Making Blackness Meaningful Presentation for the "Black States of Desires"

Making Blackness Meaningful, or When William Melvin Kelley's Characters Become Self-Conscious.

Introduction: Wake up and mover over

"Boy! Chig! Wake up and mover over. Please."1 These are the first words that are written in Dunfords Travels Everywheres, the fifth and last book published by African American writer, William Melvin Kelley.

From the start, his protagonist is encouraged to open his eyes, to get ahead with the struggle Black people are experiencing in the United States back in the 1960s.

It is not an accident if Kelley insists on the character"s awakeningand afterward on his wakefulnessgiven that the purpose of the work is to convey the primordial information to the Blafringo-Arumerican; that is the Black person, or the Africamerican as he has called them lately.

More than anything else, it is to the latter that Kelley directs his five books as well as the rest of his writings; A Different Drummer, Dancers on the Shore, A Drop of Patience, dǝm, and Dunfords Travels Everywheres, all of which were written and published during or just after the Civil Rights Movement. Dispossessions, struggles, downfalls, or even hopes are to be found in Kelley"s writings. However, the author prefers concentrating on matters related to the inner selves of the characters he creates; characters he develops from one book to the other; thus conceiving intricate personae as well as complex stories and representations. This is the common point that links Chig Dunford, Tucker Caliban and Ludlow Washington.

Besides the three of them being Black and besides, at some point or another of their stories, realizing that they have to change it all or even start anew, there is nothing that relates them, and they will never meet.

Yet, they change; all three in the same way; from being subjected to a world that devoids them of humanity to mastering it and subjecting it.

From one master to another, then from inexistence to existence, the evolution in Kelley"s characters is noticeable as we turn the pages of his works: the consequences of a world; the aftermath, undecided and unpredictable, due of course to the color of a skin, butand above allto the need for recognition of a culture, of a humanity, of a right to live.

Throughout their own stories, the three characters reconsider their relationships with the Whites. They go from conflict with their own selves to acceptation and finally to selfassessment. Considering these reveals the depth of Kelley"s characters as they succeed in making their blackness meaningful again.

What matters here is to reflect on the way these characters go from an extreme to the other; and I dare say, from one life to another, given that they often change thoroughly.

A change for oneself, and alsoconsciously or nota change for the others. That is the core of Kelley"s writing, and what he depicts in his characters, even if he says the contrary 2 . Being inscribed in the Black Arts Movement, his novels required being an example which the Blacks could rely on, as they could with such works as Dutchman and the Slave or The System of Dante's Hell by Amiri Baraka.

This Movement that Larry Neal presents as both an esthetical and ethnical movement which aimed at addressing the African American population about their will and "desire for self-determination and nationhood" may explain the changes that are perceptible in Kelley"s works; nevertheless it does not explain them all. Moreover, these transformations do not only impact the people who undergo them but also those who face, accompany, or just meet by chance the protagonists.

Let"s now concentrate on these vicissitudes before focusing on the effects they have on characters in the books, and also on the readers, back in the 1960s-70s and even now.

A Matter of Changes

The use of the word "evolutions" for the three characters on which I am going to insist now is not a mere matter of rhetoric.

They are either linear or cyclic as we can see characters that go from the main body of the American societyand more particularly the main body of the Afro Americansto selfassessment or the other way around, cyclically and endlessly.

However, to talk about changes when we speak about a writer of the Black Arts movement is almost superfluous as it was the main objective which they strove for. And it is normal that the three characters leave from the same point: people coalesced into the mass, going with the flow.

That is what Kelley wants his characters to go out of. That flow that represents the domination of Blacks by white people; which stands for what the Negro has to be from a racist point of view. This is by introducing real charactersthat is to say characters based on personalities that could exist in real lifethat Kelley endeavors and succeeds in passing his ideas onto us. Thus, these characters stand for genuine ideas, and can be judged through the scope of literature of course, but also that of sociology and psychology; what shows and results from Kelley"s adhesion to the Black Arts Movement.

Hence the awakening, for this is what happens to Chig when he wakes up in the parallel world of dreams in which the author immerses him: a wakening to the African American"s truth and their realities. Furthermore, this immersion goes together with a new name for the character, what is reminiscent of the new names taken by Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka or other members of the Black Power Movement.

As regards Tuckerthe protagonist in A Different Drummer, his awakening is a hard one as it occurs at the death of his grandfather. He realizes what has been happening to him when he loses the person who counted the most for him; the person whom he considered as his father.

The conditions in which John Caliban dies certainly explain the "act of renunciation" (ADD: 153) performed by Tucker as he recovers the body under -I quote -"a white sign inscribed with thick black letters, which, had his eyes been open, had he been alive and just resting, would have been the only thing he could see." (ADD: 121) That sign stands for the lives of African Americans in the South; a synecdochical way of depicting a blinkered region where iniquities still persist in 1959, when Kelley publishes his novel; an obnoxious stranglehold which is worth fighting against.

From injustices to revolution, the spark that will set the tensions ablaze is contained only in one word: "Sacrifice" (ADD: 123). A "sacrifice" that Tucker wants no more. ""Not another time. This is the end of it"" (ADD: 124) he says. That is how and when he starts his revolution.

From his natural discretion to his calm yet noticeable revolution, Tucker takes only one step; one that first leads him out of the church during the funeral service, then to buying his land and finally to razing it and migrating away.

Among the white people in Sutton, some will say that it is due to the blood running in his veins ( 8); yet, this act, decided because he had had enoughenough of being helped, enough of being obliged to, enough of serving as wellis a personal decision, coming from his reflection on the "Negro Problem." But these people must not be wronged as the creation of Tucker"s mythical African ancestor is a proof that the author certainly wanted the weight of African American History to weigh down on his protagonist.

The creation of this embedded story of an African Giant, trying, by every means possible, to protect his offspring and trying to go back to where he comes from can be paralleled with Tucker"s departure, to the North we suppose; an eternal cycle of migration, a diasporic motion that prevents the black person from definitely settling somewhere. Maybe this is another way of interpreting Tucker sowing salt in his field, destroying his possessions, purifying them by fire and leaving to an unknown destination.

Tucker is supposedly going north, and Chig comes back to his country after an exile that makes him realize the true meaning of the Black struggle in the USA as well as the impossibility of going away from it and the problems resulting from a false representation of the relations between Blacks and Whites.

We remember Kelley"s own expatriation to France as Chig self-expatriates for his studies, and a connection may exist between both the author and his character.

To explain this link and the various adventures that Chig lives, Stanley Schatt writes: "While Kelley obviously does not expect his readers to accept this fact (that West African slaves are still being carried from the Old to the New world) at face value, he is suggesting that black intellectuals (like Chig) need to be reminded forcibly of just who they are and just what their historical ties to West Africa are. (…) Kelley believes that one reason why American"s attitude toward blacks has not changed is that they fail to give black individual identity, but see them only as stereotypes;" 3thence, the hero finding his true identity again, away from those common place ideas. This is depicted in Chig over and over rediscovering his culture, namely his black culture. When he is with his white hypocritical friends, he notices that they try their best not to show their need for domination, however, they have habits they cannot abandon since they are fixed in their behavior. From that doxa comes the attitude of a Marian who implies sex toward a Negro man, or that of a Lane who is quasi-authoritarian toward the colored boy. These friends who want to show their open-mindedness by trying to understand racism from the point of view of the oppressed are nevertheless shocked when Chig uses a "Negro swearword" (Motherfucker). Shocked, not because of the quality of his language, but because he dared consider himself superior, even equal to them. "Wherever you go, whatever you do, you"ll find a Tom, peeping on you" his father would say. Not a Tom, but sex-crazed and afraid whites.

The question of color is raised further when Kelley"s magnificent jazz virtuoso Ludlow Washington considers Blackness.

Indeed, how can you perceive blackness when you don"t know what color is? The query comes back and again throughout the novel A Drop of Patience; first when Ludlow considers blackness with his black blind fellows at the Home and when one of them, Four-Eyes who can see a little, describes white people 4 .

This query is also identified in a conversation between Ludlow and Missus Scott, his mother-in-law-to-be, which ends with Ludlow touching her face and asking about her and himself being ugly from a white person"s point of view. The conclusion that they are both unattractive creates a noteworthy silence in which Ludlow, not knowing what to do or say starts eating. This conclusion is also prefigured in Missus Scott"s speech when she stresses the fact that for black people, the white opinion has become Gospel Speech, something -I quote -"they been told (…) often enough to believe it" (ADP: 31); a truth that was already inculcated in Ludlow when he was a child.

In the novel, Ludlow"s last act is to go back to the South, to a little store-front church where he could play his music; a music that becomes essential and has a true meaning for black people; a considerable alteration in the character who goes from discovery to famousness, then from nervous breakdown to recovery and finally to a need for secrecy and almost seclusion. These personal evolutions lead him to a more implicit one, i.e. to making his culture, his perceptions, and his experiencehis Erlebnismomentous.

As the character matures, he discovers the true gist of blackness thanks to the use of his other senses. That is what can be understood when he imagines feeling New York (ADP: 120-121). The other senses become essential for the character, but also for the readers as they come to understand that blackness is more than a derisive and theoretical idea based on the only considerations of skin colors. It is a practical, sensitive and sensible fact, a positive cultural ideology.

From an almost naïve Negro who is dominated by a master at the Home (18), and through successive masters, Ludlow grasps his own destiny in his hands and becomes selfemancipated when he decides, without any kind of promise, to go back south; thus epitomizing a common ideal in the Afro American existences, but also a symbol of what a Black should be when he faces racial hardships as well as a life based on such premises.

Ludlow going back to the South can also be seen as the end of a circle in Kelley"s writing; one initiated by Tucker"s departure to the North and completed by Ludlow"s coming back: a representation of a certain diasporic motion of the African Americans within the USA.

4 "[…] all the blind white boys was in another place because the law wouldn't let them be together with us because they was better. (…) Well, I did notice that Mister Gimpy and the Warden spoke different from us. So we asked Four-Eyes if it was being white made them talk different. And he'd say, Yes, kinda. Then he'd say white folks most always had straight hair and their noses wasn't as big." (ADP: 30)

It is all the more significant as those words are uttered by one of Chig"s white friends; one who, among others is supposed to "sympathize" with the Black Cause and who will be shocked by Chig"s reaction later in the novel.

SCHATT, Stanley. "You Must Go Home Again: Today"s Afro-American Expartiate Writers" in Negro American LiteratureForum, Vol.7, No.3, Autumn 1973, pp.80-82.

Impacts!... and conclusions

Reading the stories of Tucker Caliban, Chig Dunford, and Ludlow Washington cannot be done without being influenced in a way or another by them; what incidentally coincides with the a posteriori aim of Kelley"s literature. I say a posteriori because of the author"s indication in his preface to his collection of short-stories Dancers on the Shore. I quote: "An American writer who happens to have brown skin faces this unique problem: Solutions and answers to The Negro Problem are very often read into his work." Nonetheless his vision of his role as a Black author changes as time goes by, just like a Chig or a Ludlow"s visions changed, realizing what he could do for the Blacks in the USA.

On the other hand, in the same preface, Kelley claims that a writer should always be interrogative, he or she should ask questions; not give answers as a politician or a sociologist. And yet, he will give these answers all the same as we can read in his fourth novel for instance.

The epigraphs in his books have a significant importance as they help us understand the content of the works. Among these epigraphs, the one in dǝm, the fourth novel is the most meaningful. Kelley phonemically writes: "now, lemme tell you how dem folks live" revealing a black person"s speech and his goals in this book.

However, the work depicts black people lives as much as whites". Narrated from a white man"s point of view, the story insists on the beauty and simplicity of the lives of the Negroes, away from prejudiced ideas (a rediscovery of this beauty for a black reader), and yet, it is also to be understood through the underlying message regarding the depravity of the way whites live.

It is not only in this book that Kelley shows this, since in Dunfords Travels Everywheres he also shows us how the blacks are when they act "white;" displaying a negative image of these individuals.

Kelley"s writing is all the more so convincing as it emphasizes experience over simple narration. Thanks to various narrative techniques, among which showing is both the most effective and efficient. The mission of the writer of the Black Arts Movement is accomplished as the message that is conveyed is directed to the Black and corresponds to an ideology of self-determination.

He thus takes elements, even simulacra of events of the existing world and transposes them into his writing, creating a perpetual motion of exchange between his readers and his characters. In fact, how not to be attracted to the reactions of a Tucker who cannot take segregation anymore and moves to a place that would be more promising, and how not to sympathize with a Ludlow Washington who does not understand why his white girlfriend leaves him after she becomes pregnant? How not to sympathize when you are Black and that you live the same things?

Kelley"s writing is phenomenological in that wayeven existentialas he represents in symbols and characters, ideologies that correspond to those of Lewis R. Gordon"s Black Existentialism.

His literature can also be connected to Toni Morrison"s reflection in Playing in the Dark when she writes: "The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the


An Introduction to William Melvin Kelley and Dunfords Travels Everywheres

William Melvin Kelley and his works are unknown to many of today's readers. This is mainly due to the fact that his most famous stories take place during and are contextualized in the Civil Rights Movement, under the influence of the Black Power Movement; thus making Kelley part of the Black Arts Movement, the literary group that advocated a literature committed to teaching a Black culture to African Americans. Here, I'm going to focus on the last novel he published, Dunfords Travels Everywheres.

It introduces two protagonists. On the one hand, there's Chig Dunford, a middle-class student who has lived in Harlem all his life but has only known private schools and a culture alienated from the Black experience. At the beginning of the novel Chig is in an imaginary European country, then aboard a liner that takes him home. He comes face to face with enslaved African people who're being transported to America. On the other hand, there's Carlyle Bedlow, a Harlem hustler who lives off his petty thefts. Carlyle's confronted with one of his friends having to sell his soul to a "White Devil" in order to save his mother from dying. The two characters represent a certain aspect of Blackness, but are both at a certain point in the story obliged to face that Blackness and the meaning it has in mainstream American society. Notwithstanding their differences, Kelley considers the two characters share a common background and that's why he melts their identities into a single one in their dreams where they become Mr. Chiglyle.

Introducing the notion of "cycle" in William Melvin Kelley's Writings

The notion of cycle is among the main concepts the author uses in his work. However it's essential to note that the traditional definitions given to cycles don't fully correspond to Kelley's cycles. If the idea of central figures can be found with the intertextuality of several characters like Chig Dunford or Carlyle Bedlow, the cycles in those characters' lives don't necessarily imply that they'll always come back to the point where the reader first encountered them.

In Dunfords Travels Everywheres, Kelley deconstructs his characters' psychological, moral and physical evolutions, in order to analyze their components, as one does in a scientific dissection. He then symbolically rebuilds them through the physical structure of the novel, as well as by the Joycean language he invents so that his protagonists can regain the Black identity they'd forgotten or realize they only live because it's imposed on them by the dominant society.

These deconstructions are to be seen as a means the author uses to instruct African American readers as to their common identity. He wants to make them aware of the path they should take to go from their insouciance to the realization and the understanding of the annihilation imposed on them by the dominant society. But Kelley insists this awareness is never complete and that it's everlasting, going round in a kind of spiral-like cycle. This cycle's more like a double helix as the construction of Chig's character represents an internal cycle and the physical design of the novel's the external circle of Kelley's thoughts.

Internal Cycles

The example of Chig Dunford's meaningful here insofar as Kelley tries to achieve a real sociological, psychological and moral analysis of this character. When he first appears in the story "A Visit to Grandmother," Chig's not aware of the realities that forged his father's character, and that'll forge his too. Chig only progressively understands his father's awkwardness when he's in the family house. Actually, Charles Dunford, Sr. has come to settle his problems with his mother and brother. He goes to visit his mother because he thinks she's loved him less than she's loved his brother. His argument's based on the color of his skin because he thinks his mother makes a distinction between them because of their complexions: "That's not true, Mama. You know it. GL was light-skinned and had good hair and looked almost white and you loved him for that."1

The first "racial" confrontation that Kelley gives to Chig is in the inner family circleone which is circumscribed, but that echoes the American pre-established social order. The message's simple but precise: the mother who's a symbol of affection as well as an authoritative figure in Charles Dunford, Sr.'s single-parent family; this mother forgives her older son more easily, because he's a lighter complexion. The transposition's easy, and the reader effortlessly recognizes the organized-hierarchy due to epidermis that's current in postslavery and post-colonial societies such as the American society.

Chig's reflection on race relations in the US continues while he's in Europe. The geographical distance allows him to be plainly aware of his situation as Black in his homeland. Similarly the links he has with his friends and fellow American expatriates just like him, show him that the doxical relations are stronger than he believed, when he thought they considered him as equal. The end of this quote when Chig and his friends are on the beach helps us reflect on this:

[…] Hi, Chig. And our having Chig in the car showed them we weren't the kind of people they were against."

Chig must also answer when these friends ask him questions about his being black in the United States:

(…) Most times, Chig tried to answer their questions, to help them understand the experience of Africans in the United States, the pain of slavery, the shame of segregation, the frustrations of integration, and all the rest of it. But this Sunday he wanted only to play softball and store up sun.

There's a differentiation between Chig and the other members of his group of friends. The latter somehow set Chig apart because of the questions they ask him and they wonder about him, not as a complete person, but as only an African American. Furthermore, he doesn't try to differentiate himself from his friends. They see a difference and show it. He only wants to make the most of his Sunday with his friends, at the end of summer. It seems like these friends try to convince themselves that they're in favor of integrating black people into mainstream American society, and they consequently try to perceive Chig as an American human being, just like them; but they can't and their pretenses are visible in the commentaries they make to Chig.

It's when he's set in contrast to those different from him that Chig realizes he has a role to play in the United States, and this is one of the reasons why he goes back to his homeland.

During this return voyage he ends up in the ship hold, and witnesses the deportation of Black Africans toward the US. Yet he doesn't succeed in saving these Africans from their fate. This powerlessness is a lack of maturity in the character who hasn't saved himself yet, and hasn't made himself meaningful again yet. This is the realization Kelley wants his character to come to, so that he can have his own existence, not one that would be dictated by a dominant society. This is an additional stage in the elaboration of the cycle in Chig's life.

His understanding is completed by Carlyle Bedlow's experience. The combination of the two characters into one -Mr. Chiglylepermits Kelley to deliver a universal message to his African American readers, whatever their social categories. The author insists on the sameness of every African American concerning their shared history. He discloses the difference between the Blacks and the Whites, to show that the latter are demonic; prone to fratricidal relations with each other; but also that they're set to cause the downfall of the black man. This is what can be understood from the explanations the Professor gives: Some Usricans say it's because the Uralpean ist d'DeVille. They razen He'll tempt you, tissyue, tuss you, tighten your truest with gleeven, his Job, as illmost any quistian will taile you. (…) E.M. Fardpull, in his landark steady of the study hobits of the eurly tribs of the eorly Yacuvic Pyreod, THE MESS AGE OF THE LACKMAN, states clearly his bilefe in the thory of mismagination and expelcion, the eeveel reck of the hubristic Jack L. Yacoo, M.D.

The writing in this extract's to be examined on diverse scales since the writer implies several levels. The title given by the Professor, "THE MESS AGE OF THE LACKMAN," has a double meaning. It's of course a reference to Elijah Muhammad's Message to the Blackman in America. Yet, the underlying significance in the way Kelley spells this title mentions the Age of Mess; that is of chaos that the Black man has known, as a man who lacks of something. The reference to Muhammad's book's still more accurate when Kelley talks about the "Yacuvic" Period. The Professor's speech refers to the six thousand year cycle whose end will supposedly mean the return of Blacks to power, after the expulsion; a power that was taken by the Whites who were created by Yakub, as can be read in quote No.5.

The demon is the White man, created by Yakub who wanted a purer race. The image of expulsion is used to denounce Yakub's excess of pride, with the term "hubristic." This is certainly an exhortation to African Americans not to let themselves become self-important like the White man has; but to remain proud of their equality, if not their superiority in relation to the White man.

External Cycles

Larry Neal, one of the champions of the Black Arts Movement, used to say that the fratricide wars would terminate the Euro-American society. Kelley's aim is to show the detectable divisions in White American society and the results they'll have. He aims to convince the African Americans to gather together and brace for the dangers of the aforementioned divisions. By assembling together the Blacks would come to dominate the American society as the White is dominated because of his weakening culture.

The transformations of the moral attitudes due to the various episodes in this novel make it possible for Chig and Carlyle to join in their dreams and form a single agent, the one that Kelley and the other members of the Black Arts Movement think should motivate the African American community.

In the final part of the novel, Mr. Chiglyle meets with two atypical characters -Rab who stands for Br'er Rabbit in the Southern US and Cherokee's tales and Turt for Brother Turtle in the same tales). Both are depicted in Kelley's novel as Texas Rangers. When Chig reacts negatively to one of his white friends' -Lane's --remarks by saying "No, motherfucker!," he fulfills a request made by the Rangers, who told him not to say "No" to a Black person, but to the Whites.

The cycle is completed and it's after this hubris directed toward Lane, that the professor's lecture starts and the reconstruction of blackness begins in the novel. The inner circles join with the external ones in the transmission of values dear to each character toward a sharing with the community. Chig Dunford's ego becomes the one in which every African American partakes.

For Kelley, this novel starts on chapter 29, the penultimate one, and chapter one is just a continuation of chapter 30, creating a never-ending circular motion. When the Texas Rangers send Mr. Chiglyle back to the "real world" in chapter 30, they proclaim the following truth: "In Side, out! Good-bye, man: Good-buy, man. Go odd-buy Man. Go Wood, buy Man. Gold buy Man. MAN!BE!GOLD!BE!," and the first thing that Chig hears when he wakes up in chapter one is "BOY, Chig, Wake up!" In fact it's a single sentence that shows the monetary worth of the African Americans as seen by the whites who, at the same time, belittle them.

The shortcut is simple but reminiscent of the practices during slavery in the USA:

The Negro can be purchased with gold  he is worth gold  Therefore he is gold, but with a non-human worth: he is a child.

The Black man seen as gold shows that the White man considers him as a good.

The perpetual reference of notions from one page to the other unveils the African Americans' constant, seemingly everlasting struggle. Unlike Carlyle, Chig seems unable to act in favor of the African Americans, hence his return to the beginning at the end of the cycle. He doesn't understand that it's important to act and really take part in the effort led by the other Blacks in the USA. Kelley insists that the African American is sacrificed for the White man's benefit, just like Abraham's scapegoat was sacrificed to the white man's god, that was created by the Norse mythology so that Spring could heat up the man from the North.

Thus he writes: "Wehel, Tote, it save rycompl, icated process-pool. Ingand Co., latingre Cent killrat. I.O.S. with our D.E., sire, to sacrifice T.O.O.D. inso thats Pringwill com,e?"2 Spring must be perceived as the going toward summer, toward the heat coming from the African sun. After the white man's wintry period and his Norse tales that lasted for six thousand years, Yakub's invention gets warmer and thence favors the black man's return to power. The voluntary sacrifices echo Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1966 speech "We Shall Overcome," in which he said that "Before the victory is won, even some will have to face physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent psychological death, then nothing shall be more redemptive." This psychological death is the one that Chig must cope with. The Professor warns that this death is explicitly related to his renouncing his African American identity.

Symbolically, because of the union of both Chig and Carlyle, the body of the African Americans starts to act at the same time as their actions become mutual and meaningful. The uninterrupted action and the will to show it's important constitute the foundations of the cycle in Chig's life. For Kelley, it does not suffice to act just once, like Chig does on the ship. The character, and in that way all of the African Americans, must strive to go away from the pretense of integration toward a real, true integration. Kelley's cycle is to make his reader realize the condition that's imposed on him by the mainstream of this society. African Americans must act so as to take the path toward a true existence, beyond the Du Boisian double consciousness and to a unique one, the one of the black community. By striving to make this schizophrenia disappear and become individuals who would act only for themselves, Chig and Carlyle come back to the Africanist values that Kelley wants to set forth. They must reclaim their cultural heritage and a land for their own. The collusion of both Old Norse and African myths is of course the confrontation of two separable, different cosmologies. It's similarly a superposition of these cosmologies opposite the four hundred years that Black people have spent in more or less intimate relationships with the Whites. Because of the transmission of the latter's beliefs, African Americans have come to know them better and find the flaws that could help them go back to the domination promised by Elijah Muhammad Yakub's legend.

Conclusion

Chig lives in a never-ending cycle that he alone can control. To do so, he must understand that his destiny is not to be with White people, but with Blacks. He must understand that he cannot disown his African origins. His insouciance and then realization will follow each other on and on, as long as he doesn't learn to know himself and renounce what he considers to be privileges and what Carlyle considers to be drawbacks because they come from the Whites.

That's a message to the Black Man who sees examples of what his behavior can lead to. This is a dichotomous vision of the American society according to the order established in the writing of the novel, and this is a vision that introduces Kelley's own vision at that time; that of a man who had been disillusioned by the situation he had to struggle against in a society that he did not choose but that remains his nevertheless; a fight because of the color of his skin and of prejudices that do not come from him.

« A Visit to Grandmother » in Dancers on the Shore. p.62-63.

(Well, Turt, it's a very complicated process, pulling & Collating recent ill-ratios with our desire to sacrifice to Odin so that spring will come).


Melvin Kelley

Yannick M Blec

William Melvin Kelley's Narratives

Memoir, Memory and Conceptualized Identities in William

Introduction

William Melvin Kelley's an African American writer who published five novels and some short stories and essays. In the 1960s, he was a member of the Black Arts Movement created by the late Amiri Baraka. His narratives portray African Americans who're struggling to redefine their identities in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. To recreate these identities, Kelley has used elements from his own life and ancestry as well as his perception of the world.

In addition to this, because they were included in the Black Arts Movement, his works were committed to the betterment of the African American situation at that time so that they could construct a finer future for themselves. Kelley's especially focused on creating credible characters and for this, he's used the collective and individual memories as well as common events to shape their personalities. He's drawn on his own lived experience and identity to give unity to the fictional world he's been creating since. For him, African Americans should of course have the same cultural ideology, yet they must have differences which are constitutive of their very identities. In order to highlight these differences, when he writes, the author tries to find the perfect balance between community and individuality. In these narratives African Americans are people who're both within and without the community.

The mythification and intertextuality that one finds in Kelley's stories can be comprehended as the structural interlacing of a network of memories. These memories are the recollections of past eventswhether it is a recent or older past. Because they are transcribed in the written form in Kelley's narratives, they become part of a kind of memoir and the works consequently have an autobiographical frame.

By relying on the past, William Melvin Kelley attempts to write a future that strays away from the destructive filiations bequeathed by the Euro-American hegemony. He creates new stories and a new history that allow the African Americans to see themselves as people and not as some sort of cliché.

Questioning the norms

We understand that Kelley's aim's the questioning of norms, those things imposed on Blacks from a certain past and from points of views that were against them.

Since the arrival of Black people in the USA, continuing throughout Segregation and until now, many Whites have considered that Blacks don't have a real individuality and they've only corresponded to selected criteria that objectified them. The one conscious discrepancy was binary: it was just a matter of distinguishing between the "Good-" and the "Bad nigger." This differentiation was nevertheless merely a way for those racist Whites to feel more confident as for the quality of object that was blindly attributed to people of African descent in the American society. Blacks have only been seen through the color of their skins and because of that, they've been perceived as deeply bad.

This point of view can be found in the narratives by William Melvin Kelley when he insists on the perception of his white racist characters. In his last novel entitled Dunfords Travels Everywheres, one of the Black protagonists who is friend with a group of expatriate white Americans is solely seen through their degrading perspective of Blackness: that is as the negative of their white selves. He's seen as vulgar and sex-crazed. He's then a beast that only obeys primary functions without any kind of humanity within him. In his writing, Kelley wants to destroy these approximations about black identity and replace them, both in the society itself and in American literature. This is a task that many African American scholars have been doinglike W.E.B. Du Bois, or Marcus Garveyand that continues so far, hence our being here today.

In her essay Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison's analyzed the presence of African Americans in the country through literature and has related it to the construction of the American identity in the whole. She writes: I want to suggest that these concerns-autonomy, authority, newness and difference, absolute power-not only become the major themes and presumptions of American literature, but that each one is made possible by, shaped by, activated by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism. It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.

3

Autonomy is freedom and translates into the much championed and revered "individualism"; newness translates into "innocence"; distinctiveness becomes difference and the erection of strategies for maintaining it; authority and absolute power become a romantic, conquering "heroism," virility, and the problematics of wielding absolute power over the lives of others.1 This is the commonplace argument that Kelley distances himself from when he creates the character of the Africanwith a capital Ain his first novel, A Different Drummer. The African represents the hyper-masculinity and heroism that were taken from Blacks in the USA. Kelley reappropriates what'd been perceived as African rawness and savagery for himself, and transforms the giant African into a newly and distinctly autonomous individual. The writer doesn't only take the so-called white and positive images and ideals to give them to black characters; he also recreates black identity.

Historically speaking, the term "American" has been associated with Whiteness. It has thus excluded Blacks from the nation and been "a self-reflexive contemplation of fabricated, mythological Africanism" as Morrison calls it (47).

The question of the norm goes further when Kelley takes this "mythological Africanism" and reinvents the myths to transform himself and every other African American. The fabrication of the canonical American literary myth is the one that shows the Black as the negative of the White, namely as the one that one shouldn't be. The African in A Different Drummer, as he's modeled on mythical attributes, becomes a superhuman, but is also admired like a Samson when he kills the lion barehanded. Mr. Harper, one of the narrators in the story says it himself: the story of the African was amplified and extended, but it's because of this that it's remarkable and must be remembered. Because the African, who is a synecdoche of the origin of the African Americans and of their real culture and character -so because the African's larger than life, he's, in addition to Tucker Caliban (the real protagonist in the novel), the ferocious and at the same time discreet character that the reader will remember. He's different from the ordinary, common, normed and flat stereotypes. Still in relation to a synecdoche approach, Black people go from the category of sub-humans to that of mythic heroes, if not mythological. Caliban (who's the African's descendant) can be found on other characters' behaviors, as well.

This myth-like narrative system is further amplified thanks to the intertextual system that's used in Kelley's works. Because we can find the same characters (in a Faulknerian fashion) from one work to another, there's a systemic understanding of real-life events explained in a fictional oeuvre. In that way when Chig Dunford -one of the protagonists of Kelley's last novelexplains what it's like to be Black in the US in the 1960s, that's a fictive character who's in a tale to explain real elements that can't be understood by some real people. The use of Chig in this narrative is thus that of a hero (despite his lacking divine characteristics)a hero who is there to explain.

The codes are diverted and used in favor of the African American identity. The characters go from a world that belittles and dehumanizes them to being in a society in which they actively participate in enacting the rules. It's no longer the African Americans who are raw and savage, but the Euro-Americans who enslaved them and made them undergo Segregation. Where Morrison analyzed "(…) the common linguistic strategies employed in fiction to engage the serious consequences of blacks," 2 Kelley, to describe the Whites and the consequences of their presence on African American culture and identity, uses the same strategies. He utilizes the same economy of stereotype and metonymic displacement. In his works, there's the metaphysical condensation since the White's the one who becomes an animal and therefore something it'd be incongruous to talk to. The author also reverses the white traditional idea of fetishization as it's a white woman who becomes the sexual predator on black males. And finally, like white writers, Kelley uses a dehistoricizing allegory and the patterns of explosive, disjointed, repetitive language but this time to signify white people.

Several of these processes are difficult to perceive directly in Kelley's oeuvre, and it's possible to question them as those of an excessively committed writer. In spite of the political force and the symbols of revolt they contain, the last novels he published are indeed responses to real-life events, whether they were personal or not. For instance, one can notice Kelley's anger and lack of understanding to JFK's assassination in a passage of Dunfords Travels Everywheres. If Chig's emotion isn't instantly detected, the episode itself is built around a situation that jeopardized the hopes of African Americans. At that moment in the story, he's not interested in 2 MORRISON. Ibid. p. 67. the subject insofar as he keeps himself physically and morally far from the action. Yet his relationship with his white friends deteriorates from the moment he learns of the death of the President to when he utters the insult: "No, motherfucker!" This angry cry's the result of the accumulation of derogatory remarks as well as the affliction regarding the annihilation of the various hopes that were set in that President. Chig's thus to be regarded as a fictional double of the author.

At the crossroad between experience and imagination

Finding the figure of the author within the representation of fictitious characters wasn't a new thing when Kelley used this technique. But here, the writer's narratives are testifying for a tumultuous time in the lived experience of the whole African American community. As a member of this group, Kelley's been able to use his own life as an example to emphasize the true worth of the African American identity. He was after all part and parcel of the Black Arts

Movement. Yet this lived experience as a Black in the USA is related to a particular Weltanschauung (that is a particular view of the world, life and condition of Man in the world). This vision correlates with an individuality which is absent from the Euro-American norms that Morrison's commented upon. Kelley sets himself as an example, because he's Black, he's an observer and as an American. On account of this selfhood or rather ipseity, we can see the dichotomy there's between being in the group and the notion of individuality. This separation's important in the construction of identity that the author tries to put forward. This way and for most of Kelley's protagonists, the person's detached from the group without getting away from it or denying it. The aim of this maneuver is to bring out a radiant culture as opposed to one that's dying.

This principle which is at the basis of the Black Arts Movement 3 lets the author use the past to encourage a brighter future. It's not simply a question of studying the mistakes of the past; it's the reappropriation of an existence that was taken from black people. The different steps to this purpose are defined by a seemingly universal reasoning: namely to substitute a concept for another. For the members of this artistic movement, the matter's going from the double-consciousness that Du Bois explained to the partial, if not complete destruction of the white culture. Kelley however, contrary to say, Amiri Baraka, doesn't wish for the complete eradication of Whites. He just wants Black culture to be cleaned up of white annihilating items. Because he's mobilizing the historical prejudices against Black people and because of the way he transmits his ideas through fictional narratives, the author theorizes and conceptualizes the African Americans based on the disparaging images that have existed of them.

Of course we can see here the dangers of this process. The risk is to produce new clichés, what can be seen in the novel entitled A Drop of Patience for instance. Ludlow Washington, the black protagonist, is unable to live his life but for himself, without sharing. This lasts even to the epilogue of the novel. Taken from a certain angle, he's the irresponsible father who abandons his family; a man without any interest for others. Because he's the protagonist in a novel by a committed black author, he can be seen as the representation of a whole community. Yet, the same Ludlow is a complete individual who strives against racial stereotypes to concentrate, at the end, on his art and black culture.

Despite the fact Kelley's characters strive to obtain the common recognition of their identities, Tucker Caliban is not the same as Ludlow Washington and so on and so forth in the list of characters. They however have common purposes as far as their rights are concerned, but are sometimes poles apart as to their personalities. These are the observations of Kelley as an author on the world in which he moves and lives and the heritage of the African American past.

As a writer, he develops a technique of analogies regarding the lived experience that allows the reader to identify with the characters or dissociate from them.

Conclusion

Kelley's Erlebnis isn't set as a unique example. Hence the multiplicity of identities despite the fact the readers know from the very first pages where the writer's opinion lies. However, in addition to the lived experience that's found in the works, one must not forget the share imagination has, and that of historical and cultural heritage. Imagination has a predictive function inasmuch as it induces a fantasized vision of the world. This fantasy comes from the need of a better future compared to a present situation or to the everlasting memory of a troubled 7 past. The prediction can be negative with the memory of that past which cannot be withdrawn and that continues for ever as it sometimes seems to be the cases in Dunfords Travels Everywheres. On the other hand, this prediction can become a utopia when it puts forward the construction of various black identities, in spite of the refusal of their existence by the Euro-American society. One can notice the plurality of final concepts related to imagination, lived experience, and memory. It's important to contextualize the events in order to understand the reasons of the changes in Kelley's way of thinking. From naivety to fatherhood, Kelley's abandoned the innocence and the blinders that blinded his life to the blatant radicalism in his penultimate novel. He's used his narratives as memoirs to note down and comment on the past and present. But contrarily to Calvin "Cooley" Johnson (one of his prominent characters), he didn't stop to that past as enslaved people in the USA. He hasbecause he continueswanted to be a part of the American society.

I

  'm talking about mythology because that's what Kelley creates in his last published novel and to a lesser extent in some of his other narratives. The influence of the African on Tucker

  4

MORRISON, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: VintageBooks, 1993

Cf. NEAL, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement". in The Drama Review: TDR. Summer 1968, Vol.12, No.4, Black Theater, pp. 29-39.


Transplants of European Normativity in India and in Japan: a Historical Comparison Jean-Louis Halpérin (Paris)

For the history of legal transplants from Western origin, Japan has been considered as a model or a kind of ideal-type from a long time. 1 Since 1868, and the beginning of the Meiji era, Japan was seen as a big extra-European country that was not colonized, but whose Government chose under the authority of the emperor to modernize its legal system through massive imitations of European laws, especially the French and the German codifications or the Prussian constitution. The voluntary action of the Meiji Government (decided after different studies travels and investigations in the most powerful European countries) and the eclectic inspirations of Japanese lawyers suppose a true "policy" about legal transplants that has been continued through generations and renewed in the 20 th century under two different factors: the occupation of Japan by the United States after World War II (1945-1952), which has provoked important borrowings of American law (notably constitutional, corporation and labour law) and the development of a strong tradition of comparative law among Japanese law scholars, who are currently linked with the United States, Germany and France.

The case of India has been generally studied as a different one. First, because it was a colonized country, in which the British rulers could impose their justice and their conceptions of law. It could be said that India was forced to become a "common law country" and that Indian lawyers had no other choice during the 19 th century and the first half of the 20 th century than to adopt common law traditions. It is well known that Gandhi and many others leaders of the Indian national movement studied law in England and were called to the English Bar. Whereas legal formants of Western origin were translated in Japanese, English became and remained until today the official language of Indian law. Second, as an apparent contradiction, the decision taken by the British colonizers to keep personals laws _ first the ones of Muslim and Hindu people, then of the Christian, Parsi and Jew minorities _ has given the feeling that the substratum of indigenous laws has been respected by the colonizers. If the rulers used common law institutions (like the jury or the English family law), have not 1 RIESENHUBER KARL, On the Identity of Japanese Civil Law in a European Perspective, in :KITAHAWA ZENTARO et al. (eds.) (2007), The Identity of German and Japanese Civil Law in comparative perspectives, Berlin, 223-248. the colonized kept their traditional law, without the influence of legal transplants? However, this point of view is today criticized and nearly abandoned. It has been proved that, from the end of the 18 th century, British lawyers (like William Jones) have "manipulated" Hindu and Muslim sources and partly invented an Hindu legal tradition through the translation of the Manu Code and its recognition as a "law book", or through the establishment of an Anglo-Muhammadan Law (which was different from Muslim law). 2 The importance of British legislation, and even codification, in India has been also re-evaluated as something very special in the common law context. 3 If one considers today India and Japan as two great Asian countries through their population (more than one billion people in India, more than 123 millions in Japan), their powerful economy (the third world ranking for Japan, the ninth for India) and their extraordinary living culture (for example in literature and pictures), it is noteworthy that these two legal systems were and remain deeply westernized, the first one with a British common law dominant influence, the second one with a "civil law" (French and German) print. In these two countries a great part of what is qualified as "legal", from the constitution to courts practice through the legal vocabulary and lawyers dressing, is from European origin. It can even be asked if the "concept of law", as it is nowadays understood in India and in Japan, is not a Western invention transplanted in these Asian territories. This assertion can appear provocative, but if one admits that every society (or polity) was not endowed with a legal system, it can be controversial to decide when something as law was invented in India and in Japan.

There are many doubts about the oldness of indigenous law in Japan and in India: there is no evidence that the Manu"s Code (Manu Smrti) and other Dharmasastras were legal norms and the same question can be asked also about the 604 "Seventeenarticle constitution" of Japan. For a great part, law was developed in both countries through foreign influences: the one of Chinese law in Japan (the 702 Taiho Code and the 718 Yoro Code were inspired by the Chinese Tang Code) and the one of Muslim Law in India. Furthermore, in Japan as in India, this traditional law was in a phase of decay when the European pressure developed on both countries. A comparison of European normativity transplantation is, according me, meaningful between Japan 2 BHATTACHARYYA-PANDA, NANDINI (2008), Appropriation and Invention of Tradition. The East IndiaCompany and Hindu Law in Early Colonial Bengal, New Delhi.

3 HALPERIN, JEAN-LOUIS, Western Legal Transplants and India, in :Jindal Global Law Review, 2/1 (2010) 14-40.

and India: it could show how two different historical contexts have known rather similar process of legal transplants and in which fields the massive transplants of the 19 th century have been limited or, on the contrary, revived in the last decades.

I Two different situations, a similar process of global reception of Western law

The historical contexts in which the European normativity could be transplanted in India and In Japan are characterized by some clear differences. The European legal influence in India, beginning in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries factories created in some harbours by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the British colonizers, blossomed with the British rule after the end of the Seven Years War (1763), that reduced the ambitions of French colonizers to a few trading posts. Of course, it was a big enterprise of colonization that began with the 1757 diwangranted by the Mughal emperor to the East India Company in order to collect taxes in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. But it could be said that the legal sovereignty of the emperor remained under the Company rule (or Raj) until the Indian Rebellion of 1857. In 1858, the Mughal dynasty came to an end and the British Raj transformed India in a crown colony.

Nevertheless, Princely States kept a relative autonomy under the British suzerainty.

On the contrary, Japan emperors succeeded to maintain the independence of their country and, since the beginning of the Meiji era in 1868, were the leaders of the deep reforming movement, including the borrowing of Western legal formants. But one can also consider that Japan was subjected to a military and political pressure from the Western world and especially the American since the 1854 Perry expedition. The Government of the Shogun was constrained to sign unequal treaties (with some privileges of judicial nature for foreign merchants) with the US and European countries. The legal transplants policy, notably with the development of a modern judiciary and the process of law codification, was an indispensable means to prove that Japan was now endowed with a true (and fair) legal system and to obtain the revision of these treaties. Is it necessary to remind us that Japan was occupied by the US from 1945 to 1952 and that this military administration had a great role in writing the 1946 Constitution and reforming the main Codes? If Japan was never colonized, the country was not always truly "sovereign".

Another feature that makes the Japanese and the Indian situations rather similar is the crisis of their legal systems in 18 th century and 19 th century. In Japan, the shogun Government (bakufu) controlled only one part of the territory and could not really impose the respect of its rules to the powerful daymios. This feudal context has meant for a long time a decline of legal regulations (penal laws from Chinese inspiration) in favour of the social normativity of chivalry codes. During the 18 th century, there was an attempt (provoked by Neo-Confucianism influences) to reinforce the legal corpus (the 1742 Code called Kujikata-Osadamegati). But these laws were kept secret and the shogun has no real means to force daymioscourts to apply these texts. 4 Japan knew a curious situation of relatively important developments of litigation (in the biggest towns where litigants lived in courts inns and obtained here a kind of legal advice from innkeepers), without a true legal order or organized lawyers. 5 In the same time, the Mughal emperor encountered also great difficulties to make the Muslim penal law applied in his territories and probably tolerated the use of social customs (especially Hindu ones) that were not enshrined in legal texts. 6 In South India, the main source of court decisions was custom: whereas in 14 th -16 th century Kerala, the Dharmasastras were never quoted, 7 the Manu Smrtiwas known in the 18 th century courts of the Marathas kingdom. 8 Generally speaking, there was no class of true lawyers in what is called "traditional Hindu law", 9 a normative system that cannot be qualified as "legal" without discussion. Courts decided case by case without taking in consideration any normative text. 10 The fact that the 1757 diwan let the civil justice department to the East India Company in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, then that the emperor did not react against Warren Hastings policy to suppress the penal competences of the kazis (cadis) in the 1770s shows that the control of the legal system was no more a political target for the last Mughal rulers.

It would be exaggerated to consider that there was a "vacuity" of law in India before the development of the British colonization and in Japan before the Meiji era. But one can argue that there was not a sophisticated legal system (as in China or in some developments concerning the legal science. At the beginning of the Meiji era, the great Japanese theorist YuchikiFukuzawa could write that three things lack in Japan in comparison with the Western World: science, commerce and law. 11 In both countries, the main question about Western legal transplants was not a choice between common law and civil law models, but the adoption (by direct force or by indirect pressure) of the whole legal structure of the European Modern States based on the concept (which is always ours) of "rationalized law" (to use Max Weber"s vocabulary). It is true that India could not make a choice between common law and civil law models because of the domination of English colonizers (with the exception of French or Portuguese trading posts, where civil law continued to be applied until today), whereas the Japan Government decided, after some preliminary investigations (Japanese students were sent to Great Britain and called to the Bar), that civil law systems were easier to be transplanted (with the ready-made codes) than common law ones (with the traditional importance of case law rooted in historical foundations).

But, in both territories, law appeared first as a global Western product. It is noteworthy that Roman law was taught and used as well in India (William Jones wrote a Digest of Hindu Law and, later, Roman law was a matter of examination for future barristers) as in Japan (where the influence of Roman law is linked with the one of the German Civil Code). 12 Besides private law (and its different structure in common law and civil law countries), the law of procedure (which was characterized by many points of contact between Great Britain, France and Germany, for example about the jury system or the rights of defence), penal law, constitutional law, administrative organs and regulations, later intellectual property or labour law were modelled in India and in Japan according general Western patterns that could not be assigned specially to civil or common law countries. The legal impact of the different from the American model. It was rather the question to implement in Japan the democratic and Welfare-State that has been reshaped in America by the New Deal and inspired also many reforms in European countries (for example in France and in Germany).

It can be said that all the "formal" characters of European normativity, as they were specially developed in the 18 th century and 19 th century, were transplanted in India and in Japan. At the first rank, one thinks at the codes or at the rationalized legislation in penal and civil matters. It is the matter of the five Japanese codes, the number of which is modelled under the French model: the Penal and Penal procedure codes (the first ones in 1882, the new Penal Code in 1907), the Code of Civil Procedure (1890), the Civil Code (Minpo, 1896-1898) and the Commercial Code (1899). For the preparation of the Civil Code (under the direction of the French professor Boissonade from 1873 to 1892), as well as for the Commercial Code (under the direction of the German professor Roessler), it is noteworthy that Japanese customs were collected and studied by the drafters of the Code. But these customs appear divided or uncertain (in family matters they were translated in English by Wigmore) and finally the Japanese writers of the codes decided to not use them. Some Japanese scholars, like Naoki Kanayama, consider today that there is absolutely nothing that can be qualified "traditionally Nippon" in these codifications. 13 More surprisingly, the British colonizers have also used the codification process in India to impose similar rules to all their subjects: the 1858 Code of Civil Procedure, the 1860-1862 Indian Penal Code, 14 the 1861 Code of Criminal Procedure, to which one must add the Indian Contract Act (1872), the Indian Evidence Act (1872), the Specific Relief Act (1877), the Easement Act (1882), the Bills of Exchange Act (1882), the Transfer of Property Act (1882), or the Indian Trust Act (1882), which are all developed statutory laws (there are 238 sections in the Indian Contract Act, 167 in the Indian Evidence Act) very similar to specialized codes. The British colonizers considered that codification was a bad thing in Great Britain, but a good means to To finish with this summary of the global reception of the Western concept of law in India and in Japan, one has to remember that English is until today the language of courts and lawyers and that new Japanese words were specially created (and inserted in the codes) to express Western legal notions that were unknown in the traditional language until the Meiji era. 15

II Which limits and which changes in the reception of Western normativity?

15 An important role was the one of Rin-ShoMitsukuri who translated the French codification in Japanese in 1875. The Japanese Codes of the Meiji era were written in Chinese writing style with the katakana rendering. Recently they have been rewritten in hiragana to make them more accessible to common people.

As for any legal transplant, the outcomes of this reception of Western normativity in Japan and in India are difficult to be evaluated in the longue durée. One has been so accustomed to consider as normal the keeping of the Indian Penal Code or of the Minpountil today that their history seems to have lost any link with the one of European law. Through process of "Indianization" or "Japanization" many legal institutions from Western origin have been acculturated in their Asiatic context. On the other hand, the question remains if the reception of European normativity has not be limited to an apparent superstructure or reinterpreted in an American way.

About the limits of the reception of European normativity, the current debates are focusing on the great difference between a country with so many peoples (from a religious, ethnic and social point of view) as India and the so-called "homogeneous society" of Japan. In legal terms it seems clear that the reception of European transplants would be easier in a unitary structure (with the same rules for all citizens) than in a federal one, especially with the keeping of personal (religious) laws. Is not the impossibility until today to achieve the promise of the Indian constitution about a "uniform civil code" the proof of a pluralistic legal order combining Asiatic cultures (especially in Hindu and Muslim law) with the one inherited from the British colonization? 16 Nevertheless, some "cultural" obstacles to a complete reception of Western normativity have been emphasized also in the case of Japan. Among the most frequently quoted arguments, the Japanese distrust towards law,17 the importance of the indigenous concept of social duties (giri), the resistance of traditional family patterns (with a minored status for married women, a rather weak number of divorces, a very small percentage of illegitimate children), the small rate of litigation and the preference to arranged settlements (between relatives, neighbours or in industrial relations) would be clues that law has not acquired until today the status of "supremacy" (towards other means of regulation) in the treatment of social conflicts. 18 Legal history helps to correct these stereotypes about the "national spirit" (kokuminseiin Japan) and to introduce chronological and social nuances: the rate of litigation was relatively high during the inter-wars period, 19 the "traditional" family (with it own titles about civil status) has been upset by the implementation of the Minpo and it is difficult anywhere to estimate the domain of law in social regulations. Japanese courts and lawyers were and are not façade institutions, without any impact on the society: the recent debates about the re-introduction of the criminal jury (practised only between 1923 and 1943)20 and about legal education (which has concerned a great part of the Japanese elite) show that many Japanese people can be interested in legal questions.

If one compares the Japanese situation with the Indian ones, cultural factors appear to have been more important in India to limit the reception of European normativity.

Especially, the keeping of personal laws as rooted in religious and social traditions as Hindu law and Muslim law has made family law a kind of citadel of resistance against the "legal individualism" (and the egalitarian principle in favour of women) what we link with European transplants. The difficulties that British then Indian rulers have encountered to curtail polygamy, the effects of the dower institution in the bad situation of married woman (towards their mother in law), the practise of burning widows (sati), the unequal treatment of woman in succession law have been exemplified as cultural obstacles to a deep anchored reception of Westernized institution like the "special marriage" (between members of different religious communities), the right to divorce or the patrimonial capacity of women.

Furthermore, the survival of the caste system, despite its prohibition through the 1950 constitution, has created great difficulties to transplant directly the European concept of equality before the law.

Here again, the historical comparison allows developing a more complex analysis.

First, British colonizers have constructed personal laws (as some effects of the castesystem) according European categories (from the departure, in considering Hindu Dharmasastrasand Muslim fiqhas laws). There is not a simple opposition between a "traditional indigenous" law and "modern transplanted" rules. Then, European transplants could have an impact in the longue durée: the recognition of Christian and Muslim divorces or the distrust of colonizers towards polygamy have facilitated the 1954-1955 reforms in Hindu law, prohibiting polygamy between Hindus and introducing the institution of divorce (that has recently grown up, notably in big cities, as an example of the Westernization of the way of life in India). One has to take noteworthy that American experts did not try to convert this civil law country in a common law one (the structure of the codes was kept and even the inquisitorial criminal process was just amended to favour the rights of defence) and that some aspects of this US-modelled legislation were abandoned or transformed after 1952 (for example about the control of the equity market, or with the case law protecting workers against unfair firing 24 ).

What seems the most important today, in India as in Japan, is the attractive force of the American model of law schools on legal education in both countries. The case of Japan is the most spectacular. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Japan has developed a dense web of Law Faculties (more than one hundred as public or private institutions), which was conceived according the European (German and French) model: a 4 years courses study led to the degree of Bachelor of Law. Since 1947, all future judges, attorneys and advocates had to enter (through a difficult competition, a numerus clausus being decided by the State), the Legal Training and Research Institute(Shiho Kenshusho). This very elitist system has meant that many graduatesof the Law Faculty (especially outside the biggest universities in Tokyo and Kyoto) did not become practising lawyers (a phenomenon that did not prevent many managers or politicians to be educated in Law Faculties). 25 In 2004, the system was reformed in order to increase the number of advocates that was considered too small (9,000 in 1970, less than 15,000 at the beginning of the 2000s) for sustaining the international competition. 74 Law Schools were created to prepare post-graduates (coming from the Law Faculties or for other undergraduate studies) for entering the Legal Training and Research Institute (which is called also the Bar Examination). The American model was clearly imitated through the name of these new institutions (for a great part linked with the old Law Faculties), the institution of an admission test or the policy to develop legal clinics for preparing future lawyers to work in big law firms. For different reasons (notably the economic crisis), the numerical targets assigned to the reform have not been reached and the rate of success (from 48 % to 25 %) has constantly diminished, provoking controversial debates in Japan. It is noteworthy that, in this competition between the European and the American model of legal education, Law Faculties remained more opened to comparative and foreign law than the competition prepared by the Law Schools, which is centred on the study of the 24 GOULD, WILLIAM B. (1987), Japan"s Reshaping of American Labor Law, MIT Press. 25 Around 45,000 and 50,000 students passed the degree each year.

Japanese Six Codes (the collection of the five codes and of the constitution, called

Roppo).

In India, the traditional system (beginning during the British colonization) was a three years study in universities (the greatest ones have law colleges affiliated to them) or in law colleges, all checked by the Bar Council of India (the degree made the graduates eligible for becoming advocates). This system (a combination of the British and of the American ones) was completed, since the 1980s (the first one was the National Law School of India University on Bangalore), by the one of law universities offering a more complete curriculum (integrating other social sciences) during five years. It can be said that it is paradoxically a European continental model that was the main source of inspiration of these law universities. Nevertheless NLS has also used moot courts and other aspects of the American case method. The nowadays debates about legal education in India (about a bad assessment in 2001 for NLS or the creation of a national Bar examination in 2010) and in Japan are showing how the globalization has renewed older schemes about the reception of Western normativity, which is no more limited to European normativity. India and Japan are two complex examples, developed in a long-term history, of "legal transplants", that are based on different forms of authority26 : the authority of European colonizers, the one of European (and American) Great Powers, the one of European elites, the one of prestigious universities or law schools. On the other side (the one of the "borrowers"), they are also two legal fields, or two successions of different configurations of legal fields, in which indigenous lawyers had to react (according to collective policies or individual patterns) towards Western transplants.

There are legal histories (varying in the different periods) to develop and to write about these processes of acculturation and transformation of a set of norms from European origin.

  Muslim countries) supported by a group of professional lawyers or by intellectual4 STEENSTRUP, CARL (1996), A History of Law in Japan until 1868, Leiden, 120. 5 WOLLSCHLÄGER, CHRISTIAN, Historical Trends of Civil Litigation, in: BAUM, HARALD (ed.) (1997), Japan: Economic Success and Legal System, Berlin-New York, 111-112. 6 FISCH, JORG (1983), Cheap Limbs and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law, Wiesbaden. 7 DAVIS, DONALD R. (2002), The Boundaries of Law: tradition, "customs" and politics in late medieval Kerala, Ph. D. Austin (Texas), 83, 119, 149 and 204.8 GUNE, VITHAL TRIMBAK(1953), The Judicial System of the Marathas, Ponna, 69. 9 ROCHER,LUDO, "Lawyers" in Classical Hindu Law, in :Law & Society Review, vol. 3, n° 2/3, (1968), 383-402. 10 MICHAELS, ALEX, The Practice of classical Hindu Law, in: LUBIN, TIMOTHY et al. (eds.) (2010), Hinduism and Law: an Introduction, Cambridge, 71.

  development of taxation, census, army, local administrations or elections (specially after World War I) was another effect of a massive transplant of European features of the Modern State. Again, from 1945 to 1952, the US occupation did not mean the transformation of a civil law country in a common law one: the structure of the codes was kept and many institutions (for example in penal procedure) remained very 11 FUKIZAWA, YUKICHIY (1872-76), Gakumon no susume, Tokyo 2009, 38; Encouragement of Learning, translated by David A. Dilworth (2012), Tokyo, 28.12 KNÜTEL, ROLF, DasJapanischeZivilgesetzbuchunddasRömischeRecht, in : KNÜTEL, ROLF, NISHIMURA SHIGEO (eds.)(2004), HundertJahreJapanischesZivilgesetzbuch, Köln, Berlin, München, 131-184.

  13 KANAYAMA, NAOKI, Le caractère non-occidental du Minpo : mythe ou réalité, in : BRUNET, PIERRE et al. (eds) (tobepublished), Rencontre franco-japonaise autour du transfert de concepts, Paris, 23-30. 14 SKUY, DAVID, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The Myth of the Inherent Superiority and Modernity of the English Legal System in the Nineteenth Century, Modern Asian Studies, 32 (1998) 513-557. impose (as a form of legal despotism) Western rules (often inspired from French models) to indigenous peoples. With the codification process it is also a rationalized case law, known through official or private law reports, which was transplanted in Japan and in India during the 19 th century. Private law reports about decisions of Presidency or Company courts were printed in India since the years 1810s and 1820s. Then,they were favoured by the colonial Government after the establishment of the High Courts in 1862 and semi official collections, as the Law Reports of the Bombay High Court, appeared regularly in the 1870s. In Japan the decisions of the Great Court of Cassation (Daishininestablished in 1875 according the French model) were also published at the end of the 19 th century. It is another formal feature of European legal systems that was thus transplanted. Beginning in Japan with the 1889 Constitution (following the 1851 Prussian model) and in colonial India with the 1919 and 1935 Government of India Acts, modern constitutionalism was also borrowed from Western countries. Constitutional law, which is now in force in Japan or in India, is based for the first country on a 1946 text largely written by American experts, and for the second one on the longest constitution of the world voted in 1950 by the Constituent Assembly after a detailed study of many foreign constitutions. Both constitutions have adopted the British modelled parliamentary government, combined with the American style of judicial review. Despite the various divergences in the content of these constitutional laws, the form of the constitution (as the fundamental norm of the country) is again a legal transplant from the Western world.

HERRENSCHMIDT, OLIVIER, The Indians" Impossible Civil Code, in :European Journal of Sociology 2 (2009) 309-347.

NODA, YOSHIHIKO (1976), Introduction to Japanese Law, Tokyo, 159.

DEAN, MERYLL (2002), The Japanese Legal System,London, 1-15.

HALEY, JOHN OWEN (2006), The Spirit of Japanese Law, Athens (Georgia) 27.

ORTOLANI, ANDREA, Reflection on Citizen Participation in Criminal Justice in Japan: Jury, Saiban-in System and Legal Reform, in :ZeitschriftfürJapanischesRecht (2010) 153-176.

KOLSKY, ELISABETH (2010), Colonial Justice in British India, Cambridge; HALPERIN, JEAN-LOUIS (2012), Portraits du droit indien, Paris, 104.

 22 VIENNA, MARIA GIOIA, Human Rights in Japan, in: PFÖSTL EVA (ed.) (2007),Human Rights and Asian Values,

Roma, 231. 23 MATSUMOTO, TSUNEO, Anglo-American Law Research, in :KITAHAWAZENTARO et al. op. cit., 123.

WATSON, ALAN (1993), Legal Transplants. An Appoach to Comparative Law, Athens (Georgia) 99.

account also of political (rather than cultural) factors in the failure of some Western transplants as the criminal jury abandoned in India in the 1960s (because it was one symbol of the unequal colonial justice). 21 If the problems engendered by the castesystem are very specific to India, the fight against discriminations is also a question in Japan (concerning Burakuminor Ainu people), which was impossible to solve with the 19 th century European legal technique. Cultural factors appear less pregnant that political issues and sociological transformations in the metamorphosis of legal transplants from Western origin.

Rather that this global comparison between two complex societies in constant evolution, it would be more fruitful to develop studies about the competition between European and American normativity, especially in the field of legal education. Since the Perry expedition, the relationship between Japan and the US has always been crucial in the Westernization of Japan. If American law (a concept that was not so easy to understand, outside the constitutional sphere, during the 19 th century) was not a model for the Meiji reformers, there were already some links between Japanese and American lawyers. For translating the French codes (and the word "droit" in the meaning of right with the neologism kenri), Mitsukuri used a Chinese translation of Wheaton"s Elements of international law. 22 Tocqueville was also translated in Japanese at the end of the 19 th century and could influence Japanese lawyers about American"s Democracy. Later, IzutaroSuehiro, one of the pioneer of legal sociology in Japan, studied at Chicago University at the end of World War I and introduced in the Japanese law teaching, the American case method. 23 Of course, the main stream of US legal influence happened in Japan after World War II, especially during the period of American occupation (1945-1952). It concerned first the constitution, human rights and judicial review and, here again, a comparison is possible with the voluntary borrowings of the 1950 India constitution to the models of the Supreme Court and of the Bill of Rights. But many other fields of Japanese law _ as corporations, competition, labour standards, criminal law and family law _ were concerned by the 1945-1952 reforms inspired by American authorities. It is