Aproximación a la Alfabetidad Visual y su inluencia en el

Saturday, 17 August 2013, noon, on a street parallel to Benson Street in central Monrovia. I have just turned off Newport Street to walk into the centre of Monrovia when I hear the sound of drums and singing coming from further up the hill. I wait on the sidewalk with a growing crowd of curious bystanders as a parade slowly makes its way down the road, framed by the hulking shell of Ducor Hotel high on the rise. A banner held by the parade’s leaders reads:

Liberian Cultural Union, celebrating 10 years of peace

155 _{Ibid, 15.}

156 _{Author interviews with officers of the Liberian Land Commission: Monrovia, 14 August 2013}

(MG5, MG7, and MG8); Zorzor, 29 August 2013 (Li18); Harper, 27 September 2013 (Li39). See also Liberian Land Commission, 2014 Annual Report (Monrovia: LC, 2014).

Dancing behind the banner are a dozen or so small ‘cultural troupes’, each dressed in their own colourful uniforms, most of them with one or two djembe players. In stark contrast, a dozen men dressed in uniform long black pants, shiny black shoes, and light brown khaki shirts with a Liberian flag stitched to the shoulder lead the Cultural Union down the street, their troupe marching to the beat of a small military-style band. Standing at the head of the parade, marching in military uniform, the message seems clear: the Government leads this Union.

And yet, as I watch the parade pass by, it is clear that the Government’s troupe is not leading the Cultural Union down the street. I am struck by how the parade frames the Government as just another cultural group amongst Liberia’s many diverse groups; althoughnot quite. Amongst the dozen cultural troupes, the Government’s representatives stick out awkwardly. Compared with the mature, comfortable way the other groups appear—their women, men, and children dancing, singing, and laughing—the Government’s troupe of unsmiling men appear stilted. Stilted: ‘furnished with or having stilts; raised artificially as on stilts’, ‘supported on props or posts so as to be raised above the ground’, ‘artificially or affectedly lofty; unnaturally elevated; formally pompous. (The usual current sense.)’158 _{It is as if the youngest brother, aware of his own impotence compared}

with his much older sisters and brothers, is seeking to assert his identity and power by placing himself at the head, whilst his more mature siblings carry on, tolerating his adolescent conceit if it keeps him quiet and allows them to continue down the street in peace.

And yet still, as I watch the parade pass by, I cannot overlook that behind the stilted leadership of the Government’s troupe is a very real power. Overshadowing the celebration of this decade of peace: a hotel on the rise.

But then my focus returns to the street again; and there, in contrast to both the hotel’s hulking shell and the Government’s monochrome troupe, dancing, singing, and laughing their way, are Liberia’s cultural groups—the life of the parade.

∞

Through this chapter I have sought to show how a particular logic informed the articulation of ‘Liberia’ from its conception as an idea of liberty at the beginning of the nineteenth century to its consolidation as a nation-state in the twentieth century. Operating through the law as its forceful medium, this logic gave form to Liberia by super-imposing over country in west Africa a representational framework that would render its lands and peoples productive as territory and citizens. This logic, I argued, is the logic of capital.

I began by examining the logic itself through a reading of John Austin’s lecture on ‘things’ in his influential nineteenth century treatise on English law, Lectures on Jurisprudence, or the Philosophy of Positive Law. This revealed a logic operating through a legal framework that, at its extreme, can render an object entirely fungible. Through the super-imposition of this representational framework, a singular object is invested with a general value, rendering it a movable species of thing, without an essential nature of its own. On one hand, as an act of realism, the effect is to give form to the object as a real asset. Thus lands and peoples become rightfully possessed as territory and citizens. On the other hand, as an act of surrealism, the result is a super-imposed reality that denies the ‘subjectivity’ of the object, as being self-possessed. On this logic, ‘rightful possession’ is a function of investment; thus an enslaved person might be made free as a rightful human through a process of civilisation that would invest their person with human rights; whilst land might be made productive through a process of cultivation that would invest it with property rights.

In the second part of the chapter I then examined how this logic was super- imposed over the peoples and lands of Liberia through a process of colonisation, which, since the Roman colōnia, has involved both the introduction of civilisation and the cultivation of new land. I began here with ‘the idea of Liberia’, to show how ‘Liberia’ was conceived at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a solution to the problem of slavery in the United States, created as a conceptual schema to achieve in practice what Austin had sought to do in his Lectures, that is, establish a clear distinction between a human person and a non-human thing. The increasingly common sight of African-Americans walking freely in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century was seen to contradict the ongoing enslavement of Africans in America, whilst their ongoing treatment as a movable species of thing was seen to contradict their freedom as African-Americans. The

result was a situation where people of colour in the United States appeared simultaneously free and unfree, never wholly slaves, and yet never wholly rightful citizens. ‘Liberia’ was supposed to resolve this logical contradiction by re- establishing a clear line of separation between human and thing. Liberia in Africa would be a place where people of colour would be wholly free; the United States would be a place where people of colour would be wholly things of capital; and the distinction would be kept in place by a vast ocean.

The idea of Liberia was thus born as an analytical conceit to secure the logic of slavery in the United States by transporting the offending category (‘free people of colour in the United States’) across the ocean to Africa, where it would have the ancillary effect of making free all of Africa. However this did not resolve the paradoxical condition of the African-American migrants, of being simultaneously free and unfree. As Americo-Liberians, their ‘sovereignty and independence’ as a people remained contingent on recognition of their international personality. The problem was that, throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, this recognition remained extremely uncertain, with Americo-Liberians living under constant threat of becoming vassals of either the British or French empires. To resolve this situation—of being a ‘sovereign and independent’ people and yet treated as a res colōnia, that is, as a thing of colonialism—the Americo-Liberian government sought to define its lands and peoples and bring both under its dominion as territory and population, in accordance with the requirements of the international legal framework. However, as I showed through an examination of the demarcation process, the super-imposition of this framework involved a work of surrealism, both fantastical and violent, fusing name and country in the creation of a metonym that would, it was said, ensure the liberty of Liberia.

The nation-state of Liberia was thus born as an attempt to finally make free the Americo-Liberian people; extending Liberia beyond the littoral would settle its place in the world. The result, however, was to extend littoral Liberia into the interior, making the Republic a place ‘of contested imaginaries’, ‘an environment of flux and change par excellence’,159 _{culminating in revolution and the eventual}

overthrow of the Americo-Liberian regime. Thus at the beginning of the twentieth century the government extended citizenship to Liberia’s ‘natives’, whilst bringing the hinterland under Provincial administration. The effect was to leave ‘African-

Liberians’ in this ‘tribal jurisdiction’ of the hinterland in a similar situation to African-Americans in the United States, as not wholly rightful citizens. The effect, in other words, was a form of civil death, their degradation manifesting at the extreme in slavery, forced labour, and exile. And yet, again, when the problem could no longer be ignored, the Government sought to resolve it by extending littoral Liberia into the hinterland, properly this time. Under the Government’s National Unification Policy, the hinterland Provinces were made the same as the coastal Counties, as a matter of territorial jurisdiction, and African-Liberians were possessed of all the rights residing in Americo-Liberians. Finally, the vision of ‘Liberia’ as the land of the free’d would be realised. And in a sense, this is precisely what happened, with African-Liberians making ‘Liberia’ consonant with them.

The argument running through this history is that, at each point, the representational framework that was supposed to liberate its object—human and land—was informed by the logic of capital. On this logic, liberation would come with the super-imposition of a general value: rendering humans productive citizens, through the investment of human rights, and rendering land productive territory, through the investment of property rights. On one hand, the investment of the general value would make the object into a real asset that could circulate freely (at least within a certain class), giving it great power. On the other hand, this general value would come at the cost of denying the object its self worth. Each time in this history, this problem with the logic, and indeed its devastating violence, was revealed most clearly in its non-realisation. Thus African-Americans in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century suffered a form of civil death as a result of their non-recognition as wholly rightful persons in the United States. Americo-Liberians suffered from a similar condition at the turn of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth as a result of their non-recognition as wholly rightful persons in the ‘international community’. And African-Liberians suffered as degraded citizens up until the overthrow of the Americo-Liberian regime. In each case, having been denied their own particular value as self-possessed humans, but not fully possessed of the general value, the result was a form of capital punishment—being abject before the law, suspended in a state of civil death.

Finally, in a post-script to this history, I considered an alternative representational framework. This independence framework operates on the same

logic but turns it from a medium of violent realism into a critical form that enables a more autobiographical expression of subjectivity. This, I suggested, might underwrite Liberia’s independence ‘post-colonialism’ and ‘post-war’. However, I also considered the government’s new development framework for its 2030 vision of the country. Rather than a break with the logic that informed the making of the First Republic, this suggests a continuation, if not an intensification, of the institutionalisation of this logic in the re-making of Liberia. Given the violence of this logic, the question for the Government is how it will deal with this, that is, how it will secure a state of peace against the violence of the logic that informs it. This is the question I now turn to examine through the next chapter.

Chapter 5