Nationalism, History and Ethnic Absolutism

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Nationalism, History and Ethnic AbsolutismAuthor(s): Paul GilroySource: History Workshop, No. 30 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 114-120Published by: Oxford University Press

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114

History

Workshop ournal

Nationalism, History and

Ethnic

Absolutism

by

Paul

Gilroy

I have been

set

up

here,

in a

sense

as an

opponent

of

national

history.

I

wish

to decline

that role.

I

am not

happy

about

focusing

our discussion

hrough

a

narrow, or-or-against ebate

over

the

writing

of

something

called

national

history.

I

would prefer

that we

move instead

to a

consideration of

nationalism

as it has

a

bearing

on

the

writing

of

history

n

general

and on

English

and British

history

n

particular.

This orientation

requires

hat we

think

aboutthe effectsof racismboth in its

relationship

o nationalism

nd

n

relation

to

the

nationalist

historiographyproduced

by

both

radical

and

conservativehistorians.

I

want then,

to

speak

as

a

representative

of a

diverse

body

of

work,

loosely

both

historicaland

sociological,

that

has

pointed

to the salience of

'race'as a

structuring

eature

of British

ociety

and drawn

attention o some

of the new varieties of racist discourse and racialpolitics found in this

country during

the last

twenty years'.

An

emphasis

on

culture lends this

novel racial

thinking

its

primary

distinguishing

haracteristic.The term

culturehas

expanded

o

displaceany

overt references o

'race'

n

the

older,

biological

sense of the term.

Culture s

reductively

onceived and is

always

primarily

and

'naturally'reproduced

n families. The

nation

is,

in

turn,

conceived

as a

neat, symmetrical

accumulationof

family

units and the

supposedlyhomogenous

culture secured

n

part by

sustained

exposure

to

nationalhistory n the classroom culminatesn the experienceof unified

and

continuousnational

dentity.

It

would

appear

hat historians

are

being

entrusted with the

precious

task

of

making

and

reproducing

a

national

identity

that is

frequently presented

as

beleaguered

and

fragile. The

proposed

role of

history teaching

in

the transmissionof

this

authentic

national

culture reveals the confluenceof

'race',

nationality

and culture n

the

contemporary olitics

of

racialexclusion.The

samefixationwith

cultural

difference has also enabled this reasonable

racismto

escape

the

conven-

tionaldesignationof politics nto left andrightand,of course, to evadethe

idea

of

race as

hierarchy

n

favour of a

pseudo-pluralismwhich is only

betrayed

n

the end

by

its

steely

lack

of

tolerance2.

As

part

of

a broad

political

commitment o

the

black

settler populations

of this

country,

a

number

of

us,

black

and

white,

have been

trying o explore

what

happens

when

this

new

racismbrings 'race' and

nation very

closely

together. The

characteristicoutcome is a

situation

in which blackness

appears

as

a

kind of

disqualificationrom

membershipof the

national

community:

he

same

national

communitywhich will

be celebrated

and

re-produced

n

the reformed

pedagogyof national

history.Therelationship








History, he Nationand theSchools

115

between racism and nationalism

has also

emerged

as the

mainspring

of a

populist politics,

bolstered

by

debates around

immigration, crime, religion

and increasingly

the educational

proclivities

of

the

minority

ethnic

popu-

lation. The 'Asian' preference

for

single-sex

education for Muslim

girls

and

the Caribbean

longing

for the authoritarian

regimes

of

Victorian-style

schooling are

familiar

themes here. These and other recent conflicts

in and

around

educational

institutions

in this

country suggest

that if these forms of

racism are to

be

effectively opposed,

some innovative

political strategies

will

have to be devised, strategies

that can answer this

pre-occupation

with

culture

directly

with a

new

language

of cultural

democracy.

This crisis of

cultural

difference,

cultural relativism

and cultural

value3

which

frames

current debates over The Satanic Verses is the essential background to our

meeting

this

morning.

Unfortunately,

the

language

of anti-racist

political struggle

has been

so

discredited

-

not least by

its moralist misuse

in

the context

of

educational

institutions4

-

that

we are obliged to find new ways of elaborating our

critique

of

educational practices

and

of

re-thinking the relationship between

race, nation and ethnic

identities. In my view, one tentative step forward lies

in

seeing the new culturalist

racism as but one

example of what might be

called ethnic absolutism. This is a reductive, essentialist understanding of

ethnic and national difference which

operates

through an absolute sense of

culture

so

powerful

that it is

capable

of

separating

people off from each other

and

diverting

them into social and historical locations that are understood to

be

mutually impermeable

and incommensurable. Ethnic

absolutism may

not trade in the vocabularies of 'race'. It may be

remote from the symbolism

of

colour and, most important

of

all, it can afflict

anyone. In fact, those who

experience

racism themselves

may

be

particularly

prone to its lure. They

often

seize

its

simple,

self-evident truths as a

way of rationalizing their

subordination and

comprehending their

own

particularity. It is therefore

necessary to argue against the rhetoric of cultural

insiderism5and the narrow

practice of cultural nationalism whatever their source.

In

my

own

work,

I have become increasingly

fascinated by the way in

which black nationalism

developed in the nineteenth century6. It would

seem

that black nationalism is also bound by its origins

in Romantic theories

of

the Nation

and

nation building.

Edward Wilmot

Blyden, Martin Delaney,

Alexander

Crummell,

James Theodore

Holly

and the rest of the

intelligen-

sia of the black Atlantic world were, to varying degrees, indebted to the

nationalist thinking

of

Herder, Schleiermacher,

Hegel and Von Treitschke.

W. E. B.

DuBois,

who studied under Treitschke

in

Berlin, went so far as to

make Bismarck the subject

of his graduation address from Fish University in

1880. Reflecting

on this

years later

in

'Dusk of

Dawn' he wrote:

Bismarck

was my hero.

He

made a nation

out of a mass of bickering

peoples.

He had

dominated the whole

development

with his strength

until he crowned an emperor at Versailles. This foreshadowed in my








116 HistoryWorkshop ournal

mind the kind

of

thing

that

American Negroes must do, marching

forwardwith strengthand

determination ndertrained eadership.

This

model of national

development

has

a

special appeal

to the

'bickering

peoples'

of

the

blackAtlantic

diaspora

and

nspired

heir

efforts

to

construct

a

nation state on African soil. But there are

other,

even more

pernicious,

varieties

of

nationalism

which have

been elaborated rom radicaland

even

socialist

sources. Here it

is

important

or

us

to

focus

on

the

very

specific

forms of

English

cultural nationalism that can be used

to

illustrate an

importantconvergencebetween the New

Right

and

the New Left around

the

meaning

of national raditionand ethnic

dentity.

I

still

hold

to the view

that

a

great

deal

of

New Left

historiography

s

articulated

n an

explicitly

nationalistic

egister.8

Whether

HistoryWorkshop

s

legitimately

or

illegit-

imately descended from

this

perspective remains to be worked

out.

Certainly

he

great power

and

authority

of

the

New

Left

historians hould

not lead us to overlook the

way

in which

their

work

hosts an encounter

between the intellectualand

political legacies

of

socialism

n

one

country

and

a

different,

rather

volkish,

tradition of national

popular

radicalism

seemingly

ransmitted

with

only

minor

nterruptions

rom

Putney

Heath

to

Greenham Common. There is a great deal more to say about this left

nationalismand

the

statist

conceptions

of

political change

that bolster it.

The

aspiration o producea

popularculture which the left can somehow

orchestrate or even command is

understandable, hough

the

doggedly

ethnocentriccharacterof

these desires

is

perplexing.

In

a situationwhere

'race',

nation,

cultureand

ethnicityare used almost as synonyms,

he very

best

that

can be said

about

it is

that it

is

ambiguous

as

far as the

politics of

racismare concerned.If we turn to the

historiography

f this

country,this

nativisticmpulserepresentsa great ntellectualweakness.The languageof

national

belonging

and

patriotism

has

acquired

a

series

of racial

referents

that cannot be

spontaneously

dislodgedby

a

pure

act

of

will.

They

will

not

necessarilygo away

if

we

opt

to

overlook them.

They may

recede and lose

their

power

while

new

conceptions

of

locality

and

connectedness

merge

but

ethnocentrism9

may

be enhancedamidst he

cultural

order

of

a new

Europe

in which

chauvinisticconcern with

ethnic

particularity as been

rehabili-

tated even as the

political

and

economic

integration

of nation

states

proceeds. Beyondtheparochialboundariesof Britishpolitical ife, the idea

that

identity

and culture are

exclusively national phenomena,

and the

relatednotion that

unchanging ssences

of

ethnicor national

distinctiveness

are

automatically, hough

mysteriously roduced

rom

their

own

guts,have

come

to

constitutea

majorpolitical

problem.

These

ideas can

be

effectively

counterposed

o the

formsof

identity

and

struggledeveloped

of

necessity

by dispersedpeoples

for whom

nationality, thnicity

andthe nationstate are

perhaps

not so

tightly

associated and for whom

the condition of exile

becomesa privilegerather han a handicap.

This

is a

roundabout

way

of

saying why I don't accept the

polarization








History, he Nationand the

Schools

117

implicit

in

the title

of

this

morning's session:

'National History, for and

against'.

I'll

be

bolder

than

that

and

say

that

I'm

tired

of the

dualistic

thinking that

risks

attempting

to

reduce the

world

to a set

of

theoretical

categories

and

is

such

a

recurrent feature of the

drive

towards

simplicity

which so

often

unravels

both

anti-racism

and

internationalism. This

approach

says

that

you

are either for or

against

the

nation,

for

blacks and

against whites. It

says

that

in

the

operation

of racism there are

only

ever two

great camps:

the

victims

and the

perpetrators.

As

if

the

fixity

and coherence

of these

complex

terms

and

positions

can be

readily

and

permanently

established.

Apart

from the

way

that

this

binary

division abolishes the

space

and the

opportunity

for

anti-racist

intervention,

it's

important

to

remember

that as historians we have to be concerned about the witnesses too. I think

we need

a

new line

of

thought that

goes beyond

either/or

ism

into

a

different

conceptual logic

of

supplementarity.

In its

simplest

form,

this

might

turn on

the alternative

couplet

both/and.

I

make no

apology

for the fact that

this

shift

in

my

own

thinking

arises

from a

desire

to

be

recognized

as

being

both

black and

English

in

addition

to

everything

else that

I

am.

It is not then a matter of

being

either for

or

against

national

history.

Somewhere

between the local

and

the

global

there

must be a

place

for that

nation state and indeed for the myths and dreams of national or ethnic

collectivity

that condition

our

political predicament

even as the

relationship

between the local and

the

global

is

itself

transformed.

The first

question

I

would ask

you

to consider is

therefore

to be

reformulated thus: what

value

should

we

attach to the claims which

nationality

makes

when we

weigh

them

against the

other

political

and

theoretical

options

we encounter

in

the

writing of

history? Here

I

have found it useful

to return to Gramsci's idea of

a

critical

self-inventory.

He

says:

The

starting-point

of critical

elaboration

is the

consciousness

of

what one

really is,

and is

'knowing

thyself'

as a

product

of

the historical

process to

date

which

has

deposited

in

you

an

infinity of

traces,

without

leaving

an

inventory. ' (My emphasis)

There

are

all sorts of

reasons

why,

as the

era

of

nation states

promises to

draw

to a

close, the

nation

should not be

accepted as

the

principal means to

organize that

inventory,

if

indeed

that inventory can be

organized at all. The

nation should have no special privileges in the process of its production and

enjoy

no

immunity

from

prosecution.

Looking at the

contemporary growth

of

supra-national structures of

domination and control in both economic

and

political

life

prompts

further

questions

for

me about

the

ways

in

which

historians have

dealt

with

the

modes of

production,

social movements and

patterns

of

informational

exchange

in

the

past

which have

criss-crossed

national

boundaries.

How

do we explain the apparent

monopoly of the

nation state as an

intermediate category lodged

between the local and the

global? C. L. R. James, whose extraordinary life bears witness to the








118 HistoryWorkshop

ournal

intellectualprivileges

hatflow frommovementand lack of

fixity,provides

a

generalwarning

n Notes on Dialecticswhich

may

be of value

here:

Now

one of the

chief errors

of

thought

s to continue

o think n one set of

forms, categories, ideas, etc.,

when the

object,

the

content,

has

moved

on,

has created or laid

premises

for an

extension,

a

development

of

thought.

In

the light of James' injunction,

it

seems

worthwhile to consider the

possibility

that

the bordersof the nation

may represent

a rather

arbitrary

point

at whichto

pause

in our effortsto

comprehend

he

past.

I want to ask

you

whether

you

think hat

we

cling

to the nationall the more

tightly

because

the

order

of

certainty

with

which t is associated s

currently eing

torn

away.

I

want

to

direct

our discussiontowardsthe

ways

in

which writingmerely

nationalhistoriesmay

now be

inadequate.

It

may

still

be

necessary

but it is

certainly

nsufficient.

There

was

fleetingrecognition

of this

in

the

paper

that

Raphael

Samuelcirculated

prior

o thissession. But I want

o

say

in

response

to

him

that I

don't

thinkhe can

have

it both

ways.

If

the national

question

s

going

to be allowedto

implode,

as he seemed to

suggest

n the

latter

parts

of

thatdocument,we shouldbe moreopenaboutourdesireto see the backof

it. We cannot plausibly enthrone the idea of national history while

simultaneouslyseeking

to take

it,

and all

it

symbolizes, apart. Raphael

maintains his

contradictory ositiononly

at the

price

of a

telling

silenceover

the fate of

political

nationalism.What

transpires

n

the

history

classroom s

afterall, overdetermined

y

the

populistpolitical

nationalism have

already

mentioned.

This

imposessignificant onstraints

n

voluntaristic ttempts o

re-configurenational identity in a more pluralistic manner however

well-intentioned hey maybe.

If we cannot

proceed simplyby

either

claiming

he nation as our own

or

by revealing ts internaldifferentiation s well as itsimperialand militaristic

legacies

what are we to do? It is

clear

that we

cannot deal with the problem

by seeking

to

add

'Empire'

nto

a

pre-existing yllabus

or

by tackingon the

supposedly

discrete and

distinct histories

of

'minority' groups whose

silenced and invisible

presences

can be shown to

be dictatingthe hidden

pattern

of

British national

identity

in

the modern world.

Rather than

clinging o the ideaof nation as the centralmeans to organizeour thoughts

about

the

past,

I

would ike to see us

trying

o be a littlebit

more maginative.

There are for

example, grounds

on which we can

defend the vitality and

richness

of

what

might

be

called 'webbed accounts 2 n contrastwith the

static and arid state of

historiography'smaster narratives.These accounts

might

strive

to

transcend

national boundaries and would

reveal the

conspicuous

nternal

differentiation f

nationalcommunities.

Their ntellec-

tual restlessness

might also endeavour to make a virtue out of the

inescapablepartiality f perspectiveon which hey are premised,and which

helps

to

locate the

distinctive ravelling tandpoint romwhich hey evaluate








History, he Nation

and the Schools 119

the turbulence and

radical

contingency

of

modern social life. This assumes

a

far more refined

politics

of location than that

currently

allowed

by

the

desperate

cartography

of nation states.

This

proposal would involve re-writing

British

history

to the

point

at

which

it

ceases to be recognizably

British at

all.

Pointers towards how

this

might

be done

already

exist.

Here,

I

want

to

emphasize

the

decidedly

trans-national character

of modes of

production,

social

movements

and

informational exchanges. In work that I've been

doing recently

on

the

travels

of

black

abolitionists

in the nineteenth

century,

I have been struck

by

something

prefigurative,

which

indicates

that

by acting locally

and

thinking

globally in

their struggles against slavery and racial

domination,

these

movements have something to teach us today. The work of historians like

Peter

Linebaugh13and Marcus Rediker who have

abrogated

nationalism

in

favour of an

Atlantic

perspective

on the

eighteenth century

has also been

particularly inspiring.

It

is no

accident

that this work has its

origins

outside

Britain.

Linebaugh actually

offers

an appropriate metaphor when

he writes

of the moribund

categories

of

merely

national

history endeavouring

to

bury

the

vitality

of

political

movements

in so

many ethnically

and

economistically

arranged

cemetery plots.

My own interest in these problems derives from the example offered by

the

history

of

the black Atlantic world.

It contains a fluid and

dynamic

cultural system

that escapes the

grasp

of

nation states and national

conceptions

of

political

and

economic

development.

The writers and

political thinkers

generated within the black

Atlantic

tradition have

produced a rich

body

of work in

which reflection on

nationality, hybridity,

independence, syncretism and

self-determination have been

acknowledged

as central

political and

philosophical

questions

for

something like two

hundred years.

There is something

exemplary

in

that work and it remains a

profound

intellectual

and

political

resource

for

whoever seeks it out and

makes use of it.

To sum

up then,

I

am not against

the nation (we have to

put it

somewhere)

but the term

national

history seems to open the door to

nationalism. Those who

are content to produce merely national

histories

should be

able to

get

on with

their work.

I

repeat that what I am

concerned

with

is the

historiography

of

ethnic

absolutism.

I

am against the

rhetoric of

cultural

insiderism whatever its

source

because

I

think

it

is too

readily

linked

to unacceptable ideas of homogenous national culture and exclusionary

national or ethnic

belonging. There is of

course,

no

necessary connection

here with

any ideas

about 'race'.

NOTES

1 A

random

selection of

texts

here

might

include

Peter Fryer,

Staying

Power:

the

History

of

Black

People in

Britain,

Pluto,

1984;

Fryer,

Black

People in

the

British

Empire,

Pluto

1988;

Stuart Hall and others, Policing the Crisis, Macmillan 1978; John MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism








120

History

Workshop

Journal

and

Popular

Culture,Manchester

University

Press 1986;

Edward

Pilkington, Beyond the

Mother

Country, . B. Tauris

1988;

Ron Ramdin, The

Making

of the Black

WorkingClass n

Britain,Gower 1987;

Robin

Blackburn,TheOverthrow

f Colonial

Slavery,

1776-1848,

Verso

1988.

2

Fay Weldon,Sacred

Cows,

Chattoand

Windus

Counterblast

amphlet)1989.

3

BarbaraHerrstein

Smith,

Contingenciesf Value,Harvard

UniversityPress

1988.

4

Ian

MacDonald nd

others, Murdern the

Playground,

LongsightPress

1989.

5

Werner

Sollors, Beyond

Ethnicity

Consent

nd Descent n

American

Culture,Oxford

University

Press

1986.

6 Immanuel

Geiss,

The

Pan-African

Movement,

Methuen

1974;

Wilson

Moses,

The

Golden

Age

of

Black

Nationalism,

Oxford

University

Press

1978.

7

Vron

Ware,

'The

Good,

the Bad and

the

Foolhardy:Moving

he

Frontiers

of

British

Women's

History',

n F.

Rogilds

ed.),

Every

Cloudhas a Silver

Lining:

Lectures

n

Everyday

Life, CulturalProduction

nd

Race,

Akademisk

Forlag

1990.

8 W. E. B. DuBois,Duskof Dawn(1940),Viking1986,p. 577.

9 V. Y.

Mudimbe,

The

Invention

f Africa,Indiana

University

Press/James

Currey,

1988.

10 Antonio

Gramsci,

The

Study

of

Philosophy',

n

Selections

rom

Prison

Notebooks,

Lawrence ndWishart

1971,p. 324.

11

C. L. R.

James,

Noteson

Dialectics,

Allisonand

Busby

1980,p.

15.

12

Donna

Haraway, Situated

Knowledges: he

Science Question

in

Feminism

and the

Privilegeof Partial

Perspective',

Feminist

tudies

14:

3,

Fall

1988.

13

Peter

Linebaugh,

All

the AtlanticMountains

hook',Labour/LeTravailleur

0,

1982.

14

Marcus

Rediker,

Between he Deviland

the

Deep BlueSea,

CambridgeUniversityPress

1988.

The

More

It

Changes, The

More It

Stays

The

Same?

by

Stephen

Yeo

There is

somethingrecalcitrant

about

history

itself,

as

a

discipline,

as a

subject

or

object

for

teaching,

writing

and

research.

There

will

be

policies,

reports,

directives,

acts of

state

licensingand

nationalization.

But

history

itself

-

as in

the

moving

past,

presently

re-presented,

in

a

shifting,

differentiated

present

history

tself

is the

problem.

Any

serious

engagement

with

time,

with

human or

geographical,

physical,

material

sequencesof

eventsor

struggles,

with

stories

rather han

The Story - prevents the kinds of absolutism, essentialism - the new

fundamentalism,as

I

would

like to call

it

-

which

some

people,

some

policy-makers

(only

some),

now

wish

to

impose.

But

History is,

by

definition,

not the

kind of

stuff

from

which

all-at-once,

for-ever-and-ever,

timeless,

absolutist

statements

can

be

made.

Its

truths

are

truthsin

time.

They

are

relative,

relational.

Lessons in

this

stuff,

usingthe

substance n

time

which

s our

subject,

actually

annot

be

passed

down

from

Head

Office,

even

from

Heads,

even

from

our

own

heads,

unless

we are to

get

back to

the

state of Readingthe Lesson. Den XiaoPingmay not live long enough to

discover

this, but

it will

be

discovered,

however

long he

prepares

Beijing

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Nationalism, History and Ethnic Absolutism