THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. LaRose T. Parris

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#21, SEPT-­NOV/2016

LaRose T. Parris is a singularly gifted intellectual and Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY where she teaches courses in African American Literature, Contemporary Black Fiction, and Composition. Her first book, Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature, was awarded the Nicolás Guillén Prize for Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2016. Her fiction and criticism has also appeared in Callaloo and the Journal of Pan African Studies.

Brotherwise Dispatch ­ How would you describe any continuing relevance, within our contemporary socio­historical context, of what you term as the “Black Vindicationist” orientation and your subsequent characterization of it as a “Sisyphean mission”?

LaRose T. Parris - Although I characterize the Black Vindicationist project as a Sisyphean mission, it is still relevant and should never be abandoned. Here is my reasoning. Firstly, utility and/or futility lie in the apprehension of the mission’s agent. If the agent fully apprehends the import of his/her mission then the outcome, whether or not it is fruitful in the objective sense, becomes inconsequential since it is the agent’s will to complete the mission that is of paramount importance. In this regard, the ending of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus is instructive: one must picture Sisyphus as happy.

Secondly, the Black Vindicationists assumed their recuperative mission in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries precisely because they were witnessing the manner in which African people were being denigrated ideologically, politically, and socially in the West. This disparagement continues into the present day, because one of the most enduring features of scientific racism is the widely accepted fallacy of inherent African cultural, moral, and intellectual inferiority.

Surprisingly, however, in recent months the American viewing public has seen evidence that the Black Vindicationist tradition is alive and well. In the History channel’s much- anticipated remake of Roots, the first episode is a stunning departure from the original in its portrayal of Kunta Kinte’s rich Mandinke cultural heritage. The episode places particular emphasis on establishing the existence of an advanced, hierarchical West African civilization based on systems of trade, agriculture, and higher learning. With this first installment of Roots the stereotype of a backward, barbaric, ahistorical African continent – promulgated in discourses of scientific racism – is effectively refuted. The Mali kingdom’s legendary institution of advanced scholarship, Timbuktu, is presented as Kunta Kinte’s desired destination. He is eager to set about on his own path of discovery, so he tells his father that he wishes to study at the university. What is more, the mini-series opens with the narrator (Laurence Fishburne as Alex Haley) characterizing the Mandinke kingdom as an advanced civilization which, like those of Greece and Rome, included a “fluid” system of servitude that included slaves. However, Fishburne/Haley, stresses the manner in which these systems of servitude departed from those that defined Western modernity – specifically, that slaves in Western Africa were considered human beings. They were neither dehumanized in their daily lives, nor classified as sub-humans. Since their humanity was a given, these slaves/servants could actually transcend their bondsman/woman status through hard work and, in certain circumstances, marry the children of their “masters.”

Under the Western chattel slave system, in contrast, the master-slave relationship was defined and undergirded by an elaborate system of violence – physical, sexual, and psychological. In our current socio-historical context, the history of Western chattel slavery is being virtually written out of the public K-12 education system, so Roots’ Vindicationist focus is extremely significant because many educators rely on docudramas like Roots to supplement their curricular offerings. This means that an entirely new generation of young people will be exposed to historically accurate renderings of the African past, which disprove commonly held racist perceptions of African people and their descendants in the West.

BD ­ As a method of philosophical emphasis throughout your work, you conceptualize “Being” and “Freedom” as necessitating an uppercase grammatical designation. As such, what distinguishes your own emancipatory understanding of “Being” and “Freedom” from Heideggerian discourse, which shares a similar grammatical emphasis, yet ultimately subordinates “Freedom” to “Being”?

LTP – My emancipatory understanding of “Being” and “Freedom” is informed by my firm belief that these two ontological realities, or states of human existence, should be equated. For can one truly “be-in-the-world” in the truest and fullest sense without exercising one’s agency, or free will, which is in fact one’s Freedom? Can one’s consciousness become manifest as purposeful action without some exercise of agency, or in the absence of Freedom? I don’t think so.

In terms of Heidegger, he subordinates Freedom to Being because in Being and Time he posits that human existence is informed, shaped, and defined by temporality. For Heidegger, Da-sein, or being-in-the-world, answers the questions posed by the ontological “problem” of being. Time allows the individual to order, understand, and define various aspects of human experience. This is of the utmost importance for Heidegger, not articulating Freedom as the central feature of human existence. Thus time – not Freedom – becomes the horizon for understanding human ontology, or Being.

Moreover, Heidegger employs temporality as a means by which to order or categorize Being. He explains that Being may be equated to one’s experience of time. And here he stresses Being as “universal Being,” which in this case is the Being of the Western/white subject, because that particular aspect of ontological experience was Heidegger’s sole frame of reference.

BD ­ What is the relation between what you disclose as the “tripartite crux of African negation” and the title of your work Being Apart?

LTP - The tripartite crux of African negation in Western discourse is comprised of three ideological developments that have become central and defining features of modern thought: the erasure of ancient Africa from the historical narrative of classical (Greek and Roman) civilization; the transmogrification of the African into the bestial, subhuman Negro slave; and the denial of chattel slavery’s centrality to the birth of modern Western capitalism. This three-part assault on African peoples, cultures, and history – which was initiated in texts promoting scientific racism, Hegelian thought, and Marxist theory respectively – had the cumulative and lasting effect of dehistoricizing the African; of setting the African historical and cultural experience apart from the Western historical and cultural legacy. Thus African people and their descendants in the West exist, or are perceived as being apart, from the so-called mainstream, or general tide of Western thought, history, and culture.

This irony is further explored in the book, but let me give you an immediate example. At LaGuardia Community College/CUNY, the majority of my students come out of the New York City public school system. When we discuss Malcolm X’s larger project of African historical recuperation and I ask them why his emphasis on Egypt as an African civilization is so important, they cannot answer. I press them further and many admit to NOT knowing that Egypt is located on the African continent. This is tacit proof that discourses of scientific racisms – found in the works of Hume, Jefferson, Hegel, and the American school ethnologists (all of whom are discussed in chapter one) – to this day, have been largely successful in their denigration and “destruction of the African past” as Cedric Robinson highlights in Black Marxism.

But thematically speaking, I also chose the title in homage to several different Africana thinkers, for Being Apart summarizes and restates their astute observations on the manner in which the chattel slave system’s dehumanization of Africans was a distinct departure from systems of servitude that preceded it. In Blues People LeRoi Jones states, “It is extremely important in a study of any aspect of the history of the American Negro to emphasize how strange and unnatural the initial contacts with Western slavery for the African, in order to show how the black man was set apart throughout the New World from the start (11).”

In Capitalism as a System Oliver Cromwell Cox states, “So far as ideology is concerned, the capitalists proceed in the normal way; they develop and exploit ethnocentrism and show by any irrational or logical means available that…people of other races, whose labor they are bent on exploiting are something apart: a) not human at all, b) only part human, c) inferior humans, and so on (212).”

And in Black Reconstruction, this Du Bois quote is restated in Being Apart: “For several generations the South had been taught to look upon the Negro as a thing apart. He was different from other human beings. This system of slave labor under which he was employed, was radically different from all other systems of labor (370).” So when I was in the early stages of researching the book, this idea of “being apart” kept coming up. I felt compelled to feature it in the book’s title.

BD ­ In what sense does the intellectual endeavor of DuBois and C.L.R. James “mark a shift within the disciplines of history and political philosophy”?

LTP - The singular beauty and seminal importance of Du Bois’s and James’s intervention into Western historiography and political philosophy lies in their unfailing and unrepentant mission to highlight the crucial importance of enslaved African labor to and for the development of modern Western capitalism from the 1500s to the late 1800s. They stress that modernity was born of the blood, sweat, and tears of our enslaved African ancestors; that had it not been for the enormous capital profits reaped during the four centuries of chattel slavery the countries of the West would not have become the global super powers that they in fact became. How does a country become a super power? Through vast amounts of wealth from capital gains, which are reaped from the exploitation of human beings and the profits gleaned from the sale, production, and processing of natural resources.

The Western slave trade and the chattel slave system provided the economic foundation for America’s and Europe’s economic interests to thrive, thus Western prosperity was created and proliferated through triangular trade: enslaved Africans forcibly transported to the “New World;” the raw materials (cotton, tobacco, sugar cane) they cultivated were then shipped to England and other European countries for processing in mills; those processed goods were then exchanged/traded with the ruling African elites for more enslaved captives.

For all of Karl Marx’s theoretical and philosophical innovation, his emphasis on the European proletariat and, in particular, the European mill worker is marred by his blindspot towards race. He theory of class struggle and its primary terms of engagement are completely Eurocentric: labor = work done by whites; wage labor = under compensated labor performed by whites; proletariat = exploited, agential white workers. The capital accumulation of chattel slavery was thus, mistakenly, labeled as “primitive accumulation,” which is somewhat myopic since it was precisely this accumulation and processing of raw materials that led to what Marx perceived as the European mill worker’s exploitation and alienation. What of the exploitation of the enslaved? Why was their unremitting toil not considered labor in the Marxian sense?

These are the very questions that Du Bois and James asked and answered in Black Reconstruction and The Black Jacobins. This is why their works are so groundbreaking. They reconfigured the stage of historical and political discourse by casting enslaved Africans as the central protagonists in the drama of proletariat agency and resistance. With their works, enslaved African toil could no longer be dismissed as the unfortunate product of four hundred years of the peculiar institution’s duration. No, they insisted that this toil was labor and that those enslaved men, women, and children were laborers, workers, a proletariat possessing agency and worth. And with these appellations, Du Bois and James expanded the lexicon of Marxism to include Black labor, Black workers, a Black proletariat, and Black agency.

Thus Du Bois’s and James’s works, to this day, have tremendous import, for they have established an enduring counterhegemonic legacy in Western historiography and political philosophy. These great thinkers opened the worlds’ eyes to the unmistakable reality that modernity – for all of its failings, injustices, and disappointments – was instantiated through the highly exploitative, dehumanizing, and brutal system of chattel slavery that is too often dismissed as a primitive aberration rather than being understood as a highly complex, mechanistic, deliberately planned and executed commercial system that transformed somewhat loosely connected Western trade systems (beginning in the late 15th century), into a cohesive, interdependent, mutually informed globalized economic system that generated the affluence of the entire Western world.

BD ­ Towards the end of Being Apart, how do interrogations of Fanon’s decolonization phenomenology and Kamau Brathwaite’s “Nation language theory” set the tone for introducing epistemological ruptures within a western imperialist continuum towards new potentialities of human subjectivity­as­ lived universal and globally diverse egalitarian human community?

LTP - The epistemological ruptures established by Fanon’s phenomenology of decolonization and Brathwaite’s nation language theory create new potentialities of human subjectivity as lived universal and globally diverse egalitarian human community in several ways: 1) Both Fanon’s and Brathwaite’s works reveal that Western imperialist systems of knowledge, contrary to popular thought, are the very precarious foundation that they seek to buttress. In other words Fanon and Brathwaite reveal these systems as tragically and intrinsically self-reflexive and self-destructive. They stress that these hegemonic, imperialist knowledge systems, whose authors and creators purport it as universal are, in fact, specifically particular and counterintuitive to the very conceptualization of Freedom that these epistemologies seek to define and aggrandize.

Fanon’s phenomenology of decolonization offers the colonized subject a new means of apprehending his/her consciousness through the prism of a specifically sociogenic diagnosis – that the colonized individual’s “being-in-the-world” cannot be divorced from his/her residence in a sick, violent, oppressive, and alienating colonial environment. Once the colonized subject possesses this newfound awareness, s/he may begin to experience a liberated subjectivity, free from the mire of internalized inferiority that is born of and perpetuated through the Western colonial project. Instead his/her self-perception is refashioned; the psychological relationship to the colonizer will be interrogated and challenged, moving the colonized subject from the psychological state of subordinated native identity to that of an incipient, liberated consciousness. This ‘ascendant consciousness’ as you so often term it, becomes manifest in the will to create a society in which this distilled Freedom may be fully realized on the material level for all members of that society.

Brathwaite’s theory of nation language completely flips the script on normalized perceptions of dialect and/or broken English. And Brathwaite does precisely this in order to problematize, destabilize, and reorganize our understanding of chattel slavery’s cultural and linguistic legacy. “Human subjectivity as lived universal and globally diverse egalitarian human community” is actualized and voiced in nation language – Anglophone Caribbean orature. What KB denotes as the “language of slaves and laborers” has become the lingua franca of the Anglophone Caribbean, since the descendants of enslaved Africans, European planters and indentured servants, and Asian laborers still speak it to this day.

Recently, when I took a Spanish language immersion class in Costa Rica, my teacher asked me about the mixture of languages that make up Jamaican patois. I explained it as a combination of West African languages, Spanish, and English. Coincidentally, that very day we had learned the Spanish verb “susurrar” – to whisper. I pointed to this verb and said in patois, “Is why dem sussu pon me,” which means why are they whispering about me, or talking about me behind my back. And my teacher instantly understood that patois’ uniquely expressive quality arises out of this mélange of oral expression. This is what Brathwaite convincingly argues: the African languages that the planter class forcibly “submerged,” because they feared this communication’s insurgent capabilities, reemerged in a creolized form that communicated a West African cultural/cosmological system, while still catalyzing insurrection and effectively articulating the native Caribbean experience.

This nation language, he argues, presents evidence of human subjectivity as lived universal experience in globally diverse human community in that it is spoken by people of all races and socio-economic classes in the Anglophone Caribbean. And I think KB would also argue that this globally diverse human community is also partially achieved in the international popularity of roots reggae music. I say partially because it is one thing to sing along to a Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, or Burning Spear song about the evils of Babylon, or Western capitalist hegemony, and quite another to devote one’s life to dismantling this insidious system. But that is precisely the hope too: that the elevated consciousness inspired by Fanon’s and Brathwaite’s shared vision will lead to the creation of new humans and new societies free of oppressive, dehumanizing systems. In their stead new societies will arise, predicated upon these new humans’ control over the means of production, their shared desire for freedom, justice, and equality which will prevent them from recommitting the same brutally tragic crimes against humanity that define our shared past.

This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

On behalf of LaRose T. Parris and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of LaRose T. Parris for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from May 25th – June 30th of 2016)