THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#17, SEPT-NOV/2023
Brotherwise Dispatch – How did the term “creolizing” conceptually originate and develop in relation to how “the human” has become shorthand for “the quite particular characteristics of the self-concept of the colonizers”?
Michael J. Monahan – Let me start with the term “creolizing” as I have been using it for the past fifteen years or so. The term has a complicated history linked to the Caribbean, where it originally picked out those, of any national/racial background, who were born on the island, as opposed to those who arrived from elsewhere (mostly Europe and Africa). Thus, to be “Creole” in this sense meant to be in some important sense “of the island,” and acclimated/accustomed to its lived reality. Over time it came to signify the “mixed” production of the island context, both culturally (especially linguistically) and biologically. To be “Creole,” to be “of the island,” came to signify a kind of mixture, which from the dominant European perspective was typically read as a kind of impurity or corruption (this will be important for answering the second half of your question). “Creolization” came thus to pick out the process whereby a people or a cultural practice, such as a language or religion, became blended or mixed. Haitian Kreyòl, Cuban Santeria, and Puerto Rican Salsa can all be understood as “creolized” linguistic, religious, and musical practices respectively. They reflect diverse elements of different “root” cultures and practices, blended together in a novel way, and it is this sense of the term “creolization” that I appeal to in my work. Of course, in the context of the colonial Caribbean where the term originates, the process is a result of violence, dislocation, and coercion, though the basic process can emerge through more peaceful means by simple proximity and trade. The Caribbean context is important for my own use the term, however, because it shows how creolization emerges through the struggle to construct a life in the face overwhelming circumstances deprived to reduce one, to paraphrase Aimé Césaire, to a “thing.” For instance, speakers of many different languages forged ways to communicate with each other that blended together elements of different African and European languages, where the new modes of communication were not simply reducible to the sum of their parts – they became new creolized languages. Creolization thus describes the ways in which humanity stubbornly emerges through the cracks, so to speak, in the colonial/racist edifice. As someone who has long been preoccupied with questions of oppression and liberation, you can see how this has immediate appeal to me.
In my use of the term, “creolization” has a descriptive register and a prescriptive or normative register. Part of the descriptive register is the historical development I have already been briefly discussing – the ways and means whereby human beings draw together diverse elements into new practices that are more than the sum of their parts. I want to emphasize this sense of being more than the sum of its parts. This means that a Creolized religious practice, like Santería, isn’t simply Roman Catholicism plus Yoruba religious practices, as if the elements remained distinct and could be separated or precipitated out (they are, in María Lugones’ metaphor, curdled). There is thus a deep ambiguity in terms of the identity of such practices. Santería remains in important ways Yoruba, but at the same time different – it both is and is not African and European – you cannot understand it without understanding its roots in Africa, but an understanding of its “root” components will not be sufficient to understand the creolized practice. Indeed, one important historical insight here is that the presumption that “root” elements of these creolizing processes are themselves “pure” is only ever a mythic pretense. Consider, for example, the Anglophone Caribbean, where the “mixture” is understood to be between English and African elements. But if you scratch the surface of “English” then all pretensions to purity vanish. The original “Pict” inhabitants of what are now the British Isles were displaced by invading Celtic peoples, who became the “Britons” later conquered and colonized by the Romans (whose occupying armies were themselves comprised of peoples from across the Mediterranean world). Saxons, in turn, invade from Northern Europe, followed by Scandinavian “Viking” invaders, then finally Normans (themselves a “mix” of Celts and Scandinavians). The English who colonized the Caribbean were thus themselves very much the product, culturally and biologically, of more than a thousand years of creolizing processes. A similar historical operation can be performed for any of the European colonial powers of the 17th Century. African peoples, likewise, conquered and were conquered by other peoples, traded, and migrated over their own history. In short, the idea that we are taking “pure” peoples or cultures and “mixing” them only makes sense if one disavows an important feature of reality. Namely, that hybridity and ambiguity – in short, creolization – is the norm, not the exception. This idea, that reality is ambiguous and “impure” is another descriptive feature of my appeal to “creolization.” Creolization is historical, certainly, but it is also ontological – it is a feature of existence – and one of the maneuvers of colonization/racism/oppression is to disavow that feature of existence. The colonizers posit themselves as “pure” and distinct (unambiguous), and against that mythic purity those who are creolized or “impure” are found wanting.
This deep suspicion of narratives of purity forms the kernel of the prescriptive register of my appeal to “creolizing,” and allows me to answer the second part of your question. This is a call to recognize that purity is only ever mythic, and that processes of creolization (broadly construed) are always an ongoing feature of human existence. As theorists and activists, we must orient ourselves such that we encounter ambiguity and impurity not as failures or challenges to be overcome, but as the open-ended horizon from and through which we carry our theorization and activism forward. This is why I very deliberately use the gerund form of the term. My appeal is to “creolizing” not “creolized” practices of freedom. The idea is to assume responsibility for and to the ongoing processes of generating human existence in the face of what I call the “politics of purity” - the efforts to disavow and deny that existence by appeal to static and pure modes of being, as opposed to dynamic and ambiguous processes of becoming. It is this notion of the politics of purity that sets up my response to the second part of your question. The modus operandi of the colonizer is to see themselves as being the most “pure” instantiation of the “human” understood as a kind of more-or-less fully-realized mode of being. “This is what is means to be Human. We colonizers are Human in this way, and all others stand in some relation of lack with respect to that mode of being human.” This only “works” to the extent that one takes the category not only of “the human” but also the “we” of the colonizer (we English, we French, we Americans, we Europeans, etc.) to be unambiguous and pure. It must admit of static, discrete boundaries that enable one to be unambiguously “in” or “out” of the relevant category. Recognizing, therefore, that human existence is in fact dynamic, open-ended, and ambiguous, we can see that the colonial account of “The Human,” so ably criticized by figures like Cesaire and Sylvia Wynter, is in actuality dehumanizing precisely because it denies and seeks to disrupt the dynamic praxis of human existence. It attempts to arrest what is in fact dynamic.
BD – Early on in your work, Creolizing Practices of Freedom, you make it plain that you intend to “articulate a theory of freedom and liberation”. However, in doing so, how would you describe the importance of distinguishing between a “creolizing praxis” and “politics of purity” as they relate to social struggles for recognition?
MJM – The term “politics of purity” comes from my first book, The Creolizing Subject. It is meant to pick out a kind of orientation toward or valorization of purity in our theory and praxis. At its root, it is the idealization of all-or-nothing, either/or categories with fixed, clear, and distinct boundaries. I first began to work the concept out in the context of present and historical discourses on race, and racial taxonomy in particular. Consider the ways in which, historically, racial categories have exhibited an imperative toward purity. A “proper” racial taxonomy will operate in such a way that any given individual will belong to one category, that each category will pick out all and only the “correct” individuals, and that any ambiguity or overlap will be understood as a failure in need of redress. The politics of purity thus aims to disavow or deny ambiguity first and foremost, and when such denial is impossible, it sees this as a challenge to be overcome. Historically, efforts to redress the emergence of racial ambiguity have been undertaken by means of two strategies that I call the “absorption” and “generative” strategies. When an ambiguity or a blurring of boundaries appears, the absorption strategy calls for a redefining of one or more of the categories to “absorb” the ambiguity. The notorious “one drop rule” in the U.S. context is a clear example of this. Individuals of “mixed” ancestry could not be easily “fit” into the existing taxonomy (where being “White” or “Black” could be of paramount importance, rendering one either a bearer of property rights or property oneself), so the category of “Black” was expanded to absorb anyone with even a trace (“one-drop”) of Black ancestry. This preserves the purity of the categories, for one remained either “White” or “Black,” but never both. In the Caribbean and Latin America, the generative strategy was more common. As ambiguous “mixtures” emerged, new categories were generated, so that these various combinations of ancestry could each have their own, distinct (pure) category. This is how the politics of purity operates at the level of racial taxonomy – purity is the guiding norm, such that even “mixed” categories come to operate as pure, insofar as being “mixed” means occupying a category distinct from the constitutive elements of that mixture. In a colonial and anti-Black world, the overarching aim of these taxonomic maneuvers was the description and protection of the purity of whiteness, but my general point here is that there is always a favoring of purity in the sense of either/or distinctions over more ambiguous both/and combinations.
We can also see the politics of purity at work in arguments for the “elimination” or “abolition” of race. If race were real, the argument goes, then we would be able to identify necessary and sufficient conditions (typically through appeal to biology) for membership in pure and discrete categories. But no such conditions exist – there is rampant ambiguity and differentiation across both time and geography (the same person could be different races at different times in the same place, or in different places at the same time). Given that there is all this dynamism and ambiguity that cannot be settled in any final and definitive way (race is merely a “social construct”), the argument goes, we can conclude that race is not real in the deepest, and most important, sense, and since the concept causes so much harm, it should be abolished/eliminated. Again, there is appeal to a norm of purity and stasis, where the failure to realize that norm is seen as an insurmountable flaw.
So my argument in that first book, and the starting point for the most recent book, is that the politics of purity operates at the deepest levels of our thinking. The distinction between culture and biology (as in the argument described above for the elimination of race), between self and other, or between freedom and coercion, have all been bound up with the politics of purity. Our approaches to freedom, I argue, have often been articulated in terms of a clear boundary between a self and “outside” influences or forces, such that free actions emerge from or are caused by what is “internal” to that self. There is thus a need to clarify and define this border between inside and outside, and liberation or freedom becomes a matter of purifying the self, or the body politic, of external influences/forces. We can thus read the history of political philosophy as often exhibiting an explicit or implicit effort to define the borders of the self, so that we can answer the question of when, if ever, that self is free from external influence. In the context of discourses on “recognition,” the politics of purity emerges both when one takes there to be some clearly defined (pure) “self” or “group” for which one demands recognition, and when, denying that such a pure self or group exists, one rejects the discourse of recognition altogether. In both cases, the guiding ideal is one of purity.
Now, I argue that the response to the politics of purity must itself avoid collapsing into another appeal to purity. In other words, the counter-move to the politics of purity cannot be a simple negation in the form of ~(purity). Such a negation simply creates a clear, distinct, and static relation between the pure and impure. This illustrates how the politics of purity can operate not only at the levels of ontology and politics, but at the level of thought or logic (a point I discuss at length in book). Rather, the response needs to itself be a dynamic, ambiguous, and relational unfolding or opening, that I try to capture through my appeal to creolizing. As I mentioned in my response to your first question, the gerund here is deliberate. To arrive at a static “creolized” form is to appeal to a pure and static category (the creolized), while the creolizing is on ongoing and dynamic process. This last point allows me to finally address your question here. “Liberation” or “freedom” must be thought of not as a final end-state toward which one ought to aim, even if only as an ultimately unreachable regulatory ideal. Rather, drawing from the discussion of creolizing above, we should think of liberation as the generative production of new and novel ways of enacting ourselves, where the “self” is understood not as a discrete and pure atom, but as a dynamic interaction of diverse elements that exists only in-process. In Creolizing Practices of Freedom, I appeal to the metaphor of the sound wave to capture what I mean here. Sound is a product of friction within and through a medium that necessarily links the source and the recipient. We exist both as individuals and as groups through the ongoing interaction of diverse elements (themselves always dynamic and ambiguous) within a larger social and material context. This context can thwart or mitigate this “productive friction,” we might think of this as oppression (I refer to it in the book as a kind of “white noise”), or the context can foster and enhance such friction. Liberation is the effort to engender the latter kind of context. In terms of the discourse of recognition, this means a foregrounding of the constitutive relations between self and other as dynamic processes (of productive friction), rather than the appeal to some fixed and static “self” around which we exchange discrete “quanta” of recognition or esteem.
BD – Whats your take on why “within theoretical circles discourses of freedom and liberation are increasingly viewed with suspicion” in spite of the fact that “oppression in its myriad forms is running rampant”?
MJM – My response to this question follows directly from the discussion of freedom and the politics of purity so far. When one conceives of freedom in the mode of the politics of purity – as an end-state toward which we ought to aim, then a couple of deep problems emerge. The idea here is that being free has a kind of static content. To be free is to be like this – exhibiting certain definite features or properties as a fully-realized and articulated state or condition. Here again we can see the invitation to either/or thinking, as one either is or is not free; one either has or has not realized that state. At the same time, within the domain of the theorization of freedom, when such a fully-realized articulation of freedom becomes the goal or aim, then the failure to realize that full and final articulation presents itself as a failure that can engender, at its logical extreme, the denial that there is any such goal or aim worth theorizing at all (this is analogous in structure to the argument for racial “abolition” I described above). The first deep problem, in other words, is that one may see this end-state as ultimately unrealizable (in practice and/or in principle). Understood in this pure and static sense, freedom is impossible to achieve, which can lead to a kind of apathy at best, and pessimism or nihilism at worst. This “suspicion” of freedom is common within certain circles of European theory that became prominent in the late 20th century. The idea is that talk of freedom is perniciously “teleological,” for instance, and should be abandoned altogether. The second deep problem is that, in cases where some content has been given to the concept of freedom – a definition of the “like this” that being free is – that content often ends up looking like the way of life of those in positions of power and domination. Thus, the “free” person within the enlightenment liberal tradition looks an awful lot like a bourgeois European male, for instance. It follows from this that liberation, as the process of becoming free, comes to mean taking up the norms and ideals of that ruling elite. In the colonial context, this means becoming more “civilized” and European. For what should be obvious reasons, this has engendered a profound suspicion of discourses of freedom and liberation among those thinkers, writers, and activists who identify with the colonized and dispossessed. If freedom means becoming like one’s oppressors, then why should one valorize freedom?
We see a similar suspicion with respect to ideas of “the Human,” (or even of universals as such). Within the politics of purity, the concept of the human, like freedom, must be given clearly defined and static content. To be human is to be like this. The same sorts of problems emerge. Pinning down or defining such content is difficult (impossible, really). How, if this is the case, do we delineate the border between human and animal, between human and machine, and so on? In the absence of such clearly defined content, there is a prominent call to abandon the concept of the human altogether (a growing “post-humanism” movement in theoretical circles). Furthermore, historically the concept of the human and of “humanistic” movements has very much overrepresented and valorized one quite particular set of standards for humanity as if it were a universal standard of the human as such. This is an argument one finds in Césaire, certainly, and articulated with great detail and sophistication more recently by Sylvia Wynter. As these thinkers point out, the “humanism” of the colonial era was in fact a way to establish the colonizers as the only real or full humans (“pure” humans) against which the colonized always stand in a relation of lack – they are the less-than-fully realized or impure instantiations of the human, which is to say, not really human after all. This being the case, we must abandon appeals to the human and its correlated concepts (such as “dehumanization”) altogether, not only because it is impossible to define, but because efforts to define it end up being themselves oppressive.
My argument is not that these critiques or “suspicions” of freedom and the human are altogether unfounded or misguided, but rather that they presume that the only concepts of freedom or the human available are pure ones. That is, they are concepts with a defined and static content comprising the standard against which all claims to freedom or humanity must be measured (and all-too-often found wanting). That concept of freedom and that concept of the human rightly deserve these critiques and warrant our suspicion. Turning away from the politics of purity, however, opens a space for creolizing concepts of freedom and the human, where what the terms capture is not a fixed content, but an ongoing and open-ended process that is made possible by the the productive interaction (friction) of diverse elements. Freedom is not a state to be achieved (or even aimed-at), but it is a mode (of praxis) whereby we manifest our faculties for self-development and self-expression (my existentialist roots are showing here). Being human, likewise, is not a matter of possessing certain traits or properties, but is rather a matter of being the sort of organism that necessarily generates the conditions and context in which it acts, where action requires a context of meaning. What it means to be human, in other words, is nothing more or less that being the sort of entity for whom what it means to be this sort of entity is an ongoing and open-ended question. This requires, I emphasize in my book, an encounter with different ways of exhibiting or practicing humanity (and freedom). In other words, “the Human” necessarily entails different modes of expressing humanity, and the larger/universal category emerges through the productive interaction of those different modes (or, as Wynter refers to them, different genres of the Human).
So, while we have ongoing and rampant alienation, exploitation, domination, colonization, and even enslavement, we have at the same time, especially within “theory” circles, a suspicion or rejection of the concepts of “freedom” and “the human.” My argument is that this leaves us unmoored and adrift, depriving us of powerful critical, constructive, and motivational tools. The idea that oppression, colonization, or enslavement are “dehuhumanizing,” for instance, captures something important, and my goal throughout this book is to articulate what that is.
BD – How do you respond to well-meaning activists who believe in “the dismissal of theory in favor of practice” as it relates to genuine and dire need for action against oppression?
MJM – I’m going to focus on your appeal to ‘well-meaning’ activists here. In my experience, part of the impetus for this attitude comes from the way in which so much “theory” amounts strictly to critique, and calls out or dismisses efforts to articulate a positive program or plan of action. I offered some general sketches of how this plays out in my response to your previous question. The theorist thus becomes a looming and pedantic voice (not coincidentally, often a very white and masculine one, as well) in the background criticizing and undermining every ideal, goal, and strategy, including even, ironically, the goals and ideals of theory itself. In my experience, this leads to an attitude in which one valorizes ‘activism,’ often understood as reducible to modes of protest (that is, critique), and sees all “theory” as Eurocentric, or colonial, or totalizing, or perniciously teleological, etc.
My response to this is twofold. First, there is the more abstract point that theory is unavoidable. Etymologically, “theory” is related at its roots to “theater,” it has to do with what we perceive or how the world is revealed to us. How we understand and engage with the world is always a matter of the concepts available to us. Suppose you consider yourself an activist, and someone asks what it is that you are doing in your activist work, and what it is that you are struggling for. There is simply no way to answer these questions that doesn’t appeal, even if only implicitly, to a whole host of concepts and meanings – to theories. You cannot talk about “exploitation,” or “environmental degradation,” or “racism” without theories that enable those phenomena to appear as the phenomena they are. To disavow or dismiss theory, therefore, doesn’t mean that one is not “doing” theory, but rather only that one is not taking responsibility for and to the theories one is inevitably employing. The theorizing just happens behind one’s back, so to speak. Secondly, while critique is important, even necessary, activism – understood not merely as protesting but also as organizing – requires a goal. You need to be able to articulate not just what you are struggling against but what you are struggling for. To be sure, there are some theoretical approaches that are ill-equipped to aid with this, but it is crucial, and one cannot take up this task without appeal to theory. Bear in mind, however, that there is also a tendency to understand “theory” simply as the texts and concepts of established (largely European) figures, and the relation between theory and practice (or activism) is on the model of “plug and play” – take the theory as is and simply apply it to the relevant context or problem. That is not what I am advocating here. Theory is a living practice, and it is needs to respond to and develop with the contexts in which it is being carried out. In other words, it is a creolizing practice that is always in the process of emerging in and through the interaction with different elements and influences, including, crucially, the different ways in which we enact and encounter those theories in our praxis.
BD – You're certainly familiar with the absolute disdain with which metaphysics is commonly treated within both the academic establishment and even at times in grassroots activist formations. As such, in what sense do you mean that “in order to treat with concepts like oppression and liberation intelligibly, one ultimately needs an underlying metaphysics”?
MJM – In a way this follows from the discussion of “theory” in my response to your last question. Consider the concept of “oppression.” In order for it to be meaningful, and thus in order to be of use in one’s practice/activism, we need to be able to distinguish it from and relate it to a host of other concepts – from harm or misfortune in general, from violence, and so on. An uprising of enslaved people, for example, may harm those who held them in bondage, and it may be experienced by the “masters” as a misfortune, and it may well be quite violent, but we surely should be suspicious of the conclusion that the former masters are thereby oppressed. Likewise, we do not think that one can oppress an object, like the chair I’m currently sitting on, or the keyboard I’m using to craft this sentence. We do not want the concept to be too broad, such that everyone is “oppressed,” nor do we want it to be too narrow, such that no one is “oppressed,” as either of these extremes render the term effectively empty. This means, in turn, that we need accounts both of the proper subject of oppression – what are the sorts of entities that can be subjected to oppression? - and of freedom, what is the condition or activity that oppression violates or disrupts? Liberation, as the effort to mitigate oppression and manifest freedom, thus needs an account of the subject of liberation and the of the goal of freedom. Just as with the disavowal of theory, to pretend that one can answer these questions and address the phenomena of oppression without offering metaphysical claims does not mean that one has successfully avoided metaphysics, only that one’s metaphysics remains unarticulated and obscured, allowed to operate behind the proverbial scenes. This disavowal of metaphysics can be found in liberal political theorists like Rawls, and in critical theorists like Honneth, and part of my argument here (though it is not original to me by any means) is that both of these figures deploy a metaphysics of the subject that is worthy of critique. Ultimately, given that I see metaphysics as unavoidable here, this is a call for taking responsibility for one’s metaphysics, rather than evading or denying it. Again, there are all sorts of metaphysical schools of thought and approaches that are worthy of critique, but turning away from metaphysics altogether is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. After all, the only kind of argument one can offer for the futility of metaphysics must, at the end of the day, be a metaphysical one. I just think that the only responsible way to do this sort of work is to own one’s metaphysics.
(this is the first of a two part interview of Michael J. Monahan for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from January 4th – January 15th 2023. The rest of the interview will be published in an upcoming issue.)
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