Table Of ContentLIVING CARGO
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Living Cargo
• • • •
How Black Britain Performs Its Past
Steven Blevins
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
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Excerpts from Lara in chapter 4 are reprinted courtesy of Bernardine Evaristo and Bloodaxe
Books, Northumberland, UK.
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2 520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator and employer.
21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blevins, Steven, author.
Title: Living cargo : how Black Britain performs its past / Steven Blevins.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039887 | ISBN 978-0-8166-9714-4 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9716-8 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Arts, BlackߞGreat Britainߞ21st centuryߞThemes, motives. | Arts and historyߞ
Great BritainߞHistoryߞ21st century. | BlacksߞGreat BritainߞIntellectual lifeߞ21st century. |
English literatureߞBlack authorsߞHistory and criticism.
Classification: LCC NX543 .B578 2016 | DDC 700.89/96041ߞdc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039887
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Contents
Introduction. History Unhoused: Performing the Life
of Human Bio-C argo 1
Part I. History and Human Cargo
1. Beautiful Remnants, Brutal Remains: Dwelling on the
Melancholy Archive 29
2. Living Rough: The Disposition and Dispensation
of Aleatory Life 67
Part II. Assembling Human Bio-C argo
3. Compound Fractures: Archival Constellations,
Narrative Violations 107
4 . Blood Pressures: Queer Inheritance and Intimate Affiliations 149
Part III. Exorbitant Life in an Age of Austerity
5. Bespoke History: Redressing the Past, Tailoring the Present,
Fashioning the Future 197
6. @Bristol: Dissident Publics in a Neoliberal City 243
Acknowledgments 295
Notes 297
Index 333
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• INTRODUCTION •
History Unhoused
Performing the Life of Human Bio-C argo
History is housed: in the archive and on the street; on the body and in the
home. This book is about unhousing the past; about opening up archives
and drawing history out; and about the opening out that occurs when his-
tory goes public. Living Cargo: How Black Britain Performs Its Past is also
about the social, political, and ethical demands such openings (up and
out) make on public and private lives; and about the publics and counter-
publics that are produced when history is on the move. My contention
is that when history is unhoused, when it travelsߞn arratively, visually,
performativelyߞi ts movements help bind people together, as surely as its
institutional enclosure helps keep them apart. Less abstractly, this book is
about the black public cultures of postcolonial Britain; the particular his-
torical resonances that join together many disparate communities in the
UK under and beyond the banner of the nation; and the transnational cir-
cuits of exchangeߞe conomic, social, political, affectiveߞt hat take British
colonial history for a ride. In short, this book is about the ways in which
history is unhoused when narratives, performances, and exhibitions of the
colonial past, once consolidated in the archive, are constellated for public
culture.
Over the last two decades the archive has come to name a dominant
critical idiom in the academic humanities, a shorthand for capturing the
interplay between the vast storehouses of records, documents, and artifacts
held by state institutions, civic organizations, and private associations, on
the one hand, and the ideologies, discourses, and rationales that determine
how these items are accessed, disseminated, received, read, and interpreted,
on the other.1 But when the archive is under lock and keyߞo r when placed
on lockdown by the stateߞ history is housed. When scholars retreat to the
archive as an intellectual enclave, history remains housed. Through sur-
reptitious policies of institutional enclosure, the archive is claimed as occu-
pied territory, a regulated scene of colonial domestication, or a manicured
• 1 •
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2 INTRODUCTION
setting for the ongoing civilizing missions of nation and empire. And yet,
2
as Anjali Arondekar concisely puts it, “The archive still promises.” Like
Arondekar, recent critics have acknowledged the countless ways in which
this “archival turn” challenges the hierarchies that have long governed
which archives matter and which do not, or which documents count as
“evidence” and which do not, as well as broader assumptions about what
“counts” as an archive at all. In the feverish drive to restore the past through
the promise of the archive, however, we run the risk of forgetting other
forms of collective memory, modes of historical consciousness, and prac-
tices of history making. In its capaciousness, the archive strives to sub-
sume the past. Yet the lesson of the archive remains the same: history can
be housed but never fully contained.
At the same time, when academic movements advance too smoothly,
when theoretical trends rise and fall too swiftly, scholars run the risk of
sanctioning a different kind of historical amnesia, a kind of critical “for-
getting” that, as Diana Taylor reminds us, often accompanies the intro-
3
duction of the new. In the rapid development of transnational theory
and globalization studiesߞt wo primary optics for apprehending the con-
temporary worldߞs cholars too often ignore the historical conditions and
material exigencies that determine how one lives in the present, condi-
tions and determinations that persist in dialectical relation to the enor-
mous creative potential for the transformation in social life today. When
valuable theoretical innovations are abandoned, when vital critical inter-
ventions are dismissed, when important movements in creative expres-
sion are ignoredߞa ll in the name of staying current for currency’s sakeߞ
precious intellectual resources are wasted. Over the past two decades, the
commitment to history generally and materialist critique in particular,
once central to both postcolonial theory and cultural studies, has been all
but forgotten, and the enormous body of pioneering critical and creative
work in these fields seems to have disappeared. But what are the conse-
quences of forgetting the colonial and postcolonial prehistories of global
neoliberalism?
One outcome has certainly been a tendency toward presentism in schol-
arly accounts of the global, scholarship valorized by the neoliberal academy
and conducive to, if not explicitly geared toward, housing the past. Mate-
rial history is deemed retrograde or made redundantߞs helved, archived,
housedߞa s modes of analysis suitable for apprehending the immediacy of
transnational “flows,” the intricacies of networked societies, or the intensity
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INTRODUCTION 3
of global markets. As a conceptual frame, the transnational too often priv-
ileges the fast tempos of contemporeity, the empty homogenous time of
the global “scape,” and the spatial synchrony of networked exchange over
the sonorous diachrony of materialist critique. In their eager presentism,
transnational and globalization studies are subsumed into their own objects
of analysis. Conducive to the same economic forces they had once set out
to critique, these new marketplace methodologies now too often autho-
rize the institutional quiescence and the political quietism global capital
demands, and history is deemed inconsequential to the complex economic
and social transactions operating within transnational space.
In order for such flows to be understood within the context of con-
temporary global geopolitics, however, they must first be apprehended as
4
articulations of long historical structures, institutions, and relationships.
Thinking along the axes of synchrony and diachrony is crucial to compre-
hending current transnational migrations, social imaginaries, and public
cultures. “Transnational” remains an empty signifier when unaccompanied
by a sustained but situated historical-m aterialist analysis. But to think trans-
nationally in any intellectually honest and substantive way demands that
one think historically; conversely, to think historically necessitates think-
ing transnationally. I find it not only useful but imperative that we return to
the theoretically inflected historiography associated with an earlier moment
in black British and postcolonial cultural studies: precious resources, as I
suggested earlier, that now run the risk of being eclipsed, if not erased, by
the presentist orientation of the “transnational” as a critical idiom. Thus,
rather than simply viewing the transnational as a viable aperture for com-
prehending the present, Living Cargo is principally a postcolonial project
that treats the transnational and global (as well as the national) as long his-
torical constructs open to critical interrogation.
To be sure, postcolonial itself has never functioned adequately or unprob-
lematically as a chronotope for periodizing colonial relations that devel-
oped and dispersed across time and space, certainly not along the axes
of before and after its prefix implies; as a theoretical field, however, the
postcolonial continues to offer an invaluable chronotrope for figuring the
reflexively situated turn in practices of imminent critique of the colonial,
challenging many of the fundamental tenets of Marxist historicism with-
out jettisoning its materialist core. What happens, however, when the post-
colonial takes the transnational as its object of analysis? How might the
postcolonial reconstitute the transnational as a contested but still useful
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