Thoughts on Modernity at Large, Texaco, and Undoing Border Imperialism

April 28, 2014

In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai sees the imagination of individuals as the key focal point in understanding contemporary global trends.  “More people than ever before,” he writes, “seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born: this is the wellspring of increased rates of migration at every level of social, national, and global life” (6).  With sly passive voice phraseology, he somewhat acknowledges external factors that might cause people’s imaginations to kick into action – most notably when mentioning those who he says “are dragged into new settings,” as with refugee camps, and those whose imaginations have become fixated with “work, wealth, and opportunity often because their current circumstances are intolerable” (6).  Any mention, however, of why those circumstances have become intolerable – of the causes – is notably omitted.  

            Appadurai instead frames his analysis of media and migration around “the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” (3).  Even in the realm of major armed conflicts across the globe, Appadurai points to the ways in which Hollywood and Hong Kong action films “create new cultures of masculinity and violence, which are in turn the fuel for increased violence in national and international politics” (41).  He goes on to make a causal link from films and their power to shape the imagination to the resulting new cultures of masculinity, which fuel violence, to the claim that “Such violence is in turn the spur to an increasingly rapid and amoral arms trade that penetrates the entire world” (41).  Thus, according to Appadurai, armed conflict across the globe and the proliferation of deadly weapons originates from cultures of masculinity derived from action movies – not private US weapons-producing corporations that have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to maximize profit, meaning the manufacture of as many deadly weapons as possible and the lobbying (bribing) of politicians to maximize the transnational flow of those weapons.

            Throughout Appadurai’s text, his central mistake is a logical one of cause and effect.  If imagination is the original source, the wellspring, of increased rates of migration, it is only insofar as the ravages of something else caused one to imagine leaving.  For example, if my house is destroyed by a flood, it will not take long for me to imagine that I will likely be living someplace else, and that imagining of a new home, we could say, will in turn cause me to eventually find one (if I am fortunate enough).  Though, in examining the totality of that situation, not many people would say, “It was not the flood that caused his displacement, it was his imagination.”  Harsha Walia, in Undoing Border Imperialism, is much more attuned to cause and effect concerning global migration when she writes, “Capitalism and imperialism have undermined the stability of communities and compelled people to move in search of work and survival” (4).  Walia gives a much clearer picture of root causes in her text and is more precise with her assessment of the impetus for most migration – work and survival – which seems a much more plausible narrative juxtaposed to Appadurai’s migrant looking for work, wealth, and opportunity – as if most contemporary migrants were seduced from their home countries, driven by an attempt to get rich or die trying.

            Although once the effects of global state-corporate capitalism have caused one to move, could we not then turn to Appadurai’s theory involving various global cultural flows, or “scapes,” to understand that which influences displaced peoples to choose one particular destination over another?  For instance, Appadurai claims that:

images, scripts, models, and narratives that come through mass mediation (in its realistic and fictional modes) make the difference between migration today and in the past … For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to new environments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space (6). 

However, the findings of a recent report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development seriously call this theory into question.  Of the countries which dominate the demonstrable transnational -scapes of media, finance, and technology – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Italy – as respective destinations for the world’s migrants, each accounts for less than three percent (Sedghi).  A great deal more migrants live in China and Romania than in all of the aforementioned rich countries combined (Sedghi).  And of the top five countries which receive the most migrants – China, Romania, India, Poland, and Mexico (Sedghi) – only India, with its film industry, could be counted as global disseminator of mass-mediated content.  I should furthermore note that each of these top five countries rank comparatively low on the United Nations (UN) Human Development Index (HDI).  China and India in particular, though many commentators rave about their spectacular rise in GDP in recent decades, have HDIs which reveal that they are still very poor countries with massive internal social problems – hardly destinations for people seeking wealth and prosperity.  In Health HDI rankings, China is #101; India is #136 (UNDP).  In considering this picture, it thus becomes apparent that even if imaginations are running wild, options are limited – and the age old search for work and survival is what continues to define global migration.

            Granted, Modernity at Large was published in 1996, and its composition likely took place several years before; however, at the Forum d’Avignon in Paris in 2010, it appears Appadurai’s theoretical foundation, rooted in the primacy of “culture,” has changed little.  What is even more is that he makes the leap from his supposedly disinterested analysis, void of prescriptions and final causes (not a teleological theory [9]) in Modernity, to one in which he advises “scholars, policy makers, [and] leaders in business, publishing, and media” that they have an “important burden … to use ‘culture’ to manage ‘social uncertainty,’” social uncertainty caused by two principal “gaps:” the gap between the lives people see on their screens and the lives they live, and the gap between those who take risks and those pay the price, in other words, the realization that “the risk makers and the risk bearers are now dramatically divided” (Appadurai).  Rather than confront the powerful factions who brought about the 2008 financial crisis, Appadurai sees the dissent of people upset about its aftermath and fears those trampling herds, seduced by the spectacle’s wares on their screens, which might threaten the opulence of the minority.  This is the essence of “social certainty,” and elites and their favored intellectuals believe it is something to be “managed” through education, policy, and media.  Notice, for establishment apologists like Appadurai, it is never the risk takers who cause “social uncertainty,” requiring a type of “management.” 

            Appadurai is forced in this discourse to play a nuanced game though because big businesses need to manufacture the desire for fashionable consumption in consumers – there is a multi-billion dollar public relations and marketing industry devoted to it – but they must also be careful not to fall into the trap about which Appadurai warns, creating a level of want too intense, causing prospective consumers to become completely disenchanted with the inflationary gap between the lives on their screen and their actual lives.  This latter scenario might lead to spontaneous outbursts of violence like the London riots in August 2011, or, much more terrifying for elites, collective political actions with the aim of democratizing social and economic spheres, like those carried out by the Global Justice Movement or Occupy Wall Street.  Therefore, the situation requires delicate management on the part of elite media and information producers.  

Appadurai’s pronouncements at the Forum d’Avignon shatter the sense that his ideas might offer anything new (or that their newness is a new kind of newness [Appadurai 1]), and they put him in league with a long tradition of intellectuals like Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays who seek to serve establishment power systems by managing and manufacturing the consent of the governed.  The fruits of Appadurai’s prescription here take us into a future that may render George Orwell’s vision of a boot stomping on a human face – forever – to be a utopian one.  We may find Orwell’s vision of the future to be utopian because, unlike Appadurai’s, it is one where we still find both resistance and human faces (Roderick).

            In order to understand contemporary global trends, with types of migration – of people, capital, and violence – chief among them, it is important to go beyond simply mounting critiques of intellectuals who serve establishment power systems, though that is necessary.  We should turn to examining the work of intellectuals and activists who seek out a variety of power systems and evaluate their legitimacy.  If the power structure in question cannot justify its own existence satisfactorily to the community which it impacts, it should be changed or dismantled.  Individuals worthy of the titles of intellectual and activist will participate in collective efforts towards changing or dismantling illegitimate power structures.  Walia is exemplary as an intellectual and activist invested not only in challenging illegitimate power structures, but also in prefiguring new democratic forms of organization in those very spaces of resistance. 
           Remaining attuned to and involved with art and literature is absolutely crucial as one hopes to better understand contemporary global trends.  Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau narrates the history and existence of a shantytown on the outskirts of Fort-de-France, the capital city of the Caribbean island and overseas region of France, Martinique.  Its numerous revelations about migration, oppression, writing and representation, and the way in which power functions in a variety of contexts make it a novel which will likely remain relevant and worthy of study for generations.  For the remainder of this essay, I will attempt to demonstrate how Texaco, in conjunction with Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism, provides a counter-argument to Appadurai’s theory of modernity and furthermore illuminates several salient global trends concerning the functioning of power systems and the related movement of people, capital, violence, and ideas.        

            The way religion is taken up in Texaco provides an interesting point of departure for the ways in which the text can illuminate some contemporary global trends.  Religious iconography plays prominently in the novel, but in interesting and sophisticated ways which require close attention.  For example, much of the narrative is framed by Sophie-Marie Laborieux recounting the history of her family line from the 1820s to the novel’s present, the late twentieth century, to a civil functionary – known as the Christ – from the urban services bureau.  Typically, the coming of Christ is associated with the arrival of redemption and truth, as it is written in John 14:6 when Jesus Christ declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”  However, rather than bringing truth, the Christ in Texaco is subjected to an event upon his arrival which functions as a metaphor for the impossibility of Truth – with a capital T.  The Christ is pelted in the head with a stone and the narrator asks, “So who threw the stone?” before commenting, “The answers to this question were so abundant that the real truth forever slipped through our fingers” (10).  In other words, so many people came to claim that they threw the rock the task of determining the truth of who threw it becomes impossible. 

            And instead of bringing redemption, the Christ brings news of destruction.  However, it is Laborieux’s testimony, along with the will of the inhabitants who refuse to leave, which ends up saving Texaco from demolition.  The final chapter, Resurrection, comes with the subheading “not in Easter’s splendor but in the shameful anxiety of the Word Scratcher who tries to write life” (383).  Analyzing the rhetoric of this subheading, we find that it is “not in Easter’s splendor” – not through Christ, his resurrection, religion, or any outside savior – but “in the shameful anxiety of the Word Scratcher” – through Chamoiseau’s own efforts.  Throughout the text, there are overtures to religious iconography, residual of the Judeo-Christian tradition which is the foundation of Western civilization, and therefore at the foundation of the colonizing nation of France, but the characters redeem and liberate themselves through acts which amount to collective struggle. 

Perhaps it is that correlative association between the colonizer and Christianity that causes the inhabitants of Texaco to view Western religion as a type of oppressive establishment power – of which the Christ is the representative – and, in the spirit of Frederick Douglass’ truism gleaned as slave, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both” (1857), they understand that spiritual and material liberation will not come from above as a type of gift.  This understanding causes the freed slaves to call out to maroons in their hutches (translated from the Creole), “They didn’t give the damn thing [freedom from slavery] to us!  We’re the ones who took it” (125).

            The attitude of the inhabitants of Texaco, and their ancestors, towards religion is furthermore instructive when examining contemporary global trends.  Appadurai contends in Modernity that “There is vast evidence in new religiosities of every sort that religion is not only not dead but that it may be more consequential than ever in today’s highly mobile and interconnected global politics” (7).  Likewise, around the same time as Modernity was published, we can find all sorts of commentary on the emergent primacy of culture and religion in global affairs, notably Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.  Huntington’s work, building upon Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, argues like Appadurai, that culture and religion will be the defining features of global trends in the twenty-first century, a line of reasoning which only intensified after the 9/11 attacks.  David Cannadine recounts how, “In the aftermath of 9/11, some historians also jumped on the ‘clash of civilizations’ bandwagon, among them Geoffrey Wheatcroft and Anthony Pagden, who produced books depicting a world irretrievably and violently sundered, initially between the East and the West, and subsequently between Christianity and Islam, extending from the confrontations among the ancient Greeks and Persians, via such battles as Poitiers and Lepanto, down to the conflicts of the present day” (Cannadine).  However, when we account for the way religion operates in the context of coercive power systems, as the characters in Texaco do, it becomes increasingly difficult to view religion as the chief driver of global trends, least of all the contributor of a simple and direct ‘clash of civilizations.’ 

            It is important to remember that, through Operation Cyclone, the Islamic fundamentalists in the Taliban who have wrought extreme violence and repression in Afghanistan, and have been the main foe of invading US forces there, received about $3 billion in military weaponry and training from US taxpayers over the course of the 1980s (Bergen 68).  Furthermore, arguably the most fundamentalist Islamic country in the world, Saudi Arabia, has been a strategic ally of the US for most of the twentieth century, a relationship which continues to the present, and likewise Bahrain, whose state religion is Islam, hosts the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.  Factors like these cause many prominent political commentators, such as Noam Chomsky, to seriously doubt the ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative.  Chomsky, however, takes a nuanced view of the way religion functions in the context of state-corporate power systems. 

He notes how even though the US is “one of the most fundamentalist countries in the world and a strong supporter of extreme Islamic fundamentalism” (“On Religion”), it also “carried out a virtual war against the church [liberation theology] in central America in the 1980’s primarily because prime elements in the church were working with great courage and honor to help those in need” (“Remarks”).  It seems thus that the clash of civilizations narrative, and similar conjecturing about the primacy or growing influence of religion in global political affairs, is often a smokescreen used by people in power, whether in an effort to drum up antagonism (those different people are against you!) or to marshal support (vote for him – he is a Christian!).  Those who remain critical of the way religion is used and abused in power systems, regardless of whether they themselves adhere to a religion or not, position themselves in a much better place – like the aforementioned characters in Texaco – to challenge illegitimate power systems and cultivate sites of democratic agency. 

            Another major global trend that Texaco helps to illuminate pertains to migration.  In the novel, the cataclysmic event which forces Esternome, Laborieux’s father, and scores of others, from the outlying hills into the city of Fort-de-France is a volcanic eruption.  Laborieux indicates in her narration that this event altered the landscape of the affected area of Martinique, saying, “My Esternome no longer recognized the landscape that he had crossed going in the other direction with Ninon in his youth” (148).  There are further clues that the amount of people displaced from this event is considerable, as Laborieux remarks, “No gendarme asked for [Esternome’s] papers, since there were just too many of them like that, you know, who had landed on the grasslands of the Fort” (162).  Also significant are the attitudes of those in the colonial power center of Fort-de-France, and how they received those who had been displaced from this event.  There is the aforementioned suspension of bureaucratic regulation; however, from Laborieux’s notebook, she writes from the point of view of the refugees, stating, “And Fort-de-France greeted us the way one does a title wave (162) … [and later]… once mild pity had its fill, Fort-de-France suspected them [the environmental refugees] of being vagabonds” (164).  This cataclysmic event in the narrative can draw our attention to the way in which climate and environmental factors have been a significant cause of migration historically, even before anthropogenic global warming began to manifest, as with dustbowl refugees in the US in the 1930s, and it portrays in stark terms how environmental migrants, “thus vegetating there like sheep at the doors of a slaughterhouse” (163) are not often welcomed or supported as they mount “attempts to penetrate City” (190).

            This scenario in the text carries a great deal of relevance to the contemporary global situation pertaining to migration, a situation which, according to numerous credible sources, is worsening due to anthropogenic global warming.  Walia argues that “The ecological crisis is another manifestation of how capitalism propels migration” (51).  She goes on to cite a recent study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science which estimates that “by the year 2020 there will be fifty million climate refugees displaced by climate-induced disasters including droughts, desertification, and mass flooding” (51).  The Norwegian Refugee Council estimates that already, in 2008 alone, about 20 million people may have been displaced by climate-induced sudden-onset natural disasters (Guterres).  Therefore, for many thousands of people, the scenario I drew up at the outset of this essay about a flood and the reactive work of imagination is not at all hypothetical.  Consistent with his tendency to omit causes, neither climate nor other environmental factors play a role in Appadurai’s theory of migration in Modernity.  A Google search and an advanced search of the University of Louisville Library database did not turn up any results of Appadurai’s work which addresses climate change, with the exception of his blog page at the World Bank, where he is a consultant.  The heading of this page is “Development in a Changing Climate: Making our Future Sustainable,” though the main content area of the page is blank.

            In terms of treatment of climate migrants and migrants in general, Texaco is also insightful.  Beyond the picture of “sheep at the doors of a slaughterhouse,” Esternome follows Adrienne Carmélite Lapidaille for basic sustenance while he finds work; Idoménée, who migrates to Fort-de-France at a younger age, tellingly works in a variety of precarious, poorly paid, and transient jobs around the city.  She “became a gardener of some plump mulattos … a storytelling mammy … a cleaning lady in a workshop … a market vendor … an aqueduct sweeper … a stone harvester, coal carter, she became this and then that” (171).  The treatment migrants receive and their labor to which they are subjected in Fort-de-France – a place which reconstitutes the post-colonial subject, ever forcefully, from an often rural identity to an ill-adjusted outsider living inside a properly European outpost (Kemedjio 137) – reinforces and illuminates a corresponding crucial point Walia makes about migration.  She writes how “The state process of illegalization of migrant and undocumented workers, through the denial of full legal status that forces a condition of permanent precarity, actually legalizes the trade in their bodies and labor by domestic capital” (70).  She adds, summing up the point, that “Migrant and undocumented workers thus are the flip side of transnational capitalist outsourcing, which itself requires border imperialism and racialized empire to create different zones of labor” (71).  Therefore, in light of Walia’s point, we can reasonably imagine that the suspension of bureaucratic coercion after the volcanic eruption (“no gendarme asked for his papers”) is perhaps not a disinterested act of bewilderment or benevolence.

            Additionally, reading Texaco with Undoing Border Imperialism is useful in illuminating the constitutive associations between overlapping oppressive and exploitative forms of labor in the realms of migration, corporate outsourcing, and post-colonialism.  Building upon Walia’s point that migrant labor domestically is the flip side of outsourced labor, in Texaco, we get a picture of the exploitative labor in the post-colonial setting which is the flip side to slave labor – and a form of exploited labor which corresponds to the sweatshops of outsourcing and the precarity of migrant labor.  In the latter part of what the text refers to as the Age of Straw, sometime in the mid to late 19th century, the dwindling agricultural labor, it becomes clear, takes the a form of non-paid oppressive labor analogous to slavery.  Ninon, Esternome’s lover at one point, recounts the post-slavery agricultural situation in Saint Pierre, a town about 20 miles to the north of Fort-de-France:

The governors, one after the other, set up banks.  Loans made the wage payments possible.  But it was just as difficult for the planters to recoup their wage debts.  It was no blackman’s ambition to sweat in the old chains.  Those who resigned themselves to it demanded a rhythm other than slavery’s.  That bothered the békés’ luxury.  So they sent for other models of slave (138).           

“Sending for other models of slave” refers to the French state and industrial managers bringing migrants from India and Portugal (138) in an attempt to replace the slave labor the free people would no longer abide.  Here, we see the “in-sourcing” of migrants just as this situation demonstrates the transnational reach of capital.  The vast majority of the native population though does not have the resources to leave. 

            This disparity of movement which constitutes the labor situation on Martinique in Texaco is a core feature of contemporary globalization – one to which Walia devotes a great deal of attention, and one which Appadurai sorely neglects.  Walia articulates the crux of this disparity, writing, “Capital, and the transnationalization of its production and consumption, is freely mobile across borders, while the people displaced as a consequence of the ravages of neoliberalism and imperialism are constructed as demographic threats and experience limited mobility” (4).  Increasing border securitization, which perpetrates a great deal of racialized and often misogynist (Walia 44) violence against migrants the world over, and corporatist so-called free-trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership further exacerbate this disparity of movement.  Internally, as corporations continue to pillage natural resources, pollute communities, and contribute to the concentration of wealth and the maintenance of a permanent underclass, the forms of management of “social uncertainty” that Appadurai solicits from policy-makers and business elites will necessarily intensify.  (On a related note, Chris Hedges notices another migratory pattern, one rarely discussed in mainstream sources.  The basis of his warning – “As the U.S. empire implodes, the harsher forms of violence employed on the outer reaches of empire are steadily migrating back to the homeland” – is plain to see in the increasing militarization of not only borders, but also local police forces [“Militarization of Police”].)

            Returning to Texaco, the founding of the quasi-autonomous zone stems from a desire to be free from institutional racism, government coercion, and the industrial nightmare – “The roar of steel.  Decisive toothed wheels.  An untamable smell” (140) – which, before decades of violent labor struggle, as in virtually all industrialized nations, was an extraordinarily dangerous place to be.  Like many who face the repression of border imperialism, the members of Texaco are carving out this autonomous space of liberation in order to survive.  Near the conclusion of the text, Laborieux gives the reader a sense of the autonomous and democratic nature of Texaco when she recounts that “we reinvented everything: laws, urban codes, neighborhood relations, settlement and construction rules (317) [italics mine].  We can juxtapose the democratic and autonomous establishment of Texaco to the hierarchical and undemocratic production of space in Fort-de-France based on “A Quick Look at Idoménée’s Musings” (175), as she describes the city founding thusly: “They say: old swamp but pretty site.  They set up the fort there.  Then the Army spoke its law.  A checkerboard stretch strung from the fort.  Businesses here.  Houses there.  Depots here” (175).  Also notable in the juxtaposition of these two distinct spaces is that word which holds so much significance for Appadurai: imagination.

            Appadurai argues against critics of mass culture who claim that “the imagination will be stunted by forces of commoditization, industrial capitalism, and the general regimentation and secularization of the world” (6), refuting these critics on the basis that religion is becoming more consequential and that electronic media are not simply dumbing people down.  The first objection I addressed previously in this essay and to his second objection, I would agree, but with the large caveat that the relentless war against the human imagination waged by the state-corporate apparatus is much bigger than electronic media.  David Graeber concludes:

It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former … Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.

The Occupy Movement which began in New York in the fall of 2011 is precisely an attempt to prefigure and imagine what a future society that is democratic and encourages human creativity might be like.  This is why in the encampments worldwide, as recent as the massive occupation of Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey in 2013, all began by collectively rebuilding and reimagining society from the ground up, in a very similar manner to the reinvention Laborieux describes in Texaco.  At the Gezi Park occupation for example, protesters constructed their own food distribution center, library, garden, medical center, veterinary clinic, art constellations, and media outreach – all organized along horizontalist, democratic lines (Hattam).

            There was a great deal of speculation following the violent dispersal of Occupy encampments as to whether the movement was a success or a failure.  After all, as Andrew Kliman writes, “Occupy Wall Street never occupied Wall Street. Even Zuccotti Park was ‘occupied’ only with the consent of the mayor of New York City, and it was cleared out the moment he withdrew that consent. In the end, no autonomous space was reclaimed.”  However, there are many dimensions to consider beyond Kliman’s short-sighted snap judgment.  Cultivating imaginative spaces where people can experiment with and engage in democratic practices is a vital and foundational part in creating a more just future society.  And in an atomized society like the United States, it is hard to understate the importance of events which bring activists together, so that they may unite to carry out collective action in the future – from fast food strikes, to pipeline blockades, to immigrant rights actions, to involvement in many other ongoing causes.  Occupy Sandy, Gezi Park, and other continuations of the movement pop up in new places all over the world, and take different forms, just as commentators, praising and criticizing, thought that Occupy represented a continuation of the Global Justice Movement (Pleyers).  Everything ceases to exist at some point, but ceasing to exist hardly constitutes failure.

            Similar questions resonate at the conclusion of Texaco, and once again, the novel has much to offer our contemporary situation.  Laborieux, whose storytelling effort with the Christ has saved Texaco from demolition, reveals that he has informed her that “City would integrate Texaco’s soul, that everything would be improved but that everything would remain in accordance with its fundamental law, with its alleys, places, with its so old memory which the country needed” (381).  This may seem in some ways like Texaco will be co-opted or assimilated by the post-colonial power structure and thus lose its autonomous character, but Texaco is a constant work in progress – “rich with what we were and strong with a legend that was becoming clearer and clearer to us” (381).  I also would argue that co-option is not necessarily always hopeless or a sign of defeat.  (As Graeber asks, “Would anyone claim that because feminism has been co-opted into corporate culture that feminism lost?”)  Furthermore, Laborieux gives us an optimistic picture of Texaco near the end of the text, stating, “In our mind, the soil under the houses remained strangely free, definitely free” (319).  This leaves the reader with the hopeful impression that, even if things look bleak or impossible, for those who believe it, revolution is always near the surface.        

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H. W. Honeycutt is the author of "Universal Basic Income and Disability" published by

Red Lion Press. @HWHoneycutt