Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh as... more Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognised as central to the history of black struggle. It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, C. L R. James, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and others, as well as movement activists like Malcolm X and Black Panthers, that vital new ideas emerged and circulated. Their most important achievement was to create and sustain a vibrant, black public sphere broadly critical of U.S. social, political, and civic inequality. Finding racism hidden within the universalising tones of reform-minded liberalism at home and global democratic imperatives abroad, race radicals alienated many who saw them as dangerous and separatist. Few wanted to hear their message then, or even now, and yet, as Singh argues, their passionate scepticism about the limits of U.S. democracy remains as indispensable to a meaningful reconstruction of racial equality and universal political ideals today as it ever was.
<p class=&... more <p class="p1">1968 represents a crossroads of sorts, whose alternative political trajectories continue to influence the present in often confusing and contradictory ways. We have an increasingly exhaustive historical narrative detailing the long Black freedom struggle against white supremacist monopolizations of power and resources in the era before the Montgomery bus boycott. From the heroic mobilizations of Reconstruction-era Black politics in the face of white terror, through two great migrations, the mobilizations of Black labor, a new Black urbanism, and forms of worldly engagement in an era of global wars and decolonization struggles, the Black freedom movement simultaneously carried and deepened a demand for racial democracy. It is ironic, however, that even as aspects of this past become clarified, the more immediate history and political meaning of this long struggle have grown murky. I am specifically thinking about the foreclosure of Black freedom imperatives in the United States, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for which the year 1968 retains an iconic significance. Here the story often bifurcates, becoming a tale either of teleological fulfillment and narrative closure, or of violent fragmentation and ragged endings. These different trajectories lead us in turn to starkly different eventualities: the election of Barack Obama and the symbolic validation of the promise of Black politics, or the increasingly global US war-prison complex, where the tattered ends of our social contract once again meet the unforgiving cut of racialized governance. In this context, the searching question asked by Martin Luther King in his fateful final year—“Where Do We Go from Here?”—remains as relevant as ever.</p>
is one of the most consistent and visionary intellectual activists working to enlarge our underst... more is one of the most consistent and visionary intellectual activists working to enlarge our understanding of what she terms the "geographies and temporalities" of black freedom struggles. In this short but wide-ranging book of essays, speeches, and interviews primarily conducted in Europe and North America (and finely curated by Frank Barat), Davis offers typically comprehensive thinking on racist state violence in an era of neoliberal globalization. Davis is particularly attuned to the ramified effects of this violence across public and intimate spheres of social life, to the connections across continents needed to confront it, and to the legacies of past movements and struggles that continue to inform the work of human liberation. Woven throughout these reflections, Davis calls for the development of new vocabularies to grasp the "complexities of racism" in the contemporary period. This includes recognizing the legacy of intergenerational harm extending back to chattel slavery, whose primary institutional locus in the United States today is a prison-industrial complex that houses well over two million people-25 percent of all the world's prisoners, the majority black and brown. It also means naming (and shaming) the police power that kills with similar disproportion, and with impunity, at home and abroad. Davis foregrounds connections of this type, for example, between hyperincarceration and cruel forms of criminal punishment, secret prisons and torture overseas, and the similar moral and affective valences animating the criminalization of blackness and Islamophobic threat inflation mobilized by the so-called war on terror. Many of the documents in this book are speeches. Activist and organizer that she is, Davis frequently issues a demand to her readers and audiences: oppositional political thought and action needs to consciously attend to intersections of various kinds-between public and private violence, between struggles to change institutions and to transform the self, and to the tributaries that flow between domestic policing and overseas military violence. In this way, she re-accents the important black feminist concept of intersectionality, amplifying its attention to crosscutting dimensions of race, class, gender, and sexual domination at individual and communal scales, with an equal and insistent emphasis upon the international, transnational, and imperial lineaments of power that egalitarian, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist movements and struggles face in the present moment. Of particular relevance to the readership of this journal, Davis points to connections drawn by activists around the exercise of militarized police power in Palestine, and in places like Ferguson, where protests against the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014 achieved sustained intensity, Recent Books Winter 2017 || 93 Recent Books
... Week 3 Sexuality and Class Society Christine Stansell, City of Women; Leonore Davidoff, &... more ... Week 3 Sexuality and Class Society Christine Stansell, City of Women; Leonore Davidoff, "Class and Gender in Victorian England: the Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick," Feminist Studies 5,l (1979 ... 43S52; Stephanie Coom, "Middle-Class Morality in the mid-19th ...
The civil rights and black power movements, SDS and the counterculture, and the women's a... more The civil rights and black power movements, SDS and the counterculture, and the women's and gay liberation movements transformed social and political life in the United States. This course charts the emergence of the “new social movements” in the 1960s, paying special ...
Racism is like a Cadillac: they bring out a new model every year. Malcolm X In the germinal book ... more Racism is like a Cadillac: they bring out a new model every year. Malcolm X In the germinal book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (), political theorist Cedric Robinson presents the concept "racial capitalism" as a framework for a new kind of inquiry and the proper object of Black radical critique. Although the most common articulation of the concept is associated with Robinson, in recent years a notion of racial capitalism has been taken up with more frequency and generality, across a range of topics and disciplines, from discussions of the history of slavery and capitalism to the impact of mass incarceration and subprime lending, to the politics of #blacklivesmatter. Departing from Robinson's discussion, this essay takes a conjunctural approach to the concept's formation in an effort to elucidate some of the intellectual and political stakes of contemporary usage. At the core of this discussion is whether there can be a nonracial capitalism, a capitalism without racial exclusion (and implicitly, a more just capitalism), or, conversely, whether the idea of racial capitalism makes audible a coercive or violent compulsion integral to capitalism proper across time, but one problematically muted by anti-capitalist critique and struggle. Robinson intended "racial capitalism" as an answer to the second problemwhat he characterized as a racist partiality (and thus recursive failure) of emancipatory discourses within the unfolding of bourgeois civilization in Western society, including Marxism. "Black Marxism," according to this argument, supplemented a specific lack: "the failed efforts to render the historical being of Black peoples into a construct of historical materialism, to signify our existence as merely an opposition to capitalist oppression" (Robinson, Black Marxism, ). Even so, equivocation persists: the term "merely" does heavy lifting here. Successive historical recompositions of Black life and labor in chattel slavery, sharecropping
IRMINGHAM, England—Racism transcends the boundaries of the nation-state, and so the fight for fre... more IRMINGHAM, England—Racism transcends the boundaries of the nation-state, and so the fight for freedom and equality must also be global. Too often when we try to understand anti-Black racism, our analyses are limited to our own country’s borders. The late sociologist Herminio Martins dubbed this tendency to frame our thinking within the nation-state “methodological nationalism.” In thinking about racism, the nation-state is frequently considered a real, tangible unit of study for racial formation and inequalities. In reality, the nation-state
In light of recent historiography that increasingly emphasizes the centrality of slavery to the o... more In light of recent historiography that increasingly emphasizes the centrality of slavery to the origins of capitalism, this essay returns to Marx, especially Capital, volume 1, to rethink the relationships among capitalist abstraction, violence, and racial differentiation.
Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh as... more Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognised as central to the history of black struggle. It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, C. L R. James, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and others, as well as movement activists like Malcolm X and Black Panthers, that vital new ideas emerged and circulated. Their most important achievement was to create and sustain a vibrant, black public sphere broadly critical of U.S. social, political, and civic inequality. Finding racism hidden within the universalising tones of reform-minded liberalism at home and global democratic imperatives abroad, race radicals alienated many who saw them as dangerous and separatist. Few wanted to hear their message then, or even now, and yet, as Singh argues, their passionate scepticism about the limits of U.S. democracy remains as indispensable to a meaningful reconstruction of racial equality and universal political ideals today as it ever was.
<p class=&... more <p class="p1">1968 represents a crossroads of sorts, whose alternative political trajectories continue to influence the present in often confusing and contradictory ways. We have an increasingly exhaustive historical narrative detailing the long Black freedom struggle against white supremacist monopolizations of power and resources in the era before the Montgomery bus boycott. From the heroic mobilizations of Reconstruction-era Black politics in the face of white terror, through two great migrations, the mobilizations of Black labor, a new Black urbanism, and forms of worldly engagement in an era of global wars and decolonization struggles, the Black freedom movement simultaneously carried and deepened a demand for racial democracy. It is ironic, however, that even as aspects of this past become clarified, the more immediate history and political meaning of this long struggle have grown murky. I am specifically thinking about the foreclosure of Black freedom imperatives in the United States, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for which the year 1968 retains an iconic significance. Here the story often bifurcates, becoming a tale either of teleological fulfillment and narrative closure, or of violent fragmentation and ragged endings. These different trajectories lead us in turn to starkly different eventualities: the election of Barack Obama and the symbolic validation of the promise of Black politics, or the increasingly global US war-prison complex, where the tattered ends of our social contract once again meet the unforgiving cut of racialized governance. In this context, the searching question asked by Martin Luther King in his fateful final year—“Where Do We Go from Here?”—remains as relevant as ever.</p>
is one of the most consistent and visionary intellectual activists working to enlarge our underst... more is one of the most consistent and visionary intellectual activists working to enlarge our understanding of what she terms the "geographies and temporalities" of black freedom struggles. In this short but wide-ranging book of essays, speeches, and interviews primarily conducted in Europe and North America (and finely curated by Frank Barat), Davis offers typically comprehensive thinking on racist state violence in an era of neoliberal globalization. Davis is particularly attuned to the ramified effects of this violence across public and intimate spheres of social life, to the connections across continents needed to confront it, and to the legacies of past movements and struggles that continue to inform the work of human liberation. Woven throughout these reflections, Davis calls for the development of new vocabularies to grasp the "complexities of racism" in the contemporary period. This includes recognizing the legacy of intergenerational harm extending back to chattel slavery, whose primary institutional locus in the United States today is a prison-industrial complex that houses well over two million people-25 percent of all the world's prisoners, the majority black and brown. It also means naming (and shaming) the police power that kills with similar disproportion, and with impunity, at home and abroad. Davis foregrounds connections of this type, for example, between hyperincarceration and cruel forms of criminal punishment, secret prisons and torture overseas, and the similar moral and affective valences animating the criminalization of blackness and Islamophobic threat inflation mobilized by the so-called war on terror. Many of the documents in this book are speeches. Activist and organizer that she is, Davis frequently issues a demand to her readers and audiences: oppositional political thought and action needs to consciously attend to intersections of various kinds-between public and private violence, between struggles to change institutions and to transform the self, and to the tributaries that flow between domestic policing and overseas military violence. In this way, she re-accents the important black feminist concept of intersectionality, amplifying its attention to crosscutting dimensions of race, class, gender, and sexual domination at individual and communal scales, with an equal and insistent emphasis upon the international, transnational, and imperial lineaments of power that egalitarian, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist movements and struggles face in the present moment. Of particular relevance to the readership of this journal, Davis points to connections drawn by activists around the exercise of militarized police power in Palestine, and in places like Ferguson, where protests against the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014 achieved sustained intensity, Recent Books Winter 2017 || 93 Recent Books
... Week 3 Sexuality and Class Society Christine Stansell, City of Women; Leonore Davidoff, &... more ... Week 3 Sexuality and Class Society Christine Stansell, City of Women; Leonore Davidoff, "Class and Gender in Victorian England: the Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick," Feminist Studies 5,l (1979 ... 43S52; Stephanie Coom, "Middle-Class Morality in the mid-19th ...
The civil rights and black power movements, SDS and the counterculture, and the women's a... more The civil rights and black power movements, SDS and the counterculture, and the women's and gay liberation movements transformed social and political life in the United States. This course charts the emergence of the “new social movements” in the 1960s, paying special ...
Racism is like a Cadillac: they bring out a new model every year. Malcolm X In the germinal book ... more Racism is like a Cadillac: they bring out a new model every year. Malcolm X In the germinal book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (), political theorist Cedric Robinson presents the concept "racial capitalism" as a framework for a new kind of inquiry and the proper object of Black radical critique. Although the most common articulation of the concept is associated with Robinson, in recent years a notion of racial capitalism has been taken up with more frequency and generality, across a range of topics and disciplines, from discussions of the history of slavery and capitalism to the impact of mass incarceration and subprime lending, to the politics of #blacklivesmatter. Departing from Robinson's discussion, this essay takes a conjunctural approach to the concept's formation in an effort to elucidate some of the intellectual and political stakes of contemporary usage. At the core of this discussion is whether there can be a nonracial capitalism, a capitalism without racial exclusion (and implicitly, a more just capitalism), or, conversely, whether the idea of racial capitalism makes audible a coercive or violent compulsion integral to capitalism proper across time, but one problematically muted by anti-capitalist critique and struggle. Robinson intended "racial capitalism" as an answer to the second problemwhat he characterized as a racist partiality (and thus recursive failure) of emancipatory discourses within the unfolding of bourgeois civilization in Western society, including Marxism. "Black Marxism," according to this argument, supplemented a specific lack: "the failed efforts to render the historical being of Black peoples into a construct of historical materialism, to signify our existence as merely an opposition to capitalist oppression" (Robinson, Black Marxism, ). Even so, equivocation persists: the term "merely" does heavy lifting here. Successive historical recompositions of Black life and labor in chattel slavery, sharecropping
IRMINGHAM, England—Racism transcends the boundaries of the nation-state, and so the fight for fre... more IRMINGHAM, England—Racism transcends the boundaries of the nation-state, and so the fight for freedom and equality must also be global. Too often when we try to understand anti-Black racism, our analyses are limited to our own country’s borders. The late sociologist Herminio Martins dubbed this tendency to frame our thinking within the nation-state “methodological nationalism.” In thinking about racism, the nation-state is frequently considered a real, tangible unit of study for racial formation and inequalities. In reality, the nation-state
In light of recent historiography that increasingly emphasizes the centrality of slavery to the o... more In light of recent historiography that increasingly emphasizes the centrality of slavery to the origins of capitalism, this essay returns to Marx, especially Capital, volume 1, to rethink the relationships among capitalist abstraction, violence, and racial differentiation.
In the aftermath of World War II, the recently liberated nations in Europe were swift to resume c... more In the aftermath of World War II, the recently liberated nations in Europe were swift to resume colonial oppression abroad. On May 8, 1945, the day victory was celebrated by the Allies, French police massacred hundreds of townspeople in Sétif, leading French editor Claude Bourdet to ask: “Are we the Gestapo in Algeria?”
In his famous essay ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ poet Aimé Césaire* argued that what in Europe is called ‘fascism’ is just colonial violence finding its way back home**. The carceral state, ethnonationalisms and imperial warfare are, one could argue, different facets of what Nikhil Pal Singh termed ‘the afterlife of fascism but the relation of settler colonialism to Fascism and National Socialism remains under-theorized and poorly understood.
The aim of the present series of events is to challenge the Eurocentrism that undergirds the current concept of Fascism, and to tackle the under-theorized relation between settler colonialism and national socialism via the ‘proto-totalitarian’ scene of colonial expansion and its racialized concept of personhood, in order to address, and by extension counter, the antipolitical nature of a concept such as the West, and the resurgence of fascist doctrines this notion engenders.
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Papers by Nikhil Singh
In his famous essay ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ poet Aimé Césaire* argued that what in Europe is called ‘fascism’ is just colonial violence finding its way back home**. The carceral state, ethnonationalisms and imperial warfare are, one could argue, different facets of what Nikhil Pal Singh termed ‘the afterlife of fascism but the relation of settler colonialism to Fascism and National Socialism remains under-theorized and poorly understood.
The aim of the present series of events is to challenge the Eurocentrism that undergirds the current concept of Fascism, and to tackle the under-theorized relation between settler colonialism and national socialism via the ‘proto-totalitarian’ scene of colonial expansion and its racialized concept of personhood, in order to address, and by extension counter, the antipolitical nature of a concept such as the West, and the resurgence of fascist doctrines this notion engenders.