For the Culture: #BlackLivesMatter and the Future Yet to Come

2019

2009

This dissertation seeks to comprehensively refocus the analytical frameworks dealing with black modern subjectivity through an in-depth examination of “Culturalism,” or the regime of meaning-making in which Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material, political economic, and structural conditions of dispossession through state technologies of antiradicalism. Cold War liberalism institutionalized the hegemony of cultural politics and Culturalism by foregrounding cultural analyses of African retention and syncretism, cultural continuity, and comparative diasporic cultures. As the Cold War instantiated the bifurcation of the world and influenced the direction of decolonization, the African diaspora as an analytical framework became reduced to its cultural aspects. It essentially framed connections among African descendants in terms of culture; asserted Black modernity and claims to equality on cultural grounds; and constructed culture as the domain of struggle. Culturalism divorced Blackness and the African diaspora from the material realties of governmentalized, transnational state projects that sustain racial and class hierarchies. The hegemony of Culturalism in contemporary theories of the Black condition and the African diaspora diverge significantly from those of the Black radical structure of feeling that conceptualized Diaspora (thought not explicitly named at this time) through a nexus that included political economy, cultural formations, and nationalism. Conditions of Black abjection were seen to permeate both the base and the superstructure such that mobilization on both fronts was necessary to combat white supremacy. The result has been a turn away from the political economy/structural critique that, in the interwar period, provided a theoretical framework to challenge American antiblack statist discourse. The marginalization of Black radicalism and political economy produced the politicization of culture as the dominant mode of organizing for Black equality, and the primary intellectual focus in African diaspora studies. Anticommunism entrenched this move away from structural critique by criminalizing and disciplining critiques that opposed the racialized social order, the spread of empire, and capitalist accumulation. Instead of challenging their exclusion from the state based on economic dispossession and maldistribution of resources, Black people in the United States began to mobilize around cultural specification, for inclusion based on liberal civil rights discourse, and/or to assert international linkages based on mutually recognized cultural enunciations of blackness. In other words, the Cold War curtailed the possibilities of challenging the state in terms of the political economy of exploitation, thus Blackness came to be understood in nationalist and cultural terms of exclusion. At the same time, decolonizing countries that sought equality in the world-system asserted their willingness and ability to adopt the culture of development, modernization, and anticommunism. This was notwithstanding the fact that their insertion into the global political economy as sovereign nations continued relations of unequal exchange, declining terms of trade, and neocolonialism. Culturalism is thus a function of antiradical and antiblack statist pedagogy, and after World War II, it became entangled with anticommunism as an instrumentality of surveillance and violence. Culturalism institutionalized the erasure of radical political economic critique in the theorizing of the black global condition, the disciplining of Black radicalism, and the cultural specification of African diaspora studies examined in the dissertation. The cultural specification of blackness and the forms of Culturalism that it takes are integrally related to statist technologies that facilitate the accommodation of black intellectual and practical challenges to the capitalist state while, at the same time, ensuring their cooptation. These are the bases for the surveillance, disciplining, and punishment of black radical critique.

American Quarterly, 2007

During the winter of 2005, rappers 50 Cent and The Game staged a wellpublicized feud replete with verbal sparring, public threats, media outcry, and a shooting outside of New York City's Hot 97-the largest and most influential urban music radio station in the nation. On cue, journalists, media personalities, and black public figures lashed out at hip-hop culture and the music industry in general for promoting negative values. Reminiscent of the activism of C. Delores Tucker with her anti-gangsta rap crusades of the 1990s and in a move that aligned black activists with right-wing values, Reverend Al Sharpton called for the Federal Communications Commission to issue a temporary ban of artists who promote violence. 1 The feud came to a temporary resolution when the two parties organized a press conference at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on the anniversary of the death of rapper Notorious B.I.G., who died in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles in 1997. During the public reconciliation, the two artists made charitable donations to the Boys Choir of Harlem and 50 Cent read the following statement:

Deleuze and Guattari deploy the image of the black hole to describe the grotesque disfigurations – the pores, blackheads and little scars – pockmarking the “semiotic face of capitalism.” It is an apt analogy for the unsettling position of blackness in relation to contemporary thought and political practice. In this special issue of Rhizomes we use the black hole as a conceptual starting point to consider how racial blackness serves as a vortex disrupting the smooth administration of late-capital and our resistance to it. An increasingly precise challenge is on the table that has largely been met with silence by radical theorists and activists alike. This challenge, what is often expediently called, “afro-pessimism,” has targeted the foundations of modern critical thought and declared them ineffective given their inability to engage what Wilderson describes as “the structural relation between Blacks and Humanity as an antagonism (an irreconcilable encounter) as opposed to a conflict.”

Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal (an open-access, online, peer-reviewed journal on activism in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies), 2020

an open-access, online, peer-re ie ed journal on acti ism in riting, rhetoric, and literac studies

2025

Mapping Afrofuturism: Understanding Black Speculative Practice addresses the multifaceted domain of Afrofuturism—a cultural, political, and intellectual movement that uses African diaspora concerns to reshape how we understand technology and culture. This anthology examines the historical trajectory and impact of Afrofuturism in the United States, providing readers with an understanding of its development and its significance in challenging systemic racism and discriminatory practices. The book outlines the movement's roots and global reach while focusing on the African American experience. This volume is methodically divided into sections reflecting Afrofuturism's pivotal role across different eras and mediums, including literature, art, music, and activism. The book traces how Afrofuturism has questioned and shaped conceptions of knowledge in the Western hemisphere and underscores its profound influence on contemporary issues like the Black Lives Matter movement. It provides a powerful critique of colonial power structures and unapologetically asserts the importance of Black cultural practice and knowledge in modern discourse, emphasizing the contributions of prominent figures from W.E.B Du Bois to Octavia E. Butler. Mapping Afrofuturism is well-suited for undergraduate and graduate courses in African American studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and media studies. It is a foundational text for students interested in examining the intersections of race, art, science, and technology within a historical and cultural framework.

This essay provides a robust introduction to the vexed and generative terrains of Afro-pessimisms and black feminisms. Taken together, the essays reviewed address what each tendency says about the nature of black positionality and the significance of the meanings and histories attached to black female flesh and the slave polity—the “arbiters of blackness itself”—via considerations of deep literacy, psychoanalysis, sound theory, black m/othering, drama, ethnography, material conditions of knowledge production, canon formation, intellectual appropriation, coalition politics, state and vigilante murder and sexualized violence, and the risk of repeating Euro-American Enlightenment through mischaracterizing the relationship between colonialism and slavery.

Ufahamu a Journal of African Studies, 1981

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.

2022

Any reader of black literature — whether African-American or Franco/Afro-Caribbean — will have recognized in this title two major references in this field, two essential authors: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Frantz Fanon. “Let the world be a Black poem” is a verse from his poem Black Art. The scansion of the latter by the activist and poet Baraka is a jazzistical invitation to fight against segregation and the Jim Crow laws that still prevailed in the country. The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre) is a literal quote of the masterful work of the Martinican psychiatrist, thinker and activist Frantz Fanon, Omar, companion in the fight of independence-seeking Algeria and its people. In terms of literature and sociology, almost everything is said through these two works. Literature is elevated here to the rank of weapons of war and mobilization, of emancipation and community progress. Incidentally, how can we not accept as absolute the inalienability of the unbreakable link, in our view, between literature and sociology? Notwithstanding the fact that sociology is our favorite field, our art (poetry, performance and even choreographic creation) is undeniably engaged! During the conference around Frantz Fanon which I attended and participated in a few years ago at the University of Mostaganem itself, I was shocked by some literary analysis made of the work of Toni Morrison. Questions and analyzes were brought and provoked my indignation somewhat, while I perceived the ineffable deficiency in terms of sociology of black worlds. How can one read or write about these literatures and these communities without considering the contexts that shaped them? Thus, I decided to draw inspiration from it for this keynote that I am invited to deliver to highlight the fundamental usefulness of literature for our black communities. I will sometimes use an inclusive approach (within reason), since I will express myself and analyze the theme at hand from my own perspective: as woman, black (mixed race), Caribbean, Afrodescendent, womanist activist and of a certain Negritude , and committed researcher. My argument will answer the following question: how is literature sociologically emancipatory for oppressed peoples? After having documented the past and contemporary sociological, historical contexts of the Black Diaspora and the rules of literary analysis that it seems essential for us to see applied, we will explore the best-known literary genres to bring to light what makes them sociological keys, since they are testimonials, social chronicles, tools of advancement and evolution, but also of identity and national/ist construction: journal/diary (i.e. The Color Purple by Alice Walker), poetry (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land / Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka’s poetry, Cette igname brisée qu’est ma terre natale / This Broken Yam That Is My Native Land by Sonny Rupaire or even Balles d'or / Golden Bullets by Guy Tirolien…), novel (works by Raphaël Confiant, Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, etc.), short stories ( Haïti noire, for example) and essay (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs / Black Skin, White Masks or Les Damnés de la Terre / The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, …). Without being exhaustive here, this overview will allow us a bibliographical approach, as well as an exploration of other questions raised: Can we write in the name of art for art's sake when we write in a dominated country? Keywords Americas — French Overseas – USA — Blackstream — Literature — Postcoloniality— Decolonial — Black Art Movements.

This course is designed to bring together philosophical pessimism and black radical political theory to engage a discussion that considers this intersection across various disciplines: art/aesthetics, literature, film, philosophy, gender and queer theories, and psychology/psychoanalysis. We will consider the writings of black theorists, activists and poets like Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, David Marriott, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, James Baldwin, Saidiya Hartman, and Dionne Brand; along with the work of philosophers like Eugene Thacker and Graham Harman. Texts will include academic articles, prose, poetry, fiction and the visual texts will include independent and mainstream films and genre television.