Race in Translation

Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic

Ella Shohat, Robert Stam

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780814798386
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814725252
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

While the term “culture wars” often designates the heated arguments in
the English-speaking world spiraling around race, the canon, and affirmative
action, in fact these discussions have raged in diverse sites and languages. Race
in Translation charts the
transatlantic traffic of the debates within and between three zones—the U.S.,
France, and Brazil. Stam and Shohat trace the literal and figurative translation of these
multidirectional intellectual debates, seen most recently in the emergence of
postcolonial studies in France, and whiteness studies in Brazil. The authors
also interrogate an ironic convergence whereby rightist politicians like
Sarkozy and Cameron join hands with some leftist intellectuals like Benn
Michaels, Žižek, and Bourdieu in condemning “multiculturalism” and “identity
politics.” At once a report from various “fronts” in the culture wars, a
mapping of the germane literatures, and an argument about methods of reading
the cross-border movement of ideas, the book constitutes a major contribution to
our understanding of the Diasporic and the Transnational.

1 The Atlantic Enlightenment

THE ENTIRE ATLANTIC world was shaped by 1492 and what is euphemistically called the “encounter,” which engendered not only a catastrophe for indigenous peoples but also a crisis in European thinking. The clash of Europe and indigene provoked a multifaceted reflection on utopia (Thomas More) and dystopia (Bartolomé de las Casas). The intertextual backdrop of the contemporary “culture wars” lies in the contradictions of an Enlightenment that was not exclusively European. The phrase “Atlantic Enlightenment” refers both to a geography and a concept. Enlightenment thought was a hybrid intellectual production; it was generated not only in Europe but also in the Americas, by the Founding Fathers in the United States, by Haitian revolutionaries, and by representatives of indigenous people. The Enlightenment was a debate, conducted in many sites, about the relation between Europe and its Others, with a left and a right wing, with proslavery and antislavery, colonialist and anticolonialist factions.

The Atlantic world has been shaped by the intellectual heritage of Enlightenment republicanism, as expressed politically in the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, and the Haitian Revolution in 1791, as well as in the Brazilian independence movements of the 18th century and in the Brazilian Republic in 1889. A clear historical thread thus leads out from the Enlightenment debates within the American and French Revolutions to the contemporary “culture wars,” as actualized, recombinant versions of earlier debates. The “culture wars,” in this sense, inherit centuries of discursive struggles going back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and their antecedents, going back to the Conquest of the Americas and even to the Crusades. Versions of the debates were present, in germ and under different names, in the intense exchanges about Conquest, colonialism, and slavery. They were argued in religious/political language in the 16th century when Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas asked whether Indians had souls and as a consequence enjoyed “derechos humanos” (human rights). They were present when indigenous people rebelled against European conquest or resisted Christian proselytization. They were present when enslaved Africans fought and argued against enslavement, or when the U.S. Founding Fathers took positions for and against the inscription of slavery into the Constitution. They were present when French Enlightenment philosophers spoke about “freedom” and “natural goodness,” and when “free men of color” opposed slavery in the French colonies.

Contemporary critiques thus lend new names to old quarrels, now rearticulated within altered idioms and paradigms. Throughout its history, colonialism has always generated its own critique, whether by the dominant culture’s own renegades or by its colonized victims. When Montaigne in the late 16th century argued in “Des Cannibales” that civilized Europeans were ultimately more barbarous than cannibals, since cannibals ate the flesh of the dead only in order to appropriate the strength of their enemies, while Europeans tortured and murdered in the name of a religion of love, he might be described as a radical anti-colonialist avant la lettre. When Diderot in the 18th century called for African insurrection against European colonialists, he too might be seen as part of this same anti-Eurocentric lineage. And when Frantz Fanon in the 20th century spoke of accepting “the reciprocal relativism of different cultures, once colonialism is excluded,” he gave us a working definition of radical forms of postcolonial critique.¹

When we say that the contemporary culture wars go back to colonialism and the Enlightenment, we do not mean this claim in a vague “everything goes back to history” way. The contemporary debates are quite literally rooted in Enlightenment quarrels. In contemporary France, for example, both right and left invoke the French Revolution and “Enlightenment values” to articulate their views of “identity politics,” whether seen as a praiseworthy expansion of Enlightenment equality or as a particularist departure from Enlightenment “universality.” In the United States, both left and right invoke the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence, but in opposite ways; Obama appeals to the “more perfect union” of the Preamble, while Tea Party Republicans interpret the Constitution to defend right-wing libertarianism. The left channels the radical Enlightenment of Diderot and Toussaint Louverture, while Newt Gingrich channels Adam Smith. The quarrels about indigenous land rights and intellectual property rights go back to the Conquest and to John Locke. The various discursive positions for and against conquest, slavery, racism, and imperialism, in sum, have been “available” for a long time; contemporary debates thus form reformatted versions of those earlier debates. Past and present reverberate together; old debates anticipate and haunt the present.

The Red Atlantic

Our invocation of a “Red,” “Black,” and “White” Atlantic is not meant to detract from the work performed under the rubric of the “Black Atlantic,” but rather to place that blackness within a relational spectrum that also embraces the metaphorical “redness” of indigenous America and, in a very different way, the metaphorical “whiteness” of Europe and Euro-America. Colonialism and slavery completely transformed racial, national, and cultural identities in what might be called the “Rainbow Atlantic.” Colonial conquest turned an extremely heterogeneous group of indigenous peoples—formerly defined as Tupi, Carib, Arawak, Mohawk, Peguot, and so forth—into generic “Reds” and turned an equally heterogeneous group of Africans—formerly named Kong, Hausa, Yoruba—into generic “blacks,” all under the domination of a motley crew of Europeans—Spanish, English, Dutch, French—now turned into generic Whites, thus forging the constitutive Red/White/Black demographic triad typical of the Americas. The cultures of the Atlantic are thus not only Black and White; they are also figuratively Red. Even slavery was “Red” in that in the Americas the indigenous peoples were kidnapped and enslaved before the Africans. In Brazil, both Red and Black groups were called “negros”: enslaved natives were “Negros da Terra” (Blacks from the Land) as opposed to “Negros da Guinee” (Blacks from Guinea, Africa). At times, one enslaved group was used to replace another, as when bandeirantes from São Paulo enslaved one hundred thousand “indios” to compensate for the loss of enslaved Africans during the suspension of the slave trade between 1625 and 1650. Colonialism, conquest, slavery, and multiculturality are thus inextricably linked. The Atlantic world became syncretic and hybrid precisely because of these violent transcontinental processes.

As tropes of color, the concepts of a “Red,” “Black,” and “White” Atlantic cast a prismatic light on a shared history. While “Black Atlantic” evokes the Middle Passage and the African diaspora, the notion of a “Red Atlantic” registers not only the dispossession of indigenous peoples by Europeans but also the impact of indigenous ideas on European thinking. The settler colonialism that dispossessed the “Red” and the racial slavery that exploited the “Black” were the twin machines of racial supremacy. Yet the relations between Red and Black and White were always unstable. Red and Black could ally against White or collaborate with White against the Black or the Red. White supremacy, as David Roediger puts it, “situated itself at some times in opposition to a ‘red’ other and at others to a ‘black’ one.”² Stances on imperialism were also conjunctural. A French observer such as Alexis de Tocqueville could urge French imperialists in Africa to look not to the U.S. treatment of the Black but rather to U.S. treatment of the Red as a model. During the Conquest of Mexico, American racists would argue about whether Mexicans were Black or Red; what was important to the racists was that they not be White.

We have not forgotten the other “colors” in the Atlantic rainbow, for example, the metaphorical yellowness and brownness of diasporic Asians, mestizos, Latinos, and Arabs. At this point in history, conquest, slavery, immigration, and globalization have thoroughly scrambled, in the manner of an action painting, an already mixed color palette, in an intermingled spectrum. Switching from a chromatic to a linguistic register, Eugene Jolas speaks of an “Atlantic, Crucible Language” as the verbal precipitate of transracial synthesis.³ Gilles Deleuze’s description of contemporary U.S. English as “worked upon by a Black English, and also a Yellow English, a Red English, a broken English, each of which is like a language shot through with a spray-gun of colors,”⁴ could be extended to the Atlantic world generally. By the same token, one might suggestively attach various modifiers to the noun “Atlantic” to speak of a Moorish Atlantic, a Jewish Atlantic, a Yoruba Atlantic, and so forth.

Here we will focus not on the full rainbow spectrum but rather on the Red, the Black, and the White. The rainbow metaphor, in any case, risks implying the facile “postracial” harmony and transcendence of race. While race has no scientific substance, “race” still effectively evokes the persistence of deep inequalities affecting visible minorities. The spectrum is also spectral, haunted and shadowed by the ghosts of various oppressions. Some colors crowd out or absorb or hide and “spook” others. Our goal, then, is to complexify a multileveled chromatic relationality shot through with power-laden inequalities. And as the metaphor of a spectrum implies, the colors fade and blur into one another; despite hierarchical regimes, they defy segregated boundaries. The indigenous Red and the diasporic Black, in both the United States and Brazil, for example, are densely interwoven: demographically through mixture, politically through coalition, academically through research, and culturally through a miscegenated popular culture. Our assumption throughout is that “colors” are situated, overlapping, and relational utterances that slip and slide in their reference; they take on meaning only as part of larger systems striated by power and inequity.

The legal foundation for conquest was the “Discovery Doctrine” that granted Europeans sovereign claim over “Red” lands and peoples. That doctrine encoded ethnocentric assumptions of European superiority over other cultures, religions, and peoples, so that Europeans, in the words of Robert Miller, “immediately and automatically acquired property rights in native lands and gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over the inhabitants without … the consent of the indigenous peoples.”⁵ Initially developed by the Roman Catholic Church as part of the Crusades to recover the Holy Lands, the Discovery Doctrine was first applied to Muslim-dominated “infidel lands,” declared by various popes to lack “lawful dominion.” A 1455 papal bull by Pope Nicholas authorized Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans” and to enslave them in perpetuity, all part of bringing all humankind into the fold of the one true religion. Subsequent papal bulls extended the right of conquest to the Americas. England, France, Holland, Sweden, and the United States later cited these precedents as legitimating their own conquests. Various popes asserted a worldwide papal jurisdiction—an early incarnation of the “universal”—rooted in the papacy’s divine mandate to care for the entire world. The Conquest and Discovery Doctrine officially became part of U.S. law with the seminal Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823, which provides the legal foundations for the U.S. takeover of Indian lands.

Church and State were mobilized to legitimate the new racial/colonial order. A key instrument of the Conquest was the Requerimiento (requisition), which Spanish conquerors read to the natives as a form of legitimation. This document communicated the idea of a chain of command extending from God to the pope to the king to the conquistadores themselves, all of whom agreed that the native territories and peoples belonged to the pope and the Spanish monarch. Some Hollywood films devoted to the Conquest (for example the 1949 film starring Fredric March) show Columbus reading from the Requerimiento, but they fail to include the document’s warning of massive retaliation for any refusal to collaborate, promising that the Spanish “with God’s help will make war against you by every means available to us, and will submit you to the yoke of obedience of the Church and His Majesty, will take your women and children and enslave them, … will take all your goods and do all kinds of ill to you and cause all the damage which a sovereign can commit against disobedient vassals.” The document then blames the victim by declaring that “all the death and damage inflicted … will be your fault and not that of His Majesty, nor of ourselves.”⁶ (The provocative 2010 film Even the Rain, about a Spanish director in Bolivia making a film about Columbus, does include the final warnings.)

The Requerimiento was supposed to be read in Spanish to “Indians” unfamiliar with that language. It is as if the Spanish wanted to believe—or pretended to believe—that the Indians were willingly giving up their land, abandoning their beliefs, renouncing their leaders, and adopting Spanish rule. Less a contractual agreement than a fable that the Spanish told themselves, the document absurdly promises that the natives will not be forced to convert—as long as they spontaneously convert on their own. The indigenous people were portrayed as devoid of any political, legal, or religious system of belief. Spanish and Portuguese ideologists claimed, incorrectly, that the indigenous languages lacked three letters—the r for rei, or “king”; the l for lei, or “law”; and the f for fe, or “faith.” While European kingdoms proclaimed, “One King, One Faith, One Law,” the “natives,” through a logic of deficit, were depicted as a tabula rasa awaiting European inscription. The Conquest also had a linguistic dimension. All over the Americas, first peoples had named, mapped, and described the continent through language. As a result, states in Brazil and the United States bear native names (Ceara and Piaui in Brazil; Idaho and Ohio in the United States). In the present day, indigenous peoples have proposed an alternative to the word “America” itself: Abya-Yala, Kuna for “place of life,” extrapolated for the continent as a whole.⁷ Yet historically, many indigenous groups were denied the right even to name themselves. Thus, the “Navajos” in the United States were self-named the “Dineh,” and the “Kayapo” of Brazil are self-named “Mebengokre” (or “people of the eye of the water”).

In both Brazil and the United States, early religious figures learned indigenous languages in order to proselytize: John Eliot translated the Bible into native tongues; Father José de Anchieta devised a Tupi grammar. The American Founding Fathers learned Native American languages, and indigenous words came to enrich English vocabulary. In Brazil, the Tupi-Guarani language, first used as a language of communication between the Portuguese and the Tupi coastal peoples, even became the lingua franca, or língua geral, called Nheengatu, up until the 18th century, including among non-Tupi natives. Indeed, Portuguese became dominant only in the 18th century.⁸ (A 2005 New York Times article reported that the língua geral was making a comeback in the interior of Brazil.)⁹ Presently indigenous Brazilians speak some 180 languages, with the number of speakers ranging from more than twenty thousand (Guarani, Tikuna, Macuxi) to a mere handful. In the United States, meanwhile, Native Americans are “resurrecting” native languages, such as Wampanoag, barely spoken for over a century.

The European response to the indigenous civilizations of the Americas reveals a general pattern of denial of indigenous cultural agency. Although native agricultural practice had sustained indigenous people for millennia, it was not recognized by Europeans as authentic agriculture but only as a kind of animal-like foraging. The fact that a densely populated and culturally remolded land was seen as “virgin” reflects a kind of mental “ethnic cleansing,” a discourse of imaginary removal. The idea of the “vanishing Indian” had its own colonial productivity, shaping a widespread impression that Indians had already disappeared or were about to disappear with the next hot breath of conquest. Yet the enduring presence of indigenous America looms behind many cultural debates, posing questions about the very legitimacy of colonial-settler states.

To think deeply about the Red Atlantic is necessarily to think in ways that transcend the nation-state: first, because many indigenous communities came into existence before the emergence of modern nation-states; second, because the national identity of colonial-settler states in the Americas was always constituted in relation to the “Indian,” whether as the enemy or as a symbol of the national socius; third, the dispossession of indigenous communities was partially the product of the colonial expansionism of nation-states; fourth, many native communities have actively rejected the very concept of the nation-state, not because they could not achieve it but because they did not want it; fifth, because the present-day boundaries of many indigenous communities actually exceed the borders of nation-states (as with the Yanomami in Brazil and Venezuela, the Mohawks in the United States and Canada); and sixth, because many indigenous peoples, due to multiple dislocations, no longer live only on their ancestral land base but are dispersed regionally and transnationally. The Quechua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The Atlantic Enlightenment
• 2 A Tale of Three Republics
• 3 The Seismic Shift and the Decolonization of Knowledge
• 4 Identity Politics and the Right/Left Convergence
• 5 France, the United States, and the Culture Wars
• 6 Brazil, the United States, and the Culture Wars
• 7 From Affirmative Action to Interrogating Whiteness
• 8 French Intellectuals and the Postcolonial
• 9 The Transnational Traffic of Ideas
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors