Race and the Totalitarian Century by Vaughn Rasberry

Author:Vaughn Rasberry [Rasberry, Vaughn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780674971080
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

This kind of landscape “was a fairly common sight in Africa.” In a letter home, Murray writes that any traveler to Ghana will be struck by “the turmoil of a country trying in one generation to leap over several centuries of painfully evolved human development. One also has the feeling at times of looking at the entire range of problems encountered in human history from the beginnings of the human race to the mid-twentieth century.”50 The temporality invoked here epitomizes the unmistakably historicist tone adopted by many black American sojourners to independent Africa.

No one views “ ‘late capitalism’ as a system whose driving engine may be in the third world,” writes Dipesh Chakrabarty, “though its impact on the rest of the globe is never denied.”51 How did African Americans in Ghana comprehend and represent this impact? Though Richard Wright also conjured imagery of bodies and landscapes disfigured by poverty, his travel writings on Ghana tend to situate the economic realities of West Africa within the paradigm of what is called uneven development, a product of the convergence of colonialism and global capitalism. If Wright’s work shows how capitalism assumes astonishing forms in the Third World, Murray’s reflections naturalize the distressing socioeconomic situation she encounters.

Murray was coauthor of an important text on Ghana’s constitution and government, but the West African experience depicted in her autobiography reaffirms her commitment to U.S. liberal democracy and the pursuit of African American citizenship, while diminishing any identification with Africa she might have felt before arriving in Accra. “America is ‘home’ to me, however alienated or disinherited I have felt at times.” Murray drew on the resources of her own family history, one irrevocably tied to U.S. national history, as opposed to what she perceived as an imagined kinship with Africa. “I discover that without knowledge of personal antecedents the African past exists in a great vacuum. I haven’t the slightest notion of who my particular ancestors were, what region or tribe they came from, whether they were traders, fisherfolk, herdspeople, or farmers, what their customs were or what language they spoke. There is no African village to which I can make a sentimental journey.”52 She finds herself “unable to conjure up some vicarious identity and [I] can do little more than relate to the people I meet on the basis of our common humanity.”

For Graham, on the other hand, a combination of cultural imagination, entrepreneurship, and powerful international alliances sufficed to instantiate a workable, if not utopian, modernity on the continent. Like Du Bois, Graham viewed liberal democracy’s codification of individual and political liberties (freedom of expression, of assembly, of the press) as an unnecessary ingredient in this version of postcolonial modernity. What mattered was that other democratic and populist elements prevailed: mass literacy and education, economic enfranchisement of the poor, and modernization of village life. By all accounts, Graham labored indefatigably to inaugurate Ghana Television as both a mass pedagogical tool for the nation and a beacon of Afro-Asian partnership in practice.53 Yet Nkrumah’s

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