Nº091 Salah M. Hassan 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 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 Poster for the First Con­ gress of Black Writers and Artists, organized by Présence Africain, 1956 / Marxismus Plakat des Ersten Kongres­ ses schwarzer Schriftsteller und Künstler, organisiert von Présence Africain, 1956 just a post­Enlightenment Western project. This made possible the 1 | Présence Africaine is a critique of Western modernity and facilitated the move toward less Paris­based, Pan­African quarterly journal that Salah M. Hassan Eurocentric modes of thinking in the humanities and social sciences focuses on culture, poli­ within and outside the academy. Today, it is impossible to think about tics, and literature. It was the mid­twentieth century and decolonization without remembering founded in 1947 by Alioune Diop (1910–1980), a How to Liberate gatherings such as the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Senegalese writer and major 1956 in Paris or the Second Congress in 1959 in Rome. Organized figure in anticolonial and by the Paris­based quarterly Présence Africaine,1 these two meetings Pan­African struggles. The journal expanded in 1949 to hosted discussions of issues ranging from decolonization to slavery become a publishing house Marx from His and signaled the rise of new schools of thoughts and movements such and a bookstore in the Latin as Négritude, Pan­Africanism, and African Socialism.2 Quarter in Paris and has been a highly influential In all these events, the specter of Karl Marx loomed large. De­ forum in the Pan­Africanist colonization and the liberation movement in the Third World were movement and decoloniza­ Eurocentrism: tion struggle, as well as an struggles in which Marxism played an important role as an ideology. incubator for what came to Hence, revisiting Marxism from an African/Black perspective would be known as the Négritude Notes on African/ also be a way to pay homage to one of the most influential German movement. thinkers of the twentieth century. After all, this is also relevant to the 2 | The congresses were most recent efforts to redeem Marx and overcome his blind spots organized by Alioune vis­à­vis the non­Western world through the global impact of his Diop (with Léopold Cédar Senghor). They attracted Black Marxism ideas, which have been appropriated, rethought, and localized in dif­ major figures of African ferent settings in ways that Marx himself could not have anticipated and African­diaspora art, or imagined. literature, and politics, such as Frantz Fanon, There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular Most of the current scholarship on Marxism and the non­West has Jacques Stephen Alexis, or dilution in the “universal.” focused on redeeming Marx by recovering his writings on the non­ George Lamming, Édouard —Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” Paris, Western world, which have been widely perceived as Eurocentric. An Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and Richard Wright, as October 24, 1956 example is the recent work of Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins, well as others includ­ which sheds new light on Marx as a thinker.3 Through thorough and ing Pablo Picasso, André When approached about the idea of contributing to dOCU­ careful analysis of his lesser­known writing, including his journalistic Malraux, and Claude Lévi­Strauss. Diop also MENTA (13)’s notebook series, I proposed to its Artistic Direc­ work as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, we discover a Marx initiated with Senghor the tor, Carolyn Christov­Bakargiev, the idea of focusing on African who is less of a class­based thinker and more of a global theorist, and Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (First World Marxism. I thought it would be interesting as a way of liberating who was sensitive to nationalism and issues of race, ethnicity, and Festival of Negro Arts) Marx from his Eurocentrism. I also thought it would be relevant to diversity of human and social experiences across the globe. in Dakar in 1966, which dOCUMENTA (13) because it revisits the exhibition’s founding Such efforts are welcome contributions to our view of Marx and his brought together figures from across the African years, which coincided with decolonization in Africa and other parts ideas regarding the non­West. However, in spite of his visionary work continent and the African of the Third World, and with corollary landmark events that shifted and enduring legacy, Marx was a product of his time and of Europe diaspora such as Ibrahim world politics and created a new international order. as a rising colonial empire with ambitions of conquest and domina­ El­Salahi, Duke Ellington, and Langston Hughes. Among these events was the 1955 Bandung conference in Indo­ tion, and the larger framework of his analysis was bound by the evo­ nesia, where non­aligned and newly independent nations from Africa, lutionary thinking of that time. Moreover, such contributions ignore 3 | Kevin B. Anderson, Asia, and the Middle East met and defiantly declared an independent non­Western (including African) contributions to Marxism as it has Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and course at the climax of the Cold War. Bandung remains an incomplete been appropriated and reshaped in the context of decolonization and Non-Western Societies (Chi­ project, but as an event it certainly signaled the potential of ending postcolonial struggles, and to some degree bear the character of navel­ cago: University of Chicago Western hegemony, and the possibility of a more pluralistic world. gazing prevalent among Western scholars in the field of critical theory. Press, 2010). Extending such potential to the domain of knowledge production Benita Barry draws our attention to the indifference among Marx­ allows us to think of modernity and modern thought as more than ist theorists in Europe to the “roads taken by Marxism in anticolonial 4 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº091 | Salah M. Hassan EN | 5 domains,” and by extension to the contribution of African and 4 | Benita Barry, “Libera­ of European colonialism and the repressive traditions within Suda­ On the Program (Khartoum: African­diaspora intellectuals to Marxism in general. Such indiffer­ tion Theory: Variations nese culture, he posed the perennial question: How can Africans uti­ Azza Publishing House, on Themes of Marxism and 2001 [orig. 1971]). He ence, as she points out, takes place “within the wider and longstand­ Modernity,” in Marxism, lize Marxist thought to create a progressive culture that embodies a also translated several texts ing exclusion of non­Western knowledge from a canon compiled Modernity and Postcolonial systematic critique of all that is reactionary within their societies?”7 including Joseph P. Stalin, by [Western] metro politan scholars.” While crediting a few Western Studies, ed. Crystal The second text, by Césaire, is known as “Letter to Maurice Marxism and Problems of Bartolovich and Neil Linguistics (Khartoum: Azza Marxist thinkers such as Göran Therborn with acknowledging that Lazarus (Cambridge: Thorez,” in which he basically tendered his resignation from the Publishing House, 2008 Marxism became “the main intellectual culture of two major move­ Cambridge University French Communist Party on October 24, 1956. “Besides its sting­ [orig. 1950]). ments of the dialectic of modernity: the labour movement and the Press, 2002), p. 125. ing rebuke of Stalinism,” Robin Kelley has written, the heart of the 7 | Rogaia Mustafa anticolonial movement,” Barry also criticizes them—with the excep­ 5 | It is worth mentioning letter “dealt with the colonial question,” and not just the French Abusharaf, “Marx in the tion of recognizing Frantz Fanon and his contribution to the study here that the scholarship Communist Party’s policies toward “the colonies but the colonial Vernacular: Abdel Khaliq of violence and trauma associated with modernity in the colonial on African/Black Marx­ relationship between the metropolitan and the Martinican Commu­ Mahgoub and the Riddles ism has recently morphed of Localizing Leftist Politics 8 context—for underestimating the creativity and innovations of Asian into a considerable body of nist Parties.” In other words, it is a call for self­determination for in Sudanese Philosophies and Latin American Marxism and for rejecting Africa as a “player in literature that sheds light on Third World people, and African/Black people more specifically. In­ of Liberation,” SAQ: South 4 the diverse and immensely Atlantic Quarterly 108, no. 3 the discourses of Marxism and Modernity.” rich world of African and terestingly, it was written in the same year that Mahgoub penned his (Summer 2009), p. 483. Hence, the urgent call to revisit African/Black Marxism and African­diasporic contribu­ book New Horizons, in which he expressed his disappointment with For a more comprehen­ to rethink its immense innovation and creativity in the context of tions to Marxist critique. Third World Marxists for their blindness regarding Stalinism. It is a sive review of Mahgoub’s See Cedric Robinson, Black intellectual legacy and the dOCUMENTA (13) as it celebrates its beginnings in the mid­1950s Marxism: The Making of well­known fact that several African/Black Marxist artists and writers Sudanese Communist in the aftermath of World War II, which as a period also ushered in the Black Radical Tradition, have had a contentious relationship with the politics of the Western Party’s impact on Sudanese the rise of anticolonial struggles in Africa and other parts of the Third 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: Uni­ Communist Party (as the official manifestation of Marxism) in two culture and politics, see the versity of North Carolina special issue of SAQ: South World.