Heroic Minds: All the Great Ones Have Been Anti-Imperialist

By Jonathan Scott

One of the most persistent obsessions among American intellectuals has been the formation of a national identity consciously and deliberately opposed to the European kind. This explains the startling fact that the real giants of American literature and culture have been all militantly anti-imperialist, from Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, and Twain, down to DuBois, Langston Hughes, Edward Said, and Noam Chomsky.

In my view, the coming collapse of the U.S. empire will likely produce a new intellectual environment in which their writings are reread closely and studied free of the old anticommunist, pro-imperialist bourgeois blindspot, what Hughes called “foam on the sea.” The present task is to prepare in advance this new curriculum.

In the case of Chomsky, for instance, his recent books are bestsellers but his most interesting texts – On Power and Ideology, Turning the Tide, and The Fateful Triangle – are much older works and the ones that continue to have the most explanatory power precisely because they were written at least twenty years ahead of their time, before all the fake French theory mania.

The same can be said of Said’s work. Notice that the carefully structured unity of his magisterial Palestine trilogy – Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam – has been in the U.S. academy totally dismantled by the so-called “poststructuralists,” so that they might better co-opt his thought and then sell it under a new name to the highest university bidder. While no U.S. academic in the humanities can get away with not having read Orientalism, The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam are forgotten texts, despite their obvious relevance in the aftermath of 9/11.

Similar observations can be made of the work of Du Bois and Hughes. In the age of “multiculturalism” and “postcolonialism,” and under the hegemony of the corporate college textbook industry, their twin bodies of work have been grossly fragmented and whitewashed to such an extent that few remember it was Du Bois who invented, more than seventy years ago, both “postcolonial” and “whiteness” studies (the latter in his masterpiece Black Reconstruction and the former in Color and Democracy). They also forget that it was Hughes who, during the height of the anticommunist witch-hunts, gave Americans their first taste of resistant and political multiculturalism, through his immensely popular “Simple” newspaper column.

This new curriculum might start with Emerson, whose personal motto was “Make your own Bible,” a concept he introduced at Harvard in 1837. His famous speech there did not go over well with the Harvard authorities, which in response banned Emerson from campus for the next thirty years. Emerson’s parting words:

Emerson was one of the first intellectuals to reject the insipid life of the American pragmatist. “The so-called ‘practical men’ sneer at speculative men,” he wrote, “as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing… Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble to thought is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.”

From this Emersonian point of departure, the new post-imperial American curriculum comes into view. First, the foundation of American literature is the African American antislavery narratives and poems. Amiri Baraka has put it persuasively:

An objection might be made that the classic African American antislavery texts have been already “integrated” into the curriculum. Yet this is the very problem, for it needs to be the other way around: a “reintegration” (Langston Hughes’s term) of European American literature into the much older and more aesthetically advanced African American tradition. The latecomers to the American national tradition are not Harriet Jacobs, Francis Harper, and George Moses Horton but rather Cather, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Toni Morrison’s under-read theory of American literature, Playing in the Dark, makes this point convincingly, namely that much of Euro-American fiction is filled with such astonishing gaps in logic that without critical recourse to what she terms the originary “Africanist presence” in American society this literature would never make any sense.

This brings up a different objection: the dead white male argument. The middle-class aspirants who came up with it, the notion that we should stop reading all the dead white male writers, are clearly working for the blundering imperial establishment, since a thoughtful rereading of Whitman, Emerson, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, et al. arms the student with a critique of white male supremacy far more powerful than any manufactured by the “cultural theory” industry. The dead white males should be reread precisely because they objectified themselves all the time, laying bare all the enduring structures of contradictory thinking that got us to the point we’re at today. And they should be reread next to the founding authors of American literature, who are African American.

Although generally unspeakable in discussions of U.S. education reform, the three-month summer vacation has to be abolished in order to make any meaningful progress towards an alternative national curriculum. This intellectually indefensible waste of precious educational time and resources has been always favored by U.S. ruling elites, because it supplies businesses with a cheap supply of disposable labor power during the touristy summer season. That U.S. education policy makers have never challenged the idiocy of this long vacation from learning condemns them as a class of professionals. In no other society are students sent away from school for three straight months. Oddly, it’s quite rare to hear anyone mention the “vacation” when pointing out the horrendous academic performance levels of most American students.

These three months are essential for implementing the new curriculum for obvious reasons: this is when the new curriculum can be hashed out and experimented with by all the teachers. This kind of experimenting with the new national curriculum will require a new national funding system, since all schools will remain open twelve months of the year, meaning they will need a lot more money to function. With the end of the empire, this will be easy. Just reverse the current federal budget priorities, that is, from 40 percent for the military and 1 percent for public education to the other way around, abolishing in the process the immoral system of racial apartheid (i.e. the property tax funding system) inherited from the days of Jim Crow. Convert all the military bases into teacher training schools and all the soldiers into future teachers.

The European style of education is still rigidly class based, and so this new American national education curriculum has a strong chance of producing citizens far superior intellectually and morally to their European counterparts. This was Emerson’s vision and also the reason for Melville’s great despair, since the opportunity had been squandered in Melville’s day by the rise of the American empire. But the empire is now decaying, and as it falls the great anti-imperialist American intellectuals regain their stature as original theorists of a post-imperialist American society.

Rereading these American thinkers one is struck by their fixation on the landscape or geography. In breaking with the old British ruling-class pastoral aesthetic, writers like Melville and DuBois did not sublimate nature but rather showed its dialectical relationship to labor power, the working-class transformation of the land. Under the monstrous rule of the plantation bourgeoisie, this transformation was for Du Bois a catastrophic deformity and for Melville a completely sterile reality devoid of any human essence. It drove Melville to Palestine, where he authored beneath its barren mountains his last work Clarel. DuBois died in the savannahs of Ghana.

There is a close connection between the capitalist decimation of the American landscape and the lack of any geographical consciousness on the part of most Americans. Academic studies consistently show that American students have no concept of geography; many cannot even find the United States on a world map.

Thus the second component of the new national education curriculum is geography, and it follows directly from the first: the African American antislavery narratives and poems. Both are “loaded with life,” as Emerson would say, because they “yield that peculiar fruit from which each man was created to bear,” because they “embrace the common,” as “every step downward is a step upward.”

Under two centuries of the Empire, Emerson’s proposals for building an equalitarian American national culture have been dismissed as random musings of a hopeless idealist, which was to be expected. The question today is how to begin gathering from underneath all the wreckage of the fast falling U.S. empire the main ideas we need to organize this totally unreconstructed national American curriculum, all these “jagged rocks, and the waves themselves, and the force of the mounting waters.”

This kind of proposal for an American national education curriculum can be crystallized into two major components, as suggested above: the antislavery narratives and poems and geography. The first component is especially felicitous because it also involves music appreciation, drama, and dance. Where there has been music appreciation in the public schools, the African American work songs, the blues, the spirituals, and jazz have not been the objects of analysis, despite the fact that black music is the base of all American tropes, styles, and traditions, and that an enormous body of musicology is already available that systematically demonstrates this thesis. Instead students have been taught European “classical” music where they have been taught music at all.

In terms of the antislavery narratives, the art of narrative writing is the best entrance into English composition and the focused study of good prose writing. Instead of beginning with comma splices and paragraphing, or the micro-level of writing, students can read closely these narratives and study their rhetorical techniques and literary styles, the full shape of the writing. What better way for those on the path to literacy to master reading and writing by studying writers who undertook themselves a very similar journey?

Moreover, writers like Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass were also historians. In short, the new American curriculum begins not with pre-existing partitions (for example, between literature and history, or music and poetry) but rather with “heroic minds” whose work intervened directly in other fields, such as sociology, philosophy, political economy, labor history, and rhetoric.

Geography has been the site of a great deal of fascinating new research. The old Rand world maps have been exposed as a transparent ideological attempt to fix indelibly in the minds of young American students an imputed irreversible U.S. centrality. There are now easily available for teachers much more accurate world maps, ones in which the U.S. is objectively represented. Yet the advances at the university level have not made their way down to the ground level of K-12 public school education.

Hence the geographical component is not simply about studying maps; it is about the ideological way maps have been constructed. Teachers in training will have much more to do than mastering a methodology for teaching geography. They will learn about world history as they learn about geography, in particular about the history of the western hemisphere. In this area, there is an abundance of intellectually dynamic projects, for example, the Native American names of plains, rivers, mountains, lakes, and valleys. What did “Michigan” mean in the language of American Indians of the Great Lakes? Like the antislavery narratives and poems, this kind of inquiry opens up into other academic subjects, such as the genocidal history of Anglo-American colonialism and its relation to language.

A critical distinction to make is between the “rainbow curriculum” and that of an equalitarian (or socialist) American national education program. The latter is not about “sensitivity training,” political correctness, or “inclusivity”; it is about the moral and intellectual development of young people. In trying to be “revolutionary,” the American multiculturalists have had the opposite effect, provoking unguardedly a powerful right-wing offensive against all relativisms that’s taken down with it the entire class project of a national education curriculum for all working Americans.       

As the American Right is now collapsing along with its late imperial disaster in Iraq, the time is ripe for giving the empty rhetoric of “education” a concrete content and the highest political priority. All the Democrats angling for office in 2008, as well as those elected a few months ago, should be forced to take a stand on a federally-funded national education program and the rapid conversion of the military industrial complex that it requires. They should also be asked how they would teach if they were in the classroom. Instantly we will know “whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.”

Source: Black Agenda Report

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Responses

Jonathan Scott's essay is of great interest, since it focuses primarily on education and curriculum. On these he makes interesting points, though he's far too hopeful on where we are politically. What troubles me is that I suspect that his suggestions spin off from too many optimistic assumptions about the corporate control of America society with its right wing supporters (Republicans and Democrats), their control of American laws and the legislative process, and the direction of America’s policies at home and abroad.

Jonathan seems to think because the Democrats have won back the Congress that we have somehow come closer to a socialist Utopia and that all sectors of society are ripe for liberal, if not radical, reform. Of course, I think that is so much wishful thinking. 

In my view, the Right is not dead, but rather remassing its forces and the conservative voter is only waiting for another moment to assert himself for cheap gas and high profits on his 401K, which means the Arabs are going to be further reduced to the niggers he points them out to be in his piece, The Niggerization of Palestine  and has occurred with neocolonialism throughout the continent of Africa. The West (and now China and India) have just seize the resources of African peoples for their own nation-states and for their own corporations, leaving the peoples of these lands with crumbs. It is to that level that America is gonna level the people of Iraq.

That means the Overall Plan is still to seize the resources of the Middle East by any means necessary. That program seems to be all steam ahead. For as many Americans think we have a right to these resources for we know how to make the best use of them. We build SUVs, gas-guzzling ones, and we like it like that. We don't build palaces for heads of states; we’re not into that kind of oriental waste.

So, no, we are not in a post-colonial world, in which imperialist wars will be shunned by the American people. When it comes to Middle East politics, we are now at a new beginning, anew 21st century vision! The only question in the minds of conservatives is how to win and keep the American electorate complacent or preoccupied, which amounts to about the same.

We will continue for sometime spending our resources on guns as we have always done rather than educating our people. We don't want them too educated. We are always in need of fodder. And he who has the most guns will have the most power—by hook or crook. The only matter that is in question is the will. And George Bush is not lacking in will and he or she who carries the Democratic Banner in 2008 will be just as anxious as the Republican candidate to secure corporate control of Middle Eastern oil. And the more American deaths there are, the more anxious they will be. There will be no Vietnam withdrawal, this go around. We will stay the course!

Neither mountains, nor deserts, nor  murderous savages will stop us. —Rudy

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Thanks, Rudy, for your comments on my new article.

To me it's not a matter of being optimistic or pessimistic but rather seeing things clearly. Of course the pro-imperialists will keep trying to destroy the planet and everyone who opposes their quest for more profits, but their Iraq disaster has shown the limits of what they can do, something the American people have already realized.

My point in the article is that there has never been a better time to propose socialist alternatives, especially in education policy. There is a huge hole in the education discourse that the left needs to fill. This hole is the proposal to convert the military into a vast national education apparatus.

My view is that most Americans are already socialists. I'm not a utopian. Socialism is nothing other than a relationship between people based on usefulness not exchange. Every day you will find people acting like socialists, from their families to education and all types of healthcare work. And the true desire of most people is to do something in life that matters, that has meaning and purpose.

We have been so mentally damaged by capitalism that we have no idea what socialism is, despite the fact that we often live according to its principles. —Jonathan

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One of the myths seems to be that Iraq has been and is a "disaster." It is oft-repeated by the Left. I am not sure exactly what is meant by its use. I know that the impact of Katrina on New Orleans, especially its poor, was a disaster. But as foreign wars go, Iraq has been fairly a safe U.S. war -- with its 3000 dead, probably less than a 1,000 a year. Clearly, there is no economic disaster. Most Americans seem fairly economically secure and comfortable. Except for the change in political parties in Congress, conservatives still seem in control of the government. And America's political and military sway throughout the world seems unabated.

Yes, we are in need of clarity. But for one who lived through the Vietnam era and the ethnic, gender, and cultural revolutions, I know that the rhetoric of the Left is too often self-delusional, which I suspect is the case with the present anti-war rhetoric. From my measure the U.S. could remain on a war-footing with the Middle East for decades and it would not of itself be a national disaster in the practical terms in which we have learned to live as American citizens. Certainly, things in need of repair will go unattended. But those kinds of things have been going on for decades without the war. Those kinds of social disintegrations were institutionalized during the Clinton administration snd with the full consent of Democrats (black and white; liberal and conservative).

So again I ask Where is it that Iraq is a disaster. It seems that American policy with regard to the Middle East, especially toward Iraq, has made great strides in seizing political and military control of the region. The only question is whether the US can maintain and secure its gains. It seems that the odds are against the resistance. If I were a betting man, I would put my money on the US and its allies to seize the oil fields and undermine Arab militancy. —Rudy

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rudy: it's a disaster for such obvious reasons, even high-ranking generals say so. the u.s. military has been unable to hold down even one neighborhood in baghdad. all the arab world sees this. the disaster is that now the very worst religious elements in the region have gained an upperhand, they are more popular than ever. i see this every day in my own community. the disaster is that the u.s. war in iraq has brought to power forces that are antidemocratic and ultra-religious. it doesn't matter that they call themselves islamic, they could call themselves anything. the fact is that the whole region is regressing back to pre-modern clan warfare. it's very likely that u.s. elites will soon find themselves out of the picture in the middle east, so no i don't think this war benefitted the big oil companies. they made huge short-term profits, but in the long term they will lose everything. it's just a matter of time. —Jon

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Did you hear the recent news that the Iraqi Parliament is on the verge of signing over sweetheart deals to the major Euro-American oil corporations? The price of gas here is falling as a result. Did you also hear also that 20,000 more troops will be sent to Baghdad to wage war on Sadr's group to secure neighborhoods, that they will no longer be turning neighborhoods over to the Iraqi Army? Iraqi elites are making their compromises with the New World order. They are securing their rule and their future wealth.

As far as the radical Islamic groups gaining popular influence is rather meaningless in practical military terms. As we can see with the recent Palestinian election, it has only meant more suffering for the masses.

Of course, I'd like for progressive forces to win. The people to receive justice. So I pray that your vision of the future is on the mark and that I am entirely wrong about what will occur in the immediate future. —Rudy

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Jonathan Scott is Assistant Professor of English at Al-Quds University in Abu Dees, the West Bank, and the author of Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes . jonascott15@aol.com

posted 18 January 2007