from Research in African Literatures Volume 27, Number 4

Paul Gilroy's Slaves, Ships, and Routes: The Middle Passage as Metaphor

Joan Dayan

---

Permission to Copy

You may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:

Copyright Clearance Center
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923

FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com

For other permissions, use our online reprint request form.
 

---

Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness--a cartography of celebratory journeys--reads like an expurgated epic history. The Black Atlantic refers to, and stresses again and again, the rites of the Middle Passage, the journey from Africa to the New World, as a kind of origin myth for later chosen tales of ocean crossings by Wright, Du Bois, Douglass, and others who make a modern journey from the Americas to Europe. Yet, there is something oddly dissembling about those sites of what Gilroy calls "contamination." For the idea of slavery, so central to his argument (and so necessary to our understanding of what he calls the enlightened "complicity of reason and terror") becomes nothing more than a metaphor. How this happens demands some discussion. Although Gilroy argues against "Africentrism" and its cult of Africa--the nostalgia for Pharaoh's treasures instead of the liberation of the Exodus story--in Gilroy's story, the slave ship, the Middle Passage, and finally slavery itself become frozen, things that can be referred to and looked back upon, but always wrenched out of an historically specific continuum. What is missing is the continuity of the Middle Passage in today's world of less obvious, but no less pernicious enslavement.

Although I can appreciate the terms used, and laud Gilroy's call for retrieval of a past either ignored or misrepresented, something is not quite right about this heroics of choice and collaboration. As terms like "hybridity," "contamination," "mixture," and "cultural fusion" were repeated, I wondered about their grounding in history. What history? Whose history? The answer is apparently simple: black history--a "transnational, diasporic" history of black slaves with the "slave ship" as vessel of transit and means to knowledge. In Gilroy's attempt to anchor "black modernism" in "a continued proximity to the unspeakable terrors of the slave experience," the slave experience becomes an icon for modernity; and in a strangely magical way, the Middle Passage becomes a metaphor, anchored somewhere in a vanishing history. In Gilroy's transit there is no historical past except as an empty fact turned into a fashionable call that dulls any response that could carry the Middle Passage, slavery, ships, and routes into the present transnational drive of global capital and political terror. Gilroy stops short of questioning the choice of exile and passage by a minority of educated elites whose names we remember: Delaney, Douglass, Du Bois, and Wright, to name a few of Gilroy's chosen, along with the conveyors of "hip-hop," soul music, and rap in Gilroy's new, "keep on moving," world. Gilroy's Middle Passage and his celebration of "crosscultural circulation" and "nomadism" lend a false idea of choice to forced migration.

Let me turn briefly to what I take to be the incisive plot of Gilroy's reflections, a plot that undergirds the images and characters called up on his broad canvas of modernity. The plot takes up three or four moments in the historiography and representation of a new racialized culture of modernity. For those of us who do literary history, the recovery of the institution of slavery and the presence of African Americans in the texts of the so-called "American Renaissance" have been essential to a rereading of gothic fiction in the Americas. Even the supernatural in many gothic tales, as I argued in "Amorous Bondage," had its real basis in the language of slavery and colonization, put forth as the most natural thing in the world. One has only to read the 1685 Code noir of Louis XIV, that collection of edicts concerning "the Discipline and Commerce of Negro Slaves in the French Islands of America," to understand how what first seemed phantasmagoric is locked into a nature mangled and relived as a spectacle of servitude.

In fixing his critique in his "deep sense of the complicity of racial terror with reason," Gilroy explores, "the ways in which closeness to the ineffable terrors of slavery was kept alive--carefully cultivated--in ritualized, social forms" (73). Here is a key to the excitement to be found in Gilroy's "doubleness": for these social forms might reside in a practice like Haitian vodou, utterly cooptive, and absorptive--a ritual reenactment of the colonial past, as well as an alternative philosophy. Gilroy's ruminations seem to encourage such movements to and fro, for "transnational, diasporic cultural innovation" always cuts both ways. Slavery is the hub--the rite of memory, a staying close to "terror" in order to recognize again and again "the complicity of rationality and ethnocidal terror to which this book is dedicated" (213). Claiming quite rightly that slavery is not the "special property" of blacks--some easily discarded residue--but rather "a part of the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West as a whole" (49), Gilroy announces that it's time to reconstruct "the primal history of modernity" from the "slaves' point of view" (55). But what do we define as "the West as a whole"? And where, oh where do we find the slaves' point of view?

To Naipaul's claim that the Caribbean is nothing but the "Third World's Third World," Sidney Mintz argues that the Caribbean was "being force fit into the so-called First World before anything like a Third World ever existed" (47). As best testing ground for the claims and coercions of capital, the colonies could be argued to be more Western than what we deem to be West: places for excess, where a Jacobin could be more Jacobin than allowed in France, and Lady Maria Nugent in 18th-century Jamaica could be more luxuriously dressed--bearing gifts from Pauline Bonaparte Leclerc next door in Haiti--than a lady in London. There's an odd way in which the Caribbean colonies drop out of Gilroy's historiography. For Gilroy seems haunted by the ghosts of terms already defined by the metropolitan definers.

In quest of what he calls a "compound outlook" in place of "a pre-rational, spiritual mode of African thought" (60-61), Gilroy oversimplifies the precarious encounter of colonial spirituality, taking for granted the very dichotomy he claims to be debunking. Since he deals with late-in-coming cultural products as exempla, he ignores the contextualization of his supposed subject: slavery. To take an example from my recent Haiti, History, and the Gods, I am less interested in how the enlightenment and the philosophers of modernity, whether called Habermas or Du Bois, Hegel, or Douglass, crafted their analyses out of the "brute facts of modern slavery" pressing on "modernity's ethics of law" (56), than in how slaves and their descendants reinterpreted and revealed what white enlightenment was really about. Facing what remains to a large extent an unreconstructable past--the responses of slaves to the terrors of slavery, to colonists, to the New World--I try to imagine what cannot be verified. Any query about the subjective reactions of slaves is perilous. But the question must be asked. Only then can we begin to probe a "memory" that demolishes such straightjacket pairs as victim and victimizer, master and slave. You see, there is a problem of agency here. Gilroy grants "art"--or "culture," his most privileged term--to the slave population, "particularly in the form of music and dance," but only as an offering from master to subordinate: "offered to slaves as a substitute for the formal political freedoms they were denied under the plantation regime" (56-57).

Now, I do not harken back to some "phantom Africa" of song and dance, but urge us to think about how one-sided is Gilroy's duplicitous doubleness. For Gilroy's narrative, though promising "contamination" and "complicity," divides the world quite evenly into the European project of rights and reason and a vaguely defined, prehistorical African thought. Further, even though Gilroy seems to attack totalizing uses of race, he gives his "black Atlantic" some predetermined essence and value. Gilroy's world of double speak is thus ultimately categorizable in terms of those who know how to theorize and those who do not; those who seek solidarity in practical struggles along ethnic lines and those who play "the games black people in all western cultures play with names and naming" (203).

Let us think for a moment, for example, about the life of the spirit in colonial Saint-Domingue: a reconstructive effort that has compelled me for some time now. Whatever remained powerful in the minds of both African-born and Creole slaves and free coloreds in Saint-Domingue had a great deal to do with Catholicism. Recall that from the time of Haitian independence in 1804 to the Concordat in 1860, the Catholic Church had nothing to do with Haiti. During those years, religious forms and rituals developed that had been either forbidden or masked before the revolution. What Gilroy dubs oddly as "pre-slave history" means little when considering how mixed and diverse were African cultures and religions before New World slavery. As Jean Price-Mars has demonstrated in his reflections on "Le sentiment et le phénomène religieux chez les nègres de St.-Domingue" (1926), not only were many of the first arrivals from the upper west coast of Africa Islamic, but many of those from the kingdoms of the Congo, Angola, and Mozambique had been affected by "Islamic propaganda" and "inculcated with ideas of catholicity by the Portuguese, the first explorers of the African coasts, around the fifteenth century." Price-Mars concludes that quite possibly "the large majority of negroes torn from different places in Africa and brought to Saint-Domingue were pious peoples attached simultaneously to the Muslim and Dahoemean faith, and even slightly Catholic" (126-27). So much for Gilroy's "pre-slave history," "outside modernity," "anteriority," "anti-modernity," and "pre-modern."

The dualist opposition between divine power and sorcery seems to have been much more fragile and vulnerable to reversal than standard accounts might otherwise suggest. The confusing similarity between divine and magical forces characteristic of Catholicism was doubtless sensed by the secular powers of Saint-Domingue. The superstitions, demons, and witches of pre-Reformation Europe, transported to the island by provincial priests, resulted in narratives at least as bizarre as the zombi spirits purported to be part of the spiritual surround of what later became identified as black folk belief. The tense, unwieldy, and silenced dialogue between spirits straddling both white and black worlds produced unlikely reversals: a reversibility that must be understood as shaking up the very definition of Western modernity.

Surely one of the most unforgettable moments in Edouard Glissant's Le discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) is his scathing analysis of the proclamation made on 31 March 1848 by Louis Thomas Husson, delegate of the Republic of France, abolishing (but not really) slavery in Martinique. Here is Glissant: "The goodness of the father. He takes care of his children; it is up to them to be well-behaved, to deserve his attention . . . . The habit that decisions are taken elsewhere. The law arrives. (Paris 'makes' the law.) The granting of freedom. It is rare that a colonizing country should so develop a theory of 'Liberation' " (28). For Glissant, this liberation is nothing but a verbal dispensation that says to the slaves: "Until the law becomes official, remain what you are, slaves." Although Gilroy mentions Glissant, in connection with "modernity" and "the emergence of a creole counter-discourse," he omits any mention of Glissant's analyses of the dehumanizing gifts of emancipation, money, and modernity to the people of Martinique. It should give readers pause that Gilroy's "reconstructive" project mentions Mannoni but not Césaire, Lacan but not Fanon.

Let us look for a moment at the telling strategies of this textualized universe, for though Gilroy quotes admiringly Rushdie's condemnation of "the little room of literature," the "Black Atlantic" is just that, closed and conservative, while seeming open and radical. I refer here to the centerpiece of Gilroy's chapter on "Masters, Mistresses, Slaves": the contest between Covey and Douglass, the fight to the death that Gilroy deems "the occasion on which a liberatory definition of masculinity is produced" (63). How do we read Gilroy's subsequent turn to Lacan's labor of death and the striking omission of Fanon's lengthy examination of Hegel's master and slave complex in Black Skin, White Masks? Fanon's master is, of course, different from Hegel's: "For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work" (220). But Gilroy is less interested in the realities of labor and economic subordination than in the romantic rhetoric of doubling two self-consciousnesses. Catapulted out of any exigency that might seem too "nationalistic," "retrograde," naively "political" or "Africentric," Gilroy's struggle omits the cunning beneficence of white recognition, noted by both Fanon and Glissant. Fanon writes: "One day the White master, without conflict, recognized the Negro slave" (217). For Fanon, like Glissant, this recognition--coming without conflict--lacks the reciprocity necessary for full consciousness of self. Further, Gilroy's ship skillfully steers clear of any possible connection with such transits as Douglass's compromised role as "free" public servant of the racist United States as "black" minister to "black" Haiti; the conversion of emancipated blacks into movable property, periodically sent out of the United States on ships to Haiti from 1824 to 1864; and finally, the history of those new migrants, called "boat people" or the "Haitian stampede," whose rickety boats are not exactly the ships Gilroy has in mind.

Just as Gilroy's Middle Passage stops short of its evolution into the new middle passage of those who do not choose to leave their homes in celebration of "nomadism," but are forced out because of dire economic facts and political terrors, Gilroy's discussion of Douglass's relation to modernity fails to account for the kind of self-invention necessitated by a racist Union--most chillingly demonstrated after emancipation. Far more than the gritty struggle with Covey--where Douglass had the chance to move from "nothing" to "man"--the overdetermined emblematic life Douglass faced as "emancipated" slave turned public officer tells us something about the impossibility of what Gilroy calls "counter-violence." Douglass, serving his country at the time of its justification for rapacious commerce and benevolent acquisition, was himself captive of systems of representation that forced him to redefine what he meant by "honor" and "diplomacy." Although Gilroy puts us on board the Cunard ship Batavia as the Fisk Jubilee singers set sail from Boston to England, he ignores Douglass's haunting description of his passage as Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti in the final chapter of Life and Times:

Before I went there, they [the New York Press] endeavored to show that the captain of the ship designated by the government to take me to my post at Port au Prince had refused to take me on board, and as an excuse for his refusal, had made a false statement concerning the unsea-worthiness of his vessel, when the real ground of objection was the color of my skin. (1024)

There are other ships ignored by Gilroy in his depiction of Douglass's trans-Atlantic passage, in the same way that he ignores the consolidation of property and capital during the heady contract of "Manifest Destiny": "the appearance in the harbor of Port au Prince of United States ships of war," and "an admiral's pennon in the harbor," taken by Douglass to be "a signal of attack upon [himself] the United States Minister" (1024). In Gilroy's potent images of "diasporic cultural innovation," in what he calls "the black Atlantic network," he never once considers how political realities--a chaos of instrumentalization and greed--merge with a destructive syncretism.

Gilroy's symbolic ship of transcultural passage ignores the reduction of the so-called transnational or deterritorialized nation-states into locales for cheap labor, giving US companies access to labor costs less than 10% of those in the United States. I realize that there is danger in dealing with the economics of deprivation, for class-based initiatives lack the aura of enhancement offered by cultural studies in the post-era of a slick, homogenized history. Yet, at what price culture? And who gets to claim it? Choices are always part of heavily contested sites of delimitation. Rituals of exclusivity and stigmatization are exercised daily. It is not yet time to look back to some fossilized theme of slavery, for slavery still exists under other names. As none other than Thomas Carlyle warned in his infamous "The Nigger Question" in 1849, writing about the "tropical dog kennel" of Haiti and presenting emancipated blacks in Jamaica as "up to the ears" in pumpkin-induced indolence: "My friends, I have come to the sad conclusion that SLAVERY, whether established by law, or by law abrogated, exists very extensively in this world, in and out of the West Indies; and, in fact, that you cannot abolish slavery by act of parliament, but can only abolish the name of it, which is very little!" (4: 359). While we in the academy discuss the problems with terms such as "creolity," "mestizaje," "hybridization," or "nomadism," the mainstream media redefine just who minorities are: how they will be recognized and what they will be called.

What are the connections between our theoretical discussions of cross-Atlantic perspectives and the deterritorial vision of the new multinationals? As the Bajan poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite has written in a phrase I never tire of repeating: hegemony can be "achieved . . . largely by remote control" (62). Under the pretext of a diasporic movement, the need for local knowledge is circumvented. Though the terms promise an alternative theorizing, they belie the facts of social and racial stratification. For example, instead of building up economies back home, transmigrants to the United States become part of development schemes that further subordinate their deterritorialized nation-states and their impoverished populations--to the needs of global capital.

For a moment, I want to move between two extremes: the pleasures of hybridity, mobility, and surplus, and the places where sameness, incapacitation, and deprivation are institutionalized: the prisons that contain mostly hyphenated Americans. On one hand, the globalized marketplace of consumers that assumes that all consumers are equal and all cultures available for consumption; and on the other hand, what might be seen as the underside of transnational cultural hybridity, or the ghost that trails behind the display of fashionable icons. What Homi Bhabha describes as the "history [that] is happening in the pages of theory" (25) is not the history that is happening outside those pages. Such theorizing needs to be put alongside another kind of rhetorical practice outside academe. The juxtaposition helps us to understand how culture and politics are reciprocal, how they operate in tandem with each other. I am suggesting that as our theorizing becomes more rarefied and exclusive in one direction--conjuring the image of migrant intellectuals, Gilroy's "de-centred identities," or Said's "cultural amphibians"--another kind of theorizing works to delimit and segregate.

Working in the state prison systems in Arizona, I recognize the power of terminologies that kill, the violence of humane restraint, medicinal execution, and disciplinary containment. Calls for the free-floating tags of ethnicity, race, and gender, are decimated when methods of classification work daily to ensure that the poor and the powerless will be converted into so much material exposed to institutional degradation. In the new spectacles of punishment, the labor called "hard" is nonproductive, a simulation of images of chain and rock implemented by the state in order to construct a phantasm of criminality.

The institutionalized servility that can sustain order and produce obedience marks the most concerted effort since reconstruction to create a class of citizens subordinate to and separate from those outside prison walls. What Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death termed the "full mechanics" of "appropriation" is accomplished when those in power control the "appropriate symbolic instruments," "by exploiting already existing symbols" or creating "new ones relevant to their needs" (37). The use of chain --what one Arizona warden calls "the public display of chain"--is the exploitation of a powerful symbol. Once attached to a person, it claims that person as part of a history of denigration and abuse, assuring the methodical exclusion of certain folks outside the pale of human relation and empathy. The marginalization of an increasing portion of black male workers from the labor force demands that we consider chain labor for those incarcerated as creating a society of the stigmatized. Of the one million inmates held in prisons in the United States, 583,000 are African Americans. African Americans are six times more likely than white Americans to be incarcerated, and comprise 40% of those executed.

I have turned, if only briefly, to the intensely national in rethinking the flow of the "black Atlantic," for what is happening in the prisons of our nation-state qualifies the uses of global hybridity. What Aijaz Ahmad has condemned as an idea of hybridity that "partakes of a carnivalesque collapse and play of identities" (13) is sinister when applied to what happens in places where those without choice see their identities collapsed, only to be renamed and claimed by the state. What Mumia Abu-Jamal has called "dehumanization by design" (90) is now accomplished by dredging up strategies of evacuation and detention very much part of the material accoutrements of slavery--and of transnational history.

In Small Acts (the title plays on Bob Marley's 1972 revolutionary "Small Axe"), Gilroy warns his readers that he wants "to convey a way of interpreting black cultural forms politically without reducing them to their politics alone." Even in "the most restricted circumstances," he argues, there are "opportunities for democratic, oppositional agency" (15). I want to take a moment to ask: What is this agency? Gilroy, in choosing hermeneutics over history, gives culture a vast and vague power to enhance "life." Life, yes; but for whom and against whom? Gilroy's vision of "de-centred identities," not anchored in the semiotic trappings of race or color, allows his tactical move away from the overdetermined discourse of the blackness that Fanon has called "a white man's artifact" (14). But where does Gilroy move these identities? Do they form a community? And what kind?

When Gilroy wants to get communal, he anchors that community in an "up by the bootstraps" philosophy that resonates with certain contemporary attacks on welfare, crime, and affirmative action. Gilroy's "politics of transfiguration" in his introduction to Small Acts should be read as a gloss to "the slave sublime" of The Black Atlantic. There is, after all, a politics behind Gilroy's culture. Praising the growing "maturity of black political responses," free of Caliban's rage, Gilroy turns to "the decidedly Victorian notions of individualism and racial uplift that found favour in the atmosphere created by Mrs. Thatcher's brand of racially coded, populist and nationalist conservatism" (11). He concludes this argument by suggesting that the "link with conservatism has been important in changing the terms of black political discourse and may be an expression of the growing maturity of black political consciousness" (11).

Not all "rootlessness" is "habitable," as Gilroy argues in his chapter on Wright, and some "recycling" is less the evidence of encounter than of conquest. But for Gilroy, economic exploitation, color prejudice, and political guile can always be derailed by a mythologized time of tears, "love stories," "death," and "sublimity." Taking writing anchored in a specific time and place out of its roots and into abstraction, Gilroy turns poverty and racial stigma into an obscurantist, if rhythmic aesthetics of pain:

The love stories they [black music and its broken rhythm] enclose are a place in which the black vernacular has been able to preserve and cultivate both the distinctive rapport with the presence of death which derives from slavery and a related ontological state that I want to call the condition of being in pain. Being in pain encompasses both a radical, personalised enregistration of time and a diachronic understanding of language whose most enduring effects are the games black people in all western cultures play with names and naming. (203)

Go tell that to the black males who constitute 46% of the prison and jail population, but less than 7% of the US population. Tell it to the mothers who have lost children in shoot-outs; to those beaten and killed by police in the Bronx, Brixton, and Los Angeles. Tell it to the Haitians sought by buscones (searchers) and sold into forced labor in the Dominican Republic.

*A longer version of this essay is forthcoming in Sisyphus and Eldorado, ed. Kamau Brathwaite and Timothy J. Reiss.

WORKS CITED

Abu-Jamal, Mumia. Lines from Death Row. Intro. by John Edgar Wideman. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

Ahmad, Aijaz. "The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality." Race & Class 36.3 (1995): 1-21.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Brathwaite, Kamau. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Mona, Jamaica: Savacoa, 1974.

Carlyle, Thomas. "The Nigger Question." Fraser's Magazine Dec. 1984. Rpt. in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 5 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1969. 348-83.

Dayan, Joan. "Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves." American Literature 66.2 (1994): 239-73. Rept. in Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from O roonoko to Anita Hill. Ed. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 109-45.

__. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.

Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times: Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967.

Gilroy, Paul. The Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.

__. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent's Tail, 1993.

Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. Michael J. Dash. 1989. Rpt. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992..

Mars, Jean-Price. "Le sentiment et le phénomène religieux chez les nègres de St.-Domingue." 1926. Une étape de l'évolution haïtienne. Port-au-Prince: "La Presse," 1929. 115-52. Cited in Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods 1995): 245.

Mintz, Sidney. "The Caribbean Region." Daedalus 103.2 (1974): 45-71.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.