Indigenous Vanguards, by Ben Conisbee Baer (introduction)

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I N D I G E N O U S V A N G U A R D S

Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism

BEN CONISBEE BAER


IN T R OD U CT IO N

Thus we believe we have solid reasons for thinking that, behind the “theatre” of the political struggles which the bourgeoisie has offered the popular masses as a spectacle, or imposed on them as an ordeal, what it has established as its number-­one, that is its dominant, Ideological State Apparatus is the scholastic apparatus [Appareil scolaire]. —­Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism Comrade, dear friend, help, save us! Already there is no school. No new school, no old school, nothing. I have taught for twenty years and I cannot take it in, cannot comprehend it. For we can only build the future on the education of the people. What will an illiterate generation say to us? —­A nonymous schoolteacher from Gomel (Soviet Union) I wonder sometimes if school inspectors and department heads are conscious of their role in the colonies. For twenty years in their school programs, they desperately try to make a White man out of the black man. In the end, they give up and tell him: you have undeniably a dependency complex regarding the White man. . . . ​ But I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass. —­Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks School is the instrument through which intellectuals of various levels are elaborated. —­A ntonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks


T

he question of schooling as a decisive process for the formation of “modern” subjects is the theoretical lever of this book. I read the interwar period as an epoch of worldwide struggles for the expansion of common schooling linked to an unprecedented emergence of new anticolonial movements in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Beyond mere mobilization of a “mass” into a “people,” vanguard intellectuals of this epoch were preoccupied with a more elaborate educative formation of future citizens able to think independently and participate in making a nonimperial world. These two sides of the problem form a double bind. On the one hand, a necessarily long term and painstaking labor of preparation, at the level of mind and spirit, for the practice of freedom as ­citizen of a new State. On the other hand, a demand and desire—­a great ­collective dreamwork—­of immediate liberation and enfranchisement that short-­circuits the deferral seemingly entailed by the former. It is not a matter of choosing between one knot or the other of this double bind; the field of their disjunctive and supplementary relationship defines the situations and dilemmas I read in the chapters that follow. Dreams of immediate freedom and concerns with institutions and methods for the making of future citizens also took hold of such contemporary interwar revolutionary formations as the Soviet Union, Austrian Socialism, and German Social Democracy, connected by fragile threads to emergent national liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.1 In this epoch, national liberation and revolution are not identical phenomena. The latter aims systemically to transform bourgeois State and society, altering their relation to capital, and this is not necessarily the aim of national liberation. Yet the historical affinity between national liberation and revolution is symbolically and aesthetically marked by the fact that Frantz Fanon named his urgent prognosis of national liberation after a quotation of the first line of the “Internationale,” the anthem of the Socialist International: “Debout, les damnés de la terre.”2 The question of the relation between intellectual and worker in socialism undergoes displacements in colonial situations even as the Soviet Union was itself a postimperial conjuncture and initially a new (and arguably benevolent) empire-­ form.3 (It was also in the 1920s a conjuncture that was obliged to think a workers’ State that comprised mainly peasants and the rural poor, with a


Introduction 3

miniscule industrial working class.) In an overlapping way, the problem of common education was acutely prevalent in modern colonial societies because great numbers of their populations were positioned in the massively heterogeneous diversity of subalternity, “removed from all lines of social mobility.” 4 Antonio Gramsci wrote about these problems of social difference in the 1930s. In his terms, subalternity is a place at “the margins of history,” thus liminal to the historical unity that is represented by the State. This means an artificially mute exteriority to the State: variegated groupings, “disaggregated and episodic,” that periodically stake political claims on State and society, but that are in the normal unfolding of things instrumentalized and “subject to the initiative of ruling groups.”5 This book is about moments where the emancipatory and pedagogical dreams of the vanguard, dreams crisscrossed with literary desires and ambitions, meet the epistemological and practical limits of subalternity in the task of national liberation. Evoking limits in this way, I draw from Michel Foucault’s formulation that the experience of the limit is also the incalculable experience of its transgression.6 The subaltern “limit” is neither an absolute barrier, nor a blank slate, nor a realm of plenitude on the far side of a determinate line: “Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust.”7 For the present study, this figure of the spiral is a way of representing the interface between vanguard intellectuals and subaltern spaces: a relation of supplementarity without guarantees. This is a book of literary criticism and theory. It argues that the problem of affecting and being affected by the subaltern, primarily educatively, in the work of national liberation and a projected democratic future, can be managed neither by modernist aesthetic practices themselves nor by the kinds of disciplinary research (constative literary criticism) they generate. Work done by the protagonists of the present study in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s encounters and discloses limits of modernist aesthetic practice that cause some of these protagonists to change course and others to retrench. Such changing course takes different directions, at tangents from benevolent primitivisms that seek to draw aesthetic “practices of negation” from subaltern spaces.8 Practices of negation shelter the subaltern in subalternity as the negations unfold elsewhere, this side of the


4 Introduction

limit, for whatever benefit experimental art has left to tap. Disciplinary limits for constative literary criticism, which are another kind of “modernist latitude,” recur in this book as a persistent question about the desire to incorporate an ever-­expanding body of works into a “global” picture of modernism. As with artistic negations, such incorporation is valuable in its own terms as a correction or augmentation of an existing disciplinary archive. Yet it leaves room for other kinds of work that fall outside of modernist studies—­a limit this book can only gesture toward. Definite and original kinds of cultural activism and modern writing emerged from the connections between anticolonial work, literary experimentation, and practices of teaching and learning from the 1920s to the 1940s. I discuss these through figures that form the pivots of the following chapters: Alain Locke represents Harlem’s “New Negro” generation by translating German Enlightenment educational philosophies of spiritual upbringing, maturity, and emancipation from colonial conditions, thereby subverting and renewing the lexicon of race in the United States. Léopold Senghor negotiates the colonial pattern of “Africanizing” education for the French West African subaltern, making a critically intimate revision of French education a condition of elaborating the modernist Négritude experiment in social and political terms. Aimé Césaire retraces the elementary French schoolbooks of the Caribbean classroom, poetically experimenting with a programmed curriculum and pedagogical techniques so as to turn them toward nonimperial meanings. Both Senghor and Césaire later became leaders of State, and their early fixation on educational problems is undoubtedly a factor in this development. D. H. Lawrence fantasizes about the coercive reeducation of the Mexican subaltern below the lines of the modern State and its social pedagogy—­ laying bare the articulation of authoritarian desire. Finally, Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi intervene in the massive and sedimented complex of educational experiments and institutions in colonial India. Addressing the impact of colonial education and cultural epistemology, they posit a revised elementary instruction in the mother tongue to offset cultural alienation (Tagore); and a radical short circuit of the political rationality they entail (Gandhi). I conclude with discussion of a modern Indian novel’s dramatization of subaltern demands for infrastructural access to the State. This singular instance is imagined through the grammatized formalism of a teaching drill, challenging


Introduction 5

the “educated reader” to work through the question of engaging with subaltern desires and languages as the condition for future solidarity.

d d d As perhaps the most general noneconomic social institution of modernity during a certain epoch, the schooling system’s environment, institutional forms, and technologies have determined incalculable subjective, epistemic, and experiential transformations of the lifeworld. The establishment of common public schooling unfolded in an uneven wave across the nation-­states of the modern world from the mid-­nineteenth to the mid-­ twentieth centuries, as both condition and effect of the nation-­state itself. The wave is still breaking. It is therefore a comparatively recent—­a nd increasingly fragile—­development, but its accumulated social and ideological force is reflected in the fact that the right to a free and compulsory elementary education is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and in other subsequent international treaties such as the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.9 Public schooling was a constituent aspect of the development of nation-­ states, which are the “signatories” of international declarations. Almost every “postcolonial” State became, at least nominally, a democratic nation-­ state or democratic republic—­entailing some sort of imaginative and institutional negotiation with principles and practices of education that were formalized in the European Enlightenment. The latter’s formula of elementary schooling may be expressed in rarefied and idealized terms as “an educational structure based on literacy, numeracy, reading skills [la littération], and familiarity with ‘universal ideas’; [a] version of what German educators called Bildung, a ‘formation’ in which there is also the projection of an image (Bild). This national(ized) literary [littérale] projection is a synchronization constituting the unity of the democratic industrial We.”10 The constitution of such a “We”—­in space and time, projected and synchronized—­is precisely the question opened up in this book. In spite of the tremendous class-­dividedness of actual modern common education systems as machines for the perpetuation of prevailing social differences, the conditions of modernizing societies have nevertheless necessitated the development of specific kinds of capabilities, knowledges, and habits across a far more general social body than in prior historical conjunctures


6 Introduction

(i.e., public education). Bernard Stiegler calls this the social requirement of “an elevated level of both individual and collective responsibility” and links it to the Enlightenment imperative to construct a condition of “maturity” for a citizen-­public.11 I shall return to this abstract educative schema later. In a radio discussion of the late 1960s, Theodor Adorno said that “the demand for independent maturity [Mündigkeit] seems self-­explanatory in a democracy. . . . ​Democracy rests on the educative formation of will [Willensbildung] in each individual, as conjoined in the institution of the representative vote. If this is not to result in irrationality, the capacity and courage of each individual to use their understanding must be presupposed.”12 Adorno poses the faculty of understanding (Verstand) against irrationality (Unvernunft) here, recapitulating a Kantian thematics of preparation for Mündigkeit that I examine in detail in chapter 1. In this presupposition is contained the need for an education (Bildung) of the “will” (and thus something of the desiring-­part of the subject). Adorno highlights not just courage to use the faculty of understanding, but a capacity to use an education in terms of desire as well as understanding, which is an ever-­ ramifying problem.13 This goes for teacher and student alike. In a nutshell, it tells us that education itself needs education, and this problem is at the center of Indigenous Vanguards. Its institutional and sociopolitical ramifications are as significant as its representational articulations are complex. Modern, mandatory public education contains the historically unprecedented possibility of preparation for a socially general practice (or “savoir-­faire”) of citizenship, and a sharable, public, democratic cultural politics, in principle open to anyone. The production of desire for this kind of civil society in colonial space—­which is an aspect of the making of the “colonial subject”—­has been covered in detail by others.14 What this book adds is an account of how some of the “enlightened” educators approached the problem of (re)educating themselves from within the presuppositions of the exceptional humanistic training they had received. Furthermore, I seek to show how they sought to imagine and represent, often in experimental literary ways, the millions not trained into the thought and presuppositions of democratic practices that were nevertheless projected as the goals of (their) national liberation. “Democratic practices” are by definition fundamentally ambiguous and open-­ended. In what ways was the


Introduction 7

“anyone” imagined and represented, welcomed, excluded, or put off until later, during and after the great scenographies of national liberation? Rather than consider such questions from the angle of political science, which I am not qualified to do, I address them in terms of literary representations and interfaces between literature and institutional teaching and learning. At an early phase of the uneven wave of general public education, variants of modern colonial states also deployed schooling at several levels to produce strata of indigenous colonial subjects who occupied an ambiguous managerial position in relation to the vast populations of the European empires. An unforeseen effect was that these strata also supplied almost all the leaders of anticolonial nationalist movements (the named founders and leaders of nation-­states that later would sign formal international declarations of the right to education). If common schooling constituted in principle an intellectual, ethical, and technical preparation to enter the structures of citizenship and practical participation in metropolitan States, the systematic denial of democratic structures in colonies engendered countermovements in imaginative upper-­and middle-­class intellectuals trained in the former’s presuppositions. Such intellectuals inhabited the scholastic apparatus to the point that they were able to “read” it and to use it, write with it, as training toward other ends where democratic participation was blocked. It is not by chance that a vivid and early example of this unfolds in an educational institution. As Partha Chatterjee tells us, in 1843 an English teacher of literature at Calcutta’s Hindu College sought to close down a meeting of the Indian Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge, which had been founded by some former students, because the meeting was critical of the very government that had founded Hindu College for Indians’ benefit in the first place.15 The society members were exercising what they thought to be their “democratic” right to criticize the limits of colonial freedom. What Chatterjee calls the possibility of “our modernity” emerges in such circumstances, precisely at the point where Enlightenment universalism encounters a limit because it cannot include a particular group within its framework of a public domain of free discourse. Enlightenment betrays itself in the deferral or limits built into the colonial relation. “The same historical process that has taught us the value of modernity has also made us the victims of modernity,” writes Chatterjee (“Modernity” 210). “At this founding moment of modernity


8 Introduction

[1840s] we did genuinely want to believe that in the new public domain of free discourse there were no bars of color or of the political status of one’s nationality, that if one could produce proof of one’s competence in the subjects under discussion one had an unrestricted right to voice one’s opinions” (205). Colonial blockage of access to a promised universality then engenders a claim to the universal from the other side—­one now marked by an emergent “national” signifier. A “distinctly national modernity” emerges (207, my emphasis). If modernity now takes on an Indian face, “our” modernity is ironic, “ambiguous,” because the very logic under which colonialism was supposed to civilize and enlighten India is that by which Indian nationalists made a case for emancipation from colonial rule (210). Inhabiting the equivocality and torsion of this space, the small “progressive bourgeoisies” that led struggles for national liberation came to produce versions of the nation on the basis of broadly “orientalist” images of a national past.16 Therefore, their active, supplementary repurposing of Enlightenment instruments may not always seem felicitous today. It should be examined case by case, however, because, I shall argue, in practice not all (national, public) education inevitably entails an orientalist outcome. It is varieties of such ambiguous currents within and alongside national liberation that I have gathered in this book under the heading of “indigenous vanguards.” This bizarre title reflects the complex and often paradoxical struggles, writings, and representations of schooling the minds and spirits of the young for the future in situations that, like all nationalisms, also assert self-­indigenizing and self-­ethnicizing methods of soul-­making and subject-­formation.

d d d What are the broad outlines of soul-­making and subject-­formation as they are—­in principle—­inculcated by modern systems of common education? Every educative program is one of “soul-­making” to the extent that it establishes itself as the humanization of a not-­yet or not-­quite human other.17 This classically appears as the humanization of the undifferentiated animal. In Kant’s most programmatic writing on education, for example, he says that “the human is the only creature that needs to be educated [erzogen].” Kant states that discipline and rearing, Disziplin and Zucht, are two of the essential components of education in general. Their application “changes animality into humanity.”18 Further, “disci-


PRAISE FOR

I N D I G E N O U S V A N G U A R D S “In this brilliantly researched book, Ben Conisbee Baer shows us the diversity of the dream of subaltern education shared by global anticolonialism and antiracism. Its relationship to Marxism is given in historical detail. Through meticulous close readings, Indigenous Vanguards shows how the literary both represents and enacts these dreams. The readings of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s The Tale of Hansuli Turn are provocatively original.” G AYAT R I C H A K R AVO RTY S P I VA K , CO LU M B I A U N I V E R S I TY

“Nothing short of a disciplinary milestone for new genealogies, epistemologies, and cartographies of the comparative humanities, this impeccably researched and carefully argued literary history maps the configuration of postindependence self-determination movements worldwide. In scope and intellectual sensitivity, Indigenous Vanguards is a major contribution to postcolonial theory and the class stratifications of geomodernism.” EMILY APTER, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

“Through a combination of the best of literary theory and an imaginative use of the archive, Baer provides brilliant insights into how anticolonial intellectuals inserted their political projects into what was supposed to be an autonomous aesthetic and, in the process, transformed the culture of the long twentieth century. Precise in its reading of cultural movements and texts, this book is a remarkable display of how a comparative approach makes modernism new again.” SIMON GIKANDI, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

MODERNIST LATITUDES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK C U P. C O L U M B I A . E D U

ISBN: 978-0-231-16372-9

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