Gilroy, "'Race,' Cosmopolitanism and Catastrophe"

[Dave Monroe]

... more from Paul Gilroy's Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond
the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000), pub. in the UK as Bewteen
Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2000), Chapter 8, "'Race,' Cosmopolitanism, and Catastrophe," pp. 279-326
...

Modernist artistic practices grew up where odernity's countercultures had
taken root.  It was enhanced by the fact that it was destined to be
perpetually impure and was thus, by the tethnocentric standards of
nationalist cultural criticism, chronically illegitimate.  The Nazis
denounced its degenerate expressions of a disgusting 'halfness," but, loyal
to art only, modernism reveled in the transgressive potential endowed in it
by its hybrid constitution.  It was reconstituted and redefined once the
link between progress and evolution was seen to have been broken, above all
the cataclysm of the 1914-1918 war.  (283-4)

Transforming the practice of cultural criticism so that it can correspond to
this new object requires a considerable change of perspective.  Among other
things, it asks that we become more sensitive to teh existence of
modernity's ethnic and racialized countercultures ... (284)

... the black Atlantic expatriate Richard Wright outlined a "negative
loyalty" to modernity ... (284)

An understanding of tainted modern culture's foundational relationship to
racialized violence and terror was central to the culture of dissent it
created.... something more is called for than a routine defense of teh same
moral and cultural values that shine more brightly when confronted by teh
barbarities that might once have been taken for their simple negation.  We
can shed the convenient fantasy that civilization and barbarism stand
opposed to each otehr in a tidy zero-sum arrangement or conflict only in the
comforting pattern of a dialectical antagonism that promises resolution.
(285)

[cf. Walter Benjamin's "every document of civilization is also a document of
barbarism" here ...]

... much of the special authority associated with the term "culture" was
worn away by the stresses of maintaining colonial civilization.  (285)

Ancient, prescientific racial myths, fears and typologies were mobilized
around the modern racial sciences of the nineteenth century.  Bound together
with the languages of enlightenment, progress, order, and social health,
this combination afforded moral and practical sanction for genocidal racisms
long before goals of this type were openly voiced as governmental objectives
in Europe itself.  (286)

... which I'm posting largely in order to drop a few bibliographic
references there I thought might be of interest, largely from pp. 383-4, n.
10 ...

Bley, Helmut, South-West Africa under German Rule, 1894-1914.
    Trans. Hugh Ridley.  Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1971.

Calvert, A.F.  South-west Africa: During the German Occupation,
    1884-1914.  T. Werner Laurie, 1915.

Gann, H.L. and P. Duignan.  The Rulers of German Africa,
    1887-1914.  Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1977.

Goldblatt, I.  History of South west Africa, from the Beginning of
    the Nineteenth Century.  Juta and Co., 1971.

Henderson, W.O.  The German Colonial Empire.  Cass, 1993.

Swan, Jon.  "The Final Solution in South West Africa,"
    Quarterly Journal of Military History 3, 4 (19??), pp. 36-55.

Sorry 'bout a lack of a year on that last one, but 'twas nowhere to be found
in Gilroy's notes ...