Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African-American and South African Writing
256
Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African-American and South African Writing
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252097584 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2015 |
| Series: | New Black Studies Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Grounds of Engagement
Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing
By Stéphane Robolin
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Stéphane RobolinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09758-4
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Imagining a Transnational Ground
In 1953, Langston Hughes was at work collecting African stories, poems, plays, and essays for what would become his 1960 anthology, An African Treasury. Inspired by rising U.S. interest in African affairs, Hughes corresponded with a variety of promising young writers from across the African continent to solicit work that could fit within the pages of his new project. Having served as a judge for a literary contest in the famed South African Drum magazine, he was positioned to seek an array of South African writers, including Bloke Modisane, Peter Abrahams, Peter Clarke, Phyllis Ntantla, and Todd Matshikiza — all of whom appeared in the anthology alongside other authors. Hughes's correspondence with the writers focused on formal publishing matters but, to varying degrees, also involved amicable discussions about the political and literary developments of their day. Some of the exchanges flourished into long-term literary friendships, and all of them attest to the centrality of Hughes as an ardent, if humble, engineer of transnational black literary circulation. Perhaps more importantly, this correspondence underscores how significant cross-cultural connections have been for black writers' personal and professional development the world over.
Among Hughes's South African contacts was Richard Rive, a young aspiring coloured-classified writer living in Cape Town. Rive eventually traveled to New York City to earn his master's degree at Columbia University's Teachers College in 1966 and, while there, relied on Hughes, who lived nearby in Harlem, for insights and books. For twelve years prior to Rive's initial trip, their letters crisscrossed the Atlantic as the writers laid out their respective interests, views, and literary preoccupations. Early in their exchange, Hughes and Rive compared and contrasted the racial politics of their countries. In a July 1954 letter to Hughes, for example, the young Rive poignantly described the lay of the land for his American would-be mentor by referencing various parts of Cape Town. But his geographically dense report did more than introduce Hughes to an unfamiliar area; it also crucially underscored the escalating segregation under the apartheid mandates of the Nationalist Party–led government that had assumed power six years earlier. Racial segregation had long held sway across South Africa, but here, Rive charted its very evident markers writ across his landscape under the new dispensation. Rive lamented how the astounding beauty of the Western Cape was "desecrated with signs reading 'Blankes alleen' or 'Whites only.'" Despite the city's proud liberal tradition that (as of Rive's writing) still permitted the limited political participation of coloured Capetonians and semisegregated transportation, he wryly noted that the city "keeps a dignified silence on the shantytowns of Windermere and African Locations [townships] of Langa and Nyanga 30 miles from [Cape Town's white] sacred precincts." Rive further identified specific racial demographics and segregationist practices that characterized South Africa's three principal urban centers — Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban — enumerating how each city's set of practices restricted the mobility and access of residents according to racial classification: European, Coloured, Indian, and African. But the abundance of geographic references alone in his snapshot of Cape Town reveals a local landscape riven by racial stratification.
Hughes, in turn, offered his own reflections on the regionally specific terms of racialized 1950s America. In an October 1954 letter, he commented that "[l]ife [in South Africa] for colored people sounds just like it is for us in most Middle Western American cities. The East (New York and New England) is much better, the South much worse — we have such a variety of regional attitudes here. And none of it is perfect, most [of] it confusing to travellers, so I can imagine what happens to you when you venture further into your own hinterlands." Hughes's focus on the particularity of place stressed white supremacy's local color. Although such particularity might seem to lock Hughes into an indelibly national frame, his appreciation of municipal and regional singularities, rather, facilitated a studied transnational comparison. Hughes oscillated between his experience of a variegated racial geography and Rive's description in a way that permitted an easily imagined relation: "so I can imagine what happens to you." In a letter three months earlier referring to the impending U.S. publication of South African Peter Abrahams's autobiography Tell Freedom, he noted:
Your racial situation seems about like ours in the Deep South. In talking with Alan Paton, he says he thinks Atlanta, Georgia, is our nearest city to Johannesburg in race attitudes — but with more hopeful things happening [in the American South] — as I gather from Tell Freedom. At least here there are some legal changes for the better, even if they take a long time to turn into everyday realities everywhere in our country. Here there's an enormous variation in race attitudes from one section to another. New York is like London, but Baltimore, only four hours away by train to the South, is like Johannesburg in some ways.
Orienting by municipal or regional proxy, Hughes offered a descriptive map by which Rive might be better able to conceive of the American terrain.
In return, Rive sent Hughes an actual visual map to continue orienting his interlocutor to his local geography (see Figure 2). In his hand-drawn rendering of the Cape Peninsula, Rive sketched out sites (where other writers lived and where Rive lived, studied, and leisured) he earlier identified for Hughes. Rive's cartography of Cape Town highlights approximate distances between various locales — "1"=5 miles" — and the writers and artists who reside therein "so that you know relatively where we live from one another." The local map quietly bespeaks an apartheid geography that only intensified in the coming years as the prospect of forced removals threatened to remake Cape Town's social landscape. For instance, the "X" that marks the place of Rive's birth, District Six — a predominantly coloured-classified, working-class enclave located in the City Bowl — designates what would become a demolition zone after city officials declared it a slum to be leveled and reclassified as a whites-only area in 1966. Years later, the notorious clearing of his beloved childhood landscape resurfaced as the subject of Rive's spatially attentive fiction.
In short, references to geography and race saturate the Hughes-Rive letters. As they shared their respective racial conditions, Rive and Hughes cast the contours of their lives in strikingly spatial terms. The writers, neither of whom had yet visited each other's country, aimed to reflect their worlds to one another, and their visual and verbal maps conveyed a South Africa and United States bearing the stamp of their racial orders. Their maps reveal both authors actively defining the structures, textures, and meanings of their worlds for one another. Making their worlds intelligible through comparison and other engagements of the imagination, the authors reveal how profoundly the spatial and racial predeterminations of their lives shaped their consciousness and their conscious expression. Through that conscious expression, Hughes and Rive not only depicted their distinct environs, but also delineated the shared ground between them.
Mapping the Territory
The exchange between Hughes and Rive illustrates in microcosm the scope and chief concerns of this book. Grounds of Engagement explores the literary relationships between black South Africans and African Americans during the years of South African apartheid (formally, 1948–1994), a period of heightened racial struggle and transnational solidarity. American and South African contexts gave rise to two of the most renowned — indeed, archetypal — struggles for racial justice in the twentieth century. Both countries' histories of entrenched, violently maintained racial segregation — and of the campaigns against it — have inspired constant comparison across the twentieth century, not only because their patterns of race-based oppression and resistance are at times strikingly resonant, but also because these national histories have long been intertwined with one another. This study takes up the literary dimensions of this intertwined history, as black people subject to the tyranny of racial domination in both lands frequently found the utility of imaginatively reaching out beyond their national boundaries and engaging one another in their battles for social justice. Their counteracting transnational practices helped black subjects on either side of the Atlantic reframe their experiences and exchange new ways of thinking, creating, and belonging.
By transnationalism, I mean to emphasize those engagements, transactions, exchanges, circulations, migrations, and practices that exceed the boundaries of nation-states. Other terms certainly evoke similar phenomena. Internationalism, in particular, conveys the relations among nation-states or among their constituents, and it does so in ways that either leave the sovereignty of nation-states intact, along with their boundaries, or maintain them as key components of wider cultural processes. Internationalism would include efforts to redress national grievances through international alliances or structures as well as efforts directly or indirectly aligned with the goals of the Communist International. As a historically specific black radical formation of the 1920s and '30s, black internationalism certainly challenged the terms of western nation-states and envisioned nonwestern political formations more conducive to black liberation. The black transnationalism I have in mind is very much heir to these extranational efforts and is entangled with them, especially when it comes to globally linked coalitions organized to resist nationally based political projects. In the eyes of those taken up in this study, the American and South African states represented the legal, economic, social, and philosophical apparatuses of racial domination, so black transnationalism names the efforts to navigate around, subvert, or directly confront the oppressive terms of the nation-state through strategic relationships that exceed it. Thus, I understand transnationalism to be sometimes compatible with, but not reducible to, some forms of black nationalism, internationalism, and Pan-Africanism. I use black transnationalism as a capacious umbrella term that can encompass these explicitly political projects, in part to distinguish it from earlier periods of extranational engagement, but also to denote a sometimes stronger challenge to the category of the nation-state. The term, here, does not so much aim to de-territorialize, ignore, or float above national politics as it does alternatively re-territorialize configurations of power — which is to say, it imagines arrangements of space and place that articulate modes of belonging not siphoned through the rubric of the nation-state.
To be sure, black investments in transnationalism well exceed the South African–U.S. dyad, but my focus rests on this cross-cultural relationship due to its unique terms. My particular interest lies in tracing out literary relationships that developed between black communities in South Africa and the United States across the most dramatic phase of their freedom struggles. They provide us with an opportunity to study, in retrospect, the terms of black cross-cultural relation organized not so much through the nexus of ancestry or extended lineal bonds but through active contemporaneous engagement. Culturally speaking, as Hughes's and Rive's letters remind us, those engagements were fundamentally bound up with racialized land, social space, spatial arrangement, and physical geography.
This book foregrounds the significance of social and physical geography in black South African and African American imaginaries because nowhere is the entanglement of race and space more elemental or pervasive than in these segregated societies. Centuries of white supremacist rule yielded modern racial geographies that cardinally ordered twentieth-century (and twenty-first– century) South African and American life. In both contexts, space continues to be a key modality through which race is experienced, defined, produced, and reproduced. Since philosopher Henri Lefebvre theorized the social production of space, geographers have critiqued constructions of social space as a "passive receptacle" or as mere "field or container, inherent emptiness, within which the location of all objects and events can be fixed," and much research has stressed how space functions as an active constituent of social dynamics. Contrary to serving as a mere stage upon which racial dramas have played out, geography and spatial arrangement have served as indispensible means through which societies define and revise racial meaning (which, in turn, redefines the terms of social space).
The histories of both countries, indeed, lay bare — at times, in blatant ways — the interconstitutionality of race and social space, or what Edward Soja (following Lefebvre) has called the "socio-spatial dialectic." In Postmodern Geographies, Soja declares that, at bottom, "social and spatial relations are dialectically inter-reactive, interdependent; that social relations of production are both space-forming and space-contingent (at least insofar as we maintain, to begin with, a view of organized space as socially constructed)."10 By seizing and partitioning landscapes, dispossessing indigenous and black landholders, reorganizing and segregating cityscapes, displacing racially categorized peoples to assigned, correspondingly classified areas, curtailing the mobility of people of color, and policing black bodies in white and black spaces, both racial states violently etched their desired social orders into the lands they presumed to own. The spatial practices and social codes of the segregationist order, to use Grace Elizabeth Hale's terms, essentially "produc[ed] the ground of difference." After all, which social spaces one can enter and on what terms — how one enters them — are markers by which race is made salient, performed, and reified. As South African and American societies persisted in making race matter in political, economic, cultural, and epistemic ways, they upheld their racial hierarchies by organizing and reorganizing racialized space. Invariably, these racial hierarchies relied upon and were animated by other categories of social difference (from gender and class to ethnicity and religion), categories that were themselves equally articulated through spatial relations. Scholars have long exposed, for example, the ways white supremacy has rested on normative conceptions of masculinity and femininity, and vice versa, and is experienced differently by men and women. It, accordingly, becomes impossible to think of race-making in America without realizing the co-constitutive constructions of gender, just as it remains necessary to recognize how heterosexuality structured black mobility and immobility in apartheid South Africa. Appreciating the complex permutations between multiple categories of social difference while also understanding the dialectical relationship between social identities and sociogeographic space in both countries necessarily propels us toward Katherine McKittrick's concise but weighty observation that — as with other racial identities — "[b]lack matters are spatial matters."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Grounds of Engagement by Stéphane Robolin. Copyright © 2015 Stéphane Robolin. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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