countervisuality

bemusedbibliophile:

Highlighting the everyday processes by which enslaved people formed social and political solidarities, of course, brings the question of the relation of cultural forms – be they African, African-American, or even just American – to the history of slavery and resistance into sharper focus. Much of the literature on African culture in the New World has concentrated on mapping the transformation in enslaved people’s cultural and material life from African forms to African-American ones. Less time has been spent on the way that cultural forms functioned as mechanisms of creating the political solidarity necessary to collective action – how did enslaved people employ a shared register of terms to make arguments to spur (or put off) collective action. In a strange echo (or displacement) of the idea of liberal “agency” as such as resistance to slavery, cultural autonomy has been seen as in-and-of-itself a form of resistance to slavery, without careful attention to the ways that it could undermine as well as facilitate the formation of political solidarity among slaves. However important they were to the survival of enslaved people generally, and there is no doubt that they were crucial, neither African nor African-American cultural forms were inherently resistant to the system of slavery. And yet it was through employing shared cultural forms – arguments, prayers, fables, etc. – that enslaved people flourished even in their slavery, and set about forming the alliances through which they helped one another resist it.

Part of thinking about the relation of political organization and collective action to culture is re-thinking the relation between the past and the present. Arguments about the fate of African culture in the New World have generally been framed by historians’ efforts to find a continuous relation between the past and present, to find a present at any moment in history, that is, which flows out of the past. This approach has the virtue of vitalizing the Marxian imagery of “traditions” (and even “nightmares”) with the histories and ideas that enslaved Africans brought with them to the New World: it [is] impossible to imagine enslaved people as being, in any simple sense, liberal “agents.” But, the displacement of the “agent” as the universal subject of history comes at the risk, as I suggested above, that he (for that is part of the problem with “the agent”) will simply be replaced by “culture” as the universal subject of history. However, African or African-American culture at any given moment was less an achieved state, the end-result of a historical process, than an ongoing argument about what elements of a shared past were relevant to a current situation. And different African and African-American slaves had differential degrees of access to shaping that argument as they tried to incorporate the residuum of their past into the circumstances of their present. The epochal transformation of African into African-American culture was at the level of its everyday enactment cross-cut by politics of gender, age, origin, etc., by a present struggle, that is, over who had the power to define the relevant elements of a shared past. History after “agency” might be written around a “Copernican revolution” of memory, an intellectual inversion of the relation of past and present, by focusing attention on the present-life of the past, on what elements of the past are drawn upon at any given moment in history and the power-structured processes through which they are selected and enforced.

Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History, Vol.37, No.1 (Autumn 2003), pg.114-5 (x)

In a quite different context – a critique of racial formation theory – Colleen Lye addresses the limits of historiographical approaches that privilege “a continuous relation between the past and present,” and – by contrast – the urgency of “an intellectual inversion of the relation of past and present” that foregrounds “the present-life of the past”: 

The powerful attractions of what I would call a “gothic narrative of race”—in which race is thought of as “haunting” our present—flow from the quite understandable desire to theorize persistent racial forms of subordination that don’t seem sufficiently explained by the usual applications of social theory to the specificities of U.S. class division. Nevertheless when the “relative autonomy” of race is claimed on the basis of the transhistorical endurance of its manifest forms—when, in other words, race is turned into a spectral figure—then our attention is more likely to be directed away from the material conditions that contribute to the reproduction of racialization in the present. Our perception is blunted to the potential, and potentially radical, variability of racial forms.

Colleen Lye, “Introduction: In Dialogue with Asian American Studies,” Representations, Vol.99, No.1 (Summer 2007), pg.2-3