At the Confluence of the Black and Indigenous Critiques of Western Civilization
This dispatch frames a request for theoretical and historical resources that I would like to inform the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project.
In their recent book, The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow ask their readers to revisit and seriously reconsider the “indigenous critique” of Western civilization – “that consistent moral and intellectual assault on European society, widely voiced by Native American observers from the seventeenth century onwards”.
Graeber and Wengrow write:
Revisiting what we will call the ‘indigenous critique’ means taking seriously contributions to social thought that come from outside the European canon, and in particular from those indigenous peoples whom Western philosophers tend to cast either in the role of history’s angels [e.g., Rousseauian noble savages] or its devils [e.g., ignoble savages living in a Hobbesian state of nature]. Both positions preclude any real possibility of intellectual exchange, or even dialogue: it’s just as hard to debate someone who is considered diabolical as someone considered divine, as almost anything they think or say is likely to be deemed either irrelevant or deeply profound. Most of the people we will be considering in this book are long since dead. It is no longer possible to have any sort of conversation with them. We are nonetheless determined to write prehistory as if it consisted of people one would have been able to talk to, when they were still alive – who don’t just exist as paragons, specimens, sock-puppets or playthings of some inexorable law of history.
I happened to have read Graeber and Wengrow’s latest at the same time that I was reading Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism and picking up R.A. Judy’s (Dis)Forming the American Canon and Sentient Flesh. This was very fortunate for me, as the works of Robinson and Judy are, in many ways, kin to the latest work of Graeber and Wengrow.
Robinson and Judy find that Western philosophers and historians have tended to view Black peoples as having been “without history” up until the moment that they were incorporated into the West by way of colonialism and slavery and then, subsequently, having only “made history” for the first time after being emancipated from colonialism and slavery, after having been “taught” the meaning of history and the value of freedom by their colonizers and slave masters. This is, of course, a white-supremacist myth. As was the case with respect to Indigenous Americans, Western philosophers and historians are preposterously maintaining a position that serves to preclude any real possibility of intellectual exchange, or even dialogue with an “Other”. White-supremacist Western philosophers and historians would have us believe that the Black peoples who had been colonized and enslaved by Europeans did not have their own considered thoughts about the cultures and the characters of their colonizers and slave masters, the reason for this being that Black peoples are not supposed to have had qualified intellectual traditions of their own to rely on apart from those imposed upon them by their colonizers and slave masters.
Taking Karl Marx to task on this very point, Robinson writes:
Marx [never] realized fully that the cargoes of laborers [brought to the Americas from Africa] also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or deculturated Blacks — men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension.
Of course, Europeans made every attempt to erase the “critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality” that enslaved Africans brought with them to the Americas; but Europeans never fully succeeded in doing so. It follows from this that the “black critique” of Western civilization — including Judy’s explication of Tom Windham’s proposition that “we should have our liberty 'cause . . . us is human flesh” — cannot be properly understood without reference to African cultures, in spite of the fact that these cultures have been subjected to varying degrees of erasure by the advancement of white-supremacy. In this way, Robinson’s and Judy’s affirmations of the black critique of the Western civilization correspond in many ways to Graeber and Wengrow’s affirmations of the indigenous critique of Western civilization, which has also been obscured by the advancement of white-supremacy.
Thinking with, through, and beyond Graeber, Wengrow, Robinson, and Judy, I have become interested in the manner in which the black critique and the indigenous critique became confluent with one another. In Black Marxism, Robinson quotes a passage from Michael Craton that alludes to certain confluences occasioned by the escape of enslaved peoples and the formation of maroon settlements in the Americas:
their African peasant roots clearly predisposed all slaves to regard plantation agriculture as being as unnatural as the institution which sustained it. From the earliest days, runaway slaves settled around provision grounds (called “polinks” in the English colonies, “palenques” in the Spanish), worked in a manner owing something to African farming, something to the conuco agriculture of the Amerindians. . .
More deeply, the slaves retained and developed concepts of family and kin quite beyond the comprehension and control of the master class, and a concept of land tenure that was in contradiction to that of the dominant European culture. . . . They wanted to live in family units, to have ready access to land of their own, and be free to develop their own culture, particularly their own, syncretized religion. These were the basic aspirations, which varied according to the different conditions in each of the colonies affected [by rebellion].
Graeber and Wengrow, for their own specific purposes, focused on the origins and character of the indigenous critique. Robinson and Judy, for their own specific purposes, have focused on the origins and character of the black critique. Given my claim that it is creolization that counters racist power formations, for my own specific purposes, I would like to focus on the meetings and mixings of the indigenous critique and the black critique in the Americas, and I would like to investigate how these two moral and intellectual assaults on European society became syncretized in different places at different points in time by different groups of people(s). In the novel Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko poeticizes the profundity of such meetings and mixings:
From the beginning, Africans had escaped and hid in the mountains where they met up with survivors of indigenous tribes hiding in remote strongholds. In the mountains the Africans had discovered a wonderful thing: certain African gods had located themselves in the Americas as well as Africa: the Giant Serpent, the Twin Brothers, the Maize Mother, to name a few. Right then the magic had happened: great American and great African tribal cultures had come together to create a powerful consciousness within all people. All were welcome—everyone had been included. That had been and still was the greatest strength of the Damballah, the Gentle. Damballah excluded no one and nothing.
To this end, I am asking my readers to contact me with any critical theoretical and historical resources that they may have that are located at the confluences of the black and indigenous critiques of Western Civilization.
To get an inkling of what I am hoping to think through with the resources you send me, please read my dispatches on “Overturning Humanism” and “Blackness and Primitiveness”.
