The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity [review] |
The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity [review]
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 3, 2013
Special Issue: Racialization and Religion: Race, culture and difference in the study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia
pages 517-518
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.737929
Robin Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies
University of Oxford
Michael J. Monahan, The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity. New York: Fordham University Press. 2011, ix + 247 pp. (paper).
This book is written by a philosopher who reworks the well-trodden ground of how we to understand race and racism. It is perhaps not too grand a claim to say that for many years US discussion about race and racism was directly or indirectly derived from Gunnar Myrdal’s formative study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). It is an indication of how far scholarship in this field has moved on that Myrdal does not even make an appearance in Monahan’s list of references. Instead he draws on three newer wellsprings of arguments—cultural studies, whiteness studies and creolization.
One of the great luminaries of cultural studies was Raymond Williams at Cambridge, became so weary of being hailed as one of the progenitors of the field that he complained, ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I’d never heard the damned word (culture)’. This is because the idea of culture is often so vague and so tantalizingly out of reach. For Monahan. cultural studies is accessed not so much through reactions and interpretations of literature (the British tradition), but through phenomenology. Phenomenology, Monahan avers, is characterized ‘first and foremost by a commitment to placing human consciousness at the forefront of philosophical investigations’ (p. 106). This gives him ‘the subject’ in the principal title of his book.
Trained in a more prosaic sociological tradition. I would have supposed that accessing the subject’ might be easier if the dramatis personae in the research were alive and able to be surveyed or at least interviewed. Monahan does not make it easy for himself by choosing, as the central characters in his research, seventeenth-century Irish servants who were indentured to masters in Barbados. The so-called ‘Redlegs’ of the Caribbean (they went also to St Vincent and the Grenadines) have rightly attracted considerable scholarly attention by fascinated historians. There were a few who were stricto sensu slaves (though Monahan denies this); most were semi-free workers who could not be sold or endowed and had to be freed after their indentures expired. They were often impoverished to the point that their…
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Tags: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Michael J. Monahan, Michael Monahan, Robin Cohen