The Bronx Slave Market (1950)

VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE

Marvel Cooke October 31, 2015

Woolworth’s, E 170th St. between Walton Ave. and Jerome Ave., The Bronx
Introduction

Marvel Cooke, a seasoned African American labor activist and member of the Communist Party, wrote this set of investigative reports for the New York-based radical newspaper The Daily Compass in January 1950. For Cooke, it was a return to a familiar setting: she and Ella Baker, the famous civil rights leader, had co-written a groundbreaking exposé on an earlier iteration of the Bronx Slave Market in 1935 for the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. Cooke’s analysis here is worth revisiting for several reasons. Not only does this represent an important attempt at conducting a form of workers’ inquiryamong black domestic workers, at that time still a mostly unorganized sector of the working class; she also picks up a line of argument that resonates with other currents of black radicalism (including Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and others), tracing the survivals of slavery within the industrializing northern ghetto, where recent black migrants encountered new forms of extra-economic coercion and superexploitation.1 Over the course of four articles, Cooke demonstrates how the set-up of these “slave markets” across New York City, where women stood on sidewalks near department stores seeking offers for a day’s work, engendered isolation (their actual workplaces were always changing, from the Upper East Side to Long Island) and depressed wages through competition (they had practically no bargaining power). In her personal experience as part of the “paper bag brigade,” Cooke details the the grueling nature of the work and the overt racism often encountered, as well as how the informal wage agreement made procuring daily necessities ‒ transportation, food, etc. ‒ a strenuous task. She ends by emphasizing unionization and struggle as the principal means for abolishing these markets once and for all. Even though the Woolworth’s on E 170th St in the Bronx has long been shuttered, Cooke’s reports remain essential material as we continue to think through the connections between migration, racialization, and domestic labor today.

***
“I Was Part of the Bronx Slave Market”
The Daily Compass, January 8th, 1950, pages 1, 15.

I was a slave.

I was part of the “paper bag brigade,” waiting patiently in front of Woolworth’s on 170th St., between Jerome and Walton Aves., for someone to “buy” me for an hour or two, or, if I were lucky, for a day.

That is the Bronx Slave Market, where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor. It has its counterparts in Brighton Beach, Brownsville and other areas of the city.

Born in the last depression, the Slave Markets are products of poverty and desperation. They grow as employment falls. Today they are growing.

They arose after the 1939 crash when thousands of Negro women, who before then had a “corner” on household jobs because they were discriminated against in other employment, found themselves among the army of the unemployed. Either the employer was forced to do her own household chores or she fired the Negro worker to make way for a white worker who had been let out of less menial employment.

The Negro domestic had no place to turn. She took to the streets in search of employment – and the Slave Markets were born.

Their growth was checked slightly in 1941 when Mayor LaGuardia ordered an investigation of charges that Negro women were being exploited by housewives. He opened free hiring halls in The Bronx and other areas where Slave Markets had mushroomed. They were not entirely erased, however, until World War II diverted labor, skilled and unskilled, to the factories.

Today, Slave Markets are starting up again in far-flung sections of the city. As yet, they are pallid replicas of the depression mode: but as unemployment increases, as more and more Negro Women are thrown out of work and there is less and less money earmarked for full-time household workers, the markets threaten to spread as they did in the middle ‘30s, when it was estimated there were 20 to 30 in The Bronx alone.

The housewife in search of cheap labor can easily identify the women of the Slave Market. She can identify them by the dejected droop of their shoulders, or by their work-worn hands, or by the look of bitter resentment on their faces, or because they stand quietly leaning against storefronts or lamp posts waiting for anything – or for nothing at all.

These unprotected workers are easily identified, however, by the paper bag in which they invariably carry their work clothes. It is a sort of badge of their profession. It proclaims their membership in the “paper bag brigade” – these women who can be bought by the hour or by the day at depressed wages. The way the Slave Market operates is a primitive and direct and simple – as simple as selling a pig or a cow in a public market.

The housewife goes to the spot where she knows women in search of domestic work congregate and looks over the prospects. She almost undresses them with her eyes as she measures their strength, to judge how much work they can stand.

If one of them pleases her, the housewife asks what her price is by the hour. Then she beats that price down as low as the worker will permit. Although the workers usually starts out demanding $6 a day and carfare, or $1 an hour and carfare, the price finally agreed upon is pretty low – lower than the wage demanded by public and private agencies, lower than the wage the women of the Slave Market have agreed upon among themselves.
Few Changes

I know because I moved among these women and made friends with them during the late 1930s. I moved among them again several days ago, some ten years later. And I worked on jobs myself to obtain first-hand information.

There is no basic change in the miserable character of the Slave Markets. The change is merely in the rate of pay. Ten years ago, women worked for as little as 25 cents an hour. In 1941, before they left the streets to work in the factories, it was 35 cents. Now it is 75 cents.

This may seem like an improvement. But considering how the prices of milk and bread and meat and coffee have jumped during the past decade, these higher wages means almost no gain at all.

And all of the other evils are still there.

The women of the “paper bag brigade” still stand around in all sorts of weather in order to get a chance to work. They are still forced to do an unspecified amount of work under unspecified conditions, with no guarantee that, at the end of the day, they will receive even the pittance they agreed upon.

They are still humiliated, day after day, by men who frequent the market area and make immoral advanced. Pointing to this shameful fact, civic and social agencies have warned that Slave Market areas could easily degenerate into centers of prostitution.

So they could, were it not for the fact that the women themselves resent and reject these advances. They are looking for an honest day’s work to keep body and soul together.
“Where Men Prowl and Women Prey on Needy Job-Seekers”
The Daily Compass, January 9th, 1950, pages 4, 7.

I was part of the Bronx Slave Market long enough to experience all the viciousness and indignity of a system which forces women to the streets in search of work.

Twice I was hired by the hour at less than the wage asked by the women of the market. Both times I went home mad – mad for all the Negro women down through the ages who have been lashed by the stinging whip of economic oppression.

Once I was approached by a predatory male who made unseemly and unmistakable advances. And I was mad all over again.

My first job netted me absolutely nothing. My employer on the occasion was a slave boss and I quit cold soon after I started.

My second job netted me $3.40 for a full day of the hardest kind of domestic work. My “madam” – that is how the “slaves” describe those who hire them – on this occasion was a gentle Mrs. Simon Legree, who fed me three crackers, a sliver of cream cheese, jelly, and a glass of coffee while she ate a savory stew.

The brush with the man was degrading and unspeakable.

These are the everyday experiences in the Bronx Slave Market and in the markets elsewhere in the city.

***

All Things to All People?: Thoughts on Liberalism and Imperialism

THE DISORDER OF THINGS
JULY 18, 2017 / GUEST AUTHORS

This is the second post in our book forum on Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire. The first post by Duncan can be read here. Dan Gorman is Associate Professor in History and Political Science at the University of Waterloo and Director of the PhD programme in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He is currently working on a project which assesses the role of the UN as a venue for debates over decolonization from the end of WWII to the early 1960s.

Duncan Bell has packed a career’s worth of work on the intellectual history of Britain and its empire into the last dozen or so years. His recent collection of essays, Reordering the World, considers the intellectual attempts by British liberal thinkers (mostly, though not entirely, Victorians) to reorder the international system through empire, and the means by which they justified and rationalized their ideas. The essays republished in the volume have been updated to account for more recent scholarship and the evolution of Bell’s thought. They are joined by new essays on the “dream machine” of liberal imperial thought and on the Victorian imperial publicist J.R. Seeley, whose book The Expansion of England(1883) is the exemplar of Victorian liberal imperial boosterism. Reordering the World is not just a “scholarly greatest hits”; rather, its finely-grained and astute essays are united within a common field of interpretive focus on what Bell terms the “pathologies and potentialities of empire.” (2)

Despite imperialism’s central role in nineteenth century political discourse and world affairs, as well as its influence on the creation of the discipline of International Relations (IR), it has been conspicuously understudied by political scientists. In a discipline that continues to position the nation-state as its theoretical alpha and omega, an examination of the constitutive role of imperial variables such as race and “civilizational” hierarchies has been left to exceptional studies by scholars such as Robert Vitalis, David Long, and Brian Schmidt whose work seeks to “desegregate” IR and reveal its imperial origins. Yet, as Bell’s essays demonstrate, nineteenth century international relations was in many ways about imperialism, and empire remained (and, in the eyes of scholars such as Jeanne Morefield, remains) a salient category of international politics well into the twentieth century. The “imperial turn” in historical scholarship,[1]meanwhile, has in a rich irony colonized much of the historical discipline over the past several decades. Bell’s scholarship is so rewarding in part because he seeks to identify connections between imperialism and the disciplinary history of international relations.

In our ostensibly post-imperial age, imperialism would seem incompatible with liberalism’s core values of liberty and equality. As Bell’s carefully constructed contextual and summative essays demonstrate, however, liberalism has historically been a protean and reflexive intellectual tradition. While liberal thought on empire was united loosely by imperial imaginaries shaped by hierarchies of “civilization,” a conviction that technological progress was compressing space and time, and a historical sensibility, it was also highly elastic, and capable of containing contradictions (most importantly, concerning race) and hybrid ideas held in common with other intellectual traditions (for instance, liberals’ and socialists’ shared advocacy of strategies of indirect rule after the First World War). Imperium et libertas could thus as easily be complementary forces as mutually exclusive. Bell thus rejects the more canonical approach to the history of liberalism and imperialism adopted in key works by historians such as Uday Mehta, Jennifer Pitts, David Armitage, and Karuna Mantena. While not neglecting the (sometimes misunderstood) role of Mount Rushmore liberals such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, Bell’s focus is not the archetypical liberal thinkers is whose ideas the wisdom of the age is allegedly distilled, but the public moralists, essayists, and imperial ideologues whose often unsystematic and sometimes contradictory thought informed much of the intellectual cut-and-thrust of Victorian political discourse on imperialism.

Bell highlights two significant themes in Victorian liberal thought on empire: the largely overlooked significance of settler colonialism, and of the white settler colonies, to Victorian ideas of imperial world order; and the historical consciousness of liberal imperial thought. I’ll reflect only on the first theme in this post. Settler colonial studies has continued to grow since many of these essays were first published (see, for instance, Lorenzo Veracini’s Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview and the very active Settler Colonial Studies blog), but it remains the case that imperial history, and especially self-identified “new imperial” histories,” as a generalization, concentrate on India, and to a lesser extent, Africa and the Caribbean. One reason for this is the well-warranted “new imperial” focus on the history of race. With exceptions, the settler colonies are comparatively absent from such work. Instead, the imperial and racial histories of settler colonialism have emerged piecemeal from respective national historical traditions, and only in the last decade or so have historians begun to uncover the material and intellectual connections between them.[2]

What we need are more studies connecting the imperial histories of the settlement colonies with those of the dependent Empire (including India) and of Britain itself. Bell’s essays provide several suggestive avenues for such connective histories, including transnational intellectual histories of “the thought-worlds of the settler empire” (368), that would avoid centrifugal histories of imperial thought that presume ideas of empire emanated from the imperial “centre” and were disseminated to a captive and passive colonial audience. Here settler ideologies regarding indigenous peoples, property, progress, and competing cosmologies are particularly relevant. So, too, is the historical irony that while metropolitan liberals argued in the later nineteenth century for the merits of imperial unity, settler colonial governments pursued various forms of imperial exclusion through restrictive immigration policies.

Unruly Poems that Illuminate White Supremacy in Everyday Life

Poet Nikki Wallschlaeger’s new book Crawlspace discovers the violence embedded in our most familiar structures: mortgages, meals, rooms, houses, family relationships, and language itself.

Nikki Wallschlaeger, Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017) (all images courtesy Bloof Books)

The word “mortgage” comes from old French and means, literally, “dead pledge”: an arrangement that “dies” if a promised payment fails. The figure of death is etymologically built in to a very common kind of American debt that belongs to those lucky enough to own property. It’s the death pledge that gives us the right to our homes, the places that nurture and sustain our livelihoods and lives.

Poet Nikki Wallschlaeger is keen on the complex relationship between debt and domestic life. Her new book Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017), a series of sonnets that consciously disrupt their own formal limits, discovers the violence embedded in our most familiar structures: mortgages, meals, rooms, houses, family relationships, and language itself. Wallschlaeger’s poems feel timely, as the links between property ownership, alienated labor, and the history of black slavery in the United States (“Greasy gangrene hamburger wrapper of a country,” in her words) become clearer by the day. She deploys a new vocabulary for talking about the legacies of slavery and white supremacy as they manifest in daily life — a vocabulary that is as damning as it is lush, as rich with sound as it is bright with image.

The sonnets in Crawlspace begin in standard, contained 14-line form, and gradually lengthen and widen themselves to fill pages. Like the domestic spaces her language evokes, these pieces become unruly, revealing the mess behind polished exteriors. A whole world emerges as the pages progress, populated by hyperbolized pieces of reality, such as “fresh Klonopin ribbons,” “King Cotton Casseroles,” “unlikable women,” and “drool rot and toxic sprayed tongues.” Wallschlaeger’s sentences flow and twist, moving between description and history: “George Washington’s mouth comin at you/yappin some bullshit about honesty or was/that Abe Lincoln I dunno they start to fade/into the same knockoff appropriated war/bonnet or kente cloth bathing suit worn on/Cinco de Mayo in Daytona on college break.” She warps old truisms, like “it takes a village to raise a/ child in nude-colored handy cuffs.” Throughout these pieces, there’s a pervading sense that language itself is one of the structures that maintains racism, or “misogynoir grimcrack.” In breaking language’s formal rules, Wallschlaeger appears to also break the rules of systemic oppression.

Nikki Wallschlaeger, I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel

Many of the lines in Crawlspaceappear in Wallschlaeger’s I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, a graphic chapbook published by Bloof Books in 2016. This book presents portraits of Mattel’s “Julia” Barbie doll (produced 1969–70 and modeled after TV star Diahann Carroll), bracketed by meme-style language. It’s a good visual companion to Crawlspace. The poet’s weariness with white male supremacy and female labor comes through perfectly in the wry face of Julia: “I wish you were a beer/ instead of a colorblind mansplainer,” reads one meme. In these pieces, as in Crawlspace, Wallschlaeger hits a delicious pitch somewhere between tragedy and humor; her singular first-person voice persists throughout the work, narrating the energy she draws, like a phoenix, from her own exhaustion.

With Crawlspace, Wallschlaeger enters the tradition of poets and artists who illuminate black female subjectivity — Wanda Coleman, Carrie Mae Weems, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Simpson. The domestic scenes she makes in her poems complicate clichés of who black women in America are “supposed” to be. The fraught splendor of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” comes to mind when Wallschlaeger speaks of “Writing under the constraints of your oppressors, whoever they are. / You start to articulate through the gold hippo lick of their loving war.” Hers is a poetry that is attentive to the nefariousness of American debt, that searches out what she as a black woman is owed, and what she is made to pay. She calls out the blood-ties between debt, cruelty, and this place we call home — and she has a great time doing it. Wallschlaeger’s voice is transformative in its capacity to articulate her lived experience. “We, as marked women transform/ ourselves,” she writes. “We are the wood violets & roses stretching in the rain.”

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Crawlspace is now out from Bloof Books.

De kotomisi als pijnlijk cultureel erfgoed

https://www.atria.nl/epublications/IAV_B00104973.pdf

NOTES ON A THEORY OF MULTI-RACIAL WHITE SUPREMACIST PATRIARCHY, AKA MRWASP

November 29, 2013 · by Robin James · in critical race theory, feminism, gender, MRWaSP, multi racial white supremacy, neoliberal, patriarchy, Puar, race, resilience, sexton, sheth
Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, or MRWaSP, is my term for early 21st-century globalized Western race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony. I put a lower-case “a” in the acronym to both make the acronym something pronounceable to English speakers, and to echo the older acronym WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). You say it like “Mr. Wasp”–emphasis on the “mister” shows that this is not just about white supremacy, it’s also about patriarchy.
MRWaSP is an upgrade on WASP. As critical theorists of race have been arguing, white supremacy has retooled itself to work more efficiently in and for globalized, neoliberal hegemonies. Not only are exclusion and border-patrolling resource-intensive, they’re also not the most efficient ways of promoting nationalist, capitalist, patriarchal interests. As Jared Sexton argues, contemporary multiculturalism/multiracialism is a “protest less against the genocidal objectives of Anglo white supremacy than the inefficiency of unrestrained violence as the means of its accomplishment” (Amalgamation Schemes, 200). You can extend this argument to patriarchy and other institutionalized forms of identity-based oppression. It is more cost-effective to include some formerly excluded/abjected groups in racial/gender/sexual supremacy, because this inclusion further reinforces both the supremacy of the hyperelites and the precarity of the most unruly groups (those who pose the greatest threat to MRWaSP hegemony). As the always-brilliant philosopher Falguni Sheth explains,more and more men and women of color have been invited into the offices of White Supremacy to share in the destruction of other men and women of color who are vulnerable, disfranchised, and rapidly being eviscerated through the policies of a multi-racial white supremacy…A multiracial white supremacy is a system of power that has invited in—or exploited wherever it could– people of color in order to wage institutional, legal, political assaults on other black, brown, and poor people—at “home” and internationally.
Sheth cites numerous recent examples, including Asian-American former Attorney General John Yu and African-American former Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Condoleza Rice’s central role in establishing and maintaining the US prison facility at Guantanamo Bay. Though installing people of color in positions of real political, economic, and social power may not seem to benefit white supremacy, it actually does; when your racist project appears to be led by a person of color, that obscures the racism. It “promote[s] their claims to be non-racist by using the presence of these [non-white] individuals as cultural symbols to distract many of us” so that what is an “overt racial mission…can be couched as an ostensible hunt for justice.” Putting otherwise privileged people of color at the center of white supremacist institutions obscures the white supremacy (and the imperialism/coloniality), thus allowing it to run all the more efficiently. This inclusion is always conditional and always instrumental–this can’t be emphasized enough. People of color are folded into white supremacy only insofar as this augments white supremacy; the moment this becomes a bad deal for white supremacy, it ends.

Homonationalism, an idea developed by Jasbir Puar, is another type of MRWaSP strategy. The nominal inclusion of formerly abjected groups–here, homosexuals–is used to distinguish between successful, resilient nations and those nations in need of (white) savoirist intervention. “Good” societies recognize that gays and lesbians are normal people, too; “bad” societies cling to primitive homophobic views and traditions. Similar discursive moves also distinguish “good” post-feminist societies and “bad” traditional societies that still overtly oppress women (e.g., through veiling, genital cutting, child marriage, sex work, etc.) Supposedly liberated attitudes about gender, sexuality, and often also race distinguish resilient societies from primitive ones. Sometimes this distinction is used to disaggregate whiteness, generally along the lines of social class. For example, in 2013 World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) featured a bad guy character (a “heel,” in industry parlance), Jack Swagger, who expressed anti-immigrant, nationalist, and sometimes overtly white supremacist views. The schtick is that these racist views are what qualify him to be a heel: they’re obviously odious to fans, evidence of the character’s vilany. “Good guys” should not harbor the racist, anti-immigrant views espoused by Swagger, and should instead be fully comfortable cheering on Swagger’s Mexican-American nemesis, Alberto del Rio. As neoliberal capitalism restructures the economy and leaves working-class and rural whites in the lurch, framing them as backwards and uneducated makes their increasingly marginal socioeconomic status seem like the result of their individual failings, not the result of broad economic forces. Just as it conditionally and instrumentally includes otherwise privileged people of color within white supremacy, MRWaSP conditionally and instrumentally excludes otherwise underprivileged whites from the privileges to which they are accustomed as white. Similarly, just as it conditionally and instrumentally includes otherwise privileged women, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities (think about pre-murder-trial Oscar Pistorious, or Temple Grandin’s recent fame), MRWaSP conditionally and instrumentally excludes otherwise underprivileged women, queers, and people with disabilities.

Another way of saying that is: MRWaSP uses resilience to cut the color line–and the gender binary, the line between homonormative and queer, and to differentiate between mainstreamable and non-mainstreamable people with disabilities. By “resilience” I mean a specific neoliberal ideology, not the general sense of surviving in the face of hardship and oppression. Mark Neocleous explains the relationship between resilience discourse and neoliberal ideology here. What I’m calling “resilience discourse” is another way of framing what Naomi Klein calls “shock doctrine” capitalism–it’s the incitement of damage for the purpose of overcoming it (because that overcoming generates surplus value/profit/etc.). I’ve talked a bit about resilience discourse and femininity here and here.

Resilient populations who can overcome their race/class/gender/sexual/immigrant/religious/ damage in socially profitable ways move closer to the center of white supremacist privilege, whereas less resilient, precarious populations move further and further from this center. Resilience deregulates the work of racialization, gendering, sexualization, bodily normalization, and so on; it treats racialization/gendering/sexualization/etc. like a deregulated marketplace. Rather than tying race status directly and primarily to phenotype (visible race), and then regulating on the basis of racial identity (e.g., Jim Crow, apartheid, etc.), resilience frames race as an effect or outcome of one’s response to underlying, background conditions. Similarly, rather than tying gender status directly and primarily to either sex and/or visible gender performance, resilience frames it as an effect or outcome of one’s response to underlying, background conditions. This makes your status seem like the result of your individual choices, a true meritocracy in which the hard-working overcome their damage, but the lazy and sick can or will not. Of course, however, these background conditions are not equal, and they’re definitely controlled by histories of racial exploitation, patriarchy, and so on. It’s harder to bounce back if you’re starting from behind.



It’s not just race that shapes these material and ideological conditions–it’s also cis/heteropatriarchy, capitalism, Eurocentrism, ableism, all of what falls under “kyriarchy”. Because all these -isms shape the background material and ideological conditions in which we all work, those who have the best odds of successfully demonstrating their resilience are the ones who have the most heavily stacked decks. So, bourgeois, cis-gendered, able-bodied people of color are generally the most resilient ones…in no small part because MRWaSP has to make fewer material and ideological compromises to let them in.

White Innocence by Gloria Wekker

In White Innocence Gloria Wekker explores a central paradox of Dutch culture: the passionate denial of racial discrimination and colonial violence coexisting alongside aggressive racism and xenophobia. Accessing a cultural archive built over 400 years of Dutch colonial rule, Wekker fundamentally challenges Dutch racial exceptionalism by undermining the dominant narrative of the Netherlands as a "gentle" and "ethical" nation. Wekker analyzes the Dutch media's portrayal of black women and men, the failure to grasp race in the Dutch academy, contemporary conservative politics (including gay politicians espousing anti-immigrant rhetoric), and the controversy surrounding the folkloric character Black Pete, showing how the denial of racism and the expression of innocence safeguards white privilege. Wekker uncovers the postcolonial legacy of race and its role in shaping the white Dutch self, presenting the contested, persistent legacy of racism in the country.

Gloria Wekker is Professor Emeritus of Gender Studies at Utrecht University and the author of several books, including The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora.

Chapter 2: White society.

Boeroes

LIFE IN THE SHADOWS
Slavery and slave culture in Surinam
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
The search for immigrants.
Skewed statistics.

This chapter focuses on the white masters, most of the others on the subservient blacks. It is necessary to understand the former, in order to understand the latter. The white overlords in slave societies were able to lay down the rules much more strictly than any other elite in history. The slaves might oppose the rules, but they were seldom able to change them fundamentally.

From the beginning, Surinam has displayed the characteristics of a plantation colony. One of the main distinguishing traits of such a society was the skewed ratio of black and white, man and woman, slave and free. A severe shortage of white settlers, especially women, was inevitable in these conditions and the authorities were acutely aware of this. In an exploitation colony, there usually was no genuine niche for white yeoman farmers and there were only limited opportunities for artisans and traders, in fact, for all workers not directly involved in plantation agriculture. For impoverished people, living in difficult circumstances but not starving, such a colony provided few prospects. Furthermore, the people in the Low Countries had a negative image of the tropical world in general: they saw it as a white man’s graveyard infested with dangerous subhuman beings. A person had to be extremely desperate, or extremely eager to make a fortune to venture there. Consequently, the push factors for emigration were not very strong in the Netherlands. As Charles Boxer has noted: “although the wages were usually very low and working hours very long, unemployment in the Northern Netherlands was never sufficiently severe to induce industrial and agricultural workers to emigrate on an adequate scale to the overseas possessions of the Dutch East and West India Companies.” However, small as the white minority in Surinam may have been (and it was always too small in the eyes of the men in power), its superior position, although sometimes a bit shaky, was never seriously threatened during the slavery era.

Unfortunately, the collection of statistics in colonial Surinam was very erratic. For most of the earlier years, the number of whites must be projected and finer distinctions cannot be made. For the years 1700 to 1745, however, we have the annual count of Whites and Red and Black Slaves, contained in the archives of the Society of Surinam. The soldiers were omitted from these counts, although they made up nearly half of the white population for most of this period. During the rest of the 18th century, the number of whites remained fairly stationary, although a large part of the plantation owners left. The statistics of the 19th century provide even more problems, because the population was often merely divided into slaves and free people and most of the figures pertained to Paramaribo only. In 1811, the English held the first census in Surinam history, which delivered a much more accurate picture. As a result, the population curve can only be drawn with the greatest hesitation. The most important conclusion nevertheless remains the same: the number of whites in the colony was always so low that they were painfully aware of the vulnerability of their position -and acted accordingly.

The only period during which it was not difficult to attract sufficient settlers to Surinam were the years of the Willoughby-colonization. In Barbados, where sugar production expanded quickly at the time, many white farmers were pushed from their small holdings by more powerful neighbours and indentured servants found no place to settle after the expiration of their contracts. These people were keen to join such a venture. Since they were experienced colonists and had already survived the first dangerous years in a tropical climate, they prospered. In 1665, Surinam counted 4000 inhabitants, of whom 1500 were capable of bearing arms (meaning they were free white men). A terrible epidemic cut their number in half and the departure of most of the English colonists after the Zeelandian occupation left Surinam practically depleted of white settlers. Therefore, the authorities spared no measure to lure new hopefuls.

Paris’s forgotten human zoo

A fragment of Paris's Monument to the glory of colonial expansion
Clea Caulcutt

By Clea Caulcutt
At Vincennes, on the edge of Paris, visitors may stumble across the relics of the 1907 colonial expo in which men and women from the former colonies were exhibited to crowds of visitors. French authorities have neglected the site, a sombre reminder of Europe’s colonial past, which is now in danger of being irreparably lost.
The Gallic rooster at the entrance of the Jardin tropical has seen better days. Once destined to preside over one of Paris’s main avenues, the central figure of the Monument to the glory of colonial expansion has lost a leg and is now covered in moss. But it still stands proudly, strutting on a globe representing the earth, on a bed of weapons and travelling instruments.
Fragments of this monument have washed up in the Jardin tropical, where many hope it will be forgotten.
“It’s the junkyard of French colonial history,” says French historian Pascal Blanchard, “The memory of France's relations to its colonies over the last century is concentrated here.”
There is little logic in the site’s layout. Buildings of Paris’s 1907 colonial exhibition stand alongside memorials to colonial soldiers dead in World War I. Embarrassing reminders of a sombre period in European history, the buildings of the colonial exhibit have been left to rot away, paint peeling, roofs falling in, overrun with brambles


Paris's Jardin tropical


Traces of the exotic can still be found, in the shape of an etched palm tree on Benin’s pavilion, or a couple of mosaics on Tunisia’s pavilion. Typical world fair pavilions, but with a more sinister story. Many historians now call such colonial exhibits "human zoos".
Men and women from the French colonies were brought to Europe and rented out to zoological and tropical gardens, where they were put on show alongside exotic animals.
Kanak warriors and their families were shipped over from French New Caledonia. African families were recruited in Senegal, Niger, Guinea and Dahomey (in what is now Benin) to live in replicas of their villages. They were given mock traditional costumes, and told to dance or play music for the visitors.
Such ethnological exhibitions were hugely popular at the beginning of the 20th century. They served the interests of the owners of tropical gardens seeking to spice up their shows as well as the purposes of colonial administrators and anthropologists at the time.

The Jardin tropical is the only remaining site in France where the displays have not been razed to the ground.
The garden could be a great teaching tool for historians, many say, but it remains largely unknown and ignored.
“The exhibit has been neglected. I know Parisians who have lived all their life near Vincennes and who have never once set foot in it,” says Benjamin Pelletier, a writer and intercultural management trainer.

Zwischen Empire und Empower: Dekolonisierung und Demokratisierung

Prof. Dr. Nikita Dhawan
Exzellenzcluster Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen
www.normativeorders.net

FB 03: Gesellschaftswissenschaften / Institut für Politikwissenschaft
Senckenberganlage 31 (Hauspostfach 7), 60054 Frankfurt am Main
dhawan@soz.uni-frankfurt.de
Erschienen in: Femina Politica. 02/2009, S. 52-63. http://budrich-journals.de/index.php/feminapolitica

Zwischen Empire und Empower: Dekolonisierung und Demokratisierung
von Nikita Dhawan
„Eines der Geschenke der Logik der Dekolonisierung ist die parlamentarische Demokratie“ (Spivak 1993, 86)

Kosmopolitismus und Postkolonialismus
In ihrem Buch „Cultivating Humanity“ formuliert Martha Nussbaum folgenden Appell: „(…) die Welt um uns herum ist unausweichlich international. Themen vom Handel bis zur Landwirtschaft – über die Menschenrechte bis hin zu der Linderung von Hungersnöten – fordern uns dazu heraus, den Blick über eng gefasste Gruppenloyalitäten hinaus zu wagen und weit entfernte Lebenswirklichkeiten zu berücksichtigen. (…) Die Kultivierung unserer Menschlichkeit in einer komplexen und ineinander verflochtenen Welt, bedarf eines Verständnisses über die Art und Weise in der gemeinsame Bedürfnisse und Ziele in unterschiedlichen Lebensverhältnissen je verschieden identifiziert und verfolgt werden“ (1997, 10).
Diese Forderung, die das liberale westliche Individuum dazu aufruft, sich angesichts zunehmender globaler Interdependenzen für Belange verantwortlich zu zeigen, die über das jeweilige Eigeninteresse hinausgehen, erscheint auf den ersten Blick als ein überaus lobenswertes Unternehmen. Kosmopolitismus wird folglich als ein ehrenwertes Ziel angesehen, dessen Realisierung angestrebt werden muss. Im Gegensatz zu der Annahme von eng begrenzten territorial begründeten Identitäten, beruht das Projekt des Kosmopolitismus auf der normativen Idee eines ausgedehnten globalen Bewusstseins. Die Idee der kosmopolitischen Demokratie ermöglicht „Weltbürgern“ an dem globalen politischen Geschehen unmittelbar teilzuhaben.
Eine weitere interessante Perspektive wird von Ulrich Beck vertreten, der der Ansicht ist, dass wir angesichts einer zunehmend interdependenten Welt, gemeinsamen ökologischen Bedrohungen, finanziellen Risiken und Sicherheitsgefahren ausgesetzt 3
sind. Diese „Globalisierung von Risiken“ macht, so Beck, alle gleichermaßen verletzlich und bildet somit die Basis für das „kosmopolitische Moment“ der Weltrisikogesellschaft (Beck 2007, 27). Auf die Frage „Wie kann das Verhältnis zwischen globalen Risiken und der Gestaltung einer globalen Öffentlichkeit verstanden werden?“ verweist Beck auf die Beispiele der öffentlichen Verhandlungen des Hurrikans Katrina und der Tsumanis, die zu einer „Globalisierung des Mitgefühls“ (ebd., 114) geführt haben. Letzteres bestätige sich durch die beispiellose Spendenbereitschaft im Anschluss an die Naturkatastrophen. Laut Beck werden durch die öffentliche Debatte zahlreiche Stimmen gehört und es findet eine größere Partizipation in Entscheidungsprozessen statt. Dieser Annahme liegt die Idee eines „erzwungenen Kosmopolitismus“ zugrunde, der Akteure über nationale Grenzen hinweg verbindet. Globale Risiken erzwingen eine unfreiwillige Demokratisierung.

"clean edifice of white supremacy.“ (paul gilroy)