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Introduction

Accumulating the Primitive

They must be soldiers or militiamen. They are armed white men. They must be readying themselves for frontier war or at the very least a skirmish with dangerous savages. But they are not soldiers. They are scientists. This is a portrait of a professor encircled by his students. In the 1870s the amateur naturalist Joseph Beal Steere left his home in Michigan and embarked on a circumglobal expedition that included the Philippines and that resulted in a donation of sixty thousand specimens—botanical, zoological, and anthropological—to his alma mater, the University of Michigan. This massive donation prompted the university to award Steere its first honorary doctorate and to build its first natural history museum building. In 1887, the year of this portrait with his students, Steere went to the Philippines for the second time and returned with even more animals, shells, and plants to donate to the university’s collection. Today, Steere’s accumulation of this material is known for constituting a significant part of the founding collection for the University of Michigan’s Museum of Natural History, and this portrait of Steere and his students is displayed in the museum’s Philippine exhibition. In this book, I understand the imperial archive as a mode of accumulation. More specifically, I understand the imperial archive as a mode of accumulating a special kind of capital—knowledge—and I contend that this accumulation of knowledge depends on the idea of the racial primitive.

Figure I.1. Photograph displayed in the Philippine exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

In the chapters that follow on Philippine exhibitions in the American natural history, anthropological, and art museum, I argue that nowhere can we appreciate so easily the intertwined nature of the triple forces of accumulation—capital, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The 1887 portrait of Steere and his students shows how America’s scientific conquest anticipated its military conquest of the Philippines, from 1899 to 1913. Both modes of conquest were forms of extractive colonialism, and both modes of conquest were shaped and justified by the idea of the primitive Filipino. Primitivity first was used as a justification for scientific conquest, which preceded genocidal conquest. The settler colonial fantasy of terra nullius—empty land by way of the genocidal emptying of land—is accompanied by what I propose we call “knowledge nullius,” the American quest for knowledge that putatively was accrued about (rather than stolen from) Filipino primitives. I moreover propose that this concept of knowledge nullius demands that we reconfigure the study of representation. In this book’s examination of a range of ways of exhibiting the Filipino, I have had to turn away from the concern with misrepresentation—truth or fallacy—that typically informs the critical analysis of the racial subject so that I instead can bring to light this connection between the racial primitive and the processes of economic and academic primitive accumulation.

This book is divided into two parts that speak to and against each other, “The Archive: Dispossession by Accumulation” and “The Repertoire of Dispossession.” In the pair of chapters that make up “The Archive: Dispossession by Accumulation,” I draw on my research on the Philippine collections and exhibits at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at Harbor Beach, Michigan, the hometown of the last American governor-general of the Philippines. In the chapters “Progress through the Museum: Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History” and “Foreign in a Domestic Space: Progressivist Imperialism and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum,” I demonstrate how the university and the museum forward the colonial project by taking the colonized as objects of accumulation, which then can be studied in the traditional disciplines and which are to this day displayed before the general American public. In the pair of chapters that make up “The Repertoire of Dispossession,” I countermand the accumulative mandate of the imperial archive by exploring how Filipino Americans traverse the space of empire and represent themselves as agents and not merely as objects. In the chapters “Lessons from the Illiterate: Carlos Bulosan and the Staged Wages of Romance” and “The Booty and Beauty of Contemporary Filipino/American Art: Stephanie Syjuco’s RAIDERS,” I examine visual, literary, and performative economies of anti-accumulation in Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” and its contemporary theatrical adaptation and in Stephanie Syjuco’s art installation RAIDERS, a parody of Asian art museum collections. In my concluding chapter on Syjuco’s social media presence and her use of online crowdsourcing, I move out of the museum per se in order to consider the ramifications of the contemporary transformation of crafting, DIY, and making practices into trendy objects of consumerism—from Walmart’s sale of “craft” beer to Etsy’s touting of homespun sweaters—in the era of the digital. Across the chapters in The Filipino Primitive, I show that the imperial project attempts and fails to put in order its vast collection of materials.

The Arkhe of Accumulation

Accumulation is a twinned phenomenon. More famously, it refers to the enclosure of land and resources that made what Karl Marx called the “primitive accumulation” of capital possible. Less famously, it refers to the developmental narrative from the primitive to the civilized that underpins the quest for accrued knowledge. Richard Halpern argues that accumulation contains “two histories: of the ‘primitive’ accumulation of capital, and of the ‘primitive’ accumulation of men” as labor.1 Ideological and intellectual wars have broken out over how to treat another set of twins, capitalist and colonial accumulation. Critiquing the teleological nature of Marxist theories of “primitive accumulation,” David Harvey came to the formulation “accumulation by dispossession” by foregrounding both Hannah Arendt’s insight about the “endless” (rather than originary) nature of capitalist voracity and Rosa Luxemburg’s insight about capitalism’s dependence on “something ‘outside of itself’ ” in order to stabilize itself.2 In The Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg argues that the “accumulation of capital, once it has started, automatically leads farther and farther beyond itself,” and she then contends that capitalism “needs other races.”3 Capitalism, Luxemburg implies, is innately colonial. Her central thesis, according to Joan Robinson’s introduction to The Accumulation of Capital, is that “it is the invasion of primitive economies by capitalism which keeps the system alive.”4

As an alternative to what he calls Marx’s “rigidly temporal framing” of primitive accumulation, Glen Coulthard has urged us to shift our emphasis from the subject position of the waged male proletariat to that of the colonized.5 According to Coulthard, it is high time to shift from a focus on capitalist relations to colonial relations and from proletarianization to dispossession.6 While Robinson’s commentary on Luxemburg implies a naturalization of the notion of the primitive and, therefore, of the developmental narrative of primitive accumulation, Coulthard crucially restores an indigenous perspective that is an alternative and not a precedent to capital. However, to the extent that Coulthard’s shift to dispossession still retains the outlines of a developmental narrative of capital, if from another perspective, Halpern valuably suggests that Marx’s account of primitive accumulation must be understood as a genealogy of capital relations and colonial relations, a “tale not of embryonic development but of a fundamental break between modes of production.”7 Halpern approaches primitive accumulation as a “genealogical discourse [that] signifies both a history to be written and the limits such a history must observe.” The “vocation” of primitive accumulation is to “provide not a conclusive narrative but a useful one.”8 The value of Marx’s narration of accumulation thus lies in its ability to “identify a space where a history ought to be.”9 Primitive accumulation is a problem of—and not simply about—history. During my research at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, I found that these museums and their collections are an instance of the archive as accumulation, and that their Philippine exhibitions constitute “a space where a history ought to be.” Both museums offer little to no context—historical or otherwise—about the appearance of the Philippines in the Midwest, and that is how the idea of the racial primitive fills that space so easily. Ironically, this epic failure in knowledge production takes place at the very site of knowledge acquisition. The Filipino Primitive is dedicated to offering an image of that counter-history that ought already to have been.

Jacques Derrida notes, in a pun whose peculiar resonance in the Philippine context I will explore in later chapters, “It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place.”10 These museums are a signal example of the peculiar occlusion of the American conquest of the Philippines—what Dylan Rodríguez has called a “suspended apocalypse”—even as they reflect the Midwest’s history of institutional participation in the colonial governance of America’s first Asian colony.11 Derrida also reminds us that the etymology of the word “archive” reveals another set of twinned (or, more accurately, constantly fissuring) principles at work, the order of “commencement” and the order of “commandment.” According to Derrida, the arkhe of commencement refers to the “sequential” principle, which works “according to nature or history, there where things commence.” The arkhe of commandment refers to the “jussive” principle, which works “according to the law, there where men and gods command.”12 This is no simple set of twins, however. For Derrida, these two “orders of order: sequential and jussive” introduce a “series of cleavages [that] incessantly divide every atom of our lexicon.”13 For example, because the arkhe of commencement can refer to nature or history, a set of “belated and problematic” oppositions emerges, say, between nature and technology or between history and the law. The same fissuring complexity emerges within the arkhe of commandment. Nonetheless, all of these problems are waved aside and forgotten. Derrida notes that forgetting is embedded in the very idea of the archive: “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.”14 The American archive constitutes just such a shelter for its Philippine collections: It offers shelter for its Philippine collections in ways that shelter itself from the memory of genocidal conquest, benevolent assimilation, and what I call “progressivist imperialism” (which I elaborate in chapter 2, on the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum). There is something about the collection and display of the Filipino that requires the erasure of the history of its presence. As Nerissa Balce has pointed out in her study of American war and photography, the visible representation of the Filipino in American culture paradoxically has secured the erasure of the circumstances surrounding that visibility.15

However, in order to take up Derrida’s invitation to participate in the “deconstruction in progress” of the archive, I must exert pressure on his concept of the citizen in ways that complement, I think, the aforementioned critiques of Marx’s privileging of the proletariat over the colonized. In naming the jussive and sequential meanings invoked by the arkhe, Derrida argues that the former precedes the latter. The arkhe of commandment precedes—it is “even earlier” than—the arkhe of commencement.16 Accordingly, Derrida spends significantly more time explaining the “jussive” meaning of the word “archive” and its association with the law, “a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.” The archons are “citizens” who wield power as the “guardians” of the documents that they physically collect, protect, and hermeneutically control. The archons are “accorded the hermeneutic right and competence.” Hence, “entrusted to such archons,” the documents come to “speak the law.”17 But where there are citizens, there are slaves. Nowhere in Derrida’s account of the jussive arkhe of commandment can we detect the presence of the slave in the house of the archon-citizen. Nowhere can we find the trace of what Fred Moten has called the para-ontological, the force exerted by the object of possession onto the subject.18 What is lacking is the history that ought to be.

When we turn our attention to the sequential arkhe of commencement, we find that Derrida associates it with “the originary, the first, the principial [sic], the primitive.”19 Though Derrida clearly is referring to the temporal primitive, might the temporal primitive also be racial? Throughout this book I argue that the temporal primitive is a racial primitive.20 Our understanding of origins is always already racial. By engaging with the history of Marx’s idea of “primitive accumulation” and juxtaposing it with an analysis of the processes of “accumulating the primitive,” I join with Coulthard and others in understanding the temporal, especially the cumulation and the developmentalism of capital, as racial. Hence, as I elaborate in the first two chapters on the American museum, the acquisition of the racial primitive in the collections of the imperial archive—what the curator-critic Jan Bernabe has called the “archive imperative”—must be analyzed in conjunction with the acquisition of epistemological capital.21 When it comes to the American museum, the Philippine exhibition constitutes a space where a history ought to be. This book intervenes in that space free of history. I take up with hope Derrida’s proposition that the violence of the shelter provided by the archive is not easy to contain: “Contrary to the impression one often has, such a concept [of the arkhe] is not easy to archive.”22 But I take up Derrida’s proposition by picking up the pen—by writing—and in the rest of this introductory chapter, I address the politics of penmanship, the modes of freedom as well as enclosure that writing unleashes.

Writing and Accumulation I: Penmanship, Enclosure, and the Coming of Style

Though my itinerary might seem erratic, I propose that in order to arrive at the possibility of a decolonial study of the Philippine collection and exhibition in the American museum, one must take a detour through the history of the Western act, scene, and product of writing, which I argue fundamentally are intertwined with capitalist accumulation. In the following sections, I address these basic questions: What is the nature of the relationship between writing and accumulation? How might the study of this relationship allow us to unschool ourselves and interrupt the mastery of knowledge? I try to answer these questions by describing the political and ethical stakes of studying the relation between writing and accumulation. I argue that there is an intimate union, a marriage, between writing and accumulation. I first offer a condensed political history of that relationship, starting with the idea of penmanship as an act of stylistic enclosure that coincides with land enclosure, population transfer, and capitalist accumulation in early Renaissance Europe. I then analyze the relationship between the novel as a genre and property, specifically between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel and the themes of marriage and inheritance. From this account of the literary representation of shifts in modes of accumulation, I turn to theorists of color who challenge this marriage between writing, accumulation, and capital. In so doing, these variously minoritized scholars turn our attention to the possibility of the rewriting of debt. They propose that living in accumulated debt, normatively understood as a negative thing, is a positivity. They dare to ask what a general commitment to “disownership,” in Fred Moten’s phrasing, would look like in a world destroyed and made over more and more rapidly by accumulation.23 Who would do or who does such a foolish thing?

By the end of this book, I will have argued that we need to listen to the foolish in order to unlearn the habit/us of capitalist accumulation, and I pay special attention to the foolishness of the illiterate. Though the illiterate usually are deemed limited by their incapacity to read, the illiterate must and do create alternative practices of coding and decoding untutored by the strictures of colonial education. Take, for example, Betty Grable’s character Loco in the classic Hollywood comedy How to Marry a Millionaire. Even as she gamely joins a husband-hunting scheme, Loco berates a would-be target when he decides to disinherit his daughter for marrying against his wishes. Loco says to him, “No matter how much money my mother didn’t have, she would never disinherit me.”24 It is Loco, the crazy and stupid one, who makes nonsense of the values of the rich, defends the values of the poor, and envisions a world without disinheritance. One cannot disinherit someone if one has no money: That is precisely Loco’s point. No one can disinherit anyone if no one has money.

Like Loco, illiterates are unschooled, and that can be a positive quality. Though we are trained to value literacy and the literary as universal markers of intelligence and respectability, with each chapter in this book I offer a reading practice (paradoxically, I realize) that allows for more imaginative listening to the illiterate and the alternative knowledge generated by critical literalism. In chapter 3, on the writer Carlos Bulosan, I argue that his illiterate, low-born character Magno Rubio produces a highly literalist approach to words and, hence, to the world of debt peonage he inhabits. Magno Rubio can expose systemic structures of exploitation and violence with much more acuity than can his more educated coworkers. This form of literalism is discernible in visual art too. Chapter 4, on the artist Stephanie Syjuco, argues that Syjuco’s way of sticking to the surface—in her nearly two-dimensional sculpture—recalls and renovates Karl Marx’s insistence that a critique of capitalism must begin not with the fantasy of the origin or the concrete base of the economy but rather with phenomena like money that we see immediately on the surface of society. In the concluding chapter, I focus on Syjuco’s social media and online crowdsourcing practices. Stepping out of the museum proper, I discuss contemporary practices of accumulation in order to provide a critique of the recent, presumably anti-capitalist trend of consuming craft practices—from homemade soap to DIY carpentry to so-called back-to-the-land homesteading.

But what do I mean when I say that there is an intimate union between writing and accumulation? Let us take up the pen. In his study The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital, Richard Halpern argues that the rise of different writing—penmanship—styles in early Renaissance England coincided with massive political, socioeconomic, and cultural upheavals in the wake of enclosure, population transfer, and capitalist accumulation. Writing capital has everything to do with “breeding capital,” in Halpern’s phrase, and we can trace that relationship through the surprising link between the figure of the beggar and the figure of the schoolboy.25 According to Halpern, during this era of tremendous displacement and dispossession, the truancy of the wandering vagrant was transformed—schooled, as it were—into the truancy of the absentee pupil. From there, Halpern outlines how this transformation was both reflected and effected by the pedagogy of penmanship and the stylistic enclosure of schoolboys.

Before focusing on the graphological pen, Halpern first accounts for the geographical penning in of people and land. Rather than replicate Marx’s controversial emphasis on the enclosure movement as the principal factor in the transformation of agrarian England, Halpern emphasizes more broadly the use and direction of force in both feudal and protocapitalist economies. For Halpern, the period of the transition to capitalism oversaw the “reversal of the direction of force” from the centripetal to the centrifugal.26 In late feudal England, the landowning class directed force inward in a “centripetal” direction that compelled the maintenance of the “unity of peasant and land,” thus “binding” the peasantry to land-based extrication of dues and services.27 With the transition to the early modern period, some landowners began to direct force outward in a “centrifugal” and “expulsive” direction.28 The nature of peasant struggle accordingly shifted. As Halpern notes, “Force became expulsive rather than binding, centrifugal rather than centripetal, and on the other side the small peasantry now tried to secure its place on the land, whereas before it had struggled to free itself from villeinage.” The Tudor and Stuart eras thus came to be defined by an “explosion in the size of the vagrant population, … who lost their domestic, social, and cultural habitations along with their means of subsistence.”29

What makes Halpern’s analysis of “breeding capital” particularly illuminating is his account of how the “vagrant” became “errant.”30 In an era when cultural, religious, and institutional traditions of hosting visitors and the poor came under extreme pressure—“the beggars, it seemed, were always coming to town”—the word and idea of the “truant” shifted such that its original denotation as a “vagabond or sturdy beggar” came to be applied in the sixteenth century to “lazy or absent schoolboys.”31 In this new “essentially sedentarizing regime,” wherein vagrancy was deemed “not as a class condition but as a moral or disciplinary failing,” the Tudor schoolhouse became a site for the anxious pedagogical warding off of vagrancy even as actual vagrants were excluded from the schoolhouse.32 Halpern then cites penmanship as an especially compelling example of how “ideological, literary, and pedagogical matters could clearly intersect.”33 How students wrote was as important as what they wrote about. In their copybooks, Renaissance students practiced forming letters by imitating the ideal models and reproducing them over and over again, carefully staying within the gridded boxes: “Penmanship as copying thus emerged from a striated or ‘ruled’ space (in every sense of the word).”34

If the pen can be understood as an instrument of stylistic enclosure, penmanship was a means of developing one’s individual style. (I recall with fondness my own copybook and my ability to replicate perfect lines and curves when I learned cursive writing during my primary school education in 1970s Australia.) Halpern describes the two stages of teaching penmanship, beginning with letter production and then advancing to line production. While the former required students to imitatively copy letters, the latter demanded the mastery of the flow of ink such that students produced lines that no longer were confined by the ruled space. Students were introduced to the “art of the flourish.”35 Thus, an opposition and then an “unstable union” emerged between letter production as a “disciplinary and sedentarizing regime” and line production as a “fluid and nomadic one.”36 The pedagogy of graphology in Tudor England reflected how anxiety about vagrancy shaped the containment of wandering, nomadic elements, and the emergence of controlled fluidity. Stylistic enclosure was enabled first by lined, gridded paper and then followed by the emergence of the art of the flourish penned by a “free hand” capable of regulating the flow of ink. I take this set of contradictions to be a harbinger of the Romanticist ideal of the sovereign individual. The coming of style anticipated the freedom of the Romantic subject, a freedom rooted in enclosure.

How does this history of freedom rooted in enclosure translate to the scene of American colonialism in the Philippines? The genocidal conquest of the Philippines was accompanied by a massive displacement of people from the land, which led to their migration to the United States, an accumulation by dispossession that followed the same logic as enclosure. Thus, Halpern’s account of an earlier enclosure in Europe helps us to detect a similar logic at work in the later movements of accumulation in post-Spain, American-occupied Philippines. Halpern’s thesis about stylistic enclosure sharpened my attention to the politics of Filipino manipulations of epistolary style. During my research for the chapter on the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, I came across a sheaf of letters, handwritten in English, by Filipinos to Marguerite Murphy Teahan, who served as the bachelor Frank Murphy’s “first lady” during his tenure as U.S. governor-general in the Philippines.37 Virtually every letter contained a combination of exaggerated flattery of the first lady followed by a concrete plea or demand, ranging from requests for a souvenir picture of Teahan to assistance obtaining a job or housing. For example, Simplicio Laude of Cebu opened his letter in 1934 to Teahan thus: “Standing in the shadow of your sympathy, I am addressing you this letter on a matter that vitally affects the condition of my living. I am at present suffering the great depression that ocurred [sic] in the Philippine Island [sic].”38 In the same year, thirteen-year-old Caridad Camacho, a student at Philippine Women’s College, wrote to Teahan and, after thanking the first lady for “all [her] sacrifice” for the Philippines, noted, “I have read too about the charitable institutions which cares [sic] for my poor fellowmen, especially the children.”39 Also in 1934, Patrocinio Hernando from Ilocos Norte opened her letter to Teahan with this flourish: “It overwhelms me to write a great lady such as you; more so when I face the fact that I am asking of you a favor.”40 As I explain further in chapter 2, enwreathed in ornate flattery, these requests constitute a demand for compensation that does not follow the logic of “progressivist imperialism” and that contains the trace of Southeast Asian values that demand recognition of the obligation that leaders have to provide for their people.

Figure I.2. First page of a letter from Patrocinio Hernando to Margaret Murphy Teahan, September 17, 1934. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Writing and Accumulation II: The Marriage between the Novel and Property

Let us put down the pen for now and take up the novel. How might we extend the insights of literature proper, especially the novel, to our understanding of accumulation? I argue that the novel offers different perspectives on accumulation. In the telescoped but productive readings of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope that follow, I show that the novel depicts shifts in modes of accumulation, particularly the shift from what we might call a “fixed” mode of accumulation in Austen’s portrayal of the landed gentry to a speculative mode of accumulation in Trollope’s portrayal of gamblers.

It is by now almost clichéd to draw attention to the intimacy between the novel and property. In its association with the developmentalism of the bildungsroman, heteroreproductive romance, the idea of national literature, and the West’s land grabs, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European novel wields enormous power as the genre—understood as the convergence of ideological pressures rather than as a static category—that repeatedly teaches the ideological lesson of marriage and property. The ultimate happy ending, the marriage between man and woman, achieves the legitimate heteropatriarchal and racial transfer of property from present to future owners and ensures the naturalized reproduction of the caste system. The apparently biological nature of woman’s destiny and duty to reproduce the next primogenitor works powerfully and insidiously to affirm class, religious, sexual, and racial hierarchies. In his tour-de-force book on Jane Austen, gender and sexuality studies scholar D. A. Miller notes that if, for the girl reader of Austen, the discovery that “Austen meant Woman” compels the girl to “be a good girl,” for the boy reader, the “same discovery … made the boy all wrong.”41 The novel amplifies its naturalization of extant power relations by deploying the pedagogical power of realism in the making of the modern subject.42 While the function of marriage as happy ending is by no means unique to the genre of the novel, the sequential, realist nature of the novel lends an inexorability to the drive toward the ending. The affinity between the genre and various modes of possession—of land, women, labor, and other resources necessary for the reproduction and expansion of capitalist accumulation—has been fortified in the last decade or so by a remarkable resurgence in the popularity of Austen and especially her novel Pride and Prejudice. Loose and stodgy versions of Pride and Prejudice can be found in the form of films, televised serials, YouTube videos, pulp fiction (with vampires, werewolves, detectives, or the afterlives of characters in sequels like The Independence of Mary Bennett), and even collectible toy sets complete with Austen doll, miniature desk, and writing quill. Who, after all, can resist the coupling of Elizabeth Bennet’s sparkling wit and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s monied ineptness?

Let us take a closer look at the famed first two sentences of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” Austen sums up the basic boy-meets-girl story that structures the genre of the novel. The story turns out to be triadic rather than dyadic in nature, however. Boy does not merely meet girl. Primogenitor meets property, the possession of which demands the coupling with girl if the boy heir is to become a real man of property, a man capable of passing on the property to his own boy heir.43 Darcy, the most privileged and propertied of literary characters, turns out to be the rightful property of “some one or other.” In other words, to have is to be had.

At the same that Austen’s Pride and Prejudice naturalizes this well-worn story of gendered, propertied heteroreproduction, it also naturalizes a story not so much of coming-of-age as of coming-into-self-possession. Austen’s novel of propertied heterosexual romance dramatizes how one comes to possess oneself. The real romance turns out to be an affair with the “self.” Both Elizabeth and Darcy learn to define their personality traits—pride and prejudice—as their own. They learn to believe that they own themselves even as their “selves” turn out to be an effect of the structure, as the work of Louis Althusser implies. Elizabeth’s bewitching self-confidence, her primary trait, is itself a story of self-possession.

Writing and Accumulation III: The Novel, Chance, and Speculation

From Austen’s portrayal of the landed aristocracy, we turn to Anthony Trollope’s portrayal of gamblers and finance capitalists. We shift from landed, “fixed” accumulation in Austen to high-risk, speculative modes of accumulation left to chance in Trollope. For example, in Trollope’s novel The Claverings, the shift from property to finance is encapsulated by Captain Boodle’s reference to betting in his advice to Archie Clavering to pursue the wealthy widow Lady Ongar: “He never surrendered a bet as lost, till the evidence as to the facts was quite conclusive, and had taught himself to regard any chance, be it ever so remote, as a kind of property.”44 In the wake of a series of fiscal scandals that rocked nineteenth-century Europe, chance—from the roll of the dice to betting on the stock market to real estate speculation—became a form of property.45

If Austen’s novels in the era of waning landed property perform the subjectivity of possession, Trollope’s novels in the era of finance capital and high imperialism perform the subjectivity of debt, and the double meaning of forgiveness drives several of his plots. We read to find out whether a character’s moral transgression or violation of codes of respectable behavior will be forgiven. We read to find out whether and how a character will pay off a monetary debt. Fiction can work powerfully to reveal the fictitiousness of capital, and none so rivetingly as Trollope’s world of debt, gambling, primogeniture, social ambition, and usury as his characters traverse the politics of the living room, the church, and Parliament. At his best, Trollope manages to make fascinating the most boring people and phenomena. The Last Chronicle of Barset is about a twenty-pound check. The Eustace Diamonds is about a necklace. Framley Parsonage is about an IOU. The eight-hundred-page novel Can Your Forgive Her? turns on Alice Vavasor’s inaction, her refusal until the inevitable end to marry and cede control over her income to her husband. Gambling and speculation emerge as a thematic across much of Trollope’s oeuvre. In novels like Can You Forgive Her? and The Way We Live Now there are scenes involving card or dice play in gentlemen’s clubs or in notorious resort and casino towns like Baden and Lucerne. Morally opposed to and socially barred from the vice of gambling, upper-class women characters use gambling as a metaphor for love. In The Last Chronicle of Barset, Lily Dale says of her love for Adolphus Crosbie: “If it were simply myself, and my own future fate in life, I would trust him with it all tomorrow, without a word. I should go to him as a gambler goes to the gambling-table, knowing that if I lost everything I could hardly be poorer than I was before.”46

Most infamously, in The Way We Live Now the enigmatic financier Augustus Melmotte takes gambling to its highest form of fiscal speculation: gambling with nothing, that is, empty assets. Trollope’s portrait of Gentile gambling tends to be gentlemanly. Near-penniless aristocrats gather at the card table in their exclusive London clubs and gamble with IOUs. But when it comes to Melmotte, who is rumored to be a Jew, the practice of gambling with debt occurs on a monumental scale. Melmotte takes London by storm with outrageously lavish parties, a demure and marriageable daughter, and a dazzling shareholding scheme that would fund the building of a railway from Utah to Mexico. Along the way, we learn about all the practices of swindling, cheating, and forgery that were endemic to the era but conveniently condensed in the racialized figure of the Jew. Trollope’s anti-Semitism lays the blame for fiscal fraud on the figure of the Jew. If we read Melmotte’s crimes of forgery and deception against the grain, however, we see that his falsification of signatures brilliantly reveals the scandalous fictitiousness of capital itself, a phenomenon that has manifested time and again in our own era. As David Harvey argues in his account of the dot-com bust that began in 1999, the resultant economic collapse “soon spread to reveal that much of what passed for finance capital was in fact unredeemable fictitious capital supported by scandalous accounting practices and totally empty assets.”47

In contrast, characters like Lady Carbury turn to fiction and nonfiction as a way to survive the transition to speculative and finance capitalism. Widowed and pursued by creditors, Lady Carbury turns to writing as a source of income to support herself and her children. (The character of Lady Carbury is an autobiographical reference to Trollope’s mother, who also turned to writing as a means of survival for her and her children.) Titled and privileged as she is, the number of respectable paths toward survival is extremely limited. Indeed, her story yet again ends in marriage, this time to an editor. Her attempt at an independent profession becomes merely a means of attaching herself to a man and regaining the position of dependence through marriage. What else is a lady to do? Austen answers this question by mystifying property relations and transactions as relations of love and moral self-discovery, while Trollope literalizes the mystified Austenian relations of capital in the novel of financial capital.

The gendered nature of Lady Carbury’s personal financial troubles signifies the generalized loss of autonomy and increased anxiety that characterize an economy now in the hands of the financier and massive corporate entities. I turn now to alternative responses to non-autonomy, other ways of gambling with debt and gambling with words. As I outline in chapter 3, on Carlos Bulosan’s fiction, the character of Magno Rubio embraces his non-autonomous status as a non-immigrant, noncitizen, illiterate seasonal laborer in Depression-era California. Magno Rubio does not care about being autonomous. Magno Rubio does not care that he has accrued an amount of debt impossible for him to ever pay off. What happens, Bulosan implicitly asks, when we see debt as a positivity and gambling as a necessity?

The Stakes of Gambling with Words

What is the context for asking these questions about debt and gambling? This book is an essay against both economic accumulation and accumulation in the university. It is an attempt to undermine the rationale for accumulation during a renewed, intensified cycle of raiding what is left of the public good—the commons—in the United States in the form of the university. Across the chapters that follow, I argue that “primitive accumulation” can and must be understood as a process that describes not only material entities like land and labor but also knowledge production, and the university and the archive are the ideal sites for the analysis of that process. Even and especially in the face of the urgent call for increasingly defensive and rearguard action to protect what little is left, I want to insist that that act of protection must be expansive, ambitious, and generous, as impossible as it is to conceptualize generosity and abundance in a moment of (manufactured) scarcity.48 I ask what the academic intellectual might have to learn, in such a moment, from those who always have been exploited by the processes of accumulation, the latest versions of which now target a university that was once the alibi of accumulation. Turning to key sentences by Black and Filipino scholars in the rest of this chapter, I track anti-accumulative thought and writing precisely at a time when such work is seen as frivolous and extravagant play, a nonproductive, morally questionable activity not unlike gambling, which moreover dissolves the boundary between leisure and toil.

What is at stake in taking up this all too rare opportunity to pause, to think, and to play with words is the possibility of imagining a nonpropertied space of decolonial knowledge production. We study, teach, write, and organize in order to train ourselves to study not only the objects of analysis we have in view. We prepare ourselves in anticipation of objects of analysis that we can barely imagine let alone grasp today. Fred Moten asks (of) us, “Is there knowledge in the service of not knowing, study as unowning knowledge?”49 Cedric Robinson asks (of) us, Where is a university that we can imagine, let alone build, in the West that would foster the “preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic sense”?50

Let me step back for a minute. What is involved in word play? What are the stakes of gambling with words? Discussing the “infinite postponement of meaning” associated with Derrida’s theory of différance in his 1990 article “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall usefully warns us that Derrida’s disciples have transformed the French critic’s insights about the play of words into a “celebration of formal ‘playfulness,’ which evacuates them of their political meaning.”51 Hall goes on to contend that “if signification depends upon the endless repositioning of its differential terms, meaning, in any specific instance, depends upon the contingent and arbitrary stop—the necessary and temporary ‘break’ in the infinite semiosis of language” even as meaning “continues to unfold, so to speak, beyond the arbitrary closure which makes it, at any moment, possible.”52 At issue in the neoliberal austerity regime’s assault on the university is how we grasp and apply the idea of that temporary break and that contingent stop as a means of rethinking the intellectual and institutional syntax of our work in the academy. Here is another way to put this in the form of questions: How might we contend with the tension between, on the one hand, the intransigent insistence on impermanence and fluidity that characterizes the fields of cultural studies, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and decolonizing studies and, on the other hand, the university’s emphasis on monumentality and permanence in the very process of institutionalizing emergent fields, a process that both calcifies and conserves these new fields of knowledge production? In the face of this new cycle of defunding, theft, and privatization, how might we continue to insist—ethically, politically, and intellectually—on the urgency of opening up rather than shutting down the spaces for nonrationalized forms of knowledge production, even and especially for those forms that thrive under conditions of impermanence and ephemerality rather than (institutionalized) permanence? How might we abide by the precepts outlined in the “Guide to Samoan Studies,” published in 2005 in the first issue of the Journal of Samoan Studies, which include tenets like the following:

1 Keep the topics open and flexible

2 Don’t be afraid to do it your way and avoid addiction to any one approach to research or publication

3 Study what and publish what you in and of Samoa need to publish, not what someone else might consider appropriate

4 Results get resources rather than the other way around53

In thinking about the de-propertied, decolonial university from my vantage as a scholar affiliated with cultural studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial and empire studies, I keep returning to three sentences that allow me to think about the possibilities of an unpropertied, anti-accumulative relation to words, ideas, and knowledge.

SENTENCE NUMBER 1: “We are here to write the sentences that have never been written and that will never be written again.” Ruminating and riffing on Frederick Douglass and the “unmeaning jargon” of slave songs at the 2008 conference “Campus Lockdown: Women of Color Negotiating the Academic Industrial Complex,” Fred Moten reminded us of our obligation and pleasure as scholars of color to forge new sentences as part of the longer traditions of meaning making within our various communities, even as those syntactical structures and forms of improvisation are dismissed and pathologized as so much nonmeaning and nonsense.54 In other words, we must write words that run amuck/amok.55

SENTENCE NUMBER 2: “Everything I am about to say in this essay has already been said.”56 In his 2005 Social Text essay “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” Hiram Pérez takes on the “queer illuminati”—establishmentarian, elite, white queer studies scholars—in the wake of the 2003 “Gay Shame” conference (or “fiasco”) that he attended, the sole scholar of color asked to speak at the conference. Pérez’s focus on repetition and the oldness of what he says calls into question the academy’s focus on critique’s “originality”: “The professional pressure to produce ‘originality’ is really a call to make property claims demarcating intellectual territory and thus an appeal to privatism and individualism.” Instead Pérez calls for queer studies to “interrogat[e] its capacity to listen imaginatively.”57

SENTENCE NUMBER 3: “Such a practice … might turn up new soil on old ground.”58 At a 2005 American Studies Association panel on the work of Hortense Spillers, Nahum Chandler delivered a paper on Spillers vis-à-vis Du Bois, published three years later in Criticism as an essay titled “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought.” And again, this question of the relation between the old and the new emerges.

Especially in my analyses of the writer Carlos Bulosan (chapter 3) and the artist Stephanie Syjuco (chapter 4), this book seeks to explore the productive tension—the syncopated rhythm, perhaps—between Pérez’s trenchant critique of (propertied) originality and Moten’s embrace of (nonpropertied) singularity. Drawing from the experience I have had to garner as an organizer for social change within the imperial American academy, I am interested in the tension between deep listening and the composition of “unmeaning jargon.” Indeed, I would suggest that that tension might constitute the praxis of knowledge production in a de-propertied, decolonial university—of “turn[ing] up new soil on old ground.”

But how and why did knowledge get commodified? I turn to the law and the law school by way of an answer. I began to think about the commodification of words—and, from there, the commodification of knowledge and education—while taking a seminar as a graduate student with Patricia Williams when we all were excited about this new phenomenon of critical race theory. While Williams is now widely known as a columnist for the Nation as well as a law professor, it is crucial to remember that Williams is a contracts scholar, thus or thence her influential 1988 essay in Signs titled “On Being the Object of Property.”59 I remember grappling with what was to me the new knowledge that the structure—not merely the content—of case law itself reproduces the enslaveability of personhood. We read all these cases testing the legal and ethical repercussions of new (at the time) reproductive technologies such as surrogacy, and we learned that the contracts governing surrogate motherhood drew upon precedents in the laws governing the trade in cattle and then the purchase and sale of human chattel. But it was not only the content of slavery in the law that I understood to be the problem. As I began to read Williams’s groundbreaking work—new soil on old ground—I paid attention to its storytelling style of anecdote upon anecdote upon anecdote, the meshed complexity of its chain of signification. I was struck by its rhetorical resistance to citation. In other words, it is very hard to quote Williams. It is difficult to lift a passage from Williams’s work and quote it in your own work because, out of its own context, the quotation loses its meaning so quickly and begins to approximate nonsense or “unmeaning jargon.” And I think that the politics of her style has everything to do with her ruminations on “being the object of property.”

Indeed, as a number of critical race scholars have pointed out, the ethical subject of Western thought, the subject that forms the epistemological ground for the imperial university, in fact turns out to be an economic subject. In the 1991 essay “Race under Representation,” David Lloyd characterizes the innately racialized nature of the universality—that is to say, the transcendence of particularity—attached to the European as a “Subject without properties,” a phrase and concept that are very much in dialogue with Denise da Silva’s description and elaboration of the “subject of transparency” in her 2007 book Toward a Global Idea of Race.60 In other words, the Subject without properties is the subject of property and ownership. Noting the close proximity between people of color—in Silva’s phrase, the subjects of affectability—and the very idea of content, Hiram Pérez writes in the aforementioned essay, “Colored folk perform affect but can never theorize it.”61 Indeed, brown bodies “must never improvise on their brownness. Whiteness experiences such improvisations as the theft of something very dear: its universal property claim to the uniqueness of being.”62 Together these scholars remind us, as I will elaborate in chapter 1, that the objectivity belonging to the universal subject of critique in fact constitutes a masked and particular subjectivity: the European subject of transparency who possesses a monopoly on the capacity for thought and judgment.

Even more, these scholars remind us that if we cannot “have” a space in the university, we must create a temporary space—a contingent stop—for unowned knowledge that sees no contradiction between Moten’s call for singularity and Perez’s reminder about unoriginality. It is a stop or a pause, rather than a space. It has to be. We have to be okay with being on the move. We have to abandon the seductions of belonging and settling. We have to roll the dice for the riskier yet deeper pleasures of the rhythm of temporary shelter in a world overwhelmingly but not totally devoted to the habits of accumulation by dispossession.