On the Potential of Failure

On the Potential of FailurePostcolonial Melancholia by Paul Gilroy; Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary ofCaribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 by Michelle Ann StephensReview by: Charlie Samuya VericAmerican Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 255-264Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068360 .

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On the Potential of Failure Charlie Samuya Veric

Postcolonial Melancholia. By Paul Gilroy. Wellek Library Lectures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 192 pages. $24.50 (cloth).

Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectu- als in the United States, 1914-1962. By Michelle Ann Stephens. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 384 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper- back).

On the Potential of Failure I 255

In Death of a Discipline Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raises what she calls the

toughest question in the diaspora: How many are we?1 It is a cryptic question that compels us to consider our concept of what is human and why the human is in a state of permanent emergency. The question is doubly difficult and complex because it is also addressed to those of us who profess the humanities in general, and the postcolonial in particular. Indeed the query is

important because it implies a sense that the field of postcolonial studies is no

longer adequate to the needs of the changing world historical conditions. Ac-

cording to Spivak, not only do we fail because our way of pursuing the interrelated discipline we know as postcolonial studies has proved insufficient, but we also fail because the discipline - conceived as it is - can no longer cope with current historical exigencies. The crisis of postcolonial studies has taken on the force of common sense, and when the obsolescence of the field becomes commonsensical, this condition of banality risks making us all irrelevant. Paul Gilroy's Postcolonial Melancholia and Michelle Ann Stephens's Black

Empire are two of the most recent interventions that have emerged from this moment of crisis. On the one hand, Gilroy and Stephens's work grapples with the predicament that Spivak has sounded in her book and thus shares the marks of disciplinary crisis. On the other hand, both Gilroy and Stephens hope to address the same disciplinary inadequacy and, for this reason, both books are timely interventions.

These books tackle complementary issues. Gilroy's recent publication was

originally conceived and delivered in 2001 as part of the Wellek Library Lec- tures, a series of events that the Critical Theory Institute holds annually at the



256 I American Quarterly

University of California, Irvine. Gilroy's work therefore has all the weight of institutional sponsorship. If Gilroy represents the vantage point of self- reflex- ive institutionalization, which is a gift and a burden, Stephens s work emerges from a different form of institutional necessity. Her book was originally written as a doctoral dissertation in American studies at Yale University. In a sense, both works are privileged; but they are also works with a felt sense of engage- ment and challenge. Part of this stems from the authors' relationships with the

question of race. Both authors have a personal and political commitment to the transatlantic movement of black peoples and the idea of a transnational Caribbean, respectively. The ambivalence in Gilroy and Stephens s work - the sense of institutional privilege and the desire to look reflexively at the institu- tion itself - is also rooted in the rethinking of postcolonial studies and race on the one hand, and the transnational turn in American studies and the actual-

ity of globalization, on the other. Accordingly, the work of both authors' is a kind of work in progress in which they grapple with the crisis and formulate creative ways of exceeding its limits.

Spivak speaks of the fatal exhaustion of postcolonial theory that, according to her, is caught in mere nationalism over colonialism. {Death of a Discipline was also written for the Wellek Library Lectures and presented a year earlier than Gilroy's.) She argues that while cultural studies is generally invested in what she calls the "new immigrant" community, postcolonial studies is stuck with India and "Sartrian Fanon." To break away from this old postcolonial model, Spivak proposes the reinvention of comparative literature into some-

thing planetary - a direct response to globalization that puts into effect a uni-

tary system everywhere.2 Indeed Spivak's declaration of a disciplinary crisis is

important for two reasons: the statement first calls attention to the inadequacy of the discipline and, second, makes a plea for its renewal. However, it is

important to mention that even before the publication of Death of a Disci-

pline, postcolonialism had already suffered from chronic attacks. Arif Dirlik, Ella Shohat, and Anne McClintock are, for instance, some of its prominent critics. In fact, such criticism had compelled Stuart Hall to clarify when the

postcolonial was and what separated it from its "others."3 What we can glean from this discussion is that the language of crisis suffuses contemporary disci-

plines and interrelated fields of study such as postcolonial studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and American studies.4

Gilroy's notable contribution to the current disciplinary crisis lies in his insistence on the postcolonial present whose conditions are marked by the

convergence of racial and national issues in the aftermath of colonial encounters. Divided into two parts, Postcolonial Melancholia brings together Gilroy's




Wellek Library Lectures, wherein he provides a defense of what he calls a

twentieth-century Utopia of tolerance, peace, and mutual regard. The first

part, titled "The Planet," recalls the setting of the twentieth century that has made race a distinct political category, while the other half, titled "Albion," confronts its historical legacies. Gilroy argues that colonial history is useful in

understanding the manifest contradictions of the present, in which a new

imperial order is emerging. Like colonialisms of the past, this new imperial condition employs the guise of civilization to beautify its terror. Hence Gilroy reclaims colonial history and uses it in comprehending the unfolding conditions of the postcolonial present. He proposes that the question of race is crucial in rethinking the present abuses of power.

Gilroy s problem, however, is double-edged, because the question of race is so institutionalized it has become inextricably invested with common sense. This is what he calls the "populist metaphysics of race" that obscures the subtle

yet entrenched refunctioning of racism in contemporary everyday life. Over-

developed yet no longer imperial nations, such as present-day Britain, have seized the notions of rights and cosmopolitanism, elevating them as instances of a national culture, only to evacuate the same ideas of their redemptive potential. This has become more pronounced in the wake of September 1 1 , when we find the idea of universal good being deployed to justify the use of force against sovereign nations. With the institutionalization of difference and the states appropriation of multiculturalism, the question of race is effectively depoliticized. As Gilroy makes clear, race has become a matter of culture. Here,

Raymond Williams's objection to the dominant tendency to transform experience into a finished product is instructive: race as a structure of feeling is

appropriated as a form of culture and therefore cast subsequently as an experience in the past. Gilroy believes that this culture of transforming our present experience into something bygone can be disabled if a political culture is re- stored. Pure fiat, charity, and good will are powerless in the presence of this racial order and, thus, only a consistent and serious political action can undo it. In other words, the persistence of race in renovated forms is indicative of the fundamental emasculation of politics.

For Gilroy, the contemporary loss of politics can be attributed to some extent to the prevailing responses to the question of race. He outlines two dominant - and debilitating - tendencies that forestall purposeful and productive politics. From one perspective, race either disappears or becomes a

marginal matter given the institutionalization of difference. If this perspective assumes race to be irrelevant nowadays, the other perspective asserts its per- manence and manifest nature in society. This, according to Gilroy, is charac-




teristic of U.S. discourses on race. In such a dependence on the concept of the

inevitability of race, the question of race becomes, above all, an experiential and therapeutic question that precedes all other considerations. Both positions are politically untenable for Gilroy. The first is blind to the circum- stances of those whose lives continue to be shaped by Western imperial and colonial power; the second is shortsighted because it is self-referential. In the end, both positions are at ease with fixed concepts of particularity and diver-

sity. These tendencies define the existing responses to racial thinking - and

they happen to be the deep sources of Gilroy s discontent. Indeed postcolonial theory and racial critique risk facing a political dead-

end that may imperil the fundamental idea of a shared future on this planet. Gilroy attributes this failure to the antihumanism in the Left. The idea of the human, given its deployment in racist and imperialist projects, has been sum-

marily rejected. Here is where Gilroy makes the necessary leap, suggesting that the way sameness and difference are analyzed can be altered productively so that the strangeness of strangers is defamiliarized and displaced. The idea of what is human, then, becomes a Utopian vision that exceeds the limits of difference. This way, other dimensions of a basic sameness can be recognized and, henceforth, rendered significant. For Gilroy, the recovery and practice of

cosmopolitanism from below is the crucial element that can bring us closer to the fulfillment of this Utopia. He cites the sort of transcendent human solidar-

ity that Mahatma Gandhi and W. E. B. DuBois anticipated and enacted in their time. This is a cosmopolitan solidarity whose movement is necessarily outward - one that derives its singular power from a multiply shared experience of subjection across time and space. Thus Gilroy argues that the capacity "to imagine political, economic, and social systems in which 'race' makes no sense is an essential, though woefully underdeveloped part of formulating a credible antiracism, as well as an invaluable transitional exercise" (54).

Two things stand out in Gilroy's formulation of cosmopolitanism: (1) the

Utopia of absent racialization as an antiracial strategy and (2) the strategy itself as a transitional tool of antiracism. To achieve this, Gilroy shifts his attention

away from the nation-state and develops a European frame. Gilroy cites the

experience of Britain in the aftermath of empire, wherein the loss of imperial prestige has generated embarrassing anxieties that are suppressed. This denial, however, is contradicted by the increasing presence of postcolonial people who have made Britain their home since 1945. Wittingly or not, their presence provokes the remembering of a shameful imperial history that is otherwise

forgotten. The immigrant therefore becomes the bearer of an irreconcilable

past - the embodiment of postcolonial melancholia. Indeed, a critical under-




standing of imperial history is crucial in correcting such a misapprehension: the immigrant arrives because Britain and the rest of Europe had their prior arrival in distant shores. The lesson that can be seized from this leads us to understand the ways strangers, aliens, and blacks - along with the logic of

European imperial history - have come to inform the continent s political and cultural actions and formations. This is a transitional exercise that can bring us closer to a Utopian space in which "race," as we know it, will have lost its

damaging sense. This transition demands the transcendence of disciplinary categories and the crossing of national borders so that a kind of planetarity is allowed to surface. Ultimately, this planetarity signifies all that is humanly contingent and mobile. It calls attention to the inestimable finitude of human existence on the planet so that every stranger becomes a neighbor.

It is this planetary desire that Stephens's work shares with Gilroy. With

Stephens, however, the frame of reference is no longer Britain or Europe, but the United States. Yet the connection in their work is solid - they both em-

phasize the transatlantic movement of people of color to the imperial centers and confront the fact of disciplinal crisis. For Gilroy, the crisis involves the

paradoxical loss of racial politics in the postcolonial present. For Stephens, it is the inadequacy of a national framework in understanding diasporic experiences in the United States. In short, what Stephens confronts is the crisis of American studies. Her work demonstrates that the disciplinary crisis of Ameri- can studies cannot be explained simply as a breakdown that is attributable to the internal logic of the field. In fact, what she proves is that the failure itself is

symbolic of the inability to recognize "American" problems and experiences -

whose origins develop outside of U.S. national borders - as problems and ex-

periences that exist on a transnational plane. Stephens focuses on the movement of Caribbean intellectuals to the United States after World War I in order to reconfigure "American" experience. Black Empires eight chapters are

organized under two main topical currents: "Blackness and Empire: The World War I Moment" and "Mapping New Geographies of History." The former outlines the conjuncture of culture and politics in the context of World War I, while the latter explores the alternative ways of imagining a black sense of

identity and belonging as a response to the limits of the nation-state. The book centers on the imagination of a diasporic black identity in the literature and politics of three male writers of Caribbean descent: Marcus Garvey, Claude

McKay, and C. L. R. James. They all immigrated to the United States from diverse island colonies, homelands but not yet nations, with a common his-

tory of imperial subjection. These writers are chosen because of their interest-

ing conceptualization of black subjectivity that underlines the productive ten-




sion between the national and transnational, on the one hand, and the colonial and postcolonial, on the other. It is through this tension that Stephens attempts to resurrect the new possibility of a united Caribbean. Though it narrates the failure of West Indian unification and the rise of nation-states in the region, Black Empire also reveals the hope for these scattered nation-states to recover the Utopia of unification. By focusing on Garvey, McKay, and James, Stephens expects to integrate Caribbean and American intellectual projects. Stephens insists that the intersection of these projects gestures toward the global nature of these intellectuals' vision, and thus toward the transnational lens. This transnational desire, however, must be understood in the context of the theoretical as well as practical crisis that American studies confronts.

The current crisis that American studies faces is evocative of the historical shifts and transformations that rocked the discipline in the 1950s and 1960s -

oddly enough a period of rapid expansion, corporate organization, and productive scholarship. Gene Wise tried to take stock of the moment in an im-

portant essay in 1979 in which he introduced his notion of paradigm dramas.5 One of his conclusions was rather plain but far-reaching - the American studies of that era was a "parasite field." Part of Wises disenchantment had to do with the lack of solid and distinct theoretical apparatuses with which to understand the changing experiences in the United States. This provides insight into the current dilemma in the field, which is the fundamental inadequacy of

theory to explain experiences as they happen in history. Today, this complaint is manifested in the concern that a national framework cannot explicate the

complex dimensions of a national U.S. history that operates on an undecid- able transnational frontier. This explains the transnational turn in American studies.6 The core of the crisis involves the fact that something essentially historical persistently eludes our attempt to historicize experience. In other words, our attempt to historicize experience falls short in comprehending the com-

plexity of historical experience itself. Hence the need for a comprehensive understanding of historical experience is what drives the attempt to be transnational, or planetary, in contemporary scholarship. Oddly enough this

intersecting, international, and interdisciplinary gesture stands Wises thesis on its head: what he saw in the 1950s and 1960s as the cause of disciplinary crisis is now seized as the solution to the contemporary predicament.7

This, in other words, is the structural moment that informs the production of Stephens s work.8 It is for this reason that she frames her project as a task that inquires into the ways male intellectuals from the Anglophone Caribbean

attempted to imagine a transnational form of black nationality that could transcend nationalism and reconstitute the notion of the nation-state. Apart




from the theoretical context specific to American studies as a discipline, the transnational turn in Stephens s book is also a response to the limiting framework that is characteristic of the conventional consideration of the Caribbean involvement in the Harlem Renaissance.9 The phenomenon, for instance, is

traditionally regarded as a predominantly national, that is, American, event.

Stephens moves away from this narrow consideration and takes this Carib- bean-American experience as an expression not only of racial but also of human solidarity, so that to see the experience of the Harlem Renaissance as a collective endeavor of individuals coming from various nations is to seize the transnational inheritance of that work. Then this collective endeavor can be seen as the political legacy not just of one nation, but a legacy that can be

reproduced in other times and locations.

Stephens also strives to point out that the transnational identity that the Caribbean intellectuals imagine is gendered. For instance, she illustrates Garvey's representation of the masculine New Negro as a figure of the black ruler; she raises the question of homoeroticism in McKays novels; and, finally, she calls attention to the analysis of masculine figures in James's interpretation of Melville. Stephens critiques the writers for limiting women's participation in the making of the nation to a symbolic category. Women are brought in only to represent the affective nature of the nation, in contrast to the figuration of the New Negro as the fully constituted nation. What this figuration reveals is the inability of many of these black intellectuals to associate their racial

marginalization with the fact of women's exclusion. This is not only an imagi- native poverty but also, and more important, a clear political failure. It must be admitted, however, that Stephens's gendered reading remains an emergent component of the entire project; the book's overriding concern is to offer a materialist theory of black internationalism. The gendered critique, for in-

stance, does not go beyond tropes of femininity and masculinity. Although there is a discussion of Audre Lorde in the conclusion, the space that the

analysis occupies is not more than seven pages. Thirty years after Robert Sklar bemoaned the separation of scholarship from forms of social organization, and nearly twenty years after Michael Denning grappled with the elusive link between the study of American culture and Marxism, Black Empire comes as another welcome sign of the growth of a materialist American studies.10

Thus Gilroy and Stephens's work affirms that so much is at stake in envi-

sioning a common responsibility for the future of the planet and the people who reside on it. For instance, Gilroy believes that the ideas of racial differ- ences are ultimately not a transparent and absolute fact of political life. He refuses the thought that a particular order of difference is all it takes to secure




the well-being of our conflict-ridden world. If a successful political practice against racism is to be achieved, he thinks that it is the very reification of race that must be challenged. Throughout his book, he makes a passionate case. Thus we hear in Gilroy the voice of Edward Said in his later work: the ur-

gency, the acrimony, and the faith in the human that redeems. It is a worldly voice in the end, one that hopes against itself, even against history. Looking toward planetarity, Gilroy addresses not only Britain but the whole of Europe. The same gesture is made in Stephens s work. Keen on reclaiming the potential of solidarity, she returns to a moment in history when Caribbean intellectuals imagined a black self that refused the politics of boundary. For Stephens, this moment is knowable and reproducible. It represents what we need to know so that the survival of alternative ways of thinking about transnational

community and democracy is secured. The lessons that the Caribbean intellectuals impart are a lesson about turning away from the language of state- hood and shifting to social formations moving across geography and history. Thus Stephens begins to think of an America that embraces not the continent alone, but also the archipelago - holding together, like a net that is cast wide and far, the peoples on the mainland and the islanders at sea.

Indeed, there is wisdom in looking toward the transnational and planetary, but there is wisdom as well in treading vigilantly the ground of transnationalism and planetarity. Speaking to Europe and America is a necessary intervention in considering global powers that are global in reach and global in their ex- cesses. Yet it is also necessary to remember that in the decolonized and

decolonizing world, the nation remains an unfinished revolution. In many cases, the nation beckons to the people of the decolonized and decolonizing world as the single decisive place wherein they can reclaim their sense of be-

coming. To deny them that nationhood is to deny their possibility. So where do the decolonizing nations stand in the scheme of transnationalism and

planetarity? How can the diasporic condition explain aspects of the transnational and planetary imagination? Is it an exiles dream? If so, what are its political energies that can be marshaled creatively? In what locations do these energies become productive, and where do they become inadequate?

The question of location must remain an important element if the transnational and planetary are to be useful. Any thinking beyond the map must consider the history and politics of mapmaking. Rather than view this

history and politics as a burden, we should allow it to inform our reconfiguration of the map. The map must place us as we place it. We must also ask where other considerations figure on this altering cartography. Is there class in the transnational and planetary? Does gender play a role? How does it relate to




blackness of different colors whose existence mobility and immobility also mark? This is the lesson that a good sense of limits provides. This returns us then to the crisis of the discipline. It seems that the crisis reveals not only the

inadequacy of narrow disciplinary formations, but also the renewed drive to

bring politics back. Moreover, it is forging innovative intersections and new alliances. This reconfiguration is bound to revive old questions and generate new antagonisms. So, the toughest question in the diaspora must remain: How many are we? In addition, who and what are we counting? Why? The sole certainty we hold is that we ask because we feel inadequate. In that almost fatal moment, we find ourselves becoming intended toward others. Postcolonial Melancholia and Black Empire compel us to consider these important questions.

Notes 1 . See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 2. It is interesting to note that Spivak's call for planetarity coincides with the watershed publication of

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire. See Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). Spivak's Wellek Library Lectures were given in 2000 but published in 2003.

3. For a discussion of postcolonialism's critics, see Stuart Hall, "When Was 'the Post-Colonial'? Thinking at the Limit," The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996); see also Arif Dirlik, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism," Critical Inquiry (Winter 1992); Anne McClintock, "The Myth of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Post-Colonialism," Social Text 31-32 (1992); Ella Shohat, "Notes on the Postcolonial," Social Text 31-32 (1992). For another critique, see E. San Juan Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

4. For a discussion that brings postcolonialism and American studies into conversation, see Jenny Sharpe, "Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race," Diaspora 4.2 (1995), and Brian Edwards, "Preposterous Encounters: Interrupting American Studies with the (Post)colonial, or Casablanca in the American Century," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23.1-2(2003).

5. See Gene Wise, "'Paradigm Dramas' in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History," American Quarterly 31 .3 (1979). For a discussion of Wise, see Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman's introduction to The Futures of American Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

6. See Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); see also Kaplan's more recent The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). For a sampling of the transnational turn, see John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), and Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

7. While it is true that the transnational turn in American studies addresses specific disparities in think-

ing about the boundaries of "American" experience, this effort remains a partial response and is cer- tain, for good or ill, not to resolve the crisis. Here, a theoretical explanation does not suffice. A satis- factory account will have to consider the political economy of the humanities in the context of the modern university becoming more corporate. I am thinking, for example, of Masao Miyoshi's argu-




ments in "Ivory Tower in Escrow," in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

8. The book is, after all, part of the New Americanists series that Pease edits for Duke University Press. 9. I thank Hazel V. Carby for this insight. 10. See Robert Sklar, "The Problem of an American Studies 'Philosophy': A Bibliography of New Direc-

tions," American Quarterly 27.3 (1975); and Michael Denning, "'The Special American Conditions': Marxism and American Studies," American Quarterly 38.3 (1986).



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