All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

I have decided finally to buy the book and it was delivered to me last Saturday by post. Once I got it on my hands, I started right away to read and just could not lay it down. The first chapter (The inventions of the Negro) was fantastic! The problem faced by White racists on what to do with Shakespeare’s Othello (I can’t believe Wikipedia today questions his race and skin colour) and the translation of the Bible into English (King James’ version) and Karl Marx’s affection for ancient Greek (”he queried how two societies separated by more than two millennia, by different cultures, by the appearance of a new civilization (Christians), and by untold changes in the forms of productions could share criteria of physical beauty and literary artistry-CJP”)

I leave this quote:

The purpose of racism is to control the behaviour of white people, not Black people. For Blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient.

Otis Madison, “Confronting Racism”, January 1997

["There is nothing like this book. At once a magnificent work of social and cultural history, an anthropology of race, and a political economy of racial capitalism and Empire, this is the most original examination of the American film industry ever published. But like all of Robinson's work, Forgeries of Memory and Meaningthe works of Shakespeare, scientific discourse, and early minstrelsy. And his prodigious research has does much more, extending over three centuries to reconstruct the roots of modern black representation in uncovered celluloid gems and theater works I never knew existed."--Robin D. G. Kelley, University of Southern California, link]

There he is, on the frontispiece, and there he is again, on the contents page, and in his other antic guises, scattered throughout the pages of Robinson’s magisterial history – the original, endlessly repeated Jim Crow, the comedic deformity and defamation of a people; a sell, a fraud.

Selling is part of what it’s about – or what it came to be about. But there is much more to it than that … And it all began much earlier, centuries before, in fact. For Forgeries is much more than a scholarly exegesis of the treatment of race in fi lm and performance, though it does that brilliantly, excavating a wealth of obscure, scarcely known material, as well as re- evaluating the great landmarks obscured as much, in their way, by unreckoning critical acclamation. Its fundamental achievement is to lay bare the cultural wellsprings of modern American society, the weight and meaning of its rootedness in slavery and the ingenious rapacity with which that fraudulent inheritance was invested; the dividends it paid; the costs it incurred.

Robinson’s narrative – though that word does not adequately convey the reconstructive nature of his enterprise – begins with nineteenthcentury ‘race’ science, reaching back to the images and understandings of ‘blackamores’ forged under pressure of slavery in a Europe that had long engaged in such practices and the consequent inferiorisation of their subjects. ‘Race is mercurial – deadly and slick … By the time the moving picture camera arrived on the scene, the Negro was in full costume. But before then, that costume would undergo extraordinary changes in the seventeenth century and then again at the end of the nineteenth century.’

As Robinson demonstrates, many of those extraordinary changes were wrought by the salvoes fi red, campaigns fought, territory grappled over, in the battle over slavery:

the sheer audacity and apparently undeterrable stream of antislavery propaganda and the frequent occurrence of actual slave revolts compelled a proslavery counterattack. It was at this moment in the struggle over slavery that many of the caricatures of Blacks which would dominate American fi lm came into existence.

The first target to come under the attack of white caricaturists was the free black middle class – its growth, despite all the forces ranged against it, a testimony to black resilience and enterprise. Its representatives were the most egregious in not knowing or respecting their allotted place, in daring to organise their own social lives, their own institutions, their own media, and were consequently pilloried for this through a sustained grossness of imagery and ridicule that permeated national cultural life.

It is no small part of Robinson’s achievement that, in giving us a history of ‘race’ in American fi lm, he gives us a history of black America for that period. And, in giving us a history of fi lm itself, he gives us a dynamic portrait of the growth of the industrial and fi nancial development with which the fi lm business was inextricably linked and out of which it grew. It is a concrete demonstration of the way in which the representations blazoned on the screen and absorbed by millions of people, multitudes of them new immigrant Americans, were only the fi nal flowering of a growth that was rooted deep in the economic and political structures of the nation. With painstaking subtlety, Robinson elucidates the links between, for example, the banking and finance houses, the indebted railroad companies (their infrastructure constructed by black convict labour) transporting the raw materials for industry across the continent and transporting
mass populations to the thriving world fairs and exhibitions where ethnographic images (in keeping with the latest race science) of blacks as savages, or blacks as slavery-nostalgia were purveyed – to advertise and sell anything from porridge and pancake mix to washing powder, tobacco and shoe polish. Images that were then used as source and substance for the new wonders of the moving picture industry, that then fed back into advertising and other media in a continuous loop.

The career of one such black icon is instructive – ‘Aunt Jemima’. Originally a fi gure from lyrics in the repertoire of the black minstrel Billy Kersands, ‘Jemima’ was then incorporated into blackface minstrelsy, and subsequently became the smiling ‘mammy’ face of a multi-million dollar food industry. The demeaning ‘mammy’ fi gure, with her fat jollity, knotted headscarf, devotion to the white family and total asexuality, bears, as Robinson demonstrates, no relation to any reality of southern black life for enslaved women. But this did not prevent her becoming the comforting face of race in popular culture. Aunt Jemima, launched

as a walking, talking fi gure at the massive Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, was performed by a black actress and a former slave, Nancy Green, who sang songs, told stories – and cooked pancakes; a front for bulk selling of this cheap, mass-produced commodity. Fictional Jemima took over real-life Green:

Though complemented by regional surrogates, Green would dominate the performance of Aunt Jemima till her death in 1923. By then her own biography and the fi ction of Jemima had long been merged by the corporate and historical reconstructions of the origins of Jemima. But hers was merely a particle of the fi ctionalizations of race, blackness and American history whose appearances would come to dominate American popular culture.

D.W. Griffi th’s 1915 Birth of a Nation is seen as crucial in what Robinson calls ‘the rewhitening of the nation’. He frames his discussion of Birth not only in terms of prior film historiography but also Griffith’s earlier work (‘paternalist, sentimental’); the source novel from which Birth is drawn; and the poisonous racial politics of the time. It was a time when the brilliant black boxer Jack Johnson (his mastery captured on fight films) so utterly refused to know his (blacks’ only) place that he was threatened by lynch mobs and public death threats and when a compound of anti- Semitism, racial and class hatred led to the railroading of a black man, Jim Conley, and a Jewish man, Frank Phagan, over the murder of a poor white woman; Phagan was eventually abducted from the prison farm where he had been sent and lynched. As Robinson laconically puts it, ‘class animosity and anti-Semitism superseded Negrophobia’; in Griffith’s fi lm elements from the murder case together with elements from the novel combined to

recast the American Civil War as a violent fratricidal confrontation between whites … Griffi th then reimagined the Reconstruction as a temporary moment of mulatto political ascendancy and Black triumph, rape, and anarchy … ‘Lincoln’s dream’ was to return Blacks to Africa, and only his assassination had frustrated his act of cleansing.

The film had opened in March 1915; Thanksgiving night that same year saw the formation in Georgia of the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. When is added to the wealth of this telling detail and close argument yet more contextual interconnection, between America’s subsequent ( arguably business-driven) involvement in the first world war and its growing expansionism, the formidable richness of Robinson’s research and the multi-layered complexity of his analysis become apparent.

That the weight of the racism, expressed in mass-manufactured cultural products, that Robinson documents is almost overwhelming is not surprising for:

At the onset of mass movie production, apartheid was the structural instrument of American capital, and American film makers supplied a galaxy of imagery and story lines which naturalized and popularized white hegemony.

Many of those story-lines, much of that imagery would, indeed, be surprisingly familiar to any student of English eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury drama. A 1911 Pathé fi lm For Massa’s Sake appears to lift its
main plot device from Thomas Morton’s 1816 The Revolt of Surinam, in which a freed slave sells himself back into slavery to clear his former master’s debt. Over and over, as in nineteenth-century English drama (with the towering exception of Ira Aldridge), blacks were represented by white actors in burnt cork make-up; while the evil mulatta/o, a staple of American motion pictures and an exemplar of the perils of race- mixing or ‘amalgamation’ had, also in the nineteenth century, crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, from a race-science obsessed America to England, that earlier home of racial science.

Yet it would be wrong to leave the story there. For in myriad ways black artists, actors, film makers, entertainers sought to challenge, subvert or broaden the humanity of those restricted images within which the major film industry attempted to confi ne them; from the black, independent and radical fi lmmaker Oscar Micheaux, whose best work was self- and community fi nanced on a shoestring budget; to the militant black actress Fredi Washington; the lesser known Theresa Harris; and the brilliant comedic presence of Mantan Moreland, with his capacity for ironic inversion of his role even as he played it. Even Stepin Fetchit on occasion neatly sidestepped his accustomed function. Not to mention those musicians and performers who, as blacks in minstrelsy, challenged the grotesquery of blackface minstrelsy, to deepen the humanity of the image of the black-skinned entertainer. At the end of the nineteenth century, one such entertainer, Bob Cole, actually performed in whiteface – an unprecedented cocking of the snook at America’s Jim Crow segregationist culture. Or there was the glamorous Aida Overton Walker, who from a singer and dancer became a choreographer – and the initiator of the dance craze, the cakewalk, which she taught to ‘English aristocrats and the cream of white American society’.

That is Robinson’s history for you – built, piece upon piece, from the ground up into a fascinating multi-storied structure, displaying a historical sweep that encompasses both the seemingly insignifi cant detail and the overarching grand design. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning in its breadth of vision, its originality of scholarship and its supple clarity of analysis is, quite simply, a tour de force.

By Hazel Waters, Race & Class 50: 98-101

The blood thirsty war warriors and propagandist due are back! Spielberg’s and Lucas’:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

A pathetic but an effective tool to dehumanize Non-Europeans.

And there is Iron Man film, a Pentagon Blockbuster.

Read the superb article by Nick Turse

By Cedric J. Robinson

Race & Class, Vol. 21, No. 4,

… at the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed

Richard Wright

The significance of Richard Wright as a black writer, as an intellectual and social activist has yet to be firmly established in the minds of most us. Certainly he was a most powerful writer, but was his literature art or propaganda? Was his work the product of a creative, imaginative and undoctrinaire mind, or the anguished thrust of ideology? And if his writing was essentially propaganda, what were its particular purposes? to whom was it directed? and for whom? These are the sorts of questions which haunt Wright’s image.
The ambiguity surrounding Wright is, in part, a consequence of his own intellectual odyssey. More precisely it is a consequence of his public honesty about the voyage. It was a journey which took him from marxism, and through existentialism, and finally to black nationalism - a journey which could be retraced biographically from his membership in the American Communist Party in the early 1930s to his death in France in 1960.

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” [A]t the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed.”

- Richard Wright, ’Blueprint for Negro Writing’, New Challenge (Fall 1937), p. 57.

This quote is also found in the last sentence of Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, before the ending chapter of the book.

By Cedric J. Robinson

The political and intellectual activities of W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963) span a most remarkable and critical period in world history. Among the developments most immediately pertinent to an inquiry into DuBois’s articulation with Liberia are: colonialism and its concomitant formations of Black middle classes; the peculiar and unique history of the ’Americo-Liberian’ elite; and the equally curious advent of the United States as a colonial power. By the early twentieth century, these elements were destined to collide when the United States and European states actively challenged the autonomy of Haiti,
Liberia and Ethiopia.’ How DuBois responded to one of those challenges, the attempt to reduce Liberia to an American colony, is my concern here. I shall contend that DuBois, blinded by the elitism characteristic of his class’s prerogative, fell prey to American colonialism. More importantly, DuBois’s treatment of Liberia provides evidence of the ambiguous conjuncture of the discourses of race and class.

As what came to be known as ’the new imperialism’ extended into the twentieth century, it provided unparalleled opportunities for the embryonic Black middle classes being nurtured in the western hemisphere and the colonies of Africa. As a class, their historical
interests were identical to those of other ’middling’ classes formed from professional service and intellectual and ideological functions rather than the domination of commerce and commodity production. Like their European predecessors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their contemporaries in the twentieth century all over the world, the Black middle classes - that is, the Black intelligentsias of the United States, the Caribbean and Africa - were captives of a dialectic: on the one hand, their continued development was structurally implicated in the continued domination of their societies by the Atlantic metropoles; on the other, the historical destiny of their class was linked to nationalism. Put directly, the future of the Black middle class was embedded in the contradictions of imperialism.

Margery Perham, the British anthropologist and colonial functionary, frankly described the projected role of the Black middle classes for an audience in attendance at a summer school training in colonial administration at Oxford University in 1938:

The basic difficulty [in carrying out ’indirect rule’] … is (and here I speak especially of Africa) the great gap between the culture of rulers and ruled. In administration, reduced to its simplest terms, it means that; for the most part the people do not understand what we want them to do, or, if they understand, do not want to do it … [therefore] we endeavour to instruct the leaders of the people in the objects of our policy, in the hope that they will, by their natural authority, at once diffuse the instruction and exact the necessary obedience.

Imperialism and colonialism required a native base for their administration of so-called ’dependencies’. The consequence was a class of bureaucrats, militias, educators and professionally- and technically trained factors whose existence and status hinged on its performance in the apparatus of domination. For this class, the objective of national development had to supersede all else - even national liberation. (more…)

Cedric Robinson reflects on his early years at UC Santa Barbara and then deals with current research he is conducting on images of Blacks and other minorities in early Hollywood films.

Highly recommended!

In this panel on The Future of Radical Scholarship, participants explore meaningful and systematic ways to guide teaching, research, and  archive-building that recuperates the radical tradition. 

[ I don't know why I did not post this article before.]

They say this town is full of cozenage, As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, Soul-killing witches that deform the body, Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks, And many such-like liberties of sin.

—William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

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• ’Mr. Minister, you made a strange speech. You come here speaking of Latin America, but this is not important. Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You’re wasting your time. ~ Henry Kissinger

I was invited tonight together with my lab groups to watch the premiere of 300, and after I read more about the movie and done some background, I’m glad that I have decided not to go. Here are some random articles I read.

It would be futile to knock down this movie for its historical distortions, given its self-promotion as a fantasy/adventure. The opening scene, showing the Spartans throwing the Persian emissaries down a well, actually relates not to Xerxes but to an earlier king, Darius, and Herodotus explicitly refers to it as a “crime” and goes on to say that when two Spartans offered themselves to Xerxes in retribution, the Persian king “with truly noble generosity replied that he would not behave like the Spartans”.
Obviously, it would be too much to expect the film’s producers even to hint at such virtuous behavior on the part of evil Persians, irrespective of the Achaemenid kings’ place in history as relatively benevolent empire-builders who freed the slaves and set new standards for peaceful co-existence among nations.Instead, 300 portrays them as bestial, dark forces descending on the civilized world, without once mentioning that their opponents, the Spartans, were slave-holders who, per the accounts of Herodotus, forced serfs known as Helots to war against Persians at Marathon, Thermopylae and elsewhere.

Neo-conservative film critics and fans of 300 see unrestrained idealism, suicide through warfare, and a take-no-prisoners approach to war as the ideals that should be exemplified.

The film takes this one step further. In imagery reminiscent of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935), Spartan men, invariably white as opposed to the darker-skinned Persians, are shown as finely chiseled reflections of the perfect masculine image.

Ironically, although the film avoids nearly any reference to the commonplace homosexuality in Spartan life, its imagery could border on pornographic if a few strategically placed pieces of cloth were removed.

It should come as no surprise to neo-conservative reviewers of this film that Nazi leaders held up Sparta’s society as a model on which to build their own utopia.

Fascist-type militarism, both in appearance and practice, is displayed throughout the film as the tool through which free men remain free and good can be separated from evil.

Although the 300 Spartans portrayed in the film ultimately did not triumph in their heroic attempt to repel the Persian hordes, they did strike a chord with militarist war hawks in the US. To the neo-conservatives, 300 represents a triumph of the will.

And more on Hollywood history of dehumanization Non-Europeans, read this a must read article! (I mean from A –> Z, probably the most important article I posted on this blog) by Cedric J. Robinson

Indiana Jones, the Third World and American foreign policy.

’There is sin and evil in the world, and we are enjoined by Scripture
and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.’

-Ronald Reagan (8 March, 1983)

’Asked what his invention [the Neutron Bomb] was good for, [Samuel] Cohen scratched his head and said it might be useful in the Third World.’

-Alexander Cockburn (26 May, 1984)

The premise of this essay is that the film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, is a crystallisation of the ideology which drives American foreign policy with respect to the Third World, the non-European world. This ideology is shared by policy-makers like George Shultz, Secretary of State, William Casey, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Jeane Kirkpatrick, American Ambassador to the United Nations, and Ronald Reagan, current US president. Through them and other ideologues who have come to positions of power in the American government (Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, Roger Fontaine at the National Security Council, Constantine Menges at the CIA, Otto Reich at AID, Chester Crocker of the State Department, etc.), this ideology has framed involvement in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Central America and the West Indies. And given the canons which govern the relationship between the state and media, its appearance in film is no less remarkable than elsewhere in American media: its daily exposure in our newspapers, our television evening news broadcasts, and in the varied forms of popular entertainment (comic books, situation comedies, adventure series, ’docu-dramas’ and the like) is routine.

Spielberg and Lucas

J. Hoberman, in a review of Indiana, observed: ’George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are the most successful filmmakers who ever lived, with the six top grossing movies in American history. Millionaires many times over, they can do whatever they want.’ (’White Boys’, Village Voice, 5 June 1984) Spielberg was the director and producer of Indiana (his other films have included E. T., Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist and Raiders of the Lost Ark), while Lucas (Star Wars) invented the story. In the ’Official Collectors Edition’, Spielberg recalled the beginnings of the project:

George told me the story of what became Raiders of the Lost Ark back in 1977 in Hawaii … He came to me with elements of a finished _ idea. A character named Indiana who would be an archaeologist/ adventurer and the film would be a throwback to some of the 1950s Republic serials like Spy Smasher and Tailspin Tommy and Don Winslow in The Navy…

… the mid-Thirties (the time period of the films) was a very masculine period, but it was also one of high adventure and exotic romance…

We have lost it. It seems we have discovered most everything there is to discover. You know, we can carbon test and pinpoint a date within a million, a thousand years or so and there are many new relics secreting from the bowels of the Earth today … It’s much simpler and more logical and more believable to create a romantic adventure when romance was romance and adventure was as hard as nails. Like in 1935.

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Some one recommended to me Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery. I have not read the book yet, but I was thinking about it two days ago while watching a documentary film on 19th century Denmark. I did not pay much attention until the presenter questioned how come a small country like Denmark surrounded by powerful nations could experience such in short period time wealth and knowledge and same time an industrial revolution. Of cource, the presenter never mentioned the small coloni Denmark had in the West Indies, and where the wealth came from. Not only Denmark, but every Western countries had their own privat colonies, so people like Kierkegaard, Goethe, Beethoven, Monet, Marx, Darwin and others quietly and peacefully create their masterpieces or their own private revolution.

To be honest, I had no expectation from the presenter, because it is too much to ask for, and as Cedric J. Robinson wrote:

“The historical fiction of the industrial bourgeoisie, however, also functioned as an entirely different warrant with respect to non-Western peoples. It clothed the bourgeoisie in the ideological role of transcendant social consciousness. The African slaves had played no part in their own liberation. They had been the passive heirs of a spiritual revolution autochthonously generated within bourgeois society. Now freed, they like other Third World peoples were seen as apprentice- Westerners subject to an incontestably superior authority, the conceptualization of social and cultural history commanded by the European and Euro-American ruling classes. Any deviation by them from the fictional construct of Western historical development would prove sufficient to expel them from the company of civilized nations. And once expelled, the West was under no obligation to extend them the expectation of democratic rule or the courtesies of international law. The dominant rationales for the exercise of American power in Africa, Central America, Latin America and Asia are the generic permutations of bourgeois historiography.”

Here is an article by Cedric J. Robinson on capitalism, slavery and bourgeois historiography. The PDF file with unedited text, notes, figure and references can be found at the bottom of the page.

——————————————–

Forty years ago, in his brilliant, provocative, and enormously influential Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams maintained that the wealth produced by the slave trade and by black slave labor in the colonies provided the capital that financed the British industrial revolution. Historians and economists have discredited this thesis by showing that even on the basis of the most generous calculations, the combined profits from the slave trade and West Indian plantations could not have come to 5 per cent of the British national income at a time when planters were prospering and the industrial revolution was getting under way.

David Brion Davis (1984)

. . . Eric Williams’s hypothesis that capital which derived from the profits of West Indian slavery fuelled Britain’s Industrial Revolution has now been discredited.

J. Morgan Kousser (1985)

. . . the thesis of Eric Williams . . . that New World slavery provided the capital that financed the Industrial Revolution in Britain [is an] untenable proposition . . .

(Sir) M.I. Finley (1985)

The late Eric Williams may have gone too far in his celebrated argument that the rise of capitalism itself could be largely accounted for by the enormous profits generated by the slave systems of the Americas. But no one now doubts that New World slavery was a key factor in the rise of the West European economies.

Orlando Patterson (1984)

On the basis of such apparently good authority, one might easily assume that whatever Eric Williams intended to demonstrate forty long years ago, he did not. Nevertheless some caution would be warranted. First, it is a bit disconcerting that there should be such fundamental disagreement among those authorities on precisely what Williams’s subject was. Though they approximate to one another in their terminology, their criticisms only appear to be equivalents: the British industrial revolution does not coincide with the rise of capitalism; nor do the ‘profits of West Indian slavery’ equate with the ‘wealth produced by the slave trade and black slave labor’. These critics differ not only in their historical architectures but in their economies as well. Worse still, as we shall discover, there is only the slightest resemblance between these assertions and what Williams actually maintained.

This essay will take up each of these matters in its proper course. Eventually we must also inquire why it has been so important to ‘discredit’ Williams in the first instance. This, too, we shall find is not a simple matter since the circumstances and motives behind the (successive) discreditations have differed. But granted for the moment the delinquencies of his critics, the place to start is with Williams himself.

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