Future Metaphysics: Before and After Robert J. C. Young’s White Mythologies

"Marxist literary criticism hasn't produced a new theory in over twenty years," Robert J. C. Young notes early in White Mythologies. This is when he's being polite.

The charge is much harsher than that. Anglophone Marxism and Francophone leftism hadn't simply run out of steam: they hadn't produced their own steam to begin with. "French theory" — Althusser, Sartre, Foucault — had shaken some things up a bit, but was easily subsumable into Marxist analyses.

How do you wrest an emancipatory political critique that is anticolonial and anti-racist from the whitest, the most mythological, and the mythologically whitest of white men? How do you write "History" and "Theory" without reifying the imperial and racist concepts that they have tended to produce? It is too easy to say that Hegel was an ignorant racist and that Sartre was so provincial that he thought The Wretched of the Earth was written for him. It is slightly more difficult to say that Hegel's dialectic was a model for M. K. Gandhi, for whom true self-rule was possible only by the total relinquishment of the self; and that Sartre's existentialism was the grounds for Frantz Fanon's grueling psycho-political process of decolonization.

Even though Sartre was a disappointing reader of Fanon's work, he was at least in the streets when it mattered. Every other white theorist, Young writes, must have read The Wretched of the Earth as though its title should have been The Proletariat of the Advanced Industrialized Countries. (I cackled when I read this. Come to postcolonial theory for the critique, but stay for the jokes.) Les damnés de la terre whom Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault were so piously not representing ended up looking and sounding exactly like Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault.1

Anticolonial and decolonial thinkers, including Fanon and Gandhi, were unconvinced of the autonomy of the category "Western" (or "European," or "white") because they witnessed the perpetual violence with which those categories insisted on their self-evidence and autonomy in the colonized world. "Algerian theory" — Derrida, Fanon, Cixous — had imagined radical new emancipatory projects, but those projects had been successfully rendered French more than the French Empire could have ever imagined. Even after philosophy moved toward anti-racist and anti-sexist leftist commitments in the wake of 1968, it nevertheless affirmed, even if accidentally, the dominant and dominating status of "Western" thought.

White leftists proliferated poststructuralist critiques of metaphysics, and then proceeded to universalize their politics as an alleged gift to the Third World. Fredric Jameson — who receives his own, especially brutal, chapter in White Mythologies — would have, Young suggests, found in Fanon's writings a "political unconscious" and a "national allegory," because those are the only things he can imagine looking for (that is, if he read Fanon at all). "History" was not the only white mythology; "Theory" was one, too. Fanon's project was not to decolonize certain nations, subjects, and blocs. Fanon demanded that we decolonize the entire world.2

Young writes in the second edition of White Mythologies (in 2003), that in 1990 he was among the first to clearly trace the contours of some as-yet-undefined project with Said, Bhabha, and Spivak at the helm. He might overestimate his role, but returning to White Mythologies as a foundational document of postcolonial theory draws our attention to the historically specific ways in which postcolonialism emerged, self-consciously, as a site of inquiry and trouble — against white Britain in the wake of colonialism, which it could not properly recognize.

Young demands two projects: decolonizing history and deconstructing the West. Besides Fanon, Young finds hope in three thinkers — Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — who have begun this work. Said's "disorientation," Bhabha's "ambivalence," and Spivak's "deconstruction" are the models for how to move leftist literary critique forward.

Said's project in Orientalism is exciting but ultimately upholds an occidental/oriental binary, and forecloses any "solutions" because it lacks Foucauldian ambivalence about its critique. This is a surprising reading, in contrast with Aijaz Ahmad's infamous attack on Said. For Ahmad, Said was so ambivalent in his analysis that reading Orientalism was like witnessing "a very personal kind of drama."3 Each time I read Orientalism I find myself agreeing with Ahmad, except I find Said's ambivalences to be charming and theoretically productive. Bhabha offers the "ambivalence" Young was left wanting in Said. Perhaps this is because Bhabha's essays throughout the 1980s pick up on Fanon's revolutionary decolonial hesitation. Mimicry, ambivalence, and psychoanalysis form the grounds for proper deconstruction of the West; and Young likes Bhabha's methodological collage (Derridean, Lacanian, Deleuzean, Fanonian). But it is Spivak who leads the way for the future of leftist criticism, because she not only "deconstructs the West" but "decolonizes History" in her response to the Subaltern Studies collective. Young's breathless appreciation for Spivak's essays strikes me as nearly the only appropriate response to the vertiginous feeling of having read "Can the Subaltern Speak?" for the first time. (The other is Ian Baucom's homage in Specters of the Atlantic.)In 2020, this trio might seem too obvious: Said, Bhabha, and Spivak are the basis for nearly every Introduction to Postcolonial Theory course. It is rare to find White Mythologies on syllabi. I think Young's most influential role in "postcolonial theory" as such came later, when he became an advocate for retaining the political commitments of mid-century Third World activism. In Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2003), Young recuperates the squandered inheritance of anticolonial and decolonial thought on its own terms. The mission of anticolonial, decolonial, and "tricontinental" thought is to save the world from Europe, even if that means saving Europe from itself.4 For Fanon, that meant the likelihood of abandoning that world to create a new one. This is the theory of B. R. Ambedkar, Che Guevara, Sylvia Wynter, and Édouard Glissant: thinkers of new humans, new political collectivities, and new worlds.

I first encountered White Mythologies in the context of "postcolonial theory." Re-reading it for this cluster, I found that its concerns were aimed at a slightly different conversation: little-Britain Marxism, the admirable but short-sighted response to Thatcherism in the 1980s.

This is not a hidden target in the book, though that fact is nevertheless easy to overlook. British Marxists' refusal to deal with questions of gender and race, their preoccupation with teleological historical narratives, and their disavowal of their own whiteness under the guise of appeals to "class" meant that their warmed-over analyses were wildly inadequate for the world they wanted to bring into view. For Young, "History" is not only a white mythology, but a mythology that disavows its allegiance to whiteness. This is especially egregious given the simultaneity of the (white) New Left with the Windrush Generation, the Falklands War, and the policing of urban "crises." But in 1990 the sprawling assemblage of work we now call postcolonial theory had not coalesced into the specific critique we recognize today. The overlooked interlocutors of White Mythologies — as well as those of Edward Said's Orientalism, Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture, and Stuart Hall's essays and lectures — are Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and the editorial collective of the New Left Review.

This, to my mind, suggests an imperative for postcolonial theory at thirty-something. We must undo the historical amnesia at the center of postcolonial theory's genealogy. Postcolonial theory is the benefactor of anticolonial thought's legacy, but by way of a forgotten detour: the New British Left and Birmingham Centre cultural studies. To trace postcolonial theory instantly back to Derrida, Foucault, or Sartre is to skip how "French theory" (let alone "Algerian theory") was first refracted through the Marxism of British red-brick institution-building in the 1970s and 1980s — all work done by Black Britain, working-class people, and women of color who were encountering "French theory" in the specific order in which it was translated into English. The colonial encounter is the predecessor of the postcolonial encounter: both are about the struggle to wrest an emancipatory politics from white mythologies.

There are postcolonial theorists — notably David Scott — who are correcting this amnesia in outstanding ways.5 Young's later work reminds us that the most challenging thinkers of humanism and universalism were anticolonial, decolonial, and tricontinental thinkers like Fanon, Gandhi, and Guevara instead of Hegel, Althusser, and Sartre. But, thirty years later, White Mythologies should alert us to the painful irony that postcolonial theory insists on being white-but-not-quite when we should so clearly be indebted to a more hybrid and diasporic genealogy: Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy (among others). In this sense, postcolonial theory has held tightly to its own white mythology of being either the direct descendent or the direct opponent of white French thought, rather than celebrate its unpredictably circuitous path of critical inquiry through Black diasporic thought, British Marxism, and Jewish philology. A recuperation of the field's promiscuous alliances is necessary if we still want to make good on its radically egalitarian promises.

The particular genealogy of postcolonialism that Young has variously offered, demanded, defended, and critiqued is the most compelling trajectory. It is recalcitrant and stubborn: it is an aggressively impossible and absolutely necessary project; it revels in ambivalence and uncertainty and shirks away from the lures of easy conclusions. This strain of postcolonialism is neither straightforwardly affirmative nor dismissive, but it is hardly meek; it might insist on becoming "minor," but it is not quiet.Postcolonial theory was trouble without polemic. Both Jameson and Said return, repeatedly, to Erich Auerbach and Theodor Adorno; but only Said does so in order to enact that "very personal kind of drama": of loving the very traditions that were used to make your life a "damaged" one.6 The subjects of this strain of postcolonialism's anti-racist and anti-imperial critiques were not objects of easy disdain: they were Said's favorite philologists, Gilroy's dancehall, Stuart Hall's Henry James, and the targets of Bhabha's ambivalent mimicry.

But whereas postcolonial theory was, as Said would write later, "a technique of trouble," the more institutionally successful iteration of postcolonial criticism was willing to "behave," and thrived because it was willing to play by the rules of national literature departments. Young has little patience for this trajectory of postcolonial critique, which opens boldly but closes meekly. We see this clearest in his repeated dismissals of Benita Parry, even though she seems like an arbitrary choice for a nemesis. Young's disappointment with Parry is that, despite her decolonial proclamations, she only read the books English and History departments already approved of, and her analysis of those books never caused any trouble. You can calmly go back to reading Kipling once you've read Parry's essays, but try going back to reading him after reading Spivak's! Postcolonial theory wasn't supposed to support the institutions of history and literature; it was supposed to save them from themselves.

This project — a core mission of postcolonial theory to my mind — has largely foundered, despite renewed claims for its necessity.7 Thinkers from the formerly colonized world could be relied upon to describe their particular experiences, but the entrenched white mythologies of academia have still prevented it from trusting that formerly colonized people could theorize the world. In a political theory graduate seminar in the early 2010s, an intelligent person asked if there might be a way of "theorizing 'the global' from the condition of being exploited." A friend and I responded: The Wretched of the Earth. No, the person responded, Fanon was describing Africa; what they wanted was something that could talk about "a cosmopolitanism, but based on suffering around the world." My friend repeated herself: The. Wretched. Of. The. Earth. The person sighed, "I think it's probably best to simply return to Kant."8

I was angry, but my friend laughed it off. After all, why should postcolonial theory want the inclusion magnanimously proffered by people who still cling to a man who wrote prolegomena while the disavowed world actually wrote the future metaphysics?9) White Mythologies — as capital-T Theory as well as an account of a particular debate — gives us a way to recuperate a postcolonialism not condemned to perpetually fill in the blindspots of European theory. Postcolonial theory, rife with messy ambivalence and hybridity, offers us a way out.

 

J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (Fordham University Press, 2020).

 

 

Also In This Cluster:

Introduction to 1990 at 30: J. Daniel Elam and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

Out of Date: David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity and the Postmodern Condition : Natalie Melas

Splitting the Difference: Black Studies' Theory Wars and bell hooks's "Postmodern Blackness": Kinohi Nishikawa

On the Unfinished Business of Theory from the South: Arjun Appadurai's Globalization Theory: Hadji Bakara

The Nation We Knew: After Homi Bhabha's "DissemiNation": Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

The Dirty World: On Stuart Hall's "The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities": Jay Garcia

Hearing What Black Women Have Been Telling Us All Along: On Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought: Meina Yates-Richard

Haircut Theory: Living with Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Joan Lubin

When M. Mitterrand was a Faggot: Reading Ignorance and Pleasure in Eve Sedgwick's "Axiomatic": Clare Hemmings

 

 

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