The Phantasm of Black Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
White Obstructions; Barriers to the Implementation of Black Studies
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies , 2023
This article interrogates the strategies of white supremacy that functioned as obstacles to the implementation of the Black Studies stream in the Social and Political Thought graduate program at York University. The author reflects on her experience as co-chair of the Graduate Student Association and an Executive Committee student representative the year before the inauguration of the stream, identifying and examining white bureaucratic delay, with its practices of reiterative revision and deliberation, as a tactical obstruction to Black studies. The author demonstrates how these administerial tactics, mutually dependent on anti-Black quotidian violence and the ongoing denial of its quintessence to the organizing logic of the university, also work to rescue academic whiteness from threats to its ascendancy, remaking it as the progressive agent of change in the neoliberal era of equity, diversity and inclusion.
New Formations, 2019
The aim of this article is two-fold. Firstly, it identifies and maps out a new presence in race discourse in the UK arts and higher education, under the heading of 'US Black Critical Thought'. Secondly, it seeks to situate 'US Black Critical Thought' and its growing impact upon intellectual and aesthetic discourses on race in the UK through the lens of the longer-term project of 'Black British Cultural Studies'. The article traces the formation and eventual dissolving of 'Black British Cultural Studies' from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, and suggests that 'US Black Critical Thought' has energised a cohort of younger thinkers and artists in Britain, following a period where the intellectual left side-lined race as a serious category of theoretical or critical analysis.
Class Struggle in the Ivory Towers Revisiting the Birth of Black Studies in '68
In this chapter, I present a revisionist history of the origins of Black Studies and how Afrocentricity emerged as a dominant ideology and school of thought in Black Studies. The contemporary state of Black Studies can only be understood through a reconstruction of its historical and political context. Sifting through the ashes of past ideological debates, political conflicts and-in the last instance-economic conditions is an obligatory task for any student of history who wishes to understand the material and intellectual forces that shaped the world of Black Studies since 1968. 4 Marxist scholar/activists-at the level of political activism and ideologymade a considerable impact on the development of Black Studies. Despite the determinate role of Marxism in the historical development of Black Studies, it never developed an institutional niche. I argue that the rise of Afrocentricity was made possible by the political repression of Black leftradicalism/Marxism. I offer a class analysis, with the aid of a historical materialist approach, which explains the dialectical unfolding of Black Studies. My analysis presupposes that each person's actions are constrained by social structures (the forces and relations of production), which divides them into classes with
Transformation in Higher Education , 2018
In an era and an academic milieu that glamour at post-racialist and globalist theoretical frameworks in philosophy and sociology, our paper posits a critical philosophical-phenomenological and political review of the experience of being-black-in-the-world as a factor that justifies the establishment and maintenance of Black Studies Programmes. Blackness is introduced as an existential-ontological reality that should function as a cardinal category in educational planning. Blackhood, conceived as the an external recognition and an internally self-negotiated consciousness of the meaning of black existential reality within the immanence of Whiteness, it is argued, justifies the institutionalisation of learning spaces and programmes that are aimed at nurturing anti-colonial and anti-racist black self-realisation, namely Black Studies. This appreciation of Blackhood as a methodological imperative is achieved through a constructivist reflection that is derived from a Fanonian existential phenomenology and Steve Biko’s perspectives, as contrasted against Achille Mbembe’s semiological-hermeneutic and cosmopolitan treatment of blackness. The paper seeks to contribute to the debate on the vagaries accompanying the institutionalisation of culturo-epistemic exclusive spaces for socially suppressed selfhoods in a postmodern academy.
2018
What is whiteness? In tracing the development of his black scholarly activism and its impact on his grassroots fight for social justice, Ornette D Clennon meditates on the ‘invisible’ impact whiteness has on the lived ‘black’ experience in the UK. Using Education as a philosophical and ethical framework, Clennon interrogates Kehinde Andrews’ vision of Black Radicalism and explores its potential applicability to grassroots activism. By applying an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that dialogues with a version of historical sociology, as advocated by Gurminder Bhambra, namely, “connected histories”, Freirean critical pedagogy and a critique of Cedric J Robinson’s concept of Racial Capitalism, Clennon also reconciles his previous writings about ‘blackness’ by crystallising the links between commercial (urban) blackness, the pathological structures of whiteness and institutional control. Clennon also finds inspiration from Robbie Shilliam’s exploration of cosmologically related ‘hinterlands’ as an antidote to the atomising nature of colonial (Eurocentric) epistemologies and as such, uses a series of polemical writings written for his community partners, to act as gateways to a hinterland of theoretical discussion about the material effects of whiteness felt on the ground. Publishers: Palgrave Macmillan. "The book is insightful and provides a different scope on racialized discourse from a praxis perspective and its appeal to community workers provides an inclusive attempt to engage audiences outside of academia. The book also offers a very interesting point of departure particularly regarding the exploration of Community resistance in a neoliberal post-truth era. The situating of this chapter within a post-truth context and why activism is needed to disrupt this is powerful" - Dr Jason Arday - University of Roehampton, UK "This is a timely and important book that expertly combines personal narrative with nuanced theoretical analysis. Black Scholarly Activism between the Academy and Grassroots is a deeply engaging work that urges the reader to consider the possibilities and challenges facing academics who work towards social justice. Once picked up, this is a difficult book to put down: a must read" - Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Leeds Beckett University, UK
2019
In this essay, I provide a synthesis of three authors at the forefront of black studies: Hortense Spillers, Calvin Warren, and Alexander Weheliye (respectively). This essay has three primary objectives. The first objective is descriptive. I use Spillers' thesis on the metaphysics of antiblackness to frame the essay and offer a description of the current institutions and how they proactively work to erase black being and many integral parts of black culture. The second objective is expository. I offer an explanation (using the thesis of Calvin Warren) as to why antiblackness exists as it does and how it is perpetuated in the status quo as such, contending that the infusion of political thinking into academic spaces hijacks rhetoric and weaponizes it against black bodies. The third objective is speculative. I offer Alexander Weheliye's strategy as a potential mode of resistance to the current world order. Using Weheliye's analysis of diaspora, I theorize that a weaponization of black studies in academic spaces through a strategic move to subsume other forms of knowledge could potentially cause a rupture in the fabric of rhetorical humanism. The contents of this essay are the intellectual property of the authors that I cite, and I take no credit for the creation of these ideas. The purpose of this work is to draw a useful connection between three influential black studies authors and apply it to the issue of rhetorical antiblackness in academic spaces.