THE TREASON OF HISTORIES
Tzvetan Todorov, a nonhistorian of interest, confessed in The Conquest of America: The Question of the
Other (New York: Harper & Row,
1984) "that to become conscious of the relativity (hence the
arbitrariness) of any feature of our culture is already to shift it a little,
and that history (not the science but its object) is nothing other than a
series of such imperceptible shifts" (254). Todorov's meditation on Spanish genocide in
the Caribbean and Mexico is a remarkable document of his negotiation with his
adopted culture, a record of how the quite "other" narratives of that
culture often provide sobering
instruction about the spectacle of Western histories and historiographies. It is reasonable to think the so-called
European imagination (not its ontology but its representation) is condemned to
refashion its outlier properties (when
it dares to be honest) and to manufacture fictions with alacrity (when it opts
to prevaricate). Seldom are we urged to
associate such instability with African and Asian acts of remembering and
forgetting. Were we to take a radical
plunge and have immediate experiences with cognitive hydraulics, perhaps we'd
be less bamboozled by uncertainty. We might be less awed by indecisiveness, particularly in discussions of
imperialism, ancient and modern stories of group hatred, and other hegemonic enterprises. Perhaps we'd be less gullible regarding the
quality of histories and more adult about the deliberate selectivity of their rhetorical gestures . And having plunged
into Yao Glover's June 7 2016 entry on "The Death of Narrative" (see
http://freeblackspace.blogspot.com), I see a flicker of hope in a maelstrom. Nothing more than a flicker.
Todorov's meditation, like Edward W. Said's seminal studies
--Orientalism ( New York: Vintage,
1979 ) and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1993), can serve as a prelude for reading
Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause:
A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) and Ibram
X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning:
The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books,
2016). Said and Todorov activate special recognitions.
Although neither
Todorov nor Said writes explicitly about contracts, their works remind us of how
essential the idea of a contract is in any narrative that claims to be history. A contract, whether it is explicit or not, functions in the asymmetrical engagements
readers have with writers (who can only be as present as their texts are).
In the reading of American narrative texts , the contract is indivisibly
aesthetic and political. Affect and effect
matter greatly. This feature has
been, and continues to be, crucial at any chosen moment in the culture(s) of
writing and reading in the United States
of America and especially crucial for readers who want to free themselves from cages of
American miseducation and self-contradicting promises. Historians, I would
argue, are not telescopes and microscopes, i.e., objective , scientific instruments.
In the matrix of the American democratic experiment, freedom
is more a myth or social science fable than a palpable reality. Therefore, it is prudent in any consumption
of American history as narrative to
frame one's reading within some awareness of the penetrating insights of
Charles W. Mills's The Racial Contract
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). His book has little value as a guide to
African and Asian histories, but it is a persuasive exposure of what ought to
be known regarding histories of the Euro-named Americas. It is a counterweight to the distractive
delight of Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy. Mills directs us
to the realm of common sense as he notes a major discrepancy between the idea
of the social contract as sketched by Jean Jacques Rousseau and the machinery
of the racial contract conceived and birthed by the "canonized"
fathers of the American republic. Mills
is a philosopher, and what he says about the phenomenon of racism in his
book is provocative:
Racism as an ideology needs to be understood as aiming at
the minds of nonwhites as well as whites, inculcating subjugation. If the social contract requires that all
citizens and persons learn to respect themselves and each other, the Racial
Contract prescribes nonwhite self-loathing and racial deference to white
citizens"(89).
As I ponder what reading history might entail, Mills's
statement rewords itself: racism is a set of double-edged , entrenched beliefs
designed to convince Americans to dislike themselves and all other human
beings. Those beliefs are magnified each
day in mass media, in the spinning of infotainments.
Borrowing language from the blurbs Nell Irvin Painter and
John Stauffer wrote for The Slave's Cause,
one might say that Manisha Sinha has written "a revolutionary
narrative" that "should be required reading for every scholar in the
humanities and social sciences who is concerned with the American
condition." It is easy to imagine
that a genuine revolutionary narrative would annihilate Western reasoning. Sinha's aim is not to assassinate reason but
to explore what reason habitually represses. The authorizing or marketing use
of blurbs does not always serve the needs of all potential readers, and one might be misled
to believe Sinha's work is so specialized as to be of minimal interest to all
American citizens. Have we abandoned concern with our everyday condition? Do we
believe suddenly that there is innate
value in whatever is labeled "revolutionary" ? I am not persuaded that we have done either of
those things.
We do have revolts (drastic revisions) in the writing of
history, and technological (digital) advances do sharpen our vision of how the
past "lives" in the present.
It is doubtful that we have yet witnessed a genuine revolution or
irreversible change in our habits of thinking about the past. "Revolution"
is an attractive but ultimately impotent sign.
We can speculate,
however, that Sinha addresses American
readers who have reached a certain level of critical thinking about
reconstructing the evidence of the past, whether they have come to that point
through academic training or along the paths of indigenous knowing (the knowing
associated most with homespun oral histories). It is a capital error to think non-academic
readers are incapable of detecting sense and nonsense in academic writing.
Her admirable,
rigorous research and the readability of her prose can appeal to all who know that the need for abolition did not come to a
dramatic halt in 1865. In the United States, the need to abolish one
reprehensible attitude or habit or
another began with European colonial
history and prevails in the 21st century
as we continue to quest for the golden fleece of social justice and human
rights. The prize disintegrates as soon as one touches it, leaving us in
possession of new and improved kinds of
enslavement. Indeed, the
contemporary enslaved persons who have a
desperate cause in our nation are not always those whom we unthinkingly throw
into the basket marked "people of color." One of the major contributions
of The Slave's Cause may be its tacit
announcement that people who have no color are still waiting for Godot, ignorant
that the obligation to take a side in the agon of endless abolition is normal.
Such a perspective informs Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, a
refreshing and serious exercise in
iconoclasm. Calling his work a
"definitive history, " Kendi challenges the treason of histories (the betrayal of good intentions) by punching
it out with its own native categories of analysis. In this sense, he puts Ishmael Reed's
familiar metaphor ----writing is fighting ---to good use. Kendi is forthcoming
about writing in a historical moment when white on white criminality is on the
rise and the disdain Americans have for one another is ascending in our sociopolitical circus. His aim is to document the origins of racist
and racialist ideas in antiquity and to focus primarily on the American display
of racist ideas by using Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd
Garrison, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis
as representative figures in what he calls "the history of …three
distinct voices ---segregationists, assimilationists, and anti-racists --and
how they each have rationalized racial disparities, arguing why Whites have
remained on the living and winning end, while Blacks remained on the losing and
dying end" (2). Kendi is ambitious,
and the breadth of coverage in Stamped
from the Beginning may be as daunting for some readers as the depth of
coverage can be in The Slave's Cause.
In the spirit of
constructive critical response, I note that Kendi and Sinha do not go far
enough in critiquing the treacherous Black/White
binary that is a cancer in body of American histories and in the minds of all
American citizens. It is probably a reification of racism to insist that the
primary colors (metonymies) of the
United States of America are Red, Yellow, Black, Brown, and White, but an
effort to provide a fuller disclosure of the multi-colored dynamics of our
nation and the disjointed experiences of its inhabitants ought to be the
dominant if not exclusive aim of American histories which want to move us into
a better state of being human. We cannot
expect Kendi and Sinha to produce magic.
It is enough that they have been honest in showing us the limits of
historical understanding when the issue
is building knowledge of the United States.
It is sufficient that they have provided noteworthy books which do move
us to be vigilant rather than abjectly stupid.
They have certainly warned us about the futility of thinking the
rhetorical shadows of hope in American histories exist as rainbow signs for
anyone.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. June 7, 2016
