Black Romanticism: A Manifesto

Abstract

PAUL YOUNGQUIST Black Romanticism: A Manifesto When we reflect on the nature of these men, and their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must we not conclude, that they are a different species of the same genus? —Edward Long, History ofJamaica, 2:356 P AUL O’NEAL, KORRYN GAINES, PHILANDO CASTILE, ALTON STERLING, Freddy Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Gamer, Rekia Boyd, Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Amodou Diallo. You know what I’m talking about. All these black people, men mostly, killed at the hands of law enforcement in the US. “The Counted,” a webpage the UK news source The Guard­ ian opened to track these killings, notes that, for 2015, “the rate of death for young black men was five times higher than white men of the same age.”1 How do we as contemporary Americans account for this pattern of institutionalized violence against blacks? How might Romanticists respond, from our positions of relative security and prestige in the academy, to the thread of state sponsored killing that runs through the fabric of our public lives? It isn’t enough to chant, in chorus with the community directly af­ fected, that “black lives matter.” Those who believe otherwise, please raise your hands. And the killing continues. What are we going to do? What can we do? In From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for more than sympathy or even solidarity with activism that aims to restore or maybe just attribute social value to black lives: “The struggle for Black liberation requires going beyond the standard narrative that Black people have come a long way but have a long way to go—which, of course, says nothing about where it is that we are actually trying to get to. It requires understanding the origins and nature of Black oppression and racism more generally.”2 While I’m aware that I’m not part of the “we” she invokes, Taylor opens a door for people belonging to another I. “The Counted,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-uspolice -killings, accessed 26 November 2016. 2. Taylor, From ttblacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2016), 194. SiR, 56 (Spring 2017) 3 4 PAUL YOUNGQUIST “we,” say “we” mostly white middle-class Romanticists, through which to enter into her project ofBlack liberation. Perhaps we can speak to “the ori­ gins and nature of Black oppression and racism.” Perhaps our dislocation from the direct effects of their deadly force offers an opportunity to exam­ ine their motivations in longstanding histories ofsubjection or transnational structures of thought, feeling, and desire. Perhaps as cultural and literary critics we can examine how black lives have—or haven’t—mattered, or for whom, toward the end of advancing the struggle Taylor exhorts for Black liberation. The stakes are nothing less than the world to come. Black liberation, Taylor writes, needs a “strategy, some sense of how we get from the cur­ rent situation into the future.”3 Here too we Romanticists might have something to offer. Hear, for instance, what’s familiar in Taylor’s summa­ tion of the goal of struggle: “While it is true that when Black people get free, everyone gets free, Black people in America cannot ‘get free’ alone. In that sense, Black liberation is bound up with the project of human liber­ ation and social transformation.”4 5 For Romanticists of a certain vintage, Taylor’s language here sounds, well, romantic. It seems to chime with the revolutionary language of Blake, the early Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and maybe Keats too, not to mention that of the French Republi­ cans. The two centuries that separate Taylor from these social reformers, suggests that, however revolutionary their hopes, the project of human lib­ eration failed to materialize in any future that includes our present. For Taylor the measure of that failure is the little word “black.” Human lib­ eration cannot occur without full black participation. So what about Romanticism remains uncongenial to black freedom? Another way to raise that question would be to ask, with Sylvia Wynter, what sort of “man” inhabits Romanticism? Wynter consistently indicts European modernity and its now global avatar with instituting a descriptive statement of the...