{"id":1380,"date":"2021-09-20T12:53:52","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T16:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/?p=1380"},"modified":"2021-09-20T12:53:52","modified_gmt":"2021-09-20T16:53:52","slug":"biodun-jeyifo-the-imagined-world-community-of-modern-revolutionaries-the-congresses-of-paris-and-rome-and-the-bandung-conference-in-retrospect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/biodun-jeyifo-the-imagined-world-community-of-modern-revolutionaries-the-congresses-of-paris-and-rome-and-the-bandung-conference-in-retrospect\/","title":{"rendered":"Biodun Jeyifo | The imagined \u201cworld\u201d community of modern revolutionaries: the Congresses of Paris and Rome and the Bandung Conference in Retrospect"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Biodun Jeyifo<\/h2>\n

The Negro is the man who must sit at the back of the bus in Alabama<\/p>\n

\u2013 Frantz Fanon, \u201cRacism and Culture\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let Negroes negrify themselves\u2026 Let them persist to the point of madness in what they are condemned to be. Negroes, if they change towards us, let it not be out of love but hatred!<\/p>\n

\u2013 Jean Genet, The Blacks<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jean Genet\u2019s dramatic masterpiece, The Blacks,<\/em> was first staged in 1959, the year of the Rome Congress. In its philosophical themes and theatrical aesthetics, the play could have been part of the two Congresses. Applying the savage motifs of mastery and servitude in Hegel\u2019s Master-Slave Dialectic (as well as the more phenomenological and purposive Sartrean tropes of being and nothingness) to the propulsive drive of the plot of his play, Genet had extended the critique of racial subjugation and racism to a practice, a revolt that would not only change the world but reorder the nature of things. In its mythemes and ideologemes, this is exactly what Negritude claimed and entrenched as the order of discourse at the two Congresses of Paris and Rome. Thus, on the surface, The Blacks<\/em> seemed to be ideologically in solidary with Negritude. But nobody could have missed the devastating critique of all claims to a racial essence or mystique in its portrayal of all the avatars of Negritude in the play.<\/p>\n

Also written or staged around the same period were two masterpieces of mid-20th<\/sup> century world drama that were uncanny in their echoes of Genet\u2019s play. These were Derek Walcott\u2019s Dream on Monkey Mountain<\/em> and Wole Soyinka\u2019s A Dance of the Forests<\/em>. Like Genet\u2019s play, both were given their stage outings close to or within half a decade of the first performance of The Blacks<\/em>, Walcott\u2019s play in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago and the Soyinka play in Lagos, Nigeria. As in The Blacks<\/em>, both plays place the racial nationalists in revolt, the avenging angels of Negritude, at the center of the plot. And also as in Genet\u2019s play, this is done not without some sympathy, if not for the Negritudists, then for their cause. But ultimately, absurdity and inauthenticity pervade nearly all their words and actions, perhaps more savagely than what we encounter in Genet\u2019s play, particularly in Dream on Monkey Mountain<\/em> which, on this score, has to be adjudged the most relentlessly anti-negritude literary work of the 20th<\/sup> century and one of the greatest anti-racist plays of our cultural posterity.<\/p>\n

These three plays were written or staged close to or within a decade of the two Congresses of Paris and Rome and at a moment in the history of modern revolutions when ideologies of racial and territorial nationalism were already under thoroughgoing critique as being, on their own, truly valid expressions or accretions of revolutionary theory and praxis. At the time, Negritude had already begun to attract its bitter and unforgiving critics, but unlike many other cultural, philosophical and political nationalisms, it still had a considerable currency of discursive and ideological capital. For these reasons, its critics and opponents, especially at the two Congresses, generally allowed that Negritude not only possessed intellectual legitimacy and dignity but also considerable institutional and mobilizational effectiveness as a progressive, even revolutionary<\/em> movement. After all, the publishing organizations, the scholarly books, the works of literature and the conferences of writers and artists, all were produced by or took place under the aegis of institutions proudly bearing the appellation of Negritude where, in the preceding decades of the late 19th<\/sup> and early to mid-20th<\/sup>centuries, similar organizations and movements bore the imprimatur of Pan Africanism. Thus, who could have dared to treat the likes of Leopold Senghor, Alioune Diop, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, Birago Diop and Jacques Stephen Alexis, the leading lights and celebrated champions of Negritude at the Congresses, who could have treated them like the social misfits and besotted soul avengers of racial insults and indignities of Genet\u2019s The Blacks <\/em>or Walcott\u2019s Dream on Monkey Mountain?<\/em><\/p>\n

This is not as fatuous a question as it seems to be. Plucked from the carceral \u201clower depths\u201d of French society in an imprisonment that was for life, Genet was not an initiate of the highest levels of the elites of French society and the Francophone world, even though one of these, Jean-Paul Sartre, was responsible for mobilizing the most prestigious intellectuals of France for the intervention that made the French state itself to release Genet from prison. And even after his release, he continued to live his life and expend his tremendous naysaying revolutionary energy among the rejects and outcasts of the social order, in France itself and in other parts of the world \u2013 among the Black Panthers in the US for one instance. All the same, the question is not redundant because in the person of Frantz Fanon and his trope of \u201cthe wretched of the earth\u201d, what we might term the \u201cGenet factor\u201d was vibrantly present within the politeness, the gravitas<\/em> of the presentations and discussions at the Congresses of Paris and Rome.<\/p>\n

In my presentation at the opening session of \u201cRevolution 13\/13\u201d \u2013 which happens to be the 65th<\/sup> anniversary of the ceremonial closing of the Paris Congress of 1956 \u2013 among other issues, I will place emphases on the following themes that we might ascribe to Fanon\u2019s inscription of the \u201cGenet factor\u201d into the proceedings of the Congresses:<\/p>\n

One \u2013 As we have seen in the cases of the impact of plays like Walcott\u2019s Dream on Monkey Mountain<\/em> in Trinidad and Tobago and Soyinka\u2019s A Dance of the Forests<\/em> in Nigeria, the vigorous disputations over the theory and practice of revolutionary nationalism that took place at the Congresses of Paris and Rome also took place at other national and regional locations of the world. I shall be exploring this categorical worldliness<\/em> of activist thinkers and \u201cworldly\u201d philosophers that marks a crucial point of departure from the venerable traditions of academic, text-bound philosophers.<\/p>\n

Two \u2013 Both celebrated and denounced as an \u201capostle of violence\u201d, Fanon openly admitted the influence on his thought of the works of an avatar of violence in French revolutionary theory and practice like Georges Sorel. At the Congresses, his contributions were inflected with a pervasive \u00a0attentiveness to the place of violence at many levels of the social order. Like the quote from his speech at the Paris Congress that serves as the epigraph for this outline of my presentation on Wednesday, the reader has to strive hermeneutically<\/em> to extract the extreme interpellative violence in the assertion that \u201cthe Negro is the man who must sit at the back of the bus in Alabama\u201d. But in the context of its actual delivery at the Congress, it was absolutely impossible not to discern the explosive, agonistic<\/em> difference that this made with the presentations of the likes of Senghor, Richard Wright and even Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire. On Wednesday, I will make a considerable extension of this trope into many of the essays and books of Fanon, both before and after the two Congresses.<\/p>\n

Three \u2013 At the Paris and Rome Congresses, celebrated icons of the French and European literary, philosophical and artistic Left were present as solidary, kindred spirits to the Black African, Caribbean and American delegates. At the Bandung Conference, the presence of Westerners, official and non-official, was either as ceremonial invitees or observers. We shall explore the implications of this for our theme of the \u201cworldliness\u201d of activist thinkers and philosophers. What \u201cworld\u201d is being imagined if a significant portion of that world is deemed to be mere observers, especially before or after those doing the imagining assume power in the wake of \u201csuccessful\u201d national emancipatory projects in the developing world?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Biodun Jeyifo<\/p>\n

Harvard University<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Biodun Jeyifo The Negro is the man who must sit at the back of the bus in Alabama \u2013 Frantz Fanon, \u201cRacism and Culture\u201d   Let Negroes negrify themselves\u2026 Let them persist to the point of madness in what… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2332,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51427],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-1-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2332"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/revolution1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}