The Creolization of Theory - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822348322 ISBN 13: 9780822348320

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2011

Synopsis

Introducing this collection of essays, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back—investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines—offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and “French theory” originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chancé, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. Édouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. The Creolization of Theory is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities.

Contributors. Étienne Balibar, Dominique Chancé, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, Édouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Françoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih

About this title

About the Author

Françoise Lionnet is Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Shu-mei Shih is Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Lionnet and Shih are co-directors of the “Cultures in Transnational Perspective” Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in the Humanities at UCLA and co-editors of Minor Transnationalism, also published by Duke University Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE CREOLIZATION OF THEORY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4832-0

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................................................1INTRODUCTION The Creolization of Theory Shu- mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet............................................................37ONE Symptomatically Black: A Creolization of the Political Barnor Hesse.....................................................................62TWO Postslavery and Postcolonial Representations: Comparative Approaches Anne Donadey.......................................................83THREE Crises of Money Pheng Cheah...........................................................................................................112FOUR Material Histories of Transcolonial Loss: Creolizing Psychoanalytic Theories of Melancholia? Liz Constable.............................142FIVE From Multicultural to Creole Subjects: David Henry Hwang's Collaborative Works with Philip Glass Ping-hui Liao.........................159SIX I Am Where I Think: Remapping the Order of Knowing Walter Mignolo.......................................................................193SEVEN Taiwan in Modernity/Coloniality: Orphan of Asia and the Colonial Difference Leo Ching.................................................207EIGHT Toward a Diasporic Citizen? From Internationalism to Cosmopolitics Étienne Balibar..............................................226NINE "The Forces of Creolization": Colorblindness and Visible Minorities in the New Europe Fatima El-Tayeb..................................255A Europe and the Antilles: An Interview with Édouard Glissant Andrea Schwieger Hiepko Translated by Julin Everett.....................262B Creolization: Definition and Critique Dominique Chancé Translated by Julin Everett..................................................269REFERENCES....................................................................................................................................293CONTRIBUTORS..................................................................................................................................297

Chapter One

SYMPTOMATICAL LY BLACK A Creolization of the Political

Barnor Hesse

A return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish. Édouard Glissant

This, then, is a symptom: a particular, "pathological," signifying formation, a binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social bond network, but is at the same time a positive condition of it. Slavoj Zizek

Creolization evokes the political, but only once we wrest its conceptual provenance from models based reductively on French Caribbean linguistic practices and interrogate the concept of the political itself. The familiar tropes of creolization—fusion, syncretism, transculturation—are also descriptors of the cross-cultural conditions historically emergent from the polities and societies established by Atlantic slavery across the Americas. Therefore understanding creolization as a way of conceptualizing practices other than language, though in important ways mediated by language, requires that we ask: what marks something as creolized? We can begin our answer by considering the historical formation of creole as a description, bearing the tropes of creolization as a process in three connected ways.

First, before its association with emergent languages, the term creole was used to refer to particular people. From the sixteenth century onward, initially in the Spanish, Portuguese, and French American colonies, creole, in its different versions, specified Europeans born in the colony as distinct from the metropole; Europeans whose European culture was compromised and curiously shaped by the cross-cultural environment of the colony. Underlying this was an informal distinction between pure Europeans and impure Europeans. Second, creole by the eighteenth century came to describe colonized people born in the colonies, partial descendants of slaves, whose African ancestry was mixed with European slave owners, and whose European culture and lighter pigmentation were born of colonial life. At the same time, the term also began to define the cultural and linguistic differences negotiated by the enslaved between black people born in the colony and those imported directly from Africa. It marked shifting and at times unreliable cultural distinctions between light-skinned creoles and dark-skinned creoles, as well as contested yet permeable Europeanized frontiers with the African cultural presence. Third, by the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, creole became heavily associated with particular language forms. Derived from historically combining European and African languages, culturally different vocabularies and syntactical structures, it emerged as a pragmatic means of communication between masters and slaves. Subsequently it became increasingly associated with the colonized populations and their descendants, often signifying a blurred distinction between Caribbean and European vocabularies, as well as sharp conflicts between African and European speech rhythms and comparative idioms of meaning (Glissant 1989; Dayan 1995; Chaudenson 2001; Enwezor et al. 2003).

What we can see in this historical schema of transculturation, in the movement from cultures to bodies to languages, is a logic of creolization that implicates each in the relations of European colonialities. It involves colonial imaginaries of autonomous, pure Europeanness seeking but failing to avoid contamination by representations from impure non-Europeanness, which in turn try to either assimilate Europeanness or to become extricated from it. There are also at work here antagonisms and accommodations between different claims to linguistic, cultural, and political representation that imbricate the dominant and the subordinate in the same transcultural relations. Conceptually we must also allow for mutual exchanges that influence and mediate the relation between colonizers and colonized, despite the historically European colonizing tendency to deny the dimension of cultural interdependency. Although the European colonial hegemony insisted on remaining dominant, and representative, while declaring the insignificance, marginalization, or nonexistence of a relation with the colonized other, this too is part of the logic of creolization. As is the colonized, non-European other's involvement in redefining and unsettling the dominating culture while articulating alternative cultural forms as a basis of its agency.

Each of these imbrications is as much the logic of creolization as the conventional separation of social forms (e.g., cultures, bodies, languages) into creolized and noncreolized identities. Particularly when read against the modern histories of the Americas, these still-legible colonial gestations remind us that creolization also describes the outcomes of intimate relations and discrepant fusions between formerly geographically disparate cultures; variously European and hegemonic, as well as variously American, African, Asian, and subaltern (cf. Hall 2003a; Lowe 2005). Yet it is from these historically modern conditions of European coloniality that the contemporary Western imaginary of the political has managed to extract itself as if racially unmarked, culturally immaculate, and unquestionably ever present. If creolization emerges from the vocabularies and grammars, sonics and oralities, representations and performativities, ruptured and transformed from the colonialities of European modernity, is it really possible to understand the political outside these entanglements?

Creolized Entanglements

Writing about creolization in the early modern French Caribbean colony, Doris Garraway (2005) cautions against defining it transparently as the result of cultural flows between already ethnically and racially constituted groups. Instead she offers a paradigmatic view of creolization as cultural transformation, "productive of new ways of thinking, knowing and imagining that diverge from colonialist epistemologies and exclusionary identity formations based in fixed notions of race, language and nation" (Garraway 2005, 18). Noticeably this approach does not obscure the relation between creolization and coloniality that is the restive condition of divergences from such dominant discourses and the basis of new trajectories of representation. It also begins to question the apparent self-evident qualities of ethnicity and race in the colonial setting.

Creolization in this sense, as Stuart Hall suggests, constitutes ethnicity and race as "issues of domination and subalterneity, mastery and servitude, control and resistance," because questions of "power, as well as issues of entanglement, are always at stake" (Hall 2003a, 31). This enables us to think about how creolization might be productive of the political, marking its Western status as fraught with the kinds of negotiations, antagonisms, and incommensurabilities that connect modernity's Europe with other parts of the world. Initially taking place through the formation of new colonial economies and polities, it can be seen to emerge from the relations associated with discrepant forms of identification and racial regulation, culturally extending throughout the colony, between the metropole and colony, and within the metropole itself.

At the outset it needs to be emphasized that what primarily entangles the coloniality of creolization with the political is race. It is the constituting of race that produces the antagonistic distinctions and relational identities of European coloniality. Within the frame of creolization, therefore, it is important to understand the anatomy of race as a political institution in terms of colonial lineage rather than biological ancestry. This is what is suggested by Eric Wolf 's (1982) observations on the emergence and circulation of the categories "Indian" and "Negro" throughout the Americas from the sixteenth century onward. Wolf suggests these ostensibly racial categories were distinctive because they did not refer to preexisting ethnicities, biological differences, or even cultural self-representations emanating from the marked populations themselves. Rather, in the case of the Indians, the designation referred to the conquered, and in the case of the Negroes it referred to the enslaved.

This recalls the colonial designs of early modern European transatlantic polities and their institutionalization as racial taxonomic states (Stoler 2002). The attributions "Negro" and "Indian" were constructed as raciality in three constitutive and imbricated ways: first, populations associated with enforced and exploitable labor; second, respective subordinate and regulated locations within colonial governance; and third, the imposed debasements of non-European otherness in the same colonial process that sedimented the relationality of race. Against the idea of biologically induced racial categories (emphasizing self-evident differences between Europeans, Indians, and Negroes), this suggests that race could never have been procured as an ontological datum outside the creolizing frame of coloniality. Race was constituted as a colonial category of governance. Arising from the administration of colonial antagonisms, negotiations, and incommensurabilities, it inscribed the governmental imprimatur of a hegemonic Europe over a subaltern non-Europe. Race was the colonial sedimentation of the political. Understanding its profound significance, however, requires coming to terms with how the imaginaries of liberalism, democracy, and this practice and conceptualization of race were fused, that is, creolized, in the institutions of, and resistances to, European expansionism, the conquests of the Americas, and the Atlantic enslavement of Africans (cf. Mignolo 2000b).

Perhaps we should also consider the West as always already creolized by virtue of its modernity and coloniality. Édouard Glissant (1989) suggests as much in his account of creolization as the irreducibility of any cross-cultural phenomena in which the content of, and differences between, ostensibly distinctive yet now related cultures were not distinguishable in that way before colonial contact. So, for example, despite the proprietarily cultural claims for the political meanings of democracy usually advanced as the exclusive (racial) preserve of western Europe and the United States, it might be argued that even by the late eighteenth century, the emergent modern discourse of the political was colonially framed and antagonistically cross-cultural. Its constitutional ideas of citizenship, equality, and national sovereignty were overdetermined by the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions against European monarchism and the Haitian (1791) revolution against European colonialism. This series of revolutions therefore becomes radically unthinkable outside the consequences of the relations between different cultural entanglements (European, African, American), in each colonial site of revolution, especially their various racial implications for the representation of democracy and democratic representation. The political is thus no longer conceivable as a "language of a single origin, but rather a cross-cultural language" (Glissant 1989, 127).

To claim the creolization of emergent modern democracy implies that it was shaped and inscribed by the cultural differences and racial entanglements emanating from metropole-colony configurations produced in political relation with each other. Creolization questions the idea of racial exclusivity in the Western origins of the modernity of the political; it also signifies the illusion of a pure democratic imaginary in the formations of subjects, discourses, and institutions, since none of these have been "spared the cross-cultural process" (Glissant 1989, 140). But this does not mean creolization erases the formation of distinct cultural or political entities; rather, it simply affirms the implications of diverse colonial relationality as part of the continual process of modern entity formation (Glissant 1989), including modern democracy. At the same time, it highlights the problem of how to reconcile this with contemporary political theory's approach to conceptualizing the meaning of the political, which has routinely colonized it as unitarily European, American, and Western.

Colonizing the Political

In recent years, a number of primarily European philosophers and political theorists have begun to discuss the meaning of the political and its relation to the question of politics in efforts to recast its meaning in the changing social contortions of Western polities. In the interrogation of both politics and the political as different concepts, new insights about the changing complexity of contemporary Western social and cultural forms are emerging. Some of these suggest that Western societies are undergoing deep processes of depoliticization in which the economics of consumer choices are replacing the politics of ideological alternatives (cf. Touraine 2000). While others argue that social and political theory itself is increasingly succumbing to an antipolitical vision that refuses to acknowledge the antagonistic dimension constitutive of the political (cf. Mouffe 2005, 2).

At stake in these discussions are ideas underpinning the restoration of politics (the ontic) as a socially meaningful, creative, disruptive, liberating activity and the recognition of the political (the ontological) as constituting the institutional field and therefore regulating the horizon of conflictual social relationships (cf. Rancière 1999; Laclau 2005). In some ways, these discussions echo earlier twentieth-century criticisms from Heidegger, Schmitt, Weber, and Arendt of liberalism's reduction of the political to the directives of Western technology and administration. In this tradition of critique, technology dispenses with the affective and collective dimensions of politics, substituting economic calculations and rational individualism for social mobilization and social change. It establishes itself "as an overly quantitative and abstract force that eradicates the concrete and qualitative particularities of human existence" (McCormick 1999, 18). Contemporary critiques of technological solutions to pervasive social questions indict the global ascendancy of neoliberalism and its corresponding evisceration of social institutions and social solidarities. The contention of neoliberalism appears to be that the social good is enhanced through extending the range and frequency of market transactions, and consequently it reinforces the recruitment of social relations to the sovereignty of the market (Harvey 2005), also producing as its effects the meaninglessness of politics, emptying it of beliefs, ideologies, and social values (Agamben 2000).

For political theorists, however, it is not only the hegemony of neoliberalism and its sedimented forms of depoliticization that are in question. At the intersection between these conceptual reformulations of the political and politics are various constructions of the people and democracy. Whether the people are phrased in terms of the "people/multitude" (Hardt and Negri 2000), "democracy/populism" (Laclau 2005), or "arithmetical equality" and "geometrical equality" (Rancière 1999),3 each construction also invokes democracy as a compromised egalitarian space, bringing critical attention to bear on unremittingly contested relations between demos and ethnos, homogeneity and heterogeneity, inclusion and exclusion.

Such invocations of the political seem to suggest contemporary discussions are in dialogue with the ghost of Carl Schmitt, the conservative and sometime fascist thinker of the early twentieth century, whose work as a political theorist and philosopher of jurisprudence is attracting increasing attention in critical theory, most notably in the influential recent work of Giorgio Agamben (2000, 1998). Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, first published in 1932, has become a significant point of departure for rethinking the idea of the political. It addresses a concern with what is seen as the elimination of decidedly political questions in preoccupations with economic or ethical concerns under the auspices of liberalism in Western political and social theory. For Chantal Mouffe (2005), this "post-political vision" is "fraught with political dangers." It replays deep-seated social antagonisms in a "moral register." Assuming the desirability of consensus and reconciliation, where social alternatives should always be at stake, it usurps and extinguishes the agonism of a pluralist democracy. This ignores "the affective dimension mobilized by collective identifications," while continuing to imagine that such passions are "bound to disappear with the advance of liberalism and the progress of rationality" (Mouffe 2005, 1–6). One of the inspirations for Mouffe's critique of liberalism and its disavowal of the pluralistic predicate of democracy is clearly Schmitt's concept of the political, which embodies and assembles a national, civil, or social distinction between friend and enemy (Schmitt 1932/1996, 26). There is, however, more to the concept of the political that can be read from Schmitt's formulations than has so far been embraced by radical democratic theorists.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822348322
• ISBN 13: 9780822348320
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Lionnet Françoise, Shih Shu-mei