STRUCTURED CONVERSATION

 

Temporalities of race and translational memory

 

 

Premesh Lalu^I; Homi Bhabha^II

^ICentre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa
^IIDepartments of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Correspondence

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This Structured Conversation between Professor Premesh Lalu and Professor Homi Bhabha - one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies - is on the future of subaltern thought and humanities. This conversation, moderated by Professor Jean Baxen, was included in the Conversations with Global Thinkers series of Science Forum South Africa 2020.

Keywords: humanities, race, apartheid, polarisation, translational

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Jean Baxen: What will it take to reimagine the arrival of a just and equal society? Responses to deep disparities and injustices require radical thought, science, ethics, institutional arrangements, and other shared systems of valuation and understanding. How do we collectively seek ways to anticipate and actively create a more just world? What is the intellectual project at this time of uncertainty, and how do we intervene in an increasingly polarised world?

Homi Bhabha: It's always a great pleasure to be in South Africa, virtually or physically. I know very little about South Africa. I want to learn more. But from my very first trip to South Africa, I felt that South Africa knew something about me. South Africa spoke to me in a way that few other countries in my travels have really done. This is a country of complex histories, a country which for me, for much of my life, I saw in very polarised and binary terms.

I was entirely, of course, on the anti-apartheid side, I was on the side of Mandela, I was on the side of all those who actually wanted to deconstruct and reconstruct the state. I also realised when I met South Africans and was involved in the complexity of the arguments that are never shied away from in this great country (which of course makes it deeply attractive to me), that South Africa has very complex histories, and the way in which I first related to the country, in a very polarised way, did not allow me to see the complexities of those with whom I felt in solidarity, and the scope of the difficult task of freedom that lay ahead.

And so it is with great respect to those of you here who have been involved in this struggle, that I come to you humbly and modestly to learn, as I have done in my several visits to South Africa.

Jean Baxen: I'd like to start by probing this ever-changing complexity in the polarised world in which we find ourselves. How do we position ourselves in relation to this planetary crisis that we appear to be living through, and how might we respond as a global intellectual community?

Premesh Lalu: I would begin by referencing the series of workshops that Homi Bhabha drew many of us into over the past several years, through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and at a time when humanists in South Africa spoke obsessively about the crisis of the humanities, or the bleak future that awaited humanities scholarship. In contrast to a vibrant public sphere, it seemed odd that the narrative of decline and a tendency towards defensiveness appeared to be the only options available to us. Homi invited us into a conversation to focus on those affirmative qualities of the post-colonial and the post-apartheid that might help us to shape a global humanities curriculum. It was refreshing to be invited into a conversation where talk about 'crisis' was briefly suspended, and where the humanities were considered at the crossroads of the global and the planetary. The energy generated by the conversation among scholars drawn from across the African continent and higher education institutions in South Africa was profound. At stake was the question of how humanistic thought might help to prepare the ground for a university oriented to a renewed idea of futurity.

At the very beginning of the workshop in Cape Town, Homi asked us to think about what we might affirm in the critical intellectual traditions of South Africa and the African continent that would enable a vision for the humanities oriented to the future. And he added to that basic exploration a more nuanced supplement related to South Africa as the latest instalment of racial governmentality: to ask whether the critique of apartheid might serve to explain a broader global condition specific to our times. In other words, was there something about the critique of apartheid that might help to explain a predicament that had enveloped the world in a very dangerous and profound way? After all, apartheid was anything but exceptional, with its idea of race formed out of persistent traces of slavery, colonialism, and late capitalism.

It is the latter qualification that proved the most demanding to unpack over the course of the workshops, partly because the humanities has been found wanting in anticipating the problem of global apartheid; the critique of its South African iteration had largely failed to cohere in the study of the humanities.

Apartheid was a dispersed racial formation, one that was experienced not once, but twice: both as grand apartheid and petty apartheid. Grand apartheid reverberated, as we know, throughout much of southern Africa. Its ravages led to deaths, torture, and maiming across the region - in Namibia, Mozambique, Angola, and beyond. Beneath the veneer of grand apartheid, the so-called minor discourse of apartheid, called petty apartheid, posed a different problem, fostering civil war that in turn justified a form of governmentality that enforced a condition of stasis. In many ways, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was convened to oversee the transition to the post-apartheid, what was often neglected was this virulent everyday experience of race orchestrated through petty apartheid.

I want to draw Homi into a discussion on what I am beginning to understand as the Trojan Horse of apartheid: that form of apartheid which left behind a devastating legacy in the midst of the unfolding narrative of the postapartheid. Allow me to briefly sketch three aspects of the discourse on race in apartheid to invite Homi into a conversation. The first relates to the notion of race as it was experienced at the level of infiltration of everyday life. How are we to think about race as the persistent product of the psychopathologies of everyday life long after apartheid was ostensibly laid to rest? The second area I'd like to probe is that form of petty apartheid that resulted in an assault of the senses: to the extent that Hendrik Verwoerd's ambitions - which he first described in his dissertation in the 1920s on the blunting of emotions - left an indelible trace on any effort to constitute a post-apartheid future (Verwoerd being the South African Prime Minister known as the architect of apartheid). I want to suggest that there's something about the affective traces of apartheid that we have not dealt with, and with which we are only belatedly beginning to contend. And finally, I want to suggest that perhaps what apartheid in its petty guise did, was to orient race towards technology. There was an element in which apartheid had already anticipated the rise of new communication technologies. Since Homi is partly responsible for directing our attention to these areas of apartheid that bear on discussion of a curriculum in the humanities, I'm interested in how he places this distribution of race on the scales of the global and the planetary. I want to propose somewhat provisionally that petty apartheid is a place to set to work on changing relations of the human and technology, a shift in the co-evolution of the human and the technological that is proving to be catastrophic and unliveable in our contemporary world.

Homi Bhabha: Well, Premesh, as always, entirely on point, and utterly convincing and articulate. But in your great generosity to me, I don't want you to forget and, as an ageing man you are bound to lose some aspects of your memory, that you were my partner. We set up this project - covering and convening thinkers from all parts of Africa - together. So I owe you a great debt of gratitude and respect. And although dementia may be creeping, and you may forget this great offering and great gift to me, I have to remind you of it again. So, thank you. Thank you, South Africa for your remarkable contribution to my Global Humanities project.

Now let me say that I think we are travelling very much on the same highway. Whether it is a highway to somewhere or a hiding to nothing, I cannot say at the moment, but we're thinking in very parallel terms. Let me first start by referring to what you've laid out for us. And then I want to say a few things that emerged out of the Global Humanities project and which speak to our current condition today. Premesh, I cannot both affirm and agree more resoundingly with you that in many parts of the world, as we witness it today, there is the narrative of the grand long-term, long durée of oppression's systemic racism and of the apartheid model - what you've called the grand model. And then there is what you call the petty apartheid model, and how it affects everyday life, how it takes hold of the senses, and its attention to and reproduction of technology. In redefining not only the human, but what citizenship is, what dignity and indignity are, what humiliation is, what survival is, what kind of indignity people have to normalise in their lives as subjects of petty everyday racism or everyday apartheid, to the point that they do not even realise their dignity is being compromised, and their intellectual wealth is being destroyed and redistributed for the benefit of those who oppress them.

So let me, on these grounds, give you a sense of what I'm working on in a long introduction to my book called In Our Time. I'm working on this issue, which emerged for me in a very graphic way at the crossroads or liminal space or the transition between the pandemic and the slow release of lockdown, the slow emergence into public life. And then there was the murder of George Floyd, where we didn't emerge into public life, but emerged, suddenly, into a moment of public death. At that point, I put everything else aside to think and write about this moment. What struck me was a kind of anomaly. On the one hand, there was systemic racism, which was continually invoked. It was invoked in history -that long systemic racism of history. It was invoked in statistics - the long history. And then on the other hand, came the suddenness, the intrusion of 8.56 minutes that captured George Floyd's death, his brutal curbside murder by a policeman confidently performing it while looking around: death, death, death! To those who said death awaited this man. This public performance of criminal injustice. And those 8.56 minutes compelled me.

What do we learn from short moments in time when we are so trained in the social sciences and in the humanities to look for the long example, to look for the long durée, to look for the long institutionalised history of inequality and injustice? And I have placed myself at the crossroads, in the chiasmas, somewhere uncomfortably in between the long durée and the short moment, to emphasise that the moment is something that suddenly turned us from not thinking solely about the pandemic, but to thinking about police violence and those 8.56 minutes on a street corner, on a curbside in Minnesota. It created a global phenomenon: not simply of creating a form of martyrdom for George Floyd, but of taking that moment and trying to hold it. That moment was reproduced not only in videos, but in murals across the world, where Minnesota may not have been known, where George Floyd may not have been known; but that moment was used as a way of translating the local, regional, global conditions of criminal injustice.

What absolutely compels me is the great difficulty of holding on to a moment. Movements often have moments; they move from moment to moment - the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo - and every time there is such a moment, people say, but how can it last? Where will it last? Maybe our form of understanding time and politics needs to be dramatically rethought in a time of social media, in a moment of the rapid circulation of images and messages? So, to me, this is what you have called petty apartheid, and what I'm calling erratic racism as opposed to systemic racism.

This notion of the moment absolutely captured me in W. E. B. Du Bois' work, which I had never really deeply understood before. There is a moment in which he creates a (perhaps, historical, perhaps imagined) dialogue between himself and a white friend. Please note, a white friend, not a white enemy. And that friend says to him: 'What are you saying to me? You were taught by William James at Harvard, you went to the Humboldt University. And are you telling me that you feel the victim of Jim Crow and racism all the time that you're continually seen in this lens?' And Du Bois replied, 'Not always, but sometimes, anywhere, not today in Atlanta, but tomorrow in New York. Not in the American South, but in the American North.' Surprisingly, paradoxically, it is that anxiety of the everyday that is worth then recognising - not experiencing, but rather recognising - and thinking about in terms of an elaborating systemic racism.

If you read The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin¹, it also turns on a moment, on a moment of such time. Likewise with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me². This book turns on that moment when he says that he was either entering or leaving a theatre and a white woman brushed against his son. This might have been a microaggression. This might have been a mistake. This might have been unconscious. Yet, for him, it registered this moment of what I'm calling erratic everyday racism, and it became the germ of his book. Like the moment of Frantz Fanon's work, where a child on a bus looks at him and says to their mother: 'Look, Mother, look at this black man, I'm frightened, I'm frightened.' And it was at that moment that Fanon began to think about the psychopathology of black and colonial peoples.

This notion of the erratic temporality, which can be a moment of trauma, or a moment of protest, but these small moments of everyday time - in my book I call it the 'diurnal moment' (which doesn't mean it's not nocturnal, but just a short unit of time) - these have profound historical implications. But we, whether on the left or the right, don't know how to give them their proper value. And I believe the proper value of the moment is articulated most clearly in works of art, especially the realm of performance and theatre, which has to deal with the moment as a moment.

Jean, I want to address you now about the polarised world. This society - the United States - like many others, and I would include India, Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, and I would probably include South Africa - these are bipolar societiesⁱ These are societies where you do not have a clear distinction, as performed for us, by the concept of political parties. There are the conservatives and labour (as the major parties in the UK, for example), or there are the Republicans and the Democrats.

The USA is a bipolar country. Let me give you two examples: this country has, on the one hand, been founded on the genocide of Native Americans and the slavery of Africans, who were forced to become the modern workforce of the USA. On the other hand, there is the great American Dream, which is founded on migration and the notion of the earliest people to travel here across the ocean (usurping the land of the Native Americans in the process). And indeed, the African descendants of the slaves who were part of a tragic migration are the dark side of this - of the American nightmare which we see more and more, especially now with the discrimination taking place as a result of COVID and in the criminal justice system. But the dream is that you arrive here, and you can succeed - if you belong to a certain kind of group. To generalise, South Asians have succeeded, and East Asians too. Unfortunately, Mexicans are, however, often undocumented, and thus restricted to ploughing the fields, working in agriculture, and curating the gardens of the wealthy.

Again, I'm reminded of Du Bois, where he said, 'there are the beautiful beaches and the mountains - and then there is Jim Crow - and they both exist in the same world.' So, I'm arguing today that many of our countries, particularly in the ethno-nationalist mode, and the ethno-nationalist pincer in which they are caught, are countries fighting against themselves. They are fighting against the best of themselves. It is not the refugee, the migrant, who is being blamed for this, who is the intruder; the deep ambivalence, that deep splitting, is within itself. I believe that when the American people have spoken, they've spoken in a completely bipolar way. They will put in, most likely, a Senate which is Republican, which has the most diehard Republicans. Republicans in the House of the Senate were lobbied by the Washington Post to speak up and say that Joe Biden had won. Out of two or three hundred Republicans, only twenty-seven acknowledged that Biden had won the election. There is literally a bipolarity here; as John Locke once said, 'Will America become ungovernable?' We wait to see.

One final point - in many of the major issues in which we are invested - as progressives and as radicals - we have to think now, or we have been forced to think now about death before justice, about death before freedom. Likewise we cannot think about the death and destruction of the planet, and only then articulate an ethics of climate change. If we are thinking about political ethics and criminal justice, we are confronted with death first, and life after. We have to - now, urgently - find a philosophical commitment to think about a politics of life after death. This is not simply about survival. This is about reimagining life after thinking about our death. Not only specifically; thinking about death metaphorically, philosophically. We are in this weird position with climate change, with public health, with public life and public justice, of placing ourselves in the future and looking back at this current moment, thinking, putting ourselves after our own extinction, after our lives, thinking: what should I do now? One of the motifs of the book I am writing is the following phrase: 'The past refuses to die and the future does not wait to be born. In between these places are the crossroads on which we stand and try and understand where we are.'

Premesh Lalu: I would like to pick up on the reference to Du Bois. In the early 1900s, a young medical student by the name of Modiri Molema, a South African who had gone to Scotland to study medicine, was in conversation with Du Bois about the problem of race in the embryonic intellectual traditions that we have come to know as the Black Atlantic, thanks to the work of Paul Gilroy. He was writing at the end of the First World War, and in the wake of the Spanish 'flu epidemic, a world defined by an apocalyptic futurity - much like the one we now face as a result of the COVID pandemic. Molema produced a substantial study about the futures of race, one that is extremely critical for how we think about the university in South Africa, especially for its humanistic and scientific commitments to tracing the changing meaning of race, from the end of slavery and the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, to the first quarter of the 20th century (for an elaboration, see Lalu³). Molema places us at a crossroads; much like the crossroads posited in our discussion on the global humanities curriculum.

Let me paraphrase Molema's concerns briefly. His abiding concern seemed to be that the mythic content of the early precursors of race were reappearing as the foundation of a new scientific rationality. These mythic precursors of race that proliferated with the abolition of slavery had reappeared in the world he was occupying as a medical student, with frightening vehemence. He wrote about how the sciences had become complicit in upholding the myth of race in order to secure the support of a nascent public sphere in Europe. Race fuelled the speculative ambitions of science and aligned its interests with a public sphere. He was especially interested in astronomy and the way in which astronomy became the queen of the scientific disciplines at the end of slavery - quoting the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell: 'Oh starry-eyed science, has thou wafted there, to bring us home a message of despair?' Molema had clearly lost faith in the belief that the scientific promise of progress would free the world from the myth of race.

There were significant disparities in the way that intellectuals of the Black Atlantic approached the problem of the eternal returns of race in the 1900s. One anecdotal example suggests that Molema's reading of South Africa was at odds with Du Bois' reading of race in the post-reconstruction period in the USA. Molema invited Du Bois to take up the position of vice president of the African Races Association in Scotland in 1919, perhaps believing that their differences could be worked out beyond the national frames of South Africa and the USA. Du Bois unfortunately declined the offer.

I feel it would be a worthwhile exercise to imagine the shape of that disagreement. Reading Molema's text, he seemed to have been concerned about the recurrence of race, and the accretion of its mythic content in science and philosophy. I wonder if Molema saw something in the problem of race in South Africa that eluded Du Bois? Was he perhaps hinting at a shift in the notion of race being rationalised, not on the grounds of biology, but as a condition of technology?

The sentiment is encapsulated in his reference to Campbell's poem. It certainly is a theme that gained currency as fascism reared its head in the early decades of the 20th century. So, if we extend your reading of Du Bois, what are we to do with this problem of the mythic content of race as it is folded into the spheres of technological reproduction?

Homi Bhabha: The very notion of the mythical is profoundly involved in recurrence, as you said, and recurrence is profoundly about iteration. It's very difficult to sustain a myth if you don't keep repeating it. This is the traditional way of thinking about it, often because the content of myth is represented as some archaic knowledge or some mythologicals (in India we call them mythologicals - the Ramayana, for example). What we don't see is that every iteration, every recurrence is in fact a revision. And this revisionary form of myth must be seen as different from its content. We are persuaded by myth because we know the content of the mythology. But when it happens, and why it happens at a particular time, is the temporal moment of its eruption or its emergence: it is the place where we need to put power and where we need to put pressure.

If you take the Ramayana, a mythological play produced every year at different times of the year as a theatrical experience, and then you put it on television - that technological translation has an effect, an affective and a political effect, which an actual gathering of people, rather than the Greek sense of watching a theatrical performance, does not have.

Whatever mythological material at the level of content is fed into me, its re-presentation, its iterative re-presentation, and the technologies of that re-presentation, constitute something dramatically different. The conservative positions on this will want to assert the content; the radical positions on this must actually talk about the re-signification in present time. The ideas themselves are not archaic - it's only the content base that is archaic. Their actual form is being restructured. Now it's being restructured to support Hindu fundamentalism, for example.

And likewise, the content of the abortion debate may seem the same -there may be a similar division between people who are anti-abortion for either Catholic or evangelical reasons, and those who are not. But when this issue is restaged by appointing an anti-abortion Justice in the Supreme Court, the status of the question changes. It is now about the myth - or, more precisely, the mythic element. And I completely understand that there are people who feel that abortion is death, and there are people who feel abortion turns on each woman's right to choose: that debate exists in the world, whatever you may think about it. But when the technology of the Supreme Court becomes the stage, when the technology of justice in that institution becomes the way in which the myth of abortion comes to be restaged, this is not an old problem: this is a new problem.ⁱⁱ

Now, in terms of the question of race, it seems to me that a very important aspect which links mythology to technology is the question of memory. What are the kinds of memories that are being reproduced through new technologies, and what are the kinds of memories that may be produced through other kinds of technologies - such as the technology of the epic, the technology of orality, the technology of published scientific journals? These are all technologies of communication and representation. But how is memory constituted in these ways? Memory is then not simply an individual rethinking of the past. Memory is caught at the crossroads of the past that refuses to die, the mythic content that will be reproduced, and the future that keeps pointing its finger at us from elsewhere and saying, 'you are our memory'. It's called the memory of the future. You emphasise technological forms as they deal with affective issues, and here let me give two concrete examples. One we just talked about -8.56 minutes caught on a video that circulated around the world and does not simply remain static for what is its content; instead it becomes translated into people's own understanding of their own conditions. That little bit of video continually re-seeds the story of Floyd and American policing, and produces different plants. That of course is Walter Benjamin's metaphor, from his essay on translation. So, the translational nature of the conjunction between the mythic and the technological produces this translational memory.

And I have to thank you because I had never had this thought before this moment. And the most useful thing about education - and I'm being educated today - is to be able to think on your feet because somebody provokes you to do that.

Premesh Lalu: I too have my uses, Homi.

Homi Bhabha: I have said that right from the start! This notion of affective memory which is technological: the state has an affective memory, it's part of its documents, its archives, and its practices. The legal discourse and legal institutions have their memories, which they call precedent, casuistic precedent. For us in the humanities, we think about the technologies of memory through texts, films, science, signification, performance, and theatre. This notion of translational memory, then, is -I think - at the heart of what you call petty apartheid and what I'm calling erratic racism, because it brings together the technological and the body: the body of the state, the body of the people, along with technology. It brings all that together. It brings together the rebellious moment, the moment of radical shifting in the midst of the discourse of the long histories of apartheid, or the long histories of institutional racism, or the long histories of casteism in India. It takes the moment as a new lens for looking at the long past, and bringing it into the present. This concept of translational memory in relation to myth and technology, in relation to the past and the present, is seen elliptically from the future. That's how we take an ethical position in the present - we say, how would I be able to live if I didn't do this now, if I didn't align with this now? That now is not simply the now that is present in the moment. It is a proleptic now, it is a now that we project into the present by placing ourselves virtually in the future.

Something very similar happened with the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who washed up dead on a Turkish beach, after drowning as their family was trying to migrate from Syria, via Turkey, to Canada. And suddenly, the evocation - the affective political evocation of that moment, that photograph - made the EU ministers hasten their meeting on migration. These might be just gestural steps; I have no faith in the kind of world where big institutions sit quiet about crises and then suddenly move to embrace their guilt. I don't give a damn about your guilt. I want to know what you're going to do. I don't care whether you're guilty or not, or whether you have a crisis. So I begin to consider that thinking about myth has to be taught iteratively. When we are taught iteratively, then we begin to grasp this concept of translational memory, and when we get the concept of translational memory, we are better equipped to deal with the everyday nature of discrimination and indignity and inequality. And I want to stress indignity here: indignity is absolutely important because it's about the humiliation of people. People will forget more easily that they didn't have a piece of bread when they were very hungry than they will an act of humiliation.

So I believe that our argument and our discussion, and what I'm proposing to you today, speak to this notion of the everyday and the erratic. And the way in which the mythic and technological science and history are put together in a kind of strange montage.

Premesh Lalu: I too have returned to the scene of a massacre in an area where I was a student activist in the 1980s, and which was enigmatically named the Trojan Horse Massacre. I've wondered about the mythic name - Trojan Horse - given to this massacre. Incidentally, Seamus Heaney's gift to Nelson Mandela at the time of his release from prison was an adaptation of the Sophoclean tragedy Philoctetes: The Cure at Troy. In Heaney's play, a wounded and banished soldier provides us with a model of education that defies the sophistry of Odysseus. That's a long story for another time. But it bears upon your reflections of myth, and more crucially, on how the humanities are poised on that knife-edge (or what you might call 'liminal space') of indecision: between education and freedom.

We have lived through a form of apartheid that has amounted to a catastrophe of the senses. It resonates with what you are describing concerning the current afflictions of the globe and the planet. There's something about our experience of the minor discourse of petty apartheid that is absolutely fundamental to put in relation to the world. It certainly is a theme resonant with a return to the senses, which our mutual friend Jim Chandler has referred to in his reflections on the contemporary turn to aesthetic education.⁴

In South Africa, Hendrick Verwoerd understood that the purpose of the assault on the senses was to break up the relation between sense and perception. That was a prevailing orthodoxy in Gestalt psychology developed in Leipzig where Verwoerd studied in the 1920s, in the laboratories of Wilhelm Wundt. This is where the relation between the myth of race and technology was substantially revised and reworked into a form of governmentality we came to know as apartheid. The commodity form is absolutely necessary for shaping how we set to work on the critique of race.

In the final analysis, there's something about the problem of apartheid that was unforeseen and that we need to return to, to open up as a global condition that is reflecting its inheritance in modernity. This reckoning will help us in unlearning petty apartheid - not only on the left, but as a species - to think about what catastrophes lie in wait if we fail to relink sense and perception. What comes to mind is the improvisational form and temporalities of jazz - this may be the accompaniment we need as we remake a global curriculum in the humanities.

 

Acknowledgement

We thank Helen Moffett for editing this article.

 

References

1. Baldwin J. The fire next time. New York: Dial Press; 1963.         [ Links ]

2. Coates T. Between the world and me: Notes on the first 150 years in America. New York: Spiegel & Grau; 2015.         [ Links ]

3. Lalu P. Undoing apartheid. Cambridge: Polity Press; 2022.         [ Links ]

4. Chandler J. Question of sensibility. New Literary History. 2018;49(4):467-492. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2018.0032        [ Links ]

 

 

Correspondence:
Premesh Lalu
Email: premeshl@gmail.com

Published: 31 October 2022

 

 

i I use this term as a resonant metaphor for what can be read as publicly performed madness rather than in any way to stigmatise a medical diagnosis/condition.
ii Consider the unthinkable overturning, by the Supreme Court, of 50 years of legal precedent guaranteeing the right to safe non-criminalised abortion; this is testament to the malignant power of re-inscribing such mythos.