©2007 Jeremy Matthew Glick All Rights Reserved ‘TAKING UP ARMS AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES’: TRAGEDY AS HISTORY AND GENRE IN THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION‘ by JEREMY MATTHEW GLICK A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Professor Brent Hayes Edwards And approved by ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2007 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ‘TAKING UP ARMS AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES’: TRAGEDY AS HISTORY AND GENRE IN THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION‘ By JEREMY MATTHEW GLICK Dissertation Director: Professor Brent Hayes Edwards This dissertation examines a sampling of twentieth century literature generated in and around the Haitian Revolution through the optic of tragedy. It examines the tension between leader and mass base during the revolutionary process in a sampling of Afro Caribbean, African American, and European modernist texts and how this tension relates to C.L.R. James’s definition of hamartia (tragic flaw), as formulated in his 1938 study The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. James modifies Aristotle’s understanding of hamartia in his Poetics to signify the degeneration of communication between leader and base in the making of modern day Haiti. The dramatic work and criticism of C.L.R. James, Eugene O’Neill, Paul Robeson, Edouard Glissant, and Lorraine Hansberry capitalize on this leader and base tension constitutive of Black radical aesthetic politics and attempt to stage a useful representation of the past, in service of their individual political desires. This dissertation is in a dialog with David Scott’s 2004 study Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, a text that argues that the tragic element of James’s text was added into the latter version and worked to temper the study’s earlier Romantic tone. This project asserts that a the tragic narrative existed in James all along and furthermore, that the tragic conceived as the relationship between leader and base is constitutive of a great deal of the literature in the Black radical tradition’s effort to stage a past engagement with the Haitian revolution in service of a revolutionary future. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND DEDICATION This Dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my father Barry Hue Glick, with great love and gratitude and to the memory of Shani Baraka. And to my Mother and Sister whose help made all this possible. To my academics in arms: Professor Michael Daniel Rubenstein and Edgar Rivera Colon To my Professors: With special appreciation to my committee. Endless gratitude: Brent Hayes Edwards, Michael McKeon, Daphne Lamothe, Elin Diamond, Martin Harries, Cheryl Clarke, Fred Moten, Matthew Buckley, Kellie Watt, Karla Jackson- Brewer, Elaine Chang, Brian Rourke, Richard Dienst, Marianne DeKoven, Bruce Robbins, Carolyn Williams, John McClure, Emily Bartels, Susie Nakley, Tzarina Prater, Kelly Josephs, Donald Gibson, Cheryl Wall, Leonard Bethel, Ivan Van Sertima, Reverend Fred Clark, Lennox Hinds, Esq., Carter Mathes, Gail Tate, Olubai Olubai, George Kearns, Miguel Algarin, Rome Neal, Brett Singer, Cheryl Robinson, Courtney Borack, Nancy Miller, and Eileen Faherty, Bill Galperin To Wesley Brown: Your friendship and wisdom makes me hopeful about where we live. To Mwalimu Ibrahim Noor Shariff: Asante Sana Teacher To my friend and comrade Heidi Amanda Bramson: All my love My brothers: Darryl Scipio, Dax Devlon Ross, Mario Ramirez Hardy, Dan Dalnekoff, Asaf Kastner, Dr. Gary Zeitlin, Ibrahim Ramey, Samuel Sanchez, Kamel Bell, Russell Shoatz III To my niece, nephew and cousin: Now, I will have more time to play with you. To the Glick, Mechanic, and Baraka families: “Some day, the war will be over.” iii CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND DEDICATION iii INTRODUCTION 1 “Backpedaling into May-flower Time”: Malcolm’s Hamlet at the Oxford Union CHAPTER ONE 34 Tragedy as Mediation in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins CHAPTER TWO 75 Thinking about Haiti: The Super-Naturalist Aesthetic of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones CHAPTER THREE 117 ‘Bringing in the Chorus’: The Haitian Revolution Plays of C.L.R. James and Edouard Glissant CHAPTER FOUR 162 Tshembe’s Choice: Lorraine Hansberry’s Pan-Africanist Dramas CONCLUSION 190 BIBLIOGRAPHY 197 CURRICULUM VITA 210 iv 1 INTRODUCTION “Backpedaling into May-flower Time”1: Malcolm’s Hamlet at the Oxford Union Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?2 -Hamlet, 3.1 …I reminded him that during the Haitian revolution, the only person that Toussaint L’Ouverture could trust implicitly was Agé, a white Jacobin who was his chief of staff. Agé hated the bigoted French almost as much as Dessalines did, I told him. Don’t worry, he said, with a broad smile, I might not have a white chief of staff. But I’ll work with everyone who believes in my cause…Really? I said, looking up at him with mock disbelief, but his rejoinder was a serious one. Yes. But I’ve got to go about building a movement carefully. The last thing an Egyptian friend said to me when we were parting is that I should never get too far ahead of my followers, because if I’m so far ahead that I’m out of sight, they might turn back. I don’t want that to happen. -Malcolm X with Jan Carew (Carew 61) Before presenting the main argument and focus of exploration for this project, I want to take a quick detour to explore Malcolm X’s use of some memorable lines from William Shakespeare. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz evokes Shakespeare’s Hamlet during his participation in the Oxford Union Presentation Debate on December 3, 1964, marking his return trip from making pilgrimage to Mecca. The Presentation Debate signals the last 1 Jan Carew, Ghosts In Our Blood [With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean]. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 68 2William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Demark. Edited by Edward Hubler. (New York: Signet Classics, 1963), 93 2 event of the term in which the President of the Oxford Union invites the person she or he respects the most to join at the podium to take on Oxford’s rival Cambridge in the spirited contestation of a motion. Cricket, Rugby, and Debate all are key theaters of warfare between the two British rivals. The motion for this occasion was a July 1964 remark by Barry Goldwater upon his acceptance of the Republican Party nomination for U.S. President: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Goldwater’s remark was stated in the context of his defense of the right-wing group the John Birch Society. Malcolm, the fifth of six speakers, followed Conservative Party Parliament member Humphrey Berkeley (who opposed the motion along with Lord Stoneham— Labour Party Member of the House of Lords and Christie Davies, Cambridge Student Union President). On Malcolm’s side in support of a radical re-interpretation and defense of Goldwater’s statement; beyond its initial reactionary connotation were Scottish Communist Party Member and Nationalist, Poet Hugh MacDiarmid and Anthony Abrahams, Jamaican student and President of the Oxford Union. Interestingly, Tariq Ali now a New Left Review editor, novelist, and writer-activist was Oxford Student chair of the debate. Speaking on how the “sacrosanct image of Oxford [was] shattered by…the fist of revolutionary logic”, Lebert Bethune states: The irony of his being at Oxford in a debate against, of all people, the Earl of Lonford, Privy Councillor to the Queen (whatever that might mean), wasn’t lost on Malcolm. But while smiling at that, he pointed out to me that the office of presidency of the Oxford Union was held then by a black Jamaican, who was proposing the motion for the debate. He also pointed out that the incoming president for the following term was a Pakistani. I didn’t believe then, nor on reflection, that Malcolm was rejoicing in the symbolic “domination” of Oxford by men of color, but it was a matter of more than simple irony for him.3 3 Lebert Bethune, “Malcolm X in Europe, ”in Malcolm X The Man and His Times, ed. John Henrik Clarke 1969. (Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc, 1990), 232 3 In a videotaped interview, Abrahams stated: “I have never been as sorry for a man as I was for Humphrey Barkley [a left leaning Conservative Parliamentarian] that night, because Malcolm took his speech and, I mean, he just tore him up.” Barkley sparked Malcolm’s ire when he unfairly referred to him as “North America’s leading exponent of apartheid,” compared him to South Africa’s Verwoerd4(Bethune, 233), and stated that for Malcolm “Liberty…means racial segregation”(Carew, 74-77). Nevertheless, Malcolm lost the debate 137 to 228. In a televised interview, the former Oxford Union president painted a picture of Malcolm as an organic intellectual dedicated to Black internationalism: He highlighted Malcolm’s “gift of analogy,” the fact that he never repeated himself during his stay, his poignant differences with Dr. King yet his respect for strategic flexibility, and the expression of his thoughts “at a totally cerebral level.” Italian Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual” captures well Malcolm’s position as a key