From the 1970s to the 1790s and the importance of metanarratives

When I was first asked to come here to give a keynote address to this conference, I thought long and hard about what the notes were that I wanted to sound; what was the key that I wanted to begin turning?

Should I research a new topic? The figure of the lascar seaman came to mind. Cruel, vindictive, dangerous, one of an alien body, in that most prolific and characteristic of nineteenth-century theatrical genres, the nautical melodrama. Look at the contrast with his opposite number, the faithful, jolly, resourceful but always subordinate Black sailor. For the lascar, who in the dramas, is threateningly ‘foreign’ in a way that the English sailor hero’s black sidekick never is, came out of a history of discrimination structured, from the seventeenth century onwards, into the organisation and conduct of Britain’s naval trade. Indeed, the methods by which he was recruited and disciplined, under a kind of gang-master system, and the laws which ensured that primacy, higher wages, and job reservation were the prerogative only of native British seamen, remained essentially in place from the founding of the East India trade to the early 1940s. The pay differentials continued to the early 1980s. And while argument raged over slavery, with corresponding debate over the ‘black character’, personality, attributes, capacities, need for white tutelage, the lascar – here today, utterly impoverished, then gone tomorrow overseas to his native land – never attracted, for obvious reasons, such attention. He remained an indigestible and unregarded lump of difference.

But that is only a partial focus, a partial theme. And then I began to think back to what led me to research and write Racism on the Victorian Stage. Because I am not an academic; I have never worked in a university and only came to this field in late middle age – doing an MA in Victorian studies, part time, at Birkbeck College and then a PhD, again part time, while working (almost) full time. Of course, there was the initial impetus; the discovery, on that MA course, of the sheer exuberance and fantastical nature of cheap, popular theatre in the nineteenth century, hitherto unknown to me. Can you imagine? Astleys Amphitheatre, with Ducrow standing upright, controlling five horses thundering round the ring, ‘one leg on the back of each’, as Figaro put it. Or the version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, featuring a trick pony, with a performing dog thrown in for good measure; characters appearing and disappearing as ghosts or doubles or demons through creaking trapdoors; theatres lit by candles – blue fire for special dramatic effect – or open gas burners, smelly, dangerous but exciting with their hot, hissing yellow light. (I grew up in a house with gas light – to a child, electricity was a real comedown after that.) And, within that came the discovery of an unknown, ridiculous, moving and often enchanted world, the ubiquity of dramas featuring black characters; minor, major, heroes, villains and, latterly, sheer grotesques. From the doomed nobility of the captive and enslaved Prince Oroonoko, to the antics of Jim Crow. Indeed, I originally called my book ‘How Oroonoko became Jim Crow’, because, really, that is what happened, but the publishers assured me that no-one would know what that meant, so it had to go. So those were the initial impetuses for my book. But what led up to it goes back much further, in fact to the significance for me of my whole working life, at a small and little-known educational charity, the Institute of Race Relations, back, indeed, to the 1970s. Today, in our era of globalisation and neoliberalism, saturated in consumerism and surfeited with information, the 1970s in Britain have a very poor image, a bad press – not just those fashions, but the power of the unions, rubbish piling up in the streets, the dead, we were doomily told, going unburied, inflation peaking at 13 and 14 per cent, the three-day week, candles for light when the electricity regularly shut down. And of course, the racism; every political party of whatever hue was hell-bent on ‘controlling the immigration’, of those whose cheap labour was needed, but not their inconvenient presence on the streets and in the dwellings of the inner city or the alleyways of Coketown – a presence that was all too often met with outright, sometimes deadly, violence.

That benighted picture is, if you like, today’s metanarrative of the 1970s – an uncouth era of ungovernability. It is a metanarrative that suits the mega, transnational corporations who control our information society, where everything – government agencies, public institutions, essential services, the academy – is judged on how profitable it can be made to be and, and this is where I am beginning to get to the point, to what extent it can serve to confine and corral the parameters of debate within which people attempt to make choices to govern, to control, to transform their lives.

Because there is another narrative of the late 1960s and early 1970s – a narrative of liberation. Nothing, we have been told, can stop an idea whose time has come – but all our global news media and entertainment corporations work flat out to ensure that the only ideas that gain currency are those that don’t threaten to change anything – ideas that, for example, emphasise particularity, the contingent, the fleeting; that lead, through the ever more contorted application of human intelligence into dead ends; ideas that eschew the grand simplicities of cause, effect and intended social transformation, that look askance at the necessary subordination of an individual to a collective cause in the interests of solidarity; yet only through such solidarity can change happen. And that was one of the most profound, and significant, features of that era – which is why it has been airbrushed and photoshopped out of history. Because it was the era not only of the last of the colonial liberation movements but also of intended radical change at home, here in Britain. One of the most significant of those movements of change, in fact the forerunner of all our personalised liberatory tendencies (as in, the personal is political), was that of Black Power, which encompassed the political, the social and the cultural, and which impacted – along with those radical colonial freedom struggles – on this white little, tight little island. It turned the world upside down.

You can judge how threatened the race-structured, segregation-oriented American state found this radical challenge from those at the bottom of society who would claim and take social justice, rather than wait forever for the odd concession, by the fact that there are still Panthers like Mumia Abu Jamal in supermax prisons in the US for crimes concocted against them during that era, still people like Woodfox of the Angola 3, in solitary for forty-two years and counting; his fellow Panther, Wallace, died of terminal cancer after forty-plus years in solitary, three days after his conviction was overturned. And still there are those on the FBI ‘Most Wanted list’ like Assata Shakur – such is the fate of those who were not either shot down, murdered in prison like George Jackson in Soledad or ultimately bought up, like Eldridge Cleaver. This is how Carmichael and Hamilton put it: ‘The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: before a group can enter the open society, it must first close its ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively in a pluralistic society.’ ¹

And for solidarity to work, you must have what we would now call a metanarrative – but then we called an analysis – a key for understanding the fundamentals of what drove the way society, what drove the way power, wealth, class, oppression and injustice were organised – and how to change it. Note, too, the difference in our terminology today – how distanced a word is metanarrative, with its implication of academic detachment in the Greek prefix ‘meta’. Only an elite education will enable you to bandy about a term like ‘meta’, as one to the manner born. And then what a neutral word is ‘narrative’. A narrative, a story, just is, it doesn’t lead anywhere but is its own justification. One tale is as good as another. But an analysis carries a structural implication, and structures, once understood, can be transformed.

So still, today, the radical proponents of Black Power, who wanted revolutionary change in the structure of US society, have never been forgiven.

Just as the people who waged the very first black revolution in the island of San Domingo, in the wake of the French Revolution, to gain its freedom in 1801 under Toussaint l’Ouverture, and change the global pecking order, have, to this day, never been truly forgiven for their presumption. Witness the centuries of purgatory to which Haiti has been condemned – beginning with the fear of the new American republic, ostensibly founded on the doctrine of the equal rights of man, that the notion of a black revolution could adversely affect the slave-owning interests of the Southern states. Toussaint himself, attempting to negotiate a peace with the equally liberty-loving French, was tricked, seized and taken into captivity where he died. In a pattern whose essentials have repeated themselves through history, that later champion of Haiti’s people, the liberation theologian and elected President, Aristide, was similarly ousted from power by orchestrated coups d’etat. Echoes of those earlier, world-shattering events sound faintly in the dramas of the nineteenth century, more often as smug and scurrilous burlesque, ridiculing the conjunction of ‘black’ and ‘liberty’, than as melodrama. There was at least one, though: The Death of Christophe King of Haiti by Amherst, long thought lost but rediscovered in the Harvard collection, performed by Ira Aldridge, the great black American-born actor of the period.

But however epochal that first Haitian revolution was, as an insurrection, it was not a completely isolated event. Although I was aware, before I began researching my book, of just how crucial slavery had been in inscribing, into the DNA of white, western, colonising societies, the racism that justified it and legitimated its profitability, I was unprepared for the scale of the continuing revolts that battered against it. The Maroons in Jamaica fought the British for some eighty years till they forced the first treaty, in 1739; there were the continual, intermittent rebellions, then the massive 1831 slave revolt that was followed – only two years later – by slavery’s ending. Even less was I prepared for just how important slavery, and the racial hierarchy it engendered, were for British culture in the widest sense. That was what underlay, made seem natural, the presence of all those black characters in the popular theatre of the nineteenth century. And was the reason, by and large, for their increasing subservience and comedic simplicity (not to say stupidity), as the century wore on.

For while the radical, challenging spirit of the late eighteenth century, where the metanarrative of Reason, Enlightenment and the Rights of Man in Britain met political repression head on; where the beginnings of the mass movement to abolish slavery met, head on, that trade’s increase in power and profitability; where all this ferment allowed, for a time, the creation of black protagonists who had personal stature, who were not ciphers, and who had just grievances, such a state of affairs gradually degraded. It was worn down, perhaps, by a smug cultural superiority that had ‘abolished’ the slave trade and finally ‘abolished’ slavery, so there was no need to feel bad about it anymore. And it was worn down in part at least by the onslaught of a new and aggressively demeaning stereotype in the person of Jim Crow.

Dr Johnson, famously, once raised a toast, among some ‘grave men of Oxford’ to the ‘next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies’; ² around two centuries later, again in Oxford, came one of the most dynamic proponents of Black liberation and Black power, Malcolm X, to debate the proposition that ‘Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.’ This is what he said:

Anytime you live in a society supposedly based upon law and it doesn’t enforce its own laws because the color of a man’s skin happens to be wrong, then I say those people are justified to resort to any means necessary to bring about justice when the government can’t give them justice. ³

Two centuries, and this was still a question that needed to be argued.

Two and a half centuries, and a young man can still be shot down by the state, for the crime of walking while being black.

That is the power of racialised thinking; that is how endemically structured it is into western societies. And that was what, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the confluence of Black Power and colonial liberation movements challenged. One of those areas of challenge and change was the Institute in which I worked, the Institute of Race Relations, which, under the aegis of A. Sivanandan, through its staff and members transformed itself from a mouthpiece for the establishment, under the control of big business, to help it ‘manage’ race relations and ‘digest’ newly arrived immigrants, to a platform for those who experienced racism day in, day out: the young people harassed by the police, the children denied proper education, the families denied access to housing, the workers discriminated against and robbed of their rights, those attacked and beaten on the streets. The IRR’s was, in its way, one of the 1970s revolutions that succeeded. Nor is this a struggle that is in any way over – the targets may be different, but the fundamentals are the same: ‘Racism’, in Sivanandan’s words, ‘does not stay still; it changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function – with changes in the economy, the social structure, the system and … the challenges, the resistances to that system.’ ⁴

It was that ongoing, but mind-blowing, experience that changed almost everything I naively thought I understood about the basic fairness and decency of British society and which led me, some thirty years later – I was always a slow developer – to want to understand, in some small way, how it was that we moved from Johnson’s trenchancy in the 1770s to, roughly one century later, a crude jingoism and an even cruder stereotype of black people as not just ‘inferior’ human beings, but as a separate species, almost. Not just the so-called ‘scientific’ racism (which of course was anything but) but the kinds of beliefs and ideas that lay at the bedrock of popular culture. Hence my research. But what I also found when I started simply trawling through the often bizarre, sometimes powerful, and occasionally moving plethora of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dramas, that hastily written, now forgotten fodder of popular entertainment, were counter-currents. There were here, too, points of opposition to the prevailing racialised consensus.

Although Irish dramatists and stage people did not figure in my book, it is possible to read into some of the Irish stage presence in the nineteenth century oppositional currents; for example, the singing of ‘The Wearing of the Green’ in Boucicault’s Arrah na Pogue was banned by the Lord Chamberlain. Or there was the way in which the much loved Irish actor Tyrone Power subtly played with the comic stereotype of the Irish so as to subvert it – for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear that the garrulous wordplay of his stock character goes well over the top in his encounters with English authority, but is rather shrewder and pithier in his encounters with his fellow Irish. And then there were those dramas set in a gothically romantic Ireland that dealt more directly with Irish resistance – like Falconer’s Peep o’ Day, where the structure and constraints of melodramatic form and what was deemed publicly acceptable strained the play’s resolution to its limits.

And is it too fanciful to read such currents of opposition into the speeches and scenarios inserted into run of the mill dramas that expressed the monumental injustice of slavery and spoke of a longed for future freedom? But of course, outstanding in this regard was the way in which the great Black American actor Ira Aldridge pursued his career in England and continental Europe. He kept alive in the repertoire those earlier dramas in which black protagonists had both agency and justification for their acts; early in his career he played Christophe, the Haitian leader, and was lampooned for it by the parodists. But, significantly, in 1827 he was officially honoured by Haiti’s republican government as ‘the first man of colour of the theatre’. ⁵ He commissioned a rewrite of Titus Andronicus (no less!) in which Aaron was a far more sympathetic a figure; his Shylock expressed the agony of the outcast, for, in the words of one Austrian Jewish theatre critic ‘he [understood] like no other how to portray the full bitterness that the Jew feels … [the] feeling of belonging to a spurned race [weighed] heavily on the admirable man’. ⁶ On occasion he addressed audiences directly – with the hope that the day might come when no distinctions of colour would be made. And, in Ireland, scene of the most enduring resistance to England’s colonial rule, he played the revolutionary black hero, Dred, in a stage adaptation of Beecher Stowe’s most radical novel, to great applause. He played it endued with an ‘enthusiasm, uncommon even to himself’, ⁷ though the play itself was considered highly flawed, not least in the exalted biblical language that Dred habitually uses. Yet a black man with a gun seen shooting down his would-be enslavers would surely have carried an impact that outstripped some of the drama’s obvious failings.

You will of course have gathered by now that my interest in this area is not that of a theoretician: I am uncomfortable communicating in terms of ‘the other’; it is an abstracted, reified language that distances me and sets me apart from the human experience that it purports to uncover; I find puzzling, and almost alien, the separation of ‘the body’ from the human being that it is; a type of terminology that, in essence, whatever its pristine philosophical intention, seems like nothing so much as the early desert fathers’ distinction between the ‘soul’ (to be saved) and the body (to be scourged) – a distinction that has bedevilled western morality to this day. And the ‘subaltern’ will always conjure up in the first instance – so unreconstructed am I – a dashing young fellow in tight trousers doing deeds of bravery in the novels of Rider Haggard and R. M. Ballantyne. Of course, I realise that we need to develop new ways of understanding, and codifying that understanding, though for me the density and schematic nature of such interpretation often mystifies as much as it illuminates. I know that we need technical language sometimes to analyse closely and convey meaning exactly; to attempt to comprehend in the round the full import and impact of that cultural past that has furnished our present; that past so tantalisingly close, yet so unknowable; a past that has, to use Walter Rodney’s coinage, so underdeveloped our imaginations. But our business is the humanities; we need, as well as academic precision, to feel the weight and heft of words; to develop an empathy of the imagination – what Keats called the holiness of the heart’s affection and the truth of the imagination. We need to be aware, when we use specialist, set-apart terminologies, that we are talking, albeit at several removes, about the fearless maroon rebel Jack Mansong, aka Three finger’d Jack, who was savagely decapitated in pantomime and melodrama over and over in our period. And that there is a history in the struggle for liberty that connects him to Samuel Sharpe, sentenced to death as one of the leaders of the major 1831 insurrection in Jamaica, whose last words were ‘I would rather die on yonder gallows than live in slavery’. It is a history that comes down to our present day, through Assata Shakur, shot by police and framed for murder, forever an exile; through Jonathan Jackson, brother of George, who at the age of 17, entered the San Marin Courthouse, armed, to free the Soledad Brothers, with the words ‘Gentlemen, I’m taking over now’, and was shot dead. ⁸

The shadow of that slavery, abolished so long, long ago, still falls on us in ways we scarcely see.