A Supple Materialism

Cooper’s first two books (published in 1977 and 1980, respectively) focused on the economy of plantation slavery in coastal East Africa, particularly Zanzibar.^{Footnote 1} Scholarship on slavery was undergoing a boom in the early 1970s, but the vast majority of this new work focused on the American institution. In taking the insights of this scholarship and testing them out in a non-Western context that was also outside the orbit of the Atlantic trade, Cooper was making a unique move that was explicitly comparative. The rising wave of work on American slavery was driven by a new generation of Marxist historians, at the head of which stood the figure of Eugene Genovese. Genovese’s magnum opus came in the form of a pair of monographs, The World the Slaveholders Made and Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, which were published as Cooper was completing his PhD.^{Footnote 2} Working on slavery meant grappling with Genovese; grappling with Genovese meant, implicitly or explicitly, wrestling with Antonio Gramsci; and wrestling with Gramsci in the early 1970s meant being a part of the vanguard of academic Marxism that was thinking through the problem of culture.

As Cooper put it in his first book, what was appealing about Genovese was the way he had shown that analyzing a slave system “requires understanding the dynamics of the master-slave relationship itself: how slaveowners, whatever their background and whatever their motives for employing slaves, tried to create some kind of social order and how slaves tried to bend that order when it could not be broken.”^{Footnote 3} This battle over the social order ranged broadly; it was social, political, economic, and ideological. Its toolkit too was diverse, and it included cultural forms like religion – Christianity in the American South, Islam on Zanzibar – which were subject to a back-and-forth struggle between masters and slaves to make claims on one other. This idea, as Cooper paraphrased it (crediting Gramsci), that a dominant class’s control could only be sustained if its repressive power “operated in conjunction with the redefinition and control of culture and social norms” lay at the heart of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.^{Footnote 4} In engaging it, as both Genovese and Cooper did, this generation sought out new tools that went beyond those of their more economistic Marxist predecessors. Indeed, at a basic level, the turn that Cooper’s generation of materialist historians was making was toward a non-deterministic Marxism.

In the most general sense, both Plantation Slavery on the Coast of East Africa and From Slaves to Squatters exemplified this move by shedding teleological assumptions that non-capitalist forms like slavery must mechanistically follow a preordained path in transitioning to capitalist ones, or that the behavior of laboring classes could be predictably read from their position in the political economy. Instead, Cooper insisted on careful investigation of the specific claims and actions of rulers and ruled alike, and demonstrated how each was consequential within the possibilities and constraints of eras of political-economic transition. In addition to being enabled by Marxism’s engagement with culture, this approach was also made hard to avoid by the empirical context of the late-nineteenth century East African coast: its “pre-capitalist” politics, economy, and social forms at the time were being disrupted by both capitalism and colonialism, but in strikingly uneven and un-predetermined ways.

Tensions of Empire

As Cooper moved to the University of Michigan, this commitment to a supple historical materialism would play a role in sparking the collaboration with Ann Stoler on the Tensions of Empire project. Stoler too was coming from a background forged in work on the political economy of plantation labor – in her case in colonial Java.^{Footnote 5} This interest in plantation labor undergoing shifts under colonial capitalism was a foundation they had in common. But Stoler was also bringing to the project an increasing engagement with French poststructuralism, particularly the work of Michel Foucault. Exploring colonial power in Java had sparked a growing interest in the use of language to construct and maintain categories of difference – including racialized and sexualized ones – and thereby shore up the vulnerabilities of colonial hierarchies.^{Footnote 6} Foucault, with his emphasis on the way discursive formations were key to a ruling order’s capacity to generate consent among the governed, was especially useful – even as his neglect of non-Western, colonial contexts presented an important opportunity to revise, indeed decolonize, his insights.^{Footnote 7}

At the time, Stoler was far from alone in engaging Foucault in an effort to understand the tenacious, if diffuse, nature of the forms of power – epistemological as well as political-economic – that colonial regimes exerted over colonized populations. Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, had drawn prominently on Foucault to develop a powerful case about the central role of Enlightenment discourse in constructing non-Western peoples as backward others and thereby naturalizing European colonial rule.^{Footnote 8} The book’s massive impact helped make Foucault essential reading for a generation of scholars of non-Western contexts who were setting the agenda of what would become postcolonial theory. A number of these scholars – including Partha Chatterjee, Homi Bhabha, Uday Mehta, Dipesh Chakrabarty, John Comaroff, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot – would join the Tensions of Empire project and give it its particular bent toward an attention to discourse and its shaping power. Indeed, coming when it did – a conference and special issue in 1989, the edited volume in 1997 – Tensions of Empire arguably sat at the high-water mark of this foregrounding of discourse and would be remembered by many as a key part of this pivot in colonial studies.^{Footnote 9}

In light of this, the simple fact of Cooper’s collaboration with Stoler at the head of the project – as well as her own initial grounding in political economy – is a useful reminder that a commitment to historical materialism was more foundational to Tensions of Empire than would later be generally remembered. Still, Cooper’s relationship to Foucaldian poststructuralism was different, and would become much more critical, than that of much of the volume’s cast. Reference to Gramsci had signaled an interest in hegemony on Cooper’s part (and indeed Gramsci was a kind of border figure in the relationship between political-economic and cultural approaches).^{Footnote 10} And, Cooper had early on cited Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in analyzing how capitalism re-structured time for workers (the route to Foucault was via E.P. Thompson).^{Footnote 11} The stress here, though, was still decidedly materialist – on the shaping, through whatever means (including discursive), of material processes. The details of these material processes were crucial for Cooper, and they would frequently lie at the base of his differences with Foucauldian approaches. While he found generative Foucault’s emphasis on the way power and resistance were co-constitutive, he took issue, particularly in colonial contexts, with Foucault’s theory of power as “capillary” and what he saw as a tendency by some postcolonial theorists to treat colonial visions as more impactful than he argued they were.^{Footnote 12}

If this tension between materialism and post-structuralism was a part of the Tensions of Empire project – and the Cooper-Stoler partnership – it worked extraordinarily well. And central to this success, I suggest, were three aspects of Cooper’s influence on it, each worth considering in turn. To begin with, Cooper played a key role in anchoring the project in a continued, robust foregrounding of a materialist perspective. Given its timing and shape, it would have been easy for Tensions of Empire to turn completely toward discursive analysis in its quest to unpack the “cultures of colonialism” it explored (as the subtitle named its object). Particularly given that the volume’s contributions leaned heavily in that direction, it is notable that Cooper and Stoler’s introduction featured multiple moments of pushback against a jettisoning of political economy in favor of an ascendant focus on the “culture of colonialism and its relationship to modernity.” Instead, they called for “a more dynamic relationship between the two approaches.”^{Footnote 13} And, indeed, the volume as a whole kept the material production and material effects of discourse well within its frame.

If this materially-anchoring role was a rather expected one for Cooper, two other aspects of his impact were, I would argue, more central and less noted – both as components of what made Tensions of Empire work, and as more general features of his scholarly approach. First was – and remains – a particularly rigorous approach to exploring Africa’s place in the world, an approach of which Cooper should properly be recognized as a pioneer. Whenever I mention studying with Cooper, specialists of all world regions and eras and across multiple disciplines respond with clear recognition – not an especially common thing for Africanist scholars. This familiarity, I suggest, largely flows from Cooper’s having worked to weave Africa into our understanding of world processes and phenomena. (Indeed, it is no accident that one of Cooper’s books is titled Africa in the World.) But this Africa-in-the-world attunement went beyond what is arguably the staple component of the more recent wave of Africa-in-the-world scholarship. The latter tends to take a phenomenon or process to which Africa was previously not thought of as central (say, the Cold War) and show how the continent was in fact key. This move is an important one, but Cooper’s was somewhat different, I would argue. His method was to take a phenomenon or process (like decolonization) to which Africa was always recognized to be empirically central but dismissed as analytically marginal, and to re-analyze the process/phenomenon in a way that reanimated – sometimes even thoroughly overhauled – our global understanding of it.^{Footnote 14} And, strikingly, the key to this move was the relatively simple trick of centering complex African agents, their actions and their worldviews, in the story.

This feature of Cooper’s scholarship marked his single-authored work in a key way. But it also helps explain why he was such a good fit for the Tensions of Empire project. In that volume, we also see the mirror image of this move applied to Europe – a critical counterpoint that would shape Cooper’s books on the French empire and make his work increasingly central to grasping Europe’s colonial anxieties and their national afterlives. When Cooper and Stoler wrote in their introduction to Tensions of Empire that “Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself,” they set an agenda that would reshape a whole wing of European history.^{Footnote 15} How was it a mirror of the Africa-in-the-world critique? It took a phenomenon – colonialism – to which Europe was always recognized to be empirically central, but which was often treated as if it had left Europe itself unscathed, unruffled by its dominion over huge swaths of the globe, and made it analytically matter to European history.

The final aspect of Cooper’s method that would shape not just Tensions of Empire but his entire œuvre had to do with political stakes. The question of political stakes has always been central for Cooper. As with his approach to Africa-in-the-world, there is also a unique quality to the way this has manifested. It would be accurate, I think, to say that Cooper has shown both a rigorous commitment to careful empirical research – to the nuances of historical conjunctures, no matter how inconvenient they may be for our trendy frames of reference – and to keeping the question of political stakes at the center of things. This is a combination that is rarer than it should be. The way he was able to do both, I suggest, is related to the fact that the political stakes Cooper foregrounded were always those of his historical subjects, not his (or our) own presentist ones. The way he worked with decolonization in the French empire is a case in point. Cooper’s argument that various African constituencies channeled claims with real, even radical, political possibility through the institutional frameworks of empire was in many ways a decidedly unfashionable one when he began making it. (He started building this case in Decolonization and African Society, but it would reach its peak with Citizenship between Empire and Nation. It has since become an argument picked up and taken further by intellectual historians like Gary Wilder.) Taking seriously these African claims made within empire – a perspective which cast the eventual triumph of the nation-state as the dominant political form of postcolonial life in a fundamentally tragic light – flowed from Cooper’s attunement to the political stakes of his historical subjects.^{Footnote 16}

Conclusion: Historiographical Arcs in Retrospect

If we put ourselves back into the moment of the birth of the Tensions of Empire project, then, there were significant and consequential intellectual bases for this collaboration that on the surface might have seemed an unlikely one. Some of these bases, as highlighted here – historical materialism, Africa-in-the-world, and historical subjects’ political stakes – are not necessarily the associations the volume most readily conjures up in retrospect. One might even call this recovery of aspects of the volume’s birth, which might otherwise be effaced by later dominant narratives, an inheritance of a Cooper-ian method. Another element of this Cooper-ian method, though – the other side of the coin, perhaps – would be an attunement to the unpredictable, contingent, and unintended paths that trajectories of historical formations take over time. And this is the question I ask in closing: if we train our Cooper-ian analytic spectacles on Tensions of Empire and what it helped generate over time, what would we see? Did the volume mark a conjuncture that had some unpredictable or unintended outcomes for the materialist approach that was one of the project’s centrally shaping strands?

When looking back at Tensions of Empire and the main points laid out in that introduction, one is struck by how a focus on the nexus of knowledge/power looms large. This is not surprising, as I noted, given the volume’s timing and cast. Furthermore, as I mentioned above, Cooper and Stoler make explicit efforts to argue against abandoning political economy in favor of more culturalist approaches. And yet, it is clear in that introduction that historical materialism was, in the mid-1990s, the approach on the ropes. Did the insistence on keeping political economy in the picture in order to build “a more dynamic relationship between the two approaches” constitute a necessary anchoring, a bringing down to earth of some of the more untethered flights of studies of colonial discourse? Certainly. As I argued above, it helped keep the materiality of discourse central to the volume’s intervention. However, it arguably could also be cast as an absorption of political economy approaches to colonialism, one pulling them into service of ascendant cultural-historical methodologies. This may only be viewable in retrospect, after the tsunami of cultural histories of colonialism that followed Tensions of Empire and supplanted the political-economic analyses of the prior two decades. Now, of course, a new wave of interest in economic history is building, driven in part by an urgent reckoning with the extremities that inequality under neoliberal capitalism has reached, the revival of a state capitalist path to growth harnessed by China’s rise, and more.^{Footnote 17} These new histories of capitalism and its antagonists – including of capital’s entwinement with empire and the postcolony – make this an especially timely moment to recover the generative tensions embedded within historiographies of the non-Western world over the past fifty years. A careful look back at Cooper’s place within the Tensions of Empire project – itself a key pivot-point in that historiographical arc – and that volume’s place in Cooper’s own œuvre, reminds us that those tensions, in all their productivity, have been there all along.