ourtropes

I suppose what I am suggesting is that the present has changed and with it have the implications of our form of address to the past. While I certainly do not want to argue that chimeric promises of Official Academic Multiculturalism have solved the problems of white overprivilege and Black disadvantage, I think that it is fair to say that the political stakes of white alignment with the cause of Black freedom within the academy have changed. Such gestures today enter a well-grooved field: making them has very few costs and, for white scholars at least, more than a few benefits. The politics of solidarity they ostensibly represent seem to me to be correspondingly diminished. Indeed, in the absence of the type of hard and clear thinking about the relation of history-writing to history…these rhetorical and performative gestures seem to me today to liquidate their ethical and political obligations in the very act of asserting them: even as they assume a posture of present engagement in the political struggles of the past they do so on a closed circuit by which historians and their audience together share in the knowledge that they have transcended the past. Left it behind. By formulating, through the terms of scholarly address, a pat notion of a community of believers who have made it far enough beyond slavery or racism (or whatever) in order to look back on them with the condescension of the converted they establish a set of terms in which the present is washed clean of the sins of the past (rather than doggedly implicated in them). And it is this that I want to highlight. If we are to draw credibility by doing our work in the name of the enslaved and then seek to discharge our debt to their history by simply “giving them back their agency” as paid in the coin of a better history, some knowing laughter, and a few ironic asides about the moral idiocy and contradictory philosophy of slaveholders, then I think that we must admit we are practicing therapy rather than politics: we are using our work to make ourselves feel better and more righteous rather than to make the world better or more righteous.

Hidden behind the ritualization of the injunction “to give the slaves back their agency,” behind the capacity of repeated performance to empty a gesture of the meaning it once had, is a history of why the idea of “agency” in slavery mattered so much to the New Social History. Writing of Black humanity as self-determination and resistance in the era of Civil Rights made sense as an intellectual and political engagement. It enabled historians to see and say things that were new and important. In so doing these delineated an optical field, which, as powerful as it was, made it hard to see some other things—even things which were already known—beyond the categories of the “agency” debates. Their categories are the historically structured “traditions” which weigh upon our own minds as we try to sort past, present, and future into better relation. Indeed, the very ambiguity of the success of the Civil Rights project—the fact that we inhabit institutions in which multicultural inclusion is the reigning official ideology at the very same time as an unprecedented global assault on the living conditions and even bare existence of the very people whose cultures are being feted in our lecture halls and seminar rooms—seems to me to call for new ways of trying to think about the past. If we are to acknowledge the claims of the past upon the present and to frame our scholarship as an act of redress, it seems to me important that we do so in ways which engage the exigencies of the present—the globalization of racialized and feminized structures of exploitation, rates of black incarceration in the United States that are unprecedented in world history, the resurgence of slavery—plain and simple slavery—as a mode of production, and, importantly, the emergence of new forms of (global) political solidarity and collective action—with terms other than those produced by an earlier struggle. It requires, that is, that we re-immerse ourselves in the nightmare of History rather than resting easy while dreaming that it is dawn and we have awakened.