Historian Richard Hofstadter haunts US history. And for good reason. An academic and public intellectual who passed away over half a century ago, Hofstadter authored works, in a relatively short but astonishingly prolific lifetime, that diagnosed the nation with ailments that seem chronic today.  In books like The American Political Tradition (1948), The Age of Reform (1955) The Paranoid Style of American Politics (1965), Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) and American Violence (1970), he depicted capitalism, racism, cultivated ignorance and violence as endemic to hegemonic US political culture.

Yet even as the national intelligentsia increasingly has acknowledged Hofstadter’s profound relevance, especially since the emergence of Trumpism, they have not quite appreciated the radical depths and subtlety of his sophisticated skeptical mind.  Above all, they have repressed that at the core of his scholarship was a post-nationalist warning, an historically informed counsel that the premise and promise of American greatness imperiled the Republic and the world.  Commentators, it seems, have been wilfully blind to the urgency of Hofstadter’s criticism.  It is almost as if they have been afraid to admit what he actually said about the US.

Hofstadter’s corpus is too rich for easy summary, but it is not difficult to realize that he wrote to upset a certain complacency about the dominant nationalist tradition. Drawn to the dark side of American life, he refused to indulge the patriotic liberal romance of ineluctable progressive change.  Rather, Hofstadter made it his intellectual duty to disenchant, to illuminate the national experience from what he called the “nether end.” Regarding his native civilization in the middle of the century, Hofstadter offered these words: “I do not like to be unduly pessimistic, but it seems to me that in the race between education and catastrophe, catastrophe thus far is ahead by several lengths.”  

Notoriously schooled as a nationalistic cheerleader, Hofstadter was anything but.  His first public facing book, The American Political Tradition explicitly warned against “hero-worship and national self-congratulation.” This 1948 work also came out swinging against capitalist greed. US democracy, observed the introduction, was a “democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity.”  During the next decade, Hofstadter persisted with his critically diagnostic ways, emphasizing what he dubbed the “paranoid style of politics” in the US.  Detractors today often dismiss his line of argument by mistakenly assuming that he saw the irrationality as an attribute exclusively of the radical right. To the contrary, however, Hofstadter plainly stated that although his book focused on “pseudo-conservatives,” the paranoid mentality that believed itself to be “in the grip of a vast conspiracy’ was “not a style of mind confined to the right wing.” 

One of the most underappreciated aspects of Hofstadter’s writing about the nation’s dysfunctional cultural politics was the centrality of white supremacy (anti-Semitism, it is often forgotten, was at the center of the controversy set off by The Age of Reform).  “Ethnic animosities,” he explained in The Paranoid Style, “at times almost a substitute for the class struggle and in any case have always affected its character.”  Moreover, Hofstadter, whose father was Jewish, had betrayed a concern with racism from incipience; his very first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), climaxed with a chapter on “racism and imperialism.” In that same year, Hofstadter jointed others at the Journal of Negro History in the attack on the racist scholarship of Ulrich B Philips.  In this move, he was likely influenced by the work of his then wife Felice Swados, who also published historical scholarship about plantation slavery.  A few years later, Hofstadter would take a sardonic swipe at Jefferson’s slave-owning privilege, noting in the American Political Tradition that the “leisure that made possible his great writings on human liberty was supported by the labors of three generations of slaves.” 

Furthermore, while it would be too much to present Hofstadter as some kind of apostle of intersectionality, his work consistently connected anti-Semitism and Negrophobia to other social power struggles and prejudices.  Anti-intellectualism was part of a primitivism inseparable from militant sexism, he insisted.  Far more sensitive to issues of gender than might be expected of a stereotypical male historian in the middle of the century, Hofstadter not only published work concerned with representations of masculinity and femininity but also did so in an American Quarterly article co-authored with his second wife, Beatrice Hofstadter (fascinating footnote: his first wife, Felice, penned the classic prison novel, House of Fury, a work that entangled race, class, gender and sexuality with such an authentically militant spirit of protest that the author was mistaken for a “Negro.”)

Finally, while professional folklore has linked Hofstadter to “American exceptionalism,” his approach to the US in a global context was almost unthinkable for its radically humbling implications.  After all, which native political observer can we imagine at the height of the Cold War conceiving of a scenario in which the war turned hot, the superpowers wound up inferior to Africa and Asia and Latin America and the resultant new “diffusion of power through the globe” produced a “healthier situation”? Yet this is exactly what Hofstadter wrote in American Perspectives in 1950.  This subversive anti-imperial vision never disappeared.  One of Hofstadter’s last public comments offered the national diagnosis that “part of our trouble is that our sense of ourselves hasn’t diminished as much as it ought.”

In the end, if Hofstadter saw anything exceptional about the United States it was the society’s self-deceptive attitude toward its wasteful unjustifiable and largely conservative violence -- a violence that, in his view, left the Republic resembling countries in AFrica Asia and Latin Americas (countries now infamous for their “shitholery”).   One of Hofstadter’s final publications, “Reflections on Violence in the United States,“ put the matter this way: “What is most exceptional about the Americans is not the voluminous record of their violence but their extraordinary ability in the face of that record to persuade themselves that they are among the best behaved and best regulated of peoples.”

Those of us concerned with comprehending the US past and the possibilities for present rehabilitation ignore the work of Richard Hofstadter at our peril.  Until we wrestle with his sobering historical diagnosis of the Republic as one that “seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb,” Hofstadter will continue to haunt us.  

Author Bio

Harvey R. Neptune is an Associate Professor of History at Temple University. Neptune is the author of several published articles (appearing in journals including The American Historical Review, Small Axe and Radical History Review) and a book, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the US Occupation (UNC Press, 2007).   Interested generally in the cultural politics of imperial and nation-building, Neptune is currently working on a book titled The Big Lie in US History: the making of the “Consensus school," which reconsiders the politics of US historiography in the postwar decades.

The latest issue of sx salon is now available online.

In sx salon 35, we are pleased to present Andil Gosine on the work of artist Wendy Nanan (whose self-titled solo exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas has been postponed because of the pandemic); Ronald Cummings on the 2019 film Shella Record: A Reggae Mystery, a Canadian filmmaker’s search for the story of Jamaican singer Sheila Rickards; Kelly Baker Josephs on the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Savacou and how we might consider the afterlives of journals, their “futures in our presents”; and finally, Ren Ellis Neyra on blackness, brownness, and the ethics of conscripting the former into the semiotic construction of the latter.

In our reviews section, reviews of Kaie Kellough’s poetry collection Magnetic Equator (Canadian winner of the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize); Lorna Goodison’s Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures; Orlando Patterson’s The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament; Aaron Kamugisha’s Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition; Jeb Sprague’s Globalizing the Caribbean: Political Economy, Social Change, and the Transnational Capitalist Class; Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens’s collection Archipelagic American Studies. Plus new Caribbean creative writing: poems by Vladimir Lucien and John Robert Lee and a short story by Kirk V. Bhajan.

Enjoy, and stay safe.

Rachel L. Mordecai
Editor

Small Axe editorial committee member Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo recently featured on the panel, "Situating the Kardashians: Skin, Theft, Ops," where she discussed how the Kardashian's exploitation of Black femininity has a long history in the French and Spanish Americas. The panel was part of the Conversations on Race series by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Watch the recording of the discussion here on YouTube and read more information about the roundtable below:

From the Annenberg UPenn website:

This roundtable explored how Kim Kardashian West extracts from Black women. In so doing, the panelists situated the Kardashian enterprise in a long U.S. tradition of extracting and repackaging Black cultural forms for mass (white and violent) consumption, highlighting the particular harm their enterprise of white womanhood does to Black women. The conversation was moderated by Brandy Monk-Payton (Fordham University) and participants included Elizabeth K. Hinton (Yale University/Yale Law School), Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo (Brown University), Ren Ellis Neyra (Wesleyan University), and Vanessa Díaz (Loyola Marymount University).

Small Axe editorial committee member Vanessa K. Valdés has edited Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, which was published this month by Suny Press. Read the book's blurb and Valdés' bio below and order the book here.

As a Francophone nation, Haiti is seldom studied in conjunction with its Spanish-speaking Caribbean neighbors. Racialized Visions challenges the notion that linguistic difference has kept the populations of these countries apart, instead highlighting ongoing exchanges between their writers, artists, and thinkers. Centering Haiti in this conversation also makes explicit the role that race—and, more specifically, anti-blackness—has played both in the region and in academic studies of it. Following the Revolution and Independence in 1804, Haiti was conflated with blackness. Spanish colonial powers used racist representations of Haiti to threaten their holdings in the Atlantic Ocean. In the years since, white elites in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico upheld Haiti as a symbol of barbarism and savagery. Racialized Visions powerfully refutes this symbolism. Across twelve essays, contributors demonstrate how cultural producers in these countries have resignified Haiti to mean liberation. An introduction and conclusion by the editor, Vanessa K. Valdés, as well as foreword by Myriam J. A. Chancy, provide valuable historical context and an overview of Afro-Latinx studies and its futures.

Vanessa K. Valdés is Director of the Black Studies Program and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the City College of New York, City University of New York. Her books include Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, also published by SUNY Press.
 

Watch the recording of the University of the Virgin Islands' Distinguished Culture & History Lecture Series here.

For those who missed David Scott's discussion of his book Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity with Ben Davis, the recording of the event is now available on YouTube. Click the link here to view it.

David Scott, the editor of Small Axe, spoke about Stuart Hall's ethics for the University of Toronto Center of Ethics' "Ethics and Caribbean Philosophy" series. To read more about the event, visit the sx live blog post.

The following message is from the Monnin family. Our thoughts are with them as they remember and celebrate the life of Michel Monnin. 

Pour voir la version originale français, défilez vers le bas.

Michel Monnin left us this Friday, November 13, 2020. He had just celebrated his 80th birthday on October 26 and was looking forward to spending time in Port-Salut. He who never sat down at a table if he was to be the thirteenth couldn't avoid the date fate had reserved for him that Friday.

On Sunday, November 22, 2020 there was a "virtual" ceremony of remembrance where family and friends celebrated the departure of a man who was a pillar for his family as well as the artistic community, We will later take him for his final rest in Port-Salut, on a hill in Viot overlooking the sea with the wind in the ti-madanm grass....

A Mapou will receive some of his ashes and his favorite dog will watch over him.

His horse is gone but his last mount perhaps the white horse that his mother had drawn on the family grave picked him up to join Roger and Freda Monnin, his parents, as well as Boris and Dallas, his children who preceded him too soon.

His friends Manès Descollines, Saint-Louis Blaise, Carlo Jean-Jacques, Fritz Saint-Jean, Captain Joubert, Reginald, Issa, Michelle and Raymond, Clara, Anne, Jean-Marie Drot, and André Pierre are already there waiting for him.

We are reassured, he is not alone.

Sunday the artists will find easels and paint at their disposal to commemorate the occasion.

We ask all those who knew him to write down anecdotes and memories; unknown photos are welcomed. Please send to info@galeriemonnin.com

The Monnin family

*

Michel Monnin nous a quitté ce vendredi 13 novembre 2020. Il venait de fêter ses 80 ans le 26 octobre et se réjouissait de bientôt partir passer du temps à Port-Salut. Lui qui ne s’asseyait jamais à une table s’il devait être le treizième, n’a pas pu éviter le rendez-vous que le destin lui avait fixé ce vendredi-là.

Nous avons organisé 22 Novembre 2020 une cérémonie "virtuelle" du souvenir pour célébrer le départ de cet homme qui fut un pilier pour sa famille ainsi que pour ses artistes.

Nous irons plus tard l'emmener reposer en paix à Port-Salut, sur une colline à Viot surplombant la mer avec le vent dans les herbes ti-madanm....

Un mapou recevra certaines de ses cendres et sa chienne préférée veillera, elle aussi, pas trop loin de là.

Son cheval n’est plus, mais sa dernière monture, peut-être le cheval blanc que sa mère avait dessiné sur la tombe familiale, est passé le chercher pour l’emmener rejoindre, dans cette eau de Là, Là-bas, Roger et Fréda Monnin, ses parents ainsi que Boris et Dallas, ses enfants partis avant l’heure.

L’y attendent déjà, la-bas, ses amis Manès Descollines, Saint-Louis Blaise, Carlo Jean-Jacques, Fritz Saint-Jean, Pierre-Joseph Valcin, Camy Rocher, Capitaine Joubert, Reginald, Issa, Michelle et Raymond, Clara, Anne…, Jean-Marie Drot veille, André Pierre surveille et les chiens pointent leurs oreilles attentifs et aimants.

Nous sommes rassurés, tu n’es pas seul.

Dimanche nous lirons des textes, les artistes trouveront chevalets et peinture, nous l'accompagnerons ensemble en amis, en artistes vers l'autre bord.

Nous demandons à tous ceux qui l'ont connu de mettre sur papier anecdotes et souvenirs; Photos inconnues bienvenues. Merci d'envoyer à info@galeriemonnin.com

La famille Monnin

Date: Monday, November 23
Time: 6pm EST

From the Centre of Ethics, University of Toronto Facebook page.

Small Axe editor David Scott will discuss his recent book Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity with Ben Davis. Stuart Hall’s Voice explores the ethos of style that characterized Stuart Hall’s intellectual vocation. David Scott frames the book—which he wrote as a series of letters to Hall in the wake of his death—as an evocation of friendship understood as the moral and intellectual medium in which his dialogical hermeneutic relationship with Hall’s work unfolded. In this respect, the book asks: what do we owe intellectually to the work of those whom we know well, admire, and honor? Reflecting one of the lessons of Hall’s style, the book responds: what we owe should be conceived less in terms of criticism than in terms of listening.

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, November 23. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit https://YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Register here.

archipelagos editor Kaiama L. Glover's latest book, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Women and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, will be available next month. Glover is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and the Faculty Director of the Barnard Digital Humanities Center, where she teaches and researches about Black francophone literature, colonialism, and postcolonialism.

Read the blurb below and get a sneak peek of the introduction here. 

In A Regarded Self Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation. The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood. Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often govern contemporary reading practices. She asks readers and critics of postcolonial literature to question their own gendered expectations and to embrace less constrictive modes of theorization.

Build: October – December 2020
Launch: 4 December 2020 at 1:00-2:00pm (EST) - Register here

This year, the seventh annual Caribbean Digital event will be held virtually, with a synchronous virtual gathering on 4 December, from 1pm-2pm, and three asynchronous digital community projects:

The Directory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship is a collaborative curation of digital resources concerning the Caribbean and its diasporas. The project engages the community in compiling entries in an open, shared online dataset. To suggest projects for inclusion in the Directory, you are invited to add links and annotations to the master spreadsheet until November 20. 

The Collective Annotation of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, will run November 16 to 20. This event offers participants the opportunity to engage Césaire’s work in ways that will generate an original textual artifact. Please sign up here to receive timely information regarding participation in this venture.

The Keyword Collection for Caribbean Studies, initiates a collaborative exploration of words that serve as rich sites for research and pedagogy in Caribbean Studies. This collection is intended to be the beginning of a project that will grow with future Caribbean Digital events.

Please contact the organizers – Kaiama L. Glover, Alex Gil, and Kelly Baker Josephs – at thecaribbeandigital@gmail.com if you have questions and/or wish to participate.

All three ventures will be launched synchronously at the Caribbean Digital event on 4 December 2020, 1pm-2pm, which you can register for here.