Chapter 3 Nothing to Say About Race and Class? We should be judged, not by the errors we make but by what we make of our errors. annie sugier1 Critics should not construct for our subjects a historically impossible purity. jonathan arac2 [B]eaucoup de problèmes nous paraissent plus essentiels que ceux qui nous concernent singulièrement…. The Second Sex, 1:29 Summer 2006. I am traveling to Berlin to speak at a conference, “Black Euro- pean Studies in Transnational Perspective,” stopping for a month in Oxford on the way. Dragging three overweight suitcases stuffed with books and notes about Simone de Beauvoir, I land at Heathrow and find myself in a longer im- migration queue than usual (because England is playing in the World Cup), and I fall into conversation with two very young American women, recent col- lege graduates. One, who asserts gamely that she “works in improv in New York,” is coming “to study Shakespeare at the Globe”; the other, nervous and asthmatic, is emigrating, moving to (I think) Hertfordshire to get married and live happily ever after. She is carrying her wedding dress with eight-foot train in a monster-sized garment bag over her shoulder, and oozing anxiety about her prospective in-laws, who appear to have a great deal of money. “I’m from a humble background,” she explains to me, a total stranger. She’s from New Ha- ven, but she didn’t go to Yale … This isn’t going to work, I think, but of course 1 Colloque internationale, Université Paris Diderot Paris 7, January 2008. Annie Sugier was in- troduced as “physiciste et militante, ancien combattante du mlf et de la Ligue des Droits de la Femme.” She delivered a powerful testimony about Beauvoir’s direct impact on feminist activism in the 1970s and into the twenty-first century. Some of what she said has been pub- lished as Annie Sugier and Kahina Benziane, “Nos chemins se sont croisés,” in the conference proceedings. 2 Jonathan Arac, “Imperial Eclecticism in Moby Dick and Invisible Man: Literature in a Postco- lonial Empire,” 152. © Meryl Altman, 2020 | doi 10.1163/9789004431218_005 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Meryl Altman - 9789004431218 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:21:45AM via free access Nothing to Say About Race and Class? 117 I don’t say so. As an older woman, a “frequent flyer,” I make reassuring noises to both. “We’re almost there,” I say. As we finally approach the immigration desk, the budding actress asks me to look over her landing card, because she isn’t sure she filled it out right (I have admitted to being a teacher). I see that in the box for “nationality,” she has writ- ten, “Hispanic, Jewish.” So I say gently, no, that’s where you put “usa.” And the other young woman says “Oh. I just put ‘White.’” ... A funny story (sort of); when I told it in Oxford, D. started teasing me: “when are you going back to White?” But how does it happen that perfectly likeable, well-meaning, well-educated young people seem oblivious to their own na- tionality as a salient fact about themselves even when traveling? Is it that Amer- icans “generously” assume all human beings to be American till proven other- wise? Or, that within the United States questions of race and ethnic identity are so heated and vexed that they block out all information about the rest of the world? Issues of nation and race were urgent for Simone de Beauvoir and her intel- lectual and political traveling companions in the years following the Second World War, as the Cold War consolidated American hegemony, while old-style European colonialism exploded, decayed, shifted shape. Such issues are equal- ly urgent for feminists today: in France, where questions about hijab and secu- larism have divided feminists, with Beauvoir’s legacy claimed by both sides; in the United States, where the lip service given to multiculturalist ideals in main- stream civic life seems to have left kneejerk nationalism largely undisturbed; and in feminist theory, where we are still looking for a way to think about more than one kind of oppression at the same time, without subordinating one to another or excusing any, trying to find our way toward a fully anti-racist and transnational feminism that does not dissolve into paradoxes. It would, I will argue, be a mistake to assume that Beauvoir has nothing to contribute to those discussions. The task of the next four chapters is partly to answer what I view as misun- derstandings and misappropriations of Beauvoir’s views on race and class, a task already well begun by Margaret Simons, Sonia Kruks, Doris Ruhe, others. But I hope to go beyond the rather strange professional activity of “defending my author” to convey a richer understanding of what Beauvoir actually said, and why, and how that can help us. I place particular emphasis on what liter- ary scholars call “reception contexts.” It is important to situate Beauvoir with respect to the discourses of the time and place from which she wrote: many Meryl Altman - 9789004431218 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:21:45AM via free access <UN> 118 Chapter 3 misunderstandings have arisen from not doing so, from imposing anachronis- tic expectations and/or recruiting her to later intra-feminist debates. But also, placing Beauvoir’s readers in historical context can usefully complicate the usual map we draw of feminist history since the middle of the last century. I’ll be reading Beauvoir in dialogue with other discourses around race and class, both upstream and downstream from her arguments, including her en- gagement with the anti-colonial and anti-racist work being done by Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and also with a more problematic dis- course of “appreciation” of non-European cultural forms by the French intel- lectual left and the avant-garde. International travel, both real and imaginary, played a crucial role in all those discourses, and in how her relationships to them developed. And, as one might expect, it is not always easy, perhaps not always possible, to pry the progressive and regressive discourses apart. 1 Beauvoir’s Trip to America, and What She Found There What I had been doing on that airplane was re-reading Beauvoir’s L’Amérique au jour le jour 1947 (America Day by Day 1947), a book-length essay-travelogue- diary about her first visit to the United States.3 In that book Beauvoir suggests that Americans, including American college students, really don’t know much about the wider world they live in, a situation she found strange and somewhat terrifying, given the enormous power the United States was wielding as the Cold War got under way. She was especially concerned to ask how a sense of political impotence and fatalism, including among intellectuals and on the so- called Left, could co-exist with an American optimism and idealism she re- garded as sincere. L’Amérique au jour le jour 1947 is an interesting book in its own right, but also because while she was writing it, she was working out the ideas that would emerge as The Second Sex.4 Beauvoir spent time in New York 3 Translations from this text are my own. Of the two available English versions, both titled America Day by Day (without the year), the better one is Carol Cosman’s (1999). The earlier one (1953), by Patrick Dudley, includes some good photographs, but made very significant cuts from the French, eliminating most of the Beauvoir’s political and economic critique and her discussion of current events, including many of the passages I discuss below. See William McBride, “The Postwar World According to Beauvoir,” for a comprehensive account of what is missing. Beyond a simple “dumbing down” for American audience, McBride sees “obvious malice aforethought”: “In fact, there is something quite sinister about this first English trans- lation, which in certain respects is more like a Hollywood film version of L’Amérique au jour le jour” (“The Postwar World According to Beauvoir,” 432). 4 Excerpts from L’Amérique au jour le jour 1947 appeared in four issues of Les Temps Modernes, from December 1947 through April 1948; in the very next issue, the lead article is “La femme Meryl Altman - 9789004431218 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:21:45AM via free access <UN> Nothing to Say About Race and Class? 119 and Chicago, where she met with leading American intellectuals and French expatriates; she also took a far-flung lecture tour of college campuses, visited California and New Mexico, and traveled through Texas and the Deep South on a Greyhound bus with her friend Nathalie Sorokine Moffat. And while she saw a lot about the United States that she liked, she was also quite critical, particu- larly of an American tendency to think in abstractions, because abstractions tend to be mystifications, or myths. Abstraction, she says, is a way of making things bearable that ought to be, and remain, unbearable.5 She also notes that the idea of “Europe,” of herself as “European,” first became salient to her in the course of that trip.6 Travel’s power to reverse the optic of identity is a familiar enough idea. She’d reach for it in the introduction to The Second Sex as a way to clarify her basic concept of the Other: while traveling, the “native” is scandalized to see that other countries have their own natives, who look at him and see a for- eigner.7 That underlying problem of intersubjectivity, which Sartre so memo- rably phrased as “the Look of the Other that steals my world from me,” had preoccupied Beauvoir from her earliest writings, and had taken center stage in her first published novel, L’invitée, with its epigraph from Hegel: “every con- sciousness desires the death of the other.” But the problem of the Other had turned out not to be as simple as it had seemed when Françoise in that novel, looking through a keyhole, saw herself as the villainess in someone else’s story rather than the heroine of her own life.