Bending and Binding Disciplines: the Interdisciplinary Ways of African-American Thinkers by Anthony Mangeon

Bending and Binding Disciplines : The Interdisciplinary Ways of African-American Thinkers Anthony Mangeon To cite this version: Anthony Mangeon. Bending and Binding Disciplines : The Interdisciplinary Ways of African-American Thinkers. Sans Papier (Online Journal), The Einaudi Working Papers, 2007. hal-03120895 HAL Id: hal-03120895 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03120895 Submitted on 25 Jan 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. sans papier Bending and Binding Disciplines: The Interdisciplinary Ways of African-American Thinkers By Anthony Mangeon November 07 sans papier is a collection of electronic pre-prints in French and Francophone Studies at Cornell University. A. Mangeon, “Bending and Binding Disciplines,” November 07 sans papier Bending and Binding Disciplines: The Interdisciplinary Ways of African-American Thinkers By Anthony Mangeon Abstract This paper argues that the intellectual projects of post-Reconstruction African-Americans demonstrated an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge avant la lettre and that this approach constitutes a “blackening” of our understanding of interdisciplinarity. The paper explores how these projects used double strategies of mastering traditional knowledge-power articulations of Europe over Non-Europeans and of “deforming” these articulations. Focusing on William E.B. Du Bois and Alain Leroy Locke, the paper identifies two overriding processes: bending disciplines to common ground and binding them to African-American concerns. The paper traces these processes in the education and intellectual endeavors of the two men to illustrate the bending and binding of both regimes of thought and of disciplines. The paper concludes by proposing the analogy of interdisciplinarity as “temperament” in the musical sense of the term. Interdisciplinarity would thus be the bending and binding of thought and disciplines in order to tune in and jam with others, and just as African-Americans were “blackening” the European scale, African-American thinkers were “blackening” theories, concepts, and practices. About the Author Anthony Mangeon studies the interactions and relations between literature and knowledge in Africana, African-American, and West Indian studies. He is Maître de Conférence at the Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier III) and is affiliate at the Institut de Recherches en Etudes Culturelles (IREC). He has edited and translated six of Alain Locke's Haitian conferences, which will soon be released, along with his introduction: Alain Locke : Le Rôle du Nègre dans la culture des Amériques, et autres textes. Paris, L’Harmattan, Collection Autrement Mêmes, 2007. Contact Information [email protected] [email protected] Source This paper was first given at the “Undisciplined Knowledge? Franco-American Interdisciplinarity in the Humanities” Conference, a French Studies event held on March 2-3, 2007 at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. A French version of this text appeared in the issue of Labyrinthe entitled La fin des disciplines? (Laurent Dubreuil ed.; Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose; 2007) A. Mangeon, “Bending and Binding Disciplines,” November 07 sans papier Bending and Binding Disciplines: The Interdisciplinary Ways of African-American Thinkers At the turn of the twentieth century, the idea of interdisciplinarity was, in America, no more an academic concern than interracial relations were thinkable on a non-segregational basis. Yet among post-Reconstruction African-American intellectuals, an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge was in actuality fuelling and backing up new intellectual, cultural and political projects. Historically and socially defined by a “double consciousness,” black intellectuals also pursued double strategies which combined “mastery of forms” and “deformations of mastery.”1 Mastering western discursive practices (such as history, philosophy, literature, or human and social sciences), and mastering the major western cultural and political idioms (such as Christian universalism, Marxism, Enlightenment ideals, Republicanism and Law) first appealed to them as ways to achieve understanding, or to realize rational assessments of the social, cultural, economic relationships Europe had historically built with the rest of the world, and especially the black world; but this “mastery of forms,” or mastery of intellectual and cultural logics which backed up the social and political ones, was primarily meant to foster new social and political agencies, agendas, and thus to allow a “deformation” of traditional knowledge-power articulations of Europe over Non-Europeans, Whites over Blacks. Interdisciplinarity, in that sense, was conceived as a way to find intersections which allowed or accounted for different interactions between groups and cultures. It went along with another concern, which consisted in “blackening” discursive practices, theories, and concepts to address the specific problems of peoples of African origins or descent. This “blackening” process was therefore no reducing tapping of western disciplines, claims or ideals, but a way of bending down their abstract schemes, categories and disembodied objectives, to the concrete needs, demands and situations of subjugated peoples. Neither rejecting western philosophies or ideologies, nor giving them full credit in their restrictive Eurocentric terms, black intellectuals actually struggled to exceed their limits and to implement them to their full meaning. As, for example, C.L.R. James and Léon- Gontran Damas argued in the 1930s,2 the Rights of Man and Citizen became only truly “universalized” once the slaves in Saint-Domingue reclaimed and practically enacted them; consequently, speaking of a “Black Internationalism”, a “Black Marxism” or a “Black Enlightenment” was not reducing these idioms to any particularist understanding, but imposing on them a pragmatic bent and an acid test which revealed what William James would have called their “cash-value.”3 Accordingly, speaking of a “black interdisciplinarity” would just be an invitation to explore how black intellectuals contributed to the development and understanding of interdisciplinary ways. 1 Houston Baker Jr, 1987. 2 James, 1936 ; Damas, 1939. 3 “The pragmatic method », says James in his book Pragmatism (1907), « is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true ? [...] You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. The pragmatic method appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed” (“What Pragmatism means”, in McDermott (ed, 1996 : 380). A. Mangeon, “Bending and Binding Disciplines,” November 07 1 sans papier I will not deal with many examples, but focusing on William E.B. Du Bois and Alain Leroy Locke, I would like to demonstrate a twofold process of “bending” and “binding” disciplines. In this formula, all terms can be understood in at least two ways : bending and binding disciplines means bringing them together on common grounds, but it also implies bending and binding them to actual African-American concerns, in order to produce a significant difference in experience. And by disciplines, one must not only understand the traditional units of knowledge, but also the conceptual regimes which put you very easily, intellectually, into some disciplinary habits. So beyond the bending and binding of disciplines, a more radical bending and binding of conceptual schemes is at stake, which helps to characterize the objectives of the mastering and deforming strategy; and even if, in the end, these interdisciplinary practices do not appear as specifically nor exclusively African-American, they will nonetheless bear witness, or surely I do hope to prove so, to an original process of “blackening” to be taken into consideration in our understanding of interdisciplinarity. Bending and Binding Regimes of Thought Many critics of the Harlem Renaissance movement have underscored the deep influence William James exerted on Du Bois and Locke. Both of them attended his courses and lectures at Harvard; Locke was even present in Oxford when James was invited to Manchester College, in 1908, to deliver his Hibbert lectures later published as A Pluralistic Universe. Comparatively, the impact of European thinkers on Du Bois’ and Locke’s thoughts and writings has often been neglected; moreover, when critics highlight their common philosophical background, the specific ways Locke and Du Bois bent concepts and bound together disciplines like philosophy, psychology, and sociology are usually left aside. But quick biographical inquiries teach us that both Du Bois and Locke followed James’ example to go abroad, in Germany, to pursue further training, and respectively attended the University of Berlin in 1892-1894, and in 1910-1911. There, both African-American

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