Race, Racism and Development

Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice

Kalpana Wilson

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848135123
• eBook ISBN: 9781780325644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Race, Racism and Development places racism and constructions of race at the centre of an exploration of the dominant discourses, structures and practices of development. Combining insights from postcolonial and race critical theory with a political economy framework, it puts forward provocative theoretical analyses of the relationships between development, race, capital, embodiment and resistance in historical and contemporary contexts. Exposing how race is central to development policies and practices relating to human rights, security, good governance, HIV/AIDS, population control, NGOs, visual representations and the role of diasporas in development, the book raises compelling questions about contemporary imperialism and the possibilities for transnational political solidarity.

CHAPTER 1

Race, capital and resistance through the lens of 1857

You may hang me, or such as me, every day but thousands will rise in my place and your object will never be gained.

Pir Ali, a bookbinder from Patna

hanged by the British in 1857

This chapter looks at the historical and conceptual roots of the ideas of development and progress in the emergence of European capitalism, and how they were related to the consolidation of constructions of ‘race’ in the contexts of slavery and colonialism, which made this emergence possible. It will then consider how both changing patterns of imperial accumulation and multiple forms of resistance to these processes reshaped and reconfigured constructions of ‘race’ in the nineteenth century, setting the parameters for future development interventions, through a focus on one of a number of key moments in this process: the Indian uprisings of 1857 and their aftermath. By looking at the events of 1857 through the lens of some of the debates which surrounded them on their 150th anniversary, we will also reflect on some continuities in the relationships between ‘race’, capital, and the discourses, structures and practices of development.

Drawing on the extensive critical theorising around race which has informed challenges to racialised power in multiple locations, I treat ‘race’ as simultaneously a socially constructed, historically contingent and mutable category, and a material reality which shaped and constrained, often fatally, embodied and lived experience, and continues to do so in changing ways. Race, then, cannot be understood simply as a legitimating ideology for capitalist accumulation, or even, in more Foucauldian terms, as a discourse of disciplinary power for categorising subjects and facilitating colonial regulation. It became a system of organising capital accumulation, and as a result its implications were not limited to naming difference and giving it material effects. Racialised capitalist accumulation in the late colonial form it took from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, I suggest, was productive of material and embodied difference on a global scale, most centrally through the systematic dispossession of working people in the global South of the resources needed to sustain human life.

This period saw the consolidation of a global division of labour in which vast regions of the global South became primarily suppliers of raw materials and food grains for European industrial centres. As we will see, everywhere this relationship was established not primarily through the operation of ‘free market’ processes but through direct interventions by the colonial state marked by violence, coercion and repression. This period saw the decisive divergence in the standards of living of the producing classes in the North and the South which has been called the ‘creation of the Third World’ (Davis, 2001), and the increasing externalisation of the phenomena of chronic hunger, large-scale destitution and recurrent famine from Europe to its colonies.

As I argue here, these global processes, on the one hand, demanded and were strengthened by the new so-called ‘scientific racism’ of Social Darwinism with its emphasis on racial hierarchies of evolution. On the other hand, they put in place economic structures which produced and reproduced the embodied difference implied by marked global inequalities. The experience of chronic undernutrition and its accompanying effects on the immune system, for example, shaped subjectivities but was also reproduced through intergenerational processes. These experiences are contingent on a number of interlinked axes of inequality – class and gender in particular – as well as global location. But these embodied differences were in turn racialised, as poverty and destitution were discursively decoupled from colonial processes of appropriation and accumulation, and essentialised as products of the innate inertia and passivity of the colonised, which directly contrasted with European dynamism and industry. Of the many interlinked oppositions that have characterised racial discourse, it was arguably this dichotomy between poverty-stricken apathy and prosperous dynamism which was most intimately related to the development enterprise, and provided its underlying logic.

Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton (1995, 1996) have traced the emergence of the concept of ‘development’ in Western thought to the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe. In a departure from earlier theories of societal change as cyclical, with capitalism and the possibility of accumulation on an ever-expanding scale had come the idea that there could be constant ‘progress’. Development came to be seen as the means through which the bourgeoisie ‘entrusted’ with it would bring ‘order’ to this otherwise chaotic and potentially dangerous progress (Cowen and Shenton, 1995: 34); as an idea it was a product of the fear of the powerless by the powerful, and specifically the anxieties among the rising bourgeoisie generated by the ‘dangerous classes’, the dispossessed who were drawn to the industrialising cities but were yet to be disciplined by capital. For Cowen and Shenton, the notion of ‘trusteeship’ was central to the idea of intentional development, which implied an ‘external authority of development’ that would regulate the internal ‘immanent’ development of capitalist production. They contrast this with Marx’s idea of an ‘expanded domain of development’ whose source is not capital but the potential embodied in human ‘capacities to create and imagine if freed from the dictates of production’ and which encompassed ‘the potential for universal freedom’ (Cowen and Shenton, 1996: xii).

However, the notion of constant progress itself was defined in counterpoint to the non-European societies whose resources provided the basis for European capitalism through the processes of slavery and colonialism. Reproducing the racialised binaries of passive/active and emotional/rational, these societies were constructed as stagnant, either lacking history altogether in the case of Africa (Goldberg, 1993; Mbembe, 2001) or fundamentally corrupt and in permanent ‘decline’ in the case of the ‘Orient’ (Said, 1978; Sangari and Vaid, 1989). Only under the direction of benevolent colonial rulers, therefore, could they achieve progress. Thus development had a different though related implication outside Europe, where, rather than regulating and controlling immanent processes, the trustees of development considered themselves responsible for bringing progress itself.

These racialised notions of ‘trusteeship’ (later to be immortalised as Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden’)¹ and the concept of the civilising mission thus deeply influenced the elaboration of ‘development’ ideas, which in turn were used to legitimise and perpetuate colonial rule, and, particularly in the twentieth century, to counter the demands of anti-colonial movements.

‘Race’, capital and freedom

The central role of transatlantic slavery and early colonialism, and of the huge transfer of resources to the global North involved in these processes, in creating the conditions for the development of capitalism in Europe has been established in extensive work by political economists. In analysing the impact of the enslavement and transportation of millions of people, the direct appropriation of resources, the extraction of surpluses through taxation, exploitation and unequal trade, and the shifting of resources away from productive activities and enforced deindustrialisation, all of which accompanied European incursions, these writers have also demonstrated the inseparable economic relation between the development of capitalism in the global North and the structures and conditions associated with what are now called ‘developing’ countries in the global South.²

With the restructuring of Western societies associated with the transition to metropolitan industrial capitalism, liberal Enlightenment ideas about freedom, the rights of the individual and universal humanism became increasingly important. As Susan Buck-Morss writes, by the eighteenth century

slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power re1ations … Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery – the systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies – was increasing quantitatively and intensifying qualitatively to the point that by the mid-eighteenth century it came to underwrite the entire economic system of the West. (2000: 821)

Enlightenment ideas were clearly inconsistent with the dynamics of colonialism – and in particular with the system of transatlantic slavery – on which continuing capital accumulation depended, as they were with the continuation, or consolidation, of patriarchal gender relations within capitalism. Not surprisingly, then, Enlightenment ‘universalism’ was from the outset based on multiple exclusions, with only the white, property-owning man ultimately defined as capable of ‘rational’ thought and action and therefore fully human and entitled to rights (Jaggar, 1988; Goldberg, 1993; Eze, 2000), reflecting what Sherene Razack calls the ‘paradox of liberalism’: ‘all human beings are equal and are entitled to equal treatment; those that are not entitled to equality are simply evicted from the category human’ (Razack, 2004: 40). In this context, as Paul Gilroy writes, there is a ‘need to indict those forms of rationality which have been rendered implausible by their racially exclusive character and further too explore their complicity with terror systematically and rationally practiced as a form of political and economic administration’ (Gilroy, 1993: 220).

Influential liberal philosophers such as Locke and Hume were explicitly racist in their writings, defining black people as lacking the capacity for rationality and therefore agency (Goldberg,1993; Eze, 1997, 2000). It was in this period that discourses of ‘race’ came to be structured around a set of binary oppositions (such as civilisation/savagery, reason/emotion and culture/nature), which characterised Enlightenment definitions of the human (Hall, 1994) and indeed, as we will see, continued to structure discourses of development even much later, when constructions of ‘cultural difference’ replaced explicit references to ‘race’ (Kothari, 2006). These claims by liberal thinkers were not, however, simply philosophical speculations but direct interventions into contemporary political debates (Eze, 2000) and, crucially, responses to the multiple forms of continuous and sustained resistance by the enslaved people themselves. They sought to provide a justification for plantation slavery as a form of surplus accumulation and its institutionalisation in forms such as France’s Code Noir, which applied to black slaves in its colonies (James, 1938) and ‘legalized not only slavery, the treatment of human beings as moveable property, but the branding, torture, physical mutilation, and killing of slaves for attempting to defy their inhuman status’ (Buck-Morss, 2000: 380). As this implies, the invention of ‘race’ was itself from the outset conditioned by the resistance of those it sought to exclude from humanity. Plantation slavery, however, can be understood not as an anomaly of capitalism but as its epitome, in which race makes possible the full commodification and therefore non-integrity of the body, which is ‘fully opened to capital’ (Cherniavsky, 2006: xvii). Revealed here are the interconnections of liberalism, ‘race’ and capital in lived experiences, one of the overarching themes of this book and one to which we will return in detail, particularly in Chapter 6.

Yet the racialised conceptualisation of notions of freedom and human rights was from their inception a site of resistance and contestation. The Haitian Revolution, which began with a massive uprising by slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791 and culminated in the establishment of the first black republic in 1804,³ has been called ‘unthinkable’ within Enlightenment thought by the Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot precisely because it ‘challenged the very framework in which proponents and opponents had examined race, colonialism and slavery in the Americas’ (Trouillot, 1995: 82–3). The engagement of enslaved and colonised people with the ideas of universal rights associated with the Enlightenment is not, as has often been implied, a process of serial claims to the extension of these rights, but rather a simultaneous and redefining engagement which was under way even as such ideas were being formulated. In the case of Haiti, it was an engagement which drew upon several distinct systems of thought and, most significantly, on the lived experiences of slavery, to reconfigure the meanings of ‘freedom’, ‘property’ and ‘labour’ (James, 1938; Fick, 1990; Trouillot, 1995; Sheller, 2000; Bogues, 2004). As Trouillot argues, ‘the claims of the revolution were indeed too radical to be formulated in advance of its deeds. Victorious practice could assert them only after the fact’ (1995: 88). That mainstream accounts of this period in world history can still ignore the Haitian Revolution (Trouillot, 1995: 95–107; Shilliam, 2008) testifies to the tenacity of racialised exclusion and erasure.

At the same time, the concept of ‘race’ as a socially constructed, historically and spatially contingent and mutable system of categorisation has not remained static. This chapter seeks to highlight two aspects of this mutability in particular. First, changing dominant notions of ‘race’ were both shaped by, and in turn made possible, changing patterns of global capital accumulation during the course of the nineteenth century. Second, ideas about racial hierarchy were deployed in response to multiple forms of anti-colonial resistance, and were themselves altered and reconfigured by such resistance. Both of these processes of change, as this book argues, have continued to be important to an understanding of the continuing presence of ‘race’ in the period since 1945, when ‘development’ came to the fore as the pre-eminent framework through which relations between the global North and South are understood.

From this perspective, the chapter will examine the uprisings of 1857 in India (still more widely known in Britain as the ‘Indian Mutiny’) as one of a number of key moments in the social construction of ‘race’. This is not to suggest that other events in other places are not equally significant in this respect. On the contrary, the existence of many such formative moments is central to my argument here. For example, the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865 and the responses to it can be analysed in similar ways (Gilroy, 1993: 11). Further, these events and the responses they generate are always partially shaped by earlier, and often less visible or smaller-scale, acts of resistance. In India, for example, there were at least seventy-seven separate officially recorded instances of peasant uprisings during British colonial rule, and this does not reflect the extent of more ‘day-to-day’ forms of resistance to colonial rule.

Undoubtedly, however, the unprecedented scale and social diversity of the 1857 uprisings triggered significant changes in colonial strategies. On the one hand, ideas of racial superiority and the importance of racial segregation, which had already taken hold, were consolidated and institutionalised. Colonial narratives of the ‘Mutiny’ and its suppression were instrumental in the development of notions of the ‘barbaric’ colonial subject who must be controlled by force, and in the fixing of the still-fluid category of ‘whiteness’ in the metropolis. On the other hand, and in direct response to the articulations of syncretic and pan-regional political projects within insurgent discourses, the aftermath of the uprisings saw a sustained attempt to ‘reinvent’ India as a society insuperably divided along religious, ethnic and caste lines, drawing upon specific and selective interpretations of the region’s history, cultures and social practices. The rise of Social Darwinism and the emergence of colonial anthropology as a discipline were to systematise the racialisation of difference through processes of enumeration, measurement and categorisation. Dominant classes and groups whose power had been consolidated by post-1857 policies also became invested in these notions of ‘race’, with important implications for post-independence politics. These approaches influenced colonial policies in Africa from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, in particular ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Race, capital and resistance through the lens of 1857
• 2 The gift of agency: gender and race in development representations
• 3 Population control, the Cold War and racialising reproduction
• 4 Pathologising racialised sexualities in the HIV/AIDS pandemic
• 5 New uses of ‘race’ in the 1990s: humanitarian intervention, good governance and democracy
• 6 Imperialism, accumulation and racialised embodiment
• 7 Worlds beyond the political? Postdevelopment and race
• 8 Reconfiguring ‘Britishness’: diasporas, DfID and neoliberalism
• In lieu of a conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index