THE ENTIRE ATLANTIC world was shaped by 1492 and what is euphemistically called the “encounter,” which engendered not only a catastrophe for indigenous peoples but also a crisis in European thinking. The clash of Europe and indigene provoked a multifaceted reflection on utopia (Thomas More) and dystopia (Bartolomé de las Casas). The intertextual backdrop of the contemporary “culture wars” lies in the contradictions of an Enlightenment that was not exclusively European. The phrase “Atlantic Enlightenment” refers both to a geography and a concept. Enlightenment thought was a hybrid intellectual production; it was generated not only in Europe but also in the Americas, by the Founding Fathers in the United States, by Haitian revolutionaries, and by representatives of indigenous people. The Enlightenment was a debate, conducted in many sites, about the relation between Europe and its Others, with a left and a right wing, with proslavery and antislavery, colonialist and anticolonialist factions.
The Atlantic world has been shaped by the intellectual heritage of Enlightenment republicanism, as expressed politically in the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, and the Haitian Revolution in 1791, as well as in the Brazilian independence movements of the 18th century and in the Brazilian Republic in 1889. A clear historical thread thus leads out from the Enlightenment debates within the American and French Revolutions to the contemporary “culture wars,” as actualized, recombinant versions of earlier debates. The “culture wars,” in this sense, inherit centuries of discursive struggles going back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and their antecedents, going back to the Conquest of the Americas and even to the Crusades. Versions of the debates were present, in germ and under different names, in the intense exchanges about Conquest, colonialism, and slavery. They were argued in religious/political language in the 16th century when Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas asked whether Indians had souls and as a consequence enjoyed “derechos humanos” (human rights). They were present when indigenous people rebelled against European conquest or resisted Christian proselytization. They were present when enslaved Africans fought and argued against enslavement, or when the U.S. Founding Fathers took positions for and against the inscription of slavery into the Constitution. They were present when French Enlightenment philosophers spoke about “freedom” and “natural goodness,” and when “free men of color” opposed slavery in the French colonies.
Contemporary critiques thus lend new names to old quarrels, now rearticulated within altered idioms and paradigms. Throughout its history, colonialism has always generated its own critique, whether by the dominant culture’s own renegades or by its colonized victims. When Montaigne in the late 16th century argued in “Des Cannibales” that civilized Europeans were ultimately more barbarous than cannibals, since cannibals ate the flesh of the dead only in order to appropriate the strength of their enemies, while Europeans tortured and murdered in the name of a religion of love, he might be described as a radical anti-colonialist avant la lettre. When Diderot in the 18th century called for African insurrection against European colonialists, he too might be seen as part of this same anti-Eurocentric lineage. And when Frantz Fanon in the 20th century spoke of accepting “the reciprocal relativism of different cultures, once colonialism is excluded,” he gave us a working definition of radical forms of postcolonial critique.1
When we say that the contemporary culture wars go back to colonialism and the Enlightenment, we do not mean this claim in a vague “everything goes back to history” way. The contemporary debates are quite literally rooted in Enlightenment quarrels. In contemporary France, for example, both right and left invoke the French Revolution and “Enlightenment values” to articulate their views of “identity politics,” whether seen as a praiseworthy expansion of Enlightenment equality or as a particularist departure from Enlightenment “universality.” In the United States, both left and right invoke the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence, but in opposite ways; Obama appeals to the “more perfect union” of the Preamble, while Tea Party Republicans interpret the Constitution to defend right-wing libertarianism. The left channels the radical Enlightenment of Diderot and Toussaint Louverture, while Newt Gingrich channels Adam Smith. The quarrels about indigenous land rights and intellectual property rights go back to the Conquest and to John Locke. The various discursive positions for and against conquest, slavery, racism, and imperialism, in sum, have been “available” for a long time; contemporary debates thus form reformatted versions of those earlier debates. Past and present reverberate together; old debates anticipate and haunt the present.
Our invocation of a “Red,” “Black,” and “White” Atlantic is not meant to detract from the work performed under the rubric of the “Black Atlantic,” but rather to place that blackness within a relational spectrum that also embraces the metaphorical “redness” of indigenous America and, in a very different way, the metaphorical “whiteness” of Europe and Euro-America. Colonialism and slavery completely transformed racial, national, and cultural identities in what might be called the “Rainbow Atlantic.” Colonial conquest turned an extremely heterogeneous group of indigenous peoples—formerly defined as Tupi, Carib, Arawak, Mohawk, Peguot, and so forth—into generic “Reds” and turned an equally heterogeneous group of Africans—formerly named Kong, Hausa, Yoruba—into generic “blacks,” all under the domination of a motley crew of Europeans—Spanish, English, Dutch, French—now turned into generic Whites, thus forging the constitutive Red/White/Black demographic triad typical of the Americas. The cultures of the Atlantic are thus not only Black and White; they are also figuratively Red. Even slavery was “Red” in that in the Americas the indigenous peoples were kidnapped and enslaved before the Africans. In Brazil, both Red and Black groups were called “negros”: enslaved natives were “Negros da Terra” (Blacks from the Land) as opposed to “Negros da Guinee” (Blacks from Guinea, Africa). At times, one enslaved group was used to replace another, as when bandeirantes from São Paulo enslaved one hundred thousand “indios” to compensate for the loss of enslaved Africans during the suspension of the slave trade between 1625 and 1650. Colonialism, conquest, slavery, and multiculturality are thus inextricably linked. The Atlantic world became syncretic and hybrid precisely because of these violent transcontinental processes.
As tropes of color, the concepts of a “Red,” “Black,” and “White” Atlantic cast a prismatic light on a shared history. While “Black Atlantic” evokes the Middle Passage and the African diaspora, the notion of a “Red Atlantic” registers not only the dispossession of indigenous peoples by Europeans but also the impact of indigenous ideas on European thinking. The settler colonialism that dispossessed the “Red” and the racial slavery that exploited the “Black” were the twin machines of racial supremacy. Yet the relations between Red and Black and White were always unstable. Red and Black could ally against White or collaborate with White against the Black or the Red. White supremacy, as David Roediger puts it, “situated itself at some times in opposition to a ‘red’ other and at others to a ‘black’ one.”2 Stances on imperialism were also conjunctural. A French observer such as Alexis de Tocqueville could urge French imperialists in Africa to look not to the U.S. treatment of the Black but rather to U.S. treatment of the Red as a model. During the Conquest of Mexico, American racists would argue about whether Mexicans were Black or Red; what was important to the racists was that they not be White.
We have not forgotten the other “colors” in the Atlantic rainbow, for example, the metaphorical yellowness and brownness of diasporic Asians, mestizos, Latinos, and Arabs. At this point in history, conquest, slavery, immigration, and globalization have thoroughly scrambled, in the manner of an action painting, an already mixed color palette, in an intermingled spectrum. Switching from a chromatic to a linguistic register, Eugene Jolas speaks of an “Atlantic, Crucible Language” as the verbal precipitate of transracial synthesis.3 Gilles Deleuze’s description of contemporary U.S. English as “worked upon by a Black English, and also a Yellow English, a Red English, a broken English, each of which is like a language shot through with a spray-gun of colors,”4 could be extended to the Atlantic world generally. By the same token, one might suggestively attach various modifiers to the noun “Atlantic” to speak of a Moorish Atlantic, a Jewish Atlantic, a Yoruba Atlantic, and so forth.
Here we will focus not on the full rainbow spectrum but rather on the Red, the Black, and the White. The rainbow metaphor, in any case, risks implying the facile “postracial” harmony and transcendence of race. While race has no scientific substance, “race” still effectively evokes the persistence of deep inequalities affecting visible minorities. The spectrum is also spectral, haunted and shadowed by the ghosts of various oppressions. Some colors crowd out or absorb or hide and “spook” others. Our goal, then, is to complexify a multileveled chromatic relationality shot through with power-laden inequalities. And as the metaphor of a spectrum implies, the colors fade and blur into one another; despite hierarchical regimes, they defy segregated boundaries. The indigenous Red and the diasporic Black, in both the United States and Brazil, for example, are densely interwoven: demographically through mixture, politically through coalition, academically through research, and culturally through a miscegenated popular culture. Our assumption throughout is that “colors” are situated, overlapping, and relational utterances that slip and slide in their reference; they take on meaning only as part of larger systems striated by power and inequity.
The legal foundation for conquest was the “Discovery Doctrine” that granted Europeans sovereign claim over “Red” lands and peoples. That doctrine encoded ethnocentric assumptions of European superiority over other cultures, religions, and peoples, so that Europeans, in the words of Robert Miller, “immediately and automatically acquired property rights in native lands and gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over the inhabitants without … the consent of the indigenous peoples.”5 Initially developed by the Roman Catholic Church as part of the Crusades to recover the Holy Lands, the Discovery Doctrine was first applied to Muslim-dominated “infidel lands,” declared by various popes to lack “lawful dominion.” A 1455 papal bull by Pope Nicholas authorized Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans” and to enslave them in perpetuity, all part of bringing all humankind into the fold of the one true religion. Subsequent papal bulls extended the right of conquest to the Americas. England, France, Holland, Sweden, and the United States later cited these precedents as legitimating their own conquests. Various popes asserted a worldwide papal jurisdiction—an early incarnation of the “universal”—rooted in the papacy’s divine mandate to care for the entire world. The Conquest and Discovery Doctrine officially became part of U.S. law with the seminal Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823, which provides the legal foundations for the U.S. takeover of Indian lands.
Church and State were mobilized to legitimate the new racial/colonial order. A key instrument of the Conquest was the Requerimiento (requisition), which Spanish conquerors read to the natives as a form of legitimation. This document communicated the idea of a chain of command extending from God to the pope to the king to the conquistadores themselves, all of whom agreed that the native territories and peoples belonged to the pope and the Spanish monarch. Some Hollywood films devoted to the Conquest (for example the 1949 film starring Fredric March) show Columbus reading from the Requerimiento, but they fail to include the document’s warning of massive retaliation for any refusal to collaborate, promising that the Spanish “with God’s help will make war against you by every means available to us, and will submit you to the yoke of obedience of the Church and His Majesty, will take your women and children and enslave them, … will take all your goods and do all kinds of ill to you and cause all the damage which a sovereign can commit against disobedient vassals.” The document then blames the victim by declaring that “all the death and damage inflicted … will be your fault and not that of His Majesty, nor of ourselves.”6 (The provocative 2010 film Even the Rain, about a Spanish director in Bolivia making a film about Columbus, does include the final warnings.)
The Requerimiento was supposed to be read in Spanish to “Indians” unfamiliar with that language. It is as if the Spanish wanted to believe—or pretended to believe—that the Indians were willingly giving up their land, abandoning their beliefs, renouncing their leaders, and adopting Spanish rule. Less a contractual agreement than a fable that the Spanish told themselves, the document absurdly promises that the natives will not be forced to convert—as long as they spontaneously convert on their own. The indigenous people were portrayed as devoid of any political, legal, or religious system of belief. Spanish and Portuguese ideologists claimed, incorrectly, that the indigenous languages lacked three letters—the r for rei, or “king”; the l for lei, or “law”; and the f for fe, or “faith.” While European kingdoms proclaimed, “One King, One Faith, One Law,” the “natives,” through a logic of deficit, were depicted as a tabula rasa awaiting European inscription. The Conquest also had a linguistic dimension. All over the Americas, first peoples had named, mapped, and described the continent through language. As a result, states in Brazil and the United States bear native names (Ceara and Piaui in Brazil; Idaho and Ohio in the United States). In the present day, indigenous peoples have proposed an alternative to the word “America” itself: Abya-Yala, Kuna for “place of life,” extrapolated for the continent as a whole.7 Yet historically, many indigenous groups were denied the right even to name themselves. Thus, the “Navajos” in the United States were self-named the “Dineh,” and the “Kayapo” of Brazil are self-named “Mebengokre” (or “people of the eye of the water”).
In both Brazil and the United States, early religious figures learned indigenous languages in order to proselytize: John Eliot translated the Bible into native tongues; Father José de Anchieta devised a Tupi grammar. The American Founding Fathers learned Native American languages, and indigenous words came to enrich English vocabulary. In Brazil, the Tupi-Guarani language, first used as a language of communication between the Portuguese and the Tupi coastal peoples, even became the lingua franca, or língua geral, called Nheengatu, up until the 18th century, including among non-Tupi natives. Indeed, Portuguese became dominant only in the 18th century.8 (A 2005 New York Times article reported that the língua geral was making a comeback in the interior of Brazil.)9 Presently indigenous Brazilians speak some 180 languages, with the number of speakers ranging from more than twenty thousand (Guarani, Tikuna, Macuxi) to a mere handful. In the United States, meanwhile, Native Americans are “resurrecting” native languages, such as Wampanoag, barely spoken for over a century.
The European response to the indigenous civilizations of the Americas reveals a general pattern of denial of indigenous cultural agency. Although native agricultural practice had sustained indigenous people for millennia, it was not recognized by Europeans as authentic agriculture but only as a kind of animal-like foraging. The fact that a densely populated and culturally remolded land was seen as “virgin” reflects a kind of mental “ethnic cleansing,” a discourse of imaginary removal. The idea of the “vanishing Indian” had its own colonial productivity, shaping a widespread impression that Indians had already disappeared or were about to disappear with the next hot breath of conquest. Yet the enduring presence of indigenous America looms behind many cultural debates, posing questions about the very legitimacy of colonial-settler states.
To think deeply about the Red Atlantic is necessarily to think in ways that transcend the nation-state: first, because many indigenous communities came into existence before the emergence of modern nation-states; second, because the national identity of colonial-settler states in the Americas was always constituted in relation to the “Indian,” whether as the enemy or as a symbol of the national socius; third, the dispossession of indigenous communities was partially the product of the colonial expansionism of nation-states; fourth, many native communities have actively rejected the very concept of the nation-state, not because they could not achieve it but because they did not want it; fifth, because the present-day boundaries of many indigenous communities actually exceed the borders of nation-states (as with the Yanomami in Brazil and Venezuela, the Mohawks in the United States and Canada); and sixth, because many indigenous peoples, due to multiple dislocations, no longer live only on their ancestral land base but are dispersed regionally and transnationally. The Quechua, for example, not only inhabit Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia; they are also dispersed into North America and Europe.
Questions about the status and social systems of the misnamed “Indian” were disputed all around the Atlantic countries by Spanish jurists (Sepúlveda, Francisco de Vitoria), French humanists (Montaigne), British empiricists (Locke), American statesmen (Jefferson, Franklin), German philosophers (Hegel), and Brazilian writers (from Pêro Vaz de Caminha to Darcy Ribeiro), as well as by the indigenous themselves. The figure of the Indian got caught up in controversies about religion, property, sovereignty, and culture. Indeed, no in-depth analysis of modernity can bypass the indigenous peoples of the Americas, whether negatively, as the “victims of progress,” or positively, as the catalysts for Western thinking and artistic production, discernible in the work of Jean de Lery, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, Melville, Marx and Engels, Oswald de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Clastres, and countless others.
The European part of the Atlantic world, in this sense, is also “Red” in something like the sense that it is “Black”—that is, it is impacted both by the conquest and enslavement of indigenous America and by the transforming ferment of native modes of thought and sociality. Inspired by sensationalist travel literature, some philosophers projected the native peoples as barbaric savages, while others saw the small-scale consensus indigenous societies as offering an alternative social model. The philosopher Michel de Montaigne recalled meeting three Brazilian Tupinamba in 1562, at the court of King Charles IX, where the Tupinamba asked provocative questions about French society; they wondered why tall adults could bow down to a small boy (the regent) and why some people ate well and others ate barely at all and why those who barely ate did not strangle those who were eating well. Montaigne’s unnamed Tupi interlocutors shifted his own thinking by posing corrosive questions based on their assumptions about what constituted a good society—in this case their own. In “Des Cannibales,” Montaigne subsequently practiced a rhetoric of civilizational reversals by arguing that the violence of Tupinamba cannibalism paled in comparison to that triggered by religious wars in Europe. With a few irreverent queries, the Tupinamba demolished the prestige of the hereditary monarchy and the class system. In a sense, the indigenous Brazilians were theorizing prerevolutionary France as much as Montaigne was theorizing pre- and post-Conquest America. Although the three Tupinamba arguably form part of European theory, we do not know their names but only that of Montaigne. Yet their refusal to be impressed by European social systems constituted a mode of implicit critique that catalyzed Montaigne’s own societal self-criticism.
On innumerable occasions, European and Euro-American thinkers deployed “the Indian” as an inspiration for social critique and utopian desire. The emergence into European consciousness of the indigene triggered an epistemological excitement that generated both the dystopian imagery of the nasty and brutish savage and the utopian imagery of an egalitarian social system markedly different from that of a rigidly hierarchical Europe. The concept of the free Indian living in a society without coercion helped spark revolutionary ideas in Europe. Jean-Jacques Rousseau deployed the notion of the “natural goodness of human beings” and “societies without coercion” as a means of undermining European authoritarianism. Rousseau lent Montaigne’s ideas political efficacy, thus helping foment the French (and indirectly the American) Revolution. In the Constitutional Assembly of 1789, the representatives of the left were avid readers of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, all of whom spoke of the natives of the Americas.
A more complex narrative of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment thus would have to take on board the literal and figurative encounter of Europe and indigene, both in terms of direct influence and of more diffuse transtextual relations, tropologies, and allegories. The motif of the Indian as “exemplar of liberty” pervades the discursive atmosphere not only of the French Enlightenment but also of the American Revolution and of Brazilian anticolonial nationalism. In the United States, the Founding Fathers were avid readers of the philo-indigenous French philosophers, but they also “read,” as it were, the Native Americans themselves. The philosophically inclined Founding Fathers, while entirely capable of Indianist exoticism and even exterminationism, had a more direct experience of Native Americans than did the French philosophers. They had diplomatic exchanges with them, traded with them, learned their languages, and were influenced by their political thought, even if—and this point is crucial—they ultimately dispossessed them. American revolutionaries brandished the Indian as an icon of national difference vis-à-vis England, whence the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) symbolism of the eagle’s quiver of arrows (representing the thirteen states) on the dollar bill, and the Indian statue gracing the Capitol building. Native American tropes such as the “Great Tree” and “chain of friendship” were absorbed into revolutionary discourse. The revolutionary hero Paul Revere cast a Native American woman as America’s first national symbol.10
A recurrent leitmotif in the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers and in those of the Founding Fathers such as Jefferson was the idea that Indian societies never submitted themselves to any laws or coercive power. Marx and Engels later picked up on native themes in their readings of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, in which Morgan lauded the profoundly democratic organization of the Iroquois League. For Marx and Engels, the Iroquois meshed a communal economic system with a democratic political organization, thus offering a model of economic equality achieved without state domination, in a society devoid of nobles, kings, governors, soldiers, and police and where all, including the women, were free and equal. Although the Marxist term “primitive communism” evokes a long-vanished communitas, this “utopia” was an actually existing 19th-century society with an actual location in what is now Canada and the United States.
Contemporary Native American scholars have highlighted the indigenous influence on American political institutions. Donald A. Grinde, Jr., argued in his 1977 book The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation that the authors of the U.S. Constitution partially borrowed the concept of a federal government from the example of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederation. In 1982, Bruce Johansen published Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois, and the Rationale for the American Revolution. Within a few years, both authors became caught up in the culture wars. The gatekeepers of the right derided the thesis of such books as ridiculous on its face, apparently unaware that even President John F. Kennedy had supported the Iroquois-influence thesis, writing in 1960 that “the League of the Iroquois inspired Benjamin Franklin to copy it in planning the federation of States.”11 A decade earlier, legal scholar Felix Cohen had argued that universal suffrage for men, federalism, and the view of chiefs as servants rather than masters of the people were part of the American way of life before Columbus landed.”12
The colonizing powers, after “enclosing” communal land within Europe itself, enclosed and appropriated communally held indigenous land under the pretext that the native peoples had no “deed” or “title” to the land. Just as rights were distributed according to a racialized schema in the past, today the question of “copyrights” is linked to the corporate appropriation of resources formerly held by indigenous peoples. Today the very idea of “title” is wed to conceptions of contracts between individual actors or corporations, an individualist conception of intellectual property rights completely alien to many indigenous peoples. Unlike pirates and conquistadores, transnational corporations no longer seize only gold and silver and diamonds; rather, they declare themselves “entitled” or “empatented” to exploit traditional communal forms of knowledge such as rainforest herbal remedies, for example, which they then market at high cost to the world at large, including even to the descendants of the people who originally developed the remedies.
The question of intellectual property rights provides a vivid example of the historical “morphing” that takes us from Columbus to the CEOs of contemporary transnational corporations. The word “patents” referred in 16th-century Europe to the official royal letters (litterae patents) by which sovereigns conferred privileges, rights, and land titles on various members of the nobility, for example, the capitanias in Brazil granted by the Portuguese king. In the “Age of Discovery,” these “letters” became associated with the literal conquest of territory; five hundred years later, they are associated with transnational corporations’ updated version of the conquest of economic rights in the Global South, whose biodiversity is very much linked to the cultural knowledges of indigenous peoples. As Djelal Kadir points out, the letter authorizing Columbus’s conquests, conceded on April 17, 1492, by Fernando and Isabel and ratified by Juan de Colona, was “the literal prototype, the paradigm, the locus classicus of its genre.” Columbus possessed, as it were, the “patent of patents and the license to appropriate the land and material wealth of the New World.”13
Five centuries after the Conquest, the World Trade Organization rules concerning copyrights constitute reformatted versions of the papal bulls and regal edicts that legalized the Conquest. For Vandana Shiva, “The freedom of action which transnational corporations demand today is the same freedom of action that European colonies demanded, after 1492, as a natural right over the territory and riches of non-European people.”14 The earlier religious language has been replaced by the secular language of market fundamentalism. Rather than control territory, the new regime controls markets, intellectual property rights, and the legal parameters of profiting from biodiversity. Under the pressure of transnational corporations, all aspects of life are becoming “patentable.” Since “the soil, the forests, the rivers, and the oceans were all colonized and polluted,” as Shiva puts it, “capital has to find new colonies to invade and exploit in order to continue the process of accumulation. These new colonies … are the interior spaces of women, plants, and animals.”15 Just as European colonizers saw indigenous land as “empty” because it had not been made “productive” of commodities—even though it had successfully nourished native peoples for millennia—transnational corporations do not recognize indigenous peoples’ title to biodiversity unless it has been turned into a marketable product.
The Amazon, in this sense, forms the epicenter of the conflicts emerging from the crisis of five centuries of productivism and the instrumental domination of nature. The process initiated in 1492 is reaching a finale as globalizing capitalism strains against the limits of planetary ecology while coming into naked conflict with the indigenous peoples occupying the land. The Amazon has become the last frontier, at the point where frontiers are at once everywhere and nowhere. As the planet reaps the bitter fruits of instrumental reason, in an age of the end of all utopias (including the neoliberal utopia of the “end of history”), the way of life of those who were always there, of those who never went away, opens up a new horizon of the politically possible. Biodiversity and sociodiversity, hegemonic biopower and indigenous sovereignty, the local and the global, all become interlinked, unstable, and interactive.
“First contact” is still occurring, but this time some of the “Indians” have computers, digital cameras, and websites. Already in the 1980s, the documentary Kayapo: Out of the Forest (1989) showed Brazilian “Indians,” armed with camcorders, protesting a hydroelectric dam that would have flooded their communities. Within the globalized contact zone, indigenous leaders and the corporate representatives of the firm Eletronorte conduct a lively debate about the nature of progress, energy, knowledge, and ownership. Corporate rationality, at the height of its arrogance but also at the end of its rope, meets articulate indigeneity. Appealing to a common humanity, one Kayapo woman tells the Eletronorte representative, “Since you also love your children, you should understand us.” Another Kayapo shows samples of the herbal remedies threatened by the construction of the dam. A woman presses a machete against the company spokesman’s face as she scolds him in Kayapo. In a reversal of colonial écriture, she tells the spokesman to write down her name, since she is one of those who will die if the dam is built. Kayapo Chief Raoni appears with the rock star Sting in a successful attempt to attract international media attention. It is as if the Tainos had videotaped their encounters with Columbus and disseminated the images on YouTube.16
The unending current of indigenous critique continues unabated. Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, whose group was devastated by an induced epidemic and who subsequently became a community spokesperson, claims that “white people design their words in visible form because their thinking is full of forgetfulness.” In an essay whose title—“Discovering White People”—inverts the usual Euro-oriented trope of discovery, Yanomami offers his own version of the “dialectic of Enlightenment.” In early times, he writes,
whites lived like us in the forest, … but once they created tools, machines, cars and planes, they became euphoric and said: “We are the only people to be so ingenious, only we know how to produce machines and merchandise.” That is when they lost all wisdom. First they damaged their own land, before going off to work in other lands in order to endlessly create their merchandise. And they never stopped to ask: “If we destroy the earth, will we be able to create another one?”17
Another activist from a threatened group, Ailton Krenak, during the discussions in 1987 about the new Brazilian constitution, painted himself black with jenipapo paste for a speech before the National Congress as a token of mourning for the legal blockage of indigenous rights. Krenak insists on the intellectual/historio-graphic agency of indigenous peoples, who also “wrote” their history not in the form of books but rather in the form of sayings, rituals, and narratives. The conflicts initiated by the Conquest continue up to the present and take place every day. Confirming the views of anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who lived with the Nhandeva and M’bia, about the active refusal of the nation-state, Krenak adds, “There is no ideology here, we are naturally against the state, we do it the way the wind follows its path, or the river follows its path, we naturally follow a path which does not affirm state institutions as necessary for our health, education, or happiness.”18
Indigenous critique incarnates a temporal paradox: it is very traditional and ancient and, at the same time, very radical and new. Not only does it challenge the logics of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and the nation-state; it also questions the productivism of Marxism, the nomadism of postmodernism, and the constructivism of poststructuralism. We see this paradox of maximum radicality and maximum traditionality in the dialogue between the thinkers of indigeneity and the multicultural left. In Red Pedagogy, Sandy Grande, a Quechua professor at Connecticut College, dialogues with the radical leftist advocates of “critical pedagogy.” While giving them immense credit, she finds them wanting from an indigenous perspective. The left (and at times the right) speaks of “democracy,” but forgets that from an indigenous perspective, democracy has often been a weapon of mass disempowerment. The Marxist left speaks of “revolution,” but Latin American revolutions have dispossessed Miskitus, Sumus, Ramas, and Quechua. For Grande, critical pedagogy critiques the colonialist project yet remains informed by individualism, anthropocentrism, and stagist progressivism, epistemic biases that worsen the ecological crisis. Students are encouraged to be “independent” (implying an individualist suspicion of collaboration), successful (i.e., competitive), and antitraditional. Thus, far-left thought does not go far enough; Marx is anticapitalist (yet secretly shares many of capitalism’s deep cultural assumptions), and critical pedagogy is transformational (but ignores the value of intergenerational knowledge). Yet Grande seeks to engage with all these currents, while literally “indigenizing” them.19
The interchange between European and indigenous thought has been both uneven and unending, lending support to such varied progressive causes as Jacobin and socialist revolutions, confederation and the separation of powers, class, gender, and sexual equality, communal property, ecology, jouissance, antiproductivism, and alter-globalization. As a situated utterance, the conversation changes with historically shaped challenges and ideological needs, as different features of the discourse of Indian radicalism come to the fore in different epochs: the critique of monarchy during the Renaissance (Montaigne), the idea of “Indian freedom” during the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Tom Paine), the critique of capitalism and bourgeois property relations in the 19th century (Marx and Engels), the valorization of societies without coercion in the 20th century (Pierre Clastres, Marshall Sahlins), and the protest against ecological devastation and transnational exploitation of biodiversity in the 21st century. In this sense, the two “red”—red as radical and red as Indian—merge.
Although indigenous people have always reflected on their collective life and their relation to other peoples, now Native intellectuals are becoming visible in the public sphere. Contemporary indigenous thinkers such as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Luiz Gomes Lana, and Ailton Krenak, for example, maintain an intense dialogue with nonindigenous scholar-activists such as Arturo Escobar, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Giuseppe Cocco. While Eurocentric commentators see Indians as vanished and “behind the times,” others see them as “ahead of the curve.” Viveiros de Castro reminds us of the intellectual debts of anthropologists to the peoples they study. The “most interesting concepts, problems, entities and agents introduced by anthropological theory,” he suggests, “find their source in the imaginative power of the societies (or peoples, or collectives) that the anthropologists propose to explain.”20 As theory becomes a hybrid coauthored practice, the anthropologist is inspired by the theoretical imaginary of the indigene, who in turn responds to the anthropologist. Indigenous activists are more and more articulating their own political positions, thus relieving nonnatives of the burden of speaking for them. Indigenous people and their nonindigenous interlocutors, in sum, have never stopped posing profound questions about culture, nature, property, energy, wealth, and equality. Indigenous thought, in its theoretical and practical manifestations, has thrown up challenges to the nostrums of Marxist, modernist, and postmodernist thought.
Just as the partly real, partly imaginary figure of the Indian generated both a critique of European social hierarchies and the utopia of an alternative social order, so Afro-diasporic resistance to slavery revealed the limitations of white bourgeois revolutions while implicitly proposing a utopia of egalitarian freedom. The violent diasporization of Africans had the paradoxical consequence of enabling “blacks” to play an indispensable economic, political, military, and intellectual role in the Americas. Apart from their crucial participation in economic production, and apart from their military service in American, Brazilian, and French wars, diasporic Africans have also formulated powerful indictments of the dominant system.
The critical agency of enslaved Africans in the Americas is all the more remarkable given that slavery as an institution tried to crush all knowledge, and even the desire for knowledge, on the part of the enslaved. Charles W. Ephraim describes the process as follows:
Africans were effectively deprogrammed as persons; they were depersonalized, robbed of their identity, with the intention of making them completely subservient to the white captors…. They were forbidden to form meaningful group relationships, for fear of the very real possibility of insurgency…. They were forbidden to speak their native languages and were allowed to learn only so much of the rudiments of a perverted version of English as would render them serviceable in bondage. Strict laws were enacted forbidding anyone to teach black people to read and write—effectively prohibiting communication and access to any information that might arouse their curiosity about their peculiar and insupportable condition as bondsmen in a strange land amidst utterly freakish and cruel men…. The white obsession with self-aggrandizement necessitated a full-scale program of dehumanization of the Africans, the wiping away of all traces of their past, an obliteration of their sense of ever having been somebody.21
Thus, massive amounts of energy were expended to block not only all black political resistance but even the material and cognitive conditions that might make possible the public articulation of critical thinking.
Not unlike the indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans were well aware of the vacuity of official U.S. proclamations about “freedom” and “equality,” of Brazilian ideas about “order and progress” and “racial democracy,” and of French boasts about the “mission civilisatrice.” The innumerable rebellions against slavery (beginning already in Africa), meanwhile, put into practice a political vision. The 17th-century maroon republic of Palmares in Brazil set up an alternative social order while fending off military attack by the Dutch and the Portuguese. Recent archeological research has confirmed earlier speculations that Palmares included, along with the African majority, Indians, mestizos, renegade whites, Jews, and Muslims, ultimately becoming a refuge for the persecuted of Brazilian society.22 Covering an area roughly a third the size of Portugal, Palmares lasted almost a century in the face of repeated assaults, withstanding on the average one military expedition every fifteen months.23 Palmares bears witness not only to the Afro-Brazilian resistance against slavery but also to the capacity to mobilize an alternative life.24 Indeed, Brazilian anthropologist José Jorge de Carvalho calls for a present-day “political actualization of Palmares” as a place where black leaders created a shelter for the integrated conviviality of Indians, enslaved Africans, and poor whites, thus shaping a model for a coalition of blacks, Indians, and progressive whites in contemporary Brazil.25
Uruguayan writer Germán Arciniegas points out in his America in Europe that Reds and Blacks in the Americas were in the vanguard of republican revolution, even if they did not use the word “republic”: “The blacks of Cartagena became strong in Palenque in 1602, proclaimed a free republic and kept it so for a hundred years…. The Indians of Tupac Amaru in their insurrection against Spain were forty years ahead of the whites.”26 Indigenous rebels and maroon leaders, in a sense, “acted out” republican ideas of self-rule and autonomy, sometimes even before Enlightenment philosophers had articulated them in essayistic form. Afro-diasporic intellectuals, in this sense, have called attention to the aporias of the Enlightenment’s universalistic claims. Exotopically positioned to call the bluff of official ideologies and idealizations, Afro-diasporic people can be seen as proleptic deconstructionists.27 While black Americans exposed the internal contradictions of the “master-race democracy” (Pierre van den Berghe) installed by the American Revolution, black critics in the French colonies such as Haiti and Guadeloupe, and their allies in France itself, exposed the contradictions of “colonial republicanism.”
Enlightenment thinkers wrestled with dilemmas that resonate with those of today, and any deeply historicized reflection on coloniality and race requires dealing with this contradictory heritage. The white-dominated “racial contract” (Charles Mills) was contested from the outset. Free blacks in the United States expressed their antislavery views publicly in the early days of the republic. A good deal of black thought, as Charles Mills put it, “has simply revolved around the insistent demand that whites live up to their own (ostensibly universalist) principles.”28 In 1779, Connecticut slaves petitioned their state’s general assembly to assert basic principles of equality, protesting, “We are the Creatures of that God who made of one Blood, and Kindred all the Nations of the Earth; we perceive by our own Reflection that we are endowed with the same Faculties as our masters, and there is nothing that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, that we are obliged to serve them, than they us.”29 The overture editorial in Freedom’s Journal, founded in 1827 as the nation’s first black newspaper, pleaded for a basic right of self-representation: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long others have spoken for us.”30
While some white Enlightenment thinkers tried to calibrate the hierarchical gradations of black and white intelligence, some black thinkers denounced such theories as cruel and frivolous. Black Americans rebutted Jefferson’s claims in Notes on Virginia concerning the intellectual inferiority of blacks. The free black Benjamin Banneker, a mathematician and astronomer, sent Jefferson a copy of his own about-to-be published Almanac in 1792, along with a letter rebuking Jefferson for underestimating blacks’ intelligence. Banneker hoped that Jefferson would “embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us.” Your sentiments, he wrote, “are concurrent with mine; which are that one uniform father hath given being to us all; and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also, without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same faculties.”31 Jefferson responded cordially but rejected Banneker’s argument. In a private letter to Joel Barlow, Jefferson claimed that Banneker’s Almanac “proved nothing.”32 In 1827, the free black David Walker published his Walker’s Appeal … to the Colored Citizens of the World, in which he pointed out the contradiction between the “all men are created equal” clause in the Declaration of Independence and the antiegalitarian racism of Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia. Confronting Jefferson with the aporias of his own discourse, Walker exhorted Jefferson, “Compare your own language, extracted from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers on ourselves and on our fathers, … men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation.”33
Although slavery stood in glaring contradiction to professed Enlightenment principles, the dominant historiography has traditionally emphasized the ideals and downplayed the contradictions. Many U.S. school textbooks treat slavery as a minor glitch within an overarching narrative of inexorable progress. Presented as the exception to the “rule” of democracy, slavery and segregation have in fact been more the rule, while freedom and equal rights have been more the exception. Although some of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 called for the abolition of slavery, they ultimately accepted it as part of a compromise with the South. The Constitution was thus based on a Faustian bargain between southern slaveholding interests and northern economic interests. The founders essentially agreed to disagree about slavery, indirectly legalizing it while also planting Enlightenment-derived language that would gesture toward (and concretely enable) its ultimate demise. In so doing, they merely postponed the Civil War that came seventy years later.34 In the long term, the privileging of the South led to the southern domination of U.S. politics and to “states’ rights” as a euphemism for racial segregation. The dilemmas of the American Revolution have long been breathing hot down American necks, from the shamefaced compromises of the founders, through the racist abolitionism of Abraham Lincoln, up to Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the 1960s and 1970s, the Republican “wedge-issues” of the 1980s, and the Bush Jr. sham diversity in the 1990s, presently culminating in the anti-Obama “birther” hysteria in the 21st century.35
Over the course of history, Afro-diasporic intellectual resistance consisted in pleading for what should have been taken for granted: black humanity and subjecthood. As Charles Mills puts it, “The most salient feature of the experience of those classified subpersons in [the dominant racial system] will be the need, for their own self-respect, to contest the racial disrespect that they routinely receive. For if they accept it without protest, they are accepting the official definition of themselves as less than human, not really persons.”36 Positionality at the bottom of the social hierarchy sometimes allowed for a dearly bought epistemological advantage, one that enabled African Americans to demystify self-flattering nationalistic narratives. Displaying what we have called, amending Raymond Williams, an “analogical structure of feeling,” a product of the intersubjective flow of affect among the marginalized, a number of the black protestations of intellectual and moral equality paraphrase Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech from Merchant of Venice.37 In 1789 one free black pointed to the limits of Enlightenment universalism by asking, “Has not a negro eyes? Has not a negro hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”38
All of U.S. history can be seen as a struggle over the political hermeneutics of the founding documents, rooted in the tensions between the “all men are created equal” of the Declaration of Independence and the slaves-as-property clauses of the Constitution. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, at an Anti-Slavery Society meeting, burned a copy of the Constitution, calling it “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”39 It is as if the United States were haunted from the beginning by two competing political models, each concretized in a symbolic edifice, one democratic—embodied in the town hall—and the other tyrannical—embodied in the Big House. The crucial question was which model would exercise greater power.
Many of the central historical conflicts and debates in the three countries discussed in this book revolve around this highly ambiguous legacy. How were Enlightenment values such as freedom and equality before the law to be squared with the actual practices of colonialism, genocide, slavery, and imperialism? Did colonialism represent a rupture with Enlightenment ideas, or its clearest expression? Was the Enlightenment the disease or the cure or both at the same time? Is it the Enlightenment or is it decolonization that is unfinished, or are both unfinished in mutually correlated ways? Shying away both from idealization and demonization, we would reject both the view of the Enlightenment as an unsullied fount of reason, science, freedom, and progress along with the contrary view that reduces the Enlightenment to the barbarity of instrumental reason and the annihilation of difference. (“We must free ourselves,” Foucault wrote, “from the intellectual blackmail of ‘being for or against the Enlightenment.’”)40 As a master code, to use Jamesonian terms, in which competing ideologies fight it out, the Enlightenment is a contradictory project, both in terms of the gap between ideals and practices and in terms of its own discursive aporias. Janus-faced, it forms above all a matrix of dilemmas and conundrums. Rather than provide a single cohesive view of race and difference, the Enlightenment implied the necessity of a debate that continues to this day. It is therefore not a question of a blanket rejection—of throwing out the baby of civil liberties with the bathwater of colonialist racism—but rather of probing the positive as well as the negative dialectics of Enlightenment.
One aspect of radical critique involves an archeological reading of the racist stratum of some Enlightenment thinking. Intellectual historian Louis Sala-Molins, in his 1987 book The Black Code, or The Calvary of Canaan, examines the “Code Noir,” the French legal code that regulated treatment of the enslaved in the colonies.41 Drawn up in 1685 under the monarchy, and only definitively eradicated in 1848, the Code legalized slavery in general and authorized torture, mutilation, and even the killing of slaves. The Code provides a template for many of the laws and practices of exception that have characterized life in racial states: the harassment of blacks, a racially rigged justice system, the exclusion of black witnesses in trials (thus prevented from recounting their own experience and history before the law), and the rejection of black economic autonomy. The Code’s articles can also be read in an against-the-grain manner as exposing the inherent difficulties in imposing slavery on a recalcitrant population. Article 33, for example, acknowledges slave resistance by calling for the punishment by death of the slave who slaps his master, mistress, or the husband of his mistress or their children.42 The article that makes any theft, whether by a slave or even by a freed black, punishable by death similarly reveals the frequency of theft as a subversive gesture.
Sala-Molins distinguishes between three distinct ideological positions among the Enlightenment philosophers: (1) the racist advocacy of slavery, (2) the nonracist advocacy of slavery, and (3) racist antislavery. (Denis Diderot—antiracist, antislavery, and anticolonialist—offers a fourth position.) Voltaire (not unlike Abraham Lincoln) was a racist who opposed slavery. Montesquieu, a major influence on French and U.S. political institutions, can be quoted to look either like a staunch abolitionist or like an advocate for slavery. His abstractly grand and rhetorical condemnations of slavery in France were undercut by his defense of slavery “in certain climes” where slavery is “less offensive to reason.”43 Many Enlightenment thinkers deployed “slavery” metaphorically, to apply to the domination of whites by other whites: the “slavery” of common people by the ancien régime or the slavery imposed by the British on colonized Americans. For the revolutionaries, Sala-Molins concludes, they themselves were the slaves.44
Rather than speak only of a single European Enlightenment, we should speak of multiple transatlantic Enlightenments. It was in Haiti, for example, that the Enlightenment’s contradictions became most explosive and intellectually provocative. Thanks to the densest slave population in the New World, 18th-century Haiti, as supplier of half the world’s sugar and coffee, provided one of the keys to French prosperity and power. Colonized Haiti, as historian Laurent Dubois puts it, “was the ground zero of European colonialism in the Americas.”45 For Aimé Césaire, it was there that the “knot” of colonialism was first tied, and then untied.46 And as “the first independent modern state of the so-called Third World,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out, “Haiti experienced early all the trials of postcolonial nation-building.”47 Yet the historical and philosophical importance of the Haitian Revolution has been silenced. The textbooks and popular writings that treat the various world revolutions usually bypass the most radical of them all, a revolution at once national, social, and racial. Since the idea of a black-led revolution more thoroughgoingly radical than the American and French Revolutions was more or less unthinkable, the Haitian Revolution was slowly turned into a nonevent.
It was writers of fiction, more than historians, who registered the impact of the Haitian Revolution, as when Herman Melville in Benito Cereno named the slave ship, subject to a rebellion, the St. Dominic, the contemporaneous term for Haiti. Historians neglected Haiti, even though the United States gained a large part of its territory thanks to the rippling shock effects of the Haitian Revolution, which triggered French fears and thus the Louisiana Purchase. Eric Hobsbawm’s Marxist classic The Age of Revolutions, 1789–1843, virtually ignores Haiti, even though both France and England lost more soldiers in Haiti than at Waterloo. In France, neither the centennial celebrations of emancipation in 1948 nor the French translation of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins catalyzed a substantive debate. In the United States, only the reedition of James’s book in 1962, the Civil Rights Movement, and the “New Social History” began to reignite a discussion of the monumental legacy of the Haitian Revolution.48
The Haitian Revolution demonstrates how the cultural politics of the Enlightenment have to be mapped across a broad Black Atlantic spectrum. Although some Enlightenment philosophers condemned slavery in abstract terms, they seldom engaged its actual brutality. In Haiti, as in much of the Black Atlantic, whippings and even castrations were performed as a disciplinary spectacle. In Haiti, hot peppers were rubbed into open wounds as a form of punishment, and gunpowder was placed in the anus of slaves and then exploded. “Master Race Rule” became intertwined with what might be called “Master Race War.” General Leclerc called for a “war of extermination” that would “spare only children under twelve years of age.”49 Germaine de Staël describes what she calls a “horrible” episode: the French, fearful that Haitians might support the rebels, “threw 1800 of them into the sea without any trial.”50When burning, drowning, and asphyxiation proved counterproductive, General Rochambeau purchased fifteen hundred attack dogs, specialized in devouring blacks, making sure that they were famished and therefore more violent.51Yet the sadistic practices of a republican government abroad, and what they suggested about the nonfreedom of the republic’s noncitizens, were not necessarily the subject of philosophical treatises in the metropole. In order to synchronize theory with practice, some conservative thinkers devised classificatory rankings that constructed the victimized as representing a different order of human being, unworthy of the rights accorded white Europeans. Although cruelty was common in all forms of colonialism, it became more glaringly anomalous in a situation where French philosophers had articulated principles of equality with uncommon power and scope, thus heightening the contrast between the ideas in all their glory and the abuses in all their horror.
The negative dialectics of Enlightenment republicanism must be conceptualized on the colonial ground outside of Hexagonal France. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” were not to be unloaded off the boats. As one planter put it in 1792, “We did not fetch half a million savage slaves off the coast of Africa to bring them to the colony as French citizens!”52 The debate about the intellectual and political consequences of the Haitian Revolution rippled all around the Atlantic world. The Creole slaveholding elites of the Americas, for example, were haunted by the specter of the Haitian precedent. In Brazil, the 18th-century Minas revolutionaries who planned a revolt against Portuguese colonialism contemplated abolishing slavery but also worried that independence might bring a “Haitianization” of the situation. (The multiracial “Tailors’ Rebellion” in Bahia in 1798, in contrast, consciously emulated the Haitian revolutionary model). While blacks and some whites exulted in the success of the Haitian Revolution, white slave owners and their allies were alarmed by the prospect of similar rebellions in the United States. The arrival of thousands of white French planters seeking refuge in cities such as Philadelphia and Charleston also dramatized the Haitian specter. Jefferson, branding Haiti’s leaders “Cannibals of the Terrible Republic,” sided with his French partners in crime, the white plantation owners, even though Haitian Revolution leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines had modeled his draft of the Declaration of Haitian Independence on the U.S. declaration penned by Jefferson. The fears of the Haitian contagion were confirmed in January 1811 when a small army of Louisiana’s enslaved faced up to a much larger army of slaveholders. Those who worked to build a new Saint Domingue along the Mississippi, as Daniel Rasmussen put its, “did not realize the extent to which they were also creating the conditions that [created] the Haitian revolution.”53
Supremacist thinking kept dominant white America from seeing the Haitian Revolution as a “sister revolution” like the French one. If a familial metaphor imaged the French and American Revolutions as sisters, the Haitian Revolution was seen at best as a bastard child and at worst as not part of the revolutionary family at all. The refusal of Haiti’s entry into the revolutionary Enlightenment metanarrative was especially ironic in light of the fact that Haitians fought with the French troops supporting the Americans at the Battle of Savannah. It was also ironic in light of another debt owed the Haitians. It was their freedom struggle that had exposed France to losses and perils that necessitated the sale of French Louisiana. Historian Henry Adams wrote in 1889 that “prejudice of race alone blinded the American people to the debt they owed to the desperate courage of 500,000 Haytian negroes who would not be enslaved.”54 The refusal of diplomatic relations with Haiti was to last until 1862, when the Union victory made it possible for the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner to open up relations again. The Haitian Revolution brought not only the first black republic/former colony but also the first war of colonial reconquest in the Americas. And just as we can trace out the lines that connect the Faustian bargains of the U.S. Constitution to latter-day segregation and discrimination, so we can trace out the lines that lead from the suppression of Haitian revolutionaries to the neocolonial violence exercised by France and the United States against Haiti in later periods.
Haiti provided stunning exemplars of revolutionary vision for the black diaspora. In Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, the Haitian example inspired a slave named Gabriel to plan an insurrection that involved whites as well as blacks.55 In Rio de Janeiro in 1805, soldiers of African descent wore medallions honoring Haitian Emperor Desssalines.56The transformation of a humiliated slave such as Dessalines into a brilliant general whom C. L. R. James called “one of the towering figures in the political history of the Atlantic world” certainly spoke volumes about the human potential of the enslaved.57 In response to Napoleon Bonaparte’s promise of only a qualified and merely local freedom for blacks, Toussaint Louverture reportedly responded, “It is not a circumstantial liberty conceded only to us that we want…. It is the absolute acceptance of the principle that no man, whether born red, black, or white, can be the property of another.”58 Ultimately, the Haitian Revolution sought to dismantle the idea of a racialized republicanism, including within the metropole itself.
If for many Enlightenment thinkers the Haitian Revolution failed to register as an “event,” many diasporic Africans recognized its world-historical importance. C. L. R. James’s coinage “Black Jacobins” fuses Caribbean blackness with the most radical avatars of the French Revolution. Some insurgents “explicitly phrased their demands in the language of Republican rights.”59 William Wells Brown dreamed that “a Toussaint, a Christophe, a Rigaud, a Clervaux, and a Dessalines may some day appear in the Southern States of this Union, when the revolution of St. Domingo will be reenacted in Southern Carolina or Louisiana.”60 In 1893, Frederick Douglass, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, declared that the “black sons of Haiti” had “struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.”61 The writing of the period even foreshadowed a kind of “Third Worldism” usually assumed to have emerged only a century and a half later. Anticipating Alfred Sauvy’s “Third World” coinage centuries later, the Haitian free colored leader Vincent Ogé compared the demands of the free people of color to those of the Third Estate within the French Revolution. The African American writer Martin Delany, long before the Civil War, similarly called for an alliance of all people of color. In Haiti, Henri Christophe’s secretary, the Baron de Vastey, conjured up the vision of “five million black, yellow, and dark-skinned men, spread across the surface of the globe, [laying] claim to the rights and privileges that have been bestowed on them by natural right.” J. Michael Dash rightfully calls the statement a “remarkably early appeal to the power of the ‘wretched of the earth.’”62 The Haitian Revolution, in sum, reverberated around the Black Atlantic, becoming a nodal point in the genealogy of what would later be the struggles around colonialism.
Some white voices were also raised in favor of Haitian revolutionaries and, more generally, in favor of the intellectual agency of people of color. English writers such as Wordsworth, French writers such as Lamartine, and American writers such as the abolitionist John Whittier all wrote tributes to the Haitian Revolution. In France, the Abbé Grégoire defended the full intellectual equality of black people in his De la Littérature des Nègres, ou Recherches sur Leurs Facultés Intellectuelles (1808), for which he was congratulated by none other than King Christophe of Haiti—the prototype for Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones—who bought fifty copies in London and invited the Abbé to visit the country he ruled. Indeed, the case of the Abbé Grégoire reminds us that a radically antiracist position was “available” among whites at the time of the French and Haitian Revolutions.
For North American revolutionaries, meanwhile, Haiti posed a challenge. What were to be the relations between the first white-dominant republic and the first black republic in the Americas? It is in this historical context that a white North American statesman, Timothy Pickering, deserves mention. A leader of the Salem militia during the Revolutionary War, a general in Washington’s army, third secretary of state, and a senator, Pickering denounced slavery in the streets of slave-trading ports as well as in the halls of Congress. In 1783, Pickering drew up a state constitution that called for the “total exclusion of slavery.” As a senator from Massachusetts, Pickering protested the double standard that supported the French Revolution but condemned the Haitian Revolution, since the same principles that led to support the French Revolution applied “with tenfold priority and force to the rude blacks of Santo Domingo.”63
The egalitarian thrust of one wing of the Enlightenment is exemplified not only by the Black Jacobins but also by some white French philosophers. Denis Diderot serves as an eminent example of our point that radically egalitarian thinkers could take clear antiracist and anticolonialist positions and even support the performative enactment of radicalism in slave revolts and revolutions. Scholars in France have been unearthing the anti-imperialist side of Diderot ever since the publication in 1970 of Yves Bénot’s Diderot: From Atheism to Anti-colonialism.64 Bénot disinterred Diderot’s contribution to anticolonial discourse, often buried because written anonymously or attached to another name in such works as Abbé Raynal’s L’Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Établissements et du Commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes. Drawing on Diderot’s contributions to Raynal’s Histoire, along with Diderot’s own Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, one is struck by the extremely radical nature of Diderot’s ideas. Although Diderot’s highly protean and polyvocal texts stage a plurality of voices and discourses, a persistently anticolonial theme clearly emerges from the body of his work.
Here we point to some of the salient features of Diderot’s radicalism that make him a forerunner of anticolonial theory, critical race theory, and even critical whiteness studies. First, Diderot sees imperialism as a pan-European phenomenon, refusing to endorse national exceptionalism of any kind, including French. Second, he focuses on the intrinsic violence of imperialism. Third, he stresses the ways that imperialism corrupts Europeans themselves. Fourth, he refuses the Euro-diffusionist notion that holds up Europe as a model to be emulated. Fifth, he critiques the narcissistic epistemologies that misperceive non-Western societies through an ethnocentric grid. Sixth, he refuses the temptation of ranking societies in a hierarchy. Seventh, he sees imperialism as a “mask” that drops away with distance from the metropole and even falls off at the frontier. Finally, and this is perhaps the most subversive feature of his thought, Diderot believes less in colonial or humanitarian reforms conducted by the colonizers than in the right of the colonized to resist by taking arms.
Diderot also engaged colonized subjectivity; in contemporary parlance, he “imagined the other.” In passages he contributed to the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, Diderot warned Tahitians against Europeans armed “with crucifix in one hand and the dagger in the other,” who would “force you to accept their customs and opinions.”65 Diderot mocked the “just show up” discovery doctrine by having a wise old Tahitian address the white colonizer as follows: “This country belongs to you! Why? Just because you landed here?” As Sankar Muthu points out in his Enlightenment against Empire, Diderot does not base his defense of the “natives” on exotic “noble savage” ontologies but rather on a taken-for-granted cognitive equality between reasoning human beings.66 What is good for the colonizing goose is good for the colonized gander.
Boomeranging the colonialist metonym of “beast and savage,” Diderot advised the African “Hottentots” that the ferocious beasts living in their forests were “less frightening than the monsters of the empire under which you are about to fall.” Diderot also scored the hypocrisy of Europe’s sentimental moralism in refusing sympathy to the peoples to whom Europe owed its own material advantages:
Europe has been reverberating for a century with the most sublime moral maxims. The fraternity of all men is established in immortal writings…. Even imaginary sufferings provoke tears in the silence of our rooms and more especially at the theatre. It is only the fatal destiny of unfortunate blacks that fails to touch us. They are tyrannized, mutilated, burned, stabbed, and we hear about it coldly and without emotion. The torments of a people to whom we owe our delights never reach our heart.67
This passage is rich in anticipations of subsequent anticolonial thinking. In Diderot’s “a people to whom we owe our delights,” we find the germ of Fanon’s idea that “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.” Diderot’s denunciation of the hypocrisies inherent in white humanist sentimentality, meanwhile, provide the seeds of “critical whiteness studies.” Diderot’s critique of the blind spots of Western bourgeois spectatorship not only “imagines the other” but also imagines how Europeans might themselves be imagined through colonized eyes. Diderot thus exemplifies the European intellectual who identifies with the colonized against European colonialism, anticipating later renegades such as the Jean-Paul Sartre of the 1961 preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.68 In a geopolitics of relationality, Diderot offers what Bénot calls “a utopian vision of a united and fraternal future planet, where violent and unequal relations will give way to pacific relations between all peoples.”69
Diderot’s critique of the imperialisms of his time, according to Muthu, resonates with contemporary critiques of globalization.70 In book IV (chapter 33) of L’Histoire des Deux Indes, Diderot depicts European imperialism or “global commerce” as spreading material and ecological ruin everywhere: “It seems as if from one region to another prosperity has been pursued by an evil genius that speaks our several languages, and which diffuses the same disasters in all parts.”71 Diderot denounces the ravages of imperial-fostered monopolies through a transposition of voice. Transvocalizing, Diderot gives ironic voice to the planetary predators of global commerce and the homogenized world they strive to create in the name of their own greed: “Let my country perish, let the region I command also perish; perish the citizen and the foreigner; perish my associates, provided that I can enrich myself with his spoils. All parts of the universe are alike to me. When I have laid waste, exhausted, and impoverished one country, I shall always find another, to which I can carry my gold.”72 Diderot’s words, which could describe the operations of Union Carbide in India or of Chevron in Peru or of Haliburton and Blackwater in Iraq, sound today like anticipatory rumors of later critiques of globalization, whether made by the victim-outsiders or by disenchanted insiders such as Joseph Stiglitz. Despite euphoric promises of a universal prosperity, globalization has produced instead a viral inequality. Trickle-down colonialism morphs into trickle-down imperialism, which morphs into trickle-down globalization, all feeding into a flood of contemporary crisis and pain.
Foreshadowing what Chalmers Johnson later called the “Sorrows of Empire,” Diderot also utters a still timely warning for the people of North America:
[Let] the example of all the nations which have preceded you, and especially that of the mother-country, serve as a lesson to you. Dread the influence of gold, which with luxury, introduces corruption of manners and contempt of the laws. Dread too an unequal distribution of wealth, which yields a small number of rich citizens, and a multitude of citizens plunged in misery…. Keep yourselves free from the spirit of conquest. The tranquility of an empire diminishes in proportion to its extent.73
These words, in a situation where conservatives such as Niall Ferguson have implored the United States to proudly take on the British imperial mantle, and where “unequal distribution of wealth” is at its zenith, are terribly resonant.