Theorizing the racialization of global politics and the Caribbean experience

Alternatives

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 449-483

  Watson, Hilbourne ^a  

^a BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 23044530995     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540102600405     Document Type: Article

References (141)

1. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 177-199.
2. Beate Jahn, "The Power of Culture in International Relations," paper presented at the International Studies Association 43d Annual Conference, Los Angeles, California, at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, March 1-19, 2000;
3. Beate Jahn, The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature (New York: Palgrave, 2000; formerly Macmillan Press, 2000);
4. Roger Bartra, The Artificial Savage: Modern Myths of the Wild Man, trans. Christopher Follett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
5. Juan Ginés de Sepulveda, "On the Indians," in D. Englander et al., eds., Culture and Belief in Europe, 1450-1600: An Anthology of Sources (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994);
6. Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991);
7. Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Selection of His Writings, ed. George Sanderlin (New York: Knopf, 1971);
8. Beate Jahn, A Selection of His Writings note 2.
9. Philip S. Foner, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919 (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), p. 125;
10. Robert Vitalis, "The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations," in Millennium 29, no. 2 (2000): 332.
11. See Andrew Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).
12. Carlos Hasenbalg as quoted in "Race and Socioeconomic Inequalities," in Race, Class, and Power in Brazil, ed. Pierre-Michel Fontaine (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, 1985), p. 27.
13. See Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (New York: New York UP, 1996), pp. 153-164.
14. William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 89;
15. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays, 1971-1991 (Philadephia: Harwood, 1991), p. 194.
16. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1997), p. 127;
17. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000);
18. W. E. B. Du Bois, the World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History, enlarged ed. with new writings on Africa by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1955-1961 (New York: International Publishers 1965), p. xii;
19. Allen, W. E. B. Du Bois, the World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History note 1, pp. 251, 258.
20. Marx, note 5, p. 273.
21. Malik, note 7, p. 81.
22. Ibid., p. 39.
23. Maureen Ramsay, What's Wrong with Liberalism? A Radical Critique of Liberal Political Philosophy (London: Leicester UP, 1997), pp. 253-254.
24. Marx, note 5, p. 274.
25. Roxanne Doty, "Sovereignty and the Nation: Constructing the Boundaries of National Identity," in Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996).
26. Malik, note 7, p. 69.
27. Du Bois, note 9, p. 1.
28. Malik, note 7, p. 97.
29. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 4 (the emphasis is mine).
30. V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 316;
31. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996).
32. Malik, note 7, p. 90.
33. Jerry Harris, "Globalization and the Technological Transformation of Capitalism," Race & Class 40, nos. 2/3 (1998/99): 30 (the emphasis is mine).
34. In Black Skin White Mask (New York: Grove Press, 1968), Frantz Fanon undertook to rescue the black man from Kantian illusionary metaphysics.
35. Fanon: "The Black is a black man; that is to say that as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, [the black man] is established at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated"; see Richard Judy, "Kant and the Negro," Surfaces 1 no. 8 (1991): 1;
36. Mills, Surfaces note 9, p. 119.
37. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. with a preface by J. Sebree, a preface by C. Hegel, and a new introduction by C. J. Friedrich (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 93.
38. See Malik, note 7, p. 15.
39. Quoted in Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States 1492-Present, revised and updated (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 293;
40. see Brian Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
41. See Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994).
42. Schmidt, note 26, chap. 4.
43. Klaus Eder, The Social Construction of Nature (London: Sage, 1996), p. 96;
44. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993).
45. Bartra, note 2, pp. 201, 280, 286; see also pp. 210, 217.
46. Beate Jahn, note 2, pp. 7, 3; Eder, note 29, p. 99. Lewis Hanke reminds us that the "brutal doctrines of ecclesiastics and the even more brutal practices of other Spaniards towards Moors and Jews at the end of the fifteenth century, when the conquest of America was just beginning, show what might have occurred in the New World": Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), p. 107. Las Casas wanted to elevate other people to the higher order of the Europeans, who lived by rules of inequality.
47. Beate Jahn, note 2, pp. 2, 4; Tzvetan Todorov, The Morals of History, trans. Alyson Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 99-100.
48. Malik, The Morals of History, note 7, pp. 155-163, provides a useful discussion of the contribution of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropological theories of culture and change to the ongoing racialization of global politics.
49. See Beate Jahn, note 2, p. 7, for a discussion of realism's quest for objectivity.
50. Beate Jahn, note 2, pp. 7-8; Bartra, note 2, pp. 209-210, 220-221; and Eder, note 29, p. 99.
51. Bartra, note 2, p. 226. Bartra argues that "Rousseau broke with the natural law tradition that lays down, on the basis of the state of nature, the innate rights of man, preceding the establishment of civil society and independent of it." Bartra does not claim that Rousseau "derived moral principles from the natural condition of man"; he says that Rousseau felt the "legitimacy of a new civil society can be founded neither on opposition to the original evil represented by the Hobbesian wild man (or by the sin of Adam and Eve) nor on the defense of a fundamental goodness symbolized by the noble savage"; instead, "legitimacy, in Rousseau's view, has to be constructed, and his homme sauvage serves as an impulse toward a critical attitude but is not intended as a model to be followed."
52. Beate Jahn, note 2, p. 10; Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994).
53. Gert Oostindie, "Ethnicity, as Ever?" introduction to Oostindie, ed., Ethnicity in the Caribbean: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoetink (London: Macmillan Educational, 1996), p. 1.
54. Cecil Gutzmore, "Of Nile and Ganges, Thames and Berbice: On Walter Rodney's Explanation of Violent Conflict in the Encounter between Africa's and Asia's Diasporas," paper delivered at the International Conference: African Diaspora Studies on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, University of California at Berkeley, April 30-May 2, 1998.
55. George Lamming, "But Alas Edgar," in Richard Drayton and Andaiye, eds., Conversations: George Lamming: Essays, Addresses, and Interviews, 1953-1990 (London: Karia, 1992), p. 33 (the emphasis is mine).
56. Anthony P. Maingot, The United States and the Caribbean (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 21;
57. Samuel F. Bemis, The Latin American Policy of the US (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943), p. 27;
58. Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (New York: Collier, 1965);
59. Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963).
60. Maingot, note 40, p. 23.
61. Pedro Perez-Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, eds., Afrocuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics, and Culture (Victoria, Australia: Ocean Press, 1993), p. 5.
62. Quoted in Zinn, note 26, p. 296.
63. Vitalis, note 4, pp. 349, 350; Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).
64. George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), p. 138;
65. Fitz A. Baptiste, The United States and West Indian Unrest, 1918-1939, working paper no. 18 (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Economic and Social Research, University of the West Indies, 1978), pp. 16-17;
66. Cedric Joseph, "The Strategic Importance of the British West Indies, 1882-1932," Journal of Caribbean History 7 (November 1973): 24-30.
67. Saul Landau, The Dangerous Doctrine (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1988), p. 19.
68. Zinn, note 26, p. 299.
69. Ibid., p. 295; Vitalis, note 4, p. 343.
70. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon, 1995).
71. John D. Garrigus, "White Jacobins/Black Jacobins: Bringing the Haitian and French Revolutions together in the Classroom, "French Historical Studies 23 no. 2 (2000): 265.
72. French Historical Studies Ibid.: 273.
73. Trouillot, note 49.
74. Anthony P. Maingot, "Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness of the Caribbean," in Oostindie, ed., note 37, p. 53;
75. Harry Hoetink, Slavery and Race Relations in the Americas: Comparative Notes on their Nature and Nexus (New York: Harper, 1973), pp. 78-79.
76. Allen, note 1, p. 251.
77. Maingot, note 53, p. 60.
78. Ibid., p. 61.
79. Rafael Duharte Jiménez, "The 19th Century Black Fear, "in Perez-Sarduy and Stubbs, note 42, pp. 44-45;
80. Pedro Perez-Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, "The Rites of Social Communion," introduction to Perez-Sarduy and Stubbs, note 42, p. 8.
81. Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 2.
82. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís; new introduction by Fernando Coronil (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995);
83. Rebecca Scott, "Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Cuba: A View from the Sugar District of Cienfuegos, 1886-1909," Hispanic American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (November 1999): 687-728;
84. Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970).
85. Helg, note 58.
86. Oostindie, "Ethnicity, as Ever?" note 37, p. 9;
87. Perez-Sarduy and Stubbs, "Rites," note 57, p. 6;
88. Nancy Morejon, "Race and Nation," in Perez-Sarduy and Stubbs, note 42.
89. Perez-Sarduy and Stubbs, "Rites," note 57, p. 7.
90. Cesare Poppi, "Wider Horizons with Larger Details: Subjectivity, Ethnicity, and Globalization," in Alan Scott, ed., The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 298-299;
91. see also Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), p. 179;
92. Gutzmore, note 38, Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (London: Zed, 1997), p. 68, where Amin argues that capitalist expansion affects the territorial components of the world system in contradictory ways, first integrating society, "on which the nation is based," and then decomposing society, and in the process "destroying the nation itself, or annihilating its potentialities."
93. Amin, note 63, p. 73.
94. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), p. 106 (the emphasis is mine).
95. J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason in European Thought, 1848-1914 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), p. 216. Burrow argues that to those who identify racism automatically with the political right it may be disconcerting to see how far nineteenth-century racial ideas sometimes represent a transposition into racial terms typical of liberal themes; Gobineau's and Chamberlain's fear of racial mixture and homogenization echoes the characteristic liberal fear, as in Mill's On Liberty, of the disappearance of individuality in what we have learnt to call mass society.
96. See also Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies (New York: Africana, 1972), p. 227;
97. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), p. 395.
98. Gilroy argues that Garvey's logic unfolded within the "the metaphysics of modernity." See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imaging Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000), p. 237.
99. The quote is from C. L. R. James, A History of the Pan-African Revolt, 2d ed., rev. (Washington, D.C.: Drum and Spear Press, 1969), p. 82.
100. Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (New York: Times Books, 1992).
101. The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State ( Ibid., p. 80;
102. Randolph B. Persaud, "Re-envisioning Sovereignty: Marcus Garvey and the Making of a Transnational Identity," in Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy Shaw, eds., Africa's Challenge to International Relations Theory (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
103. Padmore, note 45, pp. 83-84; Amy Jacques-Garvey, ed., The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, 2 vols. (New York: Athenaeum, 1970), p. 1:24.
104. For a critique of the key philosophical and theoretical blunders in Padmore's Pan-Africanist strategy, see Azima Nwafor, "The Revolutionary as Historian: Padmore and Pan-Africanism: A Critical Introduction to George Padmore's Pan-Africanism or Communism," in George Padmore, note 45. Nwafor discusses the contradictions of Pan-Africanism in the context of the Organization of African Unity, which bases its concepts of African states on the precepts of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the Treaty of Berlin (1885) that partitioned Africa.
105. Gilroy, note 67, p. 232.
106. C. L. R. James, note 68, p. 80. Leading black intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, and Aimé Césaire argued that Europeans had been practicing colonial fascism in the colonies before fascism returned home to Europe.
107. Jacques-Garvey, note 71, p. 1:32; Paget Henry, Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 208-209.
108. On the Anglo-Saxon notion of racial purity and preservation, see Gilroy, note 67, p. 233; George Padmore, note 45, p. 85.
109. Persaud, note 70.
110. Ellen M. Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991), p. 166;
111. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Moscow: 1971), p. 250.
112. Wood, note 77, p. 175.
113. Quotes ibid., p. 176.
114. Padmore said Garveyism was an obstacle to the "mass Negro struggle for liberation against American imperialism": see Padmore, note 45, p. xv.
115. Persaud's contribution (Persaud, note 70) represents an important intervention, but it does not belong with realist or liberal scholarship.
116. Padmore, note 45, pp. xvi, 268-269, 275, 320. Padmore identifies certain "errors" of Western Communist parties on the race question with special reference to blacks in Africa and the United States. He asserted that a "society in which all men are equal regardless of their color or race is to most Europeans Utopian." For a discussion of the racial attitudes of European social-democratic, socialist, and Communist parties toward colonial societies, especially African societies, see Horace B. Davis, Nationalism and Socialism: Marxist and Labor Theories of Nationalism to 1917 (New York: Monthly Review-Press, 1967), pp. 93, 95-96, 132.
117. C. L. R. James, The Case for West Indian Self-Government (London: Hogarth, 1933);
118. James, note 68, p. 92; George Lamming, Of Age and Innocence (London: Allison & Busby, 1981), p. 167; Padmore, note 45.
119. For a discussion of the role of the Communist Party of the USA and the Comintern in promoting the idea of the African American population as a national minority and the problem of calling for a black-belt state in the United States, as well as the Comintern's proposal for a African native reserve in South Africa, see Padmore, note 45, pp. 284, 295; Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998);
120. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983);
121. Frank Furedi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998), pp. 161-167.
122. Fitz A. Baptiste, The United States and West Indian Unrest, 1918-1939. working paper no. 18 (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Economic and Social Research, University of the West Indies, 1978), p. 37.
123. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).
124. Beverley Manley, The Programmatic and Ideological Platform of the People's National Party, 1938-1944, M.Sc. thesis, Department of Government, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1984, p. 163;
125. Trevor Munroe, The Marxist Left in Jamaica, 1940-1950, working paper no. 15 (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1978), pp. 69-70.
126. Furedi, note 84, pp. 169, 170; Gilroy, note 67, pp. 308-309.
127. Furedi, note 84, pp. 188, 201; James, note 68, p. 88.
128. Ibid., p. 205.
129. Governor Foot of Jamaica wrote to the Colonial Office that British anti-Mau Mau propaganda in Jamaica would arouse "suspicion about racial motives" rather than quell it. He said, The difficulty here is that amongst the great majority of the people there is a tendency to assume that injustice is being done to black people in Kenya and I doubt if anything that we can do or say will shake this belief": quoted in Furedi, note 84, p. 219; and see Henry, note 74, pp. 210-211.
130. Henry, note 74, pp. 53-54.
131. James, note 68, p. 86.
132. Maingot, note 55; and Maingot, "The Sovereignty versus Security Paradox in the Caribbean" in J. Tulchin, A. Serbin, and R. Hernandez, eds.; Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner, The Caribbean in the World Affairs: The Foreign Policies of the English-speaking States (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989);
133. Ivelaw Griffith, Drugs and Security in the Caribbean: Sovereignty Under Siege (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP);
134. Clifford Griffin, Democracy and Neoliberalism in the Developing World: Lessons from the Anglophone Caribbean (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1997).
135. Griffin, note 94.
136. "I, a man of the Caribbean," James declared, "have found that it is in the study of Western Literature, Western Philosophy, and Western History that I have found out the things that I have found out, even about the underdeveloped countries" - quoted in Paget Henry, note 74, p. 50. Henry argues that "James was a master deconstructor of European colonialist thought and an original architect of Caribbean alternatives."James's point was not so much about an admiration of the West as it was about how his location at the most advanced and complex sites within imperialism afforded the best opportunity for studying and evaluating the system firsthand.
137. Hilbourne Watson, "The 'Shiprider Solution' and Post-Cold War Imperialism: Beyond Ontologies of State/Sovereignty in the Caribbean": paper delivered at the 21st Annual Caribbean Studies Association Conference, St. John's, Antigua, May 1998.
138. Vitalis, note 4, p. 337.
139. On this structural link, see Maingot, note 55; Maingot, note 94.
140. Vitalis, note 4, p. 345.
141. Theodore Allen argues compellingly that "racial oppression and white supremacy have . . . been the dominant feature, the parametric constant, in United States history," and that "racism was not a flaw of American bourgeois democracy, but its very special essence": Allen, note 1, p. 256.