Home of the Brave,Frantz Fanon and cultural pluralism

Abstract

This article examines Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949, USA), a Hollywood social problem drama about anti-black racism, and the brief but vivid response to the film presented in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon enables a rethinking of some of the film's most central assumptions and the discourses upon which the story relies. At the same time, Fanon's response conveys information about his own biography and his perspectives on cultural representation generally. The article examines the film as a document that reveals competing claims about anti-black racism and, through Fanon's commentary, revisits the relationship between cultural pluralism and racial ideologies in the mid-20th century USA. The article explores the nature of Fanon's anti-racist commentary on the film as a form of 'cultural studies' that offers transnational historical insight and simultaneously provides ways of re-examining the national specificity of race thinking.     

The state and the colonial unconscious

In this article, Fanon’s concept of the colonial unconscious – introduced in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 1968 Fanon, F. 1968. Black Skin, White Masks, London: Paladin.  [Google Scholar]) – is used to clarify the post-1994 political conjuncture in South Africa; in particular, unconscious forms of resistance against the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). Fanon’s concept of colonialism is first outlined and developed before his concept of the colonial unconscious is itself refined and put to work in the analysis of Brett Murray’s The Spear in terms of the return of the colonial repressed. It is argued, in conclusion, that the NDR needs to include within its ambit this unconscious dimension of South African politics without, however, giving in to the temptation of attempting to totalise and saturate all processes of subject formation.     

‘Racism’, intersectionality and migration studies: framing some theoretical reflections

The concept of ‘racism’ has faced many difficulties in migration studies. Depending on definitions, islamophobia is a form either of religious discrimination or of racism. The same is true in contemporary debates in Europe about xenophobia against immigrants from the Global South. This article provides an alternative way of thinking about racism and its relationship with questions of intersectionality and discusses the relationship of these issues to migration theory. In the first part, we discuss intersectionality in relation to Fanon’s definition of racism. Then, we establish a dialogue between the work of de Sousa Santos and Fanon that could enrich our understanding of intersectionality in the framework of modernity and the capitalist/imperial/patriarchal/racial colonial world-system. Finally, we analyse this discussion’s implications for migration theory, highlighting how migration studies tend to reproduce a northern-centric social science view of the world that comes from the experience of others in the zone of being.     

Toward a Regeneration of Revolutionary Theory

Revolutionary theorists are currently immersed in a critical debate about the future of the field. Allinson has argued that a fifth generation of revolutionary theory has passed us by without our noticing, while I have contended that it is revolutionary theory's fourth generation that is decidedly imperilled. Ritter and Beck – for their part- contend that we should reject the very idea of theoretical ‘generations’, and instead think of progress in revolutionary theory as a series of ongoing and settled debates about certain key topics. The pair contend that revolutionary theory has reached a consensus on two core debates: defining our object of study and determining appropriate methods. Contrary to this position, I argue that while there is much to praise about rejecting generational imagery, doing so necessarily entails that we also critique the self-proclaimed ‘fourth generation' with which such imagery is intertwined. Furthermore, I argue that there does not yet exist consensus among revolutionary theorists about a single definition of revolution, or on the question of which methods to use. Finally, I call for a regeneration of revolutionary theory which moves genuinely beyond the generational mythologies of the past.     

The English as they see others: England revealed in Provence

Peter Mayle's best-selling accounts of his life in Provence have appealed to a wide audience in Britain but have also attracted harsh criticism. It is argued here that these works, although ostensibly about Provence, are better analysed as myths for the English. The contrast with an account from the 1930s reflects wider social change, showing a move from a confidently colonial to a self-consciously ‘anthropological’ mode. Doubts about the authenticity of Mayle's accounts are related both to his use of free indirect discourse and other literary devices in order to convey ethnographic colour, and to ideological tensions in post-colonial Britain.     

KUNG FU: NEGOTIATING NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY

‘Kung fu’, as a cultural imaginary consecrated in Hong Kong cinema since the 1970s, was constituted in a flux of nationalism. This paper argues that the kung fu imaginary found in Hong Kong kung fu cinema is imbued with an underlying self-dismantling operation that denies its own effectiveness in modern life, and betrays an ‘originary’ moment of heterogeneity, an origin of itself as already ‘impurely Chinese’. Having been British-colonized, westernized, capitalist-polluted and culturally hybrid, Hong Kong's relation with ‘Chineseness’ is at best an ambivalent one. This ambivalence embodies a critical significance of Hong Kong as a defusing hybrid other within a dominant centralizing Chinese ideology, which is itself showing signs of falling apart through complex changes imposed by global capital. Hong Kong's kung fu imaginary, which operates in a self-negating mode, is instructive when read as a tactic of intervention at the historical turn from colonial modernity to the city's reluctant return to the fatherland. The kung fu imaginary enacts a continuous unveiling of its own incoherence, and registers Hong Kong's anxious process of self-invention. If Hong Kong's colonial history makes the city a troublesome supplement, then the ‘Hong Kong cultural imaginary’ will always be latently subversive, taking to task delusive forms of ‘unitary national imagination’.     

‘Shoot with your pen’: Isaac William(s) Wauchope’s Ingcamango Ebunzimeni and the power of speaking obscurely in public

This article explores Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, a collection of poems published in the latter months of 1912 by the African intellectual and missionary Isaac William(s) Wauchope (1852–1917). Wauchope is most prominently known for having written a poem that, among other things, incites his peers to ‘take paper and ink’ and ‘[s]hoot with your pen’. Ingcamango Ebunzimeni is a peculiar moment in the life and writing of Wauchope. In a remarkable series of events, Wauchope served a two‐year prison sentence in Tokai between 1910 and 1912. In the argument that follows, I raise a number of issues regarding the circumstances leading to the writing and publication of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. Taking as a point of departure Wauchope’s seeming reluctance to explicitly engage his feelings about his imprisonment, I suggest that speaking ‘obscurely’ within a public context allows Wauchope to make utterances that begin to contest, in very complex ways, the fall from grace occasioned by his imprisonment. Wauchope’s poems address themselves to a context where the recent events of his life give rise to dire tensions between the dominant colonial version of his life story that holds him to be a ‘masquerading minister’ and its resistive corollary which seeks to redeem him as the unwilling victim of an unremorseful social order that, having generated a class of Christianised Africans as an example of civilisation, casts them down as a symptomatic failure of the very same process. Indeed, it is in addressing himself to both spheres of meaning simultaneously that Wauchope defines the complexity of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni.     

Nikolai Gogol'’s Self-Fashioning in the 1830s: The Postcolonial Perspective

This study examines Gogol'’s complex self-fashioning during the time of the creation and reception of his Ukrainian tales Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki [Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka] (1831–1832) in light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Gogol'’s self-fashioning is studied through his submission to the symbolic power responsible for branding him as the Other in imperial Russian culture, as well as through his deliberate strategy of mimicry. Not only did Gogol'’s marginal social status and his Ukrainian ethnicity create a social hierarchy responsible for fashioning him as “an outsider within” imperial culture, Gogol' himself engaged in the colonial mimicry, trying to reverse the colonial gaze that imagined him as a “sly” Ukrainian. Challenging the accepted view of Gogol' as one who internalized the colonial stereotype of a “sly” Ukrainian, this study treats Gogol'’s identity as strategic, positional, and ambivalent. The first part of the study focuses on the manipulation of stereotypes of the Other within the Russian nationalist imagination in the early 1830s; the second part examines Gogol'’s ambivalent visual self-representation and social performance that simultaneously mimicked and menaced the colonial authority.     

Revisiting 'communities in Britain'

In this article I re‐examine Frankenberg’s Communities in Britain (1966) and his use of a ‘morphological continuum’ within his analysis. This analysis is itself a re‐assessment of some influential community studies conducted within the British Isles. I look at some particular ideas within the more theoretical part of this book, especially the ideas of ‘social redundancy’ and the distinction between ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’. I then consider some themes arising from some more recent studies. These themes include identity, networks and social capital and time and I argue that Frankenberg's analysis can still provide the reader with useful tools to think through the ideas and practices of community.     

Family Therapy and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Therapeutic Use of Songs in Apartheid South Africa

A central issue for family therapy is the critical question of how to define its role in influencing social change. Family therapy has tended to focus on how to liberate and empower individual clients, not communities, from the travails of tradition. This article highlights social change mechanisms implemented by the oppressed majority in South Africa during the apartheid period. It draws inspiration from the pedagogy of the oppressed articulated by Steve Biko and other members of his generation. This enabled the Black majority in South Africa ‘to name their world by reflecting on their conditions, imagining a better world, and then taking action to create it’ (Freire, 1968, p. 253) through the use of revolutionary songs that resulted in the collapse of the cruel apartheid system. The implications for family therapy are discussed.     

Multiplicity: anarchy in the mirror of sociology

ABSTRACT

Justin Rosenberg’s proposal of ‘multiplicity’ as a new grounding concept for IR aims at liberating the international from the perceived constraints of its dominant framing by Realism. Viewed from within the singular political entity, the international can only appear as absence and negativity, traditionally thematised in IR as ‘anarchy’. Recasting it instead as ‘multiplicity’, through a move from politics to sociology, is intended to change the understanding of the international from negative to positive: from conflict, tragedy and repetition to interaction, combination and development. This move, however, does not succeed in grasping the negativity of the international, and so as a result it remains within the limits that Realism enunciates: multiplicity complements anarchy sociologically rather than transcending it theoretically. A new concept of the international would result not from rejecting the negative in favour of the positive but from recognizing them as dialectically contained within each other.     

After inclusion. Thinking with Julian Go's ‘Thinking against empire: Anticolonial thought as social theory’

This contribution engages Go's generative invitation to think against empire by thinking through the epistemic and disciplinary implications of such endeavour. I zoom in on the need to explicitly address the purpose and ethos of scholarly inquiry and how that translates into decolonial academic praxis. Thinking with Go's invitation to think against empire, I feel compelled to constructively engage the limitations and impossibilities of decolonising disciplines such as Sociology. I glean from the various attempts at inclusion and diversity in society and argue that adding or including Anticolonial Social Thought/marginalised voices and peoples in the existing corridors of power—such as canons or advisory boards—is at best a minimal rather than a sufficient condition of decolonisation or going against empire. This raises the question of what comes after inclusion. Rather than offer a ‘correct’ or single alternative anticolonial way, the paper explores the pluriversally inspired method(ological) avenues that appear when we commit to thinking about what happens after inclusion when the goal is decolonisation. I expand on my ‘discovery’ and engagement with the figure and political thought of Thomas Sankara and how this led me to abolitionist thought. The paper then offers a patchwork of methodological considerations when engaging the what, how, why?—questions of research. I engage with questions of purpose, mastery, and colonial science and turn to the generative potential of approaches such as grounding, Connected Sociologies, epistemic Blackness, and curating as methods. Thinking with abolition and Shilliam's (2015) distinction between colonial and decolonial science, between knowledge production and knowledge cultivation, the paper invites us to not only think of what we need to do more of or better when taking Anticolonial Social Thought seriously, but also what we might need to let go of.     

‘No Power on Earth can Remove his Liability’: Emperor Haile Selassie and the Foreign Office,a Documentary Essay

Using the newly released unregistered files of the Foreign Office Permanent Under Secretary's Department (PUSD) Macklin's documentary article examines an interesting, if somewhat arcane, ‘missing dimension’ in the history of Abyssinian Emperor Ras Tafari Makonnen, more commonly known as Haile Selassie, and his covert financial relationship with the British government following his exile to Britain in 1936 after the conquest of his country by Mussolini's Fascists, until his return in 1941. By examining how the Foreign Office employed covert politics in order to obviate disruption to its ‘official’ diplomatic strategy Macklin examines how the British government set about ‘neutralising’ the Emperor's diplomatically awkward presence in England in their pursuit of rapprochement with Mussolini through which to drive a wedge between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.     

Reactivating the ‘communist hypothesis’: Alain Badiou and social work

It has been argued that Alain Badiou could contribute to social work's engagement with social theory. This paper critically responds to this assertion and identifies some of the theoretical problems associated with Badiou's core conceptualisations. Divided into two sections, it will begin by outlining his main thematic preoccupations and will go on to focus on his interpretation of the significance of Saint Paul, the apostle. The second half of the paper will dwell on Webb's attempt to connect Badiou to social work so as to disrupt focal ideas on ‘diversity’ and ‘difference’. This section will conclude by critically exploring Badiou's comments on children, children's rights and abuse. Although, so far receiving no attention in the social work literature, his interventions on these matters are problematic in that they imply that children lie outside the ‘one world’ politics that he promotes. Despite such criticisms, it is concluded Badiou's theorisation needs to be included within the academic literature of European social work.     

Sex differences in how heterosexuals think about lesbians and gay men: Evidence from survey context effects

Two experiments were embedded in a 1997 telephone survey of U.S. households to assess possible differences in how heterosexuals think about lesbians versus gay men. In each experiment, one half of the sample first responded to one or more attitude items about lesbians, followed by comparable items about gay men. The other half received the gay male item(s) first. Results are reported separately for White (N = 976) and Black (N = 479) heterosexuals. For White and Black men alike, self‐reported attitudes toward lesbians tended to be more favorable when they were assessed without reference to gay men (i.e., lesbian items presented first). White men's reactions to gay men tended to be less negative when assessed after the questions about lesbians were presented, but Black men's responses did not consistently show this pattern. For some items, women gave more favorable ratings of lesbians and less favorable ratings of gay men when the lesbian items were presented first. The findings suggest possible gender differences in the cognitive organization of heterosexuals ‘ attitudes toward lesbians and gay men.     

Quakers,colonies and colonials, 1938–48

Scholars have barely scratched the surface of the history of ‘Black’ peoples in the United Kingdom before the brief episode of immigration which began in 1948. For example, very little is known about the response of ‘white’ organizations, whether religious, philanthropic or political, to colonial issues or to ‘colonials’ in Britain. This article looks at the attitudes, as revealed by central committee minutes, of the Society of Friends, a religious body with a strong anti‐slavery and public service tradition.     

In search of unity: a new politics of solidarity and action for confronting the crisis of global capitalism

ABSTRACT

This essay is an introduction to a Special Forum by critical scholar-activists responding to the late Samir Amin’s call for the establishment of a new political vehicle that would be capable of uniting diverse progressive and revolutionary movements consisting of the workers and peoples of the whole world. The purpose of this vehicle would be to confront and radically transform a global capitalist order in deep crisis. The authors of these essays tend to agree that Amin was a profound contributor to the global justice movement, and to the reformulation of Marxism to address the evolution of global capitalism and imperialism that took place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, some are critical of Amin’s stance. The essayists differ about whether they see Samir Amin’s proposal for the establishment of a global party as a good or bad idea. Among those who think it is a good idea there are differences regarding the organizational nature and issue focus of the proposed organization. There are also different attitudes toward the institution of the nation-state and regarding the sources of progressive revolutionary political forces in the contemporary world. We briefly review the main issues under contention.     

THE HI/STORIES OF HONG KONG

This paper examines the formation of modernity in three colonialist epics of Hong Kong and the recent historical and fictional works that aim to rewrite the history of the ‘local’. Adopting a challenge-response structure, the paper argues that the colonialist epics construct a monolithic discourse of modernity-as-progress via the amnesia of conflicts, tensions, and processes of domination and negotiation in the rural and everyday space of colonial Hong Kong. It is stressed that to piece together the above anomalies is not an attempt to restore a pre-given ‘native’ to but rather an endeavour to examine how the ‘local’ as divergent historical agents shaped and has been shaped by the political, social, and economic environment of Hong Kong and the larger world outside. This can be called a model of dialectics composed of an internal dialectic and a dialectic of articulation. In this regard, with the benefit of the rapprochement of history and anthropology and a non-linear view of history, this paper is a historical bricolage of the anomalous history of Hong Kong, aiming to destabilize the Hong Kong historical grand narrative. Through rethinking the impact of the colonial experience, this paper hopes to liberate alterity and diversity in historical interpretations and imaginations.     

Wresting Memory from the Violence of the Present: Rape,Martyrdom, and Double Narrative in Paul Friedrich's Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village*

Abstract Post-Modernist critiques of ethnographic method tend to reduce research and writing to only writing and erase the traces of the researcher's field experience that may appear in a text. Such critiques confer more power on the ethnographer or oral historian than he or she possesses. I argue that researchers invariably manoeuvre within political contexts in order to obtain knowledge, and that the intersubjective interaction between scholar and subject creates both silences and visibilities in the final text. In Agrarian Revolt Paul Friedrich constructed a revolutionary counter memory against his own hidden master narrative of opportunism, betrayal, and political violence. Yet partly due to his interaction with members of the competing political clans, he replicated in his counter-memeory the crucial premises of the ruling clan's ideology: the ‘doctrine of genealogical unity’ and its correlates of blood descent and female purity.     

Burmese Indians in contemporary Burma: heritage,influence, and perceptions since 1988

This article seeks to explore the current role, significance and influence of Burmese Indian minorities in post-1988 Burma as well as the perceptions the Burmese indigenous society and elite have developed on them since the colonial era. British Burma (1826–1948) witnessed a massive immigration of Indian communities that disproportionately dominated Burma's colonial enterprise. A strong resentment thus arose among the Burman Buddhist majority, illustrated by the rise of a popular ‘indophobia’ phenomenon. Paroxysmal expressions of the colonial original trauma were observed through recurrent pre-independence anti-Indian riots as well as a specific and enduring linguistic patronizing classification of the ‘Kalas’ by the Burmese language. Nationalistic administrative laws, enacted by the Burmese post-independence parliamentarian and military governments, furthered the downgrading and discrimination of Burmese Indians who remain however a visible minority today, with a manifest economic weight and a strong socio-cultural presence throughout Burma. In this paper, it will, however, be argued that after years of ‘Burmanization’ processes, Burmese old-age ‘indophobic’ sentiments have turned towards more ‘islamophobic’ tendencies, now explicitly targeting the Muslim communities of Indian origin, but that it remains difficult to evaluate their impact on Burma's current policymaking.