Mahdi Chowdhury theorises the avant-garde in the peripheries, linking postcolonial Asia, the Soviet Union, and the Black Atlantic through notions of time.
Part of What Time Tells, an ongoing series on time and the problems we face today. Published in conjunction with Countering Time, AAA’s exhibition about archival time and the idea of afterlives.
I
In the twentieth century, decolonisation remade the world.
This new world did not begin in tabula rasa. Rather, it was formed out of debris and fragmentation. Anticolonial nationalisms in Asia, Africa, and the Americas preached a collective ethos of optimism and resilience. Yet, it was clear that decolonisation would, necessarily, be an art of ruins.
In this precarious art, time was not an airy or unconscious medium. Time was an abstraction made real by new economies of survival. Through political interventions in time, decolonisation sought to overcome a dimensional sense of what was termed “backwardness.” Five-year plans, industrial production targets, famine prevention schemes. But also, a metaphysical crisis. A lingering sense of being peripheralised in time: of being denied coevalness with the present, of a melancholic deprivation of the world after centuries of the “development of underdevelopment.”
This essay explores the temporal crisis and historical concept of “backwardness” through the perspective of the postcolonial avant-garde. It was not merely party leaders and bureaucrats that grappled with this problem. Rather, the diagnostic and imaginative labours of vanguardist artists also mattered. For them, the end was not simply to “catch up” to former metropoles. The end was not linear progression or vulgar modernisation; neither the clinical teleologies of Harvard modernisation theorists nor Stalinist acceleration. Rather, these artists conjured alternative pathways of development, generous and emancipatory dwellings in time. It is from these geographies of deprivation that a redemptive future tense was opened up—a future attendant to the fact that, as Aimé Cesaire wrote, the “work of man is not finished.”1
Braiding the intellectual worlds of postcolonial Asia, the Soviet Union, and the Black Atlantic, I theorise the avant-garde in the peripheries as a radical and far-sighted tradition that differed from its metropolitan counterparts. Their works sought to augur original futures out of the ruins of empire. A cipher and touchstone by which I explore these themes is Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land—a palimpsestic text written and rewritten several times between 1939 to 1956, spanning the breadth of Négritude and Universal War to Bandung and the Cold War. As a text of ruins and futures, Notebook serves as an entry-point into the avant-garde in the colonies, the protectorates, the départments, the plantations, the mandates, the ghettos, the camps, and other manifold spatialities of empire and racial capitalism. Through this, we consider the avant-garde in sites of deferment and plunder, where the future itself felt like an obscure and unlikely horizon. Or, to paraphrase Césaire, of worlds already “humiliated” by the grandiosity of the future.
II
Au bout du petit matin.
The world begins in Notebook in an uncomfortable and aromantic light. It is a world of polluted beaches, diseases, lagoons of blood, rot, ugliness, immiseration, alcoholism, and where “the sea especially dumps its refuse, its dead cats and its dogs.”2 Even the island is a geologically precarious form, a volcanic accident on the face of the earth. Such is the tone and content of the first third of Césaire’s poem: a text absent any kind of hopeful or revolutionary sign. There is no reclamation of Blackness as a font of beauty, heritage, or nobility as one finds in the Négritude poems of Leopold Senghor; nor the fervour of a Fanonian littérature de combat. In place of nation, Césaire depicts a necropolis.
His depiction of colonial society and subjectivity is an Antillean cousin of “der Muselmann.” A piece of Auschwitz slang, this term described complete witnesses, hollow men, who lived in the camps as if they were dead. Not martyrdom, but a kind of “meaningless death” in perpetuity, wrote Giorgio Agamben.3 The narrator of Notebook begins in this category of life. In the Martinican landscape, there is only “this death without sense or piety, this death where there is no majesty, this death which limps from pettiness to pettiness.” Amongst the contradictory and indeterminate etymologies for der Musselmann, one strain leads to the ritual gestures of Islamic prayer. Those poses, so it goes, were analogised to the still look and fatalism of the concentration camp Muselmann. This pose only makes the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam’s frontispiece for Césaire’s text all the more evocative. A simultaneous gesture of prayer, arrest, and living death.
Césaire shows us colonial history as a museum of morbid symptoms. This opening tableau—Césaire’s “picture of destruction,” as Abiola Irele described it—was “intensified” across every manuscript of Notebook.4 It is, of course, one part of an arc that leads to the rendez-vous of victory, a hymnic and transcendent end. Yet, Césaire had poured a great deal of significance into this inferno and to a poetics of abjection. He defines his origins and his place amidst “the vomit of the slave-ship.”5 It is a portrait of destruction, dehumanisation, and dislocation. It is a portrait of the invention of “backwardness.”
We turn now to this pejorative, outdated, yet crucial term.
III
In the mid-1950s, the Bengali Marxist poet Bishnu Dey wrote a series of essays on the role of the contemporary artist. Dey argues that the “artist in the East [originated in] a torment of perception.”6 He contests this with the modernism of “play,” “blasé whimsicality,” “ennui,” and “boredom” of the “luxury civilisations” of nineteenth-century Europe.7 By contrast, the postcolonial avant-garde begins with an “urgent quality [born] out of a direct impulse of self-preservation.”8 It is an art surrounded by “the debris of the old world and the new just being born…”9
How, then, does one theorise the avant-garde’s diverse forms and origins? His answer lies in material conditions and the sensorium they produce. What matters to him is a starting-point in “backwardness.”
Backwardness is a loaded and multivalent historical term. It was a common and flexible term in social scientific thought—from modernisation theory, to development economics, to Marxist critique. Today, it is a pejorative and unhelpful term. It is clear that to deem something, or someone, as “backward” is to participate in what Johannes Fabian has called “allochronic distancing”10—that is, a kind of time-othering. It is something we hear inside every kind of racist taunt, inside every invocation of “shit-hole countries.” Backwardness has a visual economy. In a moment from Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon saw a person staring back at him in the mirror; his skin turned into a cavalcade of imperial French racism: “cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y’a bon Banania.”11
This pejorative dimension is part of the concept of backwardness. But there is another sense in which Dey and others invoke it. Not “backwardness” as a moral, representational, or evolutionary category—but a brute, descriptive term, a measuring and quantifying term, for the state in which vast portions of the earth were left after colonialism. For Dey, this material basis in deprivation, in the common intimacies of racial capitalism, have become the foundations of a new solidarity. A prototypical Third World, a moral and aesthetic community. For Dey, “backwardness” is valorised. He not only upturns conventional associations with this term, it becomes the origins of a more radical avant-garde.
With a “primary deprivation to start with,” the avant-garde in the peripheries have a critical distance from Euro-America and industrial capitalism.12 According to Dey, “being backward peoples, we did not have to fulfill the demands of capitalism regarding an undue emphasis on the individual, that is, on the differences between a man and man, and between man and nature.”13 Backwardness is a strange and ironic gift. It is a testament to survival and a subtle instrument of clairvoyance. In Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Walter Benjamin saw a gestural figure that stood in for the “angel of history”: a figure whose eyes are cast on the wreckage of the past but whose wings sail hopelessly into the future.14 For Dey, backwardness inverses this movement: in the colonies, we see the wreckage of the future but also sail towards and curve against it as knowing navigators. In other words, deprivation can be a form of knowledge and cartography. It is “through the backdoor of her backwardness,” Dey writes, that India—and one may believe, the postcolonial world writ large—has retained the resources of its future.15
One need not accept all of Dey’s premises. But it is clear that his argument implies a set of political responsibilities. The artist’s task is to conjure paths and destinies in deferred geographies. Contrary to the forces of conservative nationalism, this avant-garde must be “a ceaseless tense activity against revivalism”—for the avant-garde serves the futurial elaboration of new worlds.16 The avant-garde carves out “shortcuts to the future.”17
I want to linger on this simple yet cutting phrase: “shortcuts to the future.” We should not confuse this with catching up or speeding up. It does not bid us towards velocity or an exact destination, per say. Rather, it is a phrase that has an implied sense of tactfulness, of manoeuvre. Something adventurous and anti-linear, soldierly and utopian. In the context of Dey’s ideas, I interpret shortcuts to the future as the imaginative work of crafting passages, journeys, and dwellings into the substance of time.
IV
Indeed, this sense of the avant-garde is rooted closer to its original meanings. Before entering the vocabulary of modern art, the “avant-garde” was both a regimental and political term. It was associated with military reconnaissance, then with Fourierian utopian socialism. In all three senses, the avant-garde was about the other side of horizons.
To see ahead and beyond, in conditions of backwardness, constituted what Dipesh Chakrabarty called “the first Third Worldist question.”18 That question was posed by the Russian socialist Vera Zasulich. In 1881, she wrote to Karl Marx on behalf of “underdeveloped peoples,” inquiring whether we must go through a destructive stage of capitalism in order to reach communism,19 or, being “backward peoples,” can we not begin our virtuous, egalitarian society now and on this soil?20
This was a “life-and-death question” for Zasulich and her party, based as it was in the tradition of commune-making. Was it true that scientific socialism deemed “the rural commune [as] an archaic form condemned to perish by history”?21 Was there a way out—a shortcut, perhaps—of this linear, determinist course of history?
For Marx, this was a stimulating, but difficult question. He originally penned a response of nearly 4,500 words. However, he never sent this response—and subsequent drafts whittled down his original thoughts to 350 words, including a block-quote from Capital and the excuse that he had been ill. Chakrabarty pokes at this medical excuse, suggesting a staged silence. However, one can see this not simply as a silence but a sign of an opening and an openness. A hesitancy to speak too soon, as seen in a neutral expression that he sees “no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune.”22 Perhaps a subtle encouragement as well, clarifying that his supposedly stagist view of history, moving from feudalism to capitalism to communism, was “restricted to the countries of Western Europe.”23
I dwell at length here on the Zasulich-Marx correspondence because it rehearsed the problem of backwardness and opened up a theoretical, geographical, and tactical space in Marxism for the Third World. As such, for vanguardists and intellectuals of decolonisation, it was a usable philosophy. For instance, Walter Rodney directly invoked these letters in his essay on Tanzanian socialism and took from it the lesson that multilinear paths of development and creative temporal arcs were possible, if not necessary: “In a comradely letter to Vera Zasulich in 1881, Marx […] vigorously disavowed any intention of using his model of Western Europe to provide a historical-philosophical theory of the general path every people is fated to tread.”24 For Rodney, this correspondence rebuked developmental fatalisms about the Third World. The future is not predetermined, but open and three-dimensional. It affirms the many possibilities of shortcuts to the future, not bound to airless mimicry or doctrine.
V
This contrasts starkly with notions of backwardness as a problem of catching up—and, thereby, fixated on acceleration as a solution and technique. This is evident not only in the temporal imagination of capitalism, but also in anxious articulations by Joseph Stalin, as in his 1931 speech at the First Conference of Soviet Industrial Managers. Therein, reproduced below at length, Stalin spoke of the creation of a new sense of time—a redemptive, protective, industrious, “Bolshevik tempo”:
To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans, the Turkish beys, and the Japanese barons. All beat her—because of her backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness [...]
Such is the law of the exploiters—to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism […] If you do not want this, you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy. There is no other way.
That is why Lenin said on the eve of the October Revolution: “Either perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.”25
This accelerationist tempo, coupled with the repressive features of Stalinism at large, was a monstrous and exploitative experience. Yet, in Stalin’s anxiety-filled notion of backwardness and temporal prescription, we see not only the stakes underlying the problem of backwardness but the issue with treating it as a linear, econometric policy. Indeed, this is the “tragedy of development” that one witnessed across the Third World, one that reduced the politics of time to mere production.
Marshall Berman once described nineteenth-century Russia as an “archetype of the emerging twentieth-century Third World”26—namely, in this dialectic between backward societies and avant-garde cultures. Indeed, Russia was an important piece of conceptual geography in the very notion of “backwardness” since the Enlightenment onward.27 The link, however, does not cease with the nineteenth century—but this dialectic between temporal anxiety and developmentalist violence connected the Second and Third Worlds as well.
Indeed, Césaire criticised Stalinist policy and resigned from the French Communist Party in 1956. In his resignation, he described a philosophical disagreement with Stalinism as well, namely, the belief in the vulgar concept of “backwardness” and of linear time, an anachronistic belief in the hierarchy of civilizations:
Stalin is indeed the very one who reintroduced the notion of “advanced” and “backward” peoples into socialist thinking. […] I believe I have said enough to make it clear that it is neither Marxism nor communism that I am renouncing, and that it is the usage some have made of Marxism and communism that I condemn. That what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism. […] I would say that no doctrine is worthwhile unless rethought by us, rethought for us, converted to us.28
The future cannot be imitated or doctrinal.29 Césaire’s literary homeland cannot be redeemed by acceleration. The task, rather, is to be agents of one’s own temporality, to live in a more generous sense of time; a time one can use and inhabit, and not be squashed by. Time is out of a joint—the arduous task for the artist is to set it right.
VI
In 1967 in Cuba, the Haitian poet René Depestre conducted an interview with Césaire. They spoke of surrealism and the “deep and unconscious forces” it ushered forth, its “call to Africa.”30 Peppered with concepts such as “disalienation” and “detoxification,” Césaire put it simply: “Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor.”31 The emancipatory maneuvers in Notebook—and the peripheral avant-garde at large—differ from the continental tradition of surrealism given the context of race and empire.32 Césaire’s gaze begins at the limit of ontological humanity, a gaze rooted in the natal alienation of the Black Atlantic. “The human heart-beat stops at the gates of the black world,” he writes locationally.33 But it is also Blackness that has made this world, a “fingerprint” indexed across its bloodied ports:
And I say to myself Bordeaux and Nantes and Liverpool
and New York and San Francisco
not an inch of this world devoid of my fingerprint and my calcaneus on
the spines of skyscrapers and my filth in the glitter of gems!34
Césaire’s inferno takes the form of an eternal present. “How much blood there is in my memory,” a perpetual flooding of time.35 But there is a temporal carving outward and beyond.
For Césaire, it is “The End of the World.” The apocalypse is an opening. The End is a desire to begin.
“Apocalypse destroys the historical relation,” writes John E. Drabinski.36 A fever sweating out the body. For Tyrone S. Palmer, apocalypse is Césaire’s answer to the question of what is to be done if the dominant terms of reality have excluded you from the human order.
Rather than answer the question of what is to be done programmatically, with a prescriptive gesture that lays out an adaptable blueprint for decolonization, Césaire’s answer intimates that the scale of the problem at hand exceeds the field of political action; it is a problem of and for metaphysics, and it will take the End of the World—and, by extension, the destruction of metaphysics—to escape the terror.37
Both Drabinski and Palmer understandably connect Césaire’s poetics to the claims of Afropessimist critique. Yet, we should also be mindful of Césaire’s shortcut to the future—the shortest of them all, apocalypse—as intimating a new commons, a planetary humanism which states it is not true that the work of man is done. Absent from his 1939 manuscript and introduced in the 1956 version, Césaire internationalises his metaphysics, his outward march in time, to include “my racial geography: the map of the world made for my use, coloured not with the arbitrary colours of schoolmen but with the geometry of my spilt blood.”38 In the age of decolonisation, a new time begins in Notebook through the vantage of a global and transhistorical homo sacer:
As there are hyena-men and panther-men,
so I shall be a Jew man
a Kaffir man
a Hindu-from-Calcutta man
a man-from-Harlem-who-hasn’t-got-the-vote.
Famine man, curse man, torture man, you may seize
him at any moment, beat him, kill him—yes perfectly
well kill him—accounting to no one, having to offer
an excuse to no one
a Jew man
a pogrom man
a whelp
a beggar.39
This is not an avant-garde or commons of the politico nor of nationalisms of revivalist tradition. Indeed, Césaire is most blunt on this point, viewing it as an inauthentic historicity, and instead valorising a class-based backwardness through the ages:
I refuse to pass my swellings off for authentic glories. And I laugh at my old childish imaginings. No, we have never been amazons at the court of the King of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor doctors at Timbuctoo when Askia the Great was king, nor architects at Djenne, nor Madhis, nor warriors […] I wish to confess that we were always quite undistinguished dishwashers, small time shoeshiners, at the most fairly conscientious witch-doctors, and the only record we hold is our staying-power in wrangling over trifles.40
On the opposite shores of the Black Atlantic, C. L. R. James reflected on Césaire’s poem in postcolonial Ghana. What is crucial about Césaire was his belief that the work of man is not finished—a belief essential to the imagination of decolonisation. In the ruins and dreams of a new world, James put it aptly that what Césaire offers, what the avant-garde offers, are “poetic divinations of worlds to come.”41
I write and reflect on these themes as ruins refill our minds, and the heart of the tricontinent bleeds in Gaza. As James had carried Césaire’s futurial humanism to Accra, we may carry the same to Gaza, towards a familiar sensorium of empire and death, der Muselmann and figures of camp life. If one accepts the premises of this essay, one accepts that redemptive vanguardism, revolutionary thought, and planetary futures do not necessarily spring from sites of abundance but rather from worlds seemingly beyond the gates of the human heart. One accepts that the peripheral avant-garde is closer to its soldierly and political origins. That they are guerrillas in time, in search of shortcuts to the future. The work of man is not done.
Mahdi Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi-origin researcher, writer, and artist, with pieces in The New Inquiry, Jadaliyya, and Popula. He is a PhD candidate in history at Harvard University.
Notes
1. Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 81.
2. Césaire (1969), 43.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 47.
4. Aimé Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of A Return to the Native Land, ed. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), xvi.
5. Césaire (1969), 67.
6. Bishnu Dey, In the Sun and the Rain: Essays on Aesthetics (People’s Publishing House, 1972), 79.
7. Dey, 79.
8. Dey, 81.
9. Dey, 81.
10. See: Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
11. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 2008), 92. It is a moment in Fanon comparable to Césaire’s scene of his “cowardice rediscovered”—wherein he recognises himself as a laughing spectator of “the ugliness” of a Black man. “Backwardness” is not a mirror onto himself but an internalisation, an ideology he himself reproduces; a deep, self-replicating form of alienation.
12. Dey, 77.
13. Dey, 78.
14. See: Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
15. Dey, 2.
16. Dey, 6.
17. Dey, 6.
18. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Rethinking Working Class” at Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, 25 October 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqmkldsIxkI.
19. Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism”: A Case (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 98.
20. Shanin, 99.
21. Shanin, 99.
22. Shanin, 122.
23. Shanin, 123.
24. Walter Rodney, “Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism,” African Review 1:4 (1972), 61–76.
25. Joseph Stalin, “No Slowdown in Tempo!,” Pravda, 5 February 1931, excerpted from Anatole G. Mazour, “Reading No. 14,” in Soviet Economic Development: Operation Outstrip, 1921–1965.
26. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 77.
27. Eighteenth-century Russia was central to the Enlightenment imagination of “backwardness.” Alessandro Stanziani argues the discourse of Russian backwardness was also a means by which Europe spoke to itself—for instance, questions of freedom and serfdom in Montesquieu were also coded ways of talking about slavery in French colonies. See: Alessandro Stanziani on “Backwardness and the Russian Case: On Modernization and its Discontent,” NYU Jordan Center.
28. Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” trans. Chike Jeffers, Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 149–50.
29. There is a linguistic parallel occurring to Césaire’s argument that the political needs to be rethought for Black experiences and needs. Brent Edwards Hayes describes Césaire’s use of the syntactical as a way of foregrounding a sense of “confrontation”—a technique that delinks French’s standard pattern and order. Césaire describes this as a technique of crossing into an anti-imperial linguistic subjectivity, “an Antillean French.” Jean Paul Sartre’s essay “Black Orpheus” also describes how Césaire’s approach to French ruptured a linguistic colonial racialism as well. See: Brent Hayes Edwards, “Aimé Césaire and the Syntax of Influence,” Research in African Literatures 36, no. 2 (2005): 1–18; and Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review 6, no. 1 (1964): 13–52.
30. “An Interview with Aimé Césaire” in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 83.
31. Césaire (2000), 83–84.
32. Renato Poggioli argued alienation from the reproduction of the ideological status quo underpins the avant-garde and its social classes among the intelligentsia. To then look at the avant-garde beyond Europe is to perhaps, I imagine, see this cycle doubled, that is, an avant-garde alienated from the avant-garde. See: Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).
33. Césaire (1969), 63.
34. Césaire (2013), 21.
35. Césaire (1969), 59.
36. John E. Drabinski, “Césaire’s Apocalyptic Word,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 581.
37. Tyrone S. Palmer, “Otherwise than Blackness: Feeling, World, Sublimation,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 29, no. 2 (2020): 252.
38. Césaire (1969), 83.
39. Césaire (1969), 48.
40. Césaire (1969), 63.
41. C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 18.
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