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Acts of Misrecognition:
Transnational Black Politics,
Anti-imperialism and the
Ethnocentrisms of Pierre
Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant
Michael Hanchard
‘O
N THE Cunning of Imperialist Reason’, the article by Pierre
Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant published in Theory, Culture &
Society, identifies me, among several other US scholars, with
reproducing and disseminating US cultural imperialism through scholarship
which attempts to make Brazilian race relations resemble the purportedly
bi-polar model of the United States. In so doing, according to their critique,
I engaged in a form of nationalist chauvinism which they describe as ‘ethnocentric poison’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 46fn.).
One of their targets was my book Orpheus and Power, with the attendant accusation that I traveled to Brazil, utilized a normative lens about
race ground and framed in the United States and thereby exhibited two
egregious imperialist behaviors: (a) evaluated Brazil and the Brazilian black
movement according to the contours of race relations in the United States
and (b) proselytized among the Brazilian black movement in an attempt to
convince movement activists that their movement should resemble ‘the US
Civil Rights movement’ in strategy, tactics, even racial classification. This
alleged crime is described in abstract terms in their opening sentence by
its ‘power to universalize particularisms linked to a singular historical
tradition by causing them to be misrecognized as such’ (Bourdieu and
Theory, Culture & Society 2003 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 20(4): 5–29
[0263-2764(200308)20:4;5–29;035331]
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6 Theory, Culture & Society 20(4)
Wacquant, 1999: 41). The ‘particularisms’, in this instance, are strategies
and tactics of the ‘singular historical tradition’ of the US civil rights
movement.
As several respondents have noted in the previous special issue
devoted to this debate, Bourdieu and Wacquant are deeply implicated within
their own critique, ignoring legacies of French imperialism and colonialism
as well as a profound lack of knowledge about the intricacies of race
relations in Brazil. The varied responses to their initial tirade suggest that
the implications of this exchange resonate in corners of the world and in
sectors of the academy far removed from Brazilian and Latin American
Studies. For the sake of broadening the discussion around Bourdieu and
Wacquant’s harangue, I would like to make a very specific intervention in
response to their article, which has not been elaborated on previously, in
relation to the black movement in Brazil, the US civil rights movement and
transnational black politics. Their critique relies on presumptions and
critical analytical methods which privilege the nation-state and ‘national’
culture as the sole object for comparative analysis, and as a consequence
ignore how Afro-Brazilian politics, the US civil rights movements in particular and transnational black politics more generally problematize the facile,
even superficial, distinctions between imperialist and anti-imperialist
nation-states and populations in their critique. Both the black Brazilian
movement and the US civil rights movement are analyzed solely as nationalterritorial and entirely self-referential (i.e. parochial) phenomena, with no
linkages in between.
This particular constellation of presumptions and method exposes a
Latinist conflation of state and nation explicitly found in several versions of
French republicanism, wherein citizens of all races, ethnicities and classes
are not only indistinguishable from one another, but their differences are
dissolved before the unifying mythologies of the nation-state. In their view,
national populations are aligned by territorial, cultural and state fixity, and
so Brazilian and US citizens in general, and Afro-Brazilian and US AfricanAmericans in particular, are divided according to the aforementioned
coordinates. It is impossible, under their framework, to identify and read
cultural and ideological distinctions within the United States or Brazil, or
the possibility that cross-cutting cleavages, overlapping interests, ideological or cultural commonalities could traverse boundaries of nation,
‘national culture and state’. Moreover, there is no regard for the prospect of
internal distinction, the idea that people of one country may share affinities
and politics which actually run counter to state or even dominant popular
ideologies about a particular nation or people. Not only would this come as
a surprise to individuals, organizations and movements within the United
States that have long resisted the domestic and foreign policies of imperialism and racial apartheid at home and abroad, but as an insult as well. Most
importantly for the purpose of scholarly assessment of their critique,
Bourdieu and Wacquant ignore the complexity and specificity of black
agency in both Brazil and the United States, which leads them to equate
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7
black transnationalism with imperialism and US foreign policy. In their
version of political ethnocentrism, the politics of nation-states are privileged
and the mobilizations of non-state actors are neglected and, when identified,
poorly understood.
The Incorrigibility Thesis versus Politics Unbounded
In a peculiar way, their argument resonates with what Charles Taylor has
called the ‘incorrigibility thesis’ wherein culture serves as the language,
symbols and practice of a bounded, demarcated community. This form of
community helps constitute a chasm when juxtaposed against other such
communities, creating not only a Babel-like situation of mutual incomprehensibility, but also the possibilities for misinterpretation based on
presumptions of cultural superiority. Attempted interchanges between a
dominant and a subordinate culture are particularly fraught with the danger
of interpretive violence when interpreters from a dominant culture assume
that their role is to:
. . . ‘correct’ the self-understandings of the less dominant ones by substituting their own. What is really going on then becomes simply what we can
recognize in our own terms; and their self-descriptions are wrong to the extent
that they deviate from ours. Transcultural study becomes a field for the
exercise of ethnocentric prejudice. (Taylor, 1985: 124, original emphasis)
At the level of method, Taylor seeks to bridge the gap between ‘us’
and ‘them’ through the process of critical, mutually engaged understanding,
wherein the interpretation of another culture cannot be fully undertaken
‘until we have understood ourselves better as well’ (Taylor, 1985: 129).
Taylor, however, utilizes his own interpretive approach as an antidote to the
notion that cultural difference precludes the possibility of any person undertaking an analysis of another society, civilization or culture without being
so blinded by their own chauvinisms as to render their observations suspect
from the outset. Over 30 years ago, when this article first appeared, several
anthropological as well as more commonsensical notions of cultural difference assumed cultures to be discrete, separate processes. Bourdieu and
Wacquant’s argument contains traces of the incorrigibility thesis, insofar as
nationality or nation-ness serves as a form of cultural distinction (national
history, politics and culture) which radically differentiates one national
formation from another, in this case Brazil and Brazilians from the US and
US citizens. Their version of the United States thus contains vastly differentiated epochs and peoples who are united by their nation-ness but little
else; the US state, its citizens, slaves, indigenous and other subject peoples,
white ethnics, capitalists and laborers are not merely indistinguishable, but
interchangeable.
Taylor’s incorrigibility thesis and Bourdieu and Wacquant’s critique
share a common form of logic. Both formulations assume stable and internally coherent cultural formations, insofar as cultural distinction relies on an
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8 Theory, Culture & Society 20(4)
‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary opposition. In analytic terms, cultural distinction
is also coincident with spatial distinction, so that the idea of cultural difference is bounded by territorial difference, which is in turn presided over by
a state whose policies (imperialist, anti-imperialist, etc.) determine the
national ideological disposition of the people(s) to whom it grants citizenship or subjecthood. The crucial distinction here is that Taylor posits this
thesis in order to transcend it, whereas Bourdieu and Wacquant assume the
epistemic precepts of the thesis to be true. Thus, the US is a homology; its
intellectuals, activists and common people must necessarily reflect
dominant, imperialist ideologies of the US state, national society and
culture. Their nation-ness supersedes any cultural, political or ideological
positions and distinctions they may possess and articulate.
That Obscure Object of US Imperialism: The Civil Rights
Movement?
The US civil rights movement serves as an important symbol and rhetorical device in Bourdieu and Wacquant’s argument to identify a symptom of
US imperialism, a paradigmatic example of a particular type of political and
social protest that is seemingly peculiar to the United States, a sort of
bookmark, a stable, reliable and ‘given’ indicator of a singular ideological
formation. After accusing me of applying ‘North American racial categories
to the Brazilian situation’ and attempting to make ‘the particular history of
the US Civil Rights Movement into the universal standard for the struggle
of all groups oppressed on the grounds of colour (or caste)’ (1999: 44),
Bourdieu and Wacquant pose the following rhetorical question:
What are we to think, indeed, of those American researchers who travel to
Brazil to encourage the leaders of the Movimento Negro to adopt the tactics
of the Afro-American Civil Rights movement and to denounce the category
of pardo . . . in order to mobilize all Brazilians of African descent on the basis
of a dichotomous opposition between ‘Afro-Brazilians’ and ‘whites’ at the very
same time when, in the USA, people of mixed origin, including so-called
blacks, are mobilizing to obtain from the American state (beginning with the
Census bureau) official recognition of ‘mixed-race’ Americans by ceasing to
categorize them forcibly under the single label ‘black’. (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1999: 47–8)
While it is certainly plausible and in some instances true that certain
advocates of the US civil rights movement, particularly in international
forums, posit civil rights activism in the United States as a template for
black activism in other parts of the world, and in this way, can be considered
to have hegemonic aspirations, one would nonetheless have to make very
specific judgments about the particularity of the intervention rather than
simply attribute such aspirations to a form of identity politics (nation, race)
of an entire political cluster or congregation.
Bourdieu and Wacquant’s use of the terms ‘US civil rights movement’
and ‘African-American’ provides another clue to the emerging cloud of
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unfounded assumptions hovering about their argument. While being
‘American’ or more specifically ‘African-American’ might serve to locate a
particular category of US citizen/subject, it is barely an initial step in identifying, locating and ultimately discerning a political position. In other words,
even though racism in a society such as the United States creates the
material conditions under which certain modes of consciousness would and
could emerge, it does not dictate, in the final analysis, states of consciousness or how individuals and groups respond to these conditions. Thus, what
serves as an explanatory variable for these critics is a blanket categorization which in itself requires explanation and qualification.
In the case of US African-Americans (readers, please note the distinction), would an ‘African-American’ analysis be integrationist or black
nationalist, Marxist, liberal black feminist/womanist or conservative, just to
mention several of many ideological possibilities? This sort of specificity
would be de rigueur for serious critique in the social sciences and the
humanities, the first ‘cut’ of any revisionist, historiographic, sociological
investigation attempting to situate a particular mode of analysis within a
specific intellectual tradition. And yet, this prima facie prerequisite is jettisoned in the criticisms of Bourdieu and Wacquant. Would someone analyzing modern France argue that Georges Bataille, Count Gobineau, Julie
Kristeva and Henri LeFebvre – just to name four thinkers – engage in
anything that remotely resembles a ‘French’ mode of analysis and be taken
seriously? The subtle and detailed response by Robert Stam and Ella Shohat
to the Bourdieu and Wacquant salvo emphasizes the Francophilic side of
the Franco–US debate, so I won’t extend my argument into this direction
here (Shohat and Stam, 2001). I raise these questions because they provide
the wider lens through which to view my response to Bourdieu and
Wacquant’s claims about the allegedly inherent imperialism in the transmission and employment of modes of political practice utilized to good effect
in the US civil rights movement elsewhere.
In my case, their assertions betray a lack of familiarity with my work,
a prerequisite for making a critique of this sort. I have consistently underscored the problematic equation of America with the United States and have
argued, like Richard Moore, the Afro-Caribbean radical of the 1930s and
1940s (Moore, 1992), or more contemporarily Caetano Veloso and Pablo
Milanese, that the concept of America encompasses much more than the
USA or even North America. In an essay written over 10 years ago, I argued
for the use of the term African-American and American as a hemispheric,
rather than a national designation, and have consistently utilized the term
US African-American in my references to most (though not all) people of
African descent in the United States (Hanchard, 1990). Thus, their first act
of misrecognition, a seemingly minor one, is nonetheless a hint of more egregious forms of misrecognition to follow.
Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, I want to obviate the counterfactual embedded in their rhetorical question: what if someone from the
United States familiar with the black struggle for racial equality went
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outside the United States and suggested to members and activists from
another racially subordinated group that tactics exercised in the US may
have some political viability elsewhere? The more specific question,
however, is to wonder whether issues of free association, cultural recognition, political assembly and protest are so culturally specific as to be
incorrigible, and as a consequence, immobile. There are innumerable
examples to suggest that this is not necessarily a consequence of traveling
strategies, tactics and philosophies of praxis. Gandhi’s tactics of civil
disobedience, informed in part by the writings of Henry David Thoreau, did
not transform him into an ‘American’, nor the nationalist struggle in India
into one beholden to the United States. Nor did Gandhi’s anti-racist
resistance to Boers in South Africa convert India into the Union of South
Africa.
The ideas, tactics and strategies of most civil rights and black
nationalist movements emanated from neither state nor capital, but from the
interaction between popular struggle and philosophies of praxis that had
local, national and transnational dimensions. Perhaps memory fails, but I
do not recall Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Baines
Johnson nor any other dominant political-economic actors from the era of
the modern civil rights movement advocating the global spread and dissemination of ideas and tactics of black political actors in the United States.
Utilizing the old Milibandian (Miliband, 1983) distinction, with the exception of a few organizations and individuals with ties to the Federal Bureau
of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, black social movements of the civil rights era worked neither at the behest nor on behalf of
capital or state. Whether certain commentators and students of the era have
sought, literally and figuratively, to universalize their strategies, beliefs and
tactics in dialogue with movements elsewhere is another matter. But here I
would like to take my response one step further; the circulation of ideas,
tactics and philosophies of black civil rights struggles in the United States
or anywhere else is helpful for the continued circulation of debates about
the relation between power and culture in the transnational black public
sphere, a step towards the transcendence (if ever possible) of the limitations
of both rightist arguments about the cultural or biological inferiority of a
variety of African and African-descended subjects, as well as the leftist
(European and otherwise) relegation of transnational black politics to the
realm of the endlessly exotic, or worse, ‘parochial’ and ‘epiphenomenal’.
Bourdieu and Wacquant’s presumptions about the ‘US civil rights
movement’ grow even more nonsensical when one considers the globalized
character of black struggle in the United States not only during the era of
the civil rights movement, but over the course of at least two centuries.
Bourdieu and Wacquant’s self-entrapment within the analytic category of
the territorial nation leads them to imprison US African-American politics
and thought within the geographic boundaries of the US. Their assertions,
however, provide the opportunity to consider the so-called US civil rights
movement within the larger context of the struggle for racial equality,
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collective action and consciousness among US African-Americans in the
face of white supremacy, indifference and condescension, and how that
context fits within an even broader landscape of black transnationalism, in
which both Afro-Brazilian and US African-American political actors form
a part.
One of the philosophical trestles of the most renowned tradition of
black political activism, namely the civil disobedience of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was the philosophy of civil disobedience of Mohandas
Gandhi who himself was influenced by Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo
Emerson. ‘Foreign’ ideas from the writings of Frantz Fanon and Albert
Memmi, Ho Chi Minh, Amilcar Cabral (even French writers like Sartre and
Regis Debray), found their way into debates within movements and
formations such as the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army,
the Watts Writers Workshop, the Harlem Writers Workshop and other groups
during the 1960s, and were integral to the ideological and tactical development of the black liberation struggle. When one considers that non-US
African-Americans often occupied significant intellectual and strategic
positions in various tendencies within the black struggle for racial equality
in the US, from people like Kwame Toure (nee Stokely Carmichael) to Cyril
Biggs to Claudia Jones, then one must acknowledge, unlike Bourdieu and
Wacquant, that the ‘African-American’, i.e. ‘US civil rights movement’, has
always been ideologically and ethno-nationally plural.
As most students of the post-Second World War epoch in the United
States know, the era contained many different ideological and mobilizational
tendencies, some not directly attached to the civil rights movement: black
nationalisms of various kinds, the Nation of Islam, revolutionary strategies
utilizing armed struggle as well as others. The idea of a US civil rights
movement as a monolithic entity with at best two nodal points, the SNCC
and SCLC, or perhaps three with the inclusion of Black Power advocates
and ideologies, is only worth responding to in order to, once again, admonish
these critics for their lack of basic familiarity with the broader contours of
black struggle in the United States.
This should be obvious to those with even a cursory familiarity with
US history. What is less obvious is how two scholars such as Bourdieu and
Wacquant, who were raised within and in relation to a former imperial power
such as France, have managed to escape the taint of French national
mythologies and culturally corporatist logics. The scholarship of Robin D.G.
Kelley (1999), Patterson and Kelley (2000), Penny von Eschen (1997),
Winston James (1998), Mark Naison (1984), Cedric Robinson (1983) and
Michael Dawson (2001), provides ample evidence that the so-called US civil
rights movement was not limited to the United States and the ‘black’ struggle
was not entirely black. This directly counters Bourdieu and Wacquant’s
suggestion that the transmission of ideas about social struggle between the
United States and the rest of the world has been ‘one-way’ or unilinear.
Bourdieu and Wacquant’s assumption that the prospect of tactics and
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strategies emanating from the United States being taken up elsewhere is no
more than ‘ethnocentric poison’, exemplifies their lack of political imagination.
The second part of the claim about US imperialist reason is based on
the roles of US-based funding, publishing and research institutions operating like a conveyor belt for US ‘racial doxa’, which is then trailed down to
Brazil and summarily unloaded as if it were a sack of weevil-infested flour.
Their claims of US orthodoxy in funding rationales are not supported by the
evidence of a diverse array of support for myriad initiatives to increase not
only scholarship, but the presence of black and brown Brazilians in postgraduate research programs in the social sciences and the humanities, as
well as the proliferation of non-governmental organizations and actors advocating for human rights issues and concerns affecting black and brown
Brazilians.
Bourdieu and Wacquant’s version of the incorrigibility thesis
precludes the possibility that US-based funding institutions would actually
be in a position to enhance, rather than pervert, national and/or local
activism, but again, the international and transnational implications of
racial politics in Brazil – as well as non-governmental funding around the
world – are far more complicated than their arguments reveal. To give a few
concrete examples, the Ford Foundation has funded several postgraduate
programs in various universities in various parts of the country to increase
the presence of black and brown Brazilians in the Brazilian academy which
has historically, though informally, been closed to black and brown Brazilians. ‘Foreign’ anthropologists such as Peter Fry and Livio Sansone have,
along with other Brazilian scholars, supported research efforts and a book
series on the more anthropological aspects of racial identity and identification in Brazil, and helped train some of the best young scholars of anthropology – several Afro-Brazilians among them – in the process. We have had
friendly and not-so-friendly disagreements over the years about our competing perspectives on race relations in Brazil, as anyone who has actually read
our work can attest. Thus the Ford Foundation could be accused of helping
to sponsor healthy academic debate, but doxa? I think not.
To give another, more policy-oriented example, the Center for the
Articulation of Marginalized Populations in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro, known by
the Portuguese acronym CEAP, has received funding from US-based and
European foundations to continue its efforts to educate the Brazilian public
and advocate for the rights of street children, and to coordinate educational
campaigns about the history of blacks in Brazil, among several other
initiatives. Thus, foreign support, not just support from US-based foundations and institutions, has actually helped several Brazilian non-governmental organizations and institutions increase the level of debate on racial
inequality at the forefront of public policy, increase the number of black
and brown Brazilian scholars as well as expand and deepen the research
agenda on race-related topics in Brazil.
None of the individuals or organizations mentioned could be
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accurately characterized as simply mimicking US-based racial paradigms.
In the case of CEAP, its director and founder, Ivanir dos Santos, was a
former street orphan who resided in several state orphanages during the
dictatorship. After leaving one of the state-sponsored orphanages, known
by its Portuguese acronym, FUNABEM, Mr dos Santos decided to organize
former governmental wards such as himself into a social and political
organization (dos Santos, 1999) devoted to marginalized sectors of Brazilian society, Afro-Brazilians among them. This is hardly a blueprint from the
NAACP, the Great Society program, or Bill Clinton’s welfare reform policies,
but a fruitful result of the development of Afro-Brazilian political initiatives
at the interstices between the Brazilian state and civil society, and the
globalization (yes globalization) of grants and funding competition of international foundations. The category of the nation is once again unbounded.
The points of political convergence in civil society are forged by topic
(homelessness, street children, racial discrimination, etc.), rather than by
nationality or state prerogative. Local and international forms of political
engagement intersect and congeal within the category of the nation. This
suggests, contrary to their thesis, that localism can be enhanced, not necessarily violated, through engagement with extra- or transnational forms of
political thought, and engagement with institutions and people whose
material and political engagements put them at odds with the practices or
policies of their own state. Such localism should not be confused with
parochialism.
Hardt and Negri succinctly capture the conceptual and epistemological problems inherent in the juxtapositions of global and local, which
in this instance locate the United States as the monolithic power, and Brazil
as the local victim of the US steamrolling, totalizing, corporatist (if not
imperialist) tendencies:
. . . the problem rests on a false dichotomy between the global and the local,
assuming the global entails homogenization and undifferentiated identity
whereas the local preserves heterogeneity and difference. Often, implicit in
such arguments is the assumption that the differences of the local are in some
sense natural, or at least their origin remains beyond question. . . . This view
can easily devolve into a kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticizes
social relations and identities. What needs to be addressed, instead, is
precisely the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create
and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as the local.
(Hardt and Negri, 2001: 45)
The production of locality, in this instance, is Brazilian race relations, juxtaposed against not solely the United States, but a history of anti-African,
anti-black ideologies ranging from the seemingly benign (Freyre’s racial
egalitarianism, Vasconcelos’s cosmic race) to the more sinister (fascism,
Nazi and neo-Nazi and other forms of white supremacy). Many conservationists of Brazilian exceptionalism focus on the first juxtaposition – the US
– and not the second, and as a consequence, elide not only the parallels
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between racial politics in the US and Brazil but those with other
nation-states where race indeed matters.
A Debate Revisited – The Black Brazilian Movement and
Foreign Corruption
Accusations of deleterious US African-American influence and other forms
of foreign influence, real or imagined, upon the Brazilian black movement
have a much longer, deeper history than the present debate. For readers
unfamiliar with the history and literature of the black Brazilian movement,
I introduce a translated excerpt from an interview of the late José Correia
Leite, a revered founding member of the Frente Negra Brasileira, the first
black political party in Brazil, formed in São Paulo in 1931. In E disse o
velho militante José Correia Leite (Leite and Cuti, 1992), Leite recalls how
news and information about black transnationalism outside Brazil first
entered Afro-Brazilian political discourse. According to Leite, a Bahian by
the name of Mario de Vasconcelos introduced several US African-American
texts to the black movement in São Paulo and Bahia. Vasconcelos translated
sections of Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World and other black transnational
texts for a section of the Clarim newspaper called ‘O Mundo Negro’, a
Portuguese translation of the title of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) publication. But as Leite notes, ‘it was created in a
controversial climate’. A majority of black Brazilians did not accept the
ideas fostered by Garvey because it was thought that Leite ‘wanted to make
a movement that was imported, a movement of other interests that were not
our own. They said a bunch of things. That I was creating a racial question.
Proposing a racist model from elsewhere’ (Leite and Cuti, 1992: 77–8).
Journals like Clarim d’Alvorada, the newspaper organ of the Frente Negra
Brasileira, reflected the transnational character of Black Brazilian activism
since the 1920s. In providing a context for the introduction of the ideas of
Marcus Garvey through the pages of the newspaper, Leite notes that ‘Garvey
was received with great reservation in the United States, despite having
found support for his great work. But he was opposed by many black Americans who considered him an adventurer’ (Leite and Cuti, 1992: 77–8).
Leite’s recollections are interesting for several reasons which are pertinent
to this debate. First, the parallels he draws between himself and Garvey, as
visionaries attempting to move beyond the confines of racial subordination
in Brazil and the United States, respectively, implicitly acknowledge what
is made more explicit elsewhere in the text, that many considered the Frente
Negra Brasileira to be a foolhardy gesture with little popular support, much
in the way that Garvey’s UNIA was viewed with suspicion by many in the
United States. Moreover, the relevance of Garvey’s ideas of racial emancipation was considered comparatively. Thus, unlike Bourdieu and Wacquant
as well as several Brazilianists, Leite was aware of the range of debates
about Garveyism in both societies. His willingness to introduce Garvey’s
ideas to black public discourse in Brazil suggests a keen understanding of
the importance of the circulation of ideas within black transnational
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political networks, even unpopular ideas, this in a nation where the notion
of an Afro-Brazilian as a separate political and cultural entity from
the Brazilian nation-state was considered an heretical act well into the
1980s.
Third, Leite’s commentary suggests, among many other insights in this
brief passage, that what was important about Garvey was not his national
origin or place of residence, but his commitment to the struggle for racial
equality for African-descended peoples that was not restricted by national
territorial demarcation. Leite was capable of viewing Garveyism as an
implement of struggle and reflection, among many other artistic, aesthetic
and political artifacts of the African diaspora. Leite sought and met with
many artists, intellectuals and figures of the black world. Nicholas Guillen,
the Afro-Cuban poet, spent time in São Paulo with Leite and other members
of the Frente. Brazilian nationalism, like most nationalisms, is among other
things an ideology of containment which is why, as Leite himself remarked,
he and others were accused of importing foreign ideas, of importing racism,
while he and other black Brazilian activists were attempting to demonstrate
to their nation-state that racism had already existed in Brazil. That their
patriotism and national allegiance were brought into question, along with
accusations of Bolshevism levied against them, is consistent with the Brazilian nationalist reaction to the articulation of a Brazilian black transnationalist vision.
Throughout the 20th century, subsequent generations of black Brazilian activists (which is how many of them refer to themselves) continued in
the transnational dialogue of black politics. In the 1970s, for example,
members of the black movement in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo began the
‘I am Black’ campaign to highlight the invisible, repressed presence of black
and brown Brazilians in public life, and to argue for an acknowledgement
of a distinctive Afro-Brazilian identity and politics based in the history of
racial slavery, African-derived religious and cultural practices, and a
connection to African-descended peoples in other parts of the world. They
also urged many Brazilians who did not consider themselves black, many
browns, mulattos, even whites, to do likewise. Black activists like Vanderlei José Maria, Hamilton Cardoso and Deborah Santos were engaged with a
black transnational debate, literature and rhetoric (Hanchard, 1994). Like
Manthia Diawara’s nuanced description of his own experiences growing up
in Guinea and incorporating modes of dress, music and other cultural icons
of black identity and resistance of the US African-American experience
(Diawara, 1998), Afro-Brazilians inscribed themselves into a transnational
black public discourse about race, nation, identity and solidarity by melding
those symbols, and political and cultural practices with their own experiences. But since Diawara and his Afro-Brazilian contemporaries wore Afro
hairstyles during this period, which were first popularized in the United
States, I guess Wacquant and Bourdieu would consider them imperialists
too.
Finally, the arguments levied against Leite and the Frente Negra
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Brasileira resemble Bourdieu and Wacquant’s critique of US AfricanAmerican scholars like myself. Such arguments are invariably nationalist
and statist, and further resemble the French colonial model of cultural
imperialism. Unlike the British or Dutch, for example, French colonial
models imposed the notion upon its colonial subjects that they were integral
parts of the French nation, not only in the form of a Commonwealth, as in
the British case, but in normative and pseudo-spatial terms, as departments
of the nation of France itself. In other words, they could be assimilated,
translated, if you will, into France. It is more than a coincidence, then, that
during the period of Pan-Africanist nationalist movements in colonial
Africa, one of the core arguments of French imperialists was that the French
African colonies were so fundamentally distinct from the British, Dutch,
Belgian and Portuguese colonies that the idea of ‘Pan-African Unity’ was
not only untenable and inapplicable but redundant; French Africans already
had a nation. What I am suggesting here is that as the imperial idea of the
French nation competed with African nationalisms and Pan-Africanisms, so
do black Brazilian ideas of racial identity and diaspora conflict with the
nationalist imaginary of Freyreanism and neo-Freyreanism, as well as the
colonial and neo-colonial imaginary of Luso-Tropicalism. Could it be that
Bourdieu and Wacquant’s disdain for transnational collaboration between
members of a racially marginalized group stems from the residue of French
republicanism in their reasoning, their own ethno-nationalist mythology?
Orpheus and Power, Black Transnationalism and ‘the
Cultural Question’
Since Orpheus and Power utilized a methodology first conceived by an
Italian and the subject of my research was Americans of a different sort
from the ones in the United States, just how did I manage to become the
imperialist I am made out to be? For those not familiar with the argument
formulated in Orpheus and Power, it is as follows: Brazilian racial hegemony,
of which the ideology of racial democracy is a part, is a political and cultural
process which (a) emphasizes Afro-Brazilian contributions to Brazilian
national culture as natural features of Afro-Brazilian identity; (b) produces
and maintains conditions of racial inequality; and (c) negates the prospect
of Afro-Brazilian identity and politics as a phenomenon distinct from
national politics. This last point (c) is consistent with a Latin model of
plurality and diversity emphasizing national homogeneity, a feature of both
Portuguese and French colonial models, and, to a lesser extent, the Spanish,
to complete the Franco-Iberian commonalities with respect to colonial rule.
In response to such conditions, I concluded that Afro-Brazilian
activists and organizations in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, utilized cultural
practices to (a) foster and encourage the idea of Afro-Brazilian identity and
consciousness that is distinct from nation-state mythologies of racial democracy and national identity and (b) to mobilize black and brown Brazilians
against ongoing practices of racial discrimination. What got me into such
trouble with several Brazilianists is my suggestion that (a) the movimento
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negro, or black movement, reproduced some of the preoccupation with
cultural identity that could be found at the national level and (b) often
emphasized culturalism over cultural politics.
One of the claims made by some interlocutors, and now by Bourdieu
and Wacquant, is that, by suggesting greater polarization in Brazilian racial
politics and the need to distance the movement from culturalist politics, I
was not only ‘Americanizing’ Brazilian race relations, but somehow depriving Afro-Brazilian activism of one of its key organizing principles and
political devices – culture – by emphasizing the rights, services and
resources aspects of political articulation, rather than cultural performance
and recognition. This, several commentators have attributed to my ‘Americanness’ rather than a more general problematic involving groups subject
to racial discrimination and questions of political power. Laura Segato
identifies me as an ‘Afro-North American’ in a 1996 article in order:
. . . to point to the specificity of the experience of the African [sic] contingent in the US and the common amount of history they share with the White
in this country. That is, a history of a peculiar type of capitalism, of enshrinement of the market, of a derived belief in war and violent means, of endorsement of an externally aggressive state machine, of an overall belligerent,
anti-pacifist national character . . . (Segato, 1996: 2–3)
By now, this should be familiar, a critique relying on caricature of the United
States and all of its peoples, and the ‘common amount of history’ shared
between whites and blacks.
Peter Fry concluded a much more thoughtful, partly autobiographical
engagement with my work by recounting an incident in Rio while traveling
with a black male friend, where he, a white, ‘naturalized’ Brazilian,
witnessed an instance of racially motivated harassment at the hands of
police. After the incident, he went to a bar and upon entering found ‘a bar
full of people of all possible “appearances”, young and old, women and men,
of all possible colors. The lively, convivial milieu was the perfect antidote
to police harassment’ (1995–6: 134). He concluded the article by suggesting that his experience was also the perfect antidote to my analysis of
‘Brazilian racial politics’ (a term I employ in my work) which provided proof
that I was ‘importing’ foreign categories into the discussion of Brazilian
society, since there is no such thing as a politics of race in Brazil (Fry,
1995–6: 134).
When considered cross-nationally, from the so-called Gypsies to
Palestinians to Jews, which nationalities or ethnic minorities negotiated and
ensured civil and human rights solely or largely through cultural practice
and distinction? None. The expression of cultural, religious distinction is
not a guarantee or even necessary avenue towards political and socioeconomic equality. In fact, cultural distinctiveness has historically marked
groups for marginalization and exploitation and, conversely, eroticization
and repulsion, but it never marked them as the equal of their oppressors.
Thus, part of my argument in Orpheus and Power is that the black movement
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in Brazil needed a more comparative sense of the relationship between
politics and culture as a problematic for marginalized racial and ethnic
groups living in multi-ethnic and multi-racial societies. Perhaps Brazil will
be the anomalous case, but in the years since the publication of Orpheus
and Power, the explosion of organizations, research and public policy
initiatives created by Afro-Brazilian women and men along the rights,
services, resources axis suggests that Afro-Brazilian social movements, as
well as political actors in political parties who have long advocated on behalf
of black and brown Brazilian populations (along with other historically
marginalized populations) have broadened their political terrain. Critics
may assert that this demonstrates that the black movement did not have
culturalist tendencies, but merely engaged in political practices which were
allowable under the long period of dictatorship, but, ultimately, the only way
for the black movement to challenge racial inequality and discrimination in
Brazil more directly was by creating a politics that seemed counterintuitive
to their existence and formation: the politics of the powerful. The limitations
of Afro-Brazilian identity politics are emblematic of the limitations of
identity politics more generally, regardless of the race or color of its adherents; cultural preservation, rescue and reformation, by itself, may help
transform a particular population, but does not necessarily transform a
polity or society, or unhinge that society from its racist mores.
Let us consider the tensions of politics and culture in the black
movement in Brazil from another vantage point in relation to black transnationalism: the literary formations of the Harlem Renaissance and the
Francophone Negritude movement, two of the most renowned movements
generated among African diaspora populations. The genesis for both was a
combination of artistic expression and political repression. The rationale,
in part, for the use of Surrealist methods in Negritude poetry, was, according to Aimé Césaire (1969), a way of ‘smashing “normal” patterns of
language in an attempt to create a new form’. Writing in the introduction of
Césaire’s Return to My Native Land, Mazisi Kunene writes that Césaire
thought that by ‘breaking up the patterns whose logical order had affirmed
racialism he had given surrealism a purpose’ (Kunene, 1969: 24), an
aesthetic response to France and Belgium’s brutal repression of African
anti-colonial movements.
The Harlem Renaissance emerged after a period of savage repression
of black populations throughout the United States in the period after the
First World War, when many US African-American soldiers returned from
the European front to find the same discrimination they had left behind, and
revolted against the US state’s contradictory position of exhorting them to
fight for someone else’s freedoms and not their own. In the words of Alain
Locke, its leader, the Harlem Renaissance was undergirded by a New Negro
coda that sought parity for the Negro through artistic expression. While
Locke acknowledged the importance of black transnationalism (what he
called ‘race-consciousness’) and an incipient Third Worldism among nonwhite peoples globally, he intimated doubt about the prospects of such
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avenues for the removal of the national-territorial strictures upon AfricanAmericans in the United States. Referring to Garveyism and global race
consciousness, Locke writes:
Constructive participation in such causes cannot [sic] help giving the Negro
valuable group incentives . . . but for the present, more immediate hope rests
in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic
endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective. (Locke, 1925:
15)
Further down, Locke speculated on the possible political and social
gains to be made from Negro cultural expression: ‘The especially cultural
recognition they win should in turn prove the key to the revaluation of the
Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further betterment of race relationships’ (Locke, 1925: 15). Locke’s personal and political
disposition precluded the possibilities of direct political action and confrontation. He might have been a race man, but, unlike Garvey, was no mass
man. Yet, he nonetheless considered cultural production as a road to selfdetermination, particularly in a moment in US history when other avenues
to self-determination for US African-Americans were either closed or
stunted. At the very least, Locke saw cultural production as an accompaniment to formal political protest and social mobilization.
Could it be that the history of the black movement in Brazil is informed
by similar tensions? Could it be that the arrested development of civil
society, coupled with the denial of the existence of racism in Brazilian
society among left and right alike, was the Brazilian equivalent of blocked
avenues for political articulation, deftly analyzed by historians such as Kim
Butler (1998), which made cultural politics more plausible and seemingly
more viable than other forms of politics? Considered in more analytic terms,
is it possible that, for many marginalized populations in the modern world,
regardless of color or nationality, the self-conscious expression of cultural
distinction is in part shaped by the degree of subordination to a more
dominant (numerically, politically or economically) group? Could it be that,
in the absence of military might and natural resources (e.g. minerals, oil,
precious stones), culture becomes the tool of choice for marginalized populations because it forms the last barrier – other than their very bodies –
between themselves and those who have dominated them and continue to
do so, the last, final corner of political terrain upon which the dominated is
not entirely vanquished?
With the exception of the modern Jewish diaspora, for which the
historical fact and the symbolic imagery of the modern Holocaust have
rendered the (re)presentation of violence inevitable, popular depictions of
most diaspora populations in modern history have been fixated, obsessed or
otherwise focused upon notions of identity and culture, rather than, say,
their relation to the nation-state system, a mode of production, or violence
and coercion meted out by a state or national-territorial population. Thus
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resistance is often cast in terms of cultural practices, ‘weapons of the weak’
(Scott, 1985), as if these were the sole modes of engagement with dominant
social groups. Yet this response to oppression, I have argued, contains
within it both the prospect of resistance as well as the logic of domination.
How people resist, the ‘weapons’ chosen, tell us as much about the nature
and conditions of social and political struggle as specific acts of resistance
themselves. Studies and practices of subaltern groups often contain a bias
towards more informal, less direct modes of political protest. The focus in
several disciplines and fields upon topics such as ‘cultural politics’ and
‘culture of resistance’ is, in part, a consequence of this turn.
One of the conclusions of my research was that a direct confrontation
with the Brazilian state and civil society over issues of racial inequality
would require that black and brown Brazilians seeking to redress such
inequalities would have to organize politically as a group to confront the
chimera of racial equality upheld by Brazilian elites, and reject the categorical distinctions between black and mulatto. Part of the reason for this
conclusion was the demographic research conducted by Brazilian scholars
concerning the much referenced ideology of racial democracy, wherein those
categorized as pardo or mulatto were somehow better off in material terms
than either whites or blacks in Brazil. The second justification for my
conclusion was numerical and had nothing to do with phenotype, race or
color. It simply made sense for political actors seeking greater political and
economic power to attempt to enlarge their political and cultural constituencies.
As noted by John French (2000), in his well-crafted critique of the
Bourdieu and Wacquant piece, the ‘mulatto escape hatch’ thesis first put
forth by Carl Degler over 30 years ago (Degler, 1971) remains a theoretical
proposition. As Thomas Skidmore (1992–3) has noted, the thesis has never
been proven, and there are demographic data which suggest otherwise.
Demographic research by Ricardo Paes de Barros et al. (1996), Peggy Lovell
(1991, 1999) and Edward Telles and Nelson Lim (1998) on socio-economic
distinctions between pretos and pardos suggests that, while there are significant differences between pretos and pardos in quality of life indicators,
pardos tend to be more like blacks than whites in terms of income earnings.
In contrast, sociologist Nelson do Valle Silva, analyzing 1960 and 1976
census data (which utilized preto and pardo categories) concludes, ‘Blacks
and mulattoes are equally discriminated against. This clearly contradicts
the idea of a mulatto escape hatch being the essence of Brazilian race
relations’ (Silva, 1985). More recent work in collaboration with Carlos
Hasenbalg with data from the 1987 census reaffirms earlier conclusions
(Silva, 1985: 54–5; Silva and Hasenbalg, 1992). The power and resonance
of Degler’s ‘escape hatch’ thesis inhere in its social and cultural acceptance, both nationally and transnationally, despite the absence of any empirical verifiability or, lacking ‘data’, the sense that somehow mulattos in Brazil,
regardless of class, education and socio-economic position, lived more
charmed lives. As I suggested in Orpheus and Power, the escape hatch
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thesis is basically an elite ideological formation; its power resides in its
hegemonic articulation as common sense, not in its materiality. At the very
least, contemporary debate suggests that the ‘escape hatch’ thesis is
intensely debated within Brazil and not the given it is often presented as
for foreign, unwitting consumption.
At root in this commonsensical formulation, however, is a basic
presumption about the relationship between ‘race mixture’ and social engineering, what Nancy Leys Stepan has referred to as positive miscegenation
(Leys Stepan, 1991). A question that the authors do not pose, which unites
both the US and the Brazilian case under a more comparative rubric, is
whether a correlation exists between color classification and racial egalitarianism, in other words, does the multiplicity of phenotypical categories
connote greater or lesser racial equality? Or put in more au courant
language, are mestizaje, creolization, hybridity and mongrelization indicators of increased racial diversity and tolerance? Where Brazilian neoFreyrean Luso-Tropicalists, Bourdieu/Wacquant and post-structuralist
cultural studies tendencies intersect is in their eagerness to consider ‘more
fluid’ racial categorization as some form of deep play, a Bakhtinesque shell
game of ‘three-card monty’ wherein power relations are upended merely by
changing the modes of human classification according to color or phenotype. If only the change in subject position was so simple.
In a New York Times article on the Brazilian film Orfeu Negro, Caetano
Veloso posits that my conclusions concerning the black Brazilian
movement’s use of preto for both black and brown Brazilians was a simplification of Brazilian realities and would lead to ‘racial intolerance’ (Veloso,
2000). The premises undergirding Veloso’s argument parallel Bourdieu and
Wacquant’s: Brazil is a site of miscegenation, the US with hypodescent as
a feature of racial codification is not. Moreover, hybridity exemplifies play
and fluidity, not inequality, an unambiguous, peculiar gift of modernity. Let’s
consider Veloso’s premise, on its own terms, in comparative perspective
without referring to either the United States or Brazil. If one were to apply
Mr Veloso’s premise of racial miscegenation equals racial democracy to race
relations in South Africa or Haiti, then why didn’t miscegenation lead to
racial egalitarianism in those two locales? Extending the correlation to
Iberian-inflected locales in the New World, how would we then explain the
coexistence of anti-black prejudice conjoined with a national celebration of
miscegenation in places as distinct as Venezuela, Ecuador and Cuba?
Returning now to the United States, categories of mulatto, octoroon and
quadroon were operative ‘color’ and ‘racial’ classifications within the
symbology and sociology of racial apartheid and segregation, but I doubt
any serious commentator on US history would suggest that the presence of
octoroons and quadroons led to racial equality.
What Veloso and others who have drawn similar conclusions neglect
is the implications of their own admissions about racism in Brazilian society.
Racism against Afro-Brazilians, which Veloso himself has acknowledged
many times in both his music and in interviews, already exists in Brazil.
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Thus, if Brazilians’ celebrated racial hybridity coexists with racial intolerance, what does that tell us about the plausibility of the suggestion that
either racial hybridity and racial intolerance are antithetical to one another,
or that racial hybridity leads to racial tolerance?
In considering Brazil from the perspective of comparative racial
politics, I believe that both scenarios are highly unlikely, in fact, nonexistent in multi-racial polities where descendants of African slaves inhabit
the same space as the descendants of indigenous groups and European
descendants. Anti-black racial discrimination has coexisted with multipolar as well as bi-polar models of racial classification. The analytic error
made by Bourdieu and Wacquant, as well as some US-based advocates of
miscegenation and hybridity as amelioration of racial conditions (Lind,
1996; Hollinger, 2000) is the equation of racial or phenotypical categorization, which is one facet of putatively racial dynamics, with the entirety of
the interactions between the designated groups. This equation is a form of
hypostasis, and is an insufficient basis to assess the totality of the race
relations experience in Brazil or anywhere else.
The specific challenge for many Brazilian(ist) scholars considering
black Brazilian social movements as a facet of transnational black politics
is to view the participation of organizations such as the Frente Negra
Brasileira as not solely a feature of national and regional history, but as an
integral facet of a multinational, multilingual, ideologically and culturally
plural community, an imagined community if you will, but one not necessarily bounded by a singular territorial nation. The second conceptualization
requires that we view black transnationalism not as some disparate or
isolated aspect of either national histories or the history of international
relations, but as a continuous, recurrent feature of 19th-, 20th- and now
21st-century politics in which the issues of free association, cultural and
religious recognition, territorial autonomy and equal access to goods,
services and resources have been wholly or partially manifest in social
movements in South Africa, Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, the United Kingdom
and many other nation-states. The transnational linkages between African,
Caribbean and North American political actors bear great similarities with
other transnational, non-governmental linkages of the first half of the 20th
century – anarcho-syndicalism, communism, unionism and other secular
global movements.
Transnational black politics, or what I have characterized elsewhere
as ‘Afro-Modernity’ (Hanchard, 1999b), helps to underscore what Jorge
Castañeda refers to as ‘longitudinal nationalism’ (1994: 308): the development of horizontal, non-state-based relationships between political actors in
various nation-states for the purpose of challenging or overturning policies
in one or more nation-states. Intersecting affiliations across and above territorial boundaries problematize any characterization of international and
inter-state relations as the interaction of politically discrete territorially
sovereign entities. Conceptualized in this manner, the matter of nationality
or origin can be effectively translated into a broader analytic framework of
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the interface between a particular subject population on the one hand (black
South Africans, for example) and a regime (apartheid) and politically
dominant racial majority (Afrikaners). In this way, the methods utilized to
respond to particular conditions of inequality are at once universal and
culturally coded, insofar as phenomena such as marches, strikes, rebellions
often operate alongside modes of religion, dance, corporeal expression and
daily acts of resistance to articulate the site-specific nature of grievance and
protest.
Black transnationalists in many countries have operated in the interstices of international, interstate relations for well over a century and have
often fused anti-imperialist politics with anti-racist politics. In many plural
societies where self-identified African-descended peoples have found themselves occupying a relatively powerless position with another ethnic group,
there are multiple histories of attempts (some successful) at creating coalitions across racial, ethnic and phenotypic lines: between blacks and
mulattos in Haiti during the Haitian Revolution, between Afro-Trinidadians
and East Indians in Trinidad and similarly in Guyana, between blacks and
browns in Jamaica. I suggest these New World examples because they not
only cross national boundaries, but presumably ‘cultural’ and colonial
boundaries as well. My conclusion, in part, was premised upon this larger
comparative history.
At root here is a conceptual issue about the capacity of scholars to
move beyond ready-made sociological and political categories for apprehending phenomena identified under the rubrics of the US civil rights
movement and black transnationalism, and view political, social and
cultural phenomena associated with specific sites and epochs with phenomena presumably distinguished by linguistic, territorial and other forms of
demarcation. This is not merely the challenge for historical scholarship, but
for theorizing about the manner in which the study of black transnationalism in various forms challenges extant ways of analyzing nationalist or
‘single-issue’ movements, and allows us to consider certain forms of political
solidarity and mobilization across national boundaries as clusters and
congregations that are not merely coincident with the nation-state system.
Thus, while Bourdieu and Wacquant view the US civil rights movement as
a unified, even hegemonic philosophy of praxis within the lexicon of social
struggle around the world, I view the US civil rights movement as a cluster
or congregation of several ideological and political tendencies, with its own
international and transnational valences.
Concluding Remarks
Bourdieu and Wacquant’s attack is in some ways consistent with Wacquant’s
demonstrated habit of decontextualizing black cultural production and
presenting such decontextualization as a virtue or strength, as evidenced in
some of his writings on boxing in the United States. This final linkage is
crucial, I believe, in understanding how the indiscriminate use of sociological categories and refusal to engage the specific peculiarities of the
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tensions between politics and culture in Brazil are symptomatic of a wider
misrecognition of black agency more generally in Wacquant’s writings.
Wacquant’s emerging reputation as a boxer-intellectual is based
primarily on three years of participant-observer fieldwork on the south side
of Chicago, training at various boxing gyms, the Stoneland Boy’s Club among
them (Wacquant, 1998: 329). As a practitioner himself, Wacquant
approaches boxing through what he refers to as a carnal sociology, a sociology of corporeal desire to distinguish his consideration of the sport from
most journalistic writings on boxing. He characterizes boxing as one of the
bodily crafts, a form of body capital, which he concludes US African-Americans have in abundance.
Of athletes in general and African-American athletes in particular,
Wacquant writes that athletes are performers and entertainers, not charismatic leaders, as the latter are those ‘who are the true revolutionary forces
of history’ (1996: 26):
Athletes do not move people and provide a new vision of the world so much
as carve out their own individuality on the wall of public culture, transform
their lives and provide models of self-mastery, for others to try to perform
themselves. They are not other-worldly, they are this-wordly. They are not
violators of tradition but expressions of it; not innovators but ritualists. This is
particularly true of African-American culture and history . . . (1996: 27; italics
added)
The asserted truth here – that African-American culture and history
are a source of ritual but not innovation – is astonishing in many ways. The
anthropological naivety involved in the premise that any culture’s ‘tradition’
could be devoid of innovation looms largest. For the purposes of my
response, however, I would like to focus on only two facets of this ‘truth’ to
pinpoint Wacquant’s compounded misreading of US African-American
cultural and political articulation. Wacquant’s implicit distinction between
politics and culture is evidenced in his distinction between charisma and
persona; charismatic leadership is aligned with the former, persona with the
latter. Yet how can such a distinction be sustained in the assessment of a
population whose own relation to political and cultural articulation has
never been so neatly divided? Black athletes (men and women), not to
mention preachers, morticians and other professional occupations, carried
far more status in black communities than their counterparts in the
dominant, white society and institutions, leading some commentators such
as E. Franklin Frazier to go so far as to conclude that the black bourgeoisie
was not a true bourgeoisie. One does not have to abide by Frazier’s
conclusions to acknowledge the sociological disjuncture between status
positions in white and black communities. Wacquant’s generic sociological
distinction between charisma and persona, and between innovation and
ritual would be accurate only if there were a symmetry of status correlation
between whites and blacks.
Many US African-American athletes have political and cultural
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capital which serve them well beyond the spaces of the gridiron, tennis
court, basketball court, baseball diamond or boxing ring, from Paul Robeson
to even a contemporary black conservative such as J.C. Watts. The move
from the world of sport and its cultural and political implications, to the
arenas of business and party politics with their own implications, is a transition made with increasing frequency by US African-American athletes.
Sports has represented one of the few avenues of success for blacks in white
society. The social and cultural capital accrued in one sphere of society,
even the body capital of the professional athlete, was invariably brought into
question, interrogation and use in other spheres of society. The public – and
sometimes private – lives of Jack Johnson, Althea Gibson and Joe Louis,
among others, exemplify the manner in which Wacquant’s rationalization for
the persona/charisma distinction for the US African-American professional
athlete is problematic. Not only does he risk the misinterpretation of the
symbolic and political importance of US African-American athletes inside
the realm of sport, but once outside the realm of sport, in formal politics
and social movements such as ‘the civil rights movement’ to which
Wacquant and the late Bourdieu refer. Lastly, he ignores the very creativity
of the athletes themselves, as athletes.
If we were to accept Wacquant’s distinction, then a figure like
Muhammed Ali would not be a charismatic figure; Joe Louis, who came to
represent the US state’s triumphant defeat of German fascism as well as
hard-earned black achievement and success, would be, according to
Wacquant’s typology, this-worldly not other-worldly. Sugar Ray Robinson
who, to this day, was one of the few martial artists of any fighting form
capable of knocking out an opponent while moving backwards, is symptomatic of a people who are not ‘violators of tradition but expressions of it;
not innovators but ritualists’. Moving from boxing to other black male figures
(Wacquant’s focus) in the history of US sport, one can only assume that
Wacquant would also consider Tommy Smith and John Carlos, the two US
African-American sprinters who utilized the black power salute while
accepting their medals after finishing first and third respectively in the 200
meter finals at the 1968 Olympics, ‘ritualists, not violators of tradition but
expressions of it’.
Some readers might consider the engagement with Wacquant’s writings
on boxing and sport more generally as a digression from the debate about
US imperialist reason in Brazil, but, as I suggested at the outset, the implications of their attack extend beyond the borders of Brazil and the United
States. Bourdieu and Wacquant have forged their scholarly and political
reputations, in part, on their proximity and intimacy with subaltern populations. In the case of Bourdieu, his dissertation and subsequent advocacy
of Algerian nationalism and Algerians in France parallel Wacquant’s study
and advocacy for his objects of study – black male boxers in the United
States. Their seeming ability to traverse both academic and political worlds
at their ‘commanding heights’ suggests a mutually reinforced positionality,
wherein their implicit and explicit self-representation as ‘organic’
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intellectuals serves as a form of symbolic capital within the French, and
now US, academy.
Yet for all of their political bona fides, their objects of study and
critique in this debate (actual people and movements) are remarkably inorganic. Indeed, both authors perform the ‘neutralization of the historical
context’, which, in their own formulation, is a modular feature of cultural
imperialism (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 41). In both the US and Brazilian cases, neither African-descended population operates outside the
dominant, commonsensical sociological roles already prescribed for them
in the academy and society. Both are defined solely by their relation to
national culture, society and state, and, by implication, dominant institutions, mores and values of these respective societies. Like me, the
‘American’ or ‘person of color’, they exist only within a single analytic
category (‘the black athlete’). In short, they are static. They do not have
multiple roles or multi-faceted identities, or serve as cultural producers or
political actors outside a Dahrendorfian ‘incumbency of social role’ (1959).
US African-American male athletes, and black political actors in Brazil are
more multi-faceted, dynamic and ultimately more ‘progressive’ than
Wacquant, and Wacquant and Bourdieu’s sociologies would allow.
How does one explain this gap between Bourdieu and Wacquant’s
sociological critique and the lived experience of US African-Americans and
Afro-Brazilians? If cultural imperialism can be characterized as the leveling
or taming of distinction through the rationalization of alternative cultural
and political imperatives, then certainly Bourdieu and Wacquant’s interventions qualify; like actual cases of cultural imperialism, their perspectives and dismissals impact more than one location and are transnational in
scope, utilizing the categories of nation, culture and imperialism to, in their
own words, ‘universalize particularisms linked to a singular historical
tradition by causing them to be recognized as such’ (1999: 41). Since they
are neither capitalists nor state representatives, however, it is perhaps best
to characterize their critique as merely imperious, not imperialist.
My own conclusions are that Bourdieu and Wacquant’s presumptions
about the US civil rights movement, the black movement in Brazil, and US
African-American cultural politics form an island of ethnocentrism and
cultural incorrigibility with neither bridges nor boats to traverse the
distance. The interpretive limitations of ‘On the Cunning of Imperialist
Reason’ stem from an inability to identify and recognize forms of culture
and politics which are not necessarily coincident with party, nationalist
(identity) and trade unionist class politics, forms of politics which, for most
of the 20th century, black populations in the United States, Brazil and even
France have been largely excluded from and even marginalized by. Thus,
with friends such as Bourdieu and Wacquant, black political actors and
organizations, the communities which produced them, as well as those who
devote part of their lives studying their movements, need no enemies.
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Note
1. The Portuguese text follows:
Nos Estados Unidos o Garvey foi recebido com muita reserva, a pesar ter
encontrado apoio pra fazer um grande trabalho. Mas foi combatido por muitos
negros americanos que o achavam um aventureiro. . . . Como Marcus Garvey
foi considerado um visionario, e eu acabei ficando um pouco visionario aqui,
querendo fazer um movimento que era importado, um movimento de outros
interesses que nao eram propriamente nossos. Disseram um porcao de coisas,
que eu estava criando um quisto [sic] racial, propondo um modelo racista pra
ca. E ficou muita confusao por ai.
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Michael Hanchard is professor of political science at Northwestern
University. He is the author of Orpheus and Power (Princeton University
Press, 1994) and editor of Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil (Duke
University Press, 1999).