Inhabiting the Metropole: C. L. R. James and the Postcolonial Intellectual of the African Diaspora

Diaspora 2:3 1993 Inhabiting the Metropole: C. L. R. James and the Postcolonial Intellectual of the African Diaspora Anuradha Dingwaney Needham Oberlin College Ifthe ideas originated in the West Indies it was only in England and in English life and history that I was able to track them down and test them. To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries , must himselfpioneer into regions Caesar never knew. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary The anthropologist, [Asmarom] Legesse, has pointed to the extent to which we are trapped in the ordering "categories and prescriptions" ofour epistemic orders. He notes, however, that liminal groups ofany order are most able to "free us" from these prescriptions, since it is they who existentially experience the "injustice inherent in structure." Sylvia Wynter, "The Ceremony Must Be Found" Despite the call for a "proliferation of historically nuanced theories and strategies"; despite talk about "traditions" as "invented" entities which entail a "selective remembering and forgetting of the past that undergirds group identity"; despite the recognition that histories and identities are necessarily constructed; despite the call not to "give in to the rigidity and interdictions of those self-imposed limitations that come with race, moment or milieu";1 despite all these, a significant strand in discussions of anticolonial resistance, whether in homeland or diaspora, often pits simplistic notions of dispersed and colonized peoples' (African, Indian, or Caribbean) national identity and cultural authenticity against the discourses and values that authorize the power of the West. This strand reflects an understandable, but ultimately mistaken, desire for resistance to occupy an absolutely autonomous, uncontaminated space from which to launch the "truth" of its "pure" opposition to the West.2 Drawing upon the power of nationalist rhetoric, it implicitly or explicitly posits "true" resistance as proceeding from (and only from) identities securely and organically connected to a putative traditional natal culture.3 That this view ofresistance represents a well-founded reaction to Diaspora 2:3 1993 the (continuing) power of Euro-America is obvious. That it requires (indeed demands) "a peculiarly narrow and specific form [of] dissent " ifdissent is to be "audible or politically non-cooptable" (Nandy, "Shamans" 263) should, perhaps, also be obvious. As such, it is simply inadequate to the task of accounting for resistances that arise from multilayered, mixed, or hybrid cultural and historical formations , such as those produced by, and in the face of, the massive European colonization ofthe "non"-West. Given these conceptions of resistance, what are we to make ofthose principled critiques of colonial domination that nevertheless invoke (and accrue from) western values and epistemologies? Furthermore, what are we to make of the critiques of colonial domination forwarded by "native" intellectuals whose minds were formed by colonial education, who launched their critiques in a colonial language—English, French, Spanish— and who addressed these critiques primarily to a western or metropolitan audience?4 In short, what are we to make ofthe oppositional voices and visions shaped by what Cedric Robinson has, in his essay on Amilcar Cabrai, called "the contradictions of domination, the dialectic of imperialism" (40)? Rather than writing them off as incomplete, or inappropriate, or co-opted modes of resistance, we must attend to them precisely because doing so allows us, at the very least, to broaden the scope of the discussion. More importantly, doing so allows us to produce a richer, more textured and modulated account of resistance, which recognizes how resistance is necessarily affected by that which it seeks to resist, which, in turn, affects the possibilities available at any given historical moment. Finally, there is an even more compelling reason to undertake such a task: "The colonial experience," says Abiola Irele, "was not an interlude in our [ex-colonized peoples'] historfies ], a storm that broke upon us causing damage here and there but leaving us the possibility, after its passing, to pick up the pieces. It marked a sea-change of the historical processes in [the colonized world]; it effected a qualitative reordering of life" (207). Since the West has so indelibly marked the "non"-West, we have much to learn from the oppositional visions and voices of postcolonial intellectuals forged in the crucible of the colonial encounter itself...