The Culture of "Internal Colonialism": A Marxist Perspective

Author(s): Alan Wald

Source: MELUS, Vol. 8, No. 3, Ethnic Literature and Cultural Consciousness (Autumn, 1981),
pp. 18-27
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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The Culture of "Internal Colonialism":

A Marxist Perspective
Alan Wald
ULziVersiti? of Michigani/Alnn Arbor

After reading the papers and panelists' remarks from the December 1
MLA program on "Ethnic Literature and Cultural Nationalism," I feel t
I should devote my comments to explaining why it is important to sust
continuity in theoretical work between the highly creative era of the 1
and our own more conservative time. While I am unhappy about criticiz
co-workers who are toiling in this beleaguered area of scholarship-a st
fragile discipline that deserves support especially because it remains su
pect and unorthodox in the eyes of academia-I also believe that it woul
be a disservice to mute my conclusion that some of the contributions to
MLA panel represent a de facto throwback to modes of discourse that
too simple in light of our collective experience over the past twenty ye
Frankly, some of the material in the MLA program fails to provide fre
incisive analysis, and falls short of treating the cultural issues with th
subtlety of thought that they deserve. Other contributions are designed
educate us about principles that are correct but already familiar.
However, on the positive side, I am impressed by the degree to whic
the more provocative and penetrating interpretations-found in parts o
the contributions by Alurista, Martin, Ortiz, and Saldivar, but especially

Vivian Davis's "Black American Literature: A Cultural Interpretatio

derive logically from the kinds of radical cultural analysis first worked
in the 1960s and, in some cases, more fully realized in the 1970s. Readi
these particular materials reconfirms my sense that the most appropr
framework for analyzing the literary practice of blacks, Chicanos, Na
American Indians, Asian Americans, and Puerto Ricans remains a politi

cultural notion of "internal colonialism." In what follows I will review this

notion and explain why it takes my thinking in a different direction from

the thinking of MELUS members who conflate the study of all cultural

subgroups in the U.S. into the ambiguous category of "ethnic," "multiethnic," or "minority" studies. I will also offer examples of creative and
critical practice that ought to be among the centerpieces of the counter-

hegemonic cultural perspective we need to extend from the 1960s and

1970s into the 1980s.

MELUS, Volume 8, No. 3, Fall 1981.

18

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ALAN WALD

19

I. Immigrant and Colonized Minorities

Who can deny that the 1960s was a decisive decade for our work?

a period of tumult in which literature by and about racially-oppr

groups erupted on the scene in a manner somewhat analogous to the

in which literature about the working class, immigrant, and "bottom
life burst into the pages of American literature during the Great De
sion. The thrust of much of the widespread politico-nationalist thou
the 1960s was to argue for the existence of a unique cultural achieve

by blacks and certain other groups whose incorporation into Am

society bore a greater resemblance to a colonization process than
immigration process. Thus, Chicano culture was no longer viewed

adaptation of Mexican culture to the Euro-American environment, b

said to be a unique blend-Chicano; Black American culture was de

by black writers as neither African nor a "damaged" variety of
American culture, but as something new and positive-Afro-Ame
and so on.

Unfortunately, the complexity of this argument is not adequately captured by William J. Harris in his MLA contribution called "The Yardbird
Reader and the Multi-Ethnic Spirit." He begins his essay by stating that th

1960s and 1970s were dominated by forms of "black nationalism whi

assumed that race was the most significant factor in a black person

life. ..." But, to document this claim, he quotes Amiri Baraka that "Black

people are a race, a culture, a Nation," a formulation that clearly tel

us that discussions of race consciousness took place in a much broade

context than is ever disclosed in Harris's critique. Although Harris sees t

achievements of the 1960s as preparatory to a new and higher stage that h
identifies with the "multi-ethnic spirit" of Yardbird Reader in the mid-1970s,

I feel that the exigencies of his thesis cause him to caricature black nation

alism by reducing a complex politico-cultural development to a sort

mirror image of white nationalism, which he then indicts for extolling on

culture at the expense of another.
This approach to nationalism, in which he more or less equates black an
white cultural nationalism, is quite the reverse of the Marxist understan
ing of nationalist movements. Lenin, of course, made the famous differ-

entiation between the nationalism of an oppressed group (one that h

been deprived of control of land, language, economy and culture) and th

nationalism of an oppressor group (one that rules land, language, eco

omy and culture through force and hegemony). Most contemporary Mar
ists use this differentiation as the starting point for the evaluation of prec
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20

ALAN WALD

nationalist movements in terms of existing class forces and relations

a particular society at a particular time.
In any event, I simply can't agree with Harris that the major thrust
politico-cultural nationalist movements of the oppressed in the 196
one that was opposed to any kind of unity with other oppressed an

dominant groups; the question was-and remains to this day-"Ho

on what basis should this unity be achieved?" While I'm sure that Ha

I have much in common in our values and objectives-and I feel t

performed a service at the MLA panel by drawing our attention

noteworthy achievements of The Yardbird Reader-I do not feel tha

any way resolves the difficult issue of the relationship between imm
and colonized minorities by writing as if, prior to the 1970s, the nec
for alliances and cultural diversity was unrecognized or even oppose
the rebellious politico-cultural movements of the day.

In fact, the single most influential theoretical work of the earlier perio

Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (English translation, 1966)

unambiguously argues that the re-establishment and valorization

culture of the oppressed is only a preliminary step to the achieveme

truly international culture. In his conclusion to "Reciprocal Bases of
tional Culture and the Fight for Freedom," the most frequently dis
section of the book, Fanon affirms that the correct orientation towa
moting the nationalist consciousness of a colonized group

is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of unive

izing values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is nati

liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It
the heart of national consciousness that interational consciousness lives and

grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the only source of all culture.
(The Wretched of the Earth, p. 199)

There is no doubt that in the ferment and heat of the 1960s many am-

biguous and poorly thought-out-and even foolish-things were said and

done. What we really need is a thorough book that scrupulously examines
the decade in a way that distinguishes what was central from what was

epiphenomenal and which puts individualized spokespersons such as

Karenga in a proper perspective. However, because Harris's contribution-and the passages he quotes from The Yardbird Reader-tend to emphasize the most limited aspects of the legacy of the 1960s, I will try to
balance this by extracting those elements from the 1960s that I feel to be the
most positive.
For example, part of the declaration of cultural independence that occurred in the 1960s on the part of racially-oppressed minorities involved a
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ALAN WALD

21

crucial polemic against liberal notions of assimilation and integrati

Harold Cruse and others demonstrated that such notions could simply b
euphemisms for advocating that racial minorities should have the "free
dom" to acculturate to Euro-American values-a doomed effort that could

only bring humiliation and failure for the masses of the oppressed. After

all, one of the hallmarks of Euro-American culture is its deep-rooted

racism, and a society based on such a culture-and which needs divisions
among races for economic reasons-will never grant true equality to the
majority of its darker-skinned members.
Another part of the politico-nationalist argument of the '60s was that
blacks and certain other groups had some features of an "internal colony"
within the larger context of American capitalist society. There was never
any agreement as to whether "internal colonialism" was primarily a metaphor, a description of real economic relations today, or a legacy of past
experience that persists in spite of the major economic changes that have

occurred in 20th century American capitalism. The main point-stated

clearly by Robert Blauner in Racial Oppression in America (1972), and recently
theorized in a more comprehensive fashion by Mario Barrera in Race and
Class in the Southwest (1979)-is that colonized minorities differ from the

European immigrant ethnic minorities in at least three respects: historically, the colonized minorities were incorporated into the nation by force and
violence (for example, as slaves kidnapped from Africa or as the population of a territory that was invaded by outsiders); economically, the colonized minorities became special segments of the work force (for example, as
chattel or migrant laborers); and culturally, the colonized minorities were

subject to repression and misrepresentation on a scale surpassing the

experience of any European ethnic immigrant group in the United States
(for example, the extirpation of African languages and religions, and the
banning of certain Native American Indian religions).
The point of the "internal colonialism" argument was never that colonized minorities suffered cultural discrimination while immigrant European

ethnic groups did not. There is abundant evidence that even blond and
blue-eyed Scandanavian-Americans have grown up with feelings of self-

hatred and a belief that their own culture is inferior. Furthermore, there is

substantial documentation showing that the cultural achievements of

women and workers within these immigrant groups have also been unfairly disparaged. So the difference between the cultural discrimination
suffered by immigrant minorities and colonized minorities must be understood partly in terms of the degree of intensity of the discrimination and
partly in terms of the historical context in which the particular discriminatory act occurred. (For example, the denial of the legitimacy of bilingualism
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ALAN WALD

22

to the Chicano population is qualitatively different than it is to the Fran

American population, because the Chicanos are still inhabiting what is
torically their own land.)

In reminding the reader of this "internal colonialism" analysis, m

purpose is not at all to discourage comparative analyses of, for example

Afro-American and Jewish-American writing; it is to defy any simpli

and sentimental analogies between colonized groups and immigran

groups to the effect that "we are all hyphenated Amerians," or "we ar
minorities of one kind or another against whom there has been discrimi
tion," etc. This is a pseudo-universalism that can serve to obscure impo
tant differences in cultural formation and in degrees of oppression. A
here I must criticize the MLA forum for not being forceful enough in c

fronting and clarifying the differences in the cultural patterns of the immi

grant and colonized groups-for one of the crucial tasks of the 1980s w

most certainly be the necessity of having a theoretical framework

explaining why racial minorities still confront special forms of oppres

in the United States. This point will have to be cogently defended again

school administrators who are arguing that students must go "bac

basics" (often a code term for the exclusive study of Euro-American cult
from the Euro-American perspective) and against politicians who are ad
vocating the old racist doctrine that "anyone who really wants to make i
our egalitarian society can do so," as they eliminate the minimal Feder

assistance that has been given to oppressed groups under previous

ministrations.

Of course, I am completely in sympathy with black, Chicano, and other

scholars from racially-oppressed minorities who resent the depiction of
their cultures as exotic or narrow; and I can understand why many artists
from these groups feel they ought to be recognized as artists first and not
immediately pigeon-holed as a special type of "minority" artist. But it must

also be understood that, regardless of our personal yearnings to step

beyond the hypocritical terms of Euro-America's prejudice and stereotyp-

ing, there can be no genuine cultural equality achieved in this society

without a complementary struggle for social equality. The truth of the
matter is that the facile conflation of colonized and immigrant groups into

the same ambiguous category of "ethnic studies," in addition to being

historically inaccurate, plays into the hands of those who, in this conservative Reagan era, are dedicated to the abolition of affirmative action programs in regard to university hiring, the establishment and maintenance of
special institutes, and the inclusion of the culture and history of raciallyoppressed groups in the curriculum. We must not forget that the entire
basis of the affirmative action argument is that certain groups have historiMELUS, Volume 8, No. 3, Fall 1981.

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ALAN WALD

23

cally experienced special oppression and currently face special obstac

equal treatment. I believe that in the 1980s, writers, scholars, and stu
working in the culture of "internal colonialism" will have to play a
guard role in defending the need for such programs and for incr
available resources.

In order to carry out the counter-hegemonic task described above, it i

necessary for us to rely on the best theoretical acquisitions and examples

cultural practice of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, in that time there w
a considerable influence wielded by Third World activists in the colonial
revolution. Some writers and critics found themselves spontaneously tak

ing up Amilcar Cabral's call to "return to the source"-to revitalize an

learn the hidden and distorted and almost erased cultures that the colon-

izers have tried to wipe out as part of their struggle to dominate colonies i
the Third World as well as "internal colonies" in the U.S.

What is important in Cabral's work, as well as in the work of Fanon an

others, is that he gave expression to the thesis that, for a colonized peopl
the cultural struggle is inherently political; even an activity as basic as t
accurate reconstruction of the history of an oppressed group can threat
the hegemony of the ruling class. Thus, in contrast to the experience of t
American left during the 1930s, when politics and literature often existed

awkward and contradictory relationships, the 1960s and 1970s produc

works of imaginative literature that are truly remarkable in their h

monious blending of cultural affirmation and undoctrinaire but politically

revolutionary concepts.
II. Creative and Theoretical Practice

An extraordinary example of this phenomenon is Leslie Silko's Ceremony, a 1978 novel by a woman who grew up on the Laguna Pueblo
Reservation in New Mexico. In my judgment, this book represents not
only a genuine advance in the evolution of Native American literature, but
it is precisely the kind of work that those of us devoted to studying the
culture of "internal colonialism" ought to point to as exemplary of what
ought to inspire creative practice in the 1980s. The book has, of course,

already been the subject of several essays that have emphasized its remarkable technical innovations and its cultural derivation from Native

American oral tradition. Consequently, in the comments that follow,

augment these earlier discussions by giving special emphasis to som
Ceremony's political dimensions-some of which may be present by de
and others of which may have unconsciously worked their way into
text. My view is that Silko has in this area transcended all hitherto k
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ALAN WALD

24

thematic boundaries in Native American fiction. This is done through

startling perspective she brings to bear on the way in which capit
objectively unites people of color through its domestic violence and i
national wars.

Ceremony is the anatomy of the mental breakdown of Tayo, a World War

II veteran from the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. Tayo's alleged psychosis is

precipitated by a combat incident when he is ordered to execute some

Japanese soldiers lined up in front of a cave with their hands over their
heads. Tayo finds himself unable to shoot because he believes that he sees

his uncle Josiah-the most beloved member of his family, the one who
kept closest to the Pueblo traditions-in the middle of the Japanese prisoners. After the executions are carried out, Tayo collapses in uncontrollable crying and his condition is diagnosed as "battle fatigue."
When he returns to the United States, Tayo is treated in a Los Angeles

mental hospital, but on the day of his second release a second incident
occurs. He faints in a train station and awakens to find himself surrounded

by a Japanese-American family recently released from a relocation camp.

Staring into the face of the youngest boy, Tayo hallucinates that he sees

Rocky, his cousin who was killed in action in the Pacific. Tayo is then
seized by an attack of nausea and imagines that he is trying to vomit the
image of the boy's face out of his mind.
A third traumatic episode occurs when Tayo is back in New Mexico at a
bar near the reservation. He is in the company of other Native American
veterans who are frustrated because they have lost the temporary sense of
equality with whites that they had known in the service. They now pass
their time bragging about military and sexual exploits. But when Emo, the
most rabidly anti-Japanese of the group, displays a bag of teeth that he
knocked out of the head of a dead enemy soldier, Tayo stabs him with a
broken beer bottle.

Eventually Tayo learns that his sense of sympathy and identification

with the Japanese is not the result of psychotic hallucinations but the con-

sequence of a higher order of perception. He tells Betonie, a heterodox

medicine man, about his vision of Uncle Josiah among the Japanese pris-

oners, and Betonie answers: "It isn't surprising you saw him with
them.... Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers" (Ceremony,

p. 130).

After this reminder that most Native American tribes are descended

from Asian clans that crossed the Bering Straits during the Pleistocene

Age, Tayo progresses to a deeper understanding of the ways in whi

American capitalism devalues the lives of people of color in its inherent

drive to expand and dominate. In a climactic scene, when Tayo is trying
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ALAN WALD

25

escape from Emo and other veterans who are threatened by his "cra

ideas, Tayo hides in a uranium mine. In this setting he recalls the fact th
Trinity Site, where the first atom bomb was exploded, is only three hu
dred miles to the southeast of his reservation, at White Plains.

After a moment of reflection, Tayo comes to the realization that there

tragic connection between the slaughter of Native American Indians fo

their land and the holocaust at Hiroshima: "The top-secret laborato

where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, o
land the Government took from the Cochiti Pueblo" (Ceremony, p. 257
Tayo concludes that "He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He
only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only tra
sitions through all distances and time" (Ceremony, p. 258). He understan
that the victims of Hiroshima and his own people are united by the wh

man's system in a "circle of death" (Ceremony, p. 258).

One of the more popular misconceptions about Native American India
literature is that it is a variant of romanticism, advocating an impossib
return to an idealized, pre-technological existence. Although the cultur
values underlying Silko's critique of capitalism are complex and perh
contradictory, one of the most prominent threads of her narrative seems
offer a refutation of this sort of characterization.

This thread can be traced by starting with the title of the book, Ceremony,

which refers to the curative treatment that Tayo experiences under the

tutelage of Betonie. While Betonie is a character partly intended as an

answer to the white psychiatrists who had tried to "cure" Tayo by convincing him that he must adjust to the sick society, Betonie is also counterposed to a traditional medicine man, Ku'oosh. This is not only because of

Betonie's eccentricities (his medicinal paraphernalia includes telephone

books collected from all parts of the country), but also because he is an
innovator who teaches that new ceremonies must be developed to respond to the contemporary situation.
Betonie believes that the source of evil in the world is neither white

people nor their brutal, inhuman machines. He argues that the whi

themselves are victims of a value-system that transforms a vital natur

world into "objects" (142). As an antidote to this socially-induced percep
tual distortion that recalls Marx's discussion of commodity fetishism in
volume I of Capital, Betonie advocates ceremonies that will restore a sen
of collectivity among all people and a harmonious existence in nature. B
such ceremonies cannot be acted out by a medicine man alone, because,
Betonie says, "the people must do it" (Ceremony, p. 132).
Throughout Ceremony it is the individualism of the whites-especially
expressed in Christian theology with its emphasis on individual sufferi
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26

ALAN WALD

and individual salvation-that is the focus of attack. Silko sharply di

guishes between "ritual," in which the false lessons of history are s
re-enacted, and "ceremony," a praxis-like activity in which a consci
controlled creative act restores humanity to its correct relation to the
Ceremony is a first novel and not without certain flaws and limita
Silko may have to some degree sacrificed the psychological realism of
of her characters to the daring esthetic achievements of her fresh, d
language and her provocative flashbacks, juxtapositions, and transit
few of her characters may seem to be contrived to exhibit different
of assimilation to or resistance against the dominant culture. Somet

they are one-dimensional-either replete with self-hatred or els

tically sensual and bound to nature.

Nevertheless, I find Silko unequalled in the way she has used craf
imagination to provide a longer-range perspective for the kinds of
ments expressed by rebellious youth of the 1960s and 1970s. I sense
she is trying to transfer the political themes of anti-imperialism and
World solidarity characteristic of the Vietnam era back to the lesstioned World War II era, in order to suggest that similar mechanism
racism and economic exploitation are involved in all wars waged
United States. In summary, Ceremony is the culmination of what w
in the politico-cultural rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s. On the one h
offers profound testimony to the creative resources of the Native Am
cultural tradition. On the other hand, Silko's political intuition and in
surpass other writers who fail to see that American imperialism's c
against people of color are not simply aberrations that can be reform
of existence but that they inhere in the character of the social stru
itself.

If Ceremony is the novel that represents the best traditions of cr

practice in the last twenty years, Raymond Williams's Marxism and Litera

(1977) is the theoretical work that I feel can most effectively guide
critical work in the 1980s. This book presents the British Marxist's t

ical conclusions flowing from a half-dozen earlier books of litera

cultural analysis that he has published. It is not intended as an intr
tion to Marxism or Marxist literary theory, but, rather, as a critique
critical practice (of both Marxist and non-Marxist critics) and an arg
for the development of a new approach that Williams calls "cultura

terialism," and which he identifies as "a theory of the specifici

material culture and literary production within historical mater
(Marxism and Literature, p. 5).

To me, the most compelling section of the book is his argumen

virtually all of our received Euro-American literary categories-not
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ALAN WALD

27

literary traditions, genres and conventions, but also the very notio

"aesthetics" and "imaginative literature"-serve hegemonic func

the sense of inculcating us with attitudes toward cultural phenome

serve the interest of the status quo. Like all seminal works of Mar
Williams's book is primarily a creative synthesis of insights tha

others have produced in their studies of class-biased, patriarc

chauvinist cultures of advanced industrial societies. As such, Marxism

Literature joins Ceremony in re-arming the cultural left for the c

decade of struggle against the ideologies of ethnocentrism and raci
continue to deform our national life and the role of the United States in

international politics.

MELUS, Volume 8, No. 3, Fall 1981.

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