Dr Joe Jackson (School of English, UoN)
Inhabited by Savage Nations: Racial Neoliberalism and the Colonial Legacy of Adam Smith
Thursday, 11th Dec, 16.00, Trent Committee Room (Trent A19)
All Welcome
Abstract
The Scottish Enlightenment has been the target of considerable ‘unsettling’ in postcolonial critique, with an obvious focus on the racist musings of David Hume in Of National Characters. Adam Smith, a central figure in the Enlightenment and its post-hoc national mythologising, had a similar take on ‘national characters’. For Smith, only a narrow band of white Europeans had the intellect to see that free markets held the key to emancipation, and the ethos to implement those market principles. Despite relying on various naturalistic metaphors and analogies to prove his case, Smith could only repudiate the example set by ‘savages’, benighted by ethnic proclivities and incapable of evidencing the market in the ‘natural’ state he idealised. Smith’s thesis informed the assimilative paradigm of British nationhood Michael Hechter called ‘internal colonialism’ and later, carried by white Scottish emigrants, the racist dispossessions and exclusions of settler-colonialism throughout the Empire.
In ‘Inhabited by Savage Nations’, I argue that the refutation of Smithian ideas forms part of a contemporary Scottish literary response to racism. This is not wholly to do with skewering Smith’s own explicit racism in his works, though that remains in play. Instead, the texts I focus on – by Suhayl Saadi and Leila Aboulela, with supporting evidence drawn from other writers – foreground the way Smith’s philosophy, central to the Scottish Enlightenment and to a Scottish national narrative, are mobilised under neoliberalism to preserve the sediment of racialised difference laid down during Empire and its aftermath. Smith’s ‘invisible’ forces that make the operation of markets into a kind of natural law have marked ideological overlap with the social Darwinism of the ‘post-racial’; the works I examine here push back against the ‘invisible hand’, capturing its complicity in contemporary racial injustice.