Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic

1 The Atlantic Enlightenment

1  The Atlantic Enlightenment the entire atlantic world was shaped by 1492 and what is euphemistically called the “encounter,” which engendered not only a catastrophe for indigenous peoples but also a crisis in European thinking. The clash of Europe and indigene provoked a multifaceted reflection on utopia (Thomas More) and dystopia (Bartolomé de las Casas). The intertextual backdrop of the contemporary “culture wars” lies in the contradictions of an Enlightenment that was not exclusively European. The phrase “Atlantic Enlightenment” refers both to a geography and a concept. Enlightenment thought was a hybrid intellectual production; it was generated not only in Europe but also in the Americas, by the Founding Fathers in the United States, by Haitian revolutionaries, and by representatives of indigenous people. The Enlightenment was a debate, conducted in many sites, about the relation between Europe and its Others, with a left and a right wing, with proslavery and antislavery, colonialist and anticolonialist factions. The Atlantic world has been shaped by the intellectual heritage of Enlightenment republicanism, as expressed politically in the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, and the Haitian Revolution in 1791, as well as in the Brazilian independence movements of the 18th century and in the Brazilian Republic in 1889. A clear historical thread thus leads out from the Enlightenment debates within the American and French Revolutions to the contemporary “culture wars,” as actualized, recombinant versions of earlier debates. The “culture wars,” in this sense, inherit centuries of discursive struggles going back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and their antecedents, going back to the Conquest of the Americas and even to the Crusades. Versions of the debates were present, in germ and under different names, in the intense exchanges about Conquest, colonialism, and slavery. They were argued in religious/political language in the 16th century when Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas asked whether Indians had souls and as a consequence enjoyed “derechos humanos” (human rights). They were present when indigenous people rebelled against European conquest or resisted Christian proselytization. They were present when enslaved Africans fought and argued against enslavement, or when the U.S. Founding Fathers took positions for and against the inscription of slavery into the Constitution. They were present when French Enlightenment philosophers spoke about“freedom” and“natural goodness,” and when“free men of color” opposed slavery in the French colonies. 2 The Atlantic Enlightenment Contemporary critiques thus lend new names to old quarrels, now rearticulated within altered idioms and paradigms. Throughout its history, colonialism has always generated its own critique, whether by the dominant culture’s own renegades or by its colonized victims. When Montaigne in the late 16th century argued in “Des Cannibales” that civilized Europeans were ultimately more barbarous than cannibals, since cannibals ate the flesh of the dead only in order to appropriate the strength of their enemies, while Europeans tortured and murdered in the name of a religion of love, he might be described as a radical anticolonialist avant la lettre. When Diderot in the 18th century called for African insurrection against European colonialists, he too might be seen as part of this same anti-Eurocentric lineage. And when Frantz Fanon in the 20th century spoke of accepting “the reciprocal relativism of different cultures, once colonialism is excluded,” he gave us a working definition of radical forms of postcolonial critique.1 When we say that the contemporary culture wars go back to colonialism and the Enlightenment, we do not mean this claim in a vague “everything goes back to history” way. The contemporary debates are quite literally rooted in Enlightenment quarrels. In contemporary France, for example, both right and left invoke the French Revolution and “Enlightenment values” to articulate their views of “identity politics,” whether seen as a praiseworthy expansion of Enlightenment equality or as a particularist departure from Enlightenment “universality.” In the United States, both left and right invoke the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence, but in opposite ways; Obama appeals to the“more perfect union” of the Preamble, while Tea Party Republicans interpret the Constitution to defend right-wing libertarianism. The left channels the radical Enlightenment of Diderot and Toussaint Louverture, while Newt Gingrich channels Adam Smith. The quarrels about indigenous land rights and intellectual property rights go back to the Conquest and to John Locke. The various discursive positions for and against conquest, slavery, racism, and imperialism, in sum, have been “available ” for a long time; contemporary debates thus...