Salah M. Hassan E-Book

Salah M. Hassan

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 82

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

 Salah M. Hassan schlägt in seinem Text eine Neubetrachtung des afrikanischen Marxismus vor, mit der er gleichzeitig eine Befreiung Marx', eines für das 20. Jahrhundert einflussreichsten politischen Denkers, vom Eurozentrismus bezweckt. Während der Entkolonisierung und der Befreiungsbewegung in Afrika und anderen Teilen der Dritten Welt in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts, die mit den Anfängen der documenta zusammenfielen, wurde die Ideologie des Marxismus zur intellektuellen Leitkultur. Als Beispiele für die Innovationskraft und Kreativität des afrikanischen/schwarzen Marxismus, die in der gegenwärtigen Forschung nur wenig berücksichtigt werden, führt Hassan Texte zweier Schlüsselfiguren zusammen: die politische Verteidigungsrede By Virtue of Marxism, Your Honor (1956) von Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub (1927–1971), dem Gründer der Sudanesischen Kommunistischen Partei, der 1971 zusammen mit anderen führenden Mitgliedern der Partei hingerichtet wurde, sowie den Brief an Maurice Thorez (1956) von Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), dem martiniquinischen Philosophen, Dichter und Kritiker, in dem er die Gründe für seinen späteren Austritt aus der Kommunistischen Partei Frankreichs darlegt.      Salah M. Hassan ist Goldwin Smith Professor, Direktor des Institute for Comparative Modernities sowie Professor der African and African Diaspora Art History an der Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; er ist Mitglied des Honorary Advisory Committee der dOCUMENTA (13).  

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken

Nº091: Salah M. Hassan

How to Liberate Marx from His Eurocentrism:

Notes on African/Black Marxism /

Wie man Marx von seinem Eurozentrismus befreit:

Anmerkungen zum afrikanischen/schwarzen Marxismus

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Member of Core Agent Group, Head of Department / Mitglied der Agenten-Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez

Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke

Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer

Editorial Assistant / Redaktionsassistentin: Cordelia Marten

English Copyediting / Englisches Lektorat: Melissa Larner

Proofreading / Korrektorat: Stefanie Drobnik, Sam Frank

Translation / Übersetzung: Astrid Wege

Graphic Design / Grafische Gestaltung: Leftloft

Junior Graphic Designer: Daniela Weirich

Production / Verlagsherstellung: Monika Reinhardt

E-Book Implementation / E-Book-Produktion: LVD GmbH, Berlin

© 2012 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel;Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Salah M. Hassan

Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” trans. Chike Jeffers, in Social Text 108, vol. 28, no. 2–3, pp. 145–52; Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub, “By Virtue of Marxism, Your Honor,” in SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 109, no. 1, pp. 159–74: © 2010 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu.

Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: View of / Ansicht des Monte Verità, ca. 1906(detail / Detail), Fondo Harald Szeemann. Archivio Fondazione Monte Verità inArchivio di Stato del Cantone Ticino; p. / S. 2: bpk/RMN/Paris, Musée Picasso/Michèle Bellot; © 2012 Succession Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; p. / S. 16: courtesy SCP, Sudan; p. / S. 30: ddp images/AP Photo; pp. / S. 39–47: Archives du PCF – Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis

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ISBN 978-3-7757-2940-6 (Print)

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Poster for the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, organized by Présence Africain, 1956 / Plakat des Ersten Kongresses schwarzer Schriftsteller und Künstler, organisiert von Présence Africain, 1956

Salah M. HassanHow to Liberate Marx from His Eurocentrism: Notes on African/ Black Marxism / Wie man Marx von seinem Eurozentrismus befreit: Anmerkungen zum afrikanischen/ schwarzen Marxismus

Salah M. HassanHow to Liberate Marx from His Eurocentrism: Notes on African/ Black Marxism

There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the “universal.”

—Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” Paris, October 24, 1956

When approached about the idea of contributing to dOCUMENTA (13)’snotebook series, I proposed to its Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the idea of focusing on African Marxism. I thought it would be interesting as a way of liberating Marx from his Eurocentrism. I also thought it would be relevant to dOCUMENTA (13) because it revisits the exhibition’s founding years, which coincided with decolonization in Africa and other parts of the Third World, and with corollary landmark events that shifted world politics and created a new international order.

Among these events was the 1955 Bandung conference in Indonesia, where non-aligned and newly independent nations from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East met and defiantly declared an independent course at the climax of the Cold War. Bandung remains an incomplete project, but as an event it certainly signaled the potential of ending Western hegemony, and the possibility of a more pluralistic world. Extending such potential to the domain of knowledge production allows us to think of modernity and modern thought as more than just a post-Enlightenment Western project. This made possible the critique of Western modernity and facilitated the move toward less Eurocentric modes of thinking in the humanities and social sciences within and outside the academy. Today, it is impossible to think about the mid-twentieth century and decolonization without remembering gatherings such as the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956 in Paris or the Second Congress in 1959 in Rome. Organized by the Paris-based quarterly Présence Africaine,1 these two meetings hosted discussions of issues ranging from decolonization to slavery and signaled the rise of new schools of thought and movements such as Négritude, Pan-Africanism, and African Socialism.2

In all these events, the specter of Karl Marx loomed large. Decolonization and the liberation movement in the Third World were struggles in which Marxism played an important role as an ideology. Hence, revisiting Marxism from an African/Black perspective would also be a way to pay homage to one of the most influential German thinkers in the twentieth century. After all, this is also relevant to the most recent efforts to redeem Marx and overcome his blind spots vis-à-vis the non-Western world through the global impact of his ideas, which have been appropriated, rethought, and localized in different settings in ways that Marx himself could not have anticipated or imagined.

Most of the current scholarship on Marxism and the non-West has focused on redeeming Marx by recovering his writings on the non-Western world, which have been widely perceived as Eurocentric. An example is the recent work of Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins, which sheds new light on Marx as a thinker.3 Through thorough and careful analysis of his lesser-known writing, including his journalistic work as a correspondent for the NewYork Tribune, we discover a Marx who is less of a class-based thinker and more of a global theorist, and who was sensitive to nationalism and issues of race, ethnicity, and diversity of human and social experiences across the globe.

Such efforts are welcome contributions to our view of Marx and his ideas regarding the non-West. However, in spite of his visionary work and enduring legacy, Marx was a product of his time and of Europe as a rising colonial empire with ambitions of conquest and domination, and the larger framework of his analysis was bound by the evolutionary thinking of that time. Moreover, such contributions ignore non-Western (including African) contributions to Marxism as it has been appropriated and reshaped in the context of decolonization and postcolonial struggles, and to some degree bear the character of navel-gazing prevalent among Western scholars in the field of critical theory.

Benita Barry draws our attention to the indifference among Marxist theorists in Europe to the “roads taken by Marxism in anticolonial domains,” and by extension to the contribution of African and African-diaspora intellectuals to Marxism in general. Such indifference, as she points out, takes place “within the wider and longstanding exclusion of non-Western knowledge from a canon compiled by [Western] metropolitan scholars.” While crediting a few Western Marxist thinkers such as Göran Therborn with acknowledging that Marxism became “the main intellectual culture of two major movements of the dialectic of modernity: the labour movement and the anticolonial movement,” Barry also criticizes them—with the exception of recognizing Frantz Fanon and his contribution to the study of violence and trauma associated with modernity in the colonial context—for underestimating the creativity and innovations of Asian and Latin American Marxism and for rejecting Africa as a “player in the discourses of Marxism and Modernity.”4

Hence, the urgent call to revisit African/Black Marxism and to rethink its immense innovation and creativity in the context of dOCUMENTA (13) as it celebrates its beginnings in the mid-1950s in the aftermath of World War II, which as a period also ushered in the rise of anticolonial struggles in Africa and other parts of the Third World. This I intend to do by paying homage to two key figures in African/Black Marxism: Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub (1927–1971), the founder of the Sudanese Communist Party, who was a brilliant mind and an innovative Marxist thinker, and Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), the Martinican philosopher, poet, critic, and member of the French Communist Party, from which he later resigned, as pointed out below. Reproduced in this notebook are two texts by these figures, who represent Marxism in the context of Africa (Mahgoub) and of the African/Black diaspora (Césaire).5

The first text, Mahgoub’s “By Virtue of Marxism, Your Honor,” is an abbreviated translation (made by myself and my colleague Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf) of Mahgoub’s political defense (a tradition in Sudanese left politics) in front of a military tribunal in 1959.6 This text provides a glimpse into the thinking of the founders of one the strongest leftist movements in African politics, the Sudanese Communist Party. It helps explain the enduring legacy and perseverance of this party to the present day, despite the violent repression it has faced from successive regimes in Sudan, which ended with the execution (surely the assassination) of Mahgoub, along with several other leading members of the party, after a farcical military trial in July 1971. Mahgoub dedicated his short life, as Abusharaf puts it, to “considering how socialism, which he described as the noblest cause that humanity had ever known, could be advanced within the struggle for national liberation and tailored to meet the needs of ordinary citizens.” As she further explains, “Turning a critical eye on both legacies of European colonialism and the repressive traditions within Sudanese culture, he posed the perennial question: How can Africans utilize Marxist thought to create a progressive culture that embodies a systematic critique of all that is reactionary within their societies?”7