Autonomy

When Yogita Goyal first encouraged me to participate in a roundtable on keywords in postcolonial studies, I struggled to think of a particular concept or term that would be suitable and engaging, so I offered "autonomy" as a temporary placeholder, figuring I would substitute something else at a later date. Before committing to anything else, I wanted a chance to take a fresh look at Raymond Williams's legendary Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). As with many graduate students of the 1990s, Keywords is a special text for me, functioning as a combination of practical dictionary of critical terminology and visionary Bible of progressive thought. I continue to regard its method, which involves explaining how important social conflicts are registered in the development of the English language, with awe. After returning to Williams and reacquainting myself with his particular habits of thought, I would be in a better position to come up with a timely keyword. I took it for granted that Williams, with his longstanding interest in metropolitan modernism and his late-developing interest in literature from the global south — it is all too easy to forget that The Country and the City (1973) expands its running theme by arguing that the relationship between urban and rural space in Britain itself was replicated on a larger scale, through imperialism, in the relationship between metropolitan core and colonial periphery — had already filled a few pages on the question of autonomy or self-determination, preempting most of what I might bring to the discussion.

I was surprised when I finally had a chance to ease my weathered copy of Keywords off the shelf and flip through the entries. Autonomy does not feature, nor do a cluster of closely related political terms, such as freedom, independence, self-determination, or sovereignty (the verb determine does have an entry, but self-determination does not feature prominently in the discussion). Democracy, equality, liberation, nationalism, and revolution each receive entries, and although these concepts have some bearing on the political meanings of autonomy, they do not quite capture the range and emphasis of the word's political connotations. Likewise, autonomy comes with a particular set of meanings when used in a cultural or philosophical context, but aside from entries on aesthetic, art, and taste, Keywords does not expend much energy thinking about the development of autonomy as a term with special relevance for art and literary criticism. In truth, Williams is skeptical that aesthetic autonomy has much to offer as a rubric. In his entry on aesthetic, Williams argues that the marked tendency in the modern period to regard the aesthetic as a category distinct from "social or cultural interpretations" of art "can be damaging, for there is something irresistibly displaced and marginal about the now common and limiting phrase 'aesthetic considerations', especially when contrasted with practical or UTILITARIAN" forms of criticism.1 Far from taking autonomy seriously as a critical concept, Williams tends to dismiss it as inherently limiting, too tainted with elitism and social exclusion to warrant further inquiry.

Autonomy fits the keywords model, despite Williams deprecating the concept. When combined with two of its most common modifiers, as in aesthetic autonomy and political autonomy, the word can be used in very distinct, even fundamentally incompatible senses. If we consult the Oxford English Dictionary, the complexity of the term is immediately apparent. Definition 1a glosses autonomy as "The condition or right of a state, institution, group, etc., to make its own laws or rules and administer its own affairs; self-government, independence." Usage dates back to C16 at least. Definition 1b, by contrast, reads: "in Kantian philosophy: the freedom of will which enables a person to adopt the rational principles of moral law (rather than personal desire or feeling) as the prerequisite for his or her actions; the capacity of reason for moral self-determination."2 As these passages make clear, definition 1a uses the concept of autonomy principally in a legal or political sense, denoting the kinds of rights and freedoms that subjects may claim or pursue on the basis of their membership in a group or class of people; definition 1b, by contrast, uses the term to denote the moral sensibilities of an individual, whose capacity to reason (rather than the subject's membership in a group) is determinate. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant makes it explicit that aesthetic perception is a key activity through which human beings display their moral fiber: "It is required of every judgment [. . .] that the subject judge for himself, without having to grope about by means of experience among the judgments of others [. . .]. Taste makes claim merely to autonomy."3

By the turn of C19, autonomy has at least two distinct connotations. One type of autonomy, as it is used in a political context, is enabled or constrained by group membership. Independence or self-determination, in political terms, can be attained by or withheld from social groups as social groups, rather than as individuals. In another context, principally but not exclusively aesthetic, autonomy is cultivated by acts of individual judgment, in strict opposition to group belonging. Intellectual autonomy, in this Kantian sense of the concept, cannot involve a show of deference to popular opinion or even to the opinion of experts — self-development is at the very core of this definition. It is tempting, following the Keywords model, to wonder if this sharp divergence of usage may be related to the enormous social changes taking place in C18-19 western Europe as the result of ascendant capitalism, industrialism, and imperial expansion. On one hand autonomy was being used to reflect essentially democratic aspirations of collective self-determination, while on the other hand the term was being requisitioned to shield the individual from excessive obligations to others, including the state.

In postcolonial studies, we have been overeager to assume that the political connotations of autonomy have obvious and straightforward relevance for our work while the aesthetic connotations do not. I will make the case that anticolonial and antiracist thinkers have exploited on the full range of autonomy as a concept. Self-determination for the peoples of the global south is one of the foundational principles of postcolonial studies, after all, and few scholars working in the field would question this as one of the defining propositions of their research and teaching. But we in postcolonial studies have been too quick, like Williams himself, to discount the concept of aesthetic or intellectual autonomy as too elitist to be of real utility for our work. Some of the important debates in anticolonial thought, however, do not draw such a hard and fast distinction between the aesthetic and political pursuit of autonomy. Attending to these ambiguities, contradictions, and surprising convergences may be a clarifying exercise, helping us to see that although aesthetic and political uses of autonomy diverge sharply in some instances, writers and intellectuals from the global south also used these concepts to reinforce or bolster one another in a decolonizing context.

The great language debate — can an independent, self-sufficient literary tradition in the global south be sustained in imported, metropolitan languages and genres, or should writers cultivate indigenous languages and literary forms in their stead? — offers one prominent instance in which the aesthetic and political meanings of autonomy are mutually sustaining rather than mutually exclusive. The basic positions on the language question started to take shape in the interwar and wartime period: Oswald de Andrade's "Cannibalist Manifesto" (1928) and Suzanne Césaire's "Surrealism and Us" (1943) insist that metropolitan languages and aesthetic forms can be creatively adapted and appropriated by the global south, whereas the All-India Progressive Writers' Association manifesto (1936) and Mao Zedong's Talks at Yan'an (1943) are equally emphatic that revolutionary cultural workers ought to revitalize vernacular practices. Responding both to modernism in the arts and the emergence of fascism in politics, these contrasting views on aesthetic language and form both claim that cultural and political autonomy are dependent on one another. As I suggest toward the end of this entry, scholars in modernist and postcolonial studies alike have not made the most of this historical conjunction of revolutionary aesthetics and authoritarian political movements. The outlines of an implicit disagreement are in place by the 1930s, but so is an understanding that cultural autonomy cannot be secured in a context of political domination.

The debate continued and developed in the latter parts of the century, fueled in part by the competing cultural diplomacy programs of the Cold War superpowers. Whereas US-affiliated cultural diplomacy efforts leaned heavily on the dominance of English, Soviet cultural diplomacy, especially in the case of the Afro-Asian Writers' Association, prioritized translations from indigenous languages into Arabic, English, French, and the many languages of the Soviet Union and its allies.4 This kind of international competition allowed the incipient cultural conflicts of the global south to play out on a world stage. Mulk Raj Anand's The King-Emperor's English, or, The Role of the English Language in the Free India (1948), Chinua Achebe's "The African Writer and the English Language" (1964), Wole Soyinka's "Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseduo-Tradition" (1975), Salman Rushdie's "Commonwealth Literature does not Exist" (1981), and Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant's Éloge de la Créolité (1990) all pursue arguments that metropolitan languages and literary forms can be tropicalized, turned into something distinctive that cannot be controlled by metropolitan forces. On the other side of the barricade are the language nativists, contending that vernacular languages and literary forms represent the way forward for the literatures of the global south: Aimé Césaire's "Culture and Colonization" (1956), Obiajunwa Wali's "The Dead End of African Literature" (1963), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind (1986), and Kamau Brathwaite's History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984). For the language nativists, choosing to write in metropolitan languages is a refusal to give up aesthetic privileges for a worthy political cause; for the defenders of writing in metropolitan languages, the language nativists are too sure that metropolitan cultural tools cannot be refashioned for subversive use by members of marginalized groups.

To depict this debate as primarily a matter of language choice is to underplay the extent to which aesthetic principles are interlaced with understandings of political autonomy for disenfranchised groups. It is too simplistic, for instance, to regard the language nativists as subordinating aesthetic concerns to political doctrine or expediency. "We African writers," Ngũgĩ argues in a key passage of Decolonising the Mind, "are bound by our calling to do for our languages what [Spenser], Milton, and Shakespeare did for English; what Pushkin and Tolstoy did for Russian; indeed what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them."5 As he suggests here, African writers have a duty to develop their own vernaculars as both English and Russian writers used their genius to develop the capabilities of their own languages. Although it is tempting, when reading Ngũgĩ, to infer that he regards English as bully and bogeyman, this is not quite the case in this passage, where both English and Russian have become literary languages, at least in part, because of the creativity of their artists. Political autonomy alone cannot secure or guarantee cultural autonomy, and as a result he insists that aesthetic matters are of primary importance. Ngũgĩ and his fellow language nativists make the case that the aesthetic has a special function, one that may support, but cannot be reduced to, the pursuit of political self-determination. Likewise, it is too simplistic to claim that those who defend the use of metropolitan languages in the emerging literatures of the global south are too willing to protect their aesthetic privileges by conceding political dependency. For someone such as Andrade, the appropriation of metropolitan cultural materials is an act of political sabotage, a way of using aesthetic practices to contest systems of political marginalization. Competing understandings of aesthetic autonomy and the obligations of group membership are at the very center of this disagreement.

Even before the emergence of language debate in the decolonizing world, intellectuals who were interested in the cultural effects of colonialism were theorizing the relationship between cultural and political autonomy. These discussions, emerging during the period of western European imperial expansion rather than imperial retraction, helped later writers from the twentieth century recognize the inseparability of cultural and political autonomy. Edward W. Blyden, one of the earliest exponents of Pan-Africanism, prefigured the main outlines of the language debate by insisting that cultural and political dependency are closely related problems. In the correspondence collected in The West African University (1872), Blyden argues that the transatlantic slave trade had compromised the cultural and intellectual development of Black peoples. Building a case for reparations on an Enlightenment platform of cultural training, Blyden pleads for a West African university by arguing that intellectual development is a prerequisite for economic and political self-determination:

From Blyden's Pan-African perspective, cultural and political forms of subordination present complementary rather than contradictory obstacles. Writing here in the 1870s, decades before Aimé Césaire would contend that "wherever there has been colonization, entire peoples have been emptied of their culture"7 or Ngũgĩ would insist that the "cultural bomb" was the biggest weapon in imperialism's arsenal,8 Blyden recognizes how cultural dependency breeds political dependency. In contrast to Césaire and Ngũgĩ, however, Blyden reckons that a Kantian program of university education and intellectual development will repair the cultural damage of imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade. An authentic West African literary culture, he argues, must be nurtured and sustained by a university that can promote self-cultivation and cultural independence.

In thinking about the problem of cultural dependency among colonized peoples, Blyden also recognizes that economic imperialism could be as damaging as political domination. Not unlike the Euro-American modernists who would imply that aesthetic practices need to be insulated from the forces of a capitalist marketplace, Blyden understood that economic domination could undermine cultural autonomy. And yet Blyden was not altogether pessimistic about the cultural vitality of the Black Atlantic. In his elaboration of the "African personality," a phrase that would resonate with Senegalese poet and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor, Blyden turns the question of economic disadvantage on its head in the field of culture: "There is hardly anything new, in a material sense, that the so called civilized African can contribute to the world's resources, but if his individuality is preserved and developed on right or righteous lines, he will bring intellectual and spiritual contributions which Humanity will gladly welcome."9 In this talk from the 1890s, Blyden puts a slightly different spin on the problem of autonomy in its various guises. Although Black peoples are at a material disadvantage compared to their White counterparts, this economic dependency may be turned to cultural advantage. Material disadvantages have in some way shielded colonized people from the debilitating cultural effects of capitalism. The cultural particularity, or the autonomy, of the African personality can be measured, to some extent, by its distance from an acquisitive, capitalist culture.

Blyden's Black Atlantic counterpart, W.E.B. Du Bois, develops this line of reasoning in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). In this text, Du Bois advances the claim that the Black (and to a lesser extent, Indigenous) peoples of the United States are the only social groups who have a legitimate, autonomous storehouse of cultural knowledge:

The ethos of acquisitiveness prevailing in the United States undermines the nation's cultural autonomy. White culture is all imported from Europe and attenuated in translation; only the Black and Indigenous peoples of the country have anything approaching an autonomous set of cultural practices. With echoes of Blyden, Du Bois tacks back and forth between the high points of the European Enlightenment — he rallies Aristotle, Aurelius, Balzac, and Shakespeare to his cause11 — and yet insists on the cultural distinctiveness of the Black personality, precisely because it has not been thoroughly infiltrated by the logic of capitalist avarice, the "dusty desert of dollars."

As Kwame Anthony Appiah points out, both Blyden and his close associate Alexander Crummell were in some ways instigators of the language debate when they pegged their Pan-Africanism to the spread of English throughout the continent.12 Blyden's and Du Bois's complicated attitudes reveal the basic outlines of language debates that would become such a flashpoint in anticolonial writing. At one level, cultural, economic, and political forms of autonomy seem to complement one another: cultural self-determination is impossible without political self-determination. Yet at another level, cultural creativity seems to exist in inverse proportion to material emancipation: being materially poor can in a perverse way preserve a marginalized group's cultural independence. Very few of the recapitulations of these debates about cultural imperialism, however, recognize the extent to which the principle of autonomy features in its various aesthetic, cultural, economic, intellectual and political shadings (Akshya Saxena's Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India and Tobias Warner's Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal stand out as recent publications in postcolonial studies offering more nuanced perspectives on the language debate). From our current vantagepoint, postcolonial studies could benefit from a thicker engagement with scholars who have studied aesthetic autonomy, especially Pierre Bourdieu and his interlocutors such as Pascale Casanova, James F. English, and John Guillory. Likewise,    sociologists of culture could benefit from a clearer account of how aesthetic self-determination might be informed by political aspirations, especially in the global context of decolonization. Bourdieu's fundamental insight that the values of modernist aesthetics are the values of the capitalist marketplace turned upside-down finds an analog in the anticolonial discussions of cultural autonomy, as the positions of Blyden and Du Bois show us. Yet such comparisons also have clear limits. Because Bourdieu does not think seriously about the effects of economic and political imperialism on the cultural field, his account is too quick to assume that aesthetic pursuits are intrinsically resistant to non-aesthetic considerations.

By way of closure, I want to bring the discussion back to the adjacent scholarly subfields in which I work, which is to say modernist studies and postcolonial studies. The relative lack of dynamic thinking about these different inflections of autonomy is one of our great missed opportunities. When scholars of modernism have considered the question, it has been a very narrow and exclusive conversation, with an almost obsessive focus on aesthetic autonomy of the Kantian variety. To put it in the crudest possible terms, for scholars of modernism the idea of autonomy is by definition non-political, bordering on the anti-political. This is the position Williams takes in Keywords, as well as in his brilliant essay, "Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism," in which he suggests that the pursuit of aesthetic autonomy is supported by the concentration of wealth and cultural institutions in the metropolitan core. Even a thinker such as Du Bois, who is from one angle a typical modernist writer, is rarely treated by scholars of modernism as someone who shares some Euro-American modernist attitudes about aesthetic autonomy. Too often, his interest in political self-determination for subordinated groups makes it difficult for scholars of modernism to recognize his deep investments in aesthetic and intellectual autonomy.

By contrast, scholars of postcolonial studies have been prone to assume that the Kantian idea of aesthetic autonomy has little bearing on the types of autonomy and self-determination pursued by subordinated groups in the context of decolonization. The language question, more narrowly, and debates about cultural sovereignty, more broadly, are among the areas in which our discussions have not been attentive enough to the aesthetic dimensions of this debate, overemphasizing the political. Recognizing that the cultural nativists and their antagonists each have a stake in the principle of aesthetic autonomy might allow those of us working in postcolonial studies to be more precise about how their principles overlap as well as where they diverge. Just as readings of Ngũgĩ as an exemplary language nativist have suffered from this lack — his quarrel with English is read more often as an instance of political position-taking and more rarely as an argument about enhancing the creative capacities of subordinated languages — so too have readings of anglophone writers such Rushdie or Soyinka suffered when their creative appropriations of metropolitan languages and aesthetic forms have been regarded as political capitulations or as selling out to the metropolitan marketplace. When surveyed from a critical distance, it is notable how many global south thinkers enlist principles of autonomy to support their positions. The difficulty of recognizing their contributions to aesthetic and cultural theory have made our intellectual histories more segregated than necessary by overrating the political importance of taking sides and underrating the aesthetic complexity of anticolonial thought.

---

Peter Kalliney is the Tuggle Chair in English and affiliate of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. He is author of four books, the most recent of which is The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature (Princeton UP, 2022). His essays have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Modern Language Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Research in African Literatures, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. His research has been recognized with fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities. He is co-editing the anthology "Anticolonial Thought and Writing" with Harris Feinsod and Leah Feldman.

---

References