Experiments in Exile

C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness

Laura Harris

• Publisher: American Literatures Initiative
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823279807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, Experiments in Exile charts a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the "undocuments" that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, it argues that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica's experiments recall the insurgent sociality of "the motley crew" historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James's and Oiticica's projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker's inability to find evidence of that sociality's persistence or futurity, it shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew's multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James's and Oiticica's undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.

1

What Happened to the Motley Crew?

James, Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness

In The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, the historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker uncover the lost history of the motley crew, an insurgent social formation that emerged from the connections that developed between the disparate people, violently dispossessed and dispersed by the interlinked systems of enclosure, whom settler colonialism and slavery forced into brutal regimes of labor, who composed what they call the Atlantic proletariat of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. According to Linebaugh and Rediker, this Atlantic proletariat was marked by its difference. Its “coherence” as a social formation emerged in and through internal and external dissonance and dissidence. As they note, it “was not a unified cultural class, and it was not a race.” It was “motley, both dressed in rags and multi-ethnic in appearance.” It was “anonymous, nameless,” and, at the same time, “multitudinous, numerous, growing.” Though it was “female and male, of all ages,” it was figured, historically, by the self-styled Herculean heroes of the newly globalizing formal economy, as a feminized chthonic monster, a many-headed hydra that survives attempts to kill it with its “wayward reproductivity”: whenever one of its heads is chopped off, a new one grows in its place.1 This Atlantic proletariat was, moreover, fundamentally “cooperative and laboring.” And while subject to terror and coercion (“its hide was calloused by indentured labor, galley slavery, plantation slavery, convict transportation, the workhouse, the house of correction”), it was always also, Linebaugh and Rediker insist, “self-active” (though we will have to explore what “self-active” means) and “creative.”2

The motley crew began, Linebaugh and Rediker argue, as a “unit of human cooperation” assembled from, for example, a ship’s company or, on plantations, “beneath the whip” for the performance of specific tasks. Managers of the new economy often deliberately mixed people of different languages and ethnicities in order to discourage any solidarities that might exceed their capacity to regulate and exploit, but as Linebaugh and Rediker show, the very cooperation on which these managers depended seems inevitably and serially to have resisted and disrupted this strategy. Through such cooperation, the motley crew reconfigured itself, becoming, in Linebaugh and Rediker’s words, “a socio-political formation.” Its later iterations were “armed agglomerations of various crews and gangs, that possessed their own motility and were often independent of leadership from above.”3 The motley crew that coalesces as the focus of Linebaugh and Rediker’s historical analysis absorbs and combines the various forms of collaborative insurgency that developed as a crucial counterforce within the new global economy, connecting them without collapsing the differences between them. Its motleyness reemerges as action in concert: in unharmonious revolt and in the revolutionizing of harmony. This is to say, in Linebaugh and Rediker’s terms,

Over time the second (political) meaning emerged from the first (technical) one, broadening the cooperation, extending the range of activity, and transferring the command from overseers or petty officers to the group itself. This transition was manifested in the actions of the motley crew in the streets of the port cities: as sailors moved from ship to shore, they joined waterfront communities of dockers, porters, and laborers, freedom-seeking slaves, footloose youth from the country, and fugitives of various kinds. At the peak of revolutionary possibility, the motley crew appeared as a synchronicity or an actual coordination among the “risings of the people” of the port cities, the resistance of African-American slaves, and Indian struggles on the frontier.4

This continually reinvented force, in its unlikely “self-activation,” “launched the age of revolution in the Atlantic.” It “created breakthroughs in human praxis” and new modes of collective life within and against enclosure, settler colonialism, and slavery, the racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism they consolidated, and the modern state that administered and defended them.5 While Linebaugh and Rediker describe the motley crew as “a revolutionary subject,” we might understand this disorderly assemblage, this expansive series of synchronicities, coordinated risings, and agglomerations, as ever “growing” into something less and, at the same time, more than this.

But what became of the motley crew? What was the fate of the breakthroughs it forged? Linebaugh and Rediker insist that the motley crew was defeated and its potential reemergence foreclosed for future generations by a mode of racialization that divided its various components. Those who had once worked alongside one another to defeat a common enemy began to be identified and to identify themselves through the separate, irreconcilable analytics of race and class. The eighteenth century, Linebaugh and Rediker argue, was “the very moment when the biological category of race was being formed and disseminated in Britain and America, and no less the moment of the formation of the political and economic category of class.” As a result, “organizations [focused on workers’ rights] would eventually make their peace with the nation, as the working class became national, English. With the rise of pan-Africanism, the people in diaspora became a noble race in exile.”6 Englishness (or inclusion in any other national formation) secured citizenship, a place within the modern nation-state as a member of its legitimate (white) working class. Through racialization, however, “blackness,” disparaged and criminalized, was understood to be fundamentally alien and threatening to the modern nation and nation-state and necessarily excluded from citizenship. It would, in Linebaugh and Rediker’s account, come to identify itself as an exile formation enclosed within the nation-state from which it was banned. The history of motley, transatlantic radicalism and its common idea, its “egalitarian multiethnic concept of humanity,” would henceforth be obscured, as it was broken into a range of separate narratives organized around the newly consolidated opposition of (white) nation-state citizenship and unincorporable (however constantly accumulated) blackness.

I begin with Linebaugh and Rediker’s memorialization of the motley crew because I want to reopen the question of its fate and futurity. I want to consider its modes of persistence and its modes of reproduction in ways that take into account gender and sexuality while resisting the ways these categories are usually aligned with productive and reproductive processes. It is in pursuing this question that I have become interested in the radical twentieth-century experiments of C. L. R. James and Hélio Oiticica.

I INVOKE AND introduce James and Oiticica, though my interest is not just in them; it is also in those experiments in which they were involved, experiments that they worked to formulate but that preceded and exceeded their formulation. I want to avoid reducing this study to an examination of the genius of two great men because their work depended on contact and collaboration with so many others, including those whose names are unrecorded and whose contributions are never fully acknowledged. To account for that interaction and collaboration, I describe their studies of but also within the modes of performativity that they encountered in cricket and samba and in the barrack yards of Port of Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, spaces they entered into in their early wanderings away from “home.” I explore their efforts to appropriate what they found there, in ways that would seem to reenact the kinds of exploitation that are so fundamental to the functioning of racial capitalism, but also the ways in which the modes of performativity they tried to grasp worked in and through their works, appropriating and using those works as media for their own expression, erupting into and disrupting James’s and Oiticica’s intellectual itineraries. Perhaps the best way to attempt this is to trace the contact that effects that rerouting, beginning with James’s and Oiticica’s early excursions and into spaces where their already given nonbelonging seemed more pronounced. But first we must understand something about their respective situations at “home” and in exile. In accounting for their respective histories, I draw on James’s and Oiticica’s own complex narration and renarration of their itineraries, even when they cannot be given the last word. I draw also on many other studies of James and Oiticica that explore in much greater depth the specific national and regional contexts or intellectual fields within which James and Oiticica first worked. Insofar as I depart from those studies, it is, again, not in the interest of disregarding or dismissing them but in the interest of making a different kind of argument. What I offer is not a proper history of James or Oiticica or Trinidadian or Brazilian national culture or even the motley crew as a more perfect historical subject but an improper history, an account of the “something more” that the coincidences, resonances, and commonalities between them might amount to or enable.

CYRIL LIONEL ROBERT James (1901–1989) was a schoolteacher, writer, and political organizer. He was raised in the small town of Tunapuna, Trinidad, when Trinidad was a crown colony of Great Britain. James grew up within a complex class and caste system, defined by both economic status and gradations of skin color, that structured the internal and external social relations of the colonized in early twentieth-century Trinidad. This system was the legacy of settler colonialism, the genocide and displacement of the indigenous Amerindians by the Spanish, the immigration, encouraged by the Spanish, of European Catholics, particularly French and free people of color, and the later population and administration of the island by the British, to whom the island was ceded in 1797. This colonial settlement was accompanied by the importation of large numbers of Africans during the slave trade and, after abolition, of indentured laborers, first from China, West Africa, and the Portuguese island of Madeira but then, in larger numbers, from India, to sustain the economic structures that had been established, primarily in connection with the sugar plantation system.

Though James himself was dark skinned, his grandfathers’ positions as skilled laborers (one of his grandfathers worked as a “pan boiler” on a sugar plantation, a position usually held by white men, and the other was the first black engine driver on the Trinidad Government Railway) and his father’s position as a schoolteacher endowed him with middle-class status. This status was a precarious one, however, maintained through a carefully managed “respectability,” modeled on the puritanical morals imposed by the British. It was always in danger of being brought down by an unavoidable and, again, imposed proximity with the lowly morals associated with Afro- and Indo-diasporic colonial sociality. James was taught, for this reason, to wear his respectability as “armour”7 and to keep his distance from the calypso tents and other popular pleasures in which a potentially “engulfing” low morality was gathered and performed.

James devoted himself, instead, to cricket, imported to the island in an effort to “civilize” the local population by imposing on them the code of bourgeois British values that had come to define the sport. His love of the game was rooted, he later recalled,8 in the way it was played by two black players, the workman-like Arthur Jones, whose brilliant play was embellished by his trademark white hat, and the unruly Matthew Bondman, whose career was cut short by his inability or unwillingness to conform to the basic propriety demanded by the “code” of the game.

James also immersed himself in British literature, particularly the works of William Makepeace Thackeray, whose characteristically restrained characters and prose, embodiments of “Puritanism incarnate,” he especially admired. He discovered Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in his mother’s collection (from which he frequently drew) and returned to it again and again throughout his childhood. Through his reading, as he later recalled, he had already become a British intellectual.9

James won a place at Queens Royal College, the most prestigious secondary school in Trinidad, from which, despite the distractions of cricket and literature, he managed to graduate. Upon completion of his education, James, like his father, became a schoolteacher. He married his first wife, Juanita Samuel Young, but this relationship did not survive the transformations that James’s career later underwent and when James left to pursue his career in exile, she remained behind. James also worked as a part-time cricket reporter for a local newspaper and continued to play cricket as a member of a local club. The sport brought him into contact with the wider world of Trinidad, beyond school and beyond the boundaries of the world that had been so carefully delineated for him by his family’s respectability. It also precipitated his first great moral crisis, which came when he had to choose which club he was to associate himself with. Each club was linked to a specific social caste defined by economic status and color. Though he was dark skinned, James’s education earned him an invitation not only to the black working-class Shannon club but also to the lighter-skinned professional-class Maple club. He accepted Maple’s invitation but sought to rectify what he later came to recognize as a great mistake through his relationships with other players, including the great Shannon cricketer Learie Constantine. Collaborating with Constantine in the writing of Constantine’s autobiography, Cricket and I, led James to begin to question his faith in the supremacy of British values.

In addition to cricket, James intensified his own literary studies and decided to pursue a career as a fiction writer. Working together with other nonwhite intellectuals, he helped form a literary association for nonwhites called the Maverick Club. He edited, with fellow club member Alfred Mendes, the short-lived literary magazine Trinidad and contributed to its successor, edited by Albert Gomes, the Beacon, which featured literature and lively political debate.10 Through these entities, he worked to build a new literary scene in Trinidad, advancing new approaches to literature, linking those approaches to political debates, and building an audience that would engage this emergent intellectual and political formation. James developed his own particular approach to literature through his visits to and conversations with people in the slum-like barrack yards of Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain. His writing took the form of realist renditions, including frank representations of sexuality and violence, unrestrained by puritan moralizing, of the social life and expressive practices of its residents. Reactions to this work were mixed in Trinidad, with one story in particular provoking strong reactions from middle-class readers, and James recognized that there were clear limits to what he, as a black man, could do and say in Trinidad. He had had a story published in the British Saturday Evening Review, however, which was republished in the collection Best Short Stories. So he decided to migrate to England to pursue his literary career, departing in 1932.

In England, James was supported by Constantine, who had come to play cricket there, and by his own part-time work as a cricket reporter for several British newspapers, and his interests began to shift from literature to politics. He published Minty Alley, the novel he had written in Trinidad, but his future pursuits were more accurately foreshadowed by the publication of “The Case for West-Indian Self Government,”11 an abridged version of another text he had written before leaving Trinidad, a biography of the Trinidadian politician Arthur A. Cipriani, self-proclaimed representative of the black masses and champion of the “barefoot man.” James became a key figure in the Pan-Africanist movement, working alongside fellow Trinidadian George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, R. Ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Experiments in Exile
• 1. What Happened to the Motley Crew? James, Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness
• 2. Dialectic of Contact: The Organ/ization and the Nests
• 3. Undocuments: Reproduction at the Margins
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index