Fighting Words

Fighting
Words

Fifteen Books that Shaped
the Postcolonial World

Edited by Dominic Davies,
Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford

Peter Lang

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National- bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: Davies, Dominic, 1988- editor, author. | Lombard, Erica Louise, 1986- editor, author. | Mountford, Benjamin, 1980- editor, author.

Title: Fighting words : books that shaped the postcolonial world / Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford (eds).

Description: Second edition. | Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, 2019. | Series: Race and resistance across borders in the long the twentieth century ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018958 | ISBN 9781789974225 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Books and reading--Political aspects--History--20th century. | Books and reading--Political aspects--History--19th century. | Books and reading--Social aspects--History--20th century. | Books and reading--Social aspects--History--19th century. | Postcolonialism--Historiography. | Imperialism--Historiography. | Books--History--20th century. | Books--History--19th century.

Classification: LCC Z1003 .F45 2019 | DDC 028/.90904--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018958

Cover image by Erica Lombard.

Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd.

ISSN 2297-2552

ISSN 978-1-78997-422-5 (print) • ISSN 978-1-78997-427-0 (ePDF)

ISSN 978-1-78997-428-7 (ePub) • ISSN 978-1-78997-429-4 (mobi)

This revised paperback edition was first published in 2019.

First published in 2017 by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom

oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

© Peter Lang AG 2019

Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without

the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,

and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author

Dominic Davies is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London. He holds a DPhil and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930 (Peter Lang, 2017) and Urban Comics: Infrastructure & the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives (Routledge, 2019).

Erica Lombard is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town. She holds a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford.

Benjamin Mountford is Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. He was formerly a David Myers Research Fellow at La Trobe University (2017–18) and a Michael Brock Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

About the book

Can a book change the world? If books were integral to the creation of the imperial global order, what role have they played in resisting that order throughout the twentieth century? To what extent have theories and movements of anti-imperial and anticolonial resistance across the planet been shaped by books as they are read across the world?

This updated edition of Fighting Words responds to these questions by examining how the book as a cultural form has fuelled resistance to empire in the long twentieth century. Through fifteen case studies that bring together literary, historical and book historical perspectives, this collection explores the ways in which books have circulated anti-imperial ideas, as they themselves have circulated as objects and commodities within regional, national and transnational networks. What emerges is a complex portrait of the vital and multifaceted role played by the book in both the formation and the form of anticolonial resistance, and the development of the postcolonial world.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Tessa Roynon et al.

Introduction to Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Preface to the Second Edition

Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford

Introduction. Fighting Words: Books and the Making of the Postcolonial World

Dominic Davies

1 From Communism to Postcapitalism: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Imaobong Umoren

2 Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892): Black Feminism and Human Rights

Christina Twomey

3 Ambivalence, Admiration and Empire: Emily Hobhouse’s The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell (1902)←v | vi→

Reiland Rabaka

4 W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903): Of the Veil and the Color-Line, of Double- Consciousness and Second-Sight

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

5 Wake Up, India: A Plea for Social Reform (1913): Annie Besant’s Anticolonial Networks

Janet Remmington

6 Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916): The Politics of Belonging

Elleke Boehmer

7 Making Freedom: Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography (1936) and The Discovery of India (1946)

Rouven Kunstmann

8 Joseph B. Danquah’s The Akan Doctrine of God (1944): Anticolonial Fragments?

Johanna Richter

9 The Resistant Forces of Myth: Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Men of Maize (1949)

Ruth Bush

10 The Hip-Hop Legacies of Cheikh Anta Diop’s Nations nègres et culture (1954)

Asha Rogers

11 Culture in Transition: Rajat Neogy’s Transition (1961–1968) and the Decolonization of African Literature←vi | vii→

John Narayan

12 Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961): The Spectre of the Third World Project

Benjamin Mountford

13 ‘The Match is in the Spinifex’: Frank Hardy’s The Unlucky Australians (1968)

Michael R. Griffiths

14 Provenance, Identification and Confession in Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987)

Erica Lombard

15 Freedom Fighter/Postcolonial Saint: The Symbolic Legacy of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994)

Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr

Afterword: Plotting a Postcolonial Course in Fifteen Chapters

Notes on Contributors

Index←vii | viii→ ←viii | ix→

Tessa Roynon et al.

Introduction to Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century

When The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) was launched in January 2013, one of its inaugural and flagship networks was ‘Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century’. Conceived and convened by two of the current Peter Lang series editors (Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Tuck), the pioneering steering group included two of our current editorial advisory board members, Justine McConnell and Imaobong Umoren. Tessa Roynon was soon to join the growing group of postgraduate, early career and established scholars in the disciplines of History, English, Modern Languages, Classics, African Studies and Anthropology. From its inception, ‘Race and Resistance Across Borders’ has brought together researchers in the history, literature and culture of anti-racist, anti-colonial and transnational or internationalist movements in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America and the United States.

The core aims of the initial interdisciplinary network remained constant even as we were established as a full research programme, still under the auspices of TORCH, at the end of 2014. It was in that same year that this book series of the same name came into being. Both the programme and the series focus on ‘the history and culture of activists, artists and intellectuals who have worked within and against racially oppressive hierarchies in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, and who have then sought to define and to achieve full equality once those formal hierarchies have been overturned’, as our brief has it. Both the series and the programme further aim to explore ‘the ways in which such individuals – writers, scholars, campaigners and organizers, ministers, and artists and performers of all kinds – have located their resistance within a global←ix | x→ context and forged connections with each other across national, linguistic, regional and imperial borders’.