Trinidadian thinker and activist C. L. R. James penned a criticism of Herman Melville's work, Mar... more Trinidadian thinker and activist C. L. R. James penned a criticism of Herman Melville's work, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, while incarcerated in Ellis Island, New York, in the early 1950s. I investigate how the contradictory claims on labour and race, literary analysis, and communism in the last chapter come from what I call the prison-detention continuum: a historical continuity allocated to prison and detention facilities despite an overt difference between the two. The distinction survived so as to maintain racial classification and labour force from the times of slavery and plantation to the Cold War era. The physical statuses of those incarcerated were insecure when the McCarran-Walter Act legalized ideological surveillance and accelerated racism inside and outside the carceral spaces. In his book on Melville, James clarifies the difference between prison and detention by emphasizing labour's role in Ellis Island. He situates his personal experience of maltreatment of his ulcer as a structural issue, produced by the way the officers obey their authorities without any principle. To foreground the docile individuals in the totalitarian society, he compares the inmates and officers on Ellis Island with the shipmates of the Pequod in Moby Dick. Furthermore, he regards that if labour is racialized, it will necessarily culminate in revolt. I argue that James's reference to the Korean War POWs on Koje Island prefigures an interracial solidarity that becomes visible after the Bandung Conference of 1955.
While the processes of decolonization in the Pacific and the Atlantic regions have been separatel... more While the processes of decolonization in the Pacific and the Atlantic regions have been separately analyzed, this paper finds connections between these processes by examining how British and Japanese colonial regimes were reinforced by the US empire and the military, respectively. Here, Naoki Sakai's concept of translation as the process of creating cofigurative relations can be reframed as the Cold War regime of translation: namely, translating everything suspicious into communism and simultaneously anti-Americanism. This framework, all-encompassing and in the US-occupied Okinawa. His works records the presence of the colored GIs in Okinawa in the late 1960s, who participated in the local demilitarization movement. The two instances above stretch the limit of collaborative governance, questioning racialized and gendered selves under duress amidst the Cold War regime of translation KEYWORDS
本論文は、第三世界主義の決定的な瞬間の一つである、パリで開催された第一回黒人作家芸術家会議を取り上げる。そして、英語圏、仏語圏の作家や知識人たちのあいだでの人種を超えた連帯という表向きの祝祭的な... more 本論文は、第三世界主義の決定的な瞬間の一つである、パリで開催された第一回黒人作家芸術家会議を取り上げる。そして、英語圏、仏語圏の作家や知識人たちのあいだでの人種を超えた連帯という表向きの祝祭的な雰囲気の影で密かに存在していた不協和音を検討する。この論文の主な焦点は、合衆国の黒人作家であるリチャード・ライトによる発表「伝統と産業化」とバルバドスの作家ジョージ・ラミングによって読み上げられた原稿「黒人作家とその世界」を分析することにある。当時、パリに逗留していた若きアフリカ系アメリカ人の作家ジェームズ・ボールドウィンによる会議の報告も一部、検討対象とする。合衆国の内外での反共主義の隆盛という文脈において考えた時、フランス語圏の知識人たちとのあいだの共通性と差異、そして、目指されなかったものとは何なのだろうか。人種主義と植民地主義を問題化するということはフランス語圏のアフリカ系知識人やカリブ系作家らには共有されていたが、英語圏の作家らには別様に捉えられていたのではないだろうか。前半では、人種主義と植民地主義の見え方に関して、合衆国代表団とフランス語圏の発表者(特にエメ・セゼール)のあいだに存在していた軋轢に注目するが、その軋轢の要因の一つとして合衆国代表団に共通してみられたのは何だったのかについて論じる。そして後半では、この軋轢を反省的にとらえかえすための問いかけの出発点として、恥という情動にラミングが傾注していることを論じる。そのことによって、冷戦期の情報戦や心理戦が脱植民地期の「文化」概念に隠然たる影響を与えたことや、その影響に対する抗いの試みの一端を明らかにする。
This paper examines the political significance of covert animosities behind the celebratory atmosphereof interracial solidarity among French-speaking, English-speaking writers and intellectualsat the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, one of the crucial moments of the ThirdWorldism. The major focus of this article is dedicated to the analysis of the papers delivered by theblack American author Richard Wright ("Tradition and Industrialization") and the Barbadian novelistGeorge Lamming ("The Negro Writer and His World"), including a report on the conference by JamesBaldwin, the then young African American author at his sojourn in Paris. I argue that in the contextof the rising anti-communism inside and outside the U.S. soil, the problematization of racism and colonialismthat were on agenda for most of the French speaking African and Caribbean, was differentlydealt with by Anglophone authors.First, the historical and political context of the early cold war era is offered. Second, I examinehow Richard Wright, due to his tendency to psychologize the people in the colonial and ex-colonialregions, touched upon crucial issues such as racism and colonialism, but immediately passed themonto a comparatively urgent reality of economic and technological modernization. Third, I argue thatGeorge Lamming, through his philosophical adumbration on the affectivity of shame, points at therealm that cannot be grasped by a schematized, if not wholly paternalistic, understanding toward theex-colonized peoples, and thus offers an enduring critique toward the difficulty and possibility of theinterracial solidarity per se
Studies in English Literature: Regional Branches Combined Issue, Volume 3 Pages 219-233, 2011
The connection between the two Caribbean texts, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and C.L... more The connection between the two Caribbean texts, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, has been rarely identified especially with regards to their shared concern for mediating the masses. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri rejects mediation in their foregrounding of the multitude, but in this rejection the dignity of the masses have of their lands, as Frantz Fanon encompasses, cannot be represented. In the process of decolonization, mediating this dignity is a form of responsibility in which Lamming and James differently partake, and is realized in critical engagement with their region. In The Black Jacobins, the masses are not represented monolithic but articulated as two types, “descriptive” and “transformative,” a distinction Spivak makes in her reading of Marx’s analysis of the class relation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. James’s dialogue with Marxism prepares a concept of the transformative masses while the masses in Haitian Revolution are historically examined. Yet the contrast he draws with the leader of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, enacts the necessity for them to mediate themselves. In Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, such transformative masses are located near the end of the narrative in Trumper’s knowledge of the black people in the US. Before reaching this, the novel employs shame for the characters to locate denials that colonial education has instituted – the memory of slavery, the politics of language, and a feeling that would be alternative to shame. Shame thus witnesses the complicity between the colonized and the colonizer, which subsequently stimulates in the former a responsible sense for their own people. Lamming’s use of shame consequently succeeds in representing the masses and despite their differences this representation is consonant with what James tried to do in his writings.
Trinidadian thinker and activist C. L. R. James penned a criticism of Herman Melville's work, Mar... more Trinidadian thinker and activist C. L. R. James penned a criticism of Herman Melville's work, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, while incarcerated in Ellis Island, New York, in the early 1950s. I investigate how the contradictory claims on labour and race, literary analysis, and communism in the last chapter come from what I call the prison-detention continuum: a historical continuity allocated to prison and detention facilities despite an overt difference between the two. The distinction survived so as to maintain racial classification and labour force from the times of slavery and plantation to the Cold War era. The physical statuses of those incarcerated were insecure when the McCarran-Walter Act legalized ideological surveillance and accelerated racism inside and outside the carceral spaces. In his book on Melville, James clarifies the difference between prison and detention by emphasizing labour's role in Ellis Island. He situates his personal experience of maltreatment of his ulcer as a structural issue, produced by the way the officers obey their authorities without any principle. To foreground the docile individuals in the totalitarian society, he compares the inmates and officers on Ellis Island with the shipmates of the Pequod in Moby Dick. Furthermore, he regards that if labour is racialized, it will necessarily culminate in revolt. I argue that James's reference to the Korean War POWs on Koje Island prefigures an interracial solidarity that becomes visible after the Bandung Conference of 1955.
While the processes of decolonization in the Pacific and the Atlantic regions have been separatel... more While the processes of decolonization in the Pacific and the Atlantic regions have been separately analyzed, this paper finds connections between these processes by examining how British and Japanese colonial regimes were reinforced by the US empire and the military, respectively. Here, Naoki Sakai's concept of translation as the process of creating cofigurative relations can be reframed as the Cold War regime of translation: namely, translating everything suspicious into communism and simultaneously anti-Americanism. This framework, all-encompassing and in the US-occupied Okinawa. His works records the presence of the colored GIs in Okinawa in the late 1960s, who participated in the local demilitarization movement. The two instances above stretch the limit of collaborative governance, questioning racialized and gendered selves under duress amidst the Cold War regime of translation KEYWORDS
本論文は、第三世界主義の決定的な瞬間の一つである、パリで開催された第一回黒人作家芸術家会議を取り上げる。そして、英語圏、仏語圏の作家や知識人たちのあいだでの人種を超えた連帯という表向きの祝祭的な... more 本論文は、第三世界主義の決定的な瞬間の一つである、パリで開催された第一回黒人作家芸術家会議を取り上げる。そして、英語圏、仏語圏の作家や知識人たちのあいだでの人種を超えた連帯という表向きの祝祭的な雰囲気の影で密かに存在していた不協和音を検討する。この論文の主な焦点は、合衆国の黒人作家であるリチャード・ライトによる発表「伝統と産業化」とバルバドスの作家ジョージ・ラミングによって読み上げられた原稿「黒人作家とその世界」を分析することにある。当時、パリに逗留していた若きアフリカ系アメリカ人の作家ジェームズ・ボールドウィンによる会議の報告も一部、検討対象とする。合衆国の内外での反共主義の隆盛という文脈において考えた時、フランス語圏の知識人たちとのあいだの共通性と差異、そして、目指されなかったものとは何なのだろうか。人種主義と植民地主義を問題化するということはフランス語圏のアフリカ系知識人やカリブ系作家らには共有されていたが、英語圏の作家らには別様に捉えられていたのではないだろうか。前半では、人種主義と植民地主義の見え方に関して、合衆国代表団とフランス語圏の発表者(特にエメ・セゼール)のあいだに存在していた軋轢に注目するが、その軋轢の要因の一つとして合衆国代表団に共通してみられたのは何だったのかについて論じる。そして後半では、この軋轢を反省的にとらえかえすための問いかけの出発点として、恥という情動にラミングが傾注していることを論じる。そのことによって、冷戦期の情報戦や心理戦が脱植民地期の「文化」概念に隠然たる影響を与えたことや、その影響に対する抗いの試みの一端を明らかにする。
This paper examines the political significance of covert animosities behind the celebratory atmosphereof interracial solidarity among French-speaking, English-speaking writers and intellectualsat the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, one of the crucial moments of the ThirdWorldism. The major focus of this article is dedicated to the analysis of the papers delivered by theblack American author Richard Wright ("Tradition and Industrialization") and the Barbadian novelistGeorge Lamming ("The Negro Writer and His World"), including a report on the conference by JamesBaldwin, the then young African American author at his sojourn in Paris. I argue that in the contextof the rising anti-communism inside and outside the U.S. soil, the problematization of racism and colonialismthat were on agenda for most of the French speaking African and Caribbean, was differentlydealt with by Anglophone authors.First, the historical and political context of the early cold war era is offered. Second, I examinehow Richard Wright, due to his tendency to psychologize the people in the colonial and ex-colonialregions, touched upon crucial issues such as racism and colonialism, but immediately passed themonto a comparatively urgent reality of economic and technological modernization. Third, I argue thatGeorge Lamming, through his philosophical adumbration on the affectivity of shame, points at therealm that cannot be grasped by a schematized, if not wholly paternalistic, understanding toward theex-colonized peoples, and thus offers an enduring critique toward the difficulty and possibility of theinterracial solidarity per se
Studies in English Literature: Regional Branches Combined Issue, Volume 3 Pages 219-233, 2011
The connection between the two Caribbean texts, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and C.L... more The connection between the two Caribbean texts, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, has been rarely identified especially with regards to their shared concern for mediating the masses. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri rejects mediation in their foregrounding of the multitude, but in this rejection the dignity of the masses have of their lands, as Frantz Fanon encompasses, cannot be represented. In the process of decolonization, mediating this dignity is a form of responsibility in which Lamming and James differently partake, and is realized in critical engagement with their region. In The Black Jacobins, the masses are not represented monolithic but articulated as two types, “descriptive” and “transformative,” a distinction Spivak makes in her reading of Marx’s analysis of the class relation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. James’s dialogue with Marxism prepares a concept of the transformative masses while the masses in Haitian Revolution are historically examined. Yet the contrast he draws with the leader of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, enacts the necessity for them to mediate themselves. In Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, such transformative masses are located near the end of the narrative in Trumper’s knowledge of the black people in the US. Before reaching this, the novel employs shame for the characters to locate denials that colonial education has instituted – the memory of slavery, the politics of language, and a feeling that would be alternative to shame. Shame thus witnesses the complicity between the colonized and the colonizer, which subsequently stimulates in the former a responsible sense for their own people. Lamming’s use of shame consequently succeeds in representing the masses and despite their differences this representation is consonant with what James tried to do in his writings.
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Papers by Yutaka Yoshida
This paper examines the political significance of covert animosities behind the celebratory atmosphereof interracial solidarity among French-speaking, English-speaking writers and intellectualsat the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, one of the crucial moments of the ThirdWorldism. The major focus of this article is dedicated to the analysis of the papers delivered by theblack American author Richard Wright ("Tradition and Industrialization") and the Barbadian novelistGeorge Lamming ("The Negro Writer and His World"), including a report on the conference by JamesBaldwin, the then young African American author at his sojourn in Paris. I argue that in the contextof the rising anti-communism inside and outside the U.S. soil, the problematization of racism and colonialismthat were on agenda for most of the French speaking African and Caribbean, was differentlydealt with by Anglophone authors.First, the historical and political context of the early cold war era is offered. Second, I examinehow Richard Wright, due to his tendency to psychologize the people in the colonial and ex-colonialregions, touched upon crucial issues such as racism and colonialism, but immediately passed themonto a comparatively urgent reality of economic and technological modernization. Third, I argue thatGeorge Lamming, through his philosophical adumbration on the affectivity of shame, points at therealm that cannot be grasped by a schematized, if not wholly paternalistic, understanding toward theex-colonized peoples, and thus offers an enduring critique toward the difficulty and possibility of theinterracial solidarity per se
In The Black Jacobins, the masses are not represented monolithic but articulated as two types, “descriptive” and “transformative,” a distinction Spivak makes in her reading of Marx’s analysis of the class relation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. James’s dialogue with Marxism prepares a concept of the transformative masses while the masses in Haitian Revolution are historically examined. Yet the contrast he draws with the leader of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, enacts the necessity for them to mediate themselves. In Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, such transformative masses are located near the end of the narrative in Trumper’s knowledge of the black people in the US. Before reaching this, the novel employs shame for the characters to locate denials that colonial education has instituted – the memory of slavery, the politics of language, and a feeling that would be alternative to shame. Shame thus witnesses the complicity between the colonized and the colonizer, which subsequently stimulates in the former a responsible sense for their own people. Lamming’s use of shame consequently succeeds in representing the masses and despite their differences this representation is consonant with what James tried to do in his writings.
Book Reviews by Yutaka Yoshida
This paper examines the political significance of covert animosities behind the celebratory atmosphereof interracial solidarity among French-speaking, English-speaking writers and intellectualsat the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, one of the crucial moments of the ThirdWorldism. The major focus of this article is dedicated to the analysis of the papers delivered by theblack American author Richard Wright ("Tradition and Industrialization") and the Barbadian novelistGeorge Lamming ("The Negro Writer and His World"), including a report on the conference by JamesBaldwin, the then young African American author at his sojourn in Paris. I argue that in the contextof the rising anti-communism inside and outside the U.S. soil, the problematization of racism and colonialismthat were on agenda for most of the French speaking African and Caribbean, was differentlydealt with by Anglophone authors.First, the historical and political context of the early cold war era is offered. Second, I examinehow Richard Wright, due to his tendency to psychologize the people in the colonial and ex-colonialregions, touched upon crucial issues such as racism and colonialism, but immediately passed themonto a comparatively urgent reality of economic and technological modernization. Third, I argue thatGeorge Lamming, through his philosophical adumbration on the affectivity of shame, points at therealm that cannot be grasped by a schematized, if not wholly paternalistic, understanding toward theex-colonized peoples, and thus offers an enduring critique toward the difficulty and possibility of theinterracial solidarity per se
In The Black Jacobins, the masses are not represented monolithic but articulated as two types, “descriptive” and “transformative,” a distinction Spivak makes in her reading of Marx’s analysis of the class relation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. James’s dialogue with Marxism prepares a concept of the transformative masses while the masses in Haitian Revolution are historically examined. Yet the contrast he draws with the leader of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, enacts the necessity for them to mediate themselves. In Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, such transformative masses are located near the end of the narrative in Trumper’s knowledge of the black people in the US. Before reaching this, the novel employs shame for the characters to locate denials that colonial education has instituted – the memory of slavery, the politics of language, and a feeling that would be alternative to shame. Shame thus witnesses the complicity between the colonized and the colonizer, which subsequently stimulates in the former a responsible sense for their own people. Lamming’s use of shame consequently succeeds in representing the masses and despite their differences this representation is consonant with what James tried to do in his writings.