The Mythology of Imperialism
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/ayers020909.html
by Rick Ayers
02.09.09
When I decided to teach Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness at Berkeley
High School, it had been out of favor as an appropriate text because
it was considered too controversial. I wanted to do a whole unit on
Africa and the Congo, including African authors, journalism, and
history, and I figured we could start with this classic, largely
because there were perhaps 75 copies lying unused in the English
Department reading room.
The little maroon editions from the 1950s were encrusted in dust but
I grabbed one and started to plow through. I was amazed at how
radical Conrad was, how critical his approach to European
imperialism. He described the project of colonialism as, "grabb[ing]
what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just
robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men
going at it blind -- as is very proper for those who tackle a
darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking
it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly
flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look
into it too much."
Yes, Conrad comes in for criticism today in schools because of the
uncomfortable feeling he creates with the language, the racism, the
othering of his lead narrator. But he was not trying to make it
light. He was rubbing our faces in the reality of the colonial
enterprise, just fifteen years after the continent was partitioned
among European powers at a conference in Berlin presided over by the
Pope. I suppose it was the offensive reality of European thinking
that kept Conrad books back in the corner of the book room and Henry
James -- safe, elite, upper-crust, Henry James with his white
blind-spot in place -- in demand every year.
We had a rousing time with Heart of Darkness. But what was
particularly striking, what became a side-bar discussion in the
class, were the crazy notes in the columns written by students under
the direction of their high school teachers of the 50s and early
60s. Little underlined words and scrawled notes, like "gloomy,"
"graveyard," "world-weary," "super ego," and "foreshadowing," bespoke
a journey through the novel which carefully stayed away from any
political reading, from the core finding of Conrad that the darkness,
the real heart of darkness, was not in the center of Africa but in
the Europeans themselves. We were, of course, drawn to a reading
positioned in the post-colonial and anti-imperialist sensibilities of
our times. But imagine an explosive novel like this reduced to
psychological states and literary devices. That was the world of
literary criticism created by the right-wing modernists such as T. S.
Eliot and elaborated by such critics as Columbia University's Lionel Trilling.
Imagine, now, a young graduate student in the 1960s at Columbia
trying to buck the smothering hegemony of the anti-political
(actually, rightist political) eminences of the academy. What
insight, independence, and courage it must have taken to explode in
the face of such idiocy, to jeer at the emperor's new clothes, and to
explode the lies about the dead white men of the Western
tradition. Jonah Raskin was that graduate student and he did write
an explosive, transformative analysis of the literature of
imperialism. His book, The Mythology of Imperialism, began as his
doctoral dissertation in the late 60s on Kipling and Conrad. Through
Jonah's demonstrations, arrests, international travel, and
revolutionary activism, he developed it further with sharp, critical
chapters on D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Joyce Cary, and L. H.
Myers. First published in 1971, the book is out in a new edition
from Monthly Review Press this month.
It is a delightful book, a spirited jaunt through much of British
literature during the height of imperialism, and a polemic that
refuses to pull punches. His introduction to the first edition,
ambitiously entitled "Bombard the Critics," begins, "We, readers and
students of literature, have been hijacked. The literary critics,
our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the
wall and held us captive. In classrooms we sat passively and took
notes. We were paralyzed, afraid of their power." Thus the gauntlet
is thrown down. As an urban high school teacher, I might add that
the crime was not only done to the university students of literature
but to the broad society, the many students who would not be admitted
to the literary parlors, the working classes who would be ejected
from the schools, and the millions who would be represented as savage
or child-like primitives.
Raskin mows down the reactionary critics. His account of Lionel
Trilling's attempt to reduce Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit to a
psychological profile is hilarious and scathing. Trilling has taken
this powerful tale of the cruelties of capitalism, the life of
children in debtor prison, and the injustice of English society and
attempted to universalize the "message" while gutting the core
politics. "The modern self, like Little Dorrit," Trilling writes,
"was born in prison." So the problem in the novel, according to
Trilling, has to do with something about the Self, and the
frustration of the Will. Those English teachers who handled my Heart
of Darkness volumes were channeling this exact Trillingesque crap.
I first came across The Mythology of Imperialism in the early 70s
when I myself was underground, AWOL from the army after a stint of
organizing against the Vietnam War as a private at Fort Leonard Wood
and Fort Polk. I was hungry for analysis, something, anything that
tried to make sense of the world. We knew that the world the
establishment had created brought nothing but war and terror; how to
explain this world, where to find voices of reason, hope, and a
vision for a better future? We found it in the audacity of the Cuban
revolution, in the confidence of the Vietnamese resistance, in the
brilliance of the Black Power critique. Jonah's book struck me, the
exiled English and classics major, as a breath of fresh air. Here
was someone talking back to the dusty tomes. Here was the joy and
insight of liberation applied to the traditional canon. What a
delight. I devoured the book and even picked up a used copy of H. L.
Myers' The Near and the Far, one of the few British novels about
India which Jonah recommended with enthusiasm.
Of course, Raskin was breathing the same air, imbibing the same
lessons that we all were in this period of liberatory
rebellions. Psychiatry was being turned upside down by Frantz Fanon
and R. D. Laing; history was being re-written by Howard Zinn and
Philip Foner; novels were being transformed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and Toni Morrison; and on and on. In the area of social and cultural
analysis, Jonah Raskin was writing at the same time as the brilliant
Cuban Roberto Retamar, who founded Tricontinental magazine, was
penning "Caliban"; the Palestinian professor Edward Said was writing
early works that would lead to Orientalism, a study that would launch
the disciplines of Critical Studies and Post Colonial Studies; Michel
Foucault in France was developing his studies of prisons and
repression; Nguyen Khac Vien was penning Tradition and Revolution in
Vietnam; Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart in Chile were penning
their exposé of imperialist culture with How to Read Donald Duck. In
education during this period, Robert Moses from SNCC was applying the
lessons of Charlie Cobb and Ella Baker of the Mississippi Freedom
Schools in Tanzania; Paulo Freire had just published Pedagogy of the
Oppressed based on his literacy and organizing work among the
peasants of Brazil; and poor Italian students had published their
Letters to a Teacher by the Schoolboys of Barbiana.
While Jonah Raskin deplores the arrogance, the blinkered racism, the
stupidity of the writers in the imperial center, he clearly enjoys
their meanderings, their questing to make sense of this world. Many
of the most interesting writers of Britain in this period were those
who defied the cool rationality of the master narrative, celebrating
instead the vernacular, the conflict, the madness of the colonial
provinces. The best novels did not simply recount parlor debates of
the rich; they explored the lives of real people, the conflicts of
cultures and classes. Mark Twain was much more the novelist of
American reality than Henry James. French authors Balzac, Hugo, and
Zola all sought their truths in the streets and side allies. They
explored the heteroglossia (literally multiple tongues) of these
conflicts that Mikhail Bakhtin described. Why the language we use in
education must be mired in the dull parlor formalities and must exile
the voices that animate our best literature is something that has
always frustrated me as an English teacher.
Raskin examines Rudyard Kipling's split consciousness, between
identification with the empire and identification with the incredible
people he encountered in his life in the colonies: "(He) defended the
establishment and scorned rebellion, but at the same time he sought
out the exiles, the outcasts, the bohemians; he roamed the
underground, looked for the forbidden, the hidden, the
disreputable. He boxed, exported, and sold under the imperialist
label folk culture, popular culture, the culture of colonial
people" (p. 75). Kipling can be fascinating as a documenter of life
in the colonies, even as he betrays an unhealthy devotion to
imperialism and an infantilizing and patronizing attitude towards the
oppressed.
Raskin spends a good deal of time on George Orwell, that huge
presence in the middle of the 20th Century. Orwell finds plenty to
criticize about imperialism -- which he described as "a world in
which progress drinks nectar from the skulls of the slain . . ." (p.
44). But Orwell too retained his fundamental loyalty to empire and
considered colonial rebellion as ill-considered and
fruitless. Nevertheless, I found Raskin sometimes laid on Orwell
sins which perhaps he was exposing and critiquing. In the famous
memoir piece, "Shooting an Elephant," he speaks about his stint an
English policeman in Burma who is called upon by the populace to
shoot an elephant that has been causing mayhem in the village. He
resents the role of sahib, the duty that falls upon him to do the
deed, and the unjust killing of the beast. But Orwell's description
of the trapped man, caught in the obligations of his colonial office,
is more a confessional, a self-revealing portrait which in its
honesty condemns the choice he made. Indeed, he is sketching the
bind of those who serve the empire. Again, this is familiar
territory for a teacher. We want to rebel, to "fight the man," but
most of our days are spent acting as agents of the state, sorting and
even repressing the young. The narrator describes himself as "stuck
between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the
evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible" (p.
71). Ah, the anger at the kids. You know it's wrong but every
teacher gets it.
Raskin's play with Western literature, examined with eyes that have
been opened up by the struggles of people in the Third World, is a
welcome antidote to the authoritarian educational projects we were
subjected to. It points the way to a more lively, more diverse and
meaningful curriculum for students growing up in the globalized
communities of today. And, of course, it welcomes the explosion of
what we call "world literature" which is transforming our discourse
and our reality with each passing year.
Raskin has since gone on to explore many other aspects of the
culture, from studies of women writers, to American radicalism, from
revolutionary exile author B. Traven, to writers such as Allen
Ginsberg and Jack London. It is good and timely that Monthly Review
has chosen to re-release this excellent book today.
I only wish some smart editor had saved Raskin from himself by
talking him out of including the Afterword to the new volume. What
starts out as an examination of Edward Said's work becomes an
exercise in self promotion: "Said took many of the ideas I proposed
in The Mythology of Imperialism and developed them in Orientalism,
which was published in 1978. . . ." Edward Said was generous in his
praise of The Mythology of Imperialism, but here Raskin places
himself as the originator who shifted the paradigm in deep and
incalculable ways, with Said playing adjunct as developer and
popularizer. Raskin would have done well to modestly accept the
praise he received and to consider himself lucky to have been part of
the dozens, hundreds, thousands of writers and engaged intellectuals
who were literally reinscribing our understanding of culture and
power. Noting that Said's consciousness had been profoundly shaped
by his life in exile, Raskin says that he too is, well, sort of in
exile, because, you know, we are all between homes: "We are all in
exile literally and figuratively, materially and spiritually." Yes,
of course, but to dance toward an appropriation of Third World or
Palestinian exile identity, to make a neat equation and find the
experiences basically identical, is both familiar and dishonest.
But this unseemly tack-on need not tarnish this good work. It's
fairly common for academics, educators, political people, and
activists in their later years to jostle a bit uncomfortably and
self-consciously for position and legacy. We can forgive them these
silly breaches of good sense, highlight the great work they've done,
learn from it and move onto the challenges here and the fierce urgency of now.
Raskin's book forces us to look more deeply at the received wisdom of
the great books of Western civilization. He fired this opening salvo
long before the "canon wars" broke out. Like those who have the most
experience in teaching, Raskin neither insists on exiling all of
Western literature -- so much of it is powerful and even subversive
-- nor in promoting only women and authors of the colonial and
neo-colonial regions. But his scathing critique creates a welcoming
stage for such tremendous outsider writers of today as Junot Diaz,
Amitav Ghosh, Nikki Giovanni, and Adam Mansbach. When I am leading a
literature class, the reality of the imperialist project, which
colors everyone on both sides of the fence of privilege, becomes part
of the discussion. Chinweizu's great study The West and the Rest of
Us reminds us that there is a Western narrative to describe reality;
then there is a reality of those deemed the "others" by the academic
establishment.
The colonial regions, the Third World, the zones comprising OSPAAL
(Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and
Latin America), whatever you care to name the vast majority of the
regions and peoples of the world, have always offered fascination and
fear to the Westerner (a term coined to mean mainly white people of
Europe and North America). So many myths and slanders abound, such
as: the idea that these peoples have an animal nature (as
Shakespeare's creation of Caliban shows); that they are savage
(meaning violent and uncivilized); that they are childlike (and in
need of direction); that they represent our past, something we have
evolved above; that they possess some kind of intuitive wisdom, magic
powers; that they represent the Western fantasy of the ideal
sexualized female or dangerously virile male; that they need our
governance; that their wealth is wasted since they do not adequately
farm, mine, or fabricate things. And so on ad nauseam.
Often, for the Westerner, the exotic East is a place of longing and
desire, a projected fulfillment that is somehow lost or out of reach
here. This was the case in the way the British constructed the magic
kingdom of Shangri-La, and it carries forward in modern
romanticization of Tibetan Buddhism. It is a place where the West
practices unspeakable violence, in its ritual of domination. It is
the source of our huge wealth, which is not brought by Santa Claus or
created by little elves while we sleep -- it is wealth created in
thousands of mines and fields and sweatshops where people toil daily
to create resources for us; and it is the region of our nightmares
and fears, the permanent Other, which threatens to overthrow
everything we have come to care for and feel entitled to. And, we
must add, that this colonial imaginary includes a domestic identity
of the Third World peoples within the metropolis, African American,
Chicano Latino, Asian, etc.
But a modern reader, a citizen in our global world, now has an
opportunity to explore all sides of the story, to subvert the master
narrative while embracing all voices. In a sense, the reader now has
an opportunity to commit a literary version of what Amilcar Cabral
described as class suicide, the project of abandoning loyalty to the
oppressor. In this regard, I particularly enjoyed Raskin's
exploration of Burmese Days (p. 73) in which Orwell reaches the point
of hating his own privileged people: "The time comes when you burn
with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising
to drown their Empire in blood. . . " and yet he realizes that he is
implicated, he is complicit, in his inevitable role as pukka sahib,
"You are a creature of the despotism, a pukka sahib, tied tighter
than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of tabus." At last,
we see that taboos, forbidden acts, are strictures not of the tribal
peoples but of the empire itself. And we are called upon to do
something about it.
--
Rick Ayers is an Adjunct Professor in Education at University of San
Francisco and teaches at UC Berkeley and New College. This article
was first published by the Huffington Post on 1 September 2009.
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