B(l)ack at Crisis: Reclaiming the Black Radical Intellectual Archive Against the Dishonesty of a Post Racial Teleology (original) (raw)
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Anthropology and ethnology opean access journal, 2024
This work argues that the White Christian Western world ended Black history as a distinct form of system and social integration unfolding unto the world by integrating them into the dialectic of their (neo) liberal (Protestant) capitalist means and modes of production. This process, contemporarily, in postindustrial America, has led to the queerification and feminization of the socalled Black American community, which serves the imperial agenda of the White Western (Protestant) Christian world under American hegemony by promoting their neoliberal identity politics to the black diaspora and the African continent under the guise of neoliberal identity politics and capitalism.
Wake Forest University, 2020
Representation Matters is an utterance that is often evoked to uncover the ways globalized anti-blackness constructs forms of exclusion within media and culture. The phrase acts as a kind of perceptible measure for the assumed racial progress of civil society, as the presence of black bodies in powerful positions attempts to serve as verification that the horrors of slavery and genocide are simply the unfortunate effects of past mistakes rather than an enduring legacy of gratuitous violence. My thesis plans on analyzing how the visibility of racialized and gendered bodies, especially those made visible for entertainment, are intertwined within the ontometaphysically violent process of obliterating the Other, particularly the black nonbeing. My analysis hopes to unveil representation as a fraudulent measure for progress and examine representation as an epistemological tool that employs rhetorical arguments designed to fortify the anti-black logic that maintains civil society.My thesis will focus on how black representation within American popular culture is implicated within the politics of the archive, a collection of historical records, iconography, and documents which provides an assumed public memory and intimate insight on the inner workings of a place, institution, or group of people within an event. In addition, I reflect on critical fabulation as an in(ter)vention of the archive and representation. The practice of reimagining the black social life challenges the Western Canon of the archive which relegates the genealogy of black feminist epistemology into zones of death. My thesis will compare these narratives to demonstrate the ontological violence of the archive then use the process of critical fabulation to explain the radical potential of telling stories of black life in events of social death.
By providing the readers with some context in which Black Arts, Black Power Freedom Movements, and Black Aesthetics matured Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, juxtaposed with Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy :Rationalizing Violence In the New Racial Capitalism, and Jordan T. Camp’s Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State we can potentially navigate ourselves out of the muck of the class and/or/vs race but asking a different question: how do the authors identify the relationship of race and capitalism, and how does the expressive culture of the Black Radical Tradition produce alternative epistemologies about different social and economic systems and relations grounded in Black cosmologies ? I will argue in this paper that the Black Radical Tradition needs to become fully conscious of it-self in order frame addressing the race/class nexus (Fanon, 1967, in Welcome, 2007; Robinson, 1983/2000). Nonetheless, we need to pay attention to the modern movements and the practices on how to exposes the contradictions between race and capitalism. First, I will provide a quick historical development of the Black Radical Tradition through Robinson’s Black Marxism, where he traces the Black Radical Tradition from the 16th century to the present. Second, this will take us to the 1960s-1960s of transnationalism, and anti-imperialism of black freedom fighters Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, MLK Jr, and how this time was an opportune time for both black, natives and the global take advantage of that moment. Thereby producing a mature black radical formation constituted on the multiple crisis of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I will list what in my view characterizes a modern Black Radical Tradition.
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.
Towards the Gentrification of Black Power (?)
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The recent explosion in US scholarship on the Black Power Movement provides the context for this close reading and textual analysis of Peniel Joseph's latest book, "Dark Days, Bright Nights: from Black Power to Barack Obama." Taking into account the context of the book's appearance and the critical public debate surrounding it, this article unpacks Joseph's discussion of Black Power, paying particular attention to his rendering of 'self-determination' and other key political ideologies. It asks what is at stake for Black radical memory when knowledge production on the Black Power Movement is governed by the dictates of the American marketplace and, more specifically, the publishing industry. In addition, it briefly reconnoiters the ways that Black radical (collective) memory can serve as a counterbalance to the erasures of marketplace history, and keep us attentive to the contemporary pertinence and unfinished business of the past. The article closes by highlighting some alternative routes taken by scholars concerned with the future of Black Power Studies.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2021
The people of Africa were dragged to the New World, where they were enslaved and put to work and starved to death. The atrocities that African people witness are ongoing even today. This paper aims to take a journey through the history of African people. The article is divided into two parts: the first part is a concise history of the Atlantic Slave Trade and of its cultural and sociological aftermath in the New World, where the struggle between the South and the North exploited African Americans even after the Civil War. The second part focuses on the literary production of the African people, in order to connect these with experiences defined by pain, agony and nostalgia.
To Be American Is To Be Indebted To Blackness: Understanding Blackness as Constitutive of an
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In this paper, I argue that African-American’s fight for national inclusion and belonging, from the American Revolution to the late twentieth century, centres some of the founding contradictions and tensions of America’s democratic project even as it implores Americans to embark on a process of national healing and reconciliation. Starting with a discussion on the founding contradiction of the United States, embodied through the juxtaposition of its declaration of human equality while retaining the practice and institution of chattel slavery, I will show some of the earliest struggles and constraints placed on Black life in America and our ability to access meaningful and gratuitous entry into society. Following the North’s victory of the Civil War, American life saw an opportunity to effectively include now-freed Black Americans into its fold. Despite some of the achievements that highlighted Black American life during the Reconstruction Era, that, too, was mediated by forms of legalised discrimination such as segregated Jim Crow, particularly in the South. Eventually, the dehumanising trauma of slavery mixed with the experiences of Southern Jim Crow, as well as better job opportunities in the North, saw an influx of Black migrants to Northern States in what came to be dubbed the Great Migration. However, it would take over another half century, manifested in the Civil Rights Movement, for widespread, national organising, advocating for the acknowledgement and enforcement of Black folks' citizenship and the rights. This paper takes up these historical moments in African-American life, in an attempt to shed light not only on the obstacles, but also on the nuanced forms of physical and political resistance and ideological advancements that came to define these socio-political moments.