My title might be slightly dramatic, but we live in an age of catchy New Yorker titles and Caroline Calloway’s instagram captions. But now that I have you here, I think (fingers crossed) I have made great strides this week. It sounds arbitrary but I started a new notebook. For some bizarre reason, this spurred me to finally tackle the stack of books I lugged back home at the bottom of my suitcase. Wednesday was largely spent thumbing through Michael Goebel’s Anti-Imperial Metropolis which I really wish I had read before writing my historiography essay (we’re still aiming for honesty and reflection). It focuses on Paris as a ‘marketplace for the exchange of ideas’ (p2) and draws links between the great minds who roamed at the city at the same time. There are great visuals depicting the proximity between Zhuo EnLai and Deng XiaoPing’s apartments, and how it served as a ‘hotbed of anti-imperialism with global reverberations (p5). These sweeping statements are further explored through how nationalism grew not in the ‘Third World’ where they were based, but in this inherently European capital, the centre for ideas beyond the political, where art, culture and wanderlust were all allowed to mingle, as were the unconventional elites of the time.
Goebel’s picks up on Chakrabarty’s primary argument within Provincializing Europe, the idea that the history of colonialism has shaped contemporary France. Yet Goebel believes that if one concept is taken to be too all-encompassing, it can lose precision within the argument. These nationalist figures who would later go on to establish the Kuomintang were brought together by their understanding of imperialism and Paris as a ‘generator of new anti-imperialist narratives through exchange’. Yet I’m not sure I completely agree. These men came to Paris for an education, an escape from the ‘Third World’ by which they came. They already had this nationalist sentiment, because of the imperial educations they had received. He is right to argue that Paris facilitated exchange, in something he quite cleverly defines as ‘contact-zones’. In the current context of social distancing it almost seems like sacrilege. Paris did not create this anticolonial nationalism, rather it united these men.
This forced me to consider the starting points of my own project, and the prevalence of Oxford as a centre for alternative knowledge production. After helpful comments and conversations with Bernhard and Milinda, I am slightly reassured that I do not have to figure out if a global black identity exists (phew) but rather consider if these ideas were facilitated through the Rhodes scholarship and institutions. In the cases of Stuart Hall and Alain Locke, their interest in race and identity was not cultivated at Oxford, rather this was a theme throughout their upbringings and their time in academia. Locke was barred from teaching it at Howard, despite being a HBC, which led to his editing of The New Negro. Hall was similar, his ideas of a cultural diaspora come from his position as a West-Indian growing up alongside the Windrush generation. Although he was experiencing it quite differently to most, it was still the context of his formative years. Oxford for both these scholars facilitated legitimacy, gave them the platform to share their ideas. It was a centre for knowledge production in that they learnt the way the core worked, and how to then present their ideas of the periphery to the general public. Within Culture, Politics Race and Diaspora he is continually praised for the way in which he made cultural studies accessible, through his extensive radio and television appearances, and work within the Open University. Brah points out in her chapter that he was able to shift what was considered the ‘classic postmodern experience’, as migration was the key historical event in late modernity and something he himself had experienced (p78). This shift in the periphery, and the claim that these identity politics were something worth evaluating because so many people were affected and would continue to be with trends of globalisation. This collection of essays praises Hall heavily, but discusses him as if he is almost a unicorn, and no one can quite figure out why he is so intelligent and yet so kind, so willing to listen to other scholars and their ideas. This seems to be a large part of his legacy and perhaps something he strove for that he did not experience in his own education.
Both Locke and Hall had the desire to study their own contexts, further understand race and issues of identity, and through Oxford and ironically the Rhodes scholarship they were able to articulate this academically which led to their ideas and thoughts to be taken seriously. It made me think of a more contemporary example, of Remi Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (a millennial who also understands the importance of catchy titles). She writes in the beginning of her book that she always knew she was angry, and that she saw injustices and structural racism throughout her upbringing but it was not until she attended Bristol University and learnt about her own history that she was able to give those concepts names. Until the age of seven I was unaware that I was in fact, Asian. I understand this sounds ridiculous but it was never a discussion at my very liberal Californian public school. Only when I entered the international school system did I become aware of the fact I was not from single country, and had largely grown up in a completely different one. Perhaps it has led to my interest in national identity, concepts of race and hybridity. From these examples we can conclude that education has long been a great enabler in the understanding of the self and our own identity.
You might be wondering how this long-winded blog links back to Paris. I started this week reading about Paris within Goebel’s volume, and have finished it scrambling to compile sources for my dissertation proposal. Central to this would (hopefully) be to visit the colonial/postcolonial museums in the French capital. Sitting in lockdown it seems like a pipedream and a tad unrealistic, but having something to look forward to is important. Maybe in a few months’ time I won’t be sat at my desk but rather in the MQB surrounded by croissants and cappuccinos. I guess a girl can dream.