Decolonising History Project: Interview with Dr Richard Drayton (1/2)
Poster design courtesy of Jeanet Alessandra Tapia Huertas for KCL Latin American Society
Professor Richard Drayton was interviewed on the 24th of June by our Cultural and Outreach Officer Emily Arama Sánchez, as part of a Decolonising History Project organised by the King’s College London History Department. This project was coordinated by Professor Laura Gowing and Decolonise KCL Society President, Lauren Fernandes.
Dr Drayton was born in Guyana and grew up in Barbados, where he went to school at Harrison College. He left the Caribbean as a Barbados Scholar to Harvard University, going then to Yale, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Paul Kennedy and Frank Turner. He also spent two years as a graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford as the Commonwealth Caribbean Rhodes Scholar. In 1992 he first came to Cambridge as a Research Fellow of St Catharine's College, moving back to Oxford in 1994 to be Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lincoln College. After 1998, he was Associate Professor of British History at the University of Virginia. In 2001, he returned to Cambridge as University Lecturer in Imperial and extra-European History since 1500, and as Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Corpus Christi College. In 2002 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. He was Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University in Spring 2009. He came to King's as Rhodes Professor in 2009.
Dr Drayton’s interview analyses the complex nature of decolonisation in Latin America; examining how it continues to affect current politics and how we approach historical teaching.
This is Part Two of a three-part collaborative series.
Click here to read the next part of our interview with Professor Richard Drayton. For our Part One interview with Dr Francisco Bethencourt, click here.
Thank you for providing this interview Dr Drayton. How would you describe decolonisation?
Well decolonisation, first, is a historical problem: the dissolution of the European empires. C. 1918 or even c.1939, the world was completely dominated by Europeans and their diasporas. In 1939, the only country in Africa that had some sort of notional independence was Liberia, which was effectively an American protectorate. Asia was under European domination – with the exception of Japan and somewhat of China and somewhat of Siam. So, decolonisation as a classical problem is looking at that 20th century story of how countries around the world moved towards political independence. One may add to that earlier or later imperial crises, such as the eighteenth-century decolonisations that produced the United States and the independent states of Latin America and, if you want to, you can also talk about the decolonisation of the USSR – although I do not consider that to be quite a persuasive example.
Apart from this classical political historical problem of decolonisation, there is the larger subject of how the forms of economies, cultures, and societies – which were organised by the European empires as a system of domination and exploitation – are to be transformed, destroyed, dismantled, and revised to produce a world in which human beings, wherever they are, whatever their cast of body or language or mind, shall have equal capacities to grow and to flourish. This larger programme of decolonisation is a much more difficult task than change of political sovereignty. Decolonisation in this larger sense becomes a question of addressing the ways in which forms of inequality which were constructed by the European empires can be dismantled.
“This larger programme of decolonisation is a much more difficult task than change of political sovereignty.”
And how do you think they can be dismantled?
Well, I think that they can be dismantled through forms of self-help and self-organisation at the various – what were once – peripheries of the system. There is a lot of reorganisation that has to be done by people in the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Pacific about their own histories and their own relationship to landscape, culture, the past and also to their economic life. How do they live in the home? The root of the term ‘economy’ is the Greek word ‘oikos’ – the home. How do we change how we live in 'the home' in all of these places? So that is one important dimension. The other obviously comes from the centre. How is it that those of us who live in societies in the Global North – that is to say in the societies constructed in a particular location of privilege relative to the Global South – how do we attack these structures of inequality? How do we change the way in which we organise, not just our collective life but also how we think, how we feel and how we understand things? Because the problem really is that the colonial order has a very long life in terms of its cultural and psychological legacies.
In your opinion, has the current curriculum been politicised towards a Eurocentric perspective? If so, does this start at King’s or is this established in preliminary education that leads to several students’ expertise being based on colonised teaching?
The problem is a very fundamental and deep one. The forms of knowledge which make sense of the world and of the varieties of human cultures emerged in the post-1500 period in connection to the European empires. Empires organised not only political or economic inequality, but also an ontological inequality, an embodied inequality, in which people who were of dark skin were assumed only fit to be 'hewers of wood and drawers of water' – that is to say – fit for manual labour, and less fully human than the new global master class. The ways in which people organised the knowledge of the world were constituted through European norms. So, for example, the whole idea of Africa is constructed to a considerable extent from the outside, it is outsiders who imagine Africa as a single thing and this idea comes to be reprocessed by diasporic Africans in the Americas and then reimported into Africa. It’s not just at that level of reference however that we need to look, so many our intellectual weights and measures, and terms of trade, the way in which we think about time, the way in which we think about the relationship between people and things – these have constituted through European cultural norms to a considerable extent. So, in the midst of political decolonisation, we have ways of knowing and feeling which remain very much centred on this imperial experience and reproducing it a long time after the structures of formal empire have ended. So we certainly have, in the way in which we organise our teaching here at King’s and the way in which we organise our curriculum, considerable legacies of that imperial period. But in that we are not alone. It is a systemic problem. Here and elsewhere we may ask: Who are the people who are in the teaching staff? What has their education been? What do they understand or know in a first-hand sense? What is their relationship to places outside of Europe and to historical actors, agents and sources from outside of Europe? For most historians, and I am not singling out my colleagues here, but across all British universities, I would think that most of them have been constituted and formed within a national, that is to say British and European perspective.
“It is outsiders who imagine Africa as a single thing and this idea comes to be reprocessed by diasporic Africans in the Americas and then reimported into Africa.”
How do you think colonisation has shaped the relationship between Latin America and Africa, and how does the hypersexualisation of people from both of these areas shape how are they represented in history?
Well, those are two big questions which I’ll treat slightly separately.
I think that one of the key facts is that for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the relations between Latin America and Africa were often mediated by the global north. So when Aimé Césaire from Martinique meets Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal, where do they meet? They meet in Paris. When George Padmore from Trinidad meets Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana, they meet in the United States. These kinds of mediations continue today with now the United States playing this really critical role for Latin America. So even Latin Americans themselves often will encounter each other in Miami. To get from one part of Latin America and the Caribbean to another, you often have to fly through Miami, sometimes Panama, and this is a symbol of the ways in which the mediation remains very much centred around the global north. Now add to that, the fact that what was constructed in the colonial period – that is to say from 1600 onwards in Latin America – is an order in which it was assumed that those with white skins were more civilised, those who were Indios or were of African origin were considered to be less civilised, more backward, less intellectually able, less capable of self-governance, less deserving the right of self-government and even though Latin America is a profoundly indigenous and African continent in terms of its origins, what was internalised within Latin America was a contempt for Africa and a contempt for these kinds of connections. Such has taken generations to be challenged and is often operated in the midst of profound cultural erasures. So, for example, we know that one quarter of the population of Buenos Aires in 1825 was of African origin, but Argentinians in the 20th century constructed themselves as an exclusively European nation, creating a fiction of themselves as white people on the other side of the ocean. Well of course we can see in places like Bolsonaro’s Brazil how this politics of race becomes the basis of political coalitions which operate with a contempt towards their own darker-skinned fellow citizens and indeed to those parts of the world like Africa in which the vast majority of people are people with black skin.
I think that the hypersexualisation is associated with a way in which people from outside of Europe were imagined to be close to the earth and dominated by the body vs Europeans who constructed themselves as being essentially objects of the mind and as capable of reason. So, this particular opposition between the rational mind and the body comes to be organised as part of ideas of race from as early as the 17th and 18th century.
So let me just get an image to show you:
Frontispiz des Werks Index Nominum Plantarum Universalis von Christian Mentzel
R. van Langerfelt
So, here’s a classic image in a book about plants, Christian Menzel's Index Nominum Plantarum of 1697. We have Europe presiding over the kingdom of plants with the crown and with the Sceptor of Reason and with a finger pointing, indicating, naming. We have here, on the right-hand side, Asia who is dressed in flowing oriental robes, elaborately dressed. On the left-hand side, we have America who is naked except for a loincloth over his genitals, holding tobacco leaves but notice the entirely naked body. And below, on the ground, close to the earth, we have Africa, represented as an idle and voluptuous woman who is wholly naked with a plant vaguely over her bosom. So, in an image like that, you have in a nutshell, the ways in which a particular way of imagining people who lived in other parts of the world as having more or less reason, more or less capacity for self-governance is linked to the body. The sexualisation therefore of people of African origin has a very long history and it’s connected to the structures of European self-repression because what was projected onto the African was a kind of closeness to nature and to the body, whereas Europeans constructed themselves as being alienated from nature and strange to the body. And so, there is a peculiar desire in the midst of this projection, which in some ways is flattering because it makes you into the intelligent rational one, but leaves the rational wanting the carnal. There’s a desire for the other which leads to this kind of projected hypersexualisation. So, the profound cultural division of labour of mankind was linked to forms of racialised imaginaries.
“Ways in which a particular way of imagining people who lived in other parts of the world as having more or less reason, more or less capacity for self-governance is linked to the body.”
What is your take on the shared connections between the hypersexualisation of African and Latin American bodies?
Hypersexualisation occurs in cultural constructions of Africans and Latin Americans, and also of Asians, in particular Asian women. This has to be connected to another dimension which is that the forms of unequal distribution of wealth and social power, which are linked to race, are also linked to gender, the two things are entangled and what this means is that people who are darker of skin will tend to be aggregately (although there are many exceptions) poorer than people who are whiter. So therefore, apart from this question of imaginaries, Madonna-Whore, repressions and so on, there is also the fact that there is a capacity to command, to purchase or compel or to bribe or to seduce those who are weaker. So, there’s a conflation I think of gender, social class, race and unequal rights of consent over sexual relationships which can organise this hypersexualisation.
Based on your experience, what is most striking to you about notions of decolonisation in Latin America as opposed to the rest of the world?
Well, I think the critical thing for Latin America and especially for the Caribbean is that these are parts of the world in which the vast majority of the preconquest population was either exterminated or displaced or marginalised. Now of course there are many exceptions to this. I mean one only has to go to Guatemala or parts of Ecuador or Peru or Bolivia to know that there are substantial indigenous populations which are still present and still maintain a distinct cultural identity. The key fact then is that for Latin America and the Caribbean, as distinct say from Asia or Africa, the people who are demographically dominant in the postcolonial situation are mostly the products of people who migrated during the period of European colonial domination, or in a world organised by European domination. So, the majority of the population is imported in that sense. What is distinct about decolonisation in Latin America and the Caribbean is it is compelled to address this problem of novelty and metissage. Leading in this are thinkers in the Caribbean. I think in particular of José Martí and one of his most famous essays “Nuestra America”. Martí was a Cuban poet, intellectual and political figure, who wrote some of the most important examinations of the cultural, spiritual and political predicament of Latin America. The most important claim which Martí makes is that what distinguishes our people is that characteristic of mixture. So essentially decolonisation in the Caribbean and Latin America is very much linked to an assertion of the hybridity, of the mixed, metisse, mestizo character of people of the Caribbean and Latin America in which there is no possibility of an ‘embranquecimento’, a whitening, as some racist Brazilians for example projected in the early Twentieth century. The Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, very much in the tradition of Martí, describes the making of the Cuban people in his poem “Son Number 6” ['Son' is the name of a popular Cuban song and dance form of the early 20th century], with the percussive lines:
Santa Maria y uno mandado,
todo mezclado;
todo mezclado; Santa Maria,
San Berenito, todo mezclado,
todo mezclado, San Berenito,
San Berenito, Santa Maria,
Santa Maria, San Berenito,
¡todo mezclado!
Santa Maria being Colombus's ship, the point of departure of 'white' Cuban presence, and San Berenito, the first Slave Ship. And the poem climaxes where he says:
"come out Mulatto / loosen your shoe / tell the White Man he’s not going anywhere.
From here, nobody can cut themselves off / listen and don’t stop / drink and don’t stop / eat and don’t stop / live and don’t stop / for the Son that belongs to everyone is not going to stop!"
Salga el mulato,
suelte el zapato,
diganle al blanco que no se va. .
De aqui no hay nadie que se separe; mire y no pare,
oiga y no pare,
beba y no pare,
coma y no pare,
viva y no pare,
¡que el son de todos no va a parar!
“What is mine is yours, what is yours is mine.
All the blood forms one river.”
lo mío es tuyo,
lo tuyo es mío;
toda la sangre
formando un río
So, the importance of this particular claim, of Decolonisation as a point of departure for a new kind of human commuity, is one of the great contributions of the Americas to the whole question of decolonisation. It’s an assertion of the possibilities, the civilisational and humane possibilities of the Americas as a space in which all of the ancestorial communities of mankind are brought into communication, into a kind of synergy. The Guyanese novelist Sir Wilson Harris has a dialogue in one of his novels The Secret Ladder, in which he has one characters realise for the first time that representatives of every part of the world had come to Guyana and he turns and says to his friend - 'we are the first generation who can inhabit the ancestorial home'. So, in this particular way of seeing the situation of the Americas and the Caribbean, this tragic and violent history of genocide and the importation of people under conditions of brutal inequality has actually created a civilisational humane possibility. A possibility for a kind of 'cross-cultural imagination' in Wilson Harris’ language.
So, I think that to me is a distinctive characteristic of what the New World has brought to thinking of decolonisation. The problem of thinking about the Creole, the transcultural.
Across several Latin American countries, we see that some particular legacies of colonialism are colourism, exaggerated gender archetypes, and the demonisation of black religions. Why do you think this is, how do you think this has developed and what do you see as the steps to decolonise these issues?
Well to connect to some things I said earlier, the kinds of society and culture which exists in the Americas was constructed in the midst of a system of violent European conquest and domination which involved the genocide, the displacement and the enslavement of indigenous people, with many Europeans arriving too under conditions of coercion, as prisoners or indentured labour, and then large numbers of African enslaved people. This space of violence was connected to the creation of a regime of inequality which is visible in the ownership of land and in the control of social power. So, it is true across the Americas that people who are light of skin are more likely to own property than those who are dark of skin. Those who are light of skin are more likely to be in positions of leadership and of visibility in these societies, those who are darker in skin are more likely to be in positions of subordinacy and invisibility in terms of the structures of power and normal life.
So that what we describe as colourism, which is to say the forms of distinct status difference which follow from the shade of skin, from the quality of hair, from the shape of the nose; all of these signals which indicate more or less European admixture to the ancestry of a particular individual. These have become signs of status. Or to put it the other way, they become signs of safety because to have a dark skin, add to that to be a man, would be considered to be dangerous, potentially a source of brutal violence of some kind. So there have been and continue to be all sorts of advantages which occur in the space of the labour market, in terms of borrowing money, and of course in the intimate space of family life where choices are made about who, among you sexual partners, one marries and has legitimate children with. So advantages are derived by people who are lighter of skin relative to those who are darker of skin, but these advantages, the products of structural violence, are not without their costs. The late Stuart Hall, the great Jamaican sociologist and political thinker, once wrote about his sister who fell in love with a man who was substantially darker than her and she was compelled by her family or strongly pressured to break up that relationship. She broke up the relationship and she then had a succession of nervous breakdowns and never recovered her own psychological equilibrium. Stuart's family story exposes to us how the violence of colourism operates sometimes on the privileged as much as on those who are on the underside of the equation.
The same applies when looking at gender archetypes and the demonisation of black religions. Black religions were associated with some kind of vulgar embodied character, a kind of potential proximity to forms of satanic or demonic worships. So that there is at the moment a very interesting struggle in Latin America particularly among the new Protestant churches to demonise forms of Africanised worship like Candomblé in Brazil and to peel Candomblé supporters away from what Evangelical Protestants designate as being in somehow a kind of form of demonic spirit worship. With gender archetypes, once again we’ve got ways in which gender, class and race are entangled so that the physicality of African women, of black women has had a perverse double character in terms of racist imaginaries. On the one hand there has been as I described earlier, this current of desire, which is linked to that hypersexualisation, but on the other hand in exactly the opposite direction there is almost a denial of the femininity of these people because they are constituted therefore as possessors of bodies which have been valued as not as beautiful as more Europeanised bodies. So, there has been the peculiar kind of double life of the interactions of race and gender.
What do we do about this? Again, I go back to thinking about the ways in which there has to be struggles for self-emancipation and for group emancipation from below as much as there needs to be forms of ideological struggles from the centre looking out.
“Black religions were associated with some kind of vulgar embodied character, a kind of potential proximity to forms of satanic or demonic worships.”
To what extent is the current political dysphoria in many Latin American countries a product of colonisation? Would a greater understanding of colonisation yield different results?
Well, I think my answer to that really would be to repeat some things I said before to the extent that it’s quite clear that the politics of the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil are linked to the politics of racism and the ways in which these have been internalised by Brazilians. Its similarly clear on the other hand that the emergence of an emancipatory politics in places like Bolivia and most recently in Peru is linked to an assertion, a demand by the indigenous and by black Bolivians and Peruvians for a kind of equality of status and participation in the nation state. So, I think that the colonisation continues to cast a very strong shadow on the ways in which people imagine themselves and live together and continues to organise much of the politics.
Selected publications:
Material Conditions and Ideas in Global History
Drayton, R. & Motadel, D., 7 Dec 2020, (Accepted/In press) In: British Journal of Sociology. 15 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review
Commonwealth History From Below?: Caribbean national, federal and Pan-African renegotiations of the Empire project, c. 1880- 1950
Drayton, R., 2 Jul 2020, Commonwealth history in the twenty-first century. Dubow, S. & Drayton, R. (eds.). London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 41-60 21 p. (Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Studies Series). Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding - Chapter - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41788-8_3
Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century
Drayton, R. H. (ed.) & Dubow, S. (ed.), 1 Jul 2020, Palgrave Macmillan. (Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Studies) Research output: Book/Report - Book - peer-review
Race, Culture and Class: European Hegemony and Global Class Formation, c. 1800-1950
Drayton, R. H., 3 Dec 2019, The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire.Dejung, C., Osterhammel, J. & Motadel, D. (eds.). Princeton: Princeton University Press Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding - Chapter - peer-review
Rhodes must not fall? Statues, Post-colonial 'Heritage' and Temporality
Drayton, R., 25 Oct 2019, In: Third Text. 33, 4-5, p. 651-666 16 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1653073
Biggar vs Little Britain: God, War, Union, Brexit and Empire in Twenty-first century Conservative ideology
Drayton, R. H., 25 Jul 2019, Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain . Ward, S. & Rasch, A. (eds.). London: Bloomsbury, p. 143-155 12 p. Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding - Chapter - peer-review
Discussion: The futures of global history
Drayton, R. & Motadel, D., 1 Mar 2018, In: Journal Of Global History. 13, 1, p. 1-21 21 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022817000262
Federal utopias and the realities of imperial power
Drayton, R., 1 Aug 2017, In: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 37, 2, p. 401-406Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-4133001
The Commonwealth in the 21st Century
Drayton, R., 2 Jan 2016, In: The Round Table: the commonwealth journal of international affairs. 105, 1, p. 21-277 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1080/00358533.2015.1126964
Expertise:
Professor Richard Drayton is Senior Research Associate of the Centre for World Environmental History of the University of Sussex. He was a member of the Academic Advisory Committee on the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. With Megan Vaughan he edits the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series of Palgrave-Macmillan and he is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the American Historical Association and the Association of Caribbean Historians. He served as External Examiner for the University of Bristol (2007-10). He is a co-convenor of the Imperial and World History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research.
Public Engagement:
Dr Drayton believes that it is important for historians to communicate with the wider public, and in particular to speak up where their work on the past has relevance to the present. He has appeared on BBC radio on 'Nightwaves' and 'In Our Time', has participated in public debates on Britain's imperial past and present, and has published op/ed pieces in the Guardian (including An Ethical Blank Cheque and Africa and the wealth of the West).
He has been invited to give many distinguished lectures including “Hybrid time: The Incomplete Victories of the Present Over the Past”, Throckmorton Lecture at Lewis and Clark College (2007); ‘The Problem of the Hero in Caribbean History’, 21st Elsa Goveia Lecture, University of the West Indies (2004); and ‘What happens when two ways of knowing meet?’, the Elizabeth T. Kennan Lecture at Mount Holyoke College (2003)
Research interests and PhD supervision:
After c. 1500 European imperial systems began to link together the human communities around the Atlantic basin, and ultimately in the Indian Ocean and Pacific regions, into one world society. This was a complex process, mediated by extraordinary violence, which reached its culmination c. 1750-1900, when new technologies allowed the command and exploitation of continental interiors. Its product was modern Europe and its postcolonial diasporic extensions in North America and Australasia, and their still unequal relationship with modern Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Professor Drayton’s research addresses this world historical process from several directions. In his earlier work he looked at the interactions of science, Christianity, political economy, and British expansion, and the emergence in the European Enlightenment of myths of Empires as engines of development and universal improvement. One dimension of this, he argued, was the rise of the idea of ‘scientific’ enlightened government in eighteenth-century France, and of the influence of this on British domestic and colonial ideas of enlightened reform after c. 1780, and in particular on the colonial patronage of science. Professor Drayton would welcome applications from research students interested in working on topics relating to any aspect of the history of any European empire, or on the imperial experience of any region of the world, including Europe itself. He is comfortable supervising research in any period of modern history, and with sources and historiography in any major European language.