Empire (23 page)

not merely or even predominantly a transition to capitalism. They

were a relatively stable support, a pedestal ofsuperexploitation on

which European capitalism stood. There is no contradiction here:

slave labor in the colonies made capitalism in Europe possible, and

European capital had no interest in giving it up.

In the very same period when European powers constructed

the bases ofthe slave economy across the Atlantic, there was also

in Europe, principally in eastern but also in southern Europe, a

refeudalization of the agrarian economy and thus a very strong

tendency to block the mobility oflabor and freeze the conditions

ofthe labor market. Europe was thrown back into a second period

ofservitude. The point here is not simply to denounce the irrational-

ity ofthe bourgeoisie, but to understand how
slavery and servitude

can be perfectly compatible with capitalist production,
as mechanisms that limit the mobility ofthe labor f

orce and block its movements.

Slavery, servitude, and all the other guises ofthe coercive organiza-

tion oflabor—from coolieism in the Pacific and peonage in Latin

America to apartheid in South Africa—are all essential elements

internal to the processes ofcapitalist development. In this period

slavery and wage labor engaged each other as dance partners in the

coordinated steps ofcapitalist development.16

Certainly many noble and enlightened proponents ofaboli-

tionism in Europe and the Americas in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries argued against slavery on moral grounds. The

abolitionist arguments had some real force, however, only when

they served the interests ofcapital, for example, when they served

to undercut the profits ofa competitor’s slave production. Even

then, however, their force was quite limited. In fact, neither moral

T H E D I A L E C T I C S O F C O L O N I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

123

arguments at home nor calculations ofprofitability abroad could

move European capital to dismantle the slave regimes. Only the

revolt and revolution ofslaves themselves could provide an adequate

lever. Just as capital moves forward to restructure production and

employ new technologies only as a response to the organized threat

ofworker antagonism, so too European capital would not relinquish

slave production until the organized slaves posed a threat to their

power and made that system ofproduction untenable. In other

words, slavery was not abandoned for economic reasons but rather

overthrown by political forces.17 Political unrest did ofcourse under-

cut the economic profitability ofthe system, but more important,

the slaves in revolt came to constitute a real counterpower. The

Haitian revolution was certainly the watershed in the modern history

ofslave revolt—and its specter circulated throughout the Americas

in the early nineteenth century just as the specter ofthe October

Revolution haunted European capitalism over a century later. One

should not forget, however, that revolt and antagonism were a

constant part ofslavery throughout the Americas, from New York

City to Bahia. The economy ofslavery, like the economy ofmoder-

nity itself, was an economy of crisis.

The claim that regimes ofslavery and servitude are internal

to capitalist production and development points toward the intimate

relationship between the laboring subjects’ desire to flee the relation-

ship ofcommand and capital’s attempts to block the population

within fixed territorial boundaries. Yann Moulier Boutang empha-

sizes the primacy ofthese lines offlight in the history ofcapitalist

development:

An anonymous, collective, continuous, and uncontainable

force of defection is what has driven the labor market toward

freedom. This same force is what has obliged liberalism to

produce the apology offree labor, the right to property, and

open borders. It has also forced the bourgeois economists

to establish models that immobilize labor, discipline it, and

disregard the elements ofuninterrupted flight. All ofthis has

124

P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y

functioned to invent and reinvent a thousand forms of slavery.

This ineluctable aspect ofaccumulation precedes the question

ofthe proletarianization ofthe liberal era. It constructs the

bases ofthe modern state.18

The deterritorializing desire ofthe multitude is the motor that

drives the entire process ofcapitalist development, and capital must

constantly attempt to contain it.

TheProduction of Alterity

Colonialism and racial subordination function as a temporary solu-

tion to the crisis ofEuropean modernity, not only in economic and

political terms, but also in terms ofidentity and culture. Colonialism

constructs figures ofalterity and manages their flows in what unfolds

as a complex dialectical structure. The negative construction of

non-European others is finally what founds and sustains European

identity itself.

Colonial identity functions first of all through a Manichaean

logic ofexclusion. As Franz Fanon tells us, ‘‘The colonial world is

a world cut in two.’’19 The colonized are excluded from European

spaces not only in physical and territorial terms, and not only in

terms ofrights and privileges, but even in terms ofthought and

values. The colonized subject is constructed in the metropolitan

imaginary as other, and thus, as far as possible, the colonized is cast

outside the defining bases ofEuropean civilized values. (We can’t

reason with them; they can’t control themselves; they don’t respect

the value ofhuman life; they only understand violence.) Racial

difference is a sort of black hole that can swallow up all the capacities

for evil, barbarism, unrestrained sexuality, and so forth. The dark

colonized subject thus seems at first obscure and mysterious in its

otherness. This colonial construction ofidentities rests heavily on

the fixity ofthe boundary between metropole and colony. The

purity ofthe identities, in both biological and cultural senses, is of

utmost importance, and maintenance ofthe boundary is cause for

considerable anxiety. ‘‘All values, in fact,’’ Fanon points out, ‘‘are

irrevocably poisoned and diseased as soon as they are allowed in

T H E D I A L E C T I C S O F C O L O N I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

125

contact with the colonized race.’’20 The boundaries protecting this

pure European space are continually under siege. Colonial law

operates primarily around these boundaries, both in that it supports

their exclusionary function and in that it applies differently to the

subjects on the two sides ofthe divide. Apartheid is simply one

form, perhaps the emblematic form, of the compartmentalization

ofthe colonial world.

The barriers that divide the colonial world are not simply

erected on natural boundaries, even though there are almost always

physical markers that help naturalize the division.
Alterity is not given
but produced.
This premise is the common point ofdeparture for a

wide range ofresearch that has emerged in recent decades, including

notably Edward’s Said’s seminal book: ‘ I have begun with the

assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature . . . that

the Orient was created—or, as I call it, ‘Orientalized.’ ’ Orientalism

is not simply a scholarly project to gain more accurate knowledge

ofa real object, the Orient, but rather a discourse that creates its

own object in the unfolding of the discourse itself. The two primary

characteristics ofthis Orientalist project are its homogenization of

the Orient from Maghreb to India (Orientals everywhere are all

nearly the same) and its essentialization (the Orient and the Oriental

character are timeless and unchanging identities). The result, as Said

points out, is not the Orient as it is, an empirical object, but the

Orient as it has been Orientalized, an object ofEuropean discourse.21

The Orient, then, at least as we know it through Orientalism, is a

creation ofdiscourse, made in Europe and exported back to the

Orient. The representation is at once a form of creation and a form

ofexclusion.

Among the academic disciplines involved in this cultural pro-

duction ofalterity, anthropology was perhaps the most important

rubric under which the native other was imported to and exported

from Europe.22 From the real differences of non-European peoples,

nineteenth-century anthropologists constructed an other being of

a different nature; differential cultural and physical traits were con-

strued as the essence ofthe African, the Arab, the Aboriginal, and

126

P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y

so forth. When colonial expansion was at its peak and European

powers were engaged in the scramble for Africa, anthropology and

the study ofnon-European peoples became not only a scholarly

endeavor but also a broad field for public instruction. The other

was imported to Europe—in natural history museums, public exhi-

bitions ofprimitive peoples, and so forth—and thus made increas-

ingly available for the popular imaginary. In both its scholarly and

its popular forms, nineteenth-century anthropology presented non-

European subjects and cultures as undeveloped versions ofEurope-

ans and their civilization: they were signs ofprimitiveness that

represented stages on the road to European civilization. The dia-

chronic stages ofhumanity’s evolution toward civilization were

thus conceived as present synchronically in the various primitive

peoples and cultures spread across the globe.23 The anthropological

presentation ofnon-European others within this evolutionary the-

ory ofcivilizations served to confirm and validate the eminent

position ofEuropeans and thereby legitimate the colonialist project

as a whole.

Important segments ofthe discipline ofhistory were also deeply

embedded in the scholarly and popular production ofalterity, and

thus also in the legitimation ofcolonial rule. For example, upon

arriving in India and finding no historiography they could use,

British administrators had to write their own ‘‘Indian history’’ to

sustain and further the interests of colonial rule. The British had

to historicize the Indian past in order to have access to it and put

it to work. This British creation ofan Indian history, however,

like the formation of the colonial state, could be achieved only by

imposing European colonial logics and models on Indian reality.24

India’s past was thus annexed so as to become merely a portion of

British history—or rather, British scholars and administrators created

an Indian history and exported it to India. This historiography

supported the Raj and in turn made the past inaccessible to Indians

as history. The reality ofIndia and Indians was thus supplanted

by a powerful representation that posed them as an other to Europe,

a primitive stage in the teleology ofcivilization.

T H E D I A L E C T I C S O F C O L O N I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

127

TheDialectic of Colonialism

In the logic ofcolonialist representations, the construction ofa

separate colonized other and the segregation ofidentity and alterity

turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely inti-

mate. The process consists, in fact, of two moments that are dialectic-

ally related. In the first moment difference has to be pushed to the

extreme. In the colonial imaginary the colonized is not simply an

other banished outside the realm ofcivilization; rather, it is grasped

or produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant

point on the horizon. Eighteenth-century colonial slaveholders, for

example, recognized the absoluteness of this difference clearly. ‘‘The

Negro is a being, whose nature and dispositions are not merely

different from those of the European, they are the
reverse
ofthem.

Kindness and compassion excite in his breast implacable and deadly

hatred; but stripes, and insults, and abuse, generate gratitude, af-

fection, and inviolable attachment!’’25 Thus the slaveholders’ men-

tality, according to an abolitionist pamphlet. The non-European

subject acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner
exactly opposite
to the European.

Precisely because the difference of the Other is absolute, it

can be inverted in a second moment as the foundation of the

Self. In other words, the evil, barbarity, and licentiousness of the

colonized Other are what make possible the goodness, civility, and

propriety of the European Self. What first appears strange, foreign,

and distant thus turns out to be very close and intimate. Knowing,

seeing, and even touching the colonized is essential, even ifthis

knowledge and contact take place only on the plane ofrepresenta-

tion and relate little to the actual subjects in the colonies and the

metropole. The intimate struggle with the slave, feeling the sweat

on its skin, smelling its odor, defines the vitality ofthe master. This