Beyond the Black Atlantic

Relocating Modernization and Technology

Walter Goebel, Saskia Schabio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134151585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Debates about the 'Black Atlantic' have alerted us to an experience of modernization that diverges from the dominant Western narratives of globalization and technological progress. This outstanding volume expands the concept of the Black Atlantic by reaching beyond the usual African-American focus of the field, presenting fresh perspectives on postcolonial experiences of technology and modernization. A team of renowned contributors come together in this volume in order to:

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• redefine and expand ideas of Black Atlantic

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• challenge unified concepts of modernization from a postcolonial perspective

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• question fashionable concepts of the transnational by returning to the local and the national

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• offer new approaches to cross-cultural mechanisms of exchange

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• explore utopian uses of technology in the postcolonial sphere.

Exploring a variety of national, diasporan and transnational counternarratives to Western modernization, Beyond the Black Atlantic makes a valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial, literary and cultural studies.

Part I: Negotiating African modernities

1 The presence of the past in peripheral modernities

Benita Parry

Perry Anderson has argued that ‘Marx’s own conception of the historical time of the capitalist mode of production . . . was of a complex and differential temporality, in which episodes or eras were discontinuous from each other, and heterogeneous within themselves.’¹ Although Anderson does not press this usage, his observation is especially pertinent to the advent of capitalism in the colonial worlds where, as Lenin and Trotsky observed in their theory of combined and uneven development, socio-economic conditions pertaining to pre-, nascent and ‘classical’ capitalism coexisted and overlapped. Without overlooking that even in contemporary Europe residual traces of archaic ideologies and customs remain, or that the sophisticated capital cities are contemporaneous with antiquated but still-functioning peasant societies – about which John Berger has written with empathy and critical distance in Pig Earth – the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ was structural to colonized societies and continues to be so in post-independence nation-states. For here vast rural populations living in village communities provided and continue to provide the material ground for the persistence of earlier social practices and older psychic dispositions.

Moreover, as Mahmood Mamdani, writing about Sub-Saharan Africa, points out, the colonial state was deliberately deferential toward traditional forms and outlooks, encouraging the survival of ethnically based local power, ‘tribal’ divisions and those indigenous cultural habits deemed conducive to promoting social stasis.² At the same time the architects of colonialism cynically blamed these very modes for perpetuating backwardness, and, while boasting an instrumental purpose in developing the wasted and underused material resources of the pre-industrial world in the cause of international progress, and claiming an ordained mission to elevate the minds and souls of its benighted peoples, they devised plans to compel the plentiful supply of cheap labour into the production of raw materials required for metropolitan modernization. This entailed imposing aspects of capitalism’s productive methods, selectively initiating modernizing projects useful to their rule, and allowing a small elite a limited access to education. Together these policies produced a lower administrative stratum, facilitated sufficient social mobility to incline the beneficiaries toward complicity with the rulers, and ensured the retardation of the non-capitalist zones. This is not to say that colonial regimes were able to control economic development, stem urbanization or prevent proletarianization, since calculated strategies imploded under the impact of capitalism’s own dynamics. Nor were they able to contain the social agency of the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie or the populace as new modes of production generated new social relationships and altered forms of consciousness. In this sense anti-colonialism expressed the determination of colonial populations to possess a temporal condition into which they had been thrust by the penetration of capitalism and which colonialism sought to withhold.

In their representations of the colonial project, the imperial nations had cast themselves as the only creators and inhabitants of modern times, and therefore as donors or exporters of material modernization, social enlightenment and moral progress to the retarded and dependent peoples of Africa, Asia and South America. This conceited account of the imperial centres as constituting the normative temporality, prompted the anthropologist Johannes Fabian in the 1980s to address the scandal of denying coevalness, or the sharing of the same time, to the worlds beyond the technically advanced metropoles:

The expansive, aggressive and oppressive societies which we collectively and inaccurately call the West needed Space to occupy. More profoundly and problematically, they required Time to accommodate the scheme of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition). In short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.³

Paradoxically, some postcolonial critics have echoed a concept of the time, consciousness and experience of modernity as being ‘western’, rather than as coextensive with capitalism’s worldwide consolidation, and as a consequence have proposed that peripheral modernities be perceived as ‘translations’ of, or counters to, the Eurocentric prototype.⁴

Harry Harootunian has challenged the move to ‘more fashionable descriptions’ such as alternative, divergent, competing and retroactive modernities on the grounds that these imply ‘the existence of an “original” that was formulated in Europe, followed by a series of “copies” and lesser inflections’.⁵ Hence, while recognizing that modern forms were introduced into societies outside of Europe through imperial expansion, the export of capital and colonial deterritorialization, Harootunian directs attention instead to the disparate but simultaneous experiences of change and upheaval precipitated transnationally by capitalism, naming modernity as ‘a specific cultural form and a consciousness of lived historical time that differs according to social forms and practices’. Where, Harootunian maintains, the new intersected with the residual,

it made possible the production of differing inflections of the modern. It also promised not alternative modernities but coeval . . . modernities or, better yet, peripheral modernities . . . in which all societies shared a common reference provided by global capital and its requirements. Each society, however, differed according to specific times and places, the ‘not quite the same’.⁶

Because transformation was propelled by the same mode of production, even if at different speeds and to varying degrees, modernity according to Harootunian, should then be conceived as the simultaneous temporal condition of people everywhere. So too Enrique Dussel rejects the developmentalist and Eurocentric position which conceptualizes modernity ‘as an exclusively European phenomenon that expanded from the seventeenth century on throughout all the “backward” cultures’.⁷ Rather, he contends that it should be understood as a global process within which Europe, through the discovery, conquest, colonization and integration of other spheres, attained centrality as the system’s manager. This argument implies that metropolitan and colonial populations, whatever the profound material and cultural differences between and amongst them, were hurled into modernity at the same moment – a universality invoked in the opening lines of Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air: ‘Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind.’⁸

Such a perspective is shared by Peter Osborne’s designation of modernity as ‘our primary secular category of historical totalization’,⁹ a description which brings its global reach into proper focus, and serves as a reminder that modernity and modern times cannot be abstracted from the universalizing tendencies of capitalism. It also establishes the inadequacy of relegating the colonized peoples as ‘latecomers’ to modernity.¹⁰ This is not to overlook that the colonized were from the outset marginalized by the demands of an expansionist capitalism that installed and perpetuated an international division of labour and a grossly inequitable distribution of economic resources, political power and social agency. Nor is it to forget that modernities in colonial locations were overdetermined by combined and uneven development in material, social and existential conditions.

In discussions of modernity, emphasis has been placed on separating reason from its expression in religion and metaphysics and situating it in the autonomous spheres of science, morality and art (Weber), or on the revolt against the normalizing function of tradition (Habermas), or on its effecting ‘a ruthless break with any or all preceding historical conditions’, having ‘no respect even for its own past, let alone of any pre-modern social order’.¹¹ The seismic effects of accelerated capitalist transformation are graphically invoked in The Communist Manifesto: ‘Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient prejudices and opinions are swept aside, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.’¹² (If this passage has been read as infused with a sense of exhilaration, it should be remembered that the writings of Marx and Engels are notable for recording and protesting the violence of expropriation, the systemized punishment and servitude that the entrenchment of capitalist social relations visited on both domestic and colonized populations.) In the peripheries, however, the disruption of the old, though no less catastrophic, was more insidious, and, because economic, social and cultural practices from earlier times survived alongside new ones, the articulations of metropolitan upheaval do not provide a grid on which to place the diverse colonial experience where the positions on residual and emergent cultural values were more complicated and the reflections on the present condition more measured and critical.

Even though new forms of economic life and social organization were coercively introduced into the colonial worlds, this does not mean that its inhabitants were passive spectators of metropolitan modernity, or that they perceived modernity as a gift from the colonizers. If colonialism was the messenger of modernity’s transformative capacities and emancipatory potential in colonial spaces, its message, bearing exploitation, inequalities and injustice, was refused by significant numbers of the literate and illiterate. For those few with access to a larger cognitive field afforded by a secular education, and aware of living in chronologically simultaneous but non-synchronous moments,¹³ modernity was enunciated as existential dilemma and political problem, but also as promising new horizons. These discontinuities made for a particular sensibility to modernity on colonial terrains, its intellectual and imaginative expressions registering an affection for and a dislocation from tradition, a propulsion toward but not an integration into the modern as this had been received by way of a predatory colonialism. Thus to relegate the modernities of peripheral societies to ‘shadow imitations’ of what had occurred in the metropole¹⁴ connotes an extraordinary insensitivity to the ways in which such experiential difference is apparent in prose and fiction dramatizing the trauma of modernity in situations radically distinct from those prevalent in the capitalist countries.

Whereas modernity on colonial terrains did not perform an absolute break with and rejection of the pre-modern, this respect for the past cannot be dismissed as nativist and regressive. This is apparent in a nuanced stance on modernization in the writings of political intellectuals who recognized that technology in the form of ships and guns had made colonial conquest possible; that railways and the telegraph had enabled the installation and maintenance of colonial rule; and that it was advanced machinery which had facilitated the development of mining and the intensive production of other raw materials – all of which were returned to metropoles in furtherance of their own technological progress. Yet because anti-colonial movements set out to transform colonialist economic structures and develop society’s productive forces in the interest of the inhabitants, their writings acknowledge that new technologies had the potential to liberate labour from physical servitude and free humankind of want. In this there is perhaps an affinity with Walter Benjamin’s usage of technik as signifying both technology or the material means of production – the hardware, the machinery, the empirical processes of production – and technique or the organization of social relations of production under capitalism, where private ownership and class exploitation constrain the benefits of technology and frustrate its promise.¹⁵

The analyses and tracts of radical anti-colonial movements simultaneously confront the exclusions of capitalist modernity and engage its liberatory dimensions, in this using the past to contemplate a post-capitalist tomorrow beyond both the pre-colonial and the colonial.¹⁶ Contra Arif Dirlik’s contention that the ‘rewriting of history after the Eurocentric teleology of capitalist modernity, ruled out the possibility of looking into the past as a source of possible future alternatives to this teleology’,¹⁷ the consciousness of modernity in the peripheries condensed what Fredric Jameson has called ‘the forces of the past and the future within that present’.¹⁸ Thus because anti-colonial discourses were directed at reclaiming histories insulted by colonialist representations and practices, and mobilizing the populace to seize the future, it is singularly inappropriate for some postcolonial critics to charge anti-colonialism with evoking ‘an archaic past and authentic communal identity in order to assert its project of modernization’, or for incorporating ‘modern science and polity in the anti-colonial agenda’, while representing these ‘as a return of the indigenous and the archaic’.¹⁹ The error of these accusations is evident when we consider the work of thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, who articulate the aspiration to a socialist internationalism while at the same time validating native cultures for nurturing collective life. This doubleness of enunciation is registered when Césaire’s regard for cultures undermined or destroyed by imperialism is juxtaposed to his vision of a post-European future:

I make a systematic defense of the non-European civilizations . . . They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but anti-capitalist . . . For us the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond it. It is not a dead society we want to revive . . . It is a new society that we must create, with the help of our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with the fraternity of olden days.²⁰

These sentiments are also audible in Fanon’s call to retrospection: ‘The plunge into the chasm of the past, is the condition and source of freedom’; and it can be detected in Cabral’s advocacy of developing ‘all aboriginal and positive values...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Beyond the Black Atlantic
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Relocating modernization and technology
• Part I: Negotiating African modernities
• Part II: Caribbean (in)versions of modernity
• Part III: Colonial creations of the West
• Part IV: Peripheral interpretations of technology