Department of History, University of Maryland
Objectives
After a vigorous flourish in the 1980s, the study of resistance today appears to face an impasse. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have become increasingly aware that the foregrounding of subaltern agency in the contestation of power has led to the neglect of the historical and cultural complexities of consciousness--both on the side of the agents of domination and those subjected to it.
Is there a way out of this dilemma? And what might a view of "subalterity after resistance studies" entail? How can we open up our scholarly agendas to questions transcending the categories--such as resistance vs. accommodation, domination vs. hegemony--within which we previously have conceived the problem? Is there a way to capture the moral imagination of actors without preempting the complexities and contradictions of their historical experience by retrospective inferences about their relative positions as "agents" or even "patients" of history? Might such a reorientation require shifts in perspective or even methodology? Need we rethink our units of analysis to come up with spatial and/or temporal frameworks more conducive to revealing how "large" structures and processes work through, and are in turn affected and shaped by, the agency of local actors?
In aligning these questions to a specific field of inquiry, this symposium aims to engage Africanists and Americanists from a variety of disciplines in a common discussion centered on a theme inviting the transcendence of a mere comparative frame of analysis. The goal is to articulate rather than simply juxtapose regional theory. Specifically focusing not only on the religious sphere, but on the figure of the "religious virtuoso" and its dialectic relationship to wider social fields, another aim is to explore a dimension of cultural process within a particularly complex and dynamic historical arena that has rarely received adequate scholarly attention.
The goal of mediating regional theory in light of a potentially unified field of "Atlantic studies" will be particularly germane to the interests of scholars working on Africa, African-America, and the African Diaspora. At the same time, however, the attempt to break new theoretical and methodological ground in rethinking the cultural dimensions of processes of colonization and resistance should attract professional historians and social scientists from a variety of fields. In both respects the symposium should hold a strong appeal for graduate as well as undergraduate students and expose them to areas of inquiry transcending--and thereby enriching--traditional disciplinary forms of education.
Context
In a recent critique of the proliferating historical and anthropological literature on nonwestern resistance against colonial rule, Sherry Ortner (1995) identifies a tendency toward "cultural thinning" as a serious defect common to some of the most influential studies in this emerging genre. Significantly, Ortner sees such tendencies in the analytical strategies of some of the very texts which have attained "foundational" status in the historiography of subaltern groups. Targetting, among others, Ranajit Guha's "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency" (1988), James Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985), Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History (1982), and Richard Fox's Lions of the Punjab (1985), Ortner charges that the cultural dimension of subaltern action is more often evoked rhetorically than engaged analytically; more often subverted to arguments reducing the content of subaltern consciousness to a reflection of structural contradictions than explored as generative of socially and politically salient visions of morality, hierarchy, justice, and power. "Idea systems," as Wolf acknowledges on the penultimate page of a long book, "once produced, become a weapon in the clash of social interests." (Wolf 1982:320) But, as Ortner points out, why and how specific ideological constructs come to inform collective practice evades analyses that nominally grant "authenticity" to, for example, the religious dimension of oppositional agency, only to write "religiosity" off as "a massive demonstration of self-estrangement." (Guha 1988)
Peel (1993, 1995) has warned against forms of analysis muting the non-western agent in histories of colonial encounters by privileging cultural form over content. Such a strategy tends to foreground the historicity of the colonizer's copious utterances while displacing the semantics of the symbolic agency of the colonized into aggregate descriptions of transformations in the "natives' culture." To speak, as Sahlins (1981, 1985) does, of a "structure of the conjuncture," where a logic of the global encounter begins to work itself through the categories of the local "culture as constituted," shifts the analytical burden out of the realm of historical agency and into a sphere of cultural forms abstracted from the projects and preoccupations of those whose actions embody them.
Ortner and Peel may well agree with Jean Comaroff's view that "histories of peoples like that of the Tshidi . . . lie not only in the shadow of the modern world system but of the mode of social analysis it has generated." (Comaroff 1985: 263) But Ortner and Peel also seem doubtful about whether the ways in which our current preoccupations with "resistance" as a seemingly transhistorical phenomenon (Mintz 1995) lead us to sidestep the real behavioral, discursive, and presumably cognitive and affective complexities that occupied the seemingly mute historical actors for whom we presume to speak.
The proposed conference, "Prophets, Visionaries, and Their Publics in the Afro-Atlantic World," aims to explore ways to redress this balance within a strategic area of inquiry. Conceived of as a historically mutable--even geographically fluctuating--space of interaction between individuals and societal formations on three continents, the Atlantic World arguably represents not just the earliest focus of European overseas expansion, but the very fulcrum of those processes that generated the categorical distinctions between the "West and the Rest" that inform and structure our work as historians and anthropologists. Paraphrasing Dirks (1992), whose analysis resonates with the work of a number of students of Atlantic history, such as Eric Williams and Walter Rodney, we might say that as "Europe" was created in the colonial encounter, so was a modern geopolitcal awareness of "Africa" and "the Americas." Both arose when a tricontinental system of economic exchanges began to create an "Atlantic" social field linking actors in a complex array of relationships salient on both economic and moral levels, and in transatlantic as well as local terms.
Analyses of the political and economic mechanics of these processes (particularly the exchange value of commodities such as slaves, hogsheads of sugar, muskets, and brass rods) and their effect upon local social structures have been the subjects of a burgeoning literature. (Solow 1991, Inikori and Engerman 1992) But the way the emergence of an economically integrated "Atlantic World" came to inform, more strictly speaking, ideological transformations within the societies drawn into its perimeters remains unexplored.
In part at least, this appears to be due to the effects of a regional division of labor deeply ingrained in both traditional historiography and anthropology--a tradition which is itself a product of the colonial past of these disciplines. (Feierman 1993) Yet as recent attempts to breach boundaries between regionally circumscribed systems of discplinary knowledge show (Gilroy 1992), we have still to reach a stage of conceptual reorientation when comparative history yields to an "interactive" view (Cooper 1996), and anthropological analyses of "globalization" and "transnationalism" attain the ethnographic and historical specificity that might promise answers to the challenges posed by critiques such as Ortner's and Peel's. Far too often, the exploration of the "Atlanticity" of the phenomena and processes in question is subverted to intradisciplinary debates (as in the case of Thornton 1992). In other cases the "Atlanticity" question is preempted by a lack of expertise which has the author resort to ahistorical typecasting in the case of the "other side" of the Atlantic (Mullin 1992) or to concentrate on the utterances of actors (such as writers and artists) operating at a remove from local levels of discourse (Gilroy 1992).
Agenda
The proposed conference aims to break new ground in two distinct ways. On the most basic level, its aim is to involve Africanists and Americanists from a variety of relevant disciplines in a discussion focused on a theme which, by its very nature, must invite attempts to transcend a mere comparative frame of analysis, and stimulate attempts to articulate, rather than merely juxtapose, regional theory. Specifically focusing not only on the religious sphere as such, but on the figure of the "religious virtuoso" (to use Max Weber's term) and its dialectic relation to wider social fields, the conference aims to capture a dimension of cultural process within a particularly complex and dynamic historical arena that has rarely received adequate attention.
To point out particularly obvious deficits in the record of scholarship: We have no more than the beginnings of an understanding of the role of globalizing religions (Christianity and Islam)in structuring resistance against colonizing powers. We have even less clear understanding of the role played by ideas pertaining to what used to be called "traditional African religions" in processes of a scope transcending the immediate geographical areas in which such conceptual schemes may be presumed to be "indigenous."
If, as Cooper and Stoler argued for the case of the debate on colonialism, the "idea of an indigenous 'response' or 'resistance' to an imperialist initiative no longer captures the dynamics on either side of the encounter," (Cooper and Stoler 1989: 610) the need to disaggregate unidimensional oppositions between local and global religions should be even more obvious. All too often, however, we still face the invocation of reified abstractions such as "African traditional religion" (or ethnically specified versions thereof) or in the North American case, the "invisible institution" of the "Black Church." Even in the case of missionary Christianity, we have only just begun to think through the implications of a view that deflects its cultural impact to the plurality of locally elaborated Christianities--oftentimes the product of aggressively eclectic moves of appropriation rather than passive acceptance.
Surely we need to focus more closely on the specifrics of the sacred dimension of the moral imagination of actors within the confines of the Atlantic World in order to rescue their cultural creations from a rather specific version of what E. P. Thomson once called the "enormous condescension of posterity."
Taking some of its clues from a recent collection of articles on the history of prophetic activities in Eastern Africa (Johnson and Anderson 1995), the symposium will place a premium on the exploration of prophetic idioms, forms of visionary knowledge, and religious careers in the particularities of specific colonial situations. These particularities crucially iinvolve the question of how prophecy or visionary knowledge articulates with variously delineated and changing "public spheres," be they comprised of "constituencies" within which the generation and expressive modalities of such forms of knowledge are perceived as recurring to expectable models, or colonial states in which they work as explicit or implicit challenges to political and cultural hegemony.
Hence one of the central assumptions entertained in the planning of this conference is that neither the "traditionality" of a particular vision of the sacred within any specifyable non-western social context, nor the "externality" of symbolic forms manifestly traceable to "universal religions" (or other forms of "exogenic knkowledge") can be taken for granted once the historical particulatrities of local "ecologies of symbolic representations"--to use Eric Wolf's phrase--are seriously examined on a level of concrete social interaction over time. For this reason, the convenors would commend the distinction Johnson and Anderson make between traditions and moments in the study of prophetism, mantic performances, and visionary discourse. Likewise, heightened attention to biography and collective biographic memory may prove illuminating, for it is in these dimensions that collective and individual, traditionalizing and transformative, local and global tendencies find articulation and are played out in representations that retrospectively (as well as prospectively) define the moral anchorage and boundaries of the social world. We also encourage papers aimed at exploring the dimension of the visionary or prophetic moment in its discursive articulation with globalizing forms of knowledge and practice--whether they derive from versions of universal religions, enlightenment mysticism, nationalist ideologies, colonial disciplines and bodily techniques, or the fetishizations of capitalism.
Ideally, presentations should take the form of case studies specific enough to illuminate precisely how religious ideas and representations are transacted in local scenarios, while still fully attentive to the ways in which both their content and their deployment can be related to the larger dynamics and contradictions of an "Atlantic" historical field.
References
Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cooper, Frederick. 1996. "Review Esesay: Race, Ideology, and the Perils of Comparative History," American Historical Review 87: 1124-1138.
Cooper Frederick and Ann Stoler. 1989. "Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule," American Ethnologist 16: 609-621.
Dirks, Nicholas. 1992. "Introduction: Colonialism and Culture," in Dirks, Nicholas. (ed.) Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 1-25.
Feierman, Steven. 1993. "African Histories and the Dissolution of World History" in Bates, Robert, V. Y. Mudimbe and Jean O'Barr (eds.) Africa and the Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 167-212.
Fox, Richard. 1985. Lions of the Punjab. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 1992. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Guha, Ranajit. 1988. "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency" in Guha, Ranajit and Gayatri Spivak (eds.) Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 345-88.
Inikori, Joseph and Stanley Engerman. 1992. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Durham: Duke University Press.
Johnson, Douglas and David Anderson. 1995. Revealing Prophets. London: James Currey.
Mintz, Sidney. 1995. "Slave Life on Caribbean Sugar Plantations: Some Unanswered Questions" in Palmie, Stephan (ed.) Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, pp. 12-22.
Mullin, Michael. 1992. Africa in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Ortner, Sherry. 1995. "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal" Comparative Studies in Society and History 37: 173-193.
Peel, J. Y. D. 1993. "Review of Aletta Biersack (ed.), Clio in Oceania and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (ed.), Culture Through Time" History and Theory 32: 162-178.
__________. 1995. "For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology" Comparative Studies in Society and History 37: 581-607.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press.
__________. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Solow, Barbara. 1991. Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thornton, John. 1992. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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