Anxious Records: Race, Imperial Belonging, and the Black Literary

310 Pages·2013·5.39 MB·English

Anxious Records: Race, Imperial Belonging, and the Black Literary Imagination,
1900 – 1946
Victoria J. Collis
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2013
© 2013
Victoria J. Collis
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT
Anxious Records: Race, Imperial Belonging, and the Black Literary Imagination,
1900 – 1946
Victoria J. Collis
This dissertation excavates the print and archive culture of diasporic and continental Africans who
forged a community in Cape Town between 1900 and 1946. Although the writers I consider write
after the Victorian era, I use the term “black Victorian” to preserve their own political investments
in a late nineteenth-century understanding of liberal empire. With the abolition of slavery in 1834
across the British Empire and the Cape Colony’s qualified nonracial franchise of 1853, Cape
Town, and District Six in particular, took on new significance in black radicalism. By writing
periodicals, pamphlets and autobiographies, black Victorians hoped to write themselves into the
culture of empire. These recovered texts read uncannily, unsettling the construction of official
archives as well as contemporary canons of South African, African and diasporic African
literatures. By turning to the traffic of ideas between Africa and its diaspora in Cape Town, this
dissertation recovers a vision of (black) modernity that had not yet succumbed to the formulations
of anti-imperial nationalisms.
Table of Contents
Prologue. Black Modernity and Empire 1
P A R T 1, “Loss”
Chapter 1. Cape Town and African Diasporic Dreams of Utopia 37
Chapter 2. ‘Extend Hands across the Sea’:
The Race Paper and the (Im)Possibility of Building the Race in South Africa 90
P A R T 2, “Despair”
Chapter 3. Figuring in Black:
The Periodical, Trade Unionism, and Black Literature in 1920s South Africa 156
P A R T 3, “Hope”
Chapter 4. After the Revolution: ‘Making the World Safe for Heroes’ 211
Epilogue. Black Victorian Afterlives at Cape Town 266
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List of Charts, Graphs, Illustrations
2.1 Masthead, The South African Spectator, vol. 1, no. 13, May 4, 1901. Courtesy National
Library of South Africa, Cape Town Campus.
2.2 Masthead, The South African Spectator, vol. 1, no. 14, May 4, 1901. Courtesy National
Library of South Africa, Cape Town Campus.
2.3 Masthead, The South African Spectator, vol. 1, no. 28, November 23, 1901. Courtesy
National Library of South Africa, Cape Town Campus.
2.4 Masthead, The Fortnightly Spectator, vol. 1, no. 43, April 19, 1900. Courtesy National
Library of South Africa, Cape Town Campus.
3.1 Masthead, The Workers Herald, July 1923. Courtesy National Library of South Africa, Cape
Town Campus.
3.2 Masthead, The Workers Herald, May 1923. Courtesy National Library of South Africa, Cape
Town Campus.
3.3 Masthead, The Workers Herald, December 1928. Courtesy National Library of South Africa,
Cape Town Campus.
3.4 Coming Events. 1925. The Negro World.
3.5 When He Awakes. 1926.
3.6 General Hertzog’s proposed solution to Native Problem. 1926
3.7 African Trade Unionism. 1926.
3.8 Coming Events. 1927
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3.9 Within a Few Days the Union Parliament Opens. It Will Be a ‘Nativ E’ Session. 1926. The
Workers Herald.
3.10 Goal. 1926.
E.11 ‘Mr. Wooding and His Pupils.’ 1903. APO. Courtesy the National Library of South Africa,
Cape Town Campus.
iii
Acknowledgements
It is fair to say that this dissertation would not be what it is without the support of my committee:
Brent Hayes Edwards, Mamadou Diouf, Hlonipha Mokoena, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
They believed in my project and saw its potential even when I could not and pushed me to get it to
its best. They have inspired and nurtured me. If this dissertation is not as good as it should be, the
fault lies only with me. I was lucky to be at Columbia with wonderfully supportive classmates and
friends who helped me get through graduate school and finish this dissertation, volunteering to
read innumerable proposal, application, and chapter drafts: Tara Gellene, Alvan Ikoku, Sherally
Munshi, Patricia Lespinasse, and Imani Owens. Virginia Kay, Sharon Harris, and Sharon Gamble
nursed me through many administrative obstacle courses. Every university program is made (or
broken) on its administrators; I thank you for your unflagging support.
The Whiting and the Mellon ISERP fellowships gave me financial support and writing
space when I desperately needed it. They came just when I’d almost lost all hope.
My colleagues at the University of Cape Town were part of my intellectual community
while I did my research in Cape Town. Carolyn Hamilton and the Archive and Public Culture
Research Initiative gave me a forum in which I could begin sharing my project beyond my graduate
program. My time at the APC helped my project in ways I cannot articulate. My head of
department made it possible for me to finish in the first semester of my job and return for defense.
Here too, the administrative staff have never ceased to support both my work and my spirit. Thank
you Isa, Shihaam and Jill. Agnes and Cynthia made it possible for me to work while
My sisters, Tshepo Masango Chéry and Jamila Celestine Michener have shared the trials
and tribulations of mothering and dissertating. Thank you for reading drafts and transatlantic
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phone calls. Tia Diane Hutton has always been one of my rocks in times of need. Their love and
support helped push me through. Vuyolethu Keti kept me fed, laughing and focussed. Ndiyabonga
kakhulu sisi wami. Ndizokumbula-bo. In Cape Town, the Keti-Mogotlane household has been a
place of warmth and succor. Koni, thanks for always keeping me committed to my best self as a
scholar and as a human being. Jessica Rebert Chiliza, Amy Bell-Malaudzi, Maanda Malaudzi,
Lindie, Shandu, Martina Dahlmanns are other members of my Cape Town family who supported
my process.
In many ways this dissertation began over two decades as I watched Nelson Rolihlala
Mandela freed from prison in apartheid South Africa. Glued to the television screen when
Trinidad and Tobago still had only one television station, my family and I rejoiced at what felt like
our uncle’s release. In another six months, two more stations would join the fold, with cable and
satellite TV following quickly on their heels. Perhaps because he was freed before Trinidad and
Tobago jumped off the precipice of multimedia communication, but something about Mandela,
and the dream of black liberation in South Africa has always animated my intellectual curiousity.
My generation of Trinidadians still remembers where we were when the Chaka Zulu miniseries
aired. South Africa here denoted whether or not you had access to a TV. It represented a
reconnection with our ancestral African ‘roots’ as a nation. At coolers and standpipes, during
recess and lunch, we whiled away our time mulling over the scenes of that week’s installment.
(Who saw how Chaka betrayed his mother?) Those born that year and several thereafter carry our
investment in that South Africa with their names. It is not uncommon to meet Trinidadian boys
and men by the name of Shaka, or girls and women called Nandi. In what might elsewhere be a
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problematic attachment to national sentiment, I thank my nation for being what it was in my
youth. And hope you will be that kind of nation again.
I thank my parents for letting me stay up to watch both events and pushing me to discuss
them as though I were already a scholar-in-residence. You remain my best teachers and mentors.
Thank you for life; thank you for nursing us through this degree. Thank you for unpaid hours of
childcare. This dissertation is more yours than it is mine. All words seem to diminish what you’ve
given me.
To my grandparents, I thank you for the lessons learned at your feet and the struggles you
faced. If I succeed at anything it is because you persevered. To my aunts and uncles, thank you for
love and laughter. Thank you sisters and cousin sisters, brothers and cousin brothers for your
support and keeping me grounded. This could not have happened without you.
My daughter Cate braved ten transatlantic flights in two years so that I could finish my
dissertation. She came to know the ins-and-outs of dissertation production as though it were hers.
And in that way it is. One day I hope she will read the love for her woven into each line. I looked
back at Diaspora-Africa crossings to make sense of what her world will be. Yet as I write this I can
hear her saying: “Stop Mama. I don’t need your help. I can do it for myself.” I have no doubt that
she will.
Mbongiseni has walked with me every step of the way. He has read my work without
complaint, with genuine interest, sure to show me when I need to re-examine an argument. He is
a reservoir of South and southern African history. My scholarship is enriched by him; my life has
grown bigger for his arrival in it some nine years ago. Ngiyakuthanda kakhulu umkhwenyana
wami.
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For my parents,
Glenda Victoria Collis and Valentine Kenneth Collis
nomkhwenyana wami
nomtwana wethu
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