Beyond Boundaries

C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies

Pluto Press

Contents

C.L.R. James, Genre and Cultural Politics

Nicole King

In 1971 C.L.R. James gave three lectures in Atlanta, Georgia on the subject of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). The lectures cover the context of the famous history's creation, place it into conversation with W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1936), and reveal some of James's ideas on what he might do differently, if he had the writing to do all over again nearly 40 years after the original publication. At no point in these three June lectures does James mention his play, Toussaint L'Ouverture, the composition and production of which preceded the publication of Jacobins by two years, and which drew on the same extensive research he used for the history. In the third and final lecture, 'How I Would Re-write The Black Jacobins', James states, 'I would write descriptions in which the black slaves themselves, or people very close to them, describe what they're doing and how they felt about the work that they were forced to carry on.' In fact, James never did revise The Black Jacobins, although he added an extensive appendix in 1963. The play has a separate history.

Toussaint L'Ouverture was originally staged in London in March 1936, with Paul Robeson, who was then a well known star of the stage and screen, in the lead role. Three decades later, in 1967, James revised the play; it was staged for a second time in 1968, was finally published for the first time in 1976, and has enjoyed a smattering of productions, some quite warmly received, since the 1970s. At no point, however – then or now – has the play ever received the same attention or critical evaluation that the history has. Perhaps, as James himself suggests through omission in 1971, the play does not stay in the imagination the way that the history does; indeed, that is a text which has never been out of print since 1938. But then, his 1967 revision of the play and the renewed interest in it stand in contradiction to such an assessment. Nevertheless, lacking the distinguished reception accorded to the history, the play would have been widely unknown to his Atlanta audience, and bringing it into the frame would certainly have complicated the narrative line of his three lectures. For, while the story told of the Saint-Domingue Revolution is not radically different in either work, the manner in which that story is told is quite distinct, because of the ways that James chooses to activate the genres of history and drama. Ironically, what James might have done differently in the history suggests he needn't have looked much further than his very own play. For certain scripted moments in the play do give voice to the ex-slaves, and allow them to present their own interpretation of the convulsive events of the Revolution. In its ability to present these voices, the play has an immediate advantage over the history: ritual, music and dance, as well as stage effects, are all mobilised in the service of revealing the subaltern voices and bodies of the Revolution.

The formal qualities of the play present provocative contrasts with the history. Thus, when read together, a more complex narrative of the events of the Saint-Domingue Revolution emerges, a narrative that more closely approximates the one James imagined in his 1971 comments about Black Jacobins. Thus, taking our lead from James himself, the story of the play's narrative is what concerns us here: it is a compelling, creolised text. The drama's meta-narrative is an enactment of creolisation as it encompasses original and rewritten text, different stagings in multiple locations and timeframes which span from anticolonial movements to postnational moments. The generic dynamism and fluidity that attend to theatrical productions are key components of Toussaint L'Ouverture's inhabitation of creolisation. As a play staged in the 1930s, and then the 1960s–1990s its creative force and contexts are about C.L.R. James and his cultural/political vision on one level, but at the same time extend out and beyond him. For too long James's play has been pushed aside before being recognised for what it can reveal about James, and about arguments now understood as central to cultural and postcolonial studies. A consideration, then, of the internal and external creolised contexts of Toussaint L'Ouverture makes visible how James and his dramatic medium bring to the surface non-national dimensions of putatively national histories, literatures and politics.

The fact that we do not study Toussaint L'Ouverture sharply recalls the genealogical link between critical literary practices and the formation of national identity at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the Anglophone Caribbean, for example, the development of national literatures paralleled the push for self-determination and independence. Texts were evaluated and became canonical according to a rubric that prioritised a particular kind of unity and coherence, and recognised such traits as essential to a successful literary work (ironically proving just how thorough the colonisation process had been). In the pages that follow, I argue that both despite and because of the considerable obscurity of Toussaint L'Ouverture (renamed The Black Jacobins in 1967), and its so-called aesthetic failures, it demands our attention. The very contextualisation that James provides for the history in his 1971 lectures is necessary for this play, produced at the fulcrum of pan-Africanism, and emblematic of much of what that multinational political formation and ideology strove to achieve. The continued relevance of the drama as a dynamic mechanism within varied spaces of local and transnational politics is signalled by the renewed interest in the play that occurred in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Asserting creolisation as a habitus – one used variously to denote a coming into being, the lived experience and practice of individuals – while also serving as an explanatory mechanism for large-scale social structures, societies and histories, my reading of the play argues for a keener appreciation of the play and the work it continues to accomplish. An analysis of how James and Robeson came to the point of collaboration, the production history of the play, the unfolding historical contexts of the play – especially as related to Marxism and Communism – and the specific representation of vodou within the play, constitute my presentation of a creolised aesthetics for reading Toussaint L'Ouverture. A focus on vodou is a notable critical reward of revisiting and revising the ways that the play has been valued and evaluated; the representation of vodou in the play is the primary mechanism James has at his disposal for showing how the slaves and ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue felt about the convulsive events of the Revolution. Such re-viewing and contextualization of the play is complicated considerably by the fact that only the revised 1967 version of the play survives. But perhaps it is fitting that the present analysis of the play, within a creolisation framework, cannot rely upon a straightforward comparison of revision to original, and instead must treat the available text as an obscured, only partially discernable palimpsest through which to assess a series of interventions and consequences.

PARADIGMS OF CREOLISATION

Considering Toussaint L'Ouverture in a creolisation framework helps to account for its adaptations, its ongoing nature and its interest in subverting hegemonic systems, in the same way that a postnational perspective exceeds the boundaries and conservatism of the nationstate. Creolisation according to Kamau Brathwaite's model, works in two key ways: first 'the basis of culture lies in the folk' who continually perform a sort of 'marronage', which allows them continually to adapt, subvert and influence the hegemonic system in which they exist – this is the practice of creolisation. Second, creolisation is itself ongoing and ceaseless. These two characteristics situate Brathwaite's theories as analytic models aligned, if not synonymous, with the basic tenets of what has come to be known as cultural studies. In the sense that we might view Brathwaite's Caribbean as a text, he locates that text 'across a range of competing moments of inscription, representation and struggle'. Creolisation, I would argue, like cultural studies, 'seeks to keep in equilibrium the different moments of cultural production, textual production, and the "production in use" of consumption'. Thus, in Brathwaite's famous geographical metaphor, 'the unity is submarine'; such competing moments of inscription, representation, and struggle can be understood historically and physically, where the Caribbean archipelago is simultaneously a series of islands and an underwater mountain range, alternately terra firma and volcanically explosive.

In James's play, the past speaks in specific paradigms of creolisation. Worked through Stuart Hall's use of concepts of identity and diaspora, the past as it emerges from Toussaint L'Ouverture is not a 'simple, factual past', but rather one that addresses us and is 'constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth'. The other side of history, the notion that history and its telling are less stable than we may have imagined, is conveyed in James's play through the scenes of vodou gatherings and ceremonies. Furthermore, James's basic intention to give life to the dramatic personae of Toussaint, Dessalines and others alongside the dramatic events of the Revolution, is partnered with a desire to represent black diaspora politics within the specific political context of pan-African activity in 1930s London. What is fascinating, and ultimately perhaps most useful, about the play is that it gives voice to what Hall calls 'unstable points of identification', as transmitted by both the leaders and the masses, the individual and the collective players. The active realisation of selfhood, nationhood and community within Toussaint L'Ouverture is anchored in a collective desire to overthrow slavery; and yet discontinuous visions of Haiti emerge from its various constituencies. Such simultaneous unity and discord, singular and collective visions of black empowerment – the ever-present ethos of creolisation – are the core message, perhaps, that Toussaint L'Ouverture has delivered to political activists since the 1930s. I advocate reading James's dramatic and historical works on the Haitian Revolution together, and as creolised texts. Creolisation, used to read Toussaint L'Ouverture, allows for a consideration of transnational and differing blacknesses that encompass James and Robeson, Toussaint and Dessalines. Creolisation, then, is both a reason for and a mechanism used to recognise multiplicity and diversity within representations of blackness.

As a catalysing event that affected the new world and the old, the Haitian Revolution provides a site to which scholars continually turn. Since many of James's well regarded texts from the 1930s and 1940s are overshadowed by The Black Jacobins, it is not surprising that the play leads a rather obscure existence, that it was out of print for decades, and that reviewers in different eras found it to be disappointingly static. When, however, we leave aside considerations of the play as entertainment, or as commercial success, and instead examine the circumstances of its production for what they reveal about intellectual contexts, and engage the play's significations in high and low culture as a technique employed by James to explore and identify the meaning and legacy of the Haitian Revolution in not just one or two but multiple time frames, we have a cultural object before us that resoundingly exceeds its aesthetic shortcomings.

By reading the play through a creolist model, and thereby conducting a three-dimensional analysis that emphasises content, context and place, as well as players, this frequently ignored play suddenly yields a wealth of information and a diverse perspective on subjects such as the convergence of politics and practice in 1930s pan-Africanism, and the representation and lived experience of black, male, transnational, hybridised subjects. Resistance, creolisation, and nation-building all converge within James's play. Although unequal and incommensurate states of action, they are nevertheless, related phenomena, and they become activated within Toussaint L'Ouverture. A new nationhood and people are perceptible in the play. With characteristic optimism, James heralds their emergence in his appendix to The Black Jacobins when he speaks of nearly independent West Indian peoples and nations 'bringing themselves' to the world stage, newcomers as nations but not as players, and thus able to offer a wealth of experience to help shape modernity further. The cumulative effect of Toussaint L'Ouverture – its multiple significations of creolisation – can be read in a similarly optimistic fashion, and the partnership of Robeson as leading man and James as playwright is perhaps the most appropriate place to begin. Each man finds his way to the play through his modern experiences of race, nation, culture, and political struggle.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: ROBESON AND JAMES

There was an affinity of outlook between Robeson and James that made Toussaint L'Ouverture, with its one-two punch of speaking out against imperialism and bringing attention to a major black historical figure, an ideal joint venture for the two men. With its tale of the rise and fall of Toussaint and the triumph of black rebels in Saint-Domingue over their slave masters and colonial rulers, James's play reflects his engagement with revolutionary Marxism, pan-Africanism and anticolonial struggle, and was informed by the communities of political activists he circulated among in England. James's political objective and method in staging the play was the explicit 'juxtaposition of personality and events' used 'to highlight some of the broader historical and political themes raised by the Saint-Domingue revolution', and among these were, as James himself stated, the specific anticolonial and anti-fascist Abyssinian resistance to the invasion by Mussolini's forces. Moreover, the occasion to dramatise the Haitian Revolution was simultaneously seen as an invitation to audiences to remember, or simply to learn of, the long history of black revolutionary activity that took place between the Abyssinian crisis of the twentieth century and the Haitian Revolution of the eighteenth century. In its conception and various productions, then, the play was defined through radical politics. That James, a quickly matured Trotskyite, and Paul Robeson, a far more orthodox advocate of communism, came together in 1936 to work on Toussaint L'Ouverture was perhaps predictable, given the significant overlap between each man's political perspective and orientation within socialism, pan-Africanism, and anticolonialism; but those very political affiliations also set specific limits on their collaboration.

Both men experienced the early 1930s as a period of special political education, and England provided each of them with exposure to pan-Africanism and the organised left. Speaking of his personal consciousness as a black person of the diaspora, Robeson wrote, 'It was in London, in the years that I lived among the people of the British Isles and traveled back and forth to many other lands, that my outlook on world affairs was formed.' Indeed, it was in England, his home from 1927 to 1938, that Robeson 'discovered Africa' and came to consider himself 'an African'. Such sentiments and experiences stood in sharp contrast to life and the racial outlook in Jim Crow America. What Bill Schwarz has called Robeson's 'political faith in the vernacular' was developed during this period of the 1930s, as he made the transition from being a very specifically commercial artist into also being a champion of vernacular artforms and working-class struggle. This shift was helped along by Robeson's visits to the Soviet Union in 1934, 1936 and 1937, and his developing sympathy for Soviet communism as a vehicle to end the oppression of working people around the globe. For Robeson, who first entered the Soviet Union by train, via Hitler's Germany, 'Nazi fascism and Soviet communism became opposite, symbolic representations of evil and good'. James, having grown up in the very different milieu of British colonial Trinidad, entered formal politics in England more rapidly, and much further to the left, than Robeson. As has been widely discussed, in England James's acculturation within Trotskyism was prompt, and built upon his interest in working-class politics and peasant life in his native Trinidad. These interests found expression in two texts he wrote before arriving in England, and published soon thereafter: a biographical study, The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932), and a novel, Minty Alley (1936), and these works set the stage, so to speak, for his Haiti texts.