard Wright

Bill Schwarz

At the end of the 1990s, when Britain’s jurisdiction of Hong Kong was coming to an end, Wm Roger Louis turned his considerable scholarly energies to the history of the final years of the British Empire in Pacific Asia. In 2001, for his presidential address to the American Historical Association, he chose to speak on ‘The Dissolution of the British Empire in the Era of Vietnam’, later published in the American Historical Review. This is a fine essay. It focuses on the diplomatic connections between the US and Britain which resulted, on the one hand, from the American military involvement in Vietnam and, on the other, from that of the British intervention in Malaysia between 1963 and 1965 – that is (in the latter case), from the moment of the formal independence of Malaya up until the massacres of the Indonesian Communists which presaged the downfall of President Sukarno. The purpose of the essay was to consider the very different outcomes of Western intervention in Vietnam and Malaysia. One element in this story which Louis highlighted was the strategic gravity of domestic opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States and the degree to which anti-war mobilisation paralleled the race politics of Civil Rights and Black Power. In an intriguing closing passage, referring to ‘the interaction between the American Civil Rights movement and British decolonization’, he observed that ‘the comparison is fundamental for an understanding of the era. Even though the currents were parallel and not directly connected, the rivers of decolonization and Civil Rights flowed in the same direction.’¹

Not long after, there came from the same locale – Austin, Texas – a similar perspective, in this case from A.G. Hopkins. Hopkins sought to rethink the general question of decolonisation. In doing so, he argued that there existed a historical homology between the racial policies of the white settler colonies in the British Empire and those in the United States, suggesting the need to grasp the underlying connections between the destruction of the social systems in each of these two spheres. He concluded by highlighting Martin Luther King’s regard for Gandhi and Nkrumah, and cited King’s belief that the Vietnam War ‘seeks to turn the clock of history back and perpetuate white colonialism’. He closed his argument with these words:

King recognized that the movement for full emancipation in the United States was part of a broader struggle to eliminate discrimination and oppression elsewhere. It is a perception that should encourage historians to think of the transfer of power after the Second World War as being a global (and globalizing) process that overrode rather than underwrote conventional political and historical boundaries.²

Both Louis and Hopkins raise the question of the connections between US black politics and the end of the British Empire.³ It is this theme I explore here. In doing so I touch on the heroic vision of those who understood themselves to be poised on the threshold of the postcolonial age. But in the case of the author Richard Wright – the focus of this chapter – we are also required to appreciate the sense of impending tragedy by which the postcolonial future entered his imagination.

To follow this argument I will be making certain detours and working with a measure of indirection.⁴ In order to understand Wright it is important to bring into the field of vision the role of the West Indian intellectuals, who often acted as a bridgehead between black militants from North America, such as Wright, and the forces in metropolitan Britain pressing for decolonisation. The chapter begins by exploring these connections. Next, we need to add a further link in the chain: that of the francophone black Atlantic and, more particularly, the significance of Paris as an organising centre for anti-colonial activity, the focus of the second section. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Wright’s visit to the Gold Coast on the eve of independence. Through these diverse spaces, and the people, ideas and political impulses that connected them, the transnational nature of decolonisation becomes clear.

I have been impressed for a long time by the intellectual politics of New World writers who found themselves in Europe during the collapse of the colonial order. Part of their influence turned on their critiques of colonialism, and part on their conception of race, particularly their endeavours to uncover the mysteries of racial whiteness. These endeavours included a series of interventions which appeared in the 1950s and which inaugurated a challenge to the imperatives of racialised thought. I am thinking of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which appeared in 1952; the essays and fiction of James Baldwin, most particularly his essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953) and his novel Giovanni’s Room (1956); and Richard Wright’s polemical White Man, Listen!, published in 1957.⁵ In this chapter, however, I am taking a narrower perspective, principally exploring Wright’s encounters with British colonialism.

The differences between these various texts are conspicuous: in generic form, tenor and philosophical affiliation, they are distinct. No-one could confuse the writings of Fanon, Baldwin and Wright. Even so, there are significant common properties. First, each author sought to bring into the open the fact of whiteness, insisting that racial whiteness – for all its invisibilities – carries with it inescapable political consequences. Second, the shared Parisian location of these writings is significant. This is so, both in terms of intellectual life (the presence of existentialism), and in terms of politics (the relative proximity of decolonisation to the metropole). And third, they were all New World intellectuals. They had all determined to cross the Atlantic: Fanon from Fort-de-France in Martinique; Wright from Chicago, Brooklyn and Harlem; and Baldwin from Harlem and Greenwich Village. They were well versed in the practices of Western civilisation and knew no other. Until the time when his political allegiances took him to the cause of Algeria, Fanon’s identifications with France were absolute; Wright wrote passionately about his commitment to the ideals of the European and American Enlightenment, in which he was schooled; while Baldwin reiterated throughout his life the conviction that he was first and foremost an American – ‘as American as any Texas G.I.’⁶ None had ever imagined himself to have been a ‘native’, cut adrift from the pulse of Western life.

Fanon, due to his colonial background, may have been perceived by others as a native. This misrecognition dominated his early writing, but he had never imagined himself as such. Or he had not until there occurred the encounter which has come to stand as the primal moment in postcolonial history, when he was confronted on a cold Lyon street by the exclamation of the young white child: ‘Mama, tiens un nègre!’⁷ It was precisely at that point that Fanon’s white mask – his cultivation in the ways of French civilisation – collapsed, leaving him to contend as best he could in the metropole with his Antillean self and his abused black body. Although for Wright and Baldwin the particulars differed, Fanon’s predicament was one which they recognised.⁸ The experience of entering life as black but ‘of the West’, and thence crossing the seas and travelling to Paris, generated a particular mentality. It allowed new ways of thinking to emerge, constituting a powerful strand in the intellectual life of European – including British – decolonisation.

Although my concern here is with Wright, we should appreciate the degree to which his story was part of a larger history. Although the lingua franca of black radicals in the United States and of those fighting to bring about the end of British colonial rule was largely English, the francophone element proves important. So too does the connection between West Indians working for the independence of their region and those struggling for racial emancipation in the United States.⁹ Penny von Eschen’s path-breaking Race Against Empire revealed the extent of anti-colonial agitation in the US. Yet it is strange that its predominating domestic frame works, analytically, to marginalise the role of expatriates, of whom Wright is the most noticeable, and amongst whom Baldwin should also be counted.¹⁰ Wright’s absence from his native land serves to exclude him from von Eschen’s discussion. Yet as Paul Gilroy deftly demonstrates, Wright’s exile was neither destructive of his work nor inconsequential for black America.¹¹

Wright was born in poverty in rural Mississippi in 1908. Like many blacks of his generation, as a young man he made the journey northwards to Chicago’s South Side, where his first political sympathies were for Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association – an allegiance which resurfaced later in his life, during the desegregation crisis of Little Rock in the autumn of 1957.¹² In 1934 he joined the Communist Party, to which he remained affiliated for some ten years until he made his break public, describing in his article, ‘I Tried to be a Communist’, the unscrupulousness of his erstwhile comrades.¹³ In 1940 he published his novel, Native Son. Its depiction of Bigger Thomas marked a sensational challenge to the ideals of white America and, notwithstanding its provocation, established Wright not only as the leading black author in the United States but also as a writer who could rightfully claim his place in the American literary canon, tout court. Shortly after, he was officially invited by Claude Lévi-Strauss – at this point cultural attaché in the French embassy in Washington – to visit France. He went first in May 1946, returning to the US some months later. In July 1947 he and his family set sail from New York to Paris, taking with them their Oldsmobile sedan, with radio and automatic gears.

As Gilroy notes, there occurred ‘a gradual change in his thinking whereby a sense of the urgency of anti-colonial political struggle displaced an earlier exclusive interest in the liberation of African-Americans from their particular economic exploitation and political oppression’.¹⁴ What, though, of the impulses for this transformation?

In order to approach this question I will explore Wright’s links to a network of prominent Caribbean anti-colonial thinkers, in New York, in London and in Paris.

The Caribbean diaspora

In the summer of 1944, in New York, Wright first met C.L.R. James, the most luminous intellectual of the twentieth-century anglophone Caribbean. James, Trinidadian born, had spent much of the 1930s as part of an influential cadre of Pan-Africanists in London, before travelling to the United States in 1938 to continue his political work which, at this stage, was dominated by the imperatives of the Trotskyist Fourth International.¹⁵ In May 1940 James had written an ecstatic review of Wright’s Native Son, welcoming it ‘not only as a literary but also a political event’.¹⁶ He was fired with enthusiasm after meeting with Wright. In a series of letters to Constance Webb, his lover and future wife, James explained that Wright was the person he had most wanted to talk with in the entire United States, a desire driven principally by his conviction that Wright – almost alone, he inferred – truly understood the Negro question. On reading the proofs of Black Boy, James deduced that Wright, in the field of letters, and he, in the field of history, in his own The Black Jacobins, had arrived at the same conclusion, albeit by different means.¹⁷ Both, claimed James, apprehended the degree to which the US Negro represented the decisive social force of the future. Or, as Wright was to articulate this later, ‘The Negro is America’s metaphor’.¹⁸ ‘Our conclusions are identical,’ James declared.¹⁹ This enthusiasm was contagious, for not long afterwa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reframing cultures of decolonisation Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle
• PART I – Decolonising metropolitan cultures?
• PART II – Performing decolonisation
• PART III – Decolonising expertise
• Index