Gender & Sexuality in Ancient Greece

Jody Valentine

Gender & Sexuality in Ancient Greece Copyright © by Jody Valentine. All Rights Reserved.

Contents

- Introduction

- Part I. Author Introductions

- 1. Jayda Delatorre

- 2. Philip Duchild

- 3. Kate Finster

- 4. Adi Gandhi

- 5. Sarah Grade

- 6. Cy Hannahs

- 7. Peeper Hersey-Powers

- 8. Val Jackman

- 9. Miranda Mattlin

- 10. Angie Meneses Olvera

- 11. Camille Molas

- 12. Juliana Romeo

- 13. Kate Shimamoto

- 14. Carolynn Walden

- 15. Rinny Williamson

- 16. Lauren Ziment

- Part II. Critical and Creative Counter-Narratives to the Iliad

- Part III. Theoretical Approaches

- 17. Introduction Woman as Other

- 18. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

- 19. Be Not Afraid of the Dark

- 20. Introduction to Critical Race Theory and Counter-Storytelling

- 21. Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race

- 22. Abusing Foucault: How Conservatives and Liberals Misunderstand “Social Construct” Sexuality

- Part IV. Theoretical Approaches : Resources

- 23. Anti-Racism Resources

- 24. Foucault's History of Sexuality

- 25. Storytelling and Counter-Narrative

- Part V. EOS READS FOR BLACK LIVES

- 26. EOS Reads Suggestions for Discussion

- 27. On Violence

- 28. Follow Up READing

- Part VI. Workshops

- 29. Workshop One : What and how do we know about gender and sexuality in ancient Greece?

- 30. Workshop Two : Sexuality & Gender, Theory & Experience

- 31. Workshop Three : Sing, Muse

- 32. Workshop Four : μῆνις: Anger in the Iliad and You

- 33. Workshop Five : Fate, Force, and Finding our Iliad

- 34. Workshop Six : Eos READS for Black Lives

- Part VII. Resources

- 35. Student-Led Seminar

- Appendix

1

Often called the “birthplace” or “cradle” of “Western Civilization,” Ancient Greece holds unparalleled symbolic power.  The history of “Western Civilization” has been told as a series of exceptional achievements by remarkable men, beginning with Greeks.  Greek men promoted this narrative in their own time.  Save a few exceptions, all of the texts that survive from Ancient Greece were produced by men.  Yet, the Ancient Greeks celebrated both female as well as male gods and some memorable Greek myths present women as extremely powerful. Ancient Greek conceptions of sex and sexuality differed significantly from our own, while patriarchal and misogynist patterns feel eerily familiar.  Through open-minded but critical inquiry, participants in this course will interrogate not only ideas about sex and gender in Ancient Greece and today, but also the fundamental concept of “Western Civilization” itself.  Participants in this seminar — the authors of this pressbook — will contribute to a two-thousand year old, yet never more vital, conversation about ourselves as historical and embodied human beings.

I

Author Introductions

The members of Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece, a seminar hosted by Pomona College in the spring of 2021 are the authors of this Pressbook.

We are: Dr. Jody Valentine, Lillian Aff, Jayda Delatorre, Philip Duchild, Elizabeth Finster, Adi Gandhi, Sarah Grade, Cynthia Hannahs, Peeper Hersey-Powers, Nathaniel Hodgson-Walker, Valerie Jackman, Miranda Mattlin, Angelica Meneses Olvera, Camille Molas, Juliana Romeo, Phoebe Salowey, Kate Shimamoto, Carolyn Walden, Rinny Williamson, and Lauren Ziment.

Here, we introduce ourselves as we begin to create a collaborative, learning community.

1

Jayda Delatorre

For my introduction, I have decided to make a mind map so you guys can see what I’m interested in, where I’m coming from, and what I’m hoping to learn!

View my map here!

2

Philip Duchild

A Knight Lab element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas114valentine/?p=49

3

Kate Finster

Hi, everyone! My name is Kate Finster, and to complete my Author Introduction I decided to use the StoryMap program to discuss my background, interests, and intentions for this course. I’ve embedded my StoryMap below, but I think it is easier to interact with if you click the link so you can view it in a new window or tab. Please reach out to me via Slack or email if anyone has any difficulties accessing it. It was my first time using StoryMap, but I really enjoyed learning more about it and I love how interactive the final product is.

Pressbook Author Introduction StoryMap link:

https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/6bda8bfc143422e0439e2758c7a332c7/pressbook-introduction/index.html

A Knight Lab element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas114valentine/?p=51

4

Adi Gandhi

Hi everyone..

I use he/him pronouns, and I’m a third-year English major. I usually like to write, but I’ve been kind of burnt out recently so I thought I’d introduce myself through some recent photos from my camera roll, complete with captions 🙂

A page from the book (Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson) that inspired me to take this class… gay + poetry + Greek mythology, I definitely recommend

Hiking in the snow with my dad!

My roommate’s cat—her name is Olive and she really likes feathers

There were twelve days when Wizard101 was free over winter break and I played, and I include it here because looking at this screenshot I’m pretty sure this game radicalized me as a child

5

Sarah Grade

Hello! My name is Sarah Grade, and I am a contributing author for this book. I made a video introducing myself, that can be found by clicking the youtube link below:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas114valentine/?p=55

Thank you! I hope you enjoy! 🙂

6

Cy Hannahs

My name is Cy Hannahs (short for Cynthia), and I use she/her pronouns. I’m in my third year at Scripps and I’m a Geology major. I’m new to a lot of things in this course! Since switching to the STEM track, I haven’t spent as much time composing essays or writing creatively, so I’m excited to dust off those skills this semester, rusty though they probably are. While I read D’aulaires Book of Greek Myths over and over as a child, I’ve never studied Ancient Greek culture or myth in an academic setting, and I’m looking forward to re-examining the stories in an analytical and critical setting. This is also my first class expressly focusing on feminist and gender studies, and I’m glad to have that sort of focus going into Ancient Greek literature. Stories with such age behind them should be remembered and understood as well as possible; at this point it would be a terrible shame to lose them to time or misinterpretation.

When I’m at home in Atascadero, CA, I spend much of my free time outdoors — driving around aimlessly, lying in the sun with my dog and the neighbor’s cat, and practicing archery. This semester, however, I’m living with two friends and fellow Claremont students in northern Oregon, so there’s a lot less sun to be had, and I’ve been spending more time playing video games and watching video essays on Youtube. I have also been enjoying the rain even if it’s not as fun to be outside in because to someone used to a maximum of seventeen inches per year, any rain at all feels like a special treat. It’s been good for setting a dramatic background while listening to The Iliad so far.

7

Peeper Hersey-Powers

Hi everyone! I made my author introduction into a Bitsy game. I couldn’t upload it to Pressbook so I had to put it on itch.io – here’s the link!

The password is gsag2021

You can use the arrow keys or WASD to move around and walk up to things to interact with them. :^)

8

Val Jackman

Hi! My name is Valerie Jackman, and I use she/her pronouns. I am a Senior at Scripps, however, I took last semester off, so I will be enrolled in the Fall as well. When considering how I wanted to introduce myself as a contributing author of this book, I was going back and forth between a lot of different ideas, but then I took a break and asked myself, “Who do I really want to be as an author?” and “How can my authorship in this course contribute to a fruitful class dynamic?” The two words that I kept coming back to were ‘creativity’ and ‘vulnerability’. At the core of my experience in this course, I want to bring my authentic, vulnerable self to the table each day and in terms of the pressbook, I am striving to push myself to create in a way that may not always feel the most comfortable for me in order to hopefully allow and welcome my classmates to do the same.

Ultimately, I decided to pursue creativity for my introduction as an author through my biggest passion in life: dance. I have danced since I was 3 years old, and it has been the most consistent tether to vulnerability and creativity for me throughout my life. In recent years, dance has taken on a very new form for me, as I have struggled with chronic pain and various autoimmune disorders since I was about 15 years old and continue to struggle with pain daily. This has greatly limited my physical ability, especially in terms of dance. The process of re-discovering what movement means to me has and will likely be a lifelong journey, but pushing myself to dance despite my pain and limitations is something that I feel represents the core of my being and the person that I hope to bring to this class: someone who brings their all to the class despite setbacks, anxiety around speaking up, lack of background in classics, etc.

Below, I have attached a link to an improv dance that I recorded for this author introduction. In this video, I am dancing to ‘Half-Saved’ by Luca Fogale. For me, this song represents the feelings that come with admitting how little we may know about ourselves or a certain subject. In the context of this song, I feel that it touches on how feeling “half-loved” or “half-saved” may not be the “same thing” but it still means something. And in this video, I dance with this idea in mind. I dance while considering that we do not always have to live in absolutes and that to feel anything, even if a small amount of that feeling, is to feel something. In a way, I am learning how to believe that within the parameters of my body as well and to learn that to move and express through dance at all is something and better than nothing at all. And to feel something, is really at the core of who we are. I hope that you enjoy my exploration into listening to my body and dancing through limitation while allowing myself to feel the ebbs and flows of creativity. I am really excited for this class and to learn from all of you throughout this semester!

https://use.vg/rdthqftx5XxR

9

Miranda Mattlin

My name is Miranda Mattlin and I use she/her pronouns. I am in my final semester at Pomona College, pursuing a degree in Theatre and English with a focus on dramatic literature and creative producing, and have a longstanding personal interest in the Classics and Feminist Theory. For my major, I am currently working on a thesis about the adaptation of Aristotle’s Poetics to modern playwriting through the exploration of trauma healing, for which I have written a research paper and a short original play. I studied Latin from 7th grade through my whole first year of college, but mostly lacked the schedule space for the Classics after that, aside from one course called Classical Myth and Film, which offered a small window into how ancient texts can be reinterpreted in different contexts. As such, I am very excited to look at Greek Classic literature and culture through a GWS and CRT lens. I expect myself to make consistently unhelpful references to my experience in Latin considering this is a class about Greece, and though I will apologize every time, I stand by this impulse, because we have already begun reading about how modern and continuing historical lenses and conceptions simply cannot be removed from our understanding of ancient worlds.

I can often be seen sitting out on my apartment terrace to absorb sunlight, much like a plant, and may at times get distracted by birds and commotion. My sweet, needy senior cat may also make an appearance at some point, because she thinks it’s very rude of me to close any door at any time or not pay her constant attention. I have included a photo of her from the holidays for reference. Most assuredly, I will spend many a class openly snacking on Goldfish crackers, as they are a primary staple of my diet. Outside of class, I am highly involved in student theatre organizations at Pomona and a member of a Claremont acapella group, and I love to bake and cook.

10

Angie Meneses Olvera

Hi! I chose to do my author introduction using Storymaps, here it is 🙂

A Knight Lab element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas114valentine/?p=67

11

Camille Molas

Reflection: A self-portrait and commentary on authorship

Time-Lapse _ PLEASE CLICK THIS – I worked hard on this video (idk why it won’t just show up as a video)

What does it mean to be an author? How does a story change based on who the author is? Does it matter? These are the questions running through my head as we further our discussion on the Illiad and honestly, any other texts.

My name is Camille Molas and I experience the world visually. Even ideas become pictures or the words on a page dance off of it so that I can literally “see” the words moving. It’s just how I have been able to fully understand my surroundings. I thought that I should bring this “visual” aspect of my life into understanding authorship.

I wanted to paint myself based on my reflection- since this is the only way I can see myself, while others see the “flipped” version of me. I used a mirror to look at myself deeply and painted as I looked.

It’s strange that I only ever see a reflection of me! But others get such a different perspective. This made me think about how authors can create a work that only they have seen through their eyes but someone else can be viewing it from another point of view even if the author themselves have never seen that perspective.

As the painter of my own portrait, I found it so difficult to truly capture my face and put it on the canvas. Maybe this is because I am not a very experienced artist or I am probably just bad at painting. Nevertheless, no matter how much I stared at myself, the canvas just never looked 100% me. Authors may try to do this and try to describe EXACTLY what’s going on or trying to portray something, but in reality, it may not come out as 100% as they intend it to be (even if they are the best author in the world). There’s just something about failing to reach 100% of what you are fully describing. When I began to paint my features, I was so tempted to enhance my portrait, perhaps making my nose smaller or making my face more symmetrical. While I tried hard not to succumb to those enhancements, ultimately subconsciously I did end up enhancing my face in some type of way. Authors can try their VERY HARDEST to be impartial, unbiased, removed from their writing but in practice that is just not achievable. At some point, they eventually enhance, dramatize, leave out, or bias their writing from their lived-experiences.

If my painting was created by someone else, people might feel more inclined to believe that it is truly me and that’s how I look like, versus thinking that I made myself prettier since I painted it. Or perhaps an enemy of mine painted that photo, viewers could feel that I might be better looking and that the painter intentionally made it ugly since I am their enemy. My point is, when it comes to writing, the author clearly has a big influence on the piece whether they are the narrator or not. Perspective from a specific person can change the meaning of the same sentence or word, thus changing the story. Authors can never be removed from the work itself.

There’s still more to uncover when it comes to authorship. However, as an author, I want to be clear about my own biases and my own perspective- not only to be blinded by it but also to use it and be empowered by it.  My perspective matters in the world of Classics academia. But I am reminded that my reflection may never actually be seen by others but only by myself.

12

Juliana Romeo

A video element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can watch it online here: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas114valentine/?p=71

13

Kate Shimamoto

14

Carolynn Walden

Hi! I’m Carolynn (aka Connie) Walden, and I’ve made a little video introducing myself!

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas114valentine/?p=77

15

Rinny Williamson

https://goopyjibjob.itch.io/gsag21-writer-introduction

Here’s my introduction — it’s a choose your own adventure game. I hope you enjoy!:)

16

Lauren Ziment

My name is Lauren Ziment and I am a freshman at Pomona College. I am currently undecided as to what I want to study in college, but definitely know that I will not be studying pre-med because of a very strong phobia I have of blood and the associated tendency to faint in its presence (or even when just thinking about it which is newly discovered) This may prove to be difficult considering that classical texts provide very vivid imagery in battle scenes, so we will see how this goes. I have always been interested in gender studies and think that this book is going to be a great opportunity for me to explore gender and sexuality studies in the classical texts, and hopefully to draw parallels to our current day society. Because Ancient Greece marked the birth of democratic society and many of the cultural ideals we still see in present day, analyzing gender and sex roles and looking at them in relation to today will provide for, what I think, will be some very necessary insight. Personally identifying as a feminist, I am constantly looking to expand that definition and to look past the mainstream ideas and confines for the word. By studying the ancient texts, I hope to understand more about the gender roles in Ancient Greek society and compare them with my own definition of feminism to strive to broaden my understanding on a personal level and seek deeper understanding of the meaning of true equality in gender and in sex. I hope you will all bear with me as I will probably dive into some moments of introspection in my writing. I find that it is easiest to connect older material to the present day when we look specifically at how we can see some of the things we are learning and reading about in our own lives.

Just a little bit about me to frame myself as an author in relation to the material I will be discussing. I identify as a cisgender female and use she/her pronouns. I am from San Diego, CA where I have lived basically all my life, however, I was originally born in New York City, NY where I lived for a couple of years. I am very close with my family including both my parents, my sister, and my two adorable cats. I will be playing softball for Pomona-Pitzer and have played softball for 13 years. I think that’s probably enough about me for now. I just wanted to say that I am really excited to embark on this journey and hope you enjoy reading along with me.

II

Critical and Creative Counter-Narratives to the Iliad

How might we draw on queer and critical race theory to create our own counter-narratives in relationship to the Iliad?

Such a counter-narrative could be in the voice of a non-dominant character from the poem.  It might imagine a subaltern character’s (perhaps unnoticed or unexpressed) experience of the events, circumstances, or a specific scene, or the ramifications of the events, circumstances, or a specific scene on a character whose experience isn’t centered in the poem.  The counter-narrative could be in the author’s own voice(s), exploring their own experience of the poem, from a radical, critical, or otherwise non-dominant perspective.  What else could a counter-narrative to the Iliad look like?

Authors may create collaborative responses or post individually.

In the following chapters, students in Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece present their responses to these questions.

III

Theoretical Approaches

The Chapters of this Part are a selection of essays to support us in our work this semester.  Please read and annotate these chapters via hypothesis before class on Tuesday February 2nd.  These include:

1.  Simone de Beauvoir’s “Introduction: Woman as Other” from The Second Sex (1949/1952)

2.  Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” 1984

3.  Shelley Haley’s “Be Not Afraid of the Dark” (2009)

4.  Margo Hendricks’ “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race” (2019).

5.  Luna Castelli’s “Introduction to Critical Race Theory and Counter-Storytelling”

6.  Jesi Egan’s “Abusing Foucault: How Conservatives and Liberals Misunderstand “Social Construct” Sexuality” (2014)

17

Introduction Woman as Other

The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

Introduction
Woman as Other

For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: ‘Even in Russia women still are women’; and other erudite persons – sometimes the very same – say with a sigh: ‘Woman is losing her way, woman is lost.’ One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should, what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. ‘What has become of women?’ was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine.

But first we must ask: what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one, ‘woman is a womb’. But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the rest. All agree in recognising the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in the times of St Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy

But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro. Science regards any characteristic as a reaction dependent in part upon a situation. If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman … My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.’ But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine, and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women simply are not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality. Some years ago a well-known woman writer refused to permit her portrait to appear in a series of photographs especially devoted to women writers; she wished to be counted among the men. But in order to gain this privilege she made use of her husband’s influence! Women who assert that they are men lay claim none the less to masculine consideration and respect. I recall also a young Trotskyite standing on a platform at a boisterous meeting and getting ready to use her fists, in spite of her evident fragility. She was denying her feminine weakness; but it was for love of a militant male whose equal she wished to be. The attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their femininity. In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”?

To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer. The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that my only defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man’, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam.

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being …’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself … Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’

The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.

Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.

Lévi-Strauss, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of primitive societies, reaches the following conclusion: ‘Passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social reality.’ These phenomena would be incomprehensible if in fact human society were simply a Mitsein or fellowship based on solidarity and friendliness. Things become clear, on the contrary, if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.

But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim. The native travelling abroad is shocked to find himself in turn regarded as a ‘stranger’ by the natives of neighbouring countries. As a matter of fact, wars, festivals, trading, treaties, and contests among tribes, nations, and classes tend to deprive the concept Other of its absolute sense and to make manifest its relativity; willy-nilly, individuals and groups are forced to realize the reciprocity of their relations. How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been recognised between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this submission in the case of woman?

There are, to be sure, other cases in which a certain category has been able to dominate another completely for a time. Very often this privilege depends upon inequality of numbers – the majority imposes its rule upon the minority or persecutes it. But women are not a minority, like the American Negroes or the Jews; there are as many women as men on earth. Again, the two groups concerned have often been originally independent; they may have been formerly unaware of each other’s existence, or perhaps they recognised each other’s autonomy. But a historical event has resulted in the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger. The scattering of the Jews, the introduction of slavery into America, the conquests of imperialism are examples in point. In these cases the oppressed retained at least the memory of former days; they possessed in common a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion or a culture.

The parallel drawn by Bebel between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind. And instead of a single historical event it is in both cases a historical development that explains their status as a class and accounts for the membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in virtue of their anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they have always been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change – it was not something that occurred. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time, as the Negroes of Haiti and others have proved: but it might seem that natural condition is beyond the possibility of change. In truth, however, the nature of things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical reality. If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say ‘We’; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are battling for it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.

The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another.

One could suppose that this reciprocity might have facilitated the liberation of woman. When Hercules sat at the feet of Omphale and helped with her spinning, his desire for her held him captive; but why did she fail to gain a lasting power? To revenge herself on Jason, Medea killed their children; and this grim legend would seem to suggest that she might have obtained a formidable influence over him through his love for his offspring. In Lysistrata Aristophanes gaily depicts a band of women who joined forces to gain social ends through the sexual needs of their men; but this is only a play. In the legend of the Sabine women, the latter soon abandoned their plan of remaining sterile to punish their ravishers. In truth woman has not been socially emancipated through man’s need – sexual desire and the desire for offspring – which makes the male dependent for satisfaction upon the female.

Master and slave, also, are united by a reciprocal need, in this case economic, which does not liberate the slave. In the relation of master to slave the master does not make a point of the need that he has for the other; he has in his grasp the power of satisfying this need through his own action; whereas the slave, in his dependent condition, his hope and fear, is quite conscious of the need he has for his master. Even if the need is at bottom equally urgent for both, it always works in favour of the oppressor and against the oppressed. That is why the liberation of the working class, for example, has been slow.

Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as man’s, and frequently it is much to her disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognised in the abstract, long-standing custom prevents their full expression in the mores. In the economic sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two castes; other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages, and have more opportunity for success than their new competitors. In industry and politics men have a great many more positions and they monopolise the most important posts. In addition to all this, they enjoy a traditional prestige that the education of children tends in every way to support, for the present enshrines the past – and in the past all history has been made by men. At the present time, when women are beginning to take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that belongs to men – they have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any. To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it – passive, lost, ruined – becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value. But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect to manifest deep-seated tendencies towards complicity. Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.

But it will be asked at once: how did all this begin? It is easy to see that the duality of the sexes, like any duality, gives rise to conflict. And doubtless the winner will assume the status of absolute. But why should man have won from the start? It seems possible that women could have won the victory; or that the outcome of the conflict might never have been decided. How is it that this world has always belonged to the men and that things have begun to change only recently? Is this change a good thing? Will it bring about an equal sharing of the world between men and women?

These questions are not new, and they have often been answered. But the very fact that woman is the Other tends to cast suspicion upon all the justifications that men have ever been able to provide for it. These have all too evidently been dictated by men’s interest. A little-known feminist of the seventeenth century, Poulain de la Barre, put it this way: ‘All that has been written about women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge and party to the lawsuit.’ Everywhere, at all times, the males have displayed their satisfaction in feeling that they are the lords of creation. ‘Blessed be God … that He did not make me a woman,’ say the Jews in their morning prayers, while their wives pray on a note of resignation: ‘Blessed be the Lord, who created me according to His will.’ The first among the blessings for which Plato thanked the gods was that he had been created free, not enslaved; the second, a man, not a woman. But the males could not enjoy this privilege fully unless they believed it to be founded on the absolute and the eternal; they sought to make the fact of their supremacy into a right. ‘Being men, those who have made and compiled the laws have favoured their own sex, and jurists have elevated these laws into principles’, to quote Poulain de la Barre once more.

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination. In the legends of Eve and Pandora men have taken up arms against women. They have made use of philosophy and theology, as the quotations from Aristotle and St Thomas have shown. Since ancient times satirists and moralists have delighted in showing up the weaknesses of women. We are familiar with the savage indictments hurled against women throughout French literature. Montherlant, for example, follows the tradition of Jean de Meung, though with less gusto. This hostility may at times be well founded, often it is gratuitous; but in truth it more or less successfully conceals a desire for self-justification. As Montaigne says, ‘It is easier to accuse one sex than to excuse the other’. Sometimes what is going on is clear enough. For instance, the Roman law limiting the rights of woman cited ‘the imbecility, the instability of the sex’ just when the weakening of family ties seemed to threaten the interests of male heirs. And in the effort to keep the married woman under guardianship, appeal was made in the sixteenth century to the authority of St Augustine, who declared that ‘woman is a creature neither decisive nor constant’, at a time when the single woman was thought capable of managing her property. Montaigne understood clearly how arbitrary and unjust was woman’s appointed lot: ‘Women are not in the wrong when they decline to accept the rules laid down for them, since the men make these rules without consulting them. No wonder intrigue and strife abound.’ But he did not go so far as to champion their cause.

It was only later, in the eighteenth century, that genuinely democratic men began to view the matter objectively. Diderot, among others, strove to show that woman is, like man, a human being. Later John Stuart Mill came fervently to her defence. But these philosophers displayed unusual impartiality. In the nineteenth century the feminist quarrel became again a quarrel of partisans. One of the consequences of the industrial revolution was the entrance of women into productive labour, and it was just here that the claims of the feminists emerged from the realm of theory and acquired an economic basis, while their opponents became the more aggressive. Although landed property lost power to some extent, the bourgeoisie clung to the old morality that found the guarantee of private property in the solidity of the family. Woman was ordered back into the home the more harshly as her emancipation became a real menace. Even within the working class the men endeavoured to restrain woman’s liberation, because they began to see the women as dangerous competitors – the more so because they were accustomed to work for lower wages.

In proving woman’s inferiority, the anti-feminists then began to draw not only upon religion, philosophy, and theology, as before, but also upon science – biology, experimental psychology, etc. At most they were willing to grant ‘equality in difference’ to the other sex. That profitable formula is most significant; it is precisely like the ‘equal but separate’ formula of the Jim Crow laws aimed at the North American Negroes. As is well known, this so-called equalitarian segregation has resulted only in the most extreme discrimination. The similarity just noted is in no way due to chance, for whether it is a race, a caste, a class, or a sex that is reduced to a position of inferiority, the methods of justification are the same. ‘The eternal feminine’ corresponds to ‘the black soul’ and to ‘the Jewish character’. True, the Jewish problem is on the whole very different from the other two – to the anti-Semite the Jew is not so much an inferior as he is an enemy for whom there is to be granted no place on earth, for whom annihilation is the fate desired. But there are deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro. Both are being emancipated today from a like paternalism, and the former master class wishes to ‘keep them in their place’ – that is, the place chosen for them. In both cases the former masters lavish more or less sincere eulogies, either on the virtues of ‘the good Negro’ with his dormant, childish, merry soul – the submissive Negro – or on the merits of the woman who is ‘truly feminine’ – that is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsible the submissive woman. In both cases the dominant class bases its argument on a state of affairs that it has itself created. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, in substance, ‘The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.’ This vicious circle is met with in all analogous circumstances; when an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of ‘to have become’. Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue?

Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle. The conservative bourgeoisie still see in the emancipation of women a menace to their morality and their interests. Some men dread feminine competition. Recently a male student wrote in the Hebdo-Latin: ‘Every woman student who goes into medicine or law robs us of a job.’ He never questioned his rights in this world. And economic interests are not the only ones concerned. One of the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most humble among them is made to feel superior; thus, a ‘poor white’ in the South can console himself with the thought that he is not a ‘dirty nigger’ – and the more prosperous whites cleverly exploit this pride.

Similarly, the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. It was much easier for M. de Montherlant to think himself a hero when he faced women (and women chosen for his purpose) than when he was obliged to act the man among men – something many women have done better than he, for that matter. And in September 1948, in one of his articles in the Figaro littéraire, Claude Mauriac – whose great originality is admired by all – could write regarding woman: ‘We listen on a tone [sic!] of polite indifference … to the most brilliant among them, well knowing that her wit reflects more or less luminously ideas that come from us.’ Evidently the speaker referred to is not reflecting the ideas of Mauriac himself, for no one knows of his having any. It may be that she reflects ideas originating with men, but then, even among men there are those who have been known to appropriate ideas not their own; and one can well ask whether Claude Mauriac might not find more interesting a conversation reflecting Descartes, Marx, or Gide rather than himself. What is really remarkable is that by using the questionable we he identifies himself with St Paul, Hegel, Lenin, and Nietzsche, and from the lofty eminence of their grandeur looks down disdainfully upon the bevy of women who make bold to converse with him on a footing of equality. In truth, I know of more than one woman who would refuse to suffer with patience Mauriac’s ‘tone of polite indifference’.

I have lingered on this example because the masculine attitude is here displayed with disarming ingenuousness. But men profit in many more subtle ways from the otherness, the alterity of woman. Here is a miraculous balm for those afflicted with an inferiority complex, and indeed no one is more arrogant towards women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility. Those who are not fear-ridden in the presence of their fellow men are much more disposed to recognise a fellow creature in woman; but even to these the myth of Woman, the Other, is precious for many reasons. They cannot be blamed for not cheerfully relinquishing all the benefits they derive from the myth, for they realize what they would lose in relinquishing woman as they fancy her to be, while they fail to realize what they have to gain from the woman of tomorrow. Refusal to pose oneself as the Subject, unique and absolute, requires great self-denial. Furthermore, the vast majority of men make no such claim explicitly. They do not postulate woman as inferior, for today they are too thoroughly imbued with the ideal of democracy not to recognise all human beings as equals.

In the bosom of the family, woman seems in the eyes of childhood and youth to be clothed in the same social dignity as the adult males. Later on, the young man, desiring and loving, experiences the resistance, the independence of the woman desired and loved; in marriage, he respects woman as wife and mother, and in the concrete events of conjugal life she stands there before him as a free being. He can therefore feel that social subordination as between the sexes no longer exists and that on the whole, in spite of differences, woman is an equal. As, however, he observes some points of inferiority – the most important being unfitness for the professions – he attributes these to natural causes. When he is in a co-operative and benevolent relation with woman, his theme is the principle of abstract equality, and he does not base his attitude upon such inequality as may exist. But when he is in conflict with her, the situation is reversed: his theme will be the existing inequality, and he will even take it as justification for denying abstract equality.

So it is that many men will affirm as if in good faith that women are the equals of man and that they have nothing to clamour for, while at the same time they will say that women can never be the equals of man and that their demands are in vain. It is, in point of fact, a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature. The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation. And there is no reason to put much trust in the men when they rush to the defence of privileges whose full extent they can hardly measure. We shall not, then, permit ourselves to be intimidated by the number and violence of the attacks launched against women, nor to be entrapped by the self-seeking eulogies bestowed on the ‘true woman’, nor to profit by the enthusiasm for woman’s destiny manifested by men who would not for the world have any part of it.

We should consider the arguments of the feminists with no less suspicion, however, for very often their controversial aim deprives them of all real value. If the ‘woman question’ seems trivial, it is because masculine arrogance has made of it a ‘quarrel’; and when quarrelling one no longer reasons well. People have tirelessly sought to prove that woman is superior, inferior, or equal to man. Some say that, having been created after Adam, she is evidently a secondary being: others say on the contrary that Adam was only a rough draft and that God succeeded in producing the human being in perfection when He created Eve. Woman’s brain is smaller; yes, but it is relatively larger. Christ was made a man; yes, but perhaps for his greater humility. Each argument at once suggests its opposite, and both are often fallacious. If we are to gain understanding, we must get out of these ruts; we must discard the vague notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto corrupted every discussion of the subject and start afresh.

Very well, but just how shall we pose the question? And, to begin with, who are we to propound it at all? Man is at once judge and party to the case; but so is woman. What we need is an angel – neither man nor woman – but where shall we find one? Still, the angel would be poorly qualified to speak, for an angel is ignorant of all the basic facts involved in the problem. With a hermaphrodite we should be no better off, for here the situation is most peculiar; the hermaphrodite is not really the combination of a whole man and a whole woman, but consists of parts of each and thus is neither. It looks to me as if there are, after all, certain women who are best qualified to elucidate the situation of woman. Let us not be misled by the sophism that because Epimenides was a Cretan he was necessarily a liar; it is not a mysterious essence that compels men and women to act in good or in bad faith, it is their situation that inclines them more or less towards the search for truth. Many of today’s women, fortunate in the restoration of all the privileges pertaining to the estate of the human being, can afford the luxury of impartiality – we even recognise its necessity. We are no longer like our partisan elders; by and large we have won the game. In recent debates on the status of women the United Nations has persistently maintained that the equality of the sexes is now becoming a reality, and already some of us have never had to sense in our femininity an inconvenience or an obstacle. Many problems appear to us to be more pressing than those which concern us in particular, and this detachment even allows us to hope that our attitude will be objective. Still, we know the feminine world more intimately than do the men because we have our roots in it, we grasp more immediately than do men what it means to a human being to be feminine; and we are more concerned with such knowledge. I have said that there are more pressing problems, but this does not prevent us from seeing some importance in asking how the fact of being women will affect our lives. What opportunities precisely have been given us and what withheld? What fate awaits our younger sisters, and what directions should they take? It is significant that books by women on women are in general animated in our day less by a wish to demand our rights than by an effort towards clarity and understanding. As we emerge from an era of excessive controversy, this book is offered as one attempt among others to confirm that statement.

But it is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind free from bias. The way in which questions are put, the points of view assumed, presuppose a relativity of interest; all characteristics imply values, and every objective description, so called, implies an ethical background. Rather than attempt to conceal principles more or less definitely implied, it is better to state them openly, at the beginning. This will make it unnecessary to specify on every page in just what sense one uses such words as superior, inferior, better, worse, progress, reaction, and the like. If we survey some of the works on woman, we note that one of the points of view most frequently adopted is that of the public good, the general interest; and one always means by this the benefit of society as one wishes it to be maintained or established. For our part, we hold that the only public good is that which assures the private good of the citizens; we shall pass judgement on institutions according to their effectiveness in giving concrete opportunities to individuals. But we do not confuse the idea of private interest with that of happiness, although that is another common point of view. Are not women of the harem more happy than women voters? Is not the housekeeper happier than the working-woman? It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the happiness of others, and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them.

In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.

Now, what peculiarly signalises the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilise her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfilment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.

Quite evidently this problem would be without significance if we were to believe that woman’s destiny is inevitably determined by physiological, psychological, or economic forces. Hence I shall discuss first of all the light in which woman is viewed by biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism. Next I shall try to show exactly how the concept of the ‘truly feminine’ has been fashioned – why woman has been defined as the Other – and what have been the consequences from man’s point of view. Then from woman’s point of view I shall describe the world in which women must live; and thus we shall be able to envisage the difficulties in their way as, endeavouring to make their escape from the sphere hitherto assigned them, they aspire to full membership in the human race.

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18

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

by Audre Lorde

Preface:

In the 1970s, women of color and lesbians in the United States called on feminist scholars to recognize their own discriminatory practices and to analyze the intersections of racial, sexual, and gender hierarchies. At an academic feminist conference commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the lesbian poet and literature professor Audre Lorde articulated the frustrations of women treated as tokens, the sole black or lesbian speaker invited to participate in a predominantly white movement. Her influential remarks impelled women’s studies courses, programs, and conferences to expand their vision and embrace, rather than fear, differences among women. Lorde knew firsthand the dilemmas of bridging cultures. Raised in Harlem by Caribbean immigrant parents, she had been one of the few black women within the lesbian bar culture that flourished in post-World War II New York City.

Her poetry increasingly dealt with multiple identities. “I who am bound by my mirror / as well as my bed / see causes in color/ as well as sex,” she wrote in “The Black Unicorn” (New York: Norton, 1978). Along with members of the Combahee River Collective, Lorde helped found Kitchen Table—Women of Color Press. Her autobiographical prose includeds The Cancer Journals (1980), and Sami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982).

–From The Essential Feminist Reader edited by Estelle B. Freedman

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House Audre Lorde (1984)

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.

It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and womenidentified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women “who attempt to emancipate themselves ay perhaps too high a price for the results,” as this paper states.

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power I rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.

Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?

In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don’t love each other?

In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, “We do not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art our of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work our of most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, which feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us—white and Black— when it is key to our survival as a movement?

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educated men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.

Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.” Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.

Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.

Lying is your trademark.

And you have lied so much to me

(Lied about the world, lied about me)

That you have ended by imposing on me An image of myself.

Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,

That s the way you have forced me to see myself

I detest that image! What’s more, it’s a lie!

But now I know you, you old cancer,

And I know myself as well.

~ Caliban, in Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest

Citation: Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007. Print.

19

Be Not Afraid of the Dark

EXCERPTS FROM:

Critical Race Theory and Classical Studies

by Shelley P. Haley

Critical race theory had its beginnings in the scholarship of jurisprudence and in the sociological theory of social construction that developed in the 1970s as a response to the backlash and rollbacks of civil rights legislation. To me, as a Classical Studies scholar who is simultaneously a woman of African descent, critical race theory is appealing because of its oppositional stance and its use of storytelling to challenge negative portrayals of all people of color, but particularly people of African descent.

Critical race theory has found its way into the academy with the publication of Ladson-Billings and Tate’s article, “Towards a Critical Theory of Education.”[1] In addition, critical race theory has nurtured critical race feminism, which centers on the experiential knowledge of women of color and challenges white liberal feminism and essentialist feminism. I would argue that critical race theory has also found its way into literary criticism, most notably in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark.[2]

Admittedly, this all sounds very twentieth and twenty-first century. How can a classicist justify using a theory so closely aligned with modern phenomena like “race,” “racism,” and “systemic oppression” to analyze the vanished societies of ancient Greece and ancient Rome? I hope to show in this chapter that my justification abides in the fact that the interpreters of these ancient societies were or are intellectuals of the nineteenth through twentieth-first centuries, and so have internalized (consciously or not) the values, structures, and behaviors that foster the need for critical race theory.

It is important to remember that critical race theory challenges the experience of whites as the norm while at the same time it centers its conceptual framework in the experiences of people of color. In its broadest possible framing, critical race theory demonstrates that there are multiple levels of meaning of race and difference and that these levels are experienced simultaneously. [28]

According to George J. Sefa Dei, “There is a social, political, cultural, and intellectual meaning of race and difference. . . . Race and racisms also work differently for groups depending on history, geography, culture, class, and gender.”[3]  Before we can even attempt an integrated analysis of these factors on the ancient construction of race, we must interrogate the extent to which we bring our modern “social, political, cultural, and intellectual meaning of race and difference”4 to our analyses of the ancient world. Only by acknowledging the presence of this meaning can we begin to pull back the layers in order to arrive at the ancient construct of race. It certainly is not easy. [29]

This excerpt comes from pages 28 – 29 [pages marked in square brackets] of:

Haley, Shelley. 2009. “Be Not Afraid of the Dark: Critical Race Theory and Classical Studies.” In Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies, edited by Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 27–49. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

1. G. Ladson-Billings and W. Tate, “Towards a Critical Theory of Education,” Teachers College Report 97 (1995): 4–68. ↵

2. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992). ↵

3. George J. Sefa Dei, “Recasting Anti-Racism and the Axis of Difference: Beyond the Question of Theory,” Race, Class and Gender 7, no.2 (2000): 38–48. This particular quote is taken from the ProQuest version ↵

20

Introduction to Critical Race Theory and Counter-Storytelling

by Luna Castelli

Reproduced here from “The Noise Project”: https://noiseproject.org/learn/introduction-to-critical-race-theory-and-counter-storytelling/

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a movement that joins together activists and scholars who study and aim to transform “the relationship among race, racism, and power”(1). Originally started in the legal discipline, this theory has spread to various fields of study, research, and activism. Nowadays, CRT is commonly applied in fields such as education, Latino studies, Asian studies, and LGBTQ studies. CRT was built on insights from critical legal studies and radical feminism and gains inspiration from figures such as “Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, César Chávez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Power and Chicano movements” (2).

Critical Race theory can be used to deconstruct the power dynamics that surround race and racism through everyday societal structures and institutions. This theory can be helpful in understanding and transforming these power dynamics by using different methods and approaches that work towards equity and representation for minority populations. For example, a signature of CRT is revisionist history. This method “reexamines America’s historical record” to replace narratives that only reflect the majority perspective with those that include the perspectives and lived experiences of minority populations. In this way revisionist history attempts “to unearth little-known chapters of racial struggle” that can validate the current experiences of minorities and support the desire for change. This is just one example of how CRT can be used to elevate minority voices and work towards equity.

Another example of this can be seen through one of the major tenants of Critical Race Theory called Counter-storytelling.  Counter-storytelling is used to magnify the stories, experiences, narratives, and truths of underprivileged communities. Everywhere we turn, the world is filled with dominant culture narratives. ‘Dominant culture’ refers to the practices, norms, and ideas that have the most power and influence in social, institutional, and economic structures. For example, although I grew up in the United States I immigrated from South America and I was raised in a household that held the values and practices of my home country. Throughout the years I have held on to my culture’s norms, many of which are different from those of the dominant culture in the USA. This creates a difference in how I behave and think compared to how my peers and mentors may expect me to behave and think. The dominant culture maintains minority experiences in the background and is sustained through various levels of society. Things like history, textbooks, movies, fiction, academia, and media have all been centered around the experiences and lives of the dominant culture. Minority populations interacting with these forms of media may feel deeply excluded as they encounter stories and narratives that do not fit or apply to their lives. Even when an underprivileged community is at the center of the storytelling, the narrative tends to come from elite or privileged individuals outside of the community. This means that the community and their experience is only seen through the filter of the dominant culture. To resist this erasure, counter-storytelling creates space for community voices to create the narrative that defines their own experiences and lives. By giving power to the voices of individuals and communities, counter-storytelling fights against the dominant culture narratives that lack the knowledge and wisdom that minority individuals hold about themselves and their traditions, cultures, communities, homes, struggles, and needs. To see an example of counter-storytelling at work click here!

(1) Delgado, Richard. Critical Race Theory (Third Edition) (Critical America) (p. 2). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.

(2) Delgado, Richard. Critical Race Theory (Third Edition) (Critical America) (p. 5). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.

21

Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race

by Margo Hendricks

A SoundCloud element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas114valentine/?p=90

Race and Periodization | Learn more about the event and hear introductory remarks by Michael Witmore and Ayanna Thompson

Race and Periodization

Listen to a recording of the opening lecture given by Margo Hendricks at the September 2019 “Race and Periodization” symposium, co-sponsored by the Folger Institute and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The focus of the “Race and Periodization” symposium was the relationship between race and historical periods; it is part of the #RaceB4Race initiative, which launched in January 2019 at Arizona State University.

Margo Hendricks is professor emerita of literature at UC Santa Cruz. She is the co-editor of Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, with Patricia Parker (Routledge, 1993) and the author of many journal articles. Her current works in progress are an academic memoir and Heliodorus’ Daughters: Black Women and the Romance Industry. She writes romance fiction as Elysabeth Grace.

Transcript

MARGO HENDRICKS: Okay, I have permission to do this. [LAUGHTER] Y’all thought I was joking? [PLAYS SHORT CLIP OF “CALIFORNIA LOVE” BY 2PAC FT. DR. DRE] All right. Michael’s never going to invite me back to the Folger! [LAUGHTER]

First of all, I want to thank all of you for being here. I’m a little nervous, because it’s been a while since I gave a talk, and the last one I did—and I have no pockets, and please, somebody, let’s start really seriously giving women pockets—the last time I gave a talk, it was supposed to be my farewell to Shakespeare studies. It was a rough time. I did not care for the direction that I saw the field going, and I’m one of those individuals, if I don’t like something, I say it, and then I disappear. Unfortunately, there were certain people who didn’t allow the disappearance.

This talk is called “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race.” For anyone who doesn’t know me, you will quickly discover I have no filters. Well, maybe one or two left. My academic career on paper has been successful, though I haven’t written or published an academic article in years, which makes me either uninvested or an ancestor. Because I write romance novels, I’m going with the latter. Consider me your ancestor.

However, before I claim ancestral privilege, I want to share. Who I am in the academy falls squarely on the shoulders of the following people, and this is in no particular order, so: Kim Hall, Arthur Little, Ayanna Thompson, Joyce Green MacDonald, Francesca Royster, Elder Jones, Anthony Barthelemy, Imtiaz Habib, Patricia Parker, Geraldine Heng, Peter Fryer, Peter Stallybrass, Hayden White, Harry Berger, Michael Warren, Don Wayne, Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill, Perry Anderson, Stuart Hall, Terence Hawkes, and, most of all, Zeola Culpepper Jones, my great-grandmother whose father was born enslaved. She was not. So, you can either blame them or sing their accolades for the fact that I’m standing here. I much prefer you do the latter. In other words, cite, cite, cite.

In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was Race

In the only essay I will unapologetically go, “Damn, that was good,” I wrote:

Somehow, giving our silent mestizo the voice [and the “silent mestizo,” if you don’t recall the essay, which is Midsummer Night’s Dream “Obscured by Dream,” was the Indian boy]—Somehow, giving our silent mestizo the voice of another mestizo, rather than that of an academic like myself, seems fitting. The words of this half-Scottish/half-Irish changeling stand as a vivid reminder that it is in the “antique fables,” the “fairy toys” produced in the colonizing dreams of Europeans, that the “shaping fantasies” of modern imperialism began. These words are a reminder that it will be the mestizos—the racialized descendants of those who framed the lexicon and practices of modern imperialism—who, in dealing with it, will write the final epilogue to the shaping fantasy of race.

This essay followed upon the heels of Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Of this book, I’m inordinately proud. It is a reflection of what I wanted to achieve as an early modern Shakespeare studies colonizer. The book was never intended solely for literary dialogue. Its purpose was to initiate conversations among and between academics working on race and gender in the early modern period. The absence of male contributors was deliberate. I believe Pat Parker and I succeeded with that book.

In 1997, I organized a University of California Humanities Research Institute residential research group, entitled “Theorizing Race in Pre- and Early Modern Contexts.” This group was made up of classics, medieval, and early modern academics. Now, 20 years later, I’ve been invited to speak about historical periods, race, and bridging a divide. What I learned from the members of the residency group: There is no divide.

There is, however, a problematic rupture worth exploration. For the purpose of this conversation, I’m going to refer to it as the “White settler colonizing” of “premodern critical race studies.” I’m also going to insist that we make a distinction between “premodern race studies” (PRS)—or “priss,” I can’t do this with the next acronym, so I’m sorry, I don’t have one—and “premodern critical race studies” (PCRS).

PRS is the practice of approaching race studies as if “you’ve just discovered the land.” Practitioners ignore the preexisting inhabitants of the land or, if PRS scholars deign to acknowledge the land is inhabited, it’s viewed as uncultivated and must be done so properly.

In this body of work, all evidence (or nearly all of the evidence) of the work done to nurture and make productive the land is ignored or briefly alluded to. In other words, the ancestry is erased. No articulation of the complex genealogy that produced premodern critical race studies exists, which in turn, drew these academic “settlers,” and I am calling them “settlers,” to premodern race. And just like capitalist “White settler colonialism,” PRS fails to acknowledge the scholarly ancestry (the genealogy) that continues to inhabit and nurture the critical process for the study of premodern race.

As Patrick Wolfe cogently reminds us, White “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” It is not an invasion, so much as it is a structural event, driven by “the logic of elimination.” Much of the theoretical and analytical critiques that form anti-settler colonialism are framed around indigeneity, which admittedly complicates the centrality of the notion of anti-Blackness being the center of “race” in the premodern period and what it means for premodern critical race studies. For the moment, I want to highlight—and I want to shift our gaze away from anti-Blackness—and I want to highlight why I link PRS to White settler colonialism and why it needs to go.

White Settler Colonizing in Premodern Race Studies

I want to suggest, I want to declare, “White settler colonialist” thinking is integral to premodern race studies. Why? Because “Whiteness” is centralized in PRS as the privileged narrative creep. PRS relegates its critical race studies’ ancestry to a citational entry, buried in a lengthy footnote, surrounded by scholarly Whiteness. This creeping Whiteness mediates the narrative by insisting on the sanctity of White-centric ideologies, genres, and, of course, the privilege of engagement: who gets cited, who doesn’t. Using this creep, anyone can wear the mantle of premodern race studies. What this individual fails to see in such practices is the ways PRS intersects with the ideologies of White supremacy, and PRS’s insistence on what Lehua Yim describes as the “arrogance of assumption” embedded in the inclusive “we.” Let me just take a minute and thank Lehua, because that woman talked me through some stuff. She’s friggin’ amazing. All right? That’s all I’m going to say. I love her.

This “we” envisions itself acting inclusively, engaged in the political work of furthering premodern race studies by structuring race as an event. Okay, I’m going here, Michael. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the blurb for Stephen Greenblatt’s led edX online course, “Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor.” I’m going dramatic on you here, okay? And this is the blurb, or part of it:

In this course, we will read Shakespeare’s Othello and discuss the play from a variety of perspectives. The goal of the course is not to cover everything that has been written on Othello. Rather, it is to find a single point of entry [I’m a romance writer, and when I read that line, Lord, I was about to run with it]—Rather, it is to find a single point of entry to help us think about the play as a whole. Our entry point is storytelling. . . . From lectures filmed on-location in Venice, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon to conversations with artists, academics, and librarians at Harvard, students will have an unprecedented access to a range of resources for “unlocking” Shakespeare’s classic play.

Greenblatt’s online course typifies, in my opinion, a classic, “White settler colonialist” move. Through the “logic of elimination,” this course de-centers the theoretical, historical, and analytical work done by premodern critical race theorists and scholars, none of whom, to my knowledge, are at Harvard. In effect, by focusing on the play as a matter of “storytelling” and framing it as a filmic piece—if you haven’t seen this, I can only take 45 minutes, but it was filmed—Greenblatt ensures that the spectatorial gaze is always White centered (“eyes on me”) and Othello’s sovereignty is consumed so that his race is always received as a structural event, rather than a structural process. A structural event. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat—over and over again.

There is a deep connective tissue between a resurgence of White supremacy and fascist discourse at present and the “White settler” colonizing that informs PRS, a connection which reinforces the underlying belief systems inherent in White supremacy—perhaps out of ignorance for PRS, perhaps not. In both cases, anti-Blackness sits as a peculiar litmus test for who does or who doesn’t do PRS. On the one hand, PRS sees the value of race as anti-Blackness, and therefore will turn Othello, Aaron, Caliban, and Ithamore [editor: from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta] into an “I am woke to premodern race studies” badge to wear. The problem with such wokeness is that generally, though not always, it fails to turn inward.

Rarely do these individuals ask of themselves: How does my discursively arguing for Othello’s emasculation, Ithamore and Aaron’s vengeful turns, Caliban’s de-humanization sustain a White supremist ideology? In what ways can I think about these characters independent of a gendered Whiteness, of White supremacy, of White settler colonialism? What if, instead of anti-Blackness, I consider these characters from a critical lens of anti-Whiteness? In other words, what if I disengage from my White privilege?

Not asking these questions shows how deeply White settler colonialism and its logic of elimination are implicated in the direction premodern race studies has taken over the past decade or so. Those of you who heard me kind of do this riff at SAA [Shakespeare Association of America] 2011, this is a little bit more sophisticated. Don’t get me wrong, race equaling anti-Blackness is still a jumping-off point for, I think, premodern critical race studies. We need to not let go of that. However, within PRS, race has come to be used as a structuring event for gender, lineage (or blood), nation, and class without any attention to skin color or indigeneity. As an ancestor, I own my responsibility in these acts of diffusion. Some of my publications do lend themselves to this type of “race signifies ______” and you fill in the blank. However, what always stood behind my writings was the belief that colonialism/imperialism, capitalism, and White sovereignty were handfast. They were wedded.

When we fall into the trap of trying to pinpoint the “actual first use of race” as a definitional or critical device, we inevitably fall into White supremacist discourse. When we make anti-Blackness the pivotal narrative, we elide the anti-Indigenous strategies woven into White supremacy’s insistence on anti-Blackness. It’s actually a very good strategy on the part of capitalism and its colonial arm. White settler colonialism happens through the mind. The enslaved Indigenous peoples removed from the continent of Africa were the first to undergo the horrors of colonization. White settler colonialism stripped the enslaved of their right to sovereignty as a capitalist experiment. An experiment that involved the destruction of a relationship to land, a relationship to community, and a relationship to the idea of sovereignty itself. By elevating the idea of individuality, a fundamental tenet of premodern and modern capitalism, and by stripping Indigenous peoples of their relationship to the means of production—you hear my anti-historical materialism work in here—their labor, and most importantly, land, White settler colonialism ensured that not only descendants of the enslaved, but all Indigenous peoples, remained locked in a capitalist experiment.

This experiment is what PRS fails to see, when the storytelling narrative is about “anti-Blackness” and not about White settler colonialism and its “anti-Indigeneity.” I told you this was going to be short.

Premodern Critical Race Studies

Someone asked me, “What does that mean?” [LAUGH] “I don’t know.” So I thought about it. So what does PCRS look like? I have no idea, except it’s not PRS in its current iteration. I do want to suggest, as part of the larger critical race theory practice and practices, PCRS actively pursues not only the study of race in the premodern, not only the way in which periods helped to define, demarcate, tear apart, and bring together the study of race in the premodern era, but the way that outcome, the way those studies can effect a transformation of the academy and its relationship to our world. PCRS is about being a public humanist. It’s about being an activist.

Unlike PRS, PCRS resists the study of race as a single, somatic event (skin color, in most cases) and insists that race be seen in terms of a socioeconomic process (colonialism). What truly distinguishes PCRS from PRS, of course, is the bidirectional gaze, the one that looks inward even as it looks outward. As bell hooks observed, “spaces of agency exist . . . wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The gaze has been and is a site of resistance for colonized . . . people globally.”

I want to argue that PCRS entails, or requires, both an oppositional and an insider definitional gaze. That like the term “Indigenous,” PCRS is strategic and political. It recognizes the analytical gaze’s capacity to define the premodern as a multiethnic system of competing sovereignties. PCRS will resist PRS’s tendency to make the study of race something akin to ecotourism (a passive-aggressive form of White settler colonialism). PCRS is an intellectual, political, and public interrogation of capitalism’s capacious erasure of the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, whether in the Americas, the Pacific islands, Asia, or the African continent.

PCRS is the work of humanists/activists who recognize that the kinetic importance of their work is not strolling through Venice, posturing your PRS creds, but finding ways to destabilize the academy’s role in furthering capitalism’s use of White supremacy to sustain itself. That’s what PCRS does.

PCRS also recognizes and acknowledges its genealogies. It celebrates that lineage—citation—and it uses it “to dismantle the master’s house” since the master’s tools are ineffective.

I’m going to end now.

This is an epilogue. Since I’m both an academic and a romance writer, I will end with something I wrote years ago.

Willoughby Plantation, Barbadoes 1649

The young girl sat at the feet of her Black nurse, entranced as the woman’s aged fingers moved swiftly and certainly through the cane husks, bringing to life a past nearly forgotten. “Tell me once more, Nana. Tell me about the Negress Maria.”

“In the veins of the Negress Maria flowed the blood of kings. Both she and her sister (who was called Phillipa), were taken as young girls, no older than you. Maria was perhaps fifteen. The Spaniard who stole her kept her as his mistress. Her beauty then bewitched an Englishman. It was he who taught her the secrets of love and hate. Francis Drake, the Dragon,” the old woman spat.

The woman stroked the girl’s dark hair. “Drake fathered Francisco, your mother’s grandsire, on the Negress Maria then left her to die on an island with no women to care for her. None to bring the babe into the world. They lived, mother and child. They lived. Francisco was always a wild seed, not African like his mother but not English like his father. The Spanish called him Mulattos, little mules. He was of that temper. When an English ship came to the island to take on food and water, Francisco persuaded the captain to take him on. Maria’s son worked hard for the merciless White man, and when Francisco came to England he left the barbaric captain and went in search of his father. Alas, it was not to be. The Dragon was dead. With no mother, no father, no lands, Francisco was lost. Desterrado.”

“Exile,” the child mouthed.

“Exile,” the old woman acknowledged. “His child begat a child and that child begat a child, you, and with each generation, the Negress Maria’s blood grows thinner and Drake’s stronger. Francisco knew that those of his seed would wear the Whiteness of his father and pass among the English as one of them. Before his death, he made his daughter Elizabeth swear to remember his line. His daughter’s daughter was to be called Aphra. For the dark earth that nurtured her ancestors. Aphra, A-P-H-R-A. To remind her that, despite her Whiteness, she was of the land, of Africa, was forever mestizaje, forever desterrado.”

All right, one last comment before I walk away—well, not permanently, because Ayanna won’t let me. Y’all are the next generation. I’m handing it over to you. Don’t come looking for me to be brilliant. Don’t come looking for me to save y’all. Don’t look for me to be theoretical. I’m just going to be me.

Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

22

Abusing Foucault: How Conservatives and Liberals Misunderstand “Social Construct” Sexuality

by Jesi Egan

MARCH 04, 2014

Where does sexual orientation come from? It’s a tired question and, frankly, a tiresome one, since it always seems to lead us back to the same familiar (and likely inextricable) tangle of science, culture, and ideology. That said, it’s at least worth trying to keep the terms of the debate, well, straight, and “social construct”—the notion that sexual orientation is a modern invention, with which a person might or might not choose to affiliate—is a concept that has been greatly misunderstood.

To wit: last month, the religious journal First Things published a controversial essay by Michael W. Hannon called “Against Heterosexuality,” which offers an ultra-conservative take on the issue of whether our sexual orientations are natural conditions or chosen constructs. Hannon’s piece is just the latest in a number of recent articles in the “choice wars.” Brandon Ambrosino, writing for the New Republic, set off a small firestorm in January when he described his homosexuality as a choice, not a biological fact. His article provoked vitriolic responses from, among others, Gabriel Arana and Slate’s own Mark Joseph Stern. Clearly, the biology vs. choice (or nature vs. culture) debate remains a point of serious contention within the LGBTQ community and beyond.

But does “construct” mean what these new adopters think it does? Though Hannon and Ambrosino have different political endgames, they both invoke a very unlikely ally: Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who’s known as the grandfather of queer theory and a central architect of the “construct” conception of sexuality. Though Foucault died in 1984, his History of Sexuality, Volume I is still mandatory reading in LGBTQ studies courses. His theories about where sexuality comes from have been hugely influential in academia for decades. But Foucault is also responsible for a lot of the confusion surrounding the biology vs. choice debate—largely because his work been taken out of context by liberals and social conservatives alike. While Hannon’s essay is a particularly disturbing piece of work (see Stern’s scathing take-down for more), all of these popular misinterpretations tend to muddy the political waters, and risk obscuring Foucault’s most important contributions to our understanding of sexuality.

Let’s start with a quick primer. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault writes that Western society’s views on sex have undergone a major shift over the past few centuries. It’s not that same-sex relationships or desires didn’t exist before—they definitely did. What’s relatively new, though, is 1) the idea that our desires reveal some fundamental truth about who we are, and 2) the conviction that we have an obligation to seek out that truth and express it.

Within this framework, sex isn’t just something you do. Instead, the kind of sex you have (or want to have) becomes a symptom of something else: your sexuality. Though Foucault traces the origins of this shift back to the 16th century, our modern conceptions of sexuality really take root during the Victorian era, when the psychiatrist replaced the priest as the confessional authority figure. The science of sexuality was born—along with the elaborate systems of classification that allowed doctors to establish a divide between “normal” sexualities and “deviant” ones (like homosexuality).

How did one detect, diagnose, and correct deviancy? Parents, teachers, and doctors had to maintain constant vigilance over young children, so as to identify abnormal tendencies as early as possible. As they grew up, children would internalize these procedures of examination, until eventually they could be counted on to carefully monitor and report on their own thoughts, feelings, and desires. Foucault and people like Hannon agree on this point: in modern Western society, we experience a great deal of pressure to share and interpret our sexual impulses. Every desire, no matter how fleeting, must be catalogued and made to fit into our overarching sense of who we are. Queer people may experience this pressure in a more intense and immediate way than heterosexuals do, but nobody is immune. You might think you’re straight, but you’d better keep a very close eye on things, just in case. And even if you cross your t’s, dot your i’s, and say “No homo” at all the right moments, it’s still possible that others will be able to detect something in you that you didn’t know was there.

For Foucault, the obsession with figuring out the truth of our sexualities is a trap. After all, how do we know when to stop? Who can tell us when we’ve peeled back the final layer of social constraints and discovered our truest, most authentic selves? Foucault—who, by the way, identified as gay—knew that knowledge can never really be separated from power. Sometimes knowledge can be empowering, like when we take the language that was once used to diagnose us and turn it into a political rallying cry. But that knowledge can also be wielded against us, often with very concrete and painful results. Thinking and talking endlessly about our sexualities doesn’t really get us closer to figuring out who we “really are.” It does, however, generate plenty of evidence that can be used to monitor, control, and discipline us when we deviate from the norm.

This is why Foucault, who spent his life studying criminals, so-called sexual deviants, and the mentally ill, never tried to analyze these people the way a doctor or psychologist might. He wasn’t interested in figuring out what environmental or genetic factors caused them to turn out like they did. In fact, he refused to ask or answer those kinds of questions at all. When an interviewer inquired whether he thought homosexuality was an “innate predisposition” or the result of “social conditioning,” Foucault replied, “On this question I have absolutely nothing to say. No comment.” Pressed for details, he explained that he would not use his position of authority to “traffic in opinions.”

In the end, Foucault wasn’t interested in settling the question of whether sexual orientation was biologically determined or, indeed, socially constructed. What he wanted to understand was how sexuality came to be the question—the one thing we believe we have to answer before we can move on to anything else.

However, that does not mean he thought we should, or even could, dismiss these categories out of hand. And this is where Hannon and the other choicers deeply (and, it should be said, perhaps willfully) misunderstand Foucault: “Social construct” doesn’t mean “not real.” Try that logic out on the 81 percent of LGBTQ students who report experiencing verbal or physical harassment at school, or the estimated 40 percent of homeless youth who identify as gay and/or trans: These are people who know firsthand that these “fragile constructs,” as Hannon puts it, still have tremendous real world power. We live in a world that values and rewards certain identities and punishes, often brutally, those who don’t fit that mold. Concepts like sexuality aren’t just names that we can take on or cast off at will. They are structures built into the very fabric of modern society, and they shape, from Day 1, how we understand the world and our place within it.

If I believed Hannon was actually interested in dismantling what queer theorists call “compulsory heterosexuality,” I’d be the first to enlist in his campaign. As theorists of race and gender have long recognized, however, the dream of easily declaring ourselves “post”-anything often conceals a desire to sweep structural inequalities and long histories of violence under the rug. To say that sexuality doesn’t or shouldn’t matter is to deny many people the reality of their lived experience. It is also to ignore this important truth: that while society may construct these categories, these categories also construct us, and not only in negative ways. Identifying as queer isn’t simply a matter of swapping your straight hat for a feather boa. For most of us, it is a lifelong process of crafting bodies, relationships, and selves that can make our lives fuller, our art more vibrant, and the task of existing a little less destructive.

To me, making space for that kind of work seems like a better use of our collective energy than spinning our wheels at the biology vs. culture impasse. Changing our ideas and institutions is possible: that’s what The History of Sexuality helps us see, by showing us that our categories are not set in stone. After all, we arrived here, and that must mean we can still go elsewhere—but in order to do that, we have to follow Foucault’s lead and start asking some different questions.

Published originally in SLATE at: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/03/sexuality-as-social-construct-foucault-is-misunderstood-by-conservatives-and-liberals.html

IV

Theoretical Approaches : Resources

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Anti-Racism Resources

A working document for scaffolding anti-racism resources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PrAq4iBNb4nVIcTsLcNlW8zjaQXBLkWayL8EaPlh0bc/preview?fbclid=IwAR3NRYunPLuLuGqOCxoMJhSP8cQZxBkabxb_hYygHjUNrdmaoNdgyIhDUNQ&pru=AAABcpq8c14*C_JncXmFmMjf8og2gUGURA

The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture: https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html

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Foucault's History of Sexuality

Everyday Aphrodite Podcast, Episode 4 by Dr. Tom Sapsford: A great introduction to Michel Foucault.

See these excerpts from:

Foucault, Michel. 1990a. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Reissue edition. New York: Vintage.

Foucault_History of Sexuality Vol 1

Foucault, Michel. 1990b. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. Reissue edition. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault_Histroy of Sexuality Volume 2

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Storytelling and Counter-Narrative

For various resources on how storytelling can inform activism, check out https://workingnarratives.org/: “We work with movements to tell great stories that inspire, activate and enliven our democracy. We believe that social movements thrive and win when they draw on participants’ personal experiences and local cultures. By telling stories—in the form of performance, radio, video or other media—movements build power, envision new democratic possibilities and change culture and policy.”

V

EOS READS FOR BLACK LIVES

This part of the Pressbook contains materials for a seminar organized by Eos Africana https://www.eosafricana.org/ last summer. For 3/2, we will follow the guidelines from EOS READS, reproduced in our Pressbook here: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas114valentine/chapter/eos-reads-suggestions-for-discussion/.  The page is password protected because Eos asked that those suggestions not be shared outside of groups actually doing the READS seminars). Please read through the reading/listening instructions on that page.  You don’t need to read all of the discussion questions in advance.  Next, read Fanon’s “On Violence” and review the Hendricks.  Feel free to use hypothes.is to annotate.  Our seminar will discuss the questions suggested by Eos, as well as our own, in our seminar-style discussion of these materials on 3/2.  For tips on successful seminar participation, see: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas114valentine/chapter/student-led-seminar/.

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EOS Reads Suggestions for Discussion

READS For Black Lives: Fanon and Hendricks

Principles and Guidelines for Organizers

READS was conceived of as a mechanism for 1) helping Classicists substantially incorporate seminal texts from the African diaspora into their work and 2) creating a forum for those of us who, by doing this work already, were isolated within our departments and programs and/or harassed in classrooms. For this extraordinary session, discussions should focus on analyzing the texts in order to apply their insights and critiques to the everyday fight against anti-Blackness and White supremacy needed in the academy and beyond. We must, furthermore, be mindful that the isolation READS was designed to remediate is symptomatic of the Classics’ aggressive yet matter-of-fact marginalization of racialized practitioners and anti-racist knowledge practices.

READS For Black Lives focuses on Frantz Fanon’s “Concerning Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth (1961) included in this Part of the Pressbook:  On Violence

and

Margo Hendricks’ “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race” (2019), in our Theoretical Approaches Part, here: RaceB4Race

It is tempting for us as academics (especially for scholars dealing with historical and philological subjects) to simply add these authors’ language and ideas to our long list of “things to be mastered.” But to do so would be to revert to a paradigm that has and continues to do considerable harm, particularly to racialized and minoritized members of the field. For that reason, the questions below prompt you and your interlocutors to engage in critical self-reflection instead of concept mastery alone. How will our work in our classrooms, scholarship, and communities change in response to reading and discussing Fanon and Hendricks? How must the work we do in the future differ from the work we did before? While Eos is oriented toward long-term change in the field of Classics, we anticipate that discussions organized as part of this iteration of READS will take place in and benefit from multi- and trans-disciplinary contexts.

We suggest that 40% of the time you dedicate to your session of READS be spent discussing the ideas expressed in the assigned texts, and 60% reflecting on their application to anti-racist action in your own lives, communities, and professional contexts (using the questions at the opening and conclusion of this document).

Questions for Discussion

(The questions below are intended to guide your discussions. We do not expect that all groups will address every question.)

The Bigger Picture:

While you are reading and discussing, make sure to keep track of your emotional and physical responses as you process the ideas put forth in the texts. At which points do you find yourself energized to act on these ideas in your work and in your life?

Where, in turn, do you find yourself resisting what you are reading or discussing?

What do you think motivates this resistance, both in yourself and more broadly? How can you overcome that resistance in yourself, in your department, in your community, in the field of Classics?

For participants unaffiliated with the field of Classics: how did these readings and discussions inform your perceptions of the field of Classics and of the scholars within it? Did the readings and discussions make you think differently about your own field?

Selections from Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), “Concerning Violence”:

How does Fanon define decolonization? How does the violence of the colonizer compare to the violence of the colonized?

What role does education in “Western values” play in colonial society and in what respects does it resemble “the barracks and the police stations”? How does education bring violence “into the homes and minds of the colonized subject”?

Please describe the relations between “the colonialist bourgeoisie,” “the colonized intellectual,” and “the masses.” How exactly do their interactions turn “all the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty” into “pale, lifeless trinkets”?

What specifically African countermodels does Fanon provide to the individualism placed on the “Greco-Roman pedestal”? What would these look like in practice?

What does it mean to “leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world”?

What should we be doing instead of simply “freeing more and more slaves”?

Margo Hendricks, “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race” (2019)

How does settler colonialism in academia as defined by Hendricks relate to the historical phenomenon of settler colonialism that she also discusses?

How can we avoid participating in settler colonialism in scholarship on race?

What distinguishes premodern race studies from premodern critical race studies (PCRS) as Hendricks defines the terms?

What continuities and departures do you see between Fanon’s and Hendricks’ approaches to resisting settler colonialism?

Hendricks says: “Consider me your ancestor.” What is the significance of identifying ancestors in one’s scholarship, teaching, and activism?

Hendricks says: “PCRS is about being a public humanist. It’s about being an activist.” What does it mean to have an activist orientation to your scholarship?

What steps can we take to advance PCRS in our teaching, research, and responsibilities as colleagues to practitioners of the Classics (or Medieval Studies, or Archaeology, or in language departments) who have been marginalized in our departments and/or fields?

Looking Back at the Discussion (especially for organizers)

Were there moments of discomfort or silence during your discussion session(s)? What do you think produced them? Did you acknowledge them, and if so, how?

Were there issues or questions that arose in the discussion that you felt under-prepared to address?

What are the specific responsibilities of White people and non-Black People of Color to work against anti-Blackness, especially in educational spaces?

What are your specific plans to commit to racial justice in your scholarship, in your classroom, on your campus, or elsewhere in your community? What are your plans for the immediate future, for the next year, and for the next five years?

How could these plans have helped in the past, including (but not limited to) prior curricular redesigns, reviews for promotion and tenure, hiring practices, scholarship, conference planning, community engagement, interactions with students and their parents?

If you are already engaged in anti-racist work, how will this discussion inform your approach going forward? How do you see yourself engaging with newcomers to anti-racist activism?

What challenges does this moment offer for your work and well-being that might not be obvious to newcomers to anti-racist work? How do you intend to build (or keep building) networks to support you in your efforts?

27

On Violence

Full text of “Concerning Violence,” DOWLOAD HERE or see below.

From:

THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

By FRANTZ FANON

Preface by JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Translated by CONSTANCE FARRINGTON

GROVE WEIDENFELD

NEW YORK

CONCERNING VIOLENCE

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. At whatever level we study it–relationships between individuals, new names for sports clubs, the human admixture at cocktail parties, in the police, on the directing boards of national or private banks–decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain “species” of men by another “species” of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution. It is true that we could equally well stress the rise of a new nation, the setting up of a new state, its diplomatic relations, and its economic and political trends. But we have precisely chosen to speak of that kind of tabula rasa which characterizes at the outset all decolonization. Its unusual importance is that it constitutes, from the very first day, the minimum demands of the colonized. To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. The extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the

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lives of the men and women who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colonizers.

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together–that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler–was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing “them” well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system.

Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the

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“thing” which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.

In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the wellknown words: “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful.

The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists. That affirmed intention to place the last at the head of things, and to make them climb at a pace (too quickly, some say) the well-known steps which characterize an organized society, can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.

You do not turn any society, however primitive it may be, upside down with such a program if you have not decided from the very beginning, that is to say from the actual formulation of that program, to overcome all the obstacles that you will come across in so doing. The native who decides to put the program into practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all times. From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.

The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. It is probably unnecessary to recall the existence of native quarters and European quarters, of schools for natives and schools for Europeans; in the same way we need not recall apartheid in South Africa. Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at

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least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized.

The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior–all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and “bewilderers” separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.

The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both

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follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers’ town is a town of white people, of foreigners.

The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs. The look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession–all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, “They want to take our place.” It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place.

This world divided into compartments, this world cut

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in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, yon are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.

Everything up to and including the very nature of precapitalist society, so well explained by Marx, must here be thought out again. The serf is in essence different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is necessary to legitimize this statutory difference. In the colonies, the foreigner coming from another country imposed his rule by means of guns and machines. In defiance of his successful transplantation, in spite of his appropriation, the settler still remains a foreigner. It is neither the act of owning factories, nor estates, nor a bank balance which distinguishes the governing classes. The governing race is first and foremost those who come from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, “the others.”

The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. To wreck the colonial world is henceforward a mental picture of action

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which is very clear, very easy to understand and which may be assumed by each one of the individuals which constitute the colonized people. To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less that the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.

The natives’ challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute. The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. * Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. Monsieur Meyer could thus state seriously in the French National Assembly that the Republic must not be prostituted by allowing

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* We have demonstrated the mechanism of this Manichean world in Black Skin, White Masks ( New York: Grove Press, 1967).

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the Algerian people to become part of it. All values, in fact, are irrevocably poisoned and diseased as soon as they are allowed in contact with the colonized race. The customs of the colonized people, their traditions, their myths — above all, their myths–are the very sign of that poverty of spirit and of their constitutional depravity. That is why we must put the DDT which destroys parasites, the bearers of disease, on the same level as the Christian religion which wages war on embryonic heresies and instincts, and on evil as yet unborn. The recession of yellow fever and the advance of evangelization form part of the same balance sheet. But the triumphant communiqués from the missions are in fact a source of information concerning the implantation of foreign influences in the core of the colonized people. I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few chosen.

At times this Manicheism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man’s reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary. The European rarely hits on a picturesque style; but the native, who knows what is in the mind of the settler, guesses at once what he is thinking of. Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or

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end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life–all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. General de Gaulle speaks of “the yellow multitudes” and François Mauriac of the black, brown, and yellow masses which soon will be unleashed. The native knows all this, and laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s words. For he knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory.

As soon as the native begins to pull on his moorings, and to cause anxiety to the settler, he is handed over to well-meaning souls who in cultural congresses point out to him the specificity and wealth of Western values. But every time Western values are mentioned they produce in the native a sort of stiffening or muscular lockjaw. During the period of decolonization, the natives’s reason is appealed to. He is offered definite values, he is told frequently that decolonization need not mean regression, and that he must put his trust in qualities which are welltried, solid, and highly esteemed. But it so happens that when the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife–or at least he makes sure it is within reach. The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him. In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up.

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This phenomenon is ordinarily masked because, during the period of decolonization, certain colonized intellectuals have begun a dialogue with the bourgeoisie of the colonialist country. During this phase, the indigenous population is discerned only as an indistinct mass. The few native personalities whom the colonialist bourgeois have come to know here and there have not sufficient influence on that immediate discernment to give rise to nuances. On the other hand, during the period of liberation, the colonialist bourgeoisie looks feverishly for contacts with the elite and it is with these elite that the familiar dialogue concerning values is carried on. The colonialist bourgeoisie, when it realizes that it is impossible for it to maintain its domination over the colonial countries, decides to carry out a rearguard action with regard to culture, values, techniques, and so on. Now what we must never forget is that the immense majority of colonized peoples is oblivious to these problems. For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity. But this dignity has nothing to do with the dignity of the human individual: for that human individual has never heard tell of it. All that the native has seen in his country is that they can freely arrest him, beat him, starve him: and no professor of ethics, no priest has ever come to be beaten in his place, nor to share their bread with him. As far as the native is concerned, morality is very concrete; it is to silence the settler’s defiance, to break his flaunting violence–in a word, to put him out of the picture. The wellknown principle that all men are equal will be illustrated in the colonies from the moment that the native claims that he is the equal of the settler. One step more, and he is ready to fight to be more than the settler. In fact, he has already decided to eject him and to take his place; as

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we see it, it is a whole material and moral universe which is breaking up. The intellectual who for his part has followed the colonialist with regard to the universal abstract will fight in order that the settler and the native may live together in peace in a new world. But the thing he does not see, precisely because he is permeated by colonialism and all its ways of thinking, is that the settler, from the moment that the colonial context disappears, has no longer any interest in remaining or in co-existing. It is not by chance that, even before any negotiation * between the Algerian and French governments has taken place, the European minority which calls itself “liberal” has already made its position clear: it demands nothing more nor less than twofold citizenship. By setting themselves apart in an abstract manner, the liberals try to force the settler into taking a very concrete jump into the unknown. Let us admit it, the settler knows perfectly well that no phraseology can be a substitute for reality.

Thus the native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner. All the new, revolutionary assurance of the native stems from it. For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don’t give a damn for him. Not only does his presence no longer trouble me, but I am already preparing such efficient ambushes for him that soon there will be no way out but that of flight.

We have said that the colonial context is characterized by the dichotomy which it imposes upon the whole peo-

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* Fanon is writing in 1961.–Trans.

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ple. Decolonization unifies that people by the radical decision to remove from it its heterogeneity, and by unifying it on a national, sometimes a racial, basis. We know the fierce words of the Senegalese patriots, referring to the maneuvers of their president, Senghor: “We have demanded that the higher posts should be given to Africans; and now Senghor is Africanizing the Europeans.” That is to say that the native can see clearly and immediately if decolonization has come to pass or not, for his minimum demands are simply that the last shall be first.

But the native intellectual brings variants to this petition, and, in fact, he seems to have good reasons: higher civil servants, technicians, specialists–all seem to be needed. Now, the ordinary native interprets these unfair promotions as so many acts of sabotage, and he is often heard to declare: “It wasn’t worth while, then, our becoming independent…”

In the colonial countries where a real struggle for freedom has taken place, where the blood of the people has flowed and where the length of the period of armed warfare has favored the backward surge of intellectuals toward bases grounded in the people, we can observe a genuine eradication of the superstructure built by these intellectuals from the bourgeois colonialist environment. The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course. The native intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas, and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal. Now it so happens that during the struggle for liberation, at the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch again with his people, this

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artificial sentinel is turned into dust. All the Mediterranean values–the triumph of the human individual, of clarity, and of beauty–become lifeless, colorless knickknacks. All those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged.

Individualism is the first to disappear. The native intellectual had learnt from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native’s mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. Now the native who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom will discover the falseness of this theory. The very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary. Brother, sister, friend–these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie, because for them my brother is my purse, my friend is part of my scheme for getting on. The native intellectual takes part, in a sort of auto-da-fé, in the destruction of all his idols: egoism, recrimination that springs from pride, and the childish stupidity of those who always want to have the last word. Such a colonized intellectual, dusted over by colonial culture, will in the same way discover the substance of village assemblies, the cohesion of people’s committees, and the extraordinary fruitfulness of local meetings and groupments. Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred–or everyone will be saved. The motto “look out for yourself,” the atheist’s method of salvation, is in this context forbidden.

Self-criticism has been much talked about of late, but

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few people realize that it is an African institution. Whether in the djemaas * of northern Africa or in the meetings of western Africa, tradition demands that the quarrels which occur in a village should be settled in public. It is communal self-criticism, of course, and with a note of humor, because everybody is relaxed, and because in the last resort we all want the same things. But the more the intellectual imbibes the atmosphere of the people, the more completely he abandons the habits of calculation, of unwonted silence, of mental reservations, and shakes off the spirit of concealment. And it is true that already at that level we can say that the community triumphs, and that it spreads its own light and its own reason.

But it so happens sometimes that decolonization occurs in areas which have not been sufficiently shaken by the struggle for liberation, and there may be found those same know-all, smart, wily intellectuals. We find intact in them the manners and forms of thought picked up during their association with the colonialist bourgeoisie. Spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national governments, they organize the loot of whatever national resources exist. Without pity, they use today’s national distress as a means of getting on through scheming and legal robbery, by import-export combines, limited liability companies, gambling on the stock exchange, or unfair promotion. They are insistent in their demands for the nationalization of commerce, that is to say the reservation of markets and advantageous bargains for nationals only. As far as doctrine is concerned, they proclaim the pressing necessity of nationalizing the robbery of the nation. In this arid phase of national life, the so-called period of austerity, the success of their depredations is

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* Village assemblies.–Trans.

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swift to call forth the violence and anger of the people. For this same people, poverty-stricken yet independent, comes very quickly to possess a social conscience in the African and international context of today; and this the petty individualists will quickly learn.

In order to assimilate and to experience the oppressor’s culture, the native has had to leave certain of his intellectual possessions in pawn. These pledges include his adoption of the forms of thought of the colonialist bourgeoisie. This is very noticeable in the inaptitude of the native intellectual to carry on a two-sided discussion; for he cannot eliminate himself when confronted with an object or an idea. On the other hand, when once he begins to militate among the people he is struck with wonder and amazement; he is literally disarmed by their good faith and honesty. The danger that will haunt him continually is that of becoming the uncritical mouthpiece of the masses; he becomes a kind of yes-man who nods assent at every word coming from the people, which he interprets as considered judgments. Now, the fellah, the unemployed man, the starving native do not lay a claim to the truth; they do not say that they represent the truth, for they are the truth.

Objectively, the intellectual behaves in this phase like a common opportunist. In fact he has not stopped maneuvering. There is never any question of his being either rejected or welcomed by the people. What they ask is simply that all resources should be pooled. The inclusion of the native intellectual in the upward surge of the masses will in this case be differentiated by a curious cult of detail. That is not to say that the people are hostile to analysis; on the contrary, they like having things explained to them, they are glad to understand a line of argument and they like to see where they are going. But at the beginning of his association with the people the native

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intellectual over-stresses details and thereby comes to forget that the defeat of colonialism is the real object of the struggle. Carried away by the multitudinous aspects of the fight, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, performed with enthusiasm but almost always too solemnly. He fails to see the whole of the movement all the time. He introduces the idea of special disciplines, of specialized functions, of departments within the terrible stone crusher, the fierce mixing machine which a popular revolution is. He is occupied in action on a particular front, and it so happens that he loses sight of the unity of the movement. Thus, if a local defeat is inflicted, he may well be drawn into doubt, and from thence to despair. The people, on the other hand, take their stand from the start on the broad and inclusive positions of bread and the land: how can we obtain the land, and bread to eat? And this obstinate point of view of the masses, which may seem shrunken and limited, is in the end the most worthwhile and the most efficient mode of procedure.

The problem of truth ought also to be considered. In every age, among the people, truth is the property of the national cause. No absolute verity, no discourse on the purity of the soul, can shake this position. The native replies to the living lie of the colonial situation by an equal falsehood. His dealings with his fellow-nationals are open; they are strained and incomprehensible with regard to the settlers. Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigners. In this colonialist context there is no truthful behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for “them.”

Thus we see that the primary Manicheism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonization; that is to say that the settler never

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ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown. The oppressor, in his own sphere, starts the process, a process of domination, of exploitation and of pillage, and in the other sphere the coiled, plundered creature which is the native provides fodder for the process as best he can, the process which moves uninterruptedly from the banks of the colonial territory to the palaces and the docks of the mother country. In this becalmed zone the sea has a smooth surface, the palm tree stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap against the pebbles, and raw materials are ceaselessly transported, justifying the presence of the settler: and all the while the native, bent double, more dead than alive, exists interminably in an unchanging dream. The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: “This land was created by us”; he is the unceasing cause: “If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages.” Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.

The immobility to which the native is condemned can only be called in question if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonization–the history of pillage -and to bring into existence the history of the nation–the history of decolonization.

A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the

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general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world. The native is a being hemmed in; apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial world. The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.

The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the niggers beat each other up, and the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced with the astonishing waves of crime in North Africa. We shall see later how this phenomenon should be judged. * When the native is confronted with the colonial order of things, he finds he is in a state of permanent tension. The settler’s world is a hostile world, which spurns the native, but at the same time it is a world of which he is envious. We have seen that the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler–not of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler. This hostile world, ponderous and aggressive because it fends off the colonized masses with all the harshness it is capable of, represents not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight

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* See the section: “Colonial War and Mental Disorders.”

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possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs.

The native is always on the alert, for since he can only make out with difficulty the many symbols of the colonial world, he is never sure whether or not he has crossed the frontier. Confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guilty. But the native’s guilt is never a guilt which he accepts; it is rather a kind of curse, a sort of sword of Damocles, for, in his innermost spirit, the native admits no accusation. He is overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. He is patiently waiting until the settler is off his guard to fly at him. The native’s muscles are always tensed. You can’t say that he is terrorized, or even apprehensive. He is in fact ready at a moment’s notice to exchange the role of the quarry for that of the hunter. The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. The symbols of social order–the police, the bugle calls in the barracks, military parades and the waving flags–are at one and the same time inhibitory and stimulating: for they do not convey the message “Don’t dare to budge”; rather, they cry out “Get ready to attack.” And, in fact, if the native had any tendency to fall asleep and to forget, the settler’s hauteur and the settler’s anxiety to test the strength of the colonial system would remind him at every turn that the great showdown cannot be put off indefinitely. That impulse to take the settler’s place implies a tonicity of muscles the whole time; and in fact we know that in certain emotional conditions the presence of an obstacle accentuates the tendency toward motion.

The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native out loud that there he alone

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is master. The settler keeps alive in the native an anger which he deprives of outlet; the native is trapped in the tight links of the chains of colonialism. But we have seen that inwardly the settler can only achieve a pseudo petrification. The native’s muscular tension finds outlet regularly in bloodthirsty explosions–in tribal warfare, in feuds between septs, and in quarrels between individuals.

Where individuals are concerned, a positive negation of common sense is evident. While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native; for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-à-vis his brother. Tribal feuds only serve to perpetuate old grudges buried deep in the memory. By throwing himself with all his force into the vendetta, the native tries to persuade himself that colonialism does not exist, that everything is going on as before, that history continues. Here on the level of communal organizations we clearly discern the well-known behavior patterns of avoidance. It is as if plunging into a fraternal bloodbath allowed them to ignore the obstacle, and to put off till later the choice, nevertheless inevitable, which opens up the question of armed resistance to colonialism. Thus collective autodestruction in a very concrete form is one of the ways in which the native’s muscular tension is set free. All these patterns of conduct are those of the death reflex when faced with danger, a suicidal behavior which proves to the settler (whose existence and domination is by them all the more justified) that these men are not reasonable human beings. In the same way the native manages to by-pass the settler. A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God: He is Fate. In this way

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the individual accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm.

Meanwhile, however, life goes on, and the native will strengthen the inhibitions which contain his aggressiveness by drawing on the terrifying myths which are so frequently found in underdeveloped communities. There are maleficent spirits which intervene every time a step is taken in the wrong direction, leopard-men, serpent-men, six-legged dogs, zombies–a whole series of tiny animals or giants which create around the native a world of prohibitions, of barriers and of inhibitions far more terrifying than the world of the settler. This magical superstructure which permeates native society fulfills certain well-defined functions in the dynamism of the libido. One of the characteristics of underdeveloped societies is in fact that the libido is first and foremost the concern of a group, or of the family. The feature of communities whereby a man who dreams that he has sexual relations with a woman other than his own must confess it in public and pay a fine in kind or in working days to the injured husband or family is fully described by ethnologists. We may note in passing that this proves that the so-called prehistoric societies attach great importance to the unconscious.

The atmosphere of myth and magic frightens me and so takes on an undoubted reality. By terrifying me, it integrates me in the traditions and the history of my district or of my tribe, and at the same time it reassures me, it gives me a status, as it were an identification paper. In underdeveloped countries the occult sphere is a sphere belonging to the community which is entirely under magical jurisdiction. By entangling myself in this inextricable network where actions are repeated with crystalline inevitability, I find the everlasting world which belongs to

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me, and the perenniality which is thereby affirmed of the world belonging to us. Believe me, the zombies are more terrifying than the settlers; and in consequence the problem is no longer that of keeping oneself right with the colonial world and its barbed-wire entanglements, but of considering three times before urinating, spitting, or going out into the night.

The supernatural, magical powers reveal themselves as essentially personal; the settler’s powers are infinitely shrunken, stamped with their alien origin. We no longer really need to fight against them since what counts is the frightening enemy created by myths. We perceive that all is settled by a permanent confrontation on the phantasmic plane.

It has always happened in the struggle for freedom that such a people, formerly lost in an imaginary maze, a prey to unspeakable terrors yet happy to lose themselves in a dreamlike torment, such a people becomes unhinged, reorganizes itself, and in blood and tears gives birth to very real and immediate action. Feeding the moudjahidines, * posting sentinels, coming to the help of families which lack the bare necessities, or taking the place of a husband who has been killed or imprisoned: such are the concrete tasks to which the people is called during the struggle for freedom.

In the colonial world, the emotional sensitivity of the native is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches from the caustic agent; and the psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and finds outlet in muscular demonstrations which have caused certain very wise men to say that the native is a hysterical type. This sensitive emotionalism, watched by invisible keepers who are how-

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* Highly-trained soldiers who are completely dedicated to the Moslem cause.–Trans.

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ever in unbroken contact with the core of the personality, will find its fulfillment through eroticism in the driving forces behind the crisis’ dissolution.

On another level we see the native’s emotional sensibility exhausting itself in dances which are more or less ecstatic. This is why any study of the colonial world should take into consideration the phenomena of the dance and of possession. The native’s relaxation takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed, and conjured away. The circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits. At certain times on certain days, men and women come together at a given place, and there, under the solemn eye of the tribe, fling themselves into a seemingly unorganized pantomime, which is in reality extremely systematic, in which by various means–shakes of the head, bending of the spinal column, throwing of the whole body backward -may be deciphered as in an open book the huge effort of a community to exorcise itself, to liberate itself, to explain itself. There are no limits–inside the circle. The hillock up which you have toiled as if to be nearer to the moon; the river bank down which you slip as if to show the connection between the dance and ablutions, cleansing and purification–these are sacred places. There are no limits–for in reality your purpose in coming together is to allow the accumulated libido, the hampered aggressivity, to dissolve as in a volcanic eruption. Symbolical killings, fantastic rides, imaginary mass murders–all must be brought out. The evil humors are undammed, and flow away with a din as of molten lava.

One step further and you are completely possessed. In fact, these are actually organized séances of possession and exorcism; they include vampirism, possession by djinns, by zombies, and by Legba, the famous god of the voodoo.

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This disintegrating of the personality, this splitting and dissolution, all this fulfills a primordial function in the organism of the colonial world. When they set out, the men and women were impatient, stamping their feet in a state of nervous excitement; when they return, peace has been restored to the village; it is once more calm and unmoved.

During the struggle for freedom, a marked alienation from these practices is observed. The native’s back is to the wall, the knife is at his throat (or, more precisely, the electrode at his genitals): he will have no more call for his fancies. After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life–the forces of colonialism. And the youth of a colonized country, growing up in an atmosphere of shot and fire, may well make a mock of, and does not hesitate to pour scorn upon the zombies of his ancestors, the horses with two heads, the dead who rise again, and the djinns who rush into your body while you yawn. The native discovers reality and transforms it into the pattern of his customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom.

We have seen that this same violence, though kept very much on the surface all through the colonial period, yet turns in the void. We have also seen that it is canalized by the emotional outlets of dance and possession by spirits; we have seen how it is exhausted in fratricidal combats. Now the problem is to lay hold of this violence which is changing direction. When formerly it was appeased by myths and exercised its talents in finding fresh ways of committing mass suicide, now new conditions will make possible a completely new line of action.

Nowadays a theoretical problem of prime importance is being set, on the historical plane as well as on the level of

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political tactics, by the liberation of the colonies: when can one affirm that the situation is ripe for a movement of national liberation? In what form should it first be manifested? Because the various means whereby decolonization has been carried out have appeared in many different aspects, reason hesitates and refuses to say which is a true decolonization, and which a false. We shall see that for a man who is in the thick of the fight it is an urgent matter to decide on the means and the tactics to employ: that is to say, how to conduct and organize the movement. If this coherence is not present there is only a blind will toward freedom, with the terribly reactionary risks which it entails.

What are the forces which in the colonial period open up new outlets and engender new aims for the violence of colonized peoples? In the first place there are the political parties and the intellectual or commercial elites. Now, the characteristic feature of certain political structures is that they proclaim abstract principles but refrain from issuing definite commands. The entire action of these nationalist political parties during the colonial period is action of the electoral type: a string of philosophicopolitical dissertations on the themes of the rights of peoples to self-determination, the rights of man to freedom from hunger and human dignity, and the unceasing affirmation of the principle: “One man, one vote.” The national political parties never lay stress upon the necessity of a trial of armed strength, for the good reason that their objective is not the radical overthrowing of the system. Pacifists and legalists, they are in fact partisans of order, the new order–but to the colonialist bourgeoisie they put bluntly enough the demand which to them is the main one: “Give us more power.” On the specific question of violence, the elite are ambiguous. They are violent in their words and reformist in their attitudes.

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When the nationalist political leaders say something, they make quite clear that they do not really think it.

This characteristic on the part of the nationalist political parties should be interpreted in the light both of the make-up of their leaders and the nature of their followings. The rank-and-file of a nationalist party is urban. The workers, primary schoolteachers, artisans, and small shopkeepers who have begun to profit–at a discount, to be sure–from the colonial setup, have special interests at heart. What this sort of following demands is the betterment of their particular lot: increased salaries, for example. The dialogue between these political parties and colonialism is never broken off. Improvements are discussed, such as full electoral representation, the liberty of the press, and liberty of association. Reforms are debated. Thus it need not astonish anyone to notice that a large number of natives are militant members of the branches of political parties which stem from the mother country. These natives fight under an abstract watchword: “Government by the workers,” and they forget that in their country it should be nationalist watchwords which are first in the field. The native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world. He has used his aggressiveness to serve his own individual interests.

Thus there is very easily brought into being a kind of class of affranchised slaves, or slaves who are individually free. What the intellectual demands is the right to multiply the emancipated, and the opportunity to organize a genuine class of emancipated citizens. On the other hand, the mass of the people have no intention of standing by and watching individuals increase their chances of success. What they demand is not the settler’s position of status, but the settler’s place. The immense majority of natives want the settler’s farm. For them, there is no question of

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entering into competition with the settler. They want to take his place.

The peasantry is systematically disregarded for the most part by the propaganda put out by the nationalist parties. And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength. The exploited man sees that his liberation implies the use of all means, and that of force first and foremost. When in 1956, after the capitulation of Monsieur Guy Mollet to the settlers in Algeria, the Front de Libération Nationale, in a famous leaflet, stated that colonialism only loosens its hold when the knife is at its throat, no Algerian really found these terms too violent. The leaflet only expressed what every Algerian felt at heart: colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.

At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed. But if the masses, without, waiting for the chairs to be arranged around me

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baize table, listen to their own voice and begin committing outrages and setting fire to buildings, the elite and the nationalist bourgeois parties will be seen rushing to the colonialists to exclaim, “This is very serious! We do not know how it will end; we must find a solution–some sort of compromise.”

This idea of compromise is very important in the phenomenon of decolonization, for it is very far from being a simple one. Compromise involves the colonial system and the young nationalist bourgeoisie at one and the same time. The partisans of the colonial system discover that the masses may destroy everything. Blown-up bridges, ravaged farms, repressions, and fighting harshly disrupt the economy. Compromise is equally attractive to the nationalist bourgeoisie, who since they are not clearly aware of the possible consequences of the rising storm, are genuinely afraid of being swept away by this huge hurricane and never stop saying to the settlers: “We are still capable of stopping the slaughter; the masses still have confidence in us; act quickly if you do not want to put everything in jeopardy.” One step more, and the leader of the nationalist party keeps his distance with regard to that violence. He loudly proclaims that he has nothing to do with these Mau-Mau, these terrorists, these throat-slitters. At best, he shuts himself off in a no man’s land between the terrorists and the settlers and willingly offers his services as go-between; that is to say, that as the settlers cannot discuss terms with these Mau-Mau, he himself will be quite willing to begin negotiations. Thus it is that the rear guard of the national struggle, that very party of people who have never ceased to be on the other side in the fight, find themselves somersaulted into the van of negotiations and compromise–precisely because that party has taken very good care never to break contact with colonialism.

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Before negotiations have been set afoot, the majority of nationalist parties confine themselves for the most part to explaining and excusing this “savagery.” They do not assert that the people have to use physical force, and it sometimes even happens that they go so far as to condemn, in private, the spectacular deeds which are declared to be hateful by the press and public opinion in the mother country. The legitimite excuse for this ultra-conservative policy is the desire to see things in an objective light; but this traditional attitude of the native intellectual and of the leaders of the nationalist parties is not, in reality, in the least objective. For in fact they are not at all convinced that this impatient violence of the masses is the most efficient means of defending their own interests. Moreover, there are some individuals who are convinced of the ineffectiveness of violent methods; for them, there is no doubt about it, every attempt to break colonial oppression by force is a hopeless effort, an attempt at suicide, because in the innermost recesses of their brains the settler’s tanks and airplanes occupy a huge place. When they are told “Action must be taken,” they see bombs raining down on them, armored cars coming at them on every path, machine-gunning and police action… and they sit quiet. They are beaten from the start. There is no need to demonstrate their incapacity to triumph by violent methods; they take it for granted in their everyday life and in their political maneuvers. They have remained in the same childish position as Engels took up in his famous polemic with that monument of puerility, Monsieur Duhring:

In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged

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to work…. Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms manufacturer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the production of armaments, and this in its turn depends on production in general, and thus…on economic strength, on the economy of the State, and in the last resort on the material means which that violence commands. *

In fact, the leaders of reform have nothing else to say than: “With what are you going to fight the settlers? With your knives? Your shotguns?”

It is true that weapons are important when violence comes into play, since all finally depends on the distribution of these implements. But it so happens that the liberation of colonial countries throws new light on the subject. For example, we have seen that during the Spanish campaign, which was a very genuine colonial war, Napoleon, in spite of an army which reached in the offensives of the spring of 1810 the huge figure of 400,000 men, was forced to retreat. Yet the French army made the whole of Europe tremble by its weapons of war, by the bravery of its soldiers, and by the military genius of its leaders. Face to face with the enormous potentials of the Napoleonic troops, the Spaniards, inspired by an unshakeable national ardor, rediscovered the famous methods of guerilla warfare which, twenty-five years before, the American militia had tried out on the English forces. But the

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* Friedrich Engels: Anti-Dühring, Part II, Chapter III, “Theory of Violence”, p. 199.

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native’s guerilla warfare would be of no value as opposed to other means of violence if it did not form a new element in the worldwide process of competition between trusts and monopolies.

In the early days of colonization, a single column could occupy immense stretches of country: the Congo, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and so on. Today, however, the colonized countries’ national struggle crops up in a completely new international situation. Capitalism, in its early days, saw in the colonies a source of raw materials which, once turned into manufactured goods, could be distributed on the European market. After a phase of accumulation of capital, capitalism has today come to modify its conception of the profit-earning capacity of a commercial enterprise. The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a customer who is ready to buy goods; consequently, if the garrison has to be perpetually reinforced, if buying and selling slackens off, that is to say if manufactured and finished goods can no longer be exported, there is clear proof that the solution of military force must be set aside. A blind domination founded on slavery is not economically speaking worthwhile for the bourgeoisie of the mother country. The monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a government whose policy is solely that of the sword. What the factoryowners and finance magnates of the mother country expect from their government is not that it should decimate the colonial peoples, but that it should safeguard with the help of economic conventions their own “legitimate interests.”

Thus there exists a sort of detached complicity between capitalism and the violent forces which blaze up in colonial territory. What is more, the native is not alone against the oppressor, for indeed there is also the political and diplomatic support of progressive countries and peo-

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ples. But above all there is competition, that pitiless war which financial groups wage upon each other. A Berlin Conference was able to tear Africa into shreds and divide her up between three or four imperial flags. At the moment, the important thing is not whether such-and-such a region in Africa is under French or Belgian sovereignty, but rather that the economic zones are respected. Today, wars of repression are no longer waged against rebel sultans; everything is more elegant, less bloodthirsty; the liquidation of the Castro regime will be quite peaceful. They do all they can to strangle Guinea and they eliminate Mossadegh. Thus the nationalist leader who is frightened of violence is wrong if he imagines that colonialism is going to “massacre all of us.” The military will of course go on playing with tin soldiers which date from the time of the conquest, but higher finance will soon bring the truth home to them.

This is why reasonable nationalist political parties are asked to set out their claims as clearly as possible, and to seek with their colonialist opposite numbers, calmly and without passion, for a solution which will take the interests of both parties into consideration. We see that if this nationalist reformist tendency which often takes the form of a kind of caricature of trade unionism decides to take action, it will only do so in a highly peaceful fashion, through stoppages of work in the few industries which have been set up in the towns, mass demonstrations to cheer the leaders, and the boycotting of buses or of imported commodities. All these forms of action serve at one and the same time to bring pressure to bear on the forces of colonialism, and to allow the people to work off their energy. This practice of therapy by hibernation, this sleep-cure used on the people, may sometimes be successful; thus out of the conference around the green baize table comes the political selectiveness which enables Mon-

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Mon, the president of the Republic of Gabon, to state in all seriousness on his arrival in Paris for an official visit: “Gabon is independent, but between Gabon and France nothing has changed; everything goes on as before.” In fact, the only change is that Monsieur M’ba is president of the Gabonese Republic and that he is received by the president of the French Republic.

The colonialist bourgeoisie is helped in its work of calming down the natives by the inevitable religion. All those saints who have turned the other cheek, who have forgiven trespasses against them, and who have been spat on and insulted without shrinking are studied and held up as examples. On the other hand, the elite of the colonial countries, those slaves set free, when at the head of the movement inevitably end up by producing an ersatz conflict. They use their brothers’ slavery to shame the slavedrivers or to provide an ideological policy of quaint humanitarianism for their oppressors’ financial competitors. The truth is that they never make any real appeal to the aforesaid slaves; they never mobilize them in concrete terms. On the contrary, at the decisive moment (that is to say, from their point of view the moment of indecision) they brandish the danger of a “mass mobilization” as the crucial weapon which would bring about as if by magic the “end of the colonial regime.” Obviously there are to be found at the core of the political parties and among their leaders certain revolutionaries who deliberately turn their backs upon the farce of national independence. But very quickly their questionings, their energy, and their anger obstruct the party machine; and these elements are gradually isolated, and then quite simply brushed aside. At this moment, as if there existed a dialectic concomitance, the colonialist police will fall upon them. With no security in the towns, avoided by the militants of their former party and rejected by its

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leaders, these undesirable firebrands will be stranded in county districts. Then it is that they will realize bewilderedly that the peasant masses catch on to what they have to say immediately, and without delay ask them the question to which they have not yet prepared the answer: “When do we start?”

This meeting of revolutionaries coming from the towns and country dwellers will be dealt with later on. For the moment we must go back to the political parties, in order to show the nature of their action, which is all the same progressive. In their speeches the political leaders give a name to the nation. In this way the native’s demands are given shape.

There is however no definite subject matter and no political or social program. There is a vague outline or skeleton, which is nevertheless national in form, what we describe as “minimum requirements.” The politicians who make speeches and who write in the nationalist newspapers make the people dream dreams. They avoid the actual overthrowing of the state, but in fact they introduce into their readers’ or hearers’ consciousness the terrible ferment of subversion. The national or tribal language is often used. Here, once again, dreams are encouraged, and the imagination is let loose outside the bounds of the colonial order; and sometimes these politicians speak of “We Negroes, we Arabs,” and these terms which are so profoundly ambivalant take on during the colonial epoch a sacramental signification. The nationalist politicians are playing with fire: for, as an African leader recently warned a group of young intellectuals, “Think well before you speak to the masses, for they flare up quickly.” This is one of the terrible tricks that destiny plays in the colonies.

When a political leader calls a mass meeting, we may say that there is blood in the air. Yet the same leader very often is above all anxious to “make a show” of force, so

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that in fact he need not use it. But the agitation which ensues, the coming and going, the listening to speeches, seeing the people assembled in one place, with the police all around, the military demonstrations, arrests, and the deportation of the leaders–all this hubbub makes the people think that the moment has come for them to take action. In these times of instability the political parties multiply their appeals to the left for calm, while on their right they scan the horizon, trying to make out the liberal intentions of colonialism.

In the same way the people make use of certain episodes in the life of the community in order to hold themselves ready and to keep alive their revolutionary zeal. For example, the gangster who holds up the police set on to track him down for days on end, or who dies in single combat after having killed four or five policemen, or who commits suicide in order not to give away his accomplices –these types light the way for the people, form the blueprints for action and become heroes. Obviously, it’s a waste of breath to say that such-and-such a hero is a thief, a scoundrel, or a reprobate. If the act for which he is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonialist person or colonialist property, the demarcation line is definite and manifest. The process of identification is automatic.

We must also notice in this ripening process the role played by the history of the resistance at the time of the conquest. The great figures of the colonized people are always those who led the national resistance to invasion. Behanzin, Soundiata, Samory, Abdel Kader–all spring again to life with peculiar intensity in the period which comes directly before action. This is the proof that the people are getting ready to begin to go forward again, to put an end to the static period begun by colonization, and to make history.

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The uprising of the new nation and the breaking down of colonial structures are the result of one of two causes: either of a violent struggle of the people in their own right, or of action on the part of surrounding colonized peoples which acts as a brake on the colonial regime in question.

A colonized people is not alone. In spite of all that colonialism can do, its frontiers remain open to new ideas and echoes from the world outside. It discovers that violence is in the atmosphere, that it here and there bursts out, and here and there sweeps away the colonial regime –that same violence which fulfills for the native a role that is not simply informatory, but also operative. The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu is no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory. Since July, 1954, the question which the colonized peoples have asked themselves has been, “What must be done to bring about another Dien Bien Phu? How can we manage it?” Not a single colonized individual could ever again doubt the possibility of a Dien Bien Phu; the only problem was how best to use the forces at their disposal, how to organize them, and when to bring them into action. This encompassing violence does not work upon the colonized people only; it modifies the attitude of the colonialists who become aware of manifold Dien Bien Phus. This is why a veritable panic takes hold of the colonialist governments in turn. Their purpose is to capture the vanguard, to turn the movement of liberation toward the right, and to disarm the people: quick, quick, let’s decolonize. Decolonize the Congo before it turns into another Algeria. Vote the constitutional framework for all Africa, create the French Communauté, renovate that same Communauté, but for God’s sake let’s decolonize quick…. And they decolonize at such a rate that they impose independence on Houphouët-Boigny. To the strategy of Dien Bien Phu, defined by the colonized peoples, the colonialist re-

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plies by the strategy of encirclement–based on the respect of the sovereignty of states.

But let us return to that atmosphere of violence, that violence which is just under the skin. We have seen that in its process toward maturity many leads are attached to it, to control it and show it the way out. Yet in spite of the metamorphoses which the colonial regime imposes upon it in the way of tribal or regional quarrels, that violence makes its way forward, and the native identifies his enemy and recognizes all his misfortunes, throwing all the exacerbated might of his hate and anger into this new channel. But how do we pass from the atmosphere of violence to violence in action? What makes the lid blow off? There is first of all the fact that this development does not leave the settler’s blissful existence intact. The settler who “understands” the natives is made aware by several straws in the wind showing that something is afoot. “Good” natives become scarce; silence falls when the oppressor approaches; sometimes looks are black, and attitudes and remarks openly aggressive. The nationalist parties are astir, they hold a great many meetings, the police are increased and reinforcements of soldiers are brought in. The settlers, above all the farmers isolated on their land, are the first to become alarmed. They call for energetic measures.

The authorities do in fact take some spectacular measures. They arrest one or two leaders, they organize military parades and maneuvers, and air force displays. But the demonstrations and warlike exercises, the smell of gunpowder which now fills the atmosphere, these things do not make the people draw back. Those bayonets and cannonades only serve to reinforce their aggressiveness. The atmosphere becomes dramatic, and everyone wishes to show that he is ready for anything. And it is in these circumstances that the guns go off by themselves, for nerves are jangled, fear reigns and everyone is trigger-happy. A

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single commonplace incident is enough to start the machine-gunning: Sétif in Algeria, the Central Quarries in Morocco, Moramanga in Madagascar.

The repressions, far from calling a halt to the forward rush of national consciousness, urge it on. Mass slaughter in the colonies at a certain stage of the embryonic development of consciousness increases that consciousness, for the hecatombs are an indication that between oppressors and oppressed everything can be solved by force. It must be remarked here that the political parties have not called for armed insurrection, and have made no preparations for such an insurrection. All these repressive measures, all those actions which are a result of fear are not within the leaders’ intentions: they are overtaken by events. At this moment, then, colonialism may decide to arrest the nationalist leaders. But today the governments of colonized countries know very well that it is extremely dangerous to deprive the masses of their leaders; for then the people, unbridled, fling themselves into jacqueries, mutinies, and “brutish murders.” The masses give free rein to their “bloodthirsty instincts” and force colonialism to free their leaders, to whom falls the difficult task of bringing them back to order. The colonized people, who have spontaneously brought their violence to the colossal task of destroying the colonial system, will very soon find themselves with the barren, inert slogan “Release X or Y.” * Then colonialism will release these men, and hold discussions with them. The time for dancing in the streets has come.

In certain circumstances, the party political machine may remain intact. But as a result of the colonialist repression and of the spontaneous reaction of the people the parties find themselves out-distanced by their militants.

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* It may happen that the arrested leader is in fact the authentic mouthpiece of the colonized masses. In this case colonialism will make use of his period of detention to try to launch new leaders.

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The violence of the masses is vigorously pitted against the military forces of the occupying power, and the situation deteriorates and comes to a head. Those leaders who are free remain, therefore, on the touchline. They have suddenly become useless, with their bureaucracy and their reasonable demands; yet we see them, far removed from events, attempting the crowning imposture–that of “speaking in the name of the silenced nation.” As a general rule, colonialism welcomes this godsend with open arms, tranforms these “blind mouths” into spokesmen, and in two minutes endows them with independence, on condition that they restore order.

So we see that all parties are aware of the power of such violence and that the question is not always to reply to it by a greater violence, but rather to see how to relax the tension.

What is the real nature of this violence? We have seen that it is the intuition of the colonized masses that their liberation must, and can only, be achieved by force. By what spiritual aberration do these men, without technique, starving and enfeebled, confronted with the military and economic might of the occupation, come to believe that violence alone will free them? How can they hope to triumph?

It is because violence (and this is the disgraceful thing) may constitute, in so far as it forms part of its system, the slogan of a political party. The leaders may call on the people to enter upon an armed struggle. This problematical question has to be thought over. When militarist Germany decides to settle its frontier disputes by force, we are not in the least surprised; but when the people of Angola, for example, decide to take up arms, when the Algerian people reject all means which are not violent, these are proofs that something has happened or is happening at this very moment. The colonized races, those

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slaves of modern times, are impatient. They know that this apparent folly alone can put them out of reach of colonial oppression. A new type of relations is established in the world. The underdeveloped peoples try to break their chains, and the extraordinary thing is that they succeed. It could be argued that in these days of sputniks it is ridiculous to die of hunger; but for the colonized masses the argument is more down-to-earth. The truth is that there is no colonial power today which is capable of adopting the only form of contest which has a chance of succeeding, namely, the prolonged establishment of large forces of occupation.

As far as their internal situation is concerned, the colonialist countries find themselves faced with contradictions in the form of working-class demands which necessitate the use of their police forces. As well, in the present international situation, these countries need their troops to protect their regimes. Finally there is the wellknown myth of liberating movements directed from Moscow. In the regime’s panic-stricken reasoning, this signifies “If that goes on, there is a risk that the communists will turn the troubles to account and infiltrate into these parts.”

In the native’s eagerness, the fact that he openly brandishes the threat of violence proves that he is conscious of the unusual character of the contemporary situation and that he means to profit by it. But, still on the level of immediate experience, the native, who has seen the modern world penetrate into the furthermost corners of the bush, is most acutely aware of all the things he does not possess. The masses by a sort of (if we may say so) childlike process of reasoning convince themselves that they have been robbed of all these things. That is why in certain underdeveloped countries the masses forge ahead very quickly, and realize two or three years after independ-

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ence that they have been frustrated, that “it wasn’t worth while” fighting, and that nothing could really change. In 1789, after the bourgeois revolution, the smallest French peasants benefited substantially from the upheaval. But it is a commonplace to observe and to say that in the majority of cases, for 95 per cent of the population of underdeveloped countries, independence brings no immediate change. The enlightened observer takes note of the existence of a kind of masked discontent, like the smoking ashes of a burnt-down house after the fire has been put out, which still threaten to burst into flames again.

So they say that the natives want to go too quickly. Now, let us never forget that only a very short time ago they complained of their slowness, their laziness, and their fatalism. Already we see that violence used in specific ways at the moment of the struggle for freedom does not magically disappear after the ceremony of trooping the national colors. It has all the less reason for disappearing since the reconstruction of the nation continues within the framework of cutthroat competition between capitalism and socialism.

This competition gives an almost universal dimension to even the most localized demands. Every meeting held, every act of represson committed, reverberates in the international arena. The murders of Sharpeville shook public opinion for months. In the newspapers, over the wavelengths, and in private conversations Sharpeville has become a symbol. It was through Sharpeville that men and women first became acquainted with the problem of apartheid in South Africa. Moreover, we cannot believe that demagogy alone is the explanation for the sudden interest the big powers show in the petty affairs of underdeveloped regions. Each jacquerie, each act of sedition in the Third World makes up part of a picture framed by the Cold War. Two men are beaten up in Salisbury, and at

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once the whole of a bloc goes into action, talks about those two men, and uses the beating-up incident to bring up the particular problem of Rhodesia, linking it, moreover, with the whole African question and with the whole question of colonized people. The other bloc however is equally concerned in measuring by the magnitude of the campaign the local weaknesses of its system. Thus the colonized peoples realize that neither clan remains outside local incidents. They no longer limit themselves to regional horizons, for they have caught on to the fact that they live in an atmosphere of international stress.

When every three months or so we hear that the Sixth or Seventh Fleet is moving toward such-and-such a coast; when Khrushchev threatens to come to Castro’s aid with rockets; when Kennedy decides upon some desperate solution for the Laos question, the colonized person or the newly independent native has the impression that whether he wills it or not he is being carried away in a kind of frantic cavalcade. In fact, he is marching in it already. Let us take, for example, the case of the governments of recently liberated countries. The men at the head of affairs spend two-thirds of their time in watching the approaches and trying to anticipate the dangers which threaten them, and the remaining one-third of their time in working for their country. At the same time, they search for allies. Obedient to the same dialectic, the national parties of opposition leave the paths of parliamentary behavior. They also look for allies to support them in their ruthless ventures into sedition. The atmosphere of violence, after having colored all the colonial phase, continues to dominate national life, for as we have already said, the Third World is not cut off from the rest. Quite the contrary, it is at the middle of the whirlpool. This is why the statesmen of underdeveloped countries keep up

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indefinitely the tone of aggressiveness and exasperation in their public speeches which in the normal way ought to have disappeared. Herein, also, may be found the reasons for that lack of politeness so often spoken of in connection with newly established rulers. But what is less visible is the extreme courtesy of these same rulers in their contacts with their brothers or their comrades. Discourtesy is first and foremost a manner to be used in dealings with the others, with the former colonists who come to observe and to investigate. The “ex-native” too often gets the impression that these reports are already written. The photos which illustrate the article are simply a proof that one knows what one is talking about, and that one has visited the country. The report intends to verify the evidence: everything’s going badly out there since we left. Frequently reporters complain of being badly received, of being forced to work under bad conditions and of being fenced round by indifference or hostility: all this is quite normal. The nationalist leaders know that international opinion is formed solely by the Western press. Now, when a journalist from the West asks us questions, it is seldom in order to help us. In the Algerian war, for example, even the most liberal of the French reporters never ceased to use ambiguous terms in describing our struggle. When we reproached them for this, they replied in all good faith that they were being objective. For the native, objectivity is always directed against him. We may in the same way come to understand the new tone which swamped international diplomacy at the United Nations General Assembly in September, 1960. The representatives of the colonial countries were aggressive and violent, and carried things to extremes, but the colonial peoples did not find that they exaggerated. The radicalism of the African spokesmen brought the abcess to a head and showed up the inad-

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missible nature of the veto and of the dialogue between the great powers, and above all the tiny role reserved for the Third World.

Diplomacy, as inaugurated by the newly independent peoples, is no longer an affair of nuances, of implications, and of hypnotic passes. For the nation’s spokesmen are responsible at one and the same time for safeguarding the unity of the nation, the progress of the masses toward a state of well-being and the right of all peoples to bread and liberty. Thus it is a diplomacy which never stops moving, a diplomacy which leaps ahead, in strange contrast to the motionless, petrified world of colonization. And when Mr. Khrushchev brandishes his shoe at the United Nations, or thumps the table with it, there’s not a single exnative, nor any representative of an underdeveloped country, who laughs. For what Mr. Khrushchev shows the colonized countries which are looking on is that he, the moujik, who moreover is the possessor of spacerockets, treats these miserable capitalists in the way that they deserve. In the same way, Castro sitting in military uniform in the United Nations Organization does not scandalize the underdeveloped countries. What Castro demonstrates is the consciousness he has of the continuing existence of the rule of violence. The astonishing thing is that he did not come into the UNO with a machine-gun; but if he had, would anyone have minded? All the jacqueries and desperate deeds, all those bands armed with cutlesses or axes find their nationality in the implacable struggle which opposes socialism and capitalism.

In 1945, the 45,000 dead at Sétif could pass unnoticed; in 1947, the 90,000 dead in Madagascar could be the subject of a simple paragraph in the papers; in 1952, the 200,000 victims of the repression in Kenya could meet with relative indifference. This was because the international contradictions were not sufficiently distinct. Already the

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Korean and Indo-Chinese wars had begun a new phase. But it is above all Budapest and Suez which constitute the decisive moments of this confrontation.

Strengthened by the unconditional support of the socialist countries, the colonized peoples fling themselves with whatever arms they have against the impregnable citadel of colonialism. If this citadel is invulnerable to knives and naked fists, it is no longer so when we decide to take into account the context of the Cold War.

In this fresh juncture, the Americans take their role of patron of international captialism very seriously. Early on, they advise the European countries to decolonize in a friendly fashion. Later on, they do not hesitate to proclaim first the respect for and then the support of the principle of “Africa for the Africans.” The United States is not afraid today of stating officially that they are the defenders of the right of all peoples to self-determination. Mr. Mennen Williams’ last journey is only the illustration of the consciousness which the Americans have that the Third World ought not to be sacrificed. From then on we understand why the violence of the native is only hopeless if we compare it in the abstract to the military machine of the oppressor. On the other hand, if we situate that violence in the dynamics of the international situation, we see at once that it constitutes a terrible menace for the oppressor. Persistent jacqueries and Mau-Mau disturbance unbalance the colony’s economic life but do not endanger the mother country. What is more important in the eyes of imperialism is the opportunity for socialist propaganda to infiltrate among the masses and to contaminate them. This is already a serious danger in the cold war; but what would happen to that colony in case of real war, riddled as it is by murderous guerillas?

Thus capitalism realizes that its military strategy has everything to lose by the outbreak of nationalist wars.

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Again, within the framework of peaceful co-existence, all colonies are destined to disappear, and in the long run neutralism is destined to be respected by capitalism. What must at all costs be avoided is strategic insecurity: the breakthrough of enemy doctrine into the masses and the deeprooted hatred of millions of men. The colonized peoples are very well aware of these imperatives which rule international political life; for this reason even those who thunder denunciations of violence take their decisions and act in terms of this universal violence. Today, peaceful coexistence between the two blocs provokes and feeds violence in the colonial countries. Tomorrow, perhaps we shall see the shifting of that violence after the complete liberation of the colonial territories. Perhaps we will see the question of minorities cropping up. Already certain minority groups do not hesitate to preach violent methods for resolving their problems and it is not by chance (so the story runs) that in consequence Negro extremists in the United States organize a militia and arm themselves. It is not by chance, either, that in the so-called free world there exist committees for the defense of Jewish minorities in the USSR, nor an accident if General de Gaulle in one of his orations sheds tears over the millions of Moslems oppressed by Communist dictatorship. Both capitalism and imperialism are convinced that the struggle against racialism and the movements toward national freedom are purely and simply directed by remote control, fomented from outside. So they decide to use that very efficacious tactic, the Radio Free Europe station, voice of the committee for the aid of overruled minorities…. They practice anti-colonialism, as did the French colonels in Algeria when they carried on subversive warfare with the SAS * or the psychological services. They “use the people

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* Section Administrative Speciale: An officers’ corps whose task was to strengthen contact with the Algerians in non-military matters.

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against the people.” We have seen with what results.

This atmosphere of violence and menaces, these rockets brandished by both sides, do not frighten nor deflect the colonized peoples. We have seen that all their recent history has prepared them to understand and grasp the situation. Between the violence of the colonies and that peaceful violence that the world is steeped in, there is a kind of complicit agreement, a sort of homogeneity. The colonized peoples are well adapted to this atmosphere; for once, they are up to date. Sometimes people wonder that the native, rather than give his wife a dress, buys instead a transistor radio. There is no reason to be astonished. The natives are convinced that their fate is in the balance, here and now. They live in the atmosphere of doomsday, and they consider that nothing ought to be let pass unnoticed. That is why they understand very well Phouma and Phoumi, Lumumba and Tshombe, Ahidjo and Moumie, Kenyatta, and the men who are pushed forward regularly to replace him. They understand all these figures very well, for they can unmask the forces working behind them. The native and the underdeveloped man are today political animals in the most universal sense of the word.

It is true to say that independence has brought moral compensation to colonized peoples, and has established their dignity. But they have not yet had time to elaborate a society, or to build up and affirm values. The warming, light-giving center where man and citizen develop and enrich their experience in wider and still wider fields does not yet exist. Set in a kind of irresolution, such men persuade themselves fairly easily that everything is going to be decided elsewhere, for everybody, at the same time. As for the political leaders, when faced with this situation, they first hesitate and then choose neutralism.

There is plenty to be said on the subject of neutralism. Some equate it with a sort of tainted mercantilism which

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consists of taking what it can get from both sides. In fact, neutralism, a state of affairs created by the cold war, if it allows underdeveloped countries to receive economic help from both sides, does not allow either party to aid underdeveloped areas to the extent that is necessary. Those literally astronomical sums of money which are invested in military research, those engineers who are transformed into technicians of nuclear war, could in the space of fifteen years raise the standard of living of underdeveloped countries by 60 per cent. So we see that the true interests of underdeveloped countries do not lie in the protraction nor in the accentuation of this cold war. But it so happens that no one asks their advice. Therefore, when they can, they cut loose from it. But can they really remain outside it? At this very moment, France is trying out her atomic bombs in Africa. Apart from the passing of motions, the holding of meetings and the shattering of diplomatic relations, we cannot say that the peoples of Africa have had much influence, in this particular sector, on France’s attitude.

Neutralism produces in the citizen of the Third World a state of mind which is expressed in everyday life by a fearlessness and an ancestral pride strangely resembling defiance. The flagrant refusal to compromise and the tough will that sets itself against getting tied up are reminiscent of the behavior of proud, poverty-stricken adolescents, who are always ready to risk their necks in order to have the last word. All this leaves Western observers dumbfounded, for to tell the truth there is a glaring divergence between what these men claim to be and what they have behind them. These countries without tramways, without troops, and without money have no justification for the bravado that they display in broad daylight. Undoubtedly, they are impostors. The Third World often gives the impression that it rejoices in sensation and that it must have

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its weekly dose of crises. These men at the head of empty countries, who talk too loud, are most irritating. You’d like to shut them up. But, on the contrary, they are in great demand. They are given bouquets; they are invited to dinner. In fact, we quarrel over who shall have them. And this is neutralism. They are 98 per cent illiterate, but they are the subject of a huge body of literature. They travel a great deal: the governing classes and students of underdeveloped countries are gold mines for airline companies. African and Asian officials may in the same month follow a course on socialist planning in Moscow and one on the advantages of the liberal economy in London or at Columbia University. African trade-union leaders leap ahead at a great rate in their own field. Hardly have they been appointed to posts in managerial organizations than they decide to form themselves into autonomous bodies. They haven’t the requisite fifty years experience of practical trade-unionism in the framework of an industrial country, but they already know that non-political trade-unionism doesn’t make sense. They haven’t come to grips with the bourgeois machine, nor developed their consciousness in the class struggle; but perhaps this isn’t necessary. Perhaps. We shall see that this will to sum everything up, which caricatures itself often in facile internationalism, is one of the most fundamental characteristics of underdeveloped countries.

Let us return to considering the single combat between native and settler. We have seen that it takes the form of an armed and open struggle. There is no lack of historical examples: Indo-China, Indonesia, and of course North Africa. But what we must not lose sight of is that this struggle could have broken out anywhere, in Guinea as well as Somaliland, and moreover today it could break out in every place where colonialism means to stay on, in Angola, for example. The existence of an armed struggle

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shows that the people are decided to trust to violent methods only. He of whom they* The sentence is easily completed. During the phase of insurrection, each settler reasons on a basis of simple arithmetic. This logic does not surprise the other settlers, but it is important to point out that it does not surprise the natives either. To begin with, the affirmation of the principle “It’s them or us” does not constitute a paradox, since colonialism, as we have seen, is in fact the organization of a Manichean world, a world divided up into compartments. And when in laying down precise methods the settler asks each member of the oppressing minority to shoot down 30 or 100 or 200 natives, he sees that nobody shows any indignation and that the whole problem is to decide whether it can be done all at once or by-stages. † have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force. In fact, as always, the settler has shown him the way he should take if he is to become free. The argument the native chooses has been furnished by the settler, and by an ironic turning of the tables it is the native who now affirms that the colonialist understands nothing but force. The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time tries to hide this aspect of things. Every statue, whether of Faidherbe or of Lyautey, of Bugeaud or of Sergeant Blandan–all these conquistadors perched on colonial soil do not cease from proclaiming one and the same thing: “We are here by the force of bayonets….”

This chain of reasoning which presumes very arithmeti-

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* This refers to Mirabeau’s famous saying: “I am here by the will of the People; I shall leave only by the force of bayonets.”–Trans. †

It is evident that this vacuum cleaning destroys the very thing that they want to preserve. Sartre points this out when he says: “In short by the very fact of repeating them [concerning racist ideas] it is revealed that the simultaneous union of all against the natives is unrealizable. Such union only recurs from time to time and moreover it can only come into being as an active groupment in order to massacre the natives–an absurd though perpetual temptation to the settlers, which even if it was feasible would only succeed in abolishing colonization at one blow.” (  Critique de la Raison Dialectique, p. 346.)

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cally the disappearance of the colonized people does not leave the native overcome with moral indignation. He has always known that his duel with the settler would take place in the arena. The native loses no time in lamentations, and he hardly ever seeks for justice in the colonial framework. The fact is that if the settler’s logic leaves the native unshaken, it is because the latter has practically stated the problem of his liberation in identical terms: “We must form ourselves into groups of two hundred or five hundred, and each group must deal with a settler.” It is in this manner of thinking that each of the protagonists begins the struggle.

For the native, this violence represents the absolute line of action. The militant is also a man who works. The questions that the organization asks the militant bear the mark of this way of looking at things: “Where have you worked? With whom? What have you accomplished? “The group requires that each individual perform an irrevocable action. In Algeria, for example, where almost all the men who called on the people to join in the national struggle were condemned to death or searched for by the French police, confidence was proportional to the hopelessness of each case. You could be sure of a new recruit when he could no longer go back into the colonial system. This mechanism, it seems, had existed in Kenya among the Mau-Mau, who required that each member of the group should strike a blow at the victim. Each one was thus personally responsible for the death of that victim. To work means to work for the death of the settler. This assumed

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responsibility for violence allows both strayed and outlawed members of the group to come back again and to find their place once more, to become integrated. Violence is thus seen as comparable to a royal pardon. The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence. This rule of conduct enlightens the agent because it indicates to him the means and the end. The poetry of Césaire takes on in this precise aspect of violence a prophetic significance. We may recall one of the most decisive pages of his tragedy where the Rebel (indeed!) explains his conduct:

THE REBEL (harshly):

My name–an offense; my Christian name–humiliation; my status–a rebel; my age–the stone age.

THE MOTHER:

My race–the human race. My religion–brotherhood.

THE REBEL:

My race: that of the fallen. My religion…but it’s not you that will show it to me with your disarmament….

’tis I myself, with my rebellion and my poor fists clenched and my woolly head….

(Very calm): I remember one November day; it was hardly six months ago…. The master came into the cabin in a cloud of smoke like an April moon. He was flexing his short muscular arms–he was a very good master–and he was rubbing his little dimpled face with his fat fingers. His blue eyes were smiling and he couldn’t get the honeyed words out of his month quick enough. “The kid will be a decent fellow,” he said looking at me, and he said other pleasant things too, the master–that you had to start very early, that twenty years was not too much to make a good Christian and a good slave, a steady, devoted boy, a good commander’s chaingang captain, sharp-eyed and strong-armed. And all that man saw of my son’s cradle was that it was the cradle of a chaingang captain.

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We crept in knife in hand…

THE MOTHER:

Alas, you’ll die for it.

THE REBEL:

Killed…. I killed him with my own hands….

Yes, ’twas a fruitful death, a copious death….

It was night. We crept among the sugar canes.

The knives sang to the stars, but we did not heed the stars.

The sugar canes scarred our faces with streams of green blades.

THE MOTHER:

And I had dreamed of a son to close his mother’s eyes.

THE REBEL:

But I chose to open my son’s eyes upon another sun.

THE MOTHER:

O my son, son of evil and unlucky death–

THE REBEL:

Mother of living and splendid death,

THE MOTHER:

Because he has hated too much,

THE REBEL:

Because he has too much loved.

THE MOTHER:

Spare me, I am choking in your bonds. I bleed from your wounds.

THE REBEL:

And the world does not spare me…. There is not anywhere in the world a poor creature who’s been lynched or tortured in whom I am not murdered and humiliated…

THE MOTHER:

God of Heaven, deliver him!

THE REBEL:

My heart, thou wilt not deliver me from all that I remember…

It was an evening in November…

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And suddenly shouts lit up the silence;

We had attacked, we the slaves; we, the dung underfoot, we the animals with patient hooves,

We were running like madmen; shots rang out…4We were striking. Blood and sweat cooled and refreshed us. We were striking where the shouts came from, and the shouts became more strident and a great clamor rose from the east: it was the outhouses burning and the flames flickered sweetly on our cheeks.

Then was the assault made on the master’s house. They were firing from the windows. We broke in the doors.

The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, very calm… and our people stopped dead…it was the master…I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm.

It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season…I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today. *

It is understandable that in this atmosphere, daily life becomes quite simply impossible. You can no longer be a fellah, a pimp, or an alcoholic as before. The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity. This reign of violence will be the more terrible in proportion to the size of the implantation from the mother country. The development of violence among the colonized people will be proportionate to the violence exercised by the threatened colonial regime. In the first phase of this insurrectional period, the home governments are the slaves of the settlers, and these settlers seek to intimidate the natives and their home gov-

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* Aimé Césaire, Les Armes Miraculeuscs (Et les chiens se taisaient), pp. 133-37.

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emments at one and the same time. They use the same methods against both of them. The assassination of the Mayor of Evian, in its method and motivation, is identifiable with the assassination of Ali Boumendjel. For the settlers, the alternative is not between Algérie algérienne and Algérie française but between an independent Algeria and a colonial Algeria, and anything else is mere talk or attempts at treason. The settler’s logic is implacable and one is only staggered by the counter-logic visible in the behavior of the native insofar as one has not clearly understood beforehand the mechanisms of the settler’s ideas. From the moment that the native has chosen the methods of counter-violence, police reprisals automatically call forth reprisals on the side of the nationalists. However, the results are not equivalent, for machine-gunning from airplanes and bombardments from the fleet go far beyond in horror and magnitude any answer the natives can make. This recurring terror de-mystifies once and for all the most estranged members of the colonized race. They find out on the spot that all the piles of speeches on the equality of human beings do not hide the commonplace fact that the seven Frenchmen killed or wounded at the Col de Sakamody kindles the indignation of all civilized consciences, whereas the sack of the douars * of Guergour and of the dechras of Djerah and the massacre of whole populations–which had merely called forth the Sakamody ambush as a reprisal–all this is of not the slightest importance. Terror, counter-terror, violence, counter-violence: that is what observers bitterly record when they describe the circle of hate, which is so tenacious and so evident in Algeria.

In all armed straggles, there exists what we might call the point of no return. Almost always it is marked off by

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* Temporary village for the use of shepherds.–Trans.

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a huge and all-inclusive repression which engulfs all sectors of the colonized people. This point was reached in Algeria in 1955 with the 12,000 victims of Phillippeville, and in 1956 with Lacoste’s instituting of urban and rural militias. †

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† We must go back to this period in order to judge the importance of this decision on the part of the French government in Algeria. Thus we may read in “Résistance Algérienne,” No. 4, dated 28th March 1957, the following: “In reply to the wish expressed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, the French Government has now decided to create urban militias in Algeria. ‘Enough blood has been spilled’ was whatthe United Nations said; Lacoste replies ‘Let us form militias.’ ‘Cease fire,’ advised UNO; Lacoste vociferates, ‘We must arm the civilians.’ Whereas the two parties face-to-face with each other were on the recommendation of the United Nations invited to contact each other with a view to coming to an agreement and finding a peaceful and democratic solution, Lacoste decrees that henceforward every European will be armed and should open fire on any person who seems to him suspect. It was then agreed (in the Assembly) that savage and iniquitous repression verging on genocide ought at all costs to be opposed by the authorities: but Lacoste replies ‘Let us systematize the repression and organize the Algerian manhunt.’ And, symbolically, he entrusts the military with civil powers, and gives military powers to civilians. The ring is closed. In the middle, the Algerian, disarmed, famished, tracked down, jostled, struck, lynched, will soon be slaughtered as a suspect. Today, in Algeria, there is not a single Frenchman who is not authorized and even invited to use his weapons. There is not a single Frenchman, in Algeria, one month after the appeal for calm made by UNO, who is not permitted, and obliged to search out, investigate and pursue suspects.

“One month after the vote on the final motion of the General Assembly of the United Nations, there is not one European in Algeria who is not party to the most frightful work of extermination of modern times. A democratic solution? Right, Lacoste concedes; let’s begin by exterminating the Algerians, and to do that, let’s arm the civilians and give them carte blanche. The Paris press, on the whole, has welcomed the creation of these armed groups with reserve. Fascist militias, they’ve been called. Yes; but on the individual level, on the plane of human rights, what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country? The opinion has been advanced that they are systematically legalized and commended; but does not the body of Algeria bear for the last one hundred and thirty years wounds which gape still wider, more numerous and more deepseated than ever? ‘Take care,’ advises Monsieur Kenne-Vignes, member of parliament for the MRP, ‘do we not by the creation of these militias risk seeing the gap widen between the two communities in Algeria?’ Yes; but is not colonial status simply the organized reduction to slavery of a whole people? The Algerian revolution is precisely the affirmed contestation of that slavery and that abyss. The Algerian revolution speaks to the occupying nation and says: ‘Take your fangs out of the bleeding flesh of Algeria! Let the people of Algeria speak!’

“The creation of militias, they say, will lighten the tasks of the Army. It will free certain units whose mission will be to protect the Moroccan and Tunisian borders. In Algeria, the Army is six hundred thousand strong. Almost all the Navy and the Air Force are based there. There is an enormous, speedy police force with a horribly good record since it has absorbed the ex-torturers from Morocco and Tunisia. The territorial units are one hundred thousand strong. The task of the Army, all the same, must be lightened. So let us create urban militias. The fact remains that the hysterical and criminal frenzy of Lacoste imposes them even on clearsighted French people. The troth is that the creation of militias carries its contradiction even in its justification. The task of the French Army is neverending. Consequently, when it is given as an objective the gagging of the Algerian people, the door is closed on the future forever. Above all, it is forbidden to analyze, to understand, or to measure the depth and the density of the Algerian revolution: departmental leaders, housing-estate leaders, street leaders, house leaders, leaders who control each landing…Today, to the surface checker-board is added an underground network.

“In 48 hours two thousand volunteers were enrolled. The Europeans of Algeria responded immediately to Lacoste’s call to kill. From now on, each European must check up on all surviving Algerians in his sector; and in addition he will be responsible for information, for a ‘quick response’ to acts of terrorism, for the detection of suspects, for the liquidation of runaways and for the reinforcement of police services. Certainly, the tasks of the Army must be lightened. Today, to the surface mopping-up is added a deeper harrowing. Today, to the killing which is all in the day’s work is added planified murder. ‘Stop the bloodshed,’ was the advice given by UNO. ‘The best way of doing this,’ replied Lacoste, ‘is to make sure there remains no blood to shed.’ The Algerian people, after having been delivered up to Massu’s hordes, is put under the protection of the urban militias. By his decision to create these militias, Lacoste shows quite plainly that he will brook no interference with HIS war. It is a proof that there are no limits once the rot has set in. True, he is at the moment a prisoner of the situation; but what a consolation to drag everyone down in one’s fall!

“After each of these decisions, the Algerian people tense their muscles still more and fight still harder. After each of these organized, deliberately sought after assassinations, the Algerian people builds up its awareness of self, and consolidates its resistance. Yes; the tasks of the French Army are infinite: for oh, how infinite is the unity of the people of Algeria!”

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Then it became clear to everybody, including even the settlers, that “things couldn’t go on as before.” Yet the colonized people do not chalk up the reckoning. They record the huge gaps made in their ranks as a sort of necessary evil. Since they have decided to reply by violence, they therefore are ready to take all its consequences. They only insist in return that no reckoning should be kept, either, for the others. To the saying “All natives are the same” the colonized person replies, “All settlers are the same.” *

When the native is tortured, when his wife is killed or raped, he complains to no one. The oppressor’s government can set up commissions of inquiry and of information daily if it wants to; in the eyes of the native, these commissions do not exist. The fact is that soon we shall have had seven years of crimes in Algeria and there has not yet been a single Frenchman indicted before a French court of justice for the murder of an Algerian. In Indo-

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* This is why there are no prisoners when the fighting first starts. It is only through educating the local leaders politically that those at the head of the movement can make the masses accept 1) that people coming from the mother country do not always act of their own free will and are sometimes even disgusted by the war; 2) that it is of immediate advantage to the movement that its supporters should show by their actions that they respect certain international conventions; 3) that an army which takes prisoners is an army, and ceases to be considered as a group of wayside bandits; 4) that whatever the circumstances, the possession of prisoners constitutes a means of exerting pressure which must not be overlooked in order to protect our men who are in enemy hands.

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China, in Madagascar, or in the colonies the native has always known that he need expect nothing from the other side. The settler’s work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native’s work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler. On the logical plane, the Manicheism of the settler produces a Manicheism of the native. To the theory of the “absolute evil of the native” the theory of the “absolute evil of the settler” replies.

The appearance of the settler has meant in the terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy, and the petrifieation of individuals. For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler. This then is the correspondence, term by term, between the two trains of reasoning.

But it so happens that for the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible. The armed struggle mobilizes the people, that is to say, it throws them in one way and in one direction.

The mobilization of the masses, when it arises out of the war of liberation, introduces into each man’s consciousness the ideas of a common cause, of a national destiny, and of a collective history. In the same way the second phase, that of the building-up of the nation, is helped on by the existence of this cement which has been mixed with blood and anger. Thus we come to a fuller appreciation of the originality of the words used in these underdeveloped countries. During the colonial period the people are called

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upon to fight against oppression; after national liberation, they are called upon to fight against poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment. The struggle, they say, goes on. The people realize that life is an unending contest.

We have said that the native’s violence unifies the people. By its very structure, colonialism is separatist and regionalist. Colonialism does not simply state the existence of tribes; it also reinforces it and separates them. The colonial system encourages chieftaincies and keeps alive the old Marabout confraternities. Violence is in action allinclusive and national. It follows that it is closely involved in the liquidation of regionalism and of tribalism. Thus the national parties show no pity at all toward the caids and the customary chiefs. Their destruction is the preliminary to the unification of the people.

At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilized through a rapid movement of decolonization, the people have the time to see that the liberation has been the business of each and all and that the leader has no special merit. From thence comes that type of aggressive reticence with regard to the machinery of protocol which young governments quickly show. When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as “liberators.” They show themselves to be jealous of the results of their action and take good care not to place their future, their destiny, or the fate of their country in the hands of a living god. Yesterday they were completely irresponsible; today they mean to understand everything and make all decisions. Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification. From now on the demagogues, the opportunists,

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and the magicians have a difficult task. The action which has thrown them into a hand-to-hand struggle confers upon the masses a voracious taste for the concrete. The attempt at mystification becomes, in the long run, practically impossible.

VIOLENCE IN THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

We have pointed out many times in the preceding pages that in underdeveloped regions the political leader is forever calling on his people to fight: to fight against colonialism, to fight against poverty and underdevelopment, and to fight against sterile traditions. The vocabulary which he uses in his appeals is that of a chief of staff: “mass mobilization”; “agricultural front”; “fight against illiteracy”; “defeats we have undergone”; “victories won.” The young independent nation evolves during the first years in an atmosphere of the battlefield, for the political leader of an underdeveloped country looks fearfully at the huge distance his country will have to cover. He calls to the people and says to them: “Let us gird up our loins and set to work,” and the country, possessed by a kind of creative madness, throws itself into a gigantic and disproportionate effort. The program consists not only of climbing out of the morass but also of catching up with the other nations using the only means at hand. They reason that if the European nations have reached that stage of development, it is on account of their efforts: “Let us therefore,” they seem to say, “prove to ourselves and to the whole world that we are capable of the same achievements.” This manner of setting out the problem of the evolution of underdeveloped countries seems to us to be neither correct nor reasonable.

The European states achieved national unity at a moment when the national middle classes had concentrated

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most of the wealth in their hands. Shopkeepers and artisans, clerks and bankers monopolized finance, trade, and science in the national framework. The middle class was the most dynamic and prosperous of all classes. Its coming to power enabled it to undertake certain very important speculations: industrialization, the development of communications, and soon the search for outlets overseas.

In Europe, apart from certain slight differences ( England, for example, was some way ahead) the various states were at a more or less uniform stage economically when they achieved national unity. There was no nation which by reason of the character of its development and evolution caused affront to the others.

Today, national independence and the growth of national feeling in underdeveloped regions take on totally new aspects. In these regions, with the exception of certain spectacular advances, the different countries show the same absence of infrastructure. The mass of the people struggle against the same poverty, flounder about making the same gestures and with their shrunken bellies outline what has been called the geography of hunger. It is an underdeveloped world, a world inhuman in its poverty; but also it is a world without doctors, without engineers, and without administrators. Confronting this world, the European nations sprawl, ostentatiously opulent. This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world. The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races. We have decided not to overlook this any longer. When a colonialist country, embarrassed by the claims for independence made by a colony, proclaims to the nationalist leaders: “If you wish for independence,

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take it, and go back to the Middle Ages,” the newly independent people tend to acquiesce and to accept the challenge; in fact you may see colonialism withdrawing its capital and its technicians and setting up around the young State the apparatus of economic pressure. * The apotheosis of independence is transformed into the curse of independence, and the colonial power through its immense resources of coercion condemns the young nation to regression. In plain words, the colonial power says: “Since you want independence, take it and starve.” The nationalist leaders have no other choice but to turn to

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*  In the present international context, capitalism does not merely operate an economic blockade against African or Asiatic colonies. The United States with its anti-Castro operations is opening a new chapter in the long story of man’s toiling advance toward freedom. Latin America, made up of new independent countries which sit at the United Nations and raise the wind there, ought to be an object lesson for Africa. These former colonies since their liberation have suffered the brazenfaced rule of Western capitalism in terror and destitution.

The liberation of Africa and the growth of consciousness among mankind have made it possible for the Latin American peoples to break with the old merry-go-round of dictatorships where each succeeding regime exactly resembled the preceding one. Castro took over power in Cuba, and gave it to the people. This heresy is felt to be a national scourge by the Yankees, and the United States now organizes counterrevolutionary brigades, puts together a provisional government, burns the sugar-cane crops, and generally has decided to strangle the Cuban people mercilessly. But this will be difficult. The people of Cuba will suffer, but they will conquer. The Brazilian president Janio Quadros has just announced in a declaration of historic importance that his country will defend the Cuban Revolution by all means. Perhaps even the United States may draw back when faced with the declared will of the peoples. When that day comes, we’ll hang out the flags, for it will be a decisive moment for the men and women of the whole world. The almighty dollar, which when all is said or done is only guaranteed by slaves scattered all over the globe, in the oil wells of the Middle East, the mines of Peru or of the Congo, and the United Fruit or Firestone plantations, will then cease to dominate with all its force these slaves which it has created and who continue, empty-headed and emptybellied, to feed it from their substance.

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their people and ask from them a gigantic effort. A regime of austerity is imposed on these starving men; a disproportionate amount of work is required from their atrophied muscles. An autarkic regime is set up and each state, with the miserable resources it has in hand, tries to find an answer to the nation’s great hunger and poverty. We see the mobilization of a people which toils to exhaustion in front of a suspicious and bloated Europe.

Other countries of the Third World refuse to undergo this ordeal and agree to get over it by accepting the conditions of the former guardian power. These countries use their strategic position–a position which accords them privileged treatment in the struggle between the two blocs — to conclude treaties and give undertakings. The former dominated country becomes an economically dependent country. The ex-colonial power, which has kept intact and sometimes even reinforced its colonialist trade channels, agrees to provision the budget of the independent nation by small injections. Thus we see that the accession to independence of the colonial countries places an important question before the world, for the national liberation of colonized countries unveils their true economic state and makes it seem even more unendurable. The fundamental duel which seemed to be that between colonialism and anticolonialism, and indeed between capitalism and socialism, is already losing some of its importance. What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.

It might have been generally thought that the time had come for the world, and particularly for the Third World, to choose between the capitalist and socialist systems. The underdeveloped countries, which have used the fierce competition which exists between the two systems in order to assure the triumph of their struggle for national libera-

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tion, should however refuse to become a factor in that competition. The Third World ought not to be content to define itself in the terms of values which have preceded it. On the contrary, the underdeveloped countries ought to do their utmost to find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them. The concrete problem we find ourselves up against is not that of a choice, cost what it may, between socialism and capitalism as they have been defined by men of other continents and of other ages. Of course we know that the capitalist regime, in so far as it is a way of life, cannot leave us free to perform our work at home, nor our duty in the world. Capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopolies are the enemies of underdeveloped countries. On the other hand the choice of a socialist regime, a regime which is completely orientated toward the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions, will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously, and thus make impossible that caricature of society where all economic and political power is held in the hands of a few who regard the nation as a whole with scorn and contempt.

But in order that this regime may work to good effect so that we can in every instance respect those principles which were our inspiration, we need something more than human output. Certain underdeveloped countries expend a huge amount of energy in this way. Men and women, young and old undertake enthusiastically what is in fact forced labor, and proclaim themselves the slaves of the nation. The gift of oneself, and the contempt for every preoccupation which is not in the common interest, bring into being a national morale which comforts the heart of man, gives him fresh confidence in the destiny of mankind and disarms the most reserved observers. But we cannot believe that such an effort can be kept up at the same

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frenzied pace for very long. These young countries have agreed to take up the challenge after the unconditional withdrawal of the ex-colonial countries. The country finds itself in the hands of new managers; but the fact is that everything needs to be reformed and everything thought out anew. In reality the colonial system was concerned with certain forms of wealth and certain resources only -precisely those which provisioned her own industries. Up to the present no serious effort had been made to estimate the riches of the soil or of mineral resources. Thus the young independent nation sees itself obliged to use the economic channels created by the colonial regime. It can, obviously, export to other countries and other currency areas, but the basis of its exports is not fundamentally modified. The colonial regime has carved out certain channels and they must be maintained or catastrophe will threaten. Perhaps it is necessary to begin everything all over again: to change the nature of the country’s exports, and not simply their destination, to re-examine the soil and mineral resources, the rivers, and–why not?–the sun’s productivity. Now, in order to do all this other things are needed over and above human output–capital of all kinds, technicians, engineers, skilled mechanics, and so on. Let’s be frank: we do not believe that the colossal effort which the underdeveloped peoples are called upon to make by their leaders will give the desired results. If conditions of work are not modified, centuries will be needed to humanize this world which has been forced down to animal level by imperial powers. *

The truth is that we ought not to accept these condi-

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* Certain countries which have benefitted by a large European settlement come to independence with houses and wide streets, and these tend to forget the poverty-stricken, starving hinterland. By the irony of fate, they give the impression by a kind of complicit silence that their towns are contemporaneous with independence.

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tions. We should flatly refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn us. Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories. For centuries the capitalists have behaved in the underdeveloped world like nothing more than war criminals. Deportations, massacres, forced labor, and slavery have been the main methods used by capitalism to increase its wealth, its gold or diamond reserves, and to establish its power. Not long ago Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony. The governments of the various Europan nations called for reparations and demanded the restitution in kind and money of the wealth which had been stolen from them: cultural treasures, pictures, sculptures, and stained glass have been given back to their owners. There was only one slogan in the mouths of Europeans on the morrow of the 1945 V-day: “Germany must pay.” Herr Adenauer, it must be said, at the opening of the Eichmann trial, and in the name of the German people, asked once more for forgiveness from the Jewish people. Herr Adenauer has renewed the promise of his people to go on paying to the state of Israel the enormous sums which are supposed to be compensation for the crimes of the Nazis. *

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* It is true that Germany has not paid all her reparations. The indemnities imposed on the vanquished nation have not been claimed in full, for the injured nations have included Germany in their anti-communist system of defense. This same preoccupation is the permanent motivation of the colonialist countries when they try to obtain from their former colonies, if not their inclusion in the Western system, at least military bases and enclaves. On the other hand they have decided unanimously to forget their demands for the sake of NATO strategy and to preserve the free world; and we have seen Germany receiving floods of dollars and machines. A Germany once more standing on its feet, strong and powerful, was a necessity for the Western camp. It was in the understood interests of so-called free Europe to have a prosperous and reconstructed Germany which would be capable of serving as a first rampart against the eventual Red hordes. Germany has made admirable use of the European crisis. At the same time the United States and other European states feel a legitimate bitterness when confronted with this Germany, yesterday at their feet, which today metes out to them cutthroat competition in the economic field.

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In the same way we may say that the imperialist states would make a great mistake and commit an unspeakable injustice if they contented themselves with withdrawing from our soil the military cohorts, and the administrative and managerial services whose function it was to discover the wealth of the country, to extract it and to send it off to the mother countries. We are not blinded by the moral reparation of national independence; nor are we fed by it. The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too. On the universal plane this affirmation, you may be sure, should on no account be taken to signify that we feel ourselves affected by the creations of Western arts or techniques. For in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries: Latin America, China, and Africa. From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: “It’s a just reparation which will be paid to us.” Nor will

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we acquiesce in the help for underdeveloped countries being a program of “sisters of charity.” This help should be the ratification of a double realization: the realization by the colonized peoples that i t is their due, and the realization by the capitalist powers that in fact they must pay. * For if, through lack of intelligence (we won’t speak of lack of gratitude) the capitalist countries refuse to pay, then the relentless dialectic of their own system will smother them. It is fact that young nations do not attract much private capital. There are many reasons which explain and render legitimate this reserve on the part of the monopolies. As soon as the capitalists know–and of course they are the first to know–that their government is getting ready to decolonize, they hasten to withdraw all their capital from the colony in question. The spectacular flight of capital is one of the most constant phenomena of decolonization.

Private companies, when asked to invest in independent countries, lay down conditions which are shown in practice to be inacceptable or unrealizable. Faithful to the principle of immediate returns which is theirs as soon as they go “overseas,” the capitalists are very chary concerning all long-term investments. They are unamenable and often openly hostile to the prospective programs of planning laid down by the young teams which form the new government. At a pinch they willingly agree to lend money to

____________________

* “To make a radical difference between the building up of socialism in Europe and our relations with the Third World (as if our only relations with it were external ones) is, whether we know it or not, to set the pace for the distribution of the colonial inheritance over and above the liberation of the underdeveloped countries. It is to wish to build up a luxury socialism upon the fruits of imperialist robbery–as if, inside the gang, the swag is more or less shared out equally, and even a little of it is given to the poor in the form of charity, since it’s been forgotten that they were the people it was stolen from.” Marcel Péju, “To die for De Gaulle?” Temps Modernes, No. 175-6, October-November 1960.

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the young states, but only on condition that this money is used to buy manufactured products and machines: in other words, that it serves to keep the factories in the mother country going.

In fact the cautiousness of the Western financial groups may be explained by their fear of taking any risk. They also demand political stability and a calm social climate which are impossible to obtain when account is taken of the appalling state of the population as a whole immediately after independence. Therefore, vainly looking for some guarantee which the former colony cannot give, they insist on garrisons being maintained or the inclusion of the young state in military or economic pacts. The private companies put pressure on their own governments to at least set up military bases in these countries for the purpose of assuring the protection of their interests. In the last resort these companies ask their government to guarantee the investments which they decide to make in such-and-such an underdeveloped region.

It happens that few countries fulfill the conditions demanded by the trusts and monopolies. Thus capital, failing to find a safe outlet, remains blocked in Europe, and is frozen. It is all the more frozen because the capitalists refuse to invest in their own countries. The returns in this case are in fact negligible and treasury control is the despair of even the boldest spirits.

In the long run the situation is catastrophic. Capital no longer circulates, or else its circulation is considerably diminished. In spite of the huge sums swallowed up by military budgets, international capitalism is in desperate straits.

But another danger threatens it as well. Insofar as the Third World is in fact abandoned and condemned to regression or at least to stagnation by the selfishness and

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wickedness of Western nations, the underdeveloped peoples will decide to continue their evolution inside a collective autarky. Thus the Western industries will quickly be deprived of their overseas markets. The machines will pile up their products in the warehouses and a merciless struggle will ensue on the European market between the trusts and the financial groups. The closing of factories, the paying off of workers and unemployment will force the European working class to engage in an open struggle against the capitalist regime. Then the monopolies will realize that their true interests lie in giving aid to the underdeveloped countries–unstinted aid with not too many conditions. So we see that the young nations of the Third World are wrong in trying to make up to the capitalist countries. We are strong in our own right, and in the justice of our point of view. We ought on the contrary to emphasize and explain to the capitalist countries that the fundamental problem of our time is not the struggle between the socialist regime and them. The Cold War must be ended, for it leads nowhere. The plans for nuclearizing the world must stop, and large-scale investments and technical aid must be given to underdeveloped regions. The fate of the world depends on the answer that is given to this question.

Moreover, the capitalist regime must not try to enlist the aid of the socialist regime over “the fate of Europe” in face of the starving multitudes of colored peoples. The exploit of Colonial Gargarin doesn’t seem to displease General de Gaulle, for is it not a triumph which brings honor to Europe? For some time past the statesmen of the capitalist countries have adopted an equivocal attitude toward the Soviet Union. After having united all their forces to abolish the socialist regime, they now realize that they’ll have to reckon with it. So they look as pleasant

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as they can, they make all kinds of advances, and they remind the Soviet people the whole time that they “belong to Europe.”

They will not manage to divide the progressive forces which mean to lead mankind toward happiness by brandishing the threat of a Third World which is rising like the tide to swallow up all Europe. The Third World does not mean to organize a great crusade of hunger against the whole of Europe. What it expects from those who for centuries have kept it in slavery is that they will help it to rehabilitate mankind, and make man victorious everywhere, once and for all. But it is clear that we are not so naive as to think that this will come about with the cooperation and the good will of the European governments. This huge task which consists of reintroducing mankind into the world, the whole of mankind, will be carried out with the indispensable help, of the European peoples, who themselves must realize that in the past they have often joined the ranks of our common masters where colonial questions were concerned. To achieve this, the European peoples must first decide to wake up and shake themselves, use their brains, and stop playing the stupid game of the Sleeping Beauty.

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Source: openanthropology.org

hyle.gr | hyle.mobi

28

Follow Up READing

After our Eos READS session on Tuesday 3/2, I recommend that you read (and feel free to comment using our private hypothes.is group), “The fall after the summer of solidarity” by Sasha-Mae Eccleston, one of the co-founders and co-presidents of Eos.

VI

Workshops

29

Workshop One : What and how do we know about gender and sexuality in ancient Greece?

Download Workshop 1

General Instructions: (5 minutes to introduce yourselves and read instructions)

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students.  Once you have landed in your Breakout Room, please take a few minutes to introduce yourselves.  Select one person to be the timekeeper.  This person should keep the group moving along according to the time allotments on the worksheet.  This job is crucial, since without it, the group will not complete the experience which the worksheet is designed to bring about.  Select another person to the be group scribe.  This volunteer will not only take notes for themself, but also be prepared to report out the group’s work.

This workshop has four parts and is designed for 2 hours and 10 minutes.  This includes a 15-minute break and a 15-minute moveable part, which will allow time for the faculty to pop in for a chat.  Please note your start time ______ and end time _______ before beginning.

Although we must use the internet in order to meet, please refrain from using a search engine (e.g. Google) to look up answers to questions.  If a question arises during discussion that you cannot answer without external research, please bring your question back to the seminar for discussion and/or use it as a writing prompt and do your research outside of class.  You will need paper and something to write with for at least one part of this workshop; I recommend making notes — either on a copy of this workshop or on your own paper — throughout.  Of course you may also take notes on your computer.

Moveable Part (15 Minutes)

At some point during the workshop time, Jody will pop in for a 15-minute chat.

Part One:  Defining our terms  (15 minutes, 5 per question)

The title of our course, “Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece,” invites reflection.  Please discuss these questions about the foundations of the course with your group.  Notetaker: be prepared to share your group’s (however provisional) conclusions in class.

1. What do the terms “gender” and “sexuality” refer to? How have you developed your current understanding of these concepts?  What influences and/or experiences have shaped how you think about these terms?

2. What is “ancient Greece”? What do you know about it?  What images, connotations, or associations do you have with the idea of ancient Greece?  Where did  your ideas came from?

3. In addition to gender and sexuality, we will also be centering themes of race, ethnicity, social status, and class. Why do you think it is important for us to also consider these vectors of subjectivity in connection with gender and sexuality?

Part Two.  Introducing the Greek alphabet (15 minutes)

*note that ς also appears for sigma at the end of a word.

1. (5 minutes) One of the unifying practices that defines “ancient Greece” is use of the ancient Greek language. Please take a moment to familiarize yourselves (or reacquaint yourselves if you study Greek) with the ancient Greek alphabet.  Use the chart below to complete the following exercise.

2. (10 minutes) Working together, please (1) attempt to sound out, (2) transcribe into the Latin (English) alphabet, and (3) note/discuss the meanings of the following words.

1. λόγος ___________________ — a word (spoken or written), or that by which the inward thought is expressed, and the inward thought itself.

2. μῦθος _________________ — anything delivered by word of mouth, word, speech, story.

3. ἄνθρωπος __________________ — human; man or woman as opposed to a god.

4. θέα ___________________ — goddess.

5. ψύχη _______________________ — breath; life breath; spirit.

Break (15 minutes)  Please take a break and then reconvene with your small group to complete the last part of the workshop.

Part Three.  Know Yourself (and Your Course).  (25 minutes)

Please read over the course website, including the HOME page, the BLOG, and the COURSE INFORMATION.  The best way to do this might be together, with one person sharing their screen.

1. (10 minutes) As you read through the site, discuss and rephrase the course description, aims, tools, and logistics of the course.  What is interesting or exciting to you about the subject matter and format of this course?  What questions do you have going in?  Do you have any questions or concerns about the course aims?  Try to rephrase the course information and aims into one or two sentences.  Write down your results.

2. (10 minutes) Now, please focus on the logistics, course Pressbook: Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece, and SCHEDULE ONE (on the DETAILED SCHEDULE OF ASSIGNMENTS page).  Note the percentage breakdown and requirements to receive full credit in this course.  Do you feel that you fully understand all of the requirements?  Do you have any concerns or questions?

3. (5 minutes). You will be invited to report your conclusions and ask questions when we reconvene. Please work, as a group, to develop some response to the course information and Pressbook — perhaps trying to offer both a positive (e.g. we are excited about….) and a negative (e.g., we are worried or confused about…..) comment or question.

Part Four:  Reflecting on Your Positionality and Developing Your Aims (40 minutes)

1. (15 minutes) The people and culture of Ancient Greece are not the only focus of this course; we each bring our own subjectivity and positionality to our scholarly work, and self-reflection will be an important part of what we do. For this part of the workshop, please take five minutes to journal to yourself and then reconvene with your small group and discuss how your positionality as individuals has informed the perspective you bring to our inquiry.  Consider:  How have race, class, gender, sexuality, social status, and other subjectivities (taken together, your positionality) shaped the interests that brought you to this course?  What advantages helped you arrive here?  What obstacles have you overcome to be here today?

2. (5 minutes) Your Student Contract asks you to identify your aims for this course. In order to develop your answer to this question, please take a moment to reflect now.  What are your aims for this class?  Why will being self-reflective be important in helping you work toward those aims?

3. (10 minutes) Please share out and discuss your thoughts to question one above with your group. Are your aims similar or different?  Does hearing about your colleagues’ aims help you revise or develop your own?

4. (5 minutes) For the last five minutes of the workshop, please fill out and submit the STUDENT SURVEY AND CONTRACT.

30

Workshop Two : Sexuality & Gender, Theory & Experience

Download a Word Doc. of Workshop 2 here.

General Instructions: (10 minutes to check-in, introduce yourselves, and get set up with a timekeeper)

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students.  Once you have landed in your Breakout Room, please take a few minutes to introduce yourselves.  Select one person to be the timekeeper.  This person should keep the group moving along according to the time allotments on the worksheet.  This job is crucial, since without it, the group will not complete the experience which the worksheet is designed to bring about.  You won’t need a scribe for today; you are each encouraged to take notes.

This workshop has two main parts and is designed for 1 hour and 30 minutes, including the 10-minute set-up time and two 10-minute breaks.  Please note your start time 1 pm and end time 2:30 pm before beginning.

There isn’t a scheduled faculty-chat today, but I may pop in to join the conversation.  Please shout out and I’ll join if you have any questions.

Also, we won’t have time to discuss your conclusions as a group today, so please keep track of your notes, residual questions, and important conclusions — we will return to these essays and this workshop next week and throughout the semester.

Part One:  Defining key terms  (30 minutes)

Work together with your group to define the following terms and to describe how they are used by the authors.  Please note any terms that you’re struggling to define or understand.

de Beauvoir:

1. Subject

2. Other

Lorde:

3. Patriarchy

4. Interdependency

Haley:

5. Racism

Castelli:

6. Counter-Storytelling

Hendricks:

7. White Settler Colonialism

Egan:

8. Compulsory Heterosexuality

Break (10 minutes)  Please take a break and then reconvene with your small group to complete the last part of the workshop.

Part Two.  Critical Thinking (30 min)

Please work together with your group to answer the following questions.  Please stay close to the texts and refer to them often!  Reminder to take notes.  Although we won’t have time to report out and discuss these questions in the reconvened seminar today, we *will* be coming back to them throughout the semester (and you are encouraged to launch your study group seminar later this week from these starting points).

1.  (5 minutes) Egan presents an accessible summary of how sexuality has been studied since Foucault, and what might be misguided in some of the controversy around his work. What questions do you have about the theorization of sexuality, as briefly outlined here?

2. (5 minutes) According to de Beauvoir, there are several reasons why men are ill-equipped to fully comprehend and elucidate the situation of women.  Work together to list three reasons that she gives for this claim.  After you have made your list, discuss the following re. each reason that de Beauvoir gives:  (1) Do you agree or disagree with this claim? (2) Do you think this claim is astrue, moretrue, or lesstrue now than when de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex (in 1949)? de Beauvoir re-inscribes a clear gender binary, recognizing only male and female, with no consideration of non-binary genders, a gender spectrum, or other complexity. Do you think this limits the validity of her work?

3.  (5 minutes) Shelley Haley, Luna Castelli, and Margo Hendricks introduce us to Critical Race Theory and counter-storytelling. Please discuss why it might be especially important to bring these tools to our inquiry into gender and sexuality in Ancient Greece, in particular as we study texts conventionally considered key works in the “Classical Western Tradition.”

4.  (10 minutes) Lorde’s essay levels criticism at a conference (held on the work of de Beauvoir, specifically), but her concerns apply more widely. First, take a few minutes to articulate her position in your own words.  Second, discuss why it is important for you – as college students – to reflect (critically) on the culture of academia.

6.  (5 minutes) Lorde makes a statement that is also a call to action. Review the quote below and then use the concluding time in our workshop today to contemplate what it would mean to take this charge seriously.

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.

Begin with a few moments of quiet, individual reflection.  Track your thoughts and feelings in writing, if that helps you move into the deep place Lorde references.  Discuss your experience with your group.  (You are encouraged to take up your work here in your Author’s Introduction on Pressbook.)

Please take a 10-minute break at 2:20.  At 2:30, you’ll be brought back to the main Zoom room for our visit from librarians Jennifer Beamer and Adam Rosenkranz.

31

Workshop Three : Sing, Muse

Workshop duration: 85 minutes

Start time:

End time:

Download a Word Doc of Workshop 3 here

General Instructions: (10 minutes to introduce yourselves, check in, and read instructions)

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students.  Once you have landed in your Breakout Room, please take a few minutes to introduce yourselves.  Select one person to be the timekeeper.  This person should keep the group moving along according to the time allotments on the worksheet.  This job is crucial, since without it, the group will not complete the experience which the worksheet is designed to bring about.  You will not need a scribe today; everyone is encouraged to take notes, as we will return to your answers to today’s questions in our subsequent discussion of the Iliad.

Although we must use the internet in order to meet, please refrain from using a search engine (e.g. Google) to look up answers to questions.  If a question arises during discussion that you cannot answer without external research, please bring your question back to the seminar for discussion and/or use it as a writing prompt and do your research outside of class.

1. Composition & Performance (10 minutes)

Originally orally composed and recited in performance contexts over several generations from, perhaps, the late-ninth through early-eighth centuries (ca. 850-725 bce), the Homeric poems (both the Iliad and the Odyssey) were written down in the late-eighth or early-seventh centuries (ca. 725-675 bce).  The written composition of the poems coincided with the development of the Greek alphabet and writing.  For subsequent generations — through the archaic and classical periods (750-490 and 490-323 bce, respectively) — the Homeric epics were widely performed, read aloud, and memorized, and so they were deeply familiar to many Greek-speaking peoples.  Please discuss the questions below, which ask you to think about the significance of the poem’s orality.

Please discuss:

Looking back over what you’ve read of the poem so far, do you see any indications of “orality” in the poem?  What might you expect to see in a pre-literate, or performance-oriented, rather than strictly literary, composition?

Given that the Iliad evolved over several generations before it was written down, who is the author of the poem?

Why might the authorship (and mode of composition) of the poem matter to us, in a course that centers the topics of gender and sexuality?

2. In the beginning…  (10 minutes)  Please review the first seven lines of the Iliad, provided here in Greek with my own translation (which you may compare with Alexander’s).

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,

πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν

ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν

οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,                    5

ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε

Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

Anger – sing, goddess, the deadly rage of Achilles, son of Peleus,

the rage that brought myriad griefs down upon the Achaeans

and hurled many strong warriors’ souls to the house of Hades.

Sing the rage that left their bodies exposed, a feast

for all of the scavenger dogs and birds.

And sing how the will of Zeus was being fulfilled,

from its origin, the moment that it began, the conflict between

the son of Atreus, lord over men, and goddess-born Achilles.

The first three words of the Iliad are μῆνιν – rage or anger, ἄειδε – sing (in the imperative form, a.k.a. the bossy form, which we show in English with tone of voice or maybe an exclamation point: sing!), and θεὰ – goddess.  The goddess is not named.

We will return to the central theme of μῆνις (rage) in the next couple of weeks.  For today, please focus on the opening evocation of a goddess: ἄειδε θεὰ “sing goddess.”  We know the divinity called upon to sing in line one is gendered female  because in the Greek language all nouns (and adjectives) are gendered masculine, feminine, or neuter — and θεός, a male god, would show an omicron and sigma at the end of the word.  (See the Greek Alphabet included below, for your reference).

Please discuss:

Scholars have long agreed that the unnamed θεὰ called upon here to sing is a Muse, one of nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosune (the goddess of memory). Gregory Nagy suggests that she is Calliope, the Muse of poetic inspiration.  Who you think this goddess might be?

Is the goddess – perhaps the Muse Calliope – the true “author” of the poem?

3. (10 minutes)   What happens when you consider these three suggestions together?

(1) the Iliad represents the cultural values and ideas of a whole community; it was derived from a shared oral tradition rather than a single author;

(2) within the poem, a goddess, possibly/probably a Muse is credited with its authorship;

(3) critical race feminism suggests that we not only critique dominant discourses but that we elevate and emphasize subaltern voices.

Please discuss whether a critical race feminist approach to the poem invites us to elevate or emphasize the Muse-as-author and, if so, what this means for how we understand the poem.

Pause for a 15-minute break now.

4. (15 minutes) More Muses

In book two, the Muses are invoked by name – twice. Following the Alexander translation, at 2.484 we see them called out in the plural:

Tell me now, Muses, who have your homes on Olympus –

for you are goddesses, and ever-present, and know all things,

and we hear only rumor, nor do we know anything—

who were the leaders and captains of the Danaans.

As for the multitude, I could not describe nor tell their names,

not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths,

or a voice that never tired, and the spirit in me were as bronze;

not unless the Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus who wields the aegis,

should remember all who came beneath the walls of Ilion.

Yet the leaders of ships I will recite, and the ships themselves, from

start to finish.

And then, at the conclusion of the naming of the leaders of people and places, the Muse is evoked in the singular:

Such then were the commanders of the Danaans.  (760)

In this passage, we see that the Muse is addressed by name (Μοῦσα) and the poet — or narrator – is identified as “me” (μοι).

Please discuss:  Does attention to these passages change your answers to questions 2b and 3 above?

Tell me, Muse, who of these was very best,

Of the men and horses, who followed Atreus’ sons?

οὗτοι ἄρ᾽ ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν:

τίς τὰρ τῶν ὄχ᾽ ἄριστος ἔην σύ μοι ἔννεπε Μοῦσα

αὐτῶν ἠδ᾽ ἵππων, οἳ ἅμ᾽ Ἀτρεΐδῃσιν ἕποντο.

5. (15 minutes). Introducing the Goddesses

These Muses play a unique role in the poem, but they are perhaps not the most memorable goddesses to appear.  The compelling goddesses of the Olympian pantheon are one of the most enduring residues of the ancient Greek world.  The Iliad is the oldest extant written source that we have for what has come to be known as Greek mythology.  Please work together for the final 15 minutes of today’s workshop to list the goddesses that you’ve met so far and describe them.  What do they do?  What do they say?  How are they treated?  You may also begin to list male gods – and compare them to the goddesses.  Please make notes of your observations.  This will be the preliminary work for our ongoing exploration of human and divine characters — female and male — in the Iliad over the next few weeks.

Greek alphabet, again, for your reference:

*note that ς also appears for sigma at the end of a word.

32

Workshop Four : μῆνις: Anger in the Iliad and You

Download Workshop 4 as a Word Doc. here

General Instructions

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students for 60 minutes (with one 10-minute break).  Once you have landed in your Breakout Room, please begin by reading over the workshop and familiarizing yourself with the schedule and roles for today.  Please call the faculty in for support or guidance as needed.

Part I.  Somatics of Anger Exercise. (30 minutes)

For this exercise, one group member will volunteer to be the Leader, a second to be the Experiencer, and a third to be Timekeeper.  Other members will be friendly observers.  The Leader will direct the exercise.  The Experiencer will explore how anger feels in their body.  The observer(s) will watch and provide support.  To start, you’ll need to decide who is going to take which role.  Be sure that you’ve read through the instructions below and that everyone understands their role, including the Leader, the Experiencer, the timekeeper, and the observer(s).

The next few instructions are for the Leader to guide the experience.

1. Please invite the Experiencer to describe an experience of anger. Please remind the Experiencer to choose something relatively minor — we’re not looking for major, dramatic rage here. The idea is to explore a real but manageable experience of anger.  The narrative should last about 5 minutes.

2. Encourage the Experiencer to track and describe how they are sensing anger in their body. Support the Experiencer to pay attention to the body rather than the narrative itself. Allow 3-5 minutes for the Experiencer to track their sensation.

– Ask: How do you know that you are angry?

– Ask: Does the sensation have a color, temperature, movement, rhythm?

3. Ask the Experiencer how they feel now. Bring the student out of the somatic experience and back into connection with you and the group.

4. Invite the Experiencer to reflect on their experience. What did they notice about their experience of anger? What was familiar? What surprised them?

5. The observer(s) are now invited to join in the conversation. All participants — Leader, Experiencer, and Observers — please discuss what observing and experiencing this exercise revealed to you about anger in the body.

6. Discuss:

a) Do you experience anger in a similar way or differently than the Experiencer?

b) Do you believe that gender norms or expectations impact how you experience anger?

c) Do you think our society expects people to experience anger differently depending on their gender?

d) And what about in how we express our anger? Does gender inform that?

Please take a 10-minute break at this point in the Workshop.

Part II.  μῆνις in the Iliad.  (20 minutes)

Please select a scene from the poem in which one or more characters experiences anger.  Some options to consider include, but are not limited to:

1. Achilles and/or Agamemnon in Book 1

2. Helen and/or Aphrodite (& Alexandros) in Book 3, lines 380 ff.

First, discuss the way anger is portrayed in your selected scene.  Second, consider whether gender shapes the contours of the character’s experience (expression) of anger.  Does the way anger is experienced and/or gendered in the poem resonate with how you described it in your own experience?  Or is it different in significant ways?

33

Workshop Five : Fate, Force, and Finding our Iliad

This 100-minute workshop includes a 10-minute break.  We will also take a break after reconvening.  Please note your start time and end time.

Download Workshop 5 Here

General Instructions: (10 minutes to check in, read the instructions, and get settled in for the workshop)

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students.  Once you have landed in your Breakout Room, please take a few minutes to check in.  Select one person to be the timekeeper.  You will not need a scribe today; everyone is encouraged to take notes.  Reminder to give yourself permission to be as present as possible for the experience of the workshop by turning off alerts, etc.

1. Rules and Roles: Gender and Status in the Iliad (15 minutes)

Please reflect on the set of questions in this part of today’s workshop for five minutes independently and then discuss for ten.

Picking up from your small-group work last week, please consider whether the female goddesses or female human characters in this poem have powerful voices or agency to determine their own actions (consider, among others, Aphrodite, Hera, Helen, Andromache, and Hecuba)?  Do the male gods or male human characters have powerful voices or agency (consider, among others, Zeus, Hephaestus, Achilles, Hector, Paris)?  How does “fate” factor into the dynamic?

2. Force in the Iliad (20 minutes)

Writing in the summer and fall of 1940, just after the fall of France to Hitler’s Germany in WWII, the French scholar Simone Weil describes the Iliad as a “poem of force.”  She begins:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.  Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away.  In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.  For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.

To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.  Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.  Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us.  (Weil 1940, 1-2)

Weil, or her translator (?) use “man” as the universal here.  While this may circumscribe the spaciousness of her argument, I nevertheless feel that there is something profound in her analysis — and that we can take her work a step further.

Force overpowers both those identified as “men” and those identified as “women” in the Iliad.  Please consider quietly for a few minutes and then discuss: Does force affect female characters differently than male characters in the Iliad?  Please try to provide specific examples from the poem to illustrate your answer.

One intractable force in the Iliad is that of war itself.  Do you read the poem as primarily pro-war or anti-war?  Is the answer to this question the same from a “female” perspective as it is from a “male” perspective?  Again, please pause for a moment to reflect and then discuss these questions.

Please take a 10-minute break now.

3. Ring Composition & Counter Narrative (45 minutes)

One of the characteristics of the Homeric epic poems, attributable to their initial orality, is a tendency to circle back around to themes previously presented.  Segments of the poem, as well as the poem as a whole, come full circle:  that is, they begin and end on a theme (rather than starting at one point, escalating to a peak of action, and concluding with a dénouement, as modern works conventionally do).   This circular pattern is known as “ring composition.”

Looking back to the beginning of the poem, recalling the most affecting passages throughout, and then recalling the end, what themes recur cyclically throughout the poem?  What theme do you feel organizes the whole of the Iliad?  Take five minutes to reflect independently about these questions and then another five to discuss with your group.  Try to agree on a single, coherent answer to the question: “What is one (or even the) central theme of the Iliad?” (1o minutes)

Once you have agreed on one (the) central theme of the Iliad, please try to select one passage of approx. 20 lines (give or take – the length really doesn’t matter) from the poem that evokes your theme.  The connection between the passage and theme may be oblique, but it should be salient to you.  (5 minutes)

After you’ve selected your passage, please work together to prepare a counter-narrative to the passage that you selected.  Your counter-narrative could be a version of the scene from the a subaltern perspective or a speech in the voice of a non-dominant character from the poem.  Imagine a subaltern character’s (perhaps unnoticed or unexpressed) experience of the scene, or the ramifications of the scene on a character whose experience isn’t centered in the poem.  The counter-narrative could be in your own voice(s), exploring your own experience of the poem, from a radical, critical, or otherwise non-dominant perspective.  What else could a counter-narrative to the Iliad look like?

To support your creation of this counter-narrative, you may want to take a moment for private reflection.  You may also want to review Luna Castelli’s Introduction to Critical Race Theory and Counter-Storytelling.  Please remember that this work – of creating counter-stories to the Iliad is an innovative, experimental act of queer, anti-racist, embodied engagement with the poem – and so your initial (rather quick!) effort here will necessarily be more provisional rather than perfect.  Allow your emotional response to the poem as much or more than your intellectual analysis to guide your creativity and try to participate in this exercise thoughtfully and conscientiously but without overthinking or judgement.

Select one (or more) volunteer(s) from your group to perform your narrative for the reconvened group.  Try to select a performer (or performers) who would most benefit from the experience.  This may or may not be the person who initially feels most comfortable volunteering. (30 minutes)

Note:  We will take another break after returning to the main Zoom meeting.

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Workshop Six : Eos READS for Black Lives

Download Workshop 6 Eos Reads HERE

General Instructions: (15 minutes to check in, read the instructions, select which questions you plan to focus on, and get settled in for the workshop)

Today’s workshop is divided into three parts.  For the first part, you’ll be in a Zoom Breakout Room with a few colleagues.  Jody will also join for part of the time.  While in your small group, please discuss the questions developed by Eos for the READS discussion groups that most perplex and/or interest you.  If you try to discuss all of the questions, you’ll have 5 min. for each, which is probably not sufficient so please try to select three questions for each text that you will center in your discussion.  You may wish to take a few moments for quiet reflection to gather your thoughts before you begin (or as you begin to discuss each prompt).

After an hour and 15 minutes, there will be a thirty-minute interval between small group discussions and our reconvened seminar.  This includes time for stretching and time for individual reflection.

Third, we will reconvene for a student-led seminar.

Part One: Small groups (60 min)

Please begin with Frantz Fanon’s “On Violence.”  Discuss:

- How does Fanon define decolonization? How does the violence of the colonizer compare to the violence of the colonized?

- What role does education in “Western values” play in colonial society and in what respects does it resemble “the barracks and the police stations”? How does education bring violence “into the homes and minds of the colonized subject”?

- Please describe the relations between “the colonialist bourgeoisie,” “the colonized intellectual,” and “the masses.” How exactly do their interactions turn “all the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty” into “pale, lifeless trinkets”?

- What specifically African countermodels does Fanon provide to the individualism placed on the “Greco-Roman pedestal”? What would these look like in practice?

- What does it mean to “leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world”?

- What should we be doing instead of simply “freeing more and more slaves”?

Next, please turn your attention to Margo Hendricks, “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race,” and discuss the following:

- How does settler colonialism in academia as defined by Hendricks relate to the historical phenomenon of settler colonialism that she also discusses?

- How can we avoid participating in settler colonialism in scholarship on race?

- What distinguishes premodern race studies from premodern critical race studies (PCRS) as Hendricks defines the terms?

- What continuities and departures do you see between Fanon’s and Hendricks’ approaches to resisting settler colonialism?

- Hendricks says: “Consider me your ancestor.” What is the significance of identifying ancestors in one’s scholarship, teaching, and activism?

- Hendricks says: “PCRS is about being a public humanist. It’s about being an activist.” What does it mean to have an activist orientation to your scholarship?

- What steps can we take to advance PCRS in our teaching, research, and responsibilities as colleagues to practitioners of the Classics (or Medieval Studies, or Archaeology, or in language departments) who have been marginalized in our departments and/or fields?

Part Two:  Intermission (30 minutes)

Stretch Break : 10 min.

Snack Break : 10 min.

Individual Reflection : 10 min.  Please begin to contemplate the following questions, which we will discuss in reconvened seminar.

- At which points did you find yourself energized to act on these ideas in your work and in your life?

- Where, in turn, did you find yourself resisting what you are reading or discussing?

- What do you think motivates this resistance, both in yourself and more broadly? How can you overcome that resistance in yourself, in your department, in your community, in the field of Classics?

- For participants unaffiliated with the field of Classics: how did these readings and discussions inform your perceptions of the field of Classics and of the scholars within it? Did the readings and discussions make you think differently about your own field?

Part 3.  Seminar Discussion (60 minutes)

1. Which questions from your small-group discussion of Fanon do you have an impulse to report out on or discuss further?

2. Which questions from your small-group discussion of Hendricks do you have an impulse to report out on or discuss further?

3. Let’s discuss our responses to the reflective prompts above that you were asked to contemplate while reading and again in your individual reflection:

- At which points did you find yourself energized to act on these ideas in your work and in your life?

- Where, in turn, did you find yourself resisting what you are reading or discussing?

- What do you think motivates this resistance, both in yourself and more broadly? How can you overcome that resistance in yourself, in your department, in your community, in the field of Classics?

- For participants unaffiliated with the field of Classics: how did these readings and discussions inform your perceptions of the field of Classics and of the scholars within it? Did the readings and discussions make you think differently about your own field?

Student-led Seminars

A productive student-led seminar requires several contributions from each participant.  For one, it helps to come with questions.  Please come to class on seminar days with one question already prepared!  Today, our questions were generously provided by Eos, but feel free to bring any additional questions of your own!  Second, you should not expect a “spokes on a wheel” model of discussion with the course instructor at the center, moderating your discussion.  You are in charge.  To move the conversation along, therefore, please try to contribute the following to each discussion:

1. Pose one question for discussion;

2. Respond at least once to someone else’s proposed discussion question;

3. Contribute at least one process-oriented comment, e.g. “We seem to have exhausted our discussion of this question, shall we move on? Who has another question to propose? I see that Jane has their hand raised / has unmuted themselves / has commented in the chat …..”

VII

Resources

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Student-Led Seminar

A productive student-led seminar requires several contributions from each participant.

For one, it helps to come with questions.  Please join the conversation with one question already prepared!  Where do you find seminar questions?  Pay attention while you are reading to passages that surprise, confuse, irritate, anger, or otherwise interest you.  Note your thoughts/feelings/questions (and the relevant passages) clearly in your notes so you can access them in class.  Don’t rely on memory!  There’s nothing like sitting down in a silent room (or Zoom Meeting) of people who are set the task of creating a productive conversation to make your mind go blank.

Second, you should not expect a “spokes on a wheel” model of discussion with a single participant or the course instructor at the center, moderating your discussion.  You are in charge.

To generate meaningful dialogue, therefore, please try to contribute the following to each discussion:

1. Pose one question for discussion;

2. Respond at least once to someone else’s proposed discussion question;

3. Contribute at least one process-oriented comment, e.g. “We seem to have exhausted our discussion of this question, shall we move on? Who has another question to propose?”

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This is where you can add appendices or other back matter.