Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation (Get Political) - Softcover

Sivanandan, A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745328342 ISBN 13: 9780745328348

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Part of Pluto's 21st birthday series Get Political, which brings essential political writing in a range of fields to a new audience. A. Sivanandan is a highly influential thinker on race, racism, globalisation and resistance. Since 1972, he has been the director of the Institute of Race Relations and the editor of Race & Class, which set the policy agenda on ethnicity and race in the UK and worldwide. Sivanandan has been writing for over forty years and this is the definitive collection of his work. The articles selected span his entire career and are chosen for their relevance to today's most pressing issues. Included is a complete bibliography of Sivanandan's writings, and an introduction by Colin Prescod (chair of the IRR), which sets the writings in context. This book is highly relevant to undergraduate politics students and anyone reading or writing on race, ethnicity and immigration.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A. Sivanandan (1928-2018) is regarded as one of the leading Black political thinkers in the UK. He was Director Emeritus of the Institute of Race Relations and the editor of the revered journal Race and Class. He is the author of countless classics, including Catching History on the Wing (Pluto, 2008) and A Different Hunger (Pluto, 1991). He contributed the foreword to A Suitable Enemy (Pluto, 2009).

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Catching History on the Wing

Race, Culture and Globalisation

By A. Sivanandan

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2008 A. Sivanandan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2834-8

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Foreword by Colin Prescod, 
Introduction: Unity of struggle, 
I THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL, 
1. The liberation of the black intellectual, 
2. The hokum of New Times, 
3. La trahison des clercs, 
II STATE RACISM AND RESISTANCE, 
4. Race, class and the state: the political economy of immigration, 
5. From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain, 
6. RAT and the degradation of black struggle, 
7. Race, terror and civil society, 
III GLOBALISATION AND DISPLACEMENT, 
8. Imperialism and disorganic development in the silicon age, 
9. New circuits of imperialism, 
10. A black perspective on the Gulf war, 
11. Poverty is the new black, 
Notes, 
Bibliography of writings by A. Sivanandan, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE LIBERATION OF THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL

Wherever colonisation is a fact, the indigenous culture begins to rot. And among the ruins something begins to be born which is not a culture but a kind of subculture, a sub-culture which is condemned to exist on the margin allowed by an European culture. This then becomes the province of a few men, the elite, who find themselves placed in the most artificial conditions, deprived of any revivifying contact with the masses of the people.

Aimé Césaire

On the margin of European culture, and alienated from his own, the 'coloured' intellectual is an artefact of colonial history, marginal man par excellence. He is a creature of two worlds, and of none. Thrown up by a specific history, he remains stranded on its shores even as it recedes. And what he comes into is not so much a twilight world, as a world of false shadows and false light.

At the height of colonial rule, he is the servitor of those in power, offering up his people in return for crumbs of privilege; at its end, he turns servant of the people, negotiating their independence even as he attains to power. Outwardly, he favours that part of him which is turned towards his native land. He puts on the garb of nationalism, vows a return to tradition. He helps design a national flag, compose a People's Anthem. He puts up with the beat of the tom-tom and the ritual of the circumcision ceremony. But privately, he lives in the manner of his masters, affecting their style and their values, assuming their privileges and status. And for a while he succeeds in holding these two worlds together, the outer and the inner, deriving the best of both. But the forces of nationalism on the one hand and the virus of colonial privilege on the other, drive him once more into the margin of existence. In despair he turns himself to Europe. With something like belonging, he looks towards the Cathedral at Chartres and Windsor Castle, Giambologna and Donizetti and Shakespeare and Verlaine, snow-drops and roses. He must be done, once and for all, with the waywardness and uncouth manners of his people, released from their endemic ignorance, delivered from witchcraft and voodoo, from the heat and the chattering mynah-bird, from the incessant beat of the tom-tom. He must return to the country of his mind.

But even as the 'coloured' intellectual enters the mother country, he is entered into another world where his colour, and not his intellect or his status, begins to define his life – he is entered into another relationship with himself. The porter (unless he is black), the immigration officer (who is never anything but white), the customs official, the policeman of whom he seeks directions, the cabman who takes him to his lodgings, and the landlady who takes him in at a price – none of them leaves him in any doubt that he is not merely not welcome in their country, but should in fact be going back – to where he came from. That indeed is their only curiosity, their only interest: where he comes from, which particular jungle, Asian, African or Caribbean.

There was a time when he had been received warmly, but he was at Oxford then and his country was still a colony. Perhaps equality was something that the British honoured in the abstract. Or perhaps his 'equality' was something that was precisely defined and set within the enclave of Empire. He had a place somewhere in the imperial class structure. But within British society itself there seemed no place for him. Not even his upper-class affectations, his BBC accent, his well-pressed suit and college tie afford him a niche in the carefully defined inequalities of British life. He feels himself not just an outsider or different, but invested, as it were, with a separate inequality: outside and inferior at the same time.

At that point, his self-assurance which had sat on him 'like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire' takes a cruel blow. But he still has his intellect, his expertise, his qualifications to fall back on. He redeems his self-respect with another look at his Oxford diploma (to achieve which he had put his culture in pawn). But his applications for employment remain unanswered, his letters of introduction unattended. It only needs the employment officer's rejection of his qualifications, white though they be, to dispel at last his intellectual pretensions.

The certainty finally dawns on him that his colour is the only measure of his worth, the sole criterion of his being. Whatever his claims to white culture and white values, whatever his adherence to white norms, he is first and last a no-good nigger, a bleeding wog or just plain black bastard. His colour is the only reality allowed him; but a reality which, to survive, he must cope with. Once more he is caught between two worlds: accepting his colour and rejecting it, or accepting it only to reject it – aping still the white man (though now with conscious effort at survival), playing the white man's game (though now aware that he changes the rules so as to keep on winning), even forcing the white man to concede a victory or two (out of his hideous patronage, his grotesque paternalism). He accepts that it is their country and not his, rationalises their grievances against him, acknowledges the chip on his shoulder (which he knows is really a beam in their eye), and, ironically, by virtue of staying in his place, moves up a position or two – in the area, invariably, of race relations. For it is here that his skilled ambivalence finds the greatest scope, his colour the greatest demand. Once more he comes into his own – as servitor of those in power, a buffer between them and his people, a shock-absorber of 'coloured discontent' – in fact, a 'coloured' intellectual.

But this is an untenable position. As the racial 'scene' gets worse, and racism comes to reside in the very institutions of white society, the contradictions inherent in the marginal situation of the 'coloured' intellectual begin to manifest themselves. As a 'coloured' he is outside white society, in his intellectual functions he is outside black. For if, as Sartre has pointed out, 'that which defines an intellectual ... is the profound contradiction between the universality which bourgeois society is obliged to allow his scholarship, and the restricted ideological and political domain in which he is forced to apply it', there is for the 'coloured' intellectual no role in an 'ideological and political domain', shot through with racism, which is not fundamentally antipathetic to his...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745328342
• ISBN 13: 9780745328348
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland