Category: _reviews_blockhover

by Gavin Steingo

Review of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020)

The recent documentary, My Octopus Teacher, is a sequence of clichés and banalities punctuated by the effervescent, astonishing world of an octopus.[i] The film documents the relationship between Craig Foster, a white South African diver and filmmaker, with a cephalopod in a kelp forest near Cape Town in South Africa’s Western Cape province. Around 2010, Foster began free diving—that is, diving unaided by the scuba technology of an oxygen tank—and he encountered a curious octopus whose reticence among humans seemed to be mitigated only by the bareness of Foster’s body in the water. Foster visited the creature almost daily for a year, during which time he earned the octopus’ trust; unusually for a cephalopod, this one comes into contact with Foster, and the viewer witnesses scenes of intimacy between the two beings.

The film works on two distinct and only occasionally overlapping registers. On the one hand, the viewer is treated to quite exquisite cinematography: we see the octopus curled into a ball, walking on two legs, propelling itself through its aquatic environment, camouflaging itself by virtue of its incredible amorphous body, conjuring sculptural figures from black ink, shape shifting. This is, to us, an incredible creature, almost our opposite.[ii] The second trajectory of the film centers itself on what we hold in common with the octopus. Indeed, despite its radical corporeal alterity, octopuses seem to possess “advanced” cognitive capacities. (I omit the complexities and pitfalls of this kind of language.)[iii] Unfortunately, on this register—at least to my eye and ear­—Foster undoes and undermines everything that might be interesting about his experience and about the film. Somewhat late in the documentary, we hear sketchy and hastily delivered information about Foster’s personal crises—how he was overworked, under pressure from various quarters, and so on. The narrative arc of the film then jettisons everything that is incredible and terrifying about the octopus, landing instead on the creature’s resilience. After losing a leg in an attack by a shark, Foster’s octopus “teacher” nurses herself back to health and ultimately gives birth to many baby octopuses. Foster is so moved by her tenacity that he founds an environmentally focused NGO. He waxes lyrical about how the octopus taught him to be a better person, a better husband, and a better father. His unmediated, “free” dives into the ocean, in other words, ultimately lead to his personal redemption.[iv]

The backdrop of the film—which is never addressed, or even really hinted at—is the settler colonial context of contemporary South Africa. Anyone who has ever been to the region of South Africa in which the film takes place will know that it is hardly postcolonial, or even neocolonial, but rather looks like an actual, full-blown European colony from some previous era. The wealth gap is staggering: Whites own almost all the extremely expensive beachfront property, while Black people are pushed to the vast shantytowns that sprawl on either side of the region’s highways. None of this is visible in My Octopus Teacher. The film ends with Foster and his son diving into the ocean in the octopus-protected area outside their glamorous home. This is the idyllic landscape of a white heteropatriarchal nightmare. What then, did Foster learn from his octopus teacher other than white middle-class family values—don’t work too hard, spend time with your kids, and so on—values that affirm and enshrine every form of oppressive normativity on offer in the twenty-first century?

It’s worth noting that at one point in the film Foster attributes his understanding of “Nature” to previous work with San animal trackers—as depicted, for example, in his film The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story (2000). This is perhaps the only moment in the film where Foster opens an opportunity to examine his relationship to Africa, but the moment is short-lived, and the region of the Cape where My Octopus Teacher is filmed is presented as if unpeopled. If indeed Foster learned how to learn from an octopus from a San hunter, then “learning from” is a double gesture in the film. But in neither instance does Foster see these lessons as ways of helping him become someone other than who he already is. (Or if he becomes something else, it is just a more relaxed, more successful version of his former self.) This is not a case, in other words, of “becoming octopus,” or, to use Antjie Krog’s perspicacious phrase, of white South Africans dealing with their colonial history by “begging to be Black.”[v]

Two months after the release of My Octopus Teacher, Alexis Pauline Gumbs published Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. On the face of it, the two cultural products have a lot in common, and indeed they both concern what we, as humans, can learn from the beings with whom we share the earth. But, in my view, Gumbs’ book is everything that Foster’s film is not. For, unlike Foster, Gumbs invites us to unlearn rather than shore up middle-class, white capitalist values. She invites us to think and feel otherwise.

In recent years, “learning from…” has proliferated as a way of combatting ecological and social crises. In many cases, the results are underwhelming, or even quite problematic, as was the case, for example, with the 2017 Documenta exhibition, which had the title “Learning from the South” (and which resulted, in the view of many, at least, in wealthy German art dealers landing in Athens during a moment of political turmoil and acting entirely irresponsibly—in other words, they learned nothing at all). “Learning from…” is often a hazardous exercise, especially in cases where a person or institution from a position of power claims to learn something from a vulnerable “other,” and especially in cases where the person or institution claiming to learn something, or claiming to want to learn something, can inflict suffering on the thing from which it claims to want to learn. (My Octopus Teacher is a textbook problematic example.) Gumbs’ book, which has the subtitle Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, faces exactly this political and ethical challenge. But she largely (perhaps entirely) avoids the pitfalls that others fall into, and this review presents some thoughts on how and why.

Gumbs is an idiosyncratic writer. Steeped in traditions of Black feminism,[vi] she works adjacent to but not fully within academia. This book, too, is at once intellectually challenging and rigorous, but also accessible to non-academics and especially to activists and teachers of all varieties (high school teachers and students will likely get much from this book as well). Perhaps most urgently, the book does something that animal studies often fails to, namely, make the connection between forms of animal and human oppression[vii]—in this sense, it is important to Gumbs that we share a world, and not only a physical planet with dolphins, walruses, and seals. The book begins with a powerful preface in which Gumbs introduces the concept of undrowning by marking the ocean as a tremendous space of death and survival for Black people on both sides of the Atlantic. The opposite of drowning, of course, is breath, and breath is a major concern of this book, of Gumbs’ other work,[viii] and, of course, of much recent Black critical thought and activism. Nothing can substitute for Gumbs’ own words:

I am saying that those who survived in the underbellies of boats, under each other under unbreathable circumstances are the undrowned, and their breathing is not separate from the drowning of their kin and fellow captives, their breathing is not separate from the breathing of the ocean,[ix] their breathing is not separate from the sharp exhale of hunted whales, their kindred also. Their breathing did not make them individual survivors. It made a context. The context of undrowning. Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we do every day in the chokehold of racial gendered ableist capitalism. We are still undrowning. (pp. 1-2)

Like other contemporary theorists, Gumbs thinks about breath as both an essential biological function (one that depends upon delicate ecosystems), and in terms of what Achille Mbembe recently described as “breathing beyond its purely biological aspect, and instead as that which we hold in-common, that which, by definition, eludes all calculation.”[x] In this sense, I am reminded, too, of Frank Wilderson’s comment, made in the conclusion to his “unflinching paradigmatic analysis” in Red, White, & Black, that looking anti-Black violence directly in the face means refraining from offering a “roadmap so extensive it would free us from the epistemic air we breathe. To say that we must be free of air, while admitting to knowing no other source of breath, is what I have tried to do here.”[xi] Undrowned, too, is about epistemic air—and real air, which all mammals depend on for their (and our) survival. Theorizing these two registers of air together is a central preoccupation of the book. And if Undrowned also refrains from providing a roadmap to some time-space beyond the extreme violence of the present and ongoing “environment,” it does offer many subtle forms of intervention. In other words, this is not a utopian book that directly presents or “imagines” a world beyond the paradigm of anti-Blackness, an imagining that may be strictly speaking impossible.[xii] Rather, the book acts as a forceful and urgent critique of “racial gendered ableist capitalism” as a constellation that holds the world together in a murderous, suffocating embrace.

A particularly compelling aspect of Gumbs’ work is how widely stimulating it is for fields outside of its direct purview. To provide just one example: by beginning from a totally different perspective to most environmental historians, Gumbs offers new and trenchant insights on the topic of whale song. (This is a topic of particular interest to me as a musicologist.) The conventional narrative has it that song played an important role in “saving” the whales. It is true that several species of whale were well on their way to extinction before Roger Payne and Scott McVay discovered whale song, or rather, before Payne and McVay taught the American public to hear whale phonation as song. Despite the protestations and cringing of long-time marine mammal researchers, when it came time to make a case against the whaling industry, the gentle bellowing of a single male humpback some two thousand meters below the ocean surface proved far more effective than careful argumentation. Payne produced the recording Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1970, and together with McVay published the groundbreaking article “Songs of Humpback Whales” the following year.[xiii] When NASA opted to include an excerpt of whale song on the famous Voyager album that was sent into space, the president of the National Geographic Society, Gilbert Grosvenor, declared that “the whale has become a way of thinking about our planet and its creatures.”[xiv] Looking back on that period, scientist and whale song researcher Katharine Payne made this point explicitly: “There was a burst of realization that the world could change its relation to wildlife. The reaction people had to hearing these sounds made whaling obsolete!”[xv]

There is certainly some truth to this narrative, but Gumbs asks us to put pressure on aspects that many have accepted too easily. In an earlier book, written in a more experimental and poetic style (sometimes coming close, I think, to spoken word poetry or “toasting”), she writes:

between you and me, we knew it would never work. just because the singing of the whales had caused bumper stickers and rallies and international bans on their murder and the criminalization of the exploding harpoon (you know. that thing that got under their skin and destroyed them from the inside) didn’t mean it would work for us. i mean how long had we, black women, been singing.

when they decided the whale was an intelligent creature, nuanced, descriptive, they decided that the people who killed them were greedy, were savage, were less evolved. isn’t that interesting. the same people who forced the whaling indigenous into sale instead of ceremony now spoke of evolution. spoke of the humane and didn’t choke. this is why we didn’t have much hope. our intelligence and the multiple forms of proof required did not inspire the world to disentangle its hooks from our looks and our attitude.

we assert that it was not the song of the whales that saved them. if singing could save we’d be god. it was the fact of other sources of oil to move into, other deep black resources to extract. it was a fact. they could only save the whales once they knew they didn’t need them. it was a simple as that. and they haven’t found a way yet to say it. their needles in our skin, targeting us where we breathe. which is everyone we love. trapping us below and yet detracting us above. chasing us across oceans. they risk their very souls. they know it though. they need us more than gold.[xvi]

For Gumbs, then, the question of marine mammals and “us” is primarily one of value, of who and what matters enough to be secured within a political community in any given moment. Gumbs doubts that the success of the anti-whaling movement can be attributable to the discovery of whale song. She suggests, moreover, that the continued ensnarement of, and infliction of pain upon, Black women—despite the vaunted musical capacities of successive generations of Black women singers—may well be attributable to the fact that white supremacy depends on the survival and suffering of Black women for its continued existence.[xvii] This kind of critique compels a serious reevaluation of much marine environmental history. And later in this review I will comment in greater detail about her extended analysis of whale song in Undrowned.

It’s also possible to read Gumbs on a more general level, and in a way that connects directly to my own ongoing work.[xviii] In that work, I am interested in how the current political moment follows on the heels of what several writers, most notably Freud, have understood as progressive assaults on human narcissism. The first assault, argued Freud, was the Copernican revolution, which displaced Man from his position at the center of the cosmos. Second was the Darwinian revolution, which placed the human firmly in the domain of the biological animal. The third blow is more controversial; Freud names the blow of psychoanalysis, which decentered consciousness.[xix] Donna Haraway raises an eyebrow at Freud’s claim regarding the third blow but seems to concede the point. She postulates a fourth moment, namely the decentering of the human through technology, including, but not limited to cyborgic manifestations.[xx] Personally, I am not persuaded by Freud’s third periodization (the displacement of consciousness by the unconscious seems, to me, categorically different to the planetary and biological revolutions), nor am I persuaded by Haraway’s fourth (I would argue that the evolution of humanity, starting at least a quarter of a million years ago, has been thoroughly technologically constituted).

Rather, the most recent paradigm shift seems to be one of value. Until the twenty-first century, all forms of (Western) misanthropy were paradoxically and essentially optimistic. From Molière to Jonathan Swift, misanthropy has been the critique of particular societies with the implicit assumption that we, as humans, can be better. The twenty-first century is different. For the first and only time in history, many people are resolutely misanthropic: a misanthropy without redemption.[xxi] This new, full-blown misanthropy takes many forms and seems to have no political compass; it is as prevalent on the political Left as it is on the Right, where eco-fascism is a major if not dominant stream. Today, many people feel and openly express that the world would be a better place without humans. And in this light, it is possible to argue that the third major blow to human narcissism is a question of humanity’s “right” to a place on Earth.

Consider, for example, and by contrast, that Johannes Kepler remained certain about the ontological centrality of humanity, despite his famous contributions to post-Copernican science.[xxii] Nearly three centuries later, Alfred Russell Wallace (to whom the theory of natural selection is often attributed along with Darwin) continued to espouse the ontological centrality of the human even in the scientific paradigm of natural selection.[xxiii] The twenty-first century, by contrast, marks a moment in which even those certain of humanity’s “intellectual” superiority (and sometimes, in fact, because of it) doubt its ontological centrality as well as its value, and question whether the human deserves to survive as a species.

Although not stated in these terms, I read Gumbs’ book as a response to a world in which humanity’s stunning scientific and technological achievements are often dislocated from or even at odds with values. Fully recognizing the scale of destruction, Gumbs places emphasis not on the human qua species, but on structures (capitalism, the afterlives of slavery, and oppressive gender structures are key in her account). From that perspective, she uncovers what is profound about marine mammal life in terms of social arrangement, reproduction, and the way that various animals dwell in complexly entangled ecosystems. The wonder of nature is to be found in how different body plans and forms of relation coevolved with each other in ingenious ways. It makes sense that we who struggle with the fact of having bodies, we who struggle with elementary forms of being in common, might stand to learn something from animals who have been around for a lot longer than we have, and who have survived even in the face of our destructive tendencies. Bearing this in mind, it’s also possible to situate the book within a growing theoretical movement that understands the ocean not simply as a body of water “between” continents—as some kind of blank slate—but rather as a richly populated living system, and one long entangled with the traffic of goods, animals, and people.[xxiv]

Gumbs describes her book as a “guide,” writing that “this guide to undrowning listens to marine mammals specifically as a form of life that has much to teach us about the vulnerability, collaboration, and adaptation we need in order to be with change at this time, especially since one of the major changes we are living through, causing, and shaping in this climate crisis is the rising of the ocean” (p. 7). Gumbs does not view her work as a critique of science, and she uses what we have learned from scientists about marine mammals to pursue a form of “apprenticeship” (p. 9). But she does foreground a few aspects of scientific knowledge production that critical readers would do well to pay attention to.

To provide one set of examples: Gumbs notes throughout the book that marine mammal science is plagued by lacunae. This is fine as it goes, but scientists frequently rush to explanations in the absence of grounding or proof. For instance, attracting mates of the opposite sex is a default explanation for many as yet unexplained behaviors. About this, Gumbs writes: “Scientists make their own fictions. They say that the sound [of seals] is about mating, but [the male seal] doesn’t even mate until his life is half over” (p. 78). Or consider: “Walruses of any sex assignment can have tusks as long as a meter. The dominant theory is that the main use of these tusks is male struggles for dominance. But I am not convinced. Especially since tusks are not sex specific. And walruses regularly use their extended front teeth performing miracles, by pulling their up to 4,200 pound bodies onto ice” (p. 155). In a manner redolent of the Deleuze and Guattari of Capitalism and Schizophrenia—that two-part book which explodes the Freudian patriarchal structure in favor of wolf packs, rodent affinities, and so on—Gumbs’ displacement of simplistic scientistic explanations opens space for understanding wondrous animal maneuvers.

A second aspect of scientific inquiry that Gumbs responds to throughout the book is the will to knowledge. She emphasizes the reasons that some marine mammals are much better known than others. For instance, why do we know so much about the humpback whale? Gumbs suggests: “One thing that helps, when those who are studying you are capitalists, is that humpback whales are easy to identify as individuals because of the markings on their tails” (p. 71). On the other hand, many aspects about walruses are little known (hence the shoddy interpretation about their tremendous tusks). Walrus breeding patterns in particular have been little documented because of the difficulty accessing their living environs (which allows scientists to dubiously attribute whatever they want to walruses’ sexual practices).  And yet, the warming of the polar ice caps makes these creatures easier to study, to know, and to bring into our orbit.  For all of these reasons, Gumbs affirms those unknown, or only partly known creatures, those who have succeeded, against all odds, to at least partially avoid surveillance, capture, experimentation, torture, and death.

Undrowned, importantly, is not written in the kind of sentimental, fable-like manner of My Octopus Teacher, whose message is essentially “the octopus is resilient, and we should be, too.” To my own eyes and ears, the most trenchant and moving moments of the Undrowned are those where Gumbs moves between marine mammals and us in a somewhat elliptical manner that requires something of a stretch, a bit of mental gymnastics to fully appreciate. Returning, for example, to the seal—after providing a reason for why we should doubt the reductionist explanation of seal sounds, she writes: “They say it must be about [mating and] territory. But there is no one here but you. And us. Spread out across the whole bottom of Earth” (p. 78).  At such moments, the observation of a seal acts as a critique of scientific positivism, but also opens out onto a politics of the commons. In contrasting “there is no one here but you” with “and us… spread across…the Earth,” we sense Gumbs’ tenderness in writing to and for these animals, whose lives we are spatially disconnected from yet radically in contact with.

Such moments give value to aspects of marine life that are not intelligible to those working with the grammar of crass optimalization. Consider, for example, that a 2016 report on the relatively frequent practice of adoptive parenting among marine mammals ends in bewilderment. The authors of the report puzzle over the “costly” caregiving activities of Indo-Pacific dolphins, especially their frequent “allomaternal behavior” (what in human terms would be called adoption or foster parenting); the authors conclude that it is “unclear why an animal would invest its resources in this manner” (pp. 161-2).[xxv] For Gumbs, who has long been interested in practices of nonbiological, revolutionary mothering, such reasoning is myopic at best.[xxvi] “Who has not been mothered by someone genetically and socially distant from your birth situation, at some necessary time?” she asks.  “And if you have ever shared something, taught someone, shared responsibility for someone’s wellness for even a part of their journey, how would you measure what you gained from that potentially ‘costly behavior?’ We call it love” (p. 162).

Love is a leitmotif in Undrowned. Returning to the question of whale song (that, I admit, initially drew me to Gumbs’ work), she asks what happens when we think of other creatures “beyond the characteristics [singing, for example] most palatable to predatory ‘allies’” (p. 71). What happens, Gumbs queries, after we—and here the “we” shifts ambiguously to Black women, but also to any being at some point deemed intellectually inferior in the eyes of racial gendered ableist capitalism—what happens “after we finish proving we are smart and capable of feeling to those who somehow think that it is wise to boil the world…?” (ibid.). These kinds of pronoun shifts act as forms of identification and are placed strategically throughout the book. Addressing the humpback whale directly, she writes: “I love the parts of you that no one thinks are particularly special. I love the basic you of you unmarketable and everyday. I love to be around you because the round around you thrills me. And let’s get together again soon” (ibid.).

While never explicitly suggested by its author, Undrowned is a book almost crying out to be read aloud. The book is very much about breath, certainly, but the way the text unfolds across the page also seems to couple with breath, that is, with the corporeal rhythm of the voice. That this is the case should not be surprising, especially considering that Gumbs is a renowned orator as well as writer, whose work is in perennial dialogue with Black Southern spiritual practices and Caribbean oral performance traditions (the latter is most clearly articulated in her 2020 book, Dub). In this sense, it would be interesting to think about Gumbs’ work in relation to other histories of poetics, as well—for, example Charles Olson’s landmark “Projective Verse” (1950) manifesto, in which he advocates breath (rather than meter or rhyme, for example) as the structuring element of poetry. Gumbs would certainly be open to such relations, as she is to creative, performance-based versions of her work.[xxvii]

Very much in this spirit, Undrowned ends with a series of activities cultivating approaches to life based on sustainable forms of living and being together. From guided listening and American Sign Language (ASL) activities, to breathing and memory strategies based on insights garnered from the author’s “apprenticeship” with marine mammals, the final chapter of the book offers exercises that would be wonderful to perform in various settings, including, but not limited to, the college classroom. The exercises are redolent of those found in Tutorial Diversions (Bill Dietz), Sonic Meditations (Pauline Oliveros), Contra-Sexual Manifesto (Paul B. Preciado), Perceptual Education Tools (Ben Patterson), and Artificial Life (Maryanne Amacher): all of these texts, like Undrowned, can be used as guides for profound intervention into the quotidian. Refreshingly, Gumbs shows little interest in either advanced scuba-diving or the romance of free diving. Literally going into the water to meet the animals she writes about is beside the point, or even somewhat contrary to her aims. She is acutely aware of the resources required for direct interaction (think of Foster and his ocean-front property), the grotesqueness of animal captivity at places like Sea World (which she writes about brilliantly), and—while she does not address it explicitly—the proximity of much scientific experimentation to torture (I think of recent experiments trying to determine whether certain animals feel pain by maiming and dismembering them). All of the activities in the final chapter of Undrowned can take place in simple settings, and many are easily doable in the COVID era of social distancing and online interaction. Marine mammals are not mere metaphors in the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. But to honor, and indeed, to love dolphins, seals, whales, and walruses, does not mean touching them, experiencing them, or knowing them in their every detail. On the contrary, recognizing our “individual bond with life” (Mbembe) means a careful consideration of when and how to care and know.

Compassionate, inventive, and politically astute, Undrowned offers a new kind of critical praxis equal to the complexities of our time.

I am grateful to Helen H.Y. Kim and Roger Mathew Grant for first talking this review through with me and encouraging me to write it. Many thanks also to Arne De Boever and Paul Bové for thoughtful feedback on the piece.

Gavin Steingo is a South African musicologist and composer. He currently teaches at Princeton University.

[i] For what it is worth, the film recently won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

[ii] Flusser’s book on precisely this topic remains a compelling read. See Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, translated by Valentine A. Pakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); originally published in 1987.

[iii] As I write this, the cuttlefish (a relative of the octopus) passed a version of the “marshmallow test,” which supposedly proves the animal’s ability to delay gratification, that is, to exert deliberate self-control. See Alexandra K. Schnell, Markus Boeckle, Micaela Rivera, Nicola S. Clayton, and Roger T. Hanlon, “Cuttlefish Exert Self-Control in a Delay of Gratification Task,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 288(2021): 2882020316120203161. On octopus intelligence more generally, see Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016).

[iv] It is interesting to ponder which of the two registers led to its being awarded an Oscar.

[v] See Krog, Begging to be Black (Cape Town: Struik, 2009).

[vi] Prior to Undrowned, Gumbs penned a theoretical-poetic trilogy for Duke University Press, with each book in the trilogy serving as a direct, if somewhat elliptical, engagement with a single writer: Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017)—Hortense Spillers; M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)—M. Jacqui Alexander; Dub: Finding Ceremony (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020)—Sylvia Wynter.

[vii] This is perhaps too reductive a way to say it, since of course much important work at this very intersection exists. Of particular note is the work of Colin Dayan; see, for example, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

[viii] I think especially of M Archive, although Dub is also relevant in this regard.

[ix] This is not meant metaphorically; as she writes elsewhere in the book: “Researchers say, if whales returned to their pre-commercial whaling numbers, their gigantic breathing would store as much carbon as 110,000 hectares of forest, or forest the size of Rocky Mountain National Park.” See Undrowned, p. 24.

[x] Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” In the Moment, 13 April, 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/

[xii] On the topic of utopian thinking in relation to Blackness, see Linette Park’s recent and excellent, “Fantasies of Utopia: On the Property of Black Suffering (Review of Alex Zamalin’s Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism),” boundary 2 review, 25 March, 2021, https://www.boundary2.org/2021/03/linette-park-fantasies-of-utopia-on-the-property-of-black-suffering-review-of-alex-zamalins-black-utopia-the-history-of-an-idea-from-black-nationalism-to-afrofuturism/

[xiii] Roger S. Payne and Scott McVay, “Songs of Humpback Whales,” Science 173.3997(1971): 585-597.

[xiv] As quoted in D. Graham Burnett, Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 530.

[xv] As quoted in Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound (New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 45.

[xvi] Dub: Finding Ceremony (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 18.

[xvii] Frank Wilderson has made this exact argument with crushing rigor in a number of publications, including, most recently, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020).

[xviii] I am at work on a book tentatively titled, Splendid Universe: Music and Interspecies Communication.

[xix] See Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, translated by Joan Riviere (New York: Permabooks, 1958).

[xx] Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

[xxi] Examples of this new misanthropy range from a popular T-shirt design that states, “Dogs: Because People Suck,” to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement which proposes that, “Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth’s biosphere to return to good health” (http://www.vhemt.org/, accessed on July 24, 2019). The form of misanthropy I refer to is indeed unprecedented, as a recent and very useful book by Andrew Gibson (Misanthropy: The Critique of Humanity [London: Bloomsbury, 2017]) confirms.

[xxii] On Kepler, see Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Copernicus seems not to have interested himself much with these kinds of metaphysical questions.

[xxiii] Wallace states this explicitly in several places, for example, in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1889). On this aspect of Wallace’s thinking, see Steven J. Dick, The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[xxiv] See, for example, Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); and a personal favorite: Jessica Schwartz, “How the Sea is Sounded: Remapping Indigenous Soundings in the Marshallese Diaspora,” in Remapping Sound Studies, edited by Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 77-105. Of course, there is a precedent to the recent explosion of literature on this topic, such as Marcus Rediker’s pioneering work. See, for example, his early Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

[xxv] M. Sakai, Y. Kita, K. Kogi, et al., “A Wild Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphin Adopts a Socially and Genetically Distant Neonate,” Scientific Reports 6(2016), https://www.nature.com/articles/srep23902; as cited in Undrowned, pp. pp. 161-2, footnote 50.

[xxvi] See Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).

[xxvii] The fact that readers often respond to Gumbs’ work in creative ways (by making “dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more”) is a major point of pride, and one that she mentions often. The quoted list of creative responses in parentheses here is from her website: https://www.alexispauline.com/about. See also Undrowned, pp. 6-7.

by Joseph R. Slaughter

Review of Sarah Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)

The misfortune is that the forces of change are not always able to express themselves because they do not possess the means of expression.

–Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow

In April 1974, Houari Boumédiène, the Algerian Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement, opened a special session of the UN General Assembly with a blistering speech describing and denouncing the world system of neocolonial exploitation that continued to disadvantage and despoil the newly independent postcolonial states. “[T]he colonialist and imperialist Powers accepted the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination,” he asserted, “only when they had already succeeded in setting up the institutions and machinery that would perpetuate the system of pillage established in the colonial era” (Boumédiène 6). Sarah Brouillette’s important new book, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, offers a similarly searing account of Third World efforts to capture the institutional machinery of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and to redirect its work for the mass benefit of disenfranchised peoples everywhere, and of how those efforts were ultimately frustrated. Brouillette is concerned with “how cultural production emerges in relation to the real economy” (2). By “grounding the critical discourse of world literature in the political economy of global literary institutions and markets,” she places UNESCO at the center of a revealing story about the production, consolidation, and distribution of world literature in the post-war international order (2).

Because, as Brouillette insists, the economic world system overlaps with, and to a great degree determines, the cultural world system, it seems helpful to sketch here the broader Third World legal efforts to decolonize international law and the administrative organs of the UN that provide background for Brouillette’s account of UNESCO’s historical role in shaping our current neoliberal assemblage of world literature. The 1974 UN special session that Boumédiène opened was convened to consider the problem of “raw materials and development”—namely, that “The Third World possesses 80 per cent of existing raw materials, but its share of overall industrial production is under 7 per cent” (Bedjaoui 27). The session culminated on May 1^st with the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which sought to “reverse the effects of colonialism” (Anghie 199) by establishing a framework for “the economic advancement and social progress of all peoples . . . . which shall correct inequalities and redress existing injustices” (United Nations). The NIEO Declaration, adopted without a vote by a greatly expanded General Assembly in which the postcolonial states now constituted a substantial majority, intended to rectify the growing “gap between the developed and the developing countries” by (among other things) insisting on the “self-determination of all peoples,” “permanent sovereignty of every State over its natural resources,” the right “to restitution and full compensation” for colonial exploitation and “foreign occupation,” the “extension of active assistance to developing countries,” and guarantees for “developing countries [of] access to the achievements of modern science and technology” (United Nations).

It is not entirely clear which specific “machinery” in the “system of pillage” Boumédiène had in mind when he suggested that old colonialist and new imperialist economic powers lay in wait for the postcolonial right of self-determination like its own doom. In 1965, however, Kwame Nkrumah had already famously recognized the trap of postcolonial self-determination conditioned by neo-colonialism: “the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is determined from outside” (ix). Boumédiène similarly implies that the nominal right to political self-determination was undermined by the economic fact that “the developed countries have virtual control of the raw materials markets and what practically amounts to a monopoly on manufactured products and capital equipment” (6). (As Brouillette’s work has consistently shown, a similar dynamic of market domination in the global publishing industries operates in our current world literary system, effectively obviating any romantic or purist idea of cultural self-determination.) In his seminal study of the centrality of colonialism to the history and development of international law, Antony Anghie describes the provisional and partial nature of what he calls “Third World sovereignty,” whose “porous character” ensures the political and economic subordination of newly-independent states and their subjection to Euro-American international law that coalesced to legitimate the continuing exploitation of non-European peoples and their resources (269).

The doctrine of permanent sovereignty over natural resources (PSNR), first examined at the UN in 1952 by the Commission on Human Rights in relation to a prospective declaration on the right of peoples to self-determination, was formally adopted by the General Assembly in 1962. Resolution 1803 on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources declared the right of nations and peoples to explore, develop, and dispose of their natural wealth in the interest of “national development” and “the well-being of people of the State concerned.” One of the pillars of the NIEO in 1974 was the strengthening of the “[f]ull permanent sovereignty of every State over its natural resources and all economic activities” (United Nations). However, as Anghie shows, among the legal machinations by which “the West . . . negated Third World attempts to use the General Assembly as a means of transforming colonial international law” (222) was the creation of “a new legal framework, suggested by the term ‘transnational law’, to further undermine the economic [and political] sovereignty of the new states” (222-3). Indeed, as early as the 1950s Western-based multinational corporations were turning to “a complex combination of domestic law, private international law and public international law” in order to pursue (and impose) their economic interests in the emerging Third World (223). Thus, in a classic example of forum-shifting, a system of “transnational law” developed that shifted focus and force away from traditional international law and from the standard international legal forums of the United Nations system toward emerging frameworks for private arbitration between sovereign states and multinational corporate finance capital over rights and access to resources (223).

Thus, one of the sad ironies of the Declaration of the New International Economic Order advocated by Boumédiène in 1974 is that in so many ways it, too, was too late: the newly-independent states were fighting the proverbial last war. By the early 1980s, the old and new imperial powers of Europe and the U.S. had by various means largely beaten back the radical Third World challenge that the NIEO posed to their historic hegemony. Indeed, as the postcolonial nations were claiming custody of and exercising some control over international law, the institutions and machinery of neocolonial exploitation were either already in place or were being erected elsewhere by the time of the NIEO’s declaration. In other words, the Third World’s major gambit to reverse colonial international law was in the process of being reversed by the creation of an alternative framework of “transnational” law that would itself perpetuate the system of pillage established in the colonial era by other means.

The story of the NIEO in the 1970s, like the like the story of the hijacking of human rights that I’ve discussed elsewhere, is part of the more general history of the rise of neoliberalism and what Walden Bello has called the “rollback”: “the structural resubordination of the [Global] South within a U.S.-dominated global economy” (3). The Euro-American rollback was effectively a revanchist reversal that, among other things, undermined Third World efforts to capture the means of international legal expression. It set adrift the meaning and utility of a number of key political and legal terms in the lexicon of international affairs. Indeed, the growing pressure of decolonization through the 1970s (and reaction to it) instigated a dramatic lexical shift in some of those concepts, when a number of the most “fundamental principles of the international order . . . reversed polarity” (Slaughter 2018, 770). Among the many reversals of lexical fortune, self-determination doubled as “a neo-colonial tool for comprador elites in the Third World who colluded with Western neoliberal capital to dispossess the people of their rights and resources”; “permanent sovereignty over natural resources became a lever for multinational corporations to acquire concessions from newly independent states”; terrorism shifted from naming what states do to their own people to a label used to discredit ongoing national liberation movements; and “the Third World went from being a generative source of energy and inspiration for human rights[, a more just international order, and international law] to becoming a development problem and job opportunity for the new humanitarianism” (my emphasis 771).

In Brouillette’s account of the “fate of the literary” under UNESCO policy, rollback and reversal also characterize the reactionary responses of the major economic powers to democratizing developments at the cultural wing of the UN. Indeed, in light of UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, it is possible to see how “cultural development” also suffered the fate of reversal of those other key principles of international affairs, shifting from being on the side of cultural nationalist agendas of newly independent states to providing the policy rationale for the globalization of predatory intellectual property law. In her book, Brouillette astutely reveals how ideological, institutional, and economic forces effectively defused and disciplined efforts at radical reform in the fields of global cultural production, intellectual cooperation, and international communications policy through the politics and programs of UNESCO. Covering seventy years of its institutional history, that story spans the eras “from liberalism through decolonizing left-liberalism to neoliberalism” (2). Brouillette’s discussion of the changing fortunes of “the literary” in the signature programs in each of those periods intends to give “a deeper sense of how the logic of instrumentalization [of literature and culture] has changed with the tides of global economic development and integration” (9). Indeed, Brouillette’s book is written not only against the old Arnoldian “sweetness and light” thesis of literary value that still circulates, more or less surreptitiously, in much world literature discourse. It also challenges what she characterizes as its heir and antithesis: “the idealization of literature as a potent site of noncommercial humanistic social formation” (7). This latter ideal, she chastisingly suggests, is the refuge of some postcolonial and marxist approaches to world literature. By contrast, Brouillette plots the story of UNESCO (and with it, the fate of “the literary”) as a tragedy—in David Scott’s, if not Aristotle’s, sense.

Brouillette divides the history of UNESCO into three distinct “phases,” with three different policy agendas and corresponding cultural programs that she sees as typifying the prevailing ideology of the period and instantiating the power relations among the states active in UNESCO at the time. In her account, the first period, from 1945 to the 1960s, was “dominated by a liberal cosmopolitan worldview” that promoted cultural understanding among nations as an antidote to fascism and totalitarianism (10). It produced the translation project of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works that proposed to disseminate widely the world’s literary classics. The second phase, from the 1960s through the 1970s, was dominated by the economic and cultural development agendas of the newly independent postcolonial states who emphasized, through projects associated with International Book Year (1972) and proposals for a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), the role of knowledge, technology, literature, and literacy in “humanized development” and the redistribution of “cultural wealth” (16). The final phase, from the 1980s to the present, corresponds to the rise of neoliberal globalization and the rollback of the Third World agenda that I described. Literature, and culture more generally, is treated as a resource commodity requiring enhanced property protection. For Brouillette, the “Cities of Literature” program emblematizes this period and the “neoliberal governance” logic that “utterly transformed UNESCO,” which, in the third phase, began to promote “cultural programming mainly to prop up local industries and generate tourism and trade” (17).

The first phase of UNESCO’s history that Brouillette identifies is probably the most familiar from the perspective of literary studies. It is also the subject of another very insightful  book from 2019, Miriam Intrator’s Books across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951 (Palgrave / Macmillan). Under the direction of Julian Huxley, UNESCO pursued its mandate to “increase the mutual understanding of peoples” through projects such as the Collection of Representative Works, which sought to identify, translate, disseminate, and promote literary “classics.” While the project had big ambitions, as Brouillette observes, the Collection “turned out to be largely an incorporative canon. The world’s various literatures were absorbed into English and French, which were thereby solidified in their roles as the languages of expert adjudication of the merit of literary works from any region” (34). In Brouillette’s assessment, because of the institutional eurocentrism of UNESCO, the Representative Works project ultimately was part of the machinery of cultural domination, serving to “secur[e] the former imperial powers’ ongoing trusteeship and dominant position in anchoring and orchestrating [post-war] global development” (33).

The most illuminating parts of Brouillette’s book deal with the second and third phases in her history of UNESCO cultural policy. If the first phase proceeded under a colonialist/universalist ideology of cultural diffusionism, the second phase of UNESCO programs broadly reflected the Bandung spirit of political, economic, and cultural decolonization—what might be anachronistically called “decolonial” today. In what Brouillette describes as “its most radical phase” (59), UNESCO sought to use cultural policy throughout the 1960s and 70s to “humanize development” (68), to encourage local cultural production and a sense of collective identity, and to defend against cultural imperialism (or “Americanization”) and capitalist globalization (or “commercialization”) (59). Under the rubric of “cultural development,” as Brouillette shows, the newly-independent nations that dominated this period at UNESCO (demographically and ideologically, if not financially) pushed “not just for the expansion of publishing industries but for the right to tell their own stories and be heard” (13)—what the Senegalese Director General of UNESCO, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow (1974-1987), characterized as “possess[ing] the means of expression” (M’Bow 212). M’Bow is a key figure in Brouillette’s account. Under his direction, UNESCO pursued the ideal of “a vast democratization of access to information and to the means of production of information” (91) through (among other things) its advocacy for the New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), the cultural companion to the NIEO. Even as the writing was on the wall for the aspirations of the NIEO by the late 1970s, UNESCO continued to push against the tide of globalization and against Western hegemony over information and technology—eventually, as Brouillette suggests, prompting the U.S. and the U.K. to leave the organization in the mid-1980s. That reaction of forum-shifting set the stage for the third phase in Brouillette’s history and for the reversal of the Third World agenda at UNESCO.

In Brouillette’s story, the second phase of UNESCO’s history amounted to something like a third-world interregnum that was undone by the third phase, dating roughly from the early 1980s, when “UNESCO had to win back its major funders” (10). As Brouillette argues, under the new regime, culture is neoliberalized as a market resource, “conceived as a form of wealth that, properly husbanded, protected, and promoted, results in job creation and economic development thanks to growing visitor and creative economies” (101). For Brouillette’s history, this third period is characterized by UNESCO programs, such as “Cities of Literature,” that promote “adherence to copyright and intellectual property laws and conformity with protocols set out by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and in the General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade (GATT)” (100-101). Thus, according to Brouillette, rather than advocating for the liberalization of intellectual property rights and the redistribution of cultural wealth and the means of expression (as it had done during its first two phases), “UNESCO is now regularly concerned with enforcing intellectual property regimes and copyright. . . . World Book Day is now World Book and Copyright Day” (130).

One of Brouillette’s important insights that deserves special emphasis is her linking of the decline of UNESCO’s more radical cultural development agenda with the tightening of intellectual property regulation globally. This is a crucial connection for understanding the cultural politics and policies of UNESCO today, and it has important ramifications for contemporary literary studies. Indeed, I have argued previously that, although there is a clear “overlap in world-literary and world-intellectual-property space,” literature scholars have largely failed to appreciate the implications of intellectual property law on the field (and formation) of world literature and literary studies today (Slaughter 2014, 43-4). UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary goes a very long way towards remedying that lack, and Brouillette’s three-phase schema of UNESCO history is immensely helpful for beginning to chart the interaction of international cultural policy and intellectual property enclosure. Even so, like all periodizations (including my own above) it necessarily overstates some aspects of an organizational agenda as complex as UNESCO’s, while overlooking others. Moreover, the disciplinary lens of “literature” (or “the literary”) in Brouillette’s study misses some important legal maneuvers that took place outside the frame of UNESCO and distorts somewhat the picture of the organization’s third phase, since the World Heritage Sites program (rather than the Cities of Literature and Creative Cities Network) has arguably been the signature project of UNESCO over the past few decades. Likewise, some of the literary texts seem to have been selected (and bent) expediently to serve the historical narrative.

As Brouillette tells it, the economic interests of the “producer nations” (97), who also provide the largest share of UNESCO’s budget, ultimately won out over the ideals of information democracy and more global and equitable access to the “means of expression” by subaltern classes everywhere. She writes: “A powerful minority, protected by an international intellectual property regime that favored producer nations, had a clear interest in ensuring that the developing nations would continue to be net consumers of culture” (97). That trajectory seems indisputable, but I would suggest that the story of the subversion of the NWICO looks more like the subversion of the NIEO than is apparent in Brouillette’s account, because the U.S. and other “producer nations” (or, more specifically, nations with major corporate intellectual property producers) could not simply turn to existing intellectual property law for the broad monopoly protection they desired. Rather, they had to reinvent that law and then get the rest of the world to “agree” to be regulated by it.

In the 1980s, when “the content-producing, copyright-holding nations” (110) left UNESCO, they withdrew their funding and took their business elsewhere, turning away from the cultural politics of the UN organization in part to pursue their economic interests in culture and knowledge through trade agreements and the World Trade Organization. In a forum-shifting strategy that parallels the creation of “transnational law” that helped to undermine the NIEO, the U.S. (primarily U.S.-based pharmaceutical, information technology, and media companies) worked the levers of the WTO to convert cultural production and exchange into a trade issue, as they steered the Uruguay Round of GATT toward the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that came into effect in 1995 and continues to regulate international intellectual property relations today. Thus, like the NIEO, the NWICO was not only rebuffed (by the withdrawal of funding from UNESCO); it was also undermined by forum-shifting to trade councils, where new forms of intellectual property and cultural wealth were created under a stricter legal regime of intellectual property designed to protect the monopoly interests of “developed-world producers” (110).

Thus, by the time the major donor nations returned to UNESCO and its heritage agenda in Brouillette’s third phase, the new “system of pillage” was already in place. In fact, one effect of the shift to trade-related intellectual property rights was the reification of an old colonial binary division between tradition and modernity that largely left cultural property, traditional knowledge, and cultural identity to the minor heritage industry at UNESCO, while taking the much more lucrative intellectual property economy to the transnational offices of patent attorneys and the arbitration forums of the WTO. This division of cultural assets ultimately reflects and reinforces “one aspect of the property bias built into the [current] system of world literature: individual intellectual property for us [the West]; collective cultural property for them [the rest]” (Slaughter 2014, 54). This, in turn, has knock on effects for the fate of “the literary” that Brouillette tracks.

My supplement to Brouillette’s discerning account of the role of copyright in undoing the second-phase dreams of UNESCO and NWICO is intended as a friendly amendment; moreover, it is testament to how productive it can be to think with her provocative new book, which spurred me to revisit some of the original UNESCO sources and to reconsider my own understanding of the role of intellectual property in the neoliberalization of world literature. Brouillette offers salutary complication to the easy affirmative (and often ahistorical) discourse around “world literature” that has dominated literary studies (especially in the U.S.) over the past two decades, which tends to treat politics, economics, law, republics, the international, and the world itself (the list goes on) as mere metaphors. For instance, Pascale Casanova refers repeatedly to “the international laws” (94) that are said to govern world literary relations, but “law” in her world is mostly a metaphor. In fact, there is, somehow, no UNESCO in the World Republic of Letters, which is perhaps especially surprising given that Paris (its mythic capital) remains the UN organization’s institutional headquarters. For Brouillette, law and economy are not easy metaphors tossed around to make the work feel important, as with so much literary criticism today. Rather, law and economy are real, which makes the work of the literary critic so much harder but also so much more rewarding and explosive when, like Brouillette’s book, it successfully draws genuine links between economics and cultural production.

Brouillette’s book will (and should) be important and influential for contemporary literary studies, but it does have some limitations that are worth acknowledging in order to advance more fully on its best insights. For one thing, in toggling between sociological analysis and literary textual explication, Brouillette confronts the constant interdisciplinary challenge of reading between law and literature—or, more precisely, between law, policy, economics, and literature—without deciding the methodological question in favor of one over the other. Topically, the book is broadly interested in, as Brouillette says, the “logic of instrumentalization” (9) of literature in UNESCO policy. Methodologically, however, it raises tacit questions about the instrumentalization of literature in literary studies today—especially of so-called non-Western literature in contemporary literary criticism. (This problem is particularly acute in light of what I see as continuing disciplinary efforts in literary studies, parallel to those in international law and economics, to contain the third world challenge to Eurocentrism: the ongoing rollback of postcolonial studies by the expansionist fields of world literature, global modernisms, and others.) Most of Brouillette’s chapters end with readings of literary texts offered to illustrate the logic of UNESCO policies; within the framework of the book, it seems that all third world texts must necessarily be read as UNESCO policy allegories. When the text fits, the allegorical reading wears well—as with Tayeb Salih’s famous early short story, “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid.” However, if, under UNESCO cultural policy, the fate of the literary is to be instrumentalized, in literary criticism, too, it seems, the fate of literature is to be instrumentalized for other ends. Brouillette’s own analytical mode implicitly raises some basic questions that many of us in literary studies today are grappling with: not only what is literature for, but also what, in the world, is literary criticism for?

I suppose that most readers will not be coming to Brouillette’s book for the literary readings; still, those familiar with the literary texts, especially the novels by Zakes Mda and NoViolet Bulawayo, are likely to find her textual analysis intriguing, but somewhat forced and flat. These readings might have been made richer and more robust by considering and citing some of what the many critics and specialist scholars of those books have said about them, but the flattening is also an effect of the topical pressure of Brouillette’s driving interests. For example, under allegorical reading pressure, Mda’s multilayered novel Heart of Redness is reduced to a whitepaper on cultural development policy in South Africa—an approach that not only weirdly conflates Mda’s personal experience and attitudes that Brouillette imputes to him about cultural development with those of one of his fictional characters, but also loses sight entirely of the novel’s sharp ironic sensibility. Irony does not belong to whitepapers, of course, but in Mda’s novel, the promise of economic development that is to come from commodifying a people’s historical culture for heritage tourism is one more of the likely-to-be-failed prophecies of future plenty that are the subject and theme of the novel. In other words, rather than “justif[ying] contemporary cultural policy making” (114), the novel makes cultural development policy produced by international institutions an object of its satire, intimating that it may consist of little more than false hopes and empty promises. Furthermore, in its heavy intertextual (some say plagiaristic) reliance on prior written histories of the Xhosa Cattle Killing, Mda’s novel raises interesting and relevant questions about intellectual and cultural property that are unexplored by Brouillette and that might have further complicated her reading and historical narrative.

Like many sociological accounts of institutional systems and power relations, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary is written largely in the anonymous, hedging voice of intellectual history. So much happens outside the purview of the passive sentences that report on the action and the worldly effects of ideas and ideology. To give just one example (of many): “The new liberal internationalism and humanism, enshrined perhaps above all in the United Nations’ 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, were precisely directed against the old modes of unthinking domination and cultural erasure. Instead, the preference was to imagine a new international order built on mutual respect, individual rights, and a shared desire to preserve monuments to authentic human diversity” (41). As certain about history as the passage may be, it is by no means clear exactly who does or wants what, who directs, who unthinks and erases, who prefers, or who shares. This is a common challenge for marxist accounts of political economy, for discourse analysis, for intellectual history and ideology critique. I note it, because the passive voice seems to encourage and license overstatement and dubious claims for the purposes of polemic. For example, it is simply not true, in any categorical way, that “[t]he field of contemporary Anglophone African literature relies on private donors . . .” (125).

In this book about institutional contests over the means of expression, I have to wonder if the passive voice does not also contribute to the irksome sense of defeatism that emerges from its pages: the sense that “Western” power is generally successful, and “non-Western” efforts inevitably fail in the face of faceless capitalism and neoliberal globalization—that resistance, third world or otherwise, is finally futile. Brouillette’s sympathies are clearly with the futile, but the narrative mode makes it seem as if cultural policy rarely, if ever, misfires or backfires. Maybe it is the case that culture actually and effectively does what cultural policy organizations and cultural theorists think it will do—whether that is “helping to discipline subjects” or, as Brouillette is inclined to see it, serving as a “de-commodifying” branch of “governance, where concerns about the needs left unmet by capitalism are articulated and worked out” (69). However, culture and its effects seem more unreliable than that, and such a view leaves little room for grasping the ways in which people and peoples maneuver within and manipulate for themselves the policy frameworks (not to mention “culture” itself) that, in Brouillette’s narrative, otherwise seem to dominate and determine everything.

Brouillette’s book is a vital contribution to the fields of Cold War cultural studies, postcolonial studies, world literature, and a globally-minded history of print culture. She has managed to synthesize the messy business of an international political organization in a way that both paints a convincing picture of UNESCO as a central forum and force in the world economy of literature and also paves the way for deeper examination by other scholars of specific moments, movements, and actors within that literary economy. I conclude with a final observation, in order to amplify one of Brouillette’s more offhanded provocations. Reviewing some of the literature from the massive bibliography of work on “books in development,” some of which were “backed by UNESCO” (79), in the 1960s and 70s, Brouillette singles out for special commendation the huge body of scholarship by Philip Altbach. As she notes, Altbach studied (among other things) “the Western bias of the international scholarly community,” and she suggests that perhaps it was “this same bias that placed research like his on the outskirts of the field . . . [of] book history” (79). I could not agree more about the importance and underappreciated value of Altbach’s work and other like-minded “studies of the book in the developing world” (79) that were produced during the decades of development. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, too, should take its place at the center of book history. Brouillette usefully sketches an alternative route for the field, pointing us back to a path not taken, but one that is certainly worth following her down.

Joseph R. Slaughter teaches postcolonial literature and theory, cultural studies, human rights, and third-world approaches to literature and international law in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is currently completing two books: New Word Orders, on intellectual/cultural property and world literature, and Hijacking Human Rights, on the rise and fall of international law, from colonialism to neoliberalism.

Works Cited

Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge UP, 2004.

Bedjaoui, Mohammed. Towards a New International Economic Order. UNESCO, 1979.

Bello, Walden. Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty. TNI/Pluto Press, 1994.

Boumédiène, Houari. The Battle against Underdevelopment. Spokesman Pamphlet 42, 1974.

Brouillette, Sarah. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford UP, 2019.

Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Harvard UP, 2004.

Intrator, Miriam. Books across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951. Palgrave / Macmillan, 2019.

M’Bow, Amadou Mahtar. “North-South Dialogue: Interviewd by Altaf Gauhar.” Third World Quarterly. 4.2 (1982): 211-220.

Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. International Publishers CO., 1966.

Slaughter, Joseph R. “World Literature as Property.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. 34 (2014): 39-73.

Slaughter, Joseph R. “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World.” Human Rights Quarterly. 40.4 (2018): 745-775.

United Nations General Assembly. “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order.” A/RES/S-6/3201. 1 May 1974. http://www.un-documents.net/s6r3201.htm