Restoring the Radical Imagination: Shatz v. Harris

- By Kerry Sinanan

I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
From the root of the old one
A new one has sprung

                  Epilogue, Grace Nichols

(Please donate to the Grenada Disaster Fund)

Caribbean hybrid identities are characterized by survival and creativity out of monumental loss, including various languages from Arawakan, to Patois to Kreyòl. But very rarely are Caribbean people allowed to speak in their “own tongues” or for themselves outside of local and regional circles. Worse, all too often we are ventriloquized and extracted by the West, and Global North academia. In a recent article I noted the American, Adam Shatz’s, duplicitous writing on Palestine, a problem which others have also decried. And, as others such as Steven Salaita, and Abdal Jawad Omar have also noted, Shatz’s writing on Caribbean thinkers, most notably his biography of Frantz Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic, ventriloquizes to neutralize decolonial resistance in the present moment of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Cedric Robinson had famously noted this tendency some time ago: “ ‘the nationalist bourgeoisie’ . . . have sought to reappropriate and apportion Fanon for a post- or anti-revolutionary class-specific initiative”.[1] Shatz’s biography of Fanon is an extended act of what Fanon terms “domination” and treats him as an object to be observed, described, and pathologized—an account of a personality that Shatz presumes to narrate in a putatively objective manner, but with a clear agenda to, as Salaita notes, “disavow” and “diminish anticolonial resistance”.

I have further thoughts on the Global North’s extractive relationship to Caribbean thought, beyond Fanon, and Hurricane Beryl has pushed me to write. Seeing the Grenadines, Jamaica, Barbados, and Houston being devastated, holding my breath while it passed over Trinidad and Tobago where I have family, tracking her progress from afar, and knowing the kind of on the ground damage a Category 4-5 Hurricane does to the islands touches upon a deep current of love, fear, anger and care, inextricably combined, for any of us from the Caribbean. It is hard to put into words, but the feeling is a wave that carries long histories inside it, of seeing a helpless, dear one ravaged while also being helpless, and a knowledge that this present is a story of a long past, now manifesting in unprecedented ways. When I think of Trinidad, where I grew up, I think, still, of somewhere precious to be protected, and my early years there have implanted a deep affinity for a place so under threat. Maracas Bay, where we would go most frequently, was indeed largely inaccessible to non-locals until the US army blew a road through the Northern Range during World War II. The bay still has the feel of somewhere not fully ‘discovered’ by outsiders, even though it is a popular place, because it is surrounded by mountains and primeval rainforest. Watching and feeling the storm and its aftermath has made it more urgent for me to be explicit and to say that there is a direct line of connection between the racial capitalist, material extraction of the Caribbean by the Global North, and the extraction of Caribbean thought by white Westerners and Global North scholars, and that both are culpable for the climate emergency begun in 1492. The same dynamics of surveying, exclusive knowledge production, speaking ‘for’, capitalizing on, and dominating decolonial resistance, animate plantocracy, slaveocracy, and colonial writing. What is often missed is that writing, as a technology of epistemic domination, is fundamental to material, colonial domination.[2]

In a previous piece, I named Shatz’s writing on Palestine as part of a wider critical counterinsurgency: from my positionality, I see it as no coincidence that Shatz is both a Zionist apologist and a presumptive purveyor of Caribbean thought: his counterinsurgency connects both. It also tells us that 1492, what Gerald Horne calls “the Dawning of the Apocalypse”, “which led to the foregoing—slavery, white supremacy, and settler colonialism (and the precursors of capitalism)—planted in the long sixteenth century (roughly 1492 to 1607)”,[3]  is the historical nexus between the Caribbean and Palestine.[4] This is the point to which we must pay attention. Shatz’s writing on Fanon continues the possessive and extractive dynamics of settler colonialism. Obsessed with Fanon’s Blackness but without a shred of understanding of Blackness, either as “epidermalized” race or as revolutionary freedom, Shatz tries to mould Fanon with his reductive, pathologizing prose which deploys rhetorical balance to neutralize. Others have written about this in detail, notably, Hamid Dabashi who warns us against Shatz’s framing of Fanon’s arguments for liberatory violence as “a vengeful pathology”. Dabashi rightly counters, “Fanon cannot be neutralised. He was a revolutionary thinker, committed to helping liberate colonised peoples from the savagery of colonial domination of the sort we see in full throttle in Gaza today”.

But other interactions with Caribbean thought are at work in Shatz’s oeuvre; it struck me a while ago that the title of his book, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (2023), echoed the title of a collection of lectures and essays by the Guyanese writer, Wilson Harris, published in 1991, The Radical Imagination. Shatz tells us that the Trinidadian writer, V.S. Naipaul, supplied him with the first part of his title, before he consigns Naipaul to ideological extremism, a move he makes frequently to construct himself as the voice of reason and balance, someone who prides himself on “[i]rony, skepticism, doubt and detachment”.[5] This self-distancing has the effect of casting his subjects as somewhat infantile—incapable of subtle thought beyond their beliefs, zealous, like “missionaries”. Unlike Naipaul, Harris is not well known outside of Caribbean/ist circles, and his writing draws on his work as a surveyor, which brought him into close contact with the land of Guyana. His writing (dis)places Western epic and memory into the spaces of the South American rainforest, combining it with pre-colonial myth and memory. Harris’s allusive, dreamlike style opens spaces for connection and new forms beyond linear time and mappable space that have infinite roots in a living past unknown to coloniality. “You see, in the South American landscape, one is really dealing with something that is close to primordial landscape… when you go in there, you are in contact with something that runs so deep that it is not easy to assimilate it with any given model and I certainly could not assimilate it within the conventional novel.”[6]

Others have also drawn on “the radical imagination” for titles, notably Robin D. G. Kelley in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, which keeps the imagination and “the dream of a new world” central to the impetus for revolutionary action.[7]  But because Wilson Harris has long been an influence of mine, Shatz’s language in an interview about his own book struck me immediately: “What I want to suggest is that visionary thinking often proceeds from some kind of intuition or illumination. Visionary thinking requires an act of the imagination”. This is remarkably similar, in terms of its vocabulary, to Harris’s “intuitive imagination” and his account of a “re-visionary process” that channels other sources and energies to which ‘self’ is connected. But the similarity is at the superficial level only: Harris’ radical imagination is not the individualistic category that Shatz constructs and, crucially, it is “uncompromising”. While Shatz wishes to create a gallery of various thinkers who need not be on the “left” at all, Harris emphasises a well-spring of pre-Columbian energies to which some have access, which he calls, repeatedly, the “womb of space”, a hidden but present energy which

speaks of priorities before human discourse became the apparently absolute domain of nature language it now is. Human discourse is itself partial in all the books, and bibles, in which it is given the sanctity of convention. The hidden womb from which varieties of discourse come remains the well-spring from which new ideas, new associations, spring in an interwoven tapestry that no single culture can encompass.[8]

Cross-cultural intercommunication is vital to Harris’ work, which refuses linear, eugenicist ideas of progress, left and right, but which remakes language and ideas in an endless conversation: the creativity is held sacred.

Despite the echoes in Shatz’s writing, Harris’s Caribbean radical imagination is one of true renewal, located in an extrinsic, spatio-temporality that does not modify its de/precolonial force. To be clear, the problem I am naming is not personal: it is structural, ideological, and colonial. A present-day Western essayist—someone who works to construct himself as master of the current form, at the heart of the Global North essay-writing coterie,[9] and often lauded by its echo chambers, someone who speaks of Algeria as a “laboratory” for his thinking—is drawing on the language (even if unintentionally) of Black, Indigenous, Global South, and Caribbean thought and diluting it through forms and prose that neutralize it, making it consumable for a privileged liberal readership which has no accountability to actual colonized people or places.

Shatz’s essays are a space for him to explore his own individualist “fascination”, an exercise in “appraisal” and ego (his Podcast entitled “Myself with Others” is arguably too on the nose). It is important to highlight this dynamic because Shatz’s writing is one example of a much wider attempt at discursive appropriation, the seizure of extrinsic ideas beyond coloniality, for a deliberate neutralizing and counterinsurgent agenda: we need to pay attention to whom and what is reified in liberal letters and academia. Perhaps, ironically, Shatz does not include the Caribbean in his volume on “radical imagination,” which in form is like an exhibition, a private collection: “the essays in this book are portraits of writers, novelists, film-makers, and philosophers of various commitments”,[10] and he positions himself as “an American witness”.[11] His point of view performs its own curatorial violence of arrangement and possessive gazing. In a vital essay on the violence of colonial photography, William C. Anderson argues that “Histories of conquest, colonialism, and slavery structure everything around us, including the decision to use a camera”. Anderson cites Aimé Césaire, who describes the violence of such acts of spectatorship, which I see clearly in Shatz’s series of essays-as-exhibition in Writers and Missionaries: “Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle”.[12]

Shatz tells us clearly that he is more interested in “aesthetics,” and his reactionary instincts are repeatedly iterated in his denigration of actual radicals as “anti-racist warriors”, with “flaws”: Shatz’s project is to focus on individuality, on personal morality regardless of politics, rather than on systems of colonialism, white supremacy, and their discourses. He makes such moves by narrating what he assumes as the personal convictions of his subjects, so that he may erase politics altogether: “Truth is not singular . . . yesterday’s oppressed can become tomorrow’s oppressors” (14).[13] Politics becomes a matter of identity rather than positionality, and Shatz’s self-styled “American” metropolitan identity is proffered as the rational way to superintend the rabble in a perfect mimicry of colonial superiority. (V.S. Naipaul knew all about such “mimic men”).  Shatz’s prose displaces faith in true radicalism, with his own putatively objective witnessing, rising above the “fray”. One of Shatz’s most egregious possessions in the volume is his essay on Edward Said, an act of colonial-Zionist patriarchal ownership via which Shatz suggests that Said’s Palestinian identity is invented, “Palestinianism”: “Edward chose to “Palestinize” himself”.[14] The violence of these essays as portraits is clear in the placing of Said alongside Zionist and reactionary figures—making them comparable on the grounds of “radicalism,” which he wrests from political and activist commitment: “But in referring to the “radical imagination,” I do not mean an affiliation with the left, so much as a style of thinking”.[15] Shatz is clear that he considers radicalism as going to the root of ideas, rather than a necessarily violent and material uprooting of systems of oppression.

Consider, in contrast, the richness and resistance of Wilson Harris’ imagination:

What is this fabric of the imagination? Such a notion arguably implies that there has been a genesis of the imagination somewhere within the interstices of unrecorded time, that the unique—indeed inimitable—force of such a genesis imbues the human psyche with flexible and far-flung roots in all creatures, all elements, all worlds and constellations, all sciences, all spaces susceptible to visualisation.[16]

In his 1997 novel Jonestown, Harris’s prose conveys his ideas of an ontological web that connects places, times, others, to “one”, a refusal of boundaries that make colonial binaries and the fiction of the individual: “One becomes, it seems, a vessel of composite epic, imbued with many voices, one is a multitude. That multitude is housed paradoxically in the diminutive surviving entity of community and self that one is”.[17] Shatz’s writing, and that of so many other appropriators of Caribbean thought, collect specimens of constructed “others” in order to translate and control. Yet the extrinsic force of Caribbean beyondness makes a lie of their assumed authority. More broadly, once more, Shatz is merely illustrative; his writings offer no originality but instead illustrate that the intellectual extractivism of the Caribbean underpins and authorises ongoing material exploitation via tourism, economic oppression, and resource theft—something Hurricane Beryl has made starkly and fatally clear.

Academia and its offshoots in the world of liberal letters are key to maintaining the racial domination of the Caribbean by the US and Europe. The theft of its ideas and imagination are no less harmful for being intangible. I for one feel it.

(Maracas Bay from the Northern Range, Trinidad)
 

KERRY SINANAN is Assistant Professor in pre-1800 Global Literature and Culture at the University of Winnipeg. Her scholarship focuses on the Black Atlantic, Caribbean slavery and race, and the global dimensions of Black resistance and abolition, up to the present.

Notes