Martian Time-Slip

"It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again."

Still working my way through the essential PKD list George gave me a few weeks ago. Just finished "Martian Time-Slip" today. Very intriguing story on many levels. UN, co-ops, unions, colonization, human nature, schizophrenia, metaphysics, education, and race (the 'black' Bleekmen) figure prominently in this novel, and I appreciate how intertextual PKD's 1960s novels are (precogs). In a sense, Three Stigmata, Ubik and other works are hinted at by the early exploration of 'psionic' powers and human settlement elsewhere in the solar system. The description of schizophrenia here also brings to mind the destructiveness of Substance D on the protagonist of "A Scanner Darkly" or even the questionable sanity of Dick's fictionalized version of himself in "Valis."Furthermore, there is some insightful social commentary, particularly on mental illness, avarice, and the limitations of industrial models of education. I suspect PKD would be quite critical of the corporate education reform movement had he lived to see the rapid changes in public schools, although the public education system of his own lifetime was horrid enough. Class, greed, the need for human intimacy, all illustrated quite movingly in this novel. 

One should certainly not ignore the prominence of race and colonialism as themes of this work. By far the most race-conscious novel by Dick (the indigenous Bleekmen of Mars, who live bleak, nomadic lives as a dying race, are often referred to as niggers, blacks, and compared to the "Bushmen" of Africa), racism, anti-Semitism, fear, and how human societies "deal with" those on the margins or periphery are disturbingly demonstrated by the corrupt union boss, the casual anti-Semitism of a black market dealer in Earth luxuries, and the willingness of some colonists to support eradication of schizoid or mentally ill children, unsurprisingly kept at Camp Ben Gurion in New Israel, the Israeli settlement on Mars. Although one could ask why Dick did not use Earth-born people of African descent in a discussion about race, since one does not need to resort to fictional alien blacks to dissect society's racial "issues," the "dark" race of indigenes broadens the discussion of race to become analogous with European expansion in the Americas as well as anti-black racism. Indeed, when reading Arnie's harsh words for his "tame" Bleekman servant, Heliogabalus, one cannot help but think of the white working-class unionists who opposed blacks, against their own class interests, a similar fate for Arnie as Mars is on the brink of attracting massive land speculation and development from the co-ops and UN. 

One last point. As a recovering housing cooperative community member, the depiction of cooperatives in Dick's future world is fascinating yet never elucidated. Clearly, Earth is crowded and the cooperative apartments have become exclusive underworlds with shopping centers, supermarkets, or, in short, mini-cities in themselves. This future of cooperatives in which the wealthy can afford to invest in their own, separate reality, apart from the "real" world, as experienced in the schizophrenic episodes of Jack Bohlen, depicts a dystopia none of the cooperative housing proponents I have met would ever imagine. Alas, sometimes I think the housing cooperative umbrella I joined was too similar to this science fiction construct...

Ubik

"He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside."

Philip K. Dick's Ubik is a rollercoaster ride into metaphysics, dualism, and his creative science fiction world where precogs, half-lifers, telepathy, and other psionic activity coexist. Like other Dick novels, reality is not what it seems, a wondrous substance, like the fictional drugs of other novels, affect "reality," and Platonic notions of dualism (forms versus ideas) influence the potentially upsetting depiction of the real world and the world of the dead half-lifers, who can communicate with the 'living' at special moratoriums through advanced technology. Depending on how one reads this unwieldly novel in which most of the characters are "dead," Ella (to be replaced by Joe Chip) and Jory could be the eternal conflict of Ahriman and Ahura Mazda, for those familiar with the ancient Persian religion. I have no idea how to interpret this story...I am apt to suspect all the characters are in half-life, especially based on the novel's final paragraph, but in consideration of Dick's usual themes, I do not think we are to have a definitive answer about the nation of being or reality. 

Pan con Timba

One of my favorites by the legendary Bebo. Featuring exhilarating horn solos, one in homage to Benny Moré's classic, "Qué bueno baila usted," and an infectious piano solo from Bebo himself, I could listen to this all day. I could use some pan con timba right now, matter of fact...

Irène

Merry Christmas! Today, I am enjoying jazz and a random assortment of music. Today's gem is an old meringue, "Irène," performed by the Montreal-based band, Makaya. Irène the name of my great-grandmother, also has sentimental value to me, but I generally love older styles of Caribbean and Latin music, especially styles with a hint of jazz. The original can be found on Youtube or Spotify, as part of the Sans Parole volume of Haitian Belle Epoque music, consisting of meringues, big band, and jazz sounds.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldtritch

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch makes for strange bedtime reading. It's addictive, much like the illegal drug for collective hallucination, Can-D, of the novel. Like other Dick novels, the obsession with metaphysics, drugs, religious themes, and dystopic futures are explored in a rather engaging tale on reality and unreality, instigated by the return of Palmer Eldtritch from the Proxima Centaurus system. Palmer, once human, disappeared for ten years in that alien star system, returning with a new drug, CHEW-Z, cultivated from lichen he returns with. Unlike the Can-D drug, illegally manufactured by Leo Bulero's P.P. Layouts company, which sells the drugs and "mins" of dollhouse layouts for the desperate colonists of the solar system, CHEW-Z and the god-like Palmer Eldritch break apart reality at the seams in such a way that time travel is possible, along with Palmer Eldritch, despite a future predicted death by the precogs employed by Bulero's company, manages to reassert himself and attain some measure of immortality. Palmer Eldritch, knowing his physical death at the hands of Bulero is down the road, is, at the novel's conclusion, perhaps successful in reaching immortality through movement of the 'unreal' world and phantasms which proliferate throughout the realities. 

If the above makes any sense, clearly there is a lot going on in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, yet, like Maze of Death, Mayerson, one of precogs now toiling as a settler on Mars, expresses interest in Neo-Christianity and the hope embodied in the faith. Belief in some higher hope, higher being of which Palmer is only a smaller part of, can lead to salvation or escape from the world of forms in which the characters are ensnared. Thus, there are Gnostic elements in this work, as well as some parallels with Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, since both novels feature god-like beings and deal with themes of fate and divinity. Of course, whether or not Mayerson finds salvation through the ancient faith of Christianity or if Leo succeeds in ending Palmer is purposely ambiguous, as is the future of human "evolution" or Palmer Eldritch himself as "god."

Love and Death in a Hot Country

"Societies could not be created on sheets of parchment. They could not, even with the most golden of fountain pens, be signed into existence. Inevitably, men will succumb to their own reality. They will sink to the level of being where they feel most at ease with themselves. They would always act in conformity with their own natures and remake the world in their own image. The abandonment of the Constitution could be likened to a house settling into its foundations. That, more or less, was what was happening to them. They were falling prey to their own reality, settling into their foundations. (63)"

Shiva Naipaul's final novel, Love and Death in a Hot Country, reflects the darkness of his visiting Guyana after the Jonestown Massacre. In tone and style, this novel bears a much closer resemblance to his brother's novels, beginning with The Mimic Men. Like that great novel, Shiva sets the story in a fictionalized version of a Caribbean country (Cuyama, a thinly-veiled Guyana with aspects of Suriname's demographics thrown in) and ruminates on what both brothers likely see as the chaos and nothingness of Guyana. For those accustomed to Shiva Naipaul's humor, this is a radical departure with the same tone and message of his older brother on postcolonial politics, black radicalism, and the well-intentioned whites who think they're making a difference. Thus, this novel is far too similar to Vidia's Mimic Men or Guerrillas for my taste (there is even a character descended from French Creoles who fled Haiti in the early 19th century, just as in Mimic Men), but still worthwhile for a haunting read on Guyana as the dictatorship unveiled itself. Again, like Vidia, Cuyama/Guyana, or the Caribbean at large, is a region of chaos, no civilization to speak of, no meaning. Cuyama's streets are in decay, everything is in a state of decay or reverting to jungle. This nihilistic theme pervades the character of Dina, a "mixed-race" Indian-Portuguese, whose husband, Aubrey St. Pierre, clings to grandiose ideas of revolution, social equality, and a Cuyamese nation that, to Dina (or, by extension, Shiva Naipaul), will never be. For someone trapped in his older brother's shadow, this final novel only serves to confirm it.

Anacaona Live

Rousing rendition of salsa classic "Anacaona" by a legendary Cuban band, in one of its later incarnations. The vocalist actually sounds a bit like Che Feliciano, so one might as well listen to the original. 

Chumalacatea

La chanson du jour. RIP, Ismael. 

A Scanner Darkly

"Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then, briefly."

Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly should be assigned to high school students. Not strictly as an anti-drug novel, but a suspenseful, disturbing look at drug addiction in a world torn asunder by narcotics, nothing is as it seems, and the metaphorical disconnect between left and right sides of the brain have disastrous consequences for a dystopic 1990s Orange County. The heads and "straights" live in separate worlds, class divides are deeply entrenched and, much like the Substance D users, the "straights" are not exactly living in a world of reality, either. Undercover narcotics agents, conspiracies, and the usual rants of drug-addled minds provide more than enough action and dark humor, including a dig at Ayn Rand. Typical for Dick, the continued obsession with metaphysics and the nature of being and reality are interwoven with this complex tale of Fred/Robert Arctor, who is investigating himself. Time, existence, or the infinite reflections and holograms exemplify this theme, something accomplished more effectively in Dick's 1960s novels than here. A mind trip nonetheless, no?

The film, the most faithful adaptation of any Dick fiction to the big screen, is marred by a jarring animation style (interpolated rotoscape), which is not to my taste. Telling Dick's story visually, however, has some advantages, mainly in illustrating physicality of the heads and their declining grasp of "reality," yet veering dangerously close to horrid stoner comedy. There are some conspicuous changes, too. The presence of race is far less apparent in the film than the novel. For example, the scene in which Barris finds out the ten-speed bike he buys from some black guys, who, in the novel, likely stole it, the race of the sellers is omitted. Likewise, numerous references to "queers" and "homosexuals" also disappears from the film, perhaps in response to changing social conventions of the 2000s instead of the dystopic fictional world of Dick's imagination and its concrete, 1970s background. If so inclined, one could write ceaselessly on Dick's writing as it relates to race and gender.

Short Rant on Naipaul's Africa

One of the most disturbing aspects of V.S. Naipaul's high esteem is the likelihood of casual readers interpreting his travel writing or fiction on Africa as possessing the necessary depth to explain the problems facing postcolonial Africa. Since Naipaul has traveled to and Africa since the 1960s, and traveled throughout the continent, I cannot dispute his experiences, but his Conradian image of Africa is arguably worse than Conrad. Conrad’s famous novella, at least, could possibly be read as an anti-imperialist text. Instead, Naipaul, as Walcott once said, writes what the Western powers want to read in true postcolonial mandarin fashion. This is not to say that postcolonial Africa (or anywhere else, really) did not face several internal contradictions or problems not entirely reducible to imperialism, but Naipaul’s fiction and nonfiction often rearranges complex historical and political developments in such a way to fit his rather dismal, fundamentally undemocratic view of the world, best seen in A Bend In the River.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illustrates in “Americanah” some Americans and Europeans who read Naipaul's writings set in Africa may interpret Naipaul's ahistorical reduction of ethnic and political conflict in African countries like Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo as legitimate explanations for modern developments and conflicts. In short, under colonial rule, the endless warfare of the 'warrior tribes' against the weak were abated, but as soon as colonial rule ended, warfare resumed. This kind of ahistorical reading of Africa, which appears in Naipaul's "In a Free State" and inspired by travels to East Africa and the Congo, is pervasive in Naipaul’s fear of the ubiquitous bush and its African villagers, who, despite being rendered as beyond the pale of history, at least know who they are. In his own characteristically way, Naipaul will criticize white colonials and their fantasy of Africa, but the “real” Africa is nothing more than bush gradually reconquering the colonial towns, African tribes against other tribes. While some may interpret his Africa fiction as positing an even more dystopic worldview than only rehashing the “benighted Dark Continent” trope, a disturbing and seemingly casual racism also makes it hard to take him seriously. 

For anyone really interested in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, or, especially, the Congo, the setting of Naipaul’s most famous work, Mahmood Mamdani does a much better job explaining what really transpired in, Rwanda, for example, which led to the genocide. The very role of colonialism itself in structuring and restructuring ethnic difference is not present in Naipaul’s fiction, save his last two novels, which are based on Mozambique. There, I’ve said my piece and established, I hope, some reasons why Naipaul’s Africa is so “problematic.” 

Sleeping Beauty

Amazing introspective number from Sun Ra. John Gilmore's inimitable style picks things up while the last four minutes are heavenly. Anyone seeking proof that Sun Ra's later output holds up and isn't just fusion-styled noodling or over the top Sun Ra quirkiness, should listen to songs like "Sleeping Beauty," or the excellent jazz-funk of Lanquidity.

The Chip-Chip Gatherers

"The sugarcane alone flourished in that intractable environment: a bright, burning green offensive to the eye seeking escape from its limiting and limitless horizons."

Shiva Naipaul's The Chip-Chip Gatherers, set in Trinidad, is a difficult read to assess. While retaining aspects of the comic sensibilities and stronger female characters of Fireflies, in this novel, the existential crisis of the "chip-chip gatherers," the Trinidadian people, particularly women condemned to an early death by the strictures of sex and class in the Settlement, makes for a much darker tone with appropriately dark humor. Telling the story of two families, Shiva Naipaul's scathing social commentary is more condescending here, especially to the countryside of Trinidad and its aspirants to power or wealth, such as Egbert Ramsaran or Mrs. Bholai. There is even sexual angst, a disturbing experience on the part of Egbert's son with a prostitute in Port of Spain, and a general meaninglessness of life on the island that one can find in the works of Shiva's older brother. Indeed, the rise and fall of Egbert, from illiterate poverty in the countryside to his last days in decay despite his material wealth reveals some of the innate absurdity of class relations in Trinidadian society of this era. 

In short, The Chip-Chip Gatherers struck me as cruel and a more emotionally taxing read without much of the humor in the masterpiece in tragicomedy, Fireflies. Both novels share dysfunctional families, marriages, horrible conditions for women, and the problem of class and race (including douglas in this second novel), but "The Chip-Chip Gatherers is more aligned with, in my opinion, V.S. Naipaul's post-Biswas writings in its detachment and often excessive cruelty. However, as in the case of Mrs. Lutchman, for Sita, the young illegitimate child of Sushila, a young rebel also torn apart by the ravages of time and strict gender roles, one can see Shiva Naipaul's appreciation of and respect for the plight of women in Trinidadian society. Sita, Rani, Mrs. Bholai, Basdai, Phula, Sushila, and other women in this novel have, despite their shortcomings and personal defects, ranging from pride or vanity to shame and passive resignation, a far more sympathetic and nuanced portrayal in the pen of Shiva than most of the women in V.S. Naipaul's fiction. Indeed, perhaps this sympathy can be seen quite well in the overall less pessimistic Trinidad novels of Shiva versus those of Vidia, where there is, in some Sisyphean sense, purpose in these seemingly insignificant lives, if the novel's final paragraph on the rotting tree and the village chip-chip gatherers is read between the lines.  

Valis

Finally finished Philip K. Dick's VALIS, a mindtrip that explores an experience with a 'God-like' entity that Dick claimed to experience in 1974. Not unlike A Maze of Death, Gnosticism, Christianity, and other religions interact in an ecumenical melange of theological and philosophical concepts related to VALIS/Zebra/God as Dick and his alter ego, Horselover Fat, try to understand their life after experiencing a pink light and AI-like voices, beginning in '74. Fusing fiction with autobiographical aspects of his own life, such as suicide attempt, drugs, family conflicts, etc, and Dick's long-held fascination with religion, reality, and 'unreality,' provides interesting insights into his own "real" life and quotes from his Exegesis, but as such is all over the place, making it quite clear that this is either the mind of a mad man or, perhaps, a rational person who sees 'normality' as insanity because it adheres to the fake, material world of 'reality.' His alternative cosmogony, combining faiths from all over the world, is also quite impressive (Dogon people and ancient Egypt are accorded important places in this Dickian worldview, reminding one of Akhenaton's importance in Ishmael Reed's alternate history). Personally, I prefer Dick's more 'traditional' science fiction, but VALIS is certainly a great example of science fiction postmodernism creativity and intellectual food for the brain. 

A Maze of Death

Philip K. Dick's A Maze of Death represents a more religious themed novel from the great science fiction writer than I am accustomed to. Of course, religion and philosophy are important subjects in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, but this is the first to postulate and explore at the intersection of "reality" and "unreality" God, divided into a Trinity of sorts in a religion compounding Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Gnosticism, existentialism, and the meaning of life for a motley crew of colonists on a planet, Delmak-O. Reading this, one could not help but think of Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan for its similar fixation on God, determinism, and the meaning of life, or early Camus, either. Dick's drug addiction and LSD use also shaped this novel, particularly evident in some hallucinations and mind-bending colors and shapes throughout the text, especially in the theologian's experience and one character's trances, images of the Form Destroyer (the Black One, alluding to Gnosticism and Manichean dualism). Perhaps one must have faith and knowledge, and one can find salvation by seeing through the false, material realities, if you buy into Gnosticism at all... 

Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces

"I understood. Sufficient unto any man the handicap of being straightforwardly Indian or straightforwardly West Indian. But to contrive somehow how to combine the two was a challenge to reason. An Indian from the West Indies! I was guilty of a compound sin."

Shiva Naipaul's Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces consists of short stories and travel writings, taking the reader from Naipaul's native Trinidad to Puerto Rico, Grenada, Suriname, Seychelles, England, Portugal, India, Iran, Morocco, and Jamaica. While I found his travel writing to be, shall we say, less racist or offensive than VS Naipaul, both share a similar worldview ("My day trip between Islam and Christianity, Africa and Europe, had gone sour on me"). Shiva's perceptive observations on the "Bush Negroes" of Suriname was interesting (they're not Africa in South America, but have become something new altogether), as was his critical but, in my view, accurate statements on the problems of Rastafarianism as a faith and ideology. His fiction, however, is where he shines. The characteristically Naipaul sense of humor, mixed with some condescension, characterizes his short stories in this collection. By far, Naipaul's talent with comedy is most apparent throughout all of the stories, especially "Mr Sookhoo and the Carol Singers" and "The Beauty Contest," two stories set in Trinidad featuring lovable yet amusing characters. 

The Jesse Jackson Phenomon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics

"Because discussion of Afro-American affairs is so often dominated by a patronizing, exceptionalist bias that suspends norms of critical reflection and judgment, intrinsically absurd claims frequently attain currency" (29).

Adolph Reed's 1986 publication on the 1984 Jesse Jackson campaign, The Jesse Jackson Phenomon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics, retains its relevance to the state of black politics today. We still face the exceptionalist bias and essentialist reasoning that has kept brokerage politics alive for decades. Focusing on the 1984 campaign of Jackson reveals a persistent assumption of uniform black "racial interest," the conflict between the protest elite and the elected official elites vying for racial organic legitimation while mainly fighting for gains that disproportionately benefit upper income blacks. 

I also found Reed's contention with claims of black clergy as political leaders and the 'divine' rhetoric of the Jackson campaign persuasive, particularly as it is built on an exaggeration of black clergy and churches as leadership and political in nature, despite evidence for secular forces and leaders causing black churches to adopt more political stances. Nevertheless, Jackson exploited the claim of clerical political authority to assert his mass 'base' while never offering any concrete policy proposals or agenda beyond a seat at the table at the convention. In short, Jackson's campaign represented a thrust by the protest elite to reassert itself, while avoiding any fundamental break from racial authenticity appeals or the rise of neoliberalism among elected officials and protest elites. 

I fear some subsets of identitarians are wedded to the race management system of brokerage and emphasis on the upper income strata, as long as the protest elites and elected officials feature more women and LGBT individuals. What I wonder about now is how the 21st century iteration of this protest elite/elected elite dynamic plays out now in the midst of Black Lives Matter, calls for black leadership that are horizontal or privilege queer black women, and some resurgence of left social democratic or anti-austerity protests? Is Black Lives Matter, Campaign Zero, and other iterations another example of a nascent protest elite which, as Jackson did in the 1980s, legitimizes itself based on a "racial agenda" without any accountability as its links with foundations and neoliberal elected elites, black and white? Is it fair to refer to the transition of this newer, 'diverse' crop of black protest elites as wedging its role into black politics as brokerage and neoliberalism? I suppose it's hard to say in light of the decentralized nature of Black Lives Matter and its varying approach to electoral politics, albeit one in which incorporation into the Democratic 2016 apparatus appears almost complete.

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

An interesting discussion between Barbara Fields and Coates on Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. In a provocative series of chapters by the Fields sisters, they compellingly argue that racism created race and compare the reproducing ideology of racism and race to belief in witchcraft in European and African contexts. Listening to this conversation and reading the book, I couldn't help but remember conversations with friends on these topics, particularly the ways in which our "folk conventions" of race reappear in science, despite the lack of any scientific basis for race as a valid concept of biology. From genetics to blood, we continue to reaffirm the notion of race as valid or appropriate in medicine, diagnosis, blood donations, and even pseudoscience on innate differences physical styles, athleticism and intelligence. 

A recent conversation with a friend of mine was an important moment of recognizing how so many people from all backgrounds continue to think of blood, race, and ethnicity as distinct races which can be grouped and differentiated from each other, a notion which quickly falls apart in cases such as sickle cell or ideas about which diseases black people are supposed to have. I was reminded of something Adolph Reed wrote about genetics and epigenetics, which seems like it could easily lead to another attempt to use genes and recent trends in science to rehash previous discourse of alleged racial and culture sources  as the main culprits for inequality. Sometimes it feels as if we are trapped in the Victorian era notions of class and inequality, occasionally mixing up the terminology of race, class, and genes.

Another issue touched upon in the book and this lecture is the multiracial movement, which Fields convincingly argues is multiracist and biracist, since its premised on notions of distinct, "pure" races. Referring to one estimate that found 24% of "whites" on the 1970 US census had "black" ancestors, it becomes quite clear how notions of "pure" races is a myth, yet the multiracial movement is pushing forward this agenda. This rears its ugly head in moments like claims of "authentic racial identity," as mentioned by the authors, which cannot exist when race is the product of racism, and there is huge internal diversity and other causal factors for so-called "black culture," such as racism and Jim Crow leading to some unique characteristics which appear among Afro-Americans, like "Black English." Arguing against ideas of African retention, the sisters suggest the main factor, racism and segregation, often led to these distinctive characteristics of "black culture," which has always been highly flexible evolving. 

Unfortunately, the influence of Durkheim, Pritchards, DuBois and Appiah is not explored as fully as in the text. The importance of witchcraft and understanding how, historically, Europeans of the not so recent past, and African societies of yesterday and today, can continue to believe in witches in a rational manner, is applicable to racecraft or racism and the creation of race, since both racecraft and witchcraft use similar invisible ontology. The analogy may not be as perfect as the authors wish, yet I found it an incredibly useful way to look at racism in the US context, lent further credence by the fact that both are unfounded by notions by science yet continue to operate in their respective societies. 

In spite of similarities to witchcraft and certain common processes of human social and religious thought, racecraft and racism is not an inevitable fact of human life. The text explains quite succinctly how racism evolved within particular social and economic conditions, a process taking the reader back to 17th century Virginia and its gradual development of slavery. Subsequently, notions of race and racism were still not grounded in "science" until the 19th century, despite Jefferson's fame as the US's first "racial pundit." Anyway, it is mistaken to blame "race" as the cause of slavery, when it was really racism and the need for labor that led to notions of race and perpetual servitude, not some psychological need to identify Africans as an inferior peoples on an ideology which only arose after decades of slavery and indentured labor. This is the weakness pounced upon by Fields in much of the scholarship on race among historians and sociologists, which often presupposes race before racism/racecraft. Thus, "race" is blamed for Jim Crow or a white police officer shooting a black police officer, instead of racism. It can be traced back to slavery and the circular logic or reasoning of some scholars who argue race led to slavery or racism.

Elucidating ideology as something not inherited like heirlooms but a constant process of reinvention, the idea of racism or racecraft persists, much to the detriment of addressing deeper inequality, as addressed in the final chapters of Racecraft. Lamentably, there are not enough remedies or prescriptions for how to uproot racecraft in US society, but the book offers some insight on how racism functions and infiltrates science, politics, and, dare I say it, African-American Studies and identity politics. Conflating "race," a product of racecraft, with "culture" and immutable or essentialized groups inhibits recognition of broader systemic issues in the face of austerity and declining real wages for all working-class and poor people. Although certainly not advocating for colorblindness, one can easily draw from left-leaning ideologies or programs as one avenue of redress, consistent with Verso Books. 

Mighty Dougla

 

Excellent and topical calypso number by Mighty Dougla on race and ethnic differences in Trinidad. As a reader with a growing interest in Trinidad, this song encapsulates some of the ethnic, racial, and political divides in Trinidad, some excellently satirized in Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira.

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

"To the extent that I focus on the sources of radical decline, this study is written against the grain of the prevailing vindicationist trend in the literature on Black Power radicalism."

Reading Cedric Johnson's Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics reminds one of Adolph Reed. Both Johnson and Reed share a leftist perspective, both scholars are critical of racial identity politics, and last, but certainly not least, both lament the decline of practical, everyday relevance of the sectarian leftists to the "masses." In fact, Johnson's Revolutionaries to Race Leaders is quite similar to Adolph Reed's Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era, and the two texts complement the other. Johnson and Reed persuasively connect the Jim Crow past, civil rights advances, and the post-segregation era of black politics in a direction that reveals the limitations of Black Power discourse and "unity without uniformity" thinking. For that reason, in an age when popular black memory of Black Power often obscures the shortcomings of black nationalism, and a current wave of identity politics has resurfaced, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders is an important, but challenging read for those in my generation who have lionized the activists and intellectuals of the zenith of Black Power in the late 1960s and 1970s, from Baraka and Carmichael to Malcolm or Newton.

If "Black America" is not a real corporate entity, and the divergent interests of African Americans could not be silenced or cast aside in the name of "black unity" or black nationalism, due to class, regional, gender, and political differences, then why continue to pursue a race-first agenda that falls apart? Johnson's critical overview of Harold Cruse's work on black nationalism, Amiri Baraka's significant work as a proponent of Black Power, and the various Black Power conventions and organizations, such as the African Liberation Support Committee or the 1972 Gary convention, analyzes how each failed, in part, for reasons described by Adolph Reed as Black Power embraced ethnic politics and elite brokerage instead of retaining a democratic base and practical relevance. The sectarianism of the "scientific socialists" described by both scholars, for example, Marxist-Leninists wings of the ALD, and the cultural nationalists, too, were vanguardist, elitist despite democratic rhetoric, and unable to challenge the New Right, the transition to the Corporate City, or the inherent restrictions of organizing based on race alone. 

Particularly relevant to today is the peril of sectarianism and racial essentialism among cultural nationalists, rooted in prewar notions of race as culture and a poor understanding of culture, often leading to a fictitious "blackness" to organize around. Some of this disturbing essentialism is common among certain identitarian circles and organizations, leading to poor understanding of race, culture, identity, and building practical coalitions. Some, despite the not-so-recent past, for instance, still prefer to organize based on explicitly racial lines because multiracial coalitions or alliances or ideas and theories from "whites" are considered unacceptable, or they seek to ignore class differences in the name of a presumably homogeneous "blackness." As a casual observer of the Left, the vanguardist strain remains ever-present, too, often culminating in minor organizations vying for influence and recruitment but mired in arguments over the Russian Revolution, Castroist Cuba, petty ideological differences as a premise for engagement, as well as a failure to collaborate or form alliances. 

As for black politics today, we are still plagued by these lingering ideologies from the Black Power era, and the current movements and campaigns based on race leave me uncertain yet optimistic at heart. I see disturbing trends among overt identitarians that leave one wondering if it is 1968 instead of 2015. That said, surveys and other evidence on political behavior of 'Black America' does suggest some general, progressive hope which means black 'nationalism' can remain useful. Glen Ford from the Black Agenda Report has talked about Black America as the most left-leaning group in the US, the most "Scandinavia-like." Johnson's commentary on the 1972 Black Agenda from Gary and subsequent convention agendas or programs belie this point, which suggests, to some extent, race-based politics and bringing together the mostly progressive, left social democratic orientation of most African-Americans may be politically useful, particularly in the labor movement or anti-imperialism. One can also see, maybe light at the end of the tunnel in aspects of  'Black Lives Matter,' the Fight for Fifteen, and other struggles connected to the daily, lived experience and practical needs of people.

Grass Roots

Lovably funky number from the ever-quirky Andrew Hill, a Chicago-born jazz pianist who bizarrely claimed to be born in Haiti. I have always appreciated Hill for his ability to bridge the gap between more 'out there' jazz and bop, a feat that I also admire in the work of Eric Dolphy. As a sideman, Hill has proven how talented he is as a composer for other artists, such as Bobby Hutcherson. Lee Morgan and Ron Carter round things out on this funky number, particularly Carter's walking bass. 

Stairway to the Stars

"Stairways to the Stars" is my favorite track from Gordon's Our Man in Paris, an album featuring Bud Powell. I must admit, I find Powell's playing in the 1960s sub-par compared to the heights he reached in the 1940s and 1950s, but this ballad works surprisingly well. Gordon, who is usually too tame for my tastes, excels on ballads and slow numbers with his characteristically suave style. Gordon's rendition of "A Night in Tunisia" is also a classic, though pales in comparison with Powell's trio recording with Max Roach on drums, which features a stronger 'Afro-Cuban' homage. No disrespect to Kenny Clarke intended, but I prefer Roach.  

Shiva Naipaul's Fireflies

"Having from early on, confused religion with magic, they had come to hold the majority of religions in a superstitious dread, genuinely afraid of the vengeance rival gods might let fall on the clan should they be offended."

Shiva Naipaul, younger brother of V.S. Naipaul, wrote an epic comedy which possibly surpasses A House for Mr. Biswas. An alternative title could have been A House for Mrs. Lutchman given the shared style, themes, and content, but Shiva Naipaul's Mrs. Lutchman is a far more compelling female character than anyone in his brother's work. The hilarious Hindu clan, the Khojas, the gradual dissolution of the patriarchal nucleus binding the family together, the various marriages and dispossessions Mrs. Lutchman experiences, and last, but certainly not least, the hilarity which ensues in what is truly a tragic set of circumstances for the protagonist manage to make for a successful novel. Shiva Naipaul's Khoja family not only entertains, but imports many lessons on family, social change, religion, culture, and the shifts in Trinidadian life. Like fireflies caught in a jar by the brother Khoja, the sisters and Vimla gradually escape, but Mrs. Lutchman loses the most with the loss of her independence, husband, and son.  

When it comes to compelling female characters, Shiva Naipaul's Mrs. Lutchman is a more likable, nuanced character than most of V.S. Naipaul's fictional women. Both share similar comic sensibilities, but one wonders if Shiva's more sympathetic female protagonist is the result of his father dying when Shiva was rather young, whereas their father lived long enough to see Vidia reach adulthood and shape his work? We know Mr. Biswas is based on their father, but maybe Shiva looked more to their mother as a model for Fireflies, which could explain a more nuanced, female protagonist for what Christopher Hitchens described as a masterpiece in tragicomedy. Regardless of his inspiration, Fireflies is one of those rare reads which transport one to another time, place, and culture during a period of rapid change. Timeless, humorous, informative, and, in its own way, potentially feminist, if one looks to the Khoja sisters and the next generation. 

Derek Walcott's Laventille

 It huddled there

steel tinkling its blue painted metal air,

tempered in violence, like Rio's favelas,

with snaking, perilous streets whose edges fell as

its Episcopal turkey-buzzards fall

from its miraculous hilltop

shrine,

down the impossible drop

to Belmont, Woodbrook, Maraval, St. Clair

that shine

like peddlers' tin trinkets in the sun.

From a harsh

shower, its gutters growled and gargled wash 

past the Youth Centre, past the water catchment,

a rigid children's carousel of cement;

we climbed where lank electric

lines and tension cables linked its raw brick

hovels like a complex feud,

where the inheritors of the middle passage stewed,

five to a room, still clamped below their hatch,

breeding like felonies,

whose lives revolve round prison, graveyars, church.

Below bent breadfruit trees

in the flat, coloured city, class

escalated into structures still,

merchant, middleman, magistrate, knight. To go downhill

from here was to ascend.

The middle passage never guessed its end.

This is the height of poverty

for the desperate and black;

climbing, we could look back

with widening memory

on the hot, corrugated-iron sea

whose horrors we all

shared. The salt blood knew it well,

you, me, Samuel's daughter, Samuel,

and those ancestors clamped below its grate.

And climbing steeply past the wild

gutters, it shrilled

in the blood, for those who suffered, who were killed, 

and who survive.

What other gift was there to give

as the godparents of his unnamed child?

Yet outside the brown annex of the church, the

stifling odour of bay rum and talc, the particular,

neat sweetness of the crowd distressed

that sense. The black, fawning verger, 

his bow tie akimbo, grinning, the clown-gloved

fashionable wear of those I deeply loved

once, made me look on with hopelessness and rage

at their new, apish habits, their excess

and fear, the possessed, the self-possessed;

their perfume shrivelled to a childhood fear

of Sabbath graveyards, christenings, marriages,

that muggy, steaming, self-assuring air

of tropical Sabbath afternoons. And in

the church, eyes prickling with rage,

the children rescued from original sin

by their Godfather since the middle passage,

the supercilious brown curate, who intones,

healing the guilt in these rachitic bones,

twisting my love within me like a knife:

"across the troubled waters of this life..."

Which of us cares to walk 

even if God wished

those retching waters where our souls were fished

for this new world? Afterwards, we talk

in whispers, close to death

among these stones planted on alien earth.

Afterwards,

the ceremony, the careful photograph

moved out of range before the patient tombs,

we dare a laugh, 

ritual, desperate words,

born like these children from habitual wombs,

from lives fixed in the unalterable groove

of grinding poverty. I stand out on a balcony

and watch the sun pave its flat, golden path

across the roofs, the aerials, cranes, the tops

of fruit trees crawling downward to the city.

Something inside is laid wide like a wound,

some open passage that has cleft the brain,

some deep, amnesiac blow. We left

somewhere a life we never found,

customs and gods that are not born again,

some crib, some grille of light

clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld

us from that world below us and beyond,

and in its swaddling cerements we're still bound.

Lord Invader's Old Time Cat-O'-Nine

Catchy calypso! Naipaul sang this song to Paul Theroux in Africa, described in Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents.

Magic Seeds

"In spite of all the killings, the movement was becoming more and more a matter of these abstract words."

Naipaul's sequel to Half a Life, Magic Seeds, his most recent work of fiction, is underwhelming compared to the interesting plot and earlier life of the protagonist, Willie Chandran. In this sequel, Willie decides to follow his sister's advice and joins the guerrillas in the Indian countryside, drifting for several more years until being imprisoned as a political prisoner, his early 1950s "postcolonial literature" saving his hide as Roger, still in London, is able to get Willie released. Back in London, Willie continues to drift. This is essentially the entirety of the story, with the "meat" set in India amongst a dangerous group of "revolutionaries" who are not aligned with the Kandapalli's group, which his sister Sarojini, had meant for Willie to join. 

The only character from the prequel who actually succeeds in meeting his goals is Marcus, the West African who finally achieves success by having a white grandchild, while Roger is on the path to perdition and Willie reaches a typical Naipaulian conclusion: "It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world." Similar themes abound: the disconnect between the Indian guerrillas and the peasants they exploit in the name of revolution, the unreality of human connection, intimate or otherwise, decay in the postcolonial areas, decline in London (council estate houses, the alleged dependency they breed, according to Roger), a general state of unraveling, of unreality.

Since Naipaul has previously explored guerrillas in a novel with the same name, based on the Black Power movement in the West Indies, this novel, which focuses on a more explicitly Marxist-Leninist group of revolutionaries, brings to mind some critiques of Sendero Luminoso. The revolutionaries Willie joins in the Indian countryside cling to the fiction of fighting for the peasants, for a revolution inspired by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but the reality of the peasants and their different aspirations contradict them at every turn. 

In the end, the guerrillas become another exploitative force, taking advantage of the countryside's populace without meeting any success. How can one ever launch a successful revolution when one's forces are killing and exploiting the very group one claims to fight for? It is this contradiction, the elusive goal or "unreality" of revolution which plagues the Indian movement Willie joins. In typical Naipaul fashion, Africa is, though acknowledged as a site of colonialism, is portrayed as better off than India because the Africans "know who they are" while India remembers its ancient past yet lost meaning. Both are "wounded civilizations" nonetheless.   

Half a Life

"At home his life had been ruled by his mixed inheritance. It spoilt everything. Even the love he felt for his mother, which should have been pure, was full of the pain he felt for her circumstances."

Naipaul's Half a Life is really fixated on those half-and-half peoples, both in terms of caste and race. Willie Chandran, the protagonist, is born to a brahmin of the priestly caste who shames his family, all int he name of sacrifice like the Mahatma, by marrying a "backward" (Untouchable), from his college. Willie, named for the famous English writer, William Somerset Maugham, is trapped by this mixed-caste background, eventually fabricating his own identity as a college student in 1950s London. Befriending a "brown" Jamaican student, Willie participates in the multicultural bohemian Notting Hill parties, literary gatherings with an interesting cast of characters via his English friend, Roger, and experiences a changing London where the Notting Hill riots break out before his book, a collection of short stories, receives negative reviews in the press. 

One fan of his work, Ana, a mixed-race woman from Mozambique, which is never explicitly stated in the text, a second-rank Portuguese in the colonial setting, becomes close with Willie, who finds comfort with her. He later asks to return to Africa with her, spending 18 years helping manage her estate , seeing African prostitutes in the capital, finding pure satisfaction through an affair with a married "mixed-race" woman, and eventually realizing he was following in his father's path, a path of nondecision, not proclaiming and living life but trying to live someone else's life. These themes of disillusion, mimicry, and an near obsession over the "real" and the place of those caught between worlds, are hardly new to Naipaul's work, but the India of Willie and his  parents provides a new setting for Naipaulian worlds. The ease in which Willie enters the world of Ana and the second-rank Portuguese of Mozambique, mostly second-rank because of their partial African ancestry, and the historical colonial links between Portuguese Goa and the colony, illustrate this tension of the intermediary, the "mixed-race" caught between the fictional worlds of black and white, Brahmin and Untouchable.

One wishes Sarojini's character, the sister, and Marcus the West African were present in more of the book, but the most surprising thing about this novel is how it recycles older themes and settings but is still something different. There is a rich sense of humor in this tale, particularly in the London setting, and the numerous fake or lying characters, including the protagonist. In a sense, Half a Life is very similar to The Mimic Men: both feature uprooted characters of Indian origins who go off to a changing London, experience sexual frustration (although Willie finds the satisfaction that Ralph never discovers), commentary on the colonial peoples (Caribbean, Africa, and India), and the facades all peoples use to masque themselves (racial, colonial, political, sexual), to hide who they truly are. Half a Life, in that regard, is hardly a new or radical step in Naipaul's fiction, yet provides a surprisingly different take on Africa, still bearing Conradian aspects (the darkness, difficult tropical climate, the reversion of the colonial structures to the "bush") but finding commonality between India and Africa. 

A Brighter Sun

"He used to say that all this business about colour and nationality was balls, that as long as a man was happy that was all that mattered."

Selvon's first novel, A Brighter Sun, \tells the story of Tiger, the protagonist in Turn Again Tiger, the entertaining sequel which continues his story. Married off to Urmilla at age 16, Tiger struggles to understand manhood, or, better yet, adulthood and his place in an expanding world. Going to Port of Spain for the first time, becoming a father, working with the Americans on the Churchill-Roosevelt Road, learning to read, and gaining a deeper, nuanced understanding of knowledge, politics, and race, Tiger's vision of himself and his role as a man brightens as the sun. Of course, aspects of Trinidadian adult masculinity are certainly disturbing, such as Tiger and Joe beating their wives, but the community of Barataria and the various "characters" who populate Tiger's world illustrate nuance along race, class, gender, or political affiliations. 

Selvon, as mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is an expert at humor, the highlight of this novel being Sookdeo, the old Indian village drunk, selling his half-blind donkey that does not "look" well to another man. The vernacular dialogue also shines through this novel, which contains more than enough local colors, sites, and characterization of the countryside, village, and town. Joe Martin, Tiger's best friend in Turn Again Tiger, as well as Tall Boy, the Chinese shopkeeper, have their own backstories, too. Joe's origins in the barrackyards of George Street, for instance, or Rita and Urmilla's friendship which transcends the creole/coolie divide, remind one of Minty Alley by C.L.R. James. Like James, Selvon knows and empathizes deeply with the popular classes of Trinidad during the war, a time of tremendous change as Yankee bases hired local labor at higher wages than the sugar estates and government positions (rum and coca cola!). 

For any and everyone interested in Selvon or Trinidad & Tobago, A Brighter Sun is more than a worthwhile introduction. Although many events happen and Tiger's still unsure what exactly makes a man, the jokes aside will keep the reader enthralled by this rapidly changing world. Indeed, Tiger's growing interest in politics and the class and racial divisions, hint at greater change to come with keen attention to the facade of populist local officials in the legislative council who, despite their appeals to racial kinship, offer nothing but broken promises. Somewhat reminiscent of Naipaul's Suffrage of Elvira or the colonial politician in The Wine of Astonishment by Lovelace. 

Dexter Gordon on Blue Bossa

Dexter Gordon's take on Joe Henderson's "Blue Bossa" would make the latter proud. 

Minty Alley

"He had, at sixteen, after much cogitation, but without preliminary, put his arm around a girl's waist and been soundly slapped. Since then he had never repeated the experiment, and often experienced difficulty in looking young women fully in the face."

Minty Alley, the only published novel of C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Marxist, illustrates James's writing talent. Telling the story of Haynes, a sheltered middle-class young man, class, race, gender relations, and the rowdy characters in a boarding house on Minty Alley breathe life into a past Trinidad. James's great sense of humor shines throughout the text, as Haynes finally becomes a man as a "master of the house" and his relationship with the "fair sex" improves. Although very proper and English in prose as well as the dialogue for Haynes, the use of Trinidadian vernacular, one instance of patois, and the novel's colorful, determined, and newsworthy lower-class characters reveal early on how James always identified with the masses and "national" Trinidadian culture of the yard. 

The suffering of women, in particular, at the hands of the playboy, Benoit, reveal another side to James one does not find in The Black Jacobins or his other work, for example. One could rant ceaselessly without end on the complex gender dynamics of this short work, a project I may return to in the future. Moreover, Philomen, the abused Indian servant of the landlady, Mrs. Rouse, provides another example of racial and class stratification in the divided colony, a dynamic Naipaul and Selvon explore from different perspectives. Yet, here in a novel written in the 1920s, one senses where Naipaul's Trinidad fiction is coming from in describing the "Indian countryside" and the "Creole" or "Black" city. 

For those eager to read James's admirable attempt at the novel form highly recommended. Early Anglophone West Indian literature provides includes similar work to Minty Alley, which paved the way for explosion of literary production in the subsequent generation. Besides, reading Minty Alley demonstrates an early ancestor of Naipaul's Miguel Street and its comic sensibilities. One wishes James had completed that second novel, alas, but Minty Alley actually shows, from a literary angle, how James, himself not too different from Haynes in class background, came to identify with the popular classes and escape the sheltered world of petit bourgeois life. 

Adolph Reed Twofer: Class Notes and Stirrings in the Jug

This week has consisted mostly of Adolph Reed readings. Class Notes Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene is more accessible and broad while Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era consists of more formal, academic writing specifically related to the issues plaguing black politics in the post-segregation era. Stirrings in the Jug, with an insightful foreword by the late Julian Bond, posits a plausible explanation for the variety of reasons post-segregation black politics has failed to usher a new age of racial and economic equality, looking at the economy, social policy, shifts in the urban city pertinent to development and white flight, and last, but certainly not least, the sectarian black radical groups' failure to build accountable bases extended beyond the "communitarian" ethos. Class Notes, with its deliberate title, continues his observation on black politics with nuanced criticism of identity politics, the Farrakhan specter, and the perils of turning away from political movements that are not, well, structured in a democratically accountable fashion as in traditional liberalism. Even if one disagrees with Reed's conclusions, the limitations of identitarian politics ring clear, a message that is not heeded these days on the blogosphere. Furthermore, I find his conclusions on the illusory definition of the "underclass" merits his harsh denunciation of it as a myth, exploited by poverty research pimps who make far more money from it than any "welfare queen."

The two texts, both consisting of interrelated essays, actually engage each other quite well. Reed explains how the American city, increasingly black in the early decades of white flight, shifted from the "Industrial City" to the "Corporate City" in which developers are calling the shots, a declining tax base for cities experiencing population loss, and the ways in which demographic shifts allowed for the black petit bourgeoisie to win mayoral races. Focusing on Atlanta, for the most part, Reed's Stirrings in the Jug elucidates how, in the strangest discourse of representing the "black community," Maynard Jackson fired 2000 black sanitation workers. In a similar manner, Jackson could sell the airport project as benefiting the "black community" because of its affirmative action contracts implemented through negotiations with predominantly white developers, something that only benefits the black middle-class. Because of the constraints of white flight, white-dominated capital, the pro-growth ideology, and the divergent class interests of the "black misleadership class" (Black Agenda Report!) from that of the working-class African-American constituency, black officialdom faced severe limitations, yet also pursued policy antithetical to the interests of the lower classes in the name of the "black community." 

Similarly, black cultural nationalists and Marxist-Leninist groups also participated in this problem of black post-segregration politics. Invoking the poorly defined "black community" by the radicals and mainstream black political class entails "mystification," to Reed. Because any black man with a suit couuld claim to be a "race leader" (confirmed or granted by white recognition, as was the case with Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, according to Reed), and there was no large or sizable black presence in many of these sectarian or "radical" groups, this poorly defined or essentialized "black community" became a rhetorical tool for access to federal funding, political appointments, or cooptation without building any movement or mass of members to effectively challenge the pro-growth, center-right ideology. The "black misleadership class" was allowed to continue supporting the underclass myth of the black poor while wedding their own material interests to that of white capital as neoliberalism developed. Of course, these black radical groups were also neutralized by COINTELPRO and other forces, which are mentioned by Reed but not emphasized in the ways that other activists or scholars might gauge them. That said, Reed's larger argument appears valid, given the lack of any real constituency in these myriad organizations claiming to represent or fight for the "black community" without any attention to democratic organizational structures, accountability, fighting economic injustice beyond racial language, or combating inequality in practical, relatable terms to the "masses "of people. 

While I have some minor quibbles with the notion that invoking the "black community" to justify one's political legitimacy is automatically racial essentialism or mystification, as Reed defines it for the state of 1970s black politics (and beyond), these problems remain relevant today. The new wave of identity politics or identitarian discourse follows the same flaws as previous eras of black politics. We see it now with the Black Lives Matter network and Campaign Zero, which purportedly represent "blacks," as if we are some amorphous mass with the same interests, policy proposals, outlook, or needs. The ways in which cultural studies and African-American Studies sometimes perpetuates this shift away from structural causes of economic inequality or ignoring class differentiation among blacks leads to the issues we see today, where "black leaders" with connections to the rightist Democrats or foundations which support school privatization, disproportionately hurting poor minorities, are somehow said to represent the "black community" or "masses." This kind of identitarian thinking is impressively traced by Reed back to the early post-segregation politics, where racial kinship politics and ignoring class nuances and the internal diversity of "blackness" has, really, since Jim Crow days, benefitted the black petit bourgeoisie brokers with white power. 

Of course, invoking this "black community" does not automatically entail mystification if one keeps in consideration how pervasive racial segregation remains to this day. Political movements or campaigns that are accountable, relevant to the needs of working-class and poor people, or not grounded in a fictitious racial authenticity can exist, something I am sure Reed would not dispute. However, one cannot hope to find political movements in the black youth who are promoted by some academics as practicing "resistance" through hip-hip or twerking in a quotidian sense without a much larger, critical attention to building movements around issues that affect broad swathes of people, black and non-black. Thus, the harsh words Reed uses for the "raptivists" or academics in cultural studies who place hip-hop on the same level as slave revolts in the past as 'resistance" are rightfully ridiculed, although Reed may be too dismissive of the potential for youth or young people in movements. Nevertheless, he's on to something when he observes on page 167 of Class Notes, "That's the beauty of cultural politics; it can coexist comfortably with any kind of policy orientation." The same could be said about consumerism and Black Power, such as the hero worship of Malcolm X in the 1990s. 

Class Notes and Stirrings in the Jug touch on many other issues, of course, but these aforementioned points are particularly relevant and poignant observations. Reed's analysis of black politics and the political economy underneath it aids in understanding the conditions we are in now, especially an era where identity politics, something that has been around for ages, by the way, can perpetuate racial essentialism or be easily coopted by neoliberalism, such as the commodification of "white privilege" or diversity. Some may accuse Reed and other like-minded black intellectuals of class reductionism, but as Reed explains on page 206 of Class Notes, "Nevertheless, for all the limitations of the labor movement and of the individuals who comprise it, there's no place else where the left's political concerns gain a hearing and have a constituency outside the coffeeshops, cultural studies programs, and sectarian hutches." Calling attention to the need for a politics grounded in the material conditions of "workers" that is inclusive and aware of coexisting forms of discrimination or oppression is not some vulgar Marxism or class reductionist reasoning, but rather a keen attention to the importance of structural forces that relegate us to specific locales within a fundamentally unequal society. Perhaps Reed is right, maybe we need to ground reorganization of black politics on liberal formalism for democratic or popular politics. I know I am no longer a firm adherent in black linked fate notions yet remain sympathetic to Shelby's "pragmatic black nationalism." A loose coalition of "black" collective uplift is not, in my opinion, necessarily in opposition with the vision Reed, in my opinion, promotes. 

Reed Quotes

Adolph Reed has a penchant for awesome one-liners and precise observations on politics, class, race, and cultural studies. Here are some of my favorites.

From Class Notes

1. "Thus the old quip that any black person with a clean suit and five dollars in his pocket imagined himself a Negro leader" (5).

2. "Community presumes homogeneity of interest and perception at least in principle" (12).

3. "Being victimized by the state should not in itself confer political stature" (69).

4. "If a woman's decision expresses pathology because she makes it in poverty, then we have fallen into a tautology; she is poor because she is pathological because she is poor" (95).

5. "Again, a decade of underclass ideology has denied poor people any human agency in social-policy discourse. They exist only as a problem to be handled, more or less dangerous and alien objects of administration" (104).

6. "There's no such thing as authenticity; it's only a marketing ploy" (137).

7. "Cultural production can reflect and perhaps support a political movement; it can never generate or substitute for one. There is no politics worthy of the name that does not work to shape the official institutions of public authority that govern and channel people's lives. Anything else is playacting" (170).

8. "The demand to see oneself in the text easily reduces to narcissistically anti-intellectual twaddle as anyone who has encountered it as a professor is aware" (176).

From Stirrings in the Jug

1. "The historical arc of black radicalism in the post-segregation era is thus drenched in a bitter irony. The effort to maintain a transcendent, alternative vision that could not be corrupted or restricted by mundane politics actually helped to sustain a climate that increasingly limited the compass of credible black and left options. And this environment, of course, fuels demobilization." 

2. "Participating in youth fads (from zoot suits in the 1940s to hip-hop today), maintaining fraternal organizations, vesting hopes in prayer or root doctors, and even quilt making thus become indistinguishable from slave revolts, activism in Reconstruction governments, the Montgomery bus boycott, grassroots campaigns for voter registration, and labor union or welfare rights agitation as politically meaningful forms of "resistance"" (151).

3. "The point here is that the behavioral tendencies supposedly characterizing the underclass exist generally throughout the society. Drug use, divorce, educational underattainment, laziness, and empty consumerism exist no less in upper-status suburbs than in inner-city Bantustans" (190).

4. "What they have been given is a Malcolm X fabricated within an abstracted discourse of black "greatness," a discourse that lines up public figures like trading cards" (201).

5. "Confused and depressingly ignorant performers such as KRS-One, Public Enemy, X-Clan, and Sister Souljah spew garbled compounds of half-truth, distortion, Afrocentric drivel, and cracker-barrel wisdom, as often as not shot through with reactionary prejudices, and claim pontifical authority on the basis of identity with the props of their stage and video performances" (220).

6. "He was no prince, there are no princes, only people like ourselves who strive to influence their own history. To the extent that we believe otherwise, we turn Malcolm into a postage stamp and reproduce the evasive reflex that has deformed critical black political action for a generation" (224).

Ishmael Reed Times 3

I have been reading and listening to talks given by Ishmael Reed in the last few days. His radio interviews, readings, essays, fiction, and, now, his poetry, are always worthwhile for critical insight on US politics, race, literature, or history. Here are some of my favorite Reed "reads" and things I enjoyed in the last week or so.

1. I just finished Reed's satirical novel, The Terrible Twos. A masterful (and humorous) take on the 1980s, the rise of evangelicals in political power, Christmas, and Saint Nicholas, few aspects of mass consumerism and greed escape unscathed in Reed's book. Although one finds it challenging the first time around to keep track of the numerous characters who populate the book, there are conspiracies, excellent one-liners, and excessive wackiness to keep the reader entertained and laughing. While not as engaging as Mumbo Jumbo in its conspiracies, allusions, or historical references, The Terrible Twos does foresee some of the huge problems of the Reagan era. A friend of mine recently wrote an excellent short story rich in satire and stylistically reminiscent of Reed, so if they are reading this, I hope they keep working on mastering satire.

2. My second favorite Reed find was an engaging 1976 radio interview with Charles Ruas on Flight to Canada. What ensued was a conversation on Flight to Canada, Lincoln, slavery, Haiti, and Reed's interest in Vodun. Reed mentions traveling to Haiti and visiting the lovely Episcopal Cathedral in Port-au-Prince and its exquisite murals in the so-called naive style of Haitian painting. My question: why did Reed shift away from his Vodun interests and symbolism in subsequent fiction? The Hoodoo or neo-Hoodoo aesthetics and influences seem to disappear from Reed's subsequent fiction, but perhaps that's just a sign I need to read his recent novels.

3. The third and most intriguing Reed find was last night, listening to a 2006 reading of his poetry. As someone who usually sticks to novels and short stories, I am unfamiliar with most of Reed's poetry. Clearly, that was a mistake to avoid his poetry because they're actually very informative, entertaining and witty. How could anyone dislike "When I Die I Will Go to Jazz" if you are a jazz fan?

Tito Rodriguez

Legend. "Cuando Cuando Cuando" for a smooth Saturday afternoon.

Yesterdays

"All the young scholars in Karan Settlement were doomed. The sugarcane estates were monsters; they were in the habit of yawning and swallowing the young men; those who were lucky enough to get away from the estates were trapped into a career of rum drinking and fighting."

Harold Sonny Ladoo's humorous novella, Yesterdays, tells the story of a frustrated young man, Poonwa, and his desire to establish a Hindu Mission to Canada to get back at the Canadian Mission School (and colonialism generally speaking) for his years of physical abuse and torment. The son of unlettered Indian cane cutters, who, after 30 years, have a house in Karan Settlement, Poonwa, his family, and the village community are, as Ladoo's focus on excreta and depravity illustrates, full of shit. The Hindu priest, Pandit Puru, takes advantage of the community's religious faith for profit, everyone is cheating on everyone else, and, despite a general anti-gay atmosphere, a very fluid sexuality in which many men "bull" the village queer, Sook. 

The reader really does sympathize with Poonwa and his grandiose schemes for vengeance against the white colonizers for their abuse of the Indians and Negroes of this fictionalized Trinidad, yet it becomes very clear that he cannot read Hindi, has no realistic plan for actually building a Hindu school in Canada, and is driven by hatred, fueled by nightmares of his abusive Canadian schoolteacher and her white Jesus. On the other hand, the future of rum drinking and nothingness is a prevalent fear, one driving his mother, Basdai, to push her husband, Choonilal, to mortgage the house to fund Poonwa's lofty Mission. 

For those eager to read an amusing account of a village community in 1955, Ladoo's Yesterdays is quite worthwhile, yet a little underwhelming for those who expected to read about Poonwa's Canada failures. At the end of the day, it's probably unnecessary to include that, and we should enjoy the topsy-turvy world of 1950s Carib Island and its complex class, colonial, and religious tensions. For those reasons, Ladoo's novella is an extremely amusing read with a humanizing portrait of a society where everyone is lying, cheating, screwing, and exploiting each other. The Hindu priest, Choonilal, the daily intercessions of the Hindu gods through dreams, and last, but certainly not least, a disturbing emphasis on defecation or transgressive sexual acts will keep you laughing throughout.

A Way in the World

"Lebrun's political resolution was very far from this sensationalism. It enabled him, not to embrace the period of slavery, but to acknowledge it without pain, and, presenting it in his own way, to make a claim for its universality, and even its precedence."

V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World is a marriage of sorts between The Enigma of Arrival and In a Free State. The autobiographical narrator reflecting on his writing and Trinidad is juxtaposed with a pan-Caribbean vision of Trinidad's presence in much larger historical developments through a story suite. Columbus, C.L.R. James, Raleigh, Francisco Miranda, Venezuela, Trinidad & Tobago, an unnamed East African country resembling Uganda, and other locales are connected through this rather ambitious project, unfortunately marketed as a novel in the US. 

Like the best of The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul's autobiographical narrator's experiences in a rapidly changing Trinidad he no longer recognizes, combined with a strange pan-Caribbean perspective, connecting with yet dissociating himself with a C.L.R. James-inspired radical, Lebrun, Miranda's constant reinvention, a fellow West Indian from Guadeloupe living in Francophone West Africa, and a co-worker in the civil service before Naipaul left Trinidad for Oxford in 1950. In one unexpected admission, the Naipaul-like narrator even admits to the influence of George Lamming and other Caribbean peoples on his writing! So, perhaps Derek Walcott was wrong to suggest Naipaul completely turned his back on the "Negroid" creative genius of the Caribbean?

But, I digress. A Way in the World is a Naipaul work I will return to in the future. The use of Amerindian symbolism, autobiographical aspects, and Naipaul's intriguing self-distancing from a larger Caribbean "radical" collective identity or movement are fascinating, but the work was dragged down by the lengthy Miranda episode on the "Gulf of Desolation" between early English Trinidad and Venezuela. Surprisingly clear and unafraid to juxtapose brutality of slavery, indentured labor, and the South American independence struggles, Naipaul somehow loses his way. The final chapter continues a circular or cyclic theme of identity or movement, but seemed only relevant to the previous chapters in the text as an unsubtle critique of black nationalism, what Naipaul seems to suggest is a "racial sacrament" of black nationalism or racial politics. 

So, as an overall read, A Way in the World contains some compelling narratives, but begins to lose its way in the penultimate and final chapters. The characterization of the fictionalized C.L.R. James character is likewise intriguing, but fundamentally misrepresents James/Lebrun to fit Naipaul's worldview. One can, to a certain extent, understand Naipaul's desire to avoid becoming part of a larger group or collective, to be able to reinvent oneself through identity or writing, but the Naipaul perspective cannot be divorced from incorrect or misleading views on race and anti-colonial politics. 

A History of Pan-African Revolt

"All the things that Hitler was to do so well later Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921."

A History of Pan-African Revolt, first published in 1938, is a seminal text in the Pan-Africanist and Marxist tradition. In the short work, Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James presents an overview of black resistance to slavery, colonialism, and labor exploitation in the US, Africa, and the Caribbean. As a Marxist, James emphasizes labor and class, yet also identifies religion as a tool for fomenting further anti-colonial movements, such as Simon Kimbangu and Chilembwe. James also presages future work on Africa, the West Indies and African American history by emphasizing black agency, constant struggle, and the importance of slavery in the development of industrialization and capitalism.

Strangely, James compares Garvey to Hitler as a demagogue, but is likely correct on Garvey's weak or nonexistent program for blacks. Yet, James recognized the importance international black solidarity, as well as the need for black mobilization on its own to combat capitalism. So, James supported independent black revolts while also seeing the need for unity across racial lines or national borders, such as the I.C.U. in South Africa and resistance from white workers.

Besides his critique of Garvey, one may also take issue with the rather rosy depiction of race relations during Trinidad's labor unrest in the 1930s, a world in which relations between Indians and Afro-Trinidadians are perhaps generalized as more effective for the labor cause than the reality. I'll have to research the 1930s in Trinidad in depth to properly ascertain the accuracy of James and his characterization of Trinidadian society. Likewise, James writes an epilogue which is too generous to Nyerere's Tanzanian socialist project, which was an utter failure according to Robin D.G. Kelley's introduction. 

Unquestionably, there are limitations to this visionary work, but as a progressive documentation of the continuous struggle of the black masses in Africa and the Diaspora, James provides a necessary perspective linking the fight for economic justice to that of anti-racist movements. Moreover, James places the massacre of the remaining French population in Haiti under Dessalines to an environment of British pressure, illustrating how independent Haiti's independence was limited by the reality of the 19th century world. Thus, as a document of black resistance from slavery to colonialism, James demonstrates that there is no contradiction in socialism and racial justice.