“No!” to Revolutionary Romance

Jan 31, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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It would appear that my use of the term “narrative of revolutionary romance” has led to some misunderstanding, which can be discerned in the debate on the legacy of Dr Walter Rodney.
Most of the interlocutors have seized on the word “romance” and read its modern, everyday usage into the phrase to suggest notions of sentimentality, a visionary or idealistic lack of reality and in its performative sense, adventurism. This is unfortunate: as I emphasised, Dr Rodney was no adventurer.
The term takes its history from three interconnected strands. The “romance” component is taken from the artistic and philosophical movement – Romanticism – that arose in the last quarter of the 18th century.
Reacting against the rationalistic premises of the preceding “age of enlightenment”, the movement privileged the power of the imagination which inaugurated a whole new way of viewing “the individual” and “freedom”.
Rousseau, who straddled both ages, declared the centrality of the individual and that ‘man was born free but everywhere was in chains”. While its heyday peaked in the next half century, its effects linger very powerfully into the present, whether one wants to define that present as “post modern” or “post colonial”.
The Romantic narrative was one of self-identification, including a hero’s triumph over evil.
It was not coincidental that the “Age of Romanticism” coincided with the “Age of Revolution”: the American, the French and the Industrial revolutions all date from this era. Both were reactions to the massive underlying social changes in Europe and the world. Slavery by then had become entrenched in the Americas and the Caribbean and, as Orlando Patterson has pointed out, was the antinomy that made the modern notion of “freedom” possible.
In 1770, the Abbe Raynal had published a seminal multivolume anti-slavery work that called for “a new Spartacus” to “raise the banner of liberty” and lead the slaves to overthrow their masters.
According to CLR James, this was the work that inspired Toussaint L’Ouverture to join the Revolution in Haiti. The leading lights of Romanticism were all heavily influenced by the French Revolution and led to what Bernard Yack (1986) would call a new normative “longing for total revolution”. The “revolution” was not to simply remove the old external fetters but to literally change the nature of man.
What was new was not only oppression being conceived at an individual level – but the conception of a new order being imagined where the forces of oppression would be forever absent.
Inspired by the example of the French Revolution, revolutionary violence would be the tool to remove the forces of oppression – whether of governments stifling the bourgeoisie; planters subjugating new world slaves or later capitalists keeping the proletariat in fetters – and teleologically guarantee nirvana or utopia. And thus was initiated the narrative of revolutionary romance.
Jules Michelet’s 1847-1856 “History of the French Revolution” is the pioneer effort and emblematic as Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” a century later. As I pointed out earlier, David Scott offered its contours: “It typically begins with a dark age of oppression and domination.
This is followed by the emergence of the great struggle against that oppression and domination, and the gradual building of that struggle as it goes through ups and downs, temporary breakthroughs and set-backs, but moving steadily and assuredly toward the final overcoming, the final emancipation.”
This was the narrative in which all the anti-colonial leaders (such as Jagan and Burnham) and most of those that followed (such as Rodney) conceived and executed their strategies for change.
My object in raising the issue was not to determine who was “right or wrong” but whether the strategies were applicable for our present problem-space and if not what might be possible alternatives.
(Incidentally, some have missed the point that James’ criticism of Rodney was not about his revolutionary strategy per se, but about his understanding of one essential component of it – the question of power, as the Peeper pointed out.).
The narrative itself, I suggested, may have to be changed; not only because our problem-spaces have changed but because we have the benefit of hindsight.
As Yack pointed out, while the disgruntlement with present circumstances may be universal, the specific responses are contoured by the specific vocabularies and narratives in which those dissatisfactions are conceptualised and described.
Hence my caution to the provocateurs in our midst.
In his magisterial opus, “Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe” Hayden White demonstrated how history is literally “made” by historians/analysts (hereafter “historian”) since that time. From the chronicle of events, the historian answers the questions of “how, when, why”, by arranging the events in a particular sequence, by deciding what to include and exclude and what to emphasise or deemphasise.
He achieves these objectives through the plot he selects, his argument or what history is meant to do, his ideological orientation and the deep poetic structure he emphasises.
I want to focus, as I did before on the historian’s “emplotment” of the events and his/her ideology i.e. premises about life, how the past affects the present and how we ought to act in the present to alter the future.
White showed that whether consciously or unconsciously, every historian focuses on one of four plots: romance, satire, comedy, or tragedy and ideologically is conservative, liberal, radical/revolutionary or anarchist.
As I suggested before, while the narrative of revolutionary romance sets “”us” against “them” into a frenzy of nihilistic Fanonian violence – not to mention teleologically promising a future that can never be delivered – Hegel’s famous interpretation of Antigone as the paradigmatic Greek tragedy might be particularly apt to our situation.
In this particular narrative, both “sides” are morally right: the conflict is not between good and evil but between “goods” on which each is making exclusive claim. Isn’t this the situation that our mutually exclusive narratives of victimhood with its facile binary oppositions have delivered us into?
Such an emplotment of our history, I am suggesting, should suggest compromise rather the than a battle of one side overcoming.
The strategy implied would be best executed within a liberal order where progression of social history is the result of changes effected by democratic norms. That would be a constructive narrative for our time, place and circumstance.

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