Abstract
In the introduction to her book, Citizenship from Below, Mimi Sheller alerts us to the silences that occur in the production of history, referencing the work of noted Haitian anthropologist, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who has ruminated with great eloquence on the power relations that lead to “silencing the past” in his book so named. Sheller immediately zeroes in on the silencing that occurs as a result of “the invisibility of queer subjectivities” in Caribbean historiography, leading one to assume that the book is about reversing that invisibility and laboring to bring those queer subjectivities into visibility.
The book does not quite fulfill these expectations; however, Sheller does engage actively in tapping into miscellaneous, non-traditional, print and non-print sources that might unintentionally yield traces of “the embodied, spatial, and affective aspects that escape archival record.” She is also interested in exploring how subaltern subjects might participate in a silencing of their own: “how and why they, too, despite everything, sometimes reproduce the ‘hegemonic’ perspectives of the ruling regime, exclude ‘other others,’ and leave their own silences” (p. 5). She seems to associate “erotic agency,” which she does not directly address until the last chapter, with the exercise of “embodied freedom,” the staking of “racial, ethnic, gendered, and sexual claims to citizenship in the post-slavery Caribbean . . . as attempts to institute specifically embodied masculinities and femininities that are always in tension with state efforts to control and discipline sexuality, fertility, and labor relations” (pp. 26–27).
The book is uneven and sometimes strains to make connections among its somewhat disparate parts, challenging, even taxing, the reader’s imagination. Some chapters are more compelling than others. One of the gems of the book is Chapter Two (“Quasheba, Mother, Queen”) a previously published historical reconstruction in which the reader gets to enjoy Sheller’s creative deployment of archival and other sources to produce a “history from below.” In this chapter, she is “doing” history—brought to life in an artful presentation of the words, actions, and practices of African Jamaican women in the post-emancipation period—and not engaging in textual analysis to the point where the original subject gets lost, becomes irrelevant, or indeed, never surfaces, which sometimes does happen in this book. Here, Sheller strikes just the right balance of presenting the evidence from both secondary and primary sources, telling a story, and reflecting upon its complex, intersecting meanings. She acknowledges and pays due homage to the pioneering historical work of Swithin Wilmot and others in showing how black, working-class Jamaican women “resisted their banishment from the public sphere” by inserting themselves into key public institutions, debates, and actions as well as by creating counter-publics of their own, through which they exercised citizenship from below. Moreover, in doing so, “they drew on particular kinds of gendered discourses to build a distinctive repertoire of embodied freedom and claims to citizenship” (p. 50). Sheller hopes to contribute to “a general theory of embodied freedom” (which she also refers to as “reproductive freedom”) by showing how women engaged in a politics of reproduction that fused together their personal, communal, and public roles as mothers, family providers, and workers. She looks in particular at three ways in which African Jamaican women exercised public leadership: in post-emancipation labor protests; posing direct challenges to white men’s monopoly of leadership positions in the dissenting (Baptist and Methodist) churches, and, more radically, in creating indigenous Afro-Christian religions, such as Revival, Myal, and Pukumina; and by actively and vigorously participating in an urban popular culture through public protests and riots as well as through their centrality in the livelihoods and lifeworlds of markets, streets, and yards. Sheller suggests, for example, that women’s “withdrawal” from field labor after emancipation was not a retreat into domesticity so much as a strategic labor protest and an attempt to break the power of the planters over the allocation of family time and labor.
Sheller’s interrogation of historical black masculinities and the tradition of heroic, militaristic Haitian historiography is another significant contribution of the book, although this contribution is not without its problems. The more robust offering in this regard is Chapter Five (“Sword-Bearing Citizens”), in which she argues that “building black masculinity became a central task in the construction of Haitian national identity” (p. 142). She traces the masculine rhetoric of Haitian citizenship to three sources: the revolutionary republican tradition of armed egalitarianism among men; the post-independence institution of men’s rights to land based on participation in armed defense of the nation; and the political influence of Freemasonry, “with its homosocial brotherhood and constitutive exclusion of women.” She perceptively shows how the “‘masculinization’ of power” caused “damaging long-term consequences for the freedom the Haitian people had won” (p. 143). Sheller acknowledges that a more thorough analysis of the construction of gendered citizenship in Haitian political discourse is urgently needed but is stymied in part by the dearth of archival sources. She asks, since it is hard to find evidence of women’s political interventions, why not study the “wealth of material on the symbolic construction of masculinity”? This leads to a very fruitful exploration of the union of soldier and citizen in Haitian state constitutions and institutions. Moreover, the continued isolation of Haiti by Western powers was partly to blame for the persistence of a hegemonic militaristic masculinism: the infantilizing and threatening disparagement of Haitian culture “insidiously shaped Haitian self-presentation, distorted the gender order, and demanded a virile model of citizenship.”
In a previous chapter (“Her Majesty’s Sable Subjects”), Sheller notes that enslaved, emancipated, and indentured subjects “seized the ideology of universal rights” and liberal citizenship, transformed it, and made it their own. However, she is wary of black men’s deployment of this language to claim citizenship, since it “brought with it the baggage of the patriarchal family and masculine possessive individualism” (p. 90). While these manhood rights vigorously challenged white supremacy, they reproduced “masculine individualism” and female marginalization. According to Sheller, they also asserted a hegemonic claim to citizenship as proper “British,” Christian heads of household, not only against white elites, but sometimes against other non-white, non-Christian, and non-heterosexual masculinities as well. For example, black masculinity was cast not only opposite white elite masculinity but also against indentured Indian and liberated African masculinities. Sheller sets out to show “how in the very process of performing citizenship from below freed men gained power in ways that inadvertently consolidated other kinds of social inequality, ethnic exclusion, and erotic domination” (p. 94).
Sheller’s argument here is less compelling than elsewhere because of what it leaves out. She switches from positions that deny a homogeneous and stable racial subject to positions that seem to embrace this very category. It would be true to say that some black men framed freedom and Christianity as mutually constituted and claimed citizenship on that basis. It is hard to recognize those blacks that Sheller suggests were privileged with “political voice and wage-bargaining power,” “means of redress against the planters,” and “rights of citizenship,” in contrast to Indian laborers, perhaps because they represented such a small stratum among black cultivators. And were they wrong in surmising that indentured immigration was pursued as a way of undercutting their own bargaining position and delaying their claims to citizenship, expressions of subaltern ethnocentrism notwithstanding? In addition, she makes indentured workers out to be defenseless and powerless, by remaining silent about their struggles and their champions. Finally, she excludes any consideration of blacks and Indians making common cause, against the grain of the historiographical tradition established by Walter Rodney. Because of all these gaps, her insights here remain partial at best. At the end of the chapter she, too, quickly abandons complex historical entanglements among real historical subjects to embrace the somewhat abstract imaginaries of “dougla” and “queer” poetics/politics.
This is a book which is fascinating in parts, but sometimes one is left wishing that Sheller would spend less time in repetitious editorializing on the antimonies of interpretation (two lengthy introductory chapters plus an even lengthier and largely reiterative concluding chapter might be at least one too many) and more time in yielding up queer subjectivities from diverse historical sources.