Black Radical Research Articles

June Jordan’s Political Theory of Redesign

This essay examines June Jordan’s design writings to elaborate a political theory of redesign in her work. I show that Jordan’s redesign offers political principles for reimagining space at multiple scales and speaks to the question of how more livable, beautiful worlds may be wrought from the material contexts in which we presently live. Against the grain of the dismantling of public goods in the late twentieth century, Jordan re-envisioned public city spaces and housing with dignity and room for human flourishing. Her primary barometer for design was the fullest expression of human aliveness—she insisted that the built environment should “[cherish] as it amplifies the experience of being alive.” Jordan’s visionary pragmatism anticipates what Deva Woodly calls the “radical Black feminist pragmatism” of the twenty-first century’s Movement for Black Lives and speaks to contemporary abolitionist thought and struggles over the future of public goods.

Horizons of liberation: materialism, ecology, and the colonial question

The question of materialism – what it is, how it is studied and practised, and who takes it seriously enough – has long animated debates among Marxists and scholars of race and the colonial question. Today, our contemporary socioecological crises challenge established understandings of materialism and merit a return to these debates with the goal of collective liberation on a warming planet in mind. Taking up this task, this article builds an understanding of materialism as theory and practice working towards liberation – a theory and practice shaped variously by culture, ontology, and the experience of oppressive structural conditions. The contributions of scholarship focused on race and colonial projects and legacies particularly illuminate these multiple dimensions of materialism. Among a wealth of other insights, anticolonial Third Worldist thinkers left us with an astute diagnosis of value in the world system; Black radical scholars have revealed the ontological roots of material struggles; decolonial scholars have exposed the solidification of racial classification systems as structures; and Indigenous (Fourth World) ontologies continue to maintain a commitment to metabolic repair and reciprocity. While contemporary ecology-focused conceptual innovations – such as metabolic rift and material throughput – expand materialist analyses, approaches focused on race and the colonial question bring particular insight to the global structural elements of socioecological crises and generate a materialism oriented towards horizons of liberation for all.

Adapting (to) Jane Eyre: Racial Violence, Intergenerational Trauma, and Black Optimism in Lauren Blackwood’s Within These Wicked Walls

This article draws on Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe’s writings on ‘optimism,’ ‘wake work,’ and ‘fugitivity’ to present a reading of Lauren Blackwood’s 2021 rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as a metafiction of Black literary adaptation as survival. In rejecting the overdetermined stereotype of the mad subaltern woman as the localised focus of the novel’s commentary on racial violence, Within These Wicked Walls departs from twentieth-century, postcolonial responses to Jane Eyre exemplified by Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Wide Sargasso Sea to offer an explicitly Black and anti-racist rewriting of the Victorian novel. I show how Blackwood draws on the diasporic discourse of “Ethiopianism” and American genres of multiethnic and Black Gothic storytelling to explore the trauma of racialised violence (including its imperialist literature) as a cultural and intergenerational curse that must be faced, exorcised, and grieved by a younger generation. This analysis highlights the contributions Blackwood’s novel makes to the Black radical tradition, underscores the need for more Critical Race Theory in the study of Victorian literature, and reminds scholars of the vital role literary adaptation once played – and should still play – in criticism of race and imperialism in Victorian literature.

Rebellion contagion: Embodying black radical love in the westernised academy

AbstractMacro‐politics inform micro‐practices. As such, no institution and role‐player within can be thought outside of this framework. As such, the personal begets the political as the political begets the personal. Against the extractive posture of the university that imagines every‐body and every‐thing through colonial apparatus that are also individualising, with this work, I immerse myself in the communities that raised me, whose values I embody as I walk the university. I posit my travails and ruminations in the university as Black Radical Love. I argue, in a manner of speaking, that one cannot display cares against grand injustices while turning a blind eye to small ones. In this way, I make a distinction (following others) between “be‐ing in the university” and being of the university” to highlight the hidden curriculum of the university and how unscripted Black Radical Love always rises to unveil and engage with the violences embedded in the corporate, westernized university. I show glimpses of decolonial, Afrocentric futures that are intricately woven with and into Black Radical Love. They account for the robustness of my scholarship and general movement in the academy.

Black Radical Aesthetics of Violence and the Resistance of Being in Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha

Black Radical Aesthetics of Violence and the Resistance of Being in Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha

Demystifying trauma in international relations theory: From incomprehensibility to the liberatory real

Recent work on trauma and memory in international relations has sought to emphasize the key role trauma plays in state and community formation, security policies, the mediatization of atrocities, and transitional and social justice. This article problematizes the doxology of trauma in this body of work: the assumptions about the traumatic that go without saying because they come without saying in the discipline. We counter, in particular, international relations’ unreflective consumption of Cathy Caruth’s paradigm of trauma as an incomprehensible shock. In this article, we excavate the contours, origins, and effects of this doxology. We first use the examples of post-conflict struggles for truth and reconciliation and the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate that international relations’ vision of trauma centralizes a psychiatric and medicalized paradigm of governance and management that depoliticizes suffering. We then seek to provide an alternative account of trauma woven in dialogue with the psychoanalytical reflections of Francophone and Lusophone scholars in the Black Radical Tradition, particularly Fanon, Mbembe, Kilomba, Nascimento and Gonzalez. The goal is to move from a theory of trauma-as-event to an understanding of (colonial/racial) trauma as it appears in the writings of those who never felt protected or at peace in the white colonial order.

Racial Capitalism, Cedric Robinson, and a Method for Architectural History

Elaborating on the techniques that the Black Studies scholar Cedric Robinson uses to write the histories of racial capitalism, this essay outlines a way to approach longue durée architectural histories. Robinson analyses racial capitalism in Black Marxism (1983) through the practices of what he calls the Black radical tradition, and these techniques provide a way to conceptualise a history of architecture in the modern Atlantic World that focuses on denaturalising the racial regimes that have shaped it. Using a series of examples—a lecture by a carpenter-architect in upstate New York, Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello, an advertisement for marble-quarrying labour in Tennessee, and the commodity chains of lumber—this essay outlines the questions and methods that Robinson’s approach, which he describes both as a “counterfeiting” of received discourse and as a non-dialectical negation of that discourse, suggests for architectural histories that attends to vast geographies and timescales.

Palestine and the Dialectic of Racial Capitalism

This article situates racial capitalism as a historical-theoretical framework to generate new and alternative theory on the question of Palestine. It argues that the genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as the clearest expression of the logic of racial capitalism and the terrain upon which we must generate theory and strategy able to dismantle Zionism, colonialism and Imperialism. Many of the critiques of Zionism deploy frameworks of apartheid, understood by radicals in South Africa as a social structure reproduced by racial capitalism. It was understood that such a system could only be effectively dismantled through a national liberation project which understood race, class, capital and Imperialism as a single contradiction which must be overthrown as a totality. Similarly, earlier theorists within the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, such as Fayez Sayegh, understood Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of Western Imperialism. By tracing the emergence of racial capitalism within the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the similarities between the white minority regime and Zionism, this article acts as a point of departure to drawing together histories of the Black radical tradition and the Palestinian struggle in crafting radical theory relevant for our present moment.

Mending the Red-Black Thread: Marxism, the Black Radical Tradition, and the Robinson Thesis

Cedric Robinson's increasingly popular and influential work Black Marxism is best understood as a project of post-Marxist critique. Robinson's book, now regarded as a classic, asks a series of important questions of Marxism, but each of its major arguments marks a fundamental departure from the theoretical perspectives of both European and Black Marxists. The book exists in a historical moment of crisis for the left and intellectual retreat from Marxism; Robinson's relationship with Marxism and his place in the political tradition to which he gave a name, the Black Radical Tradition, suggests three main arguments. First, Robinson's critiques of the classical Marxist tradition — focused on its apparent economism and Eurocentrism — are based on a flattening of this tradition and a marked break from Marxist methodology. Second, Robinson's critique does not neatly align with the perspectives of the radical Black intellectuals whom he discusses, and indeed his conclusions are frequently in conflict with them. Third, the emancipatory project of Black Studies and the research programs convened under Robinson's influence will be best served by cautious and critical engagements with Robinson's seminal work. The generative questions that Robinson asks will be better answered through a materialist account of Black history, a syncretic understanding of Black culture, and a nonreductive, revolutionary Marxism providing the guide for political action.

Escaping the Zionist Circle: Notes on Racial Capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition

From the 1947–8 Nakba to the 2023–4 Gaza genocide, the history of Palestine appears to be stuck in a vicious circle of violence from which escape seems increasingly elusive. This leads one to ask, can one ever escape the Zionist circle? The work of Cedric Robinson provides a potential path forward. Since his death in 2016, Robinson’s name has become synonymous with the study of racial capitalism. But while racial capitalism was the background of his work, his chief concern was the Black Radical Tradition. Unlike racial capitalism, this concept has remained under-theorised, but without thoroughly accounting for it, our understanding of racial capitalism remains incomplete at best, misguided at worst. In this article, I turn our attention to the Black Radical Tradition and attempt to define it. As Robinson argued, the Black Radical Tradition is not simply derivative of racial capitalism; it actually precedes it and subverts it. Returning to Palestine, I show how Robinson’s notion of the Black Radical Tradition can contribute to our understanding of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and I suggest that at least in some sense, the Palestinians have actually been escaping the Zionist circle all along.

“The War at Home”: Winning the Hearts and Minds of the Black Community; Race and Policing in New York City, 1970 to 1973

This article argues that in 1971 a war between the radical Black Liberation Army and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) erupted, and within this war, the NYPD tried to influence Black politics in the city’s Black community. However, the Black community in New York City was not monolithic politically. This community was diverse in its political makeup, and there was a political ambivalence by Black people about policing in their communities. It further demonstrates that the law-and-order turn was not fully embedded in white liberals’ virtuous attempts to pacify Black radicals or that the rise of law and order was not solely a product of federal projects such as the War on Poverty. Instead, this article argues that political debates within New York City’s Black community and efforts by the NYPD to influence Black politics largely drove the city toward greater law and order policing.

Abolition Dreams from a Resurgent Pu'uhonua

Abstract: This essay weaves an 'upena of critical discourse to contribute to a Kanaka Maoli abolitionist theory and praxis. Following the lead of Kumu Haunani-Kay Trask, I explore the intersection of the Black Radical Tradition and Critical Hawaiian Studies at the nexus of carcerality and multiple forms of Native and Black Dispossessions. Specifically, this essay builds upon Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals and George Terry Kanalu Young's Rethinking the Native Hawaiian Past to imagine and create freedom places beyond incommensurability. With a study of Pu'uhonua (places of refuge) I investigate the pilina (intimacies) between Indigenous resurgence and Black struggles for liberation and abolition. I argue that the comprehensive abolition of carceral systems and the ongoing resurgence of Pu'uhonua are cooperative projects that can be imagined and built upon the shoal and the Papa (reef/foundation) to create new futures for Black and Indigenous comrades in pursuit of collective liberation.

Forgetting: Loss, Invention, and Unbearable Life

Abstract: Recent works in and around Black feminist and queer studies have explored the figure of unbearable life through different forms of forgetting. A forgetting attends every act of conceptual or cultural invention, but forgetting also marks a range of cognitive deteriorations in and around experiences of disability, death, and dying. Working between the discourses of afro-fabulation, afropessimism, and Black feminism, the article details the ways every act of invention is also a form of forgetting, and every instance of loss is also a form of creativity. Afro-fabulation, as one name for a Black queer mode of invention, is at once a mode of creating bearable forms of life from abjection, and a form of forgetting. In their shared attention to cognitive deterioration and death as forms of loss, Black feminism and afropessimism open space for reckoning with the impermanence and indeterminacy central to the Black radical tradition.

The Black Consciousness Movement in Azania (South Africa): A triple heritage

Starting with the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall campaign, there has been renewed interest in the philosophy of black consciousness through popular expressions – on social media and mainstream media articles – and by scholars. This article seeks to revisit the origins of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in Azania (South Africa). Through an examination of primary sources, that is, documents written by the activist writers of the movement and secondary sources by scholars who reflect on the movement and other expressions of black resistance against colonialism and the oppression of black people globally, this article relies mainly on literature review of documents that are in the public domain. The overall findings of the review show that the BCM drew inspiration from and was shaped by the ‘black radical tradition’ influences from North America (specifically the United States), the Caribbean and South American region, and from the African continent, including locally in South Africa. While shaped by these influences the BCM adapted them and responded to the peculiarities of the condition of black people in South Africa and thus formulated a unique brand of black consciousness. The conclusion reached herein is that movements and the ideas that they espouse, are often confluences of views and practices drawn from different sources.Transdisciplinary Contribution: This article contributes to the understanding of the evolution of political movements from a variety of disciplines – political studies, history, sociology of ideas, history of consciousness and political philosophy.

Infraconstitutive rhetoric: insurgent abolition and the Black radical imagination

ABSTRACT I argue for an infraconstitutive rhetoric as a practice for attending to Black rhetorical formations. I first unfold four key dimensions of infraconstitutive criticism: the infraontological, immanent, praxis, and chronotopian vectors of criticism. I then explicate the contours of an infraconstitutive imagination by reading the George Floyd rebellion as both a planetary and singular irruption of insurgent abolition.

Response to Robert Bernasconi's “Slavery's absence from histories of moral and political philosophy”

AbstractI focus in this response on what I take to be Bernasconi's proposal to dissolve and reframe moral and political philosophies around the problematic of slavery. Insofar as, in the wake of Afro‐diasporic and Black radical thought, it offers us one version of an argument that has now touched virtually all aspects of modern European philosophy, how are we to understand the specific orientations of Bernasconi's approach? Reading Bernasconi's article, I comment on the following points: (1) the notion of “absence” or “silence” about slavery, (2) Bernasconi's focus on methodology rather than individual moral or political responsibility, and (3) his shift away from canonical philosophical figures. To conclude, I open further questions regarding the relationships between the “material” approach to the history of philosophy he advocates in this article and the project of a “critical philosophy of race” he has defended elsewhere.

Black Marxism, Racial Capitalism, and Greek and Balkan Coloniality Studies: Toward an Abolitionist Perspective

The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of the Balkan and Greek postcolonial and de-colonial studies. The Yugoslav ethnic wars, the Greek “financial crisis,” and the European migration crisis generated a body of critical studies on regional nationalism, coloniality, and racialism and the Balkans and Greece's ambiguous relation to Europe. Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition was missing from the large spectrum of postcolonial literature. This absence is surprising given that the book historicizes the simultaneous occurrence of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and modernity in the Balkan and the East Mediterranean during the late feudalism. The absence of this history from the Balkan's post and de-colonial studies deprives these studies of an abolitionist perspective; rather than opting for “provincializing Europe” empowered by this history of the native enslavements and colonization, these studies, much as Black radicalism should mobilize the region for the political culture for the abolition of “Europe.”

‘Liv Good’: dreaming the intersectionally just good life

Black radical traditions include an orientation towards dreaming of better futures. In this article, I enter a dialogical space for us to explore the relationship between our desire to live a good life and our conceptions of what doing so might entail. Speaking from the perspective of an African-Caribbean person in Britain, I begin by considering the need for us to dream what it means to ‘Liv Good’—where Liv Good is an intersectionally just version of the good life. I discuss Britain’s credo and the liberal philosophical context it emerges out of that makes distinctions between the right and the good, which I claim undermine our entitlement to dream of a good life and give rise to a tendency to consider the good life as secondary to our efforts to achieve political justice. My aim is to highlight the importance of holding in tandem questions about what it means for us to live a good life with questions of justice. By conceptualising and demonstrating Liv Good methodological praxis, I explore the ways in which we can dream Liv Good into reality, by drawing on our own intellectual traditions and honouring our own dream imperatives. I conclude by offering readers an invitation to join me in dreaming Liv Good, engaging its unified ethical framework as a basis from which we can imagine an intersectionally just version of the good life.

Radical Black behaviorism to address racial microaggressions among African American clients: The case of Aniyah

AbstractThis article describes radical Black behaviorism and how it may be utilized during counseling to address the effects of racial microaggressions among African American clients. A case illustration is provided, and implications for broader societal change are discussed.

Prison Rebellions, Black Radical Consciousness, and Counterinsurgency

Prison Rebellions, Black Radical Consciousness, and Counterinsurgency