Black Radical Research Articles

Anticarceral Internationalism: Rethinking Human Rights through the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition

AbstractFrom Garveyism to the Black Panthers, from campaigns to free political prisoners to the current fight to #FreeThemAll, imprisoned Black activists and their allies have deployed expanded con...

Intoxicating Blackness: Addiction and Ambivalent Sounds of Fugitive Life in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

Abstract This article examines the intersection of drug-use, aesthetics, and Blackness at work in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). While much of the scholarship on Baldwin’s story has dwelt on the significance of music, far less attention has been paid to the equally prominent and related theme of drug addiction and intoxication. Through an historical contextualization and analysis of the story, I provide an exegesis of Baldwin’s unique theorization of drug addiction, or what I am calling intoxicating Blackness, particularly as it relates to black aesthetics. By surveying formulations of drug addiction in European thought and the counter-discourse of black radical thought, I argue that Baldwin’s short story figures an innovative notion of being on drugs. Unlike subsequent, often disparaging depictions of addiction in the political discourse of the Black Power Movement and other late twentieth-century black popular culture, ‘Sonny’s Blues’ represents addiction as a cite of possibility. Baldwin suggests that an openness to intoxication and addiction, although perilous for the addict, might function as an aesthetic of black fugitivity and that any sort of black life might be thought of as a dangerous, fugitive narcotic. To elaborate on this theory of intoxicating Blackness, I consider it in relation to Western philosophical, legal, and psychoanalytic paradigms of addiction, as well as conceptualizations of Blackness and fugitivity in the work of thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, and Frantz Fanon.

Kate Dossett. Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal focuses on the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39). Dossett argues that Black performance communities consisting of Black theatre artists and the Black public sphere helped shaped the performance and reception of theatre manuscripts in the New Deal era.

‘The White Side of the Fence:’ Charlotta Bass and the Wesley Robert Wells Case, 1947–1954

The study examined the leadership role of Charlotta Bass, the editor/publisher of the California Eagle in Los Angeles during the 1950s. Bass helped lead a massive protest campaign in the legal case for Wesley Robert Wells, an inmate sentenced to death row in 1947. During the Cold War, scholars recognized that Black women challenged patriarchal leadership by creating their own paths toward Black radicalism. Bass’ leadership is significant because it adds to pre-Civil Rights Movement activism and protests literature. Her newspaper supported Wells’ campaign targeted at bringing awareness of racism within the prison system. Bass also served as the chairman of the Wesley Wells Legal Defense committee, where she produced a newsletter. Bass played a vital role in the case on several fronts as she brought attention to racism within criminal justice practices, prison violence and capital punishment.

Negotiating antifascist solidarity across ethnic difference in Myanmar: Bhamo Tin Aung’s Yoma Taikbwe

ABSTRACT The 1989 collapse of the Communist Party of Burma through rank-and-file mutiny, and its splintering into manifold ethnic armed organizations, presaged a weakening of prospects for any leftist project across ethnic lines in Myanmar. These developments coincided with the flourishing of so-called new wars, in Myanmar and elsewhere, organized around identity politics rather than ideology. For liberal critics, such developments confirmed a belief that leftist projects could only ever be an authoritarian imposition over ascriptive ethnic difference. Considering such critiques, this article presents an alternative approach to leftist politics in Myanmar, as advanced by author and journalist Bhamo Tin Aung in his 1963 novel, Yoma Taikbwe, which narrates the emergence of antifascist struggle under wartime Japanese occupation. The book articulates a leftist politics that attends to ethnic difference as an experience grounded in uneven political economy, thus paralleling arguments from the Black radical tradition. In this way, Bhamo Tin Aung pointed to a leftist politics realized through negotiation across difference. It is a politics that remains as pertinent as ever, given worsening class inequality and enduring ethnic chauvinism, in Myanmar and elsewhere, and given the importance of cross-ethnic solidarity in the struggle against military rule following Myanmar’s February 2021 coup.

The World in Question

Abstract This essay focuses on two radical gay/homosexual organizations of the early 1970s: Third World Gay Revolution (TWGR)—a small group of radical Black and Latinx activists that spun off from the Gay Liberation Front in 1970—and the Argentine organization Homosexual Liberation Front (FLH), which was active between 1971 and 1976. By analyzing periodicals, bulletins, and other ephemera produced by them, Garrido demonstrates how both groups not only articulated demands related to queer sexualities in relation to those of other oppressed communities but also inscribed their gay struggles in a movement for the liberation of all peoples on a planetary scale within the framework provided by third world anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles being waged in African, Asian, and Latin American countries at the time. TWGR and the FLH engaged in “dissident forms of cosmopolitanism” (Chela Sandoval) that drew, in part, from the imaginary of a world in dispute—a world in which colonial and (neo)colonial/imperialist powers were being challenged and third worldism as a global emancipatory project led by “the darker nations” (Vijay Prashad) was gaining ground. At the dawn of neoliberal globalization, both organizations advanced a radical political agenda based on values of social justice with a spirit of transnational solidarity that, Garrido argues, may inspire the multidimensional nature of a queer cosmopolitics to come.

What is not real can be felt into being: affective threat in Jordan Peele’s Get Out

ABSTRACT Jordan Peele’s (2017) Get Out presents a political critique of American post-racial discourse. Using Brian Massumi’s concept of affective fact, I articulate how the film navigates a post-race perception of racially motivated threat as solely affective and immaterial in relation to the actual enactment of violence onto the racialized body in contemporary America. I locate this film in the theoretical lineage of contemporary Black radical thought, with particular emphasis on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of fungibility and Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s concept of fugitivity. By analyzing scenes that inaugurate the film’s study of threat, surveillance, and state-mandated control, I argue that Get Out reveals how apparatuses of racial violence intertwine with what Harney and Moten call state-thought. I conclude that Get Out should be read as a commentary on Black cinema and Black aesthetics, particularly how Black aesthetics forms itself against, within, and around neoliberal political discourse.

Homenagem: Remembering the Life and Work of Abdias Nascimento

This essay provides a brief introduction to this special issue focused on the life and work of Black Brazilian scholar-activist Abdias Nascimento. The contributors include, Vera Lucia Benedito, Ollie Johnson, Zachary Morgan, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, and Cheryl Sterling who all participated in a 2015 conference at Africana Studies at Brown University. This group of scholars aptly illustrate that Nascimento had long contributed to the internationalization of Black Studies as a field in US academe and he was crucial in establishing Brazil as a central component of the Black World. The essays have much to teach us about Nascimento’s views on the relationship between art and politics, the role of military service in shaping his activism, the significance of black politicians in the reconceptualization of Brazilian democracy, and the importance of preserving archives and expanding our understanding of the Black radical tradition.

“When I Couldn’t Bedazzle Them With Brilliance, I Bamboozled Them With Bullshit”: Harry Edwards, Black Power, and Countering Media Repression of the Black Athlete’s Revolt

Harry Edwards led the organization of a Black Power campaign to organize a boycott of the 1968 Olympics. Contrary to the prevailing conclusion that the boycott failed to materialize because it was unpopular, Edwards’ efforts challenged the state-enforced Cold War-consensus that racial discrimination was declining in American society. Consequently, the state, including the mainstream media, moved swiftly to repress the boycott by demonizing him as a “black militant” and accessing the effort as misguided. Edwards, like several Black radicals, responded by adopting a militant façade that attracted media attention that allowed him to counter oppositional pronouncements and keep the boycott newsworthy for a year. Edwards’ use of the media, however, continues to complicate understandings of the boycott and Black Power. Uncritical mainstream media-based assessments suggest both failed because they were unpopular. By contrast, activist-focused studies conclude that activists succeeded by expanding discussions on racial discrimination in the national discourse.

“No Trifling Matter”: A Kitchen-Table Talk on Abolition and Fugitivity

ABSTRACT Operating within the Black radical tradition, through this kitchen-table talk, we seek to edify and sustain abolitionist ontologies. We begin with poetic and musical offerings that highlight our personal connections to abolition, before exploring the complexities and necessities of relationship building as foundational for this work. We encounter the incommensurability of doing abolitionist work within institutions and systems that have attempted, yet ultimately failed, to extinguish the light of our survival. We explore the deeply creative work of fugitivity and marronage, while re-membering the irresistible mundanity of freedom. With this autotheoretical conversation, we situate our onto-epistemological orientations within an abolitionist politic of wellness and care.

The future of critical theory: on the courage and limitations of Bernard Harcourt’s Critique & Praxis

ABSTRACT This review essay examines prominent definitions of Critical Theory today. Many of these definitions frame Critical Theory as a broad project that distinguishes itself from other theories by working across disciplines in order to contribute to emancipatory movements. Defined thus, Critical Theory serves as an umbrella term under which would sit, for instance, feminist, decolonial and intersectional theories. But when elaborating on their definitions of Critical Theory in public statements, several prominent institutional sites and recent books chart a lineage from Immanuel Kant to the Frankfurt School and beyond, highlighting recent debates with French poststructuralism. When the story of Critical Theory is told in this way, Critical Theory runs into the problems Bernard Harcourt effectively outlines in Critique & Praxis, such as retreating from political practice into epistemological questions, withdrawing from activism into academic enclaves and being co-opted by liberal politics. My argument is that certain figures advancing Black radical thought and cultural critiques—I focus on Joy James and Stuart Hall—give Critical Theory the theoretical and practical resources to side-step the problems of retreating into epistemology, the academy or liberalism. Re-oriented in this way, Critical Theory could more effectively diagnose and respond to the struggles of our time.

Blackness and food resilience: black culinary epistemologies, the slow food movement and racial justice

ABSTRACT In this paper, I develop a concept that I call black culinary epistemologies. I argue that the cookbooks of Bryant Terry, African American chef and food justice activist, are an archive for black culinary epistemologies. I define black culinary epistemologies as the culinary knowledge produced by black cooks, chefs, and food preparers that build upon the black radical tradition, reframe black foods and black consumption, and participate in life-making practices in death-producing spaces. Terry builds upon this archive through his cookbooks and food activism. Black culinary epistemologies have numerous impacts: First, they demonstrate that black cooks, chefs and food preparers engage food as a critique of racism and inequities. Secondly, black culinary epistemologies highlight the ways in which black communities participate in alternative food practices. This contests the notion that “slow foods” is an idea of European origin and that black bodies only consume unhealthy foods. Finally, black culinary epistemologies demonstrate how food is a site through which black communities have produced vitality and empowerment. Through a cultural studies analysis, I argue that Terry’s four cookbooks and food activism are sites that recuperate black culinary epistemologies. This paper brings together literature in cultural studies, food studies, and critical race studies.

World Histories of Big Data Policing

Textbook presentations of U.S. policing name the present as new stage of professionalization: the homeland security era, where the application of “big data” promises “smarter” policing. Within this framework of gradual progress, liberal police scholarship has become the official criticism of big data policing to organize a project of liberal reform. Of course, this scholarship is being in written in the context of both militant social movements within the United States and the terminal decline of U.S. global hegemony. To clarify the stakes of this moment, this paper connects the Marxist anti-security perspective and anti-racist critiques of surveillance and big data policing from within the Black radical tradition. It argues that the emergence of big data policing is the latest development in on-going processes of pacification that have expanded, organized, and reproduced the colonial/modern world-system over the longue durée. The paper extends and elaborates conceptualizations of hegemonic cycles in relation to work on the maturation of intelligence tradecraft, focusing on two interrelated developments: (1) two information revolutions that reorganized social relations and (2) the police-wars that shaped the rise and decline of the United States as a world hegemonic power. It concludes that big data policing is the latest outgrowth of the imperial epistemology that organized and continues animate the work of pacification and obscure the politics of anti-systemic struggle.

War-on-Crime Fiction

AbstractThis essay tells the story of how the War on Crime helped remake American crime fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. Amid starkly racialized public anxieties about rising crime rates and urban uprisings, Lyndon B. Johnson officially launched the War on Crime in 1965. The cultural logic of Johnson's crime war infiltrated various kinds of crime writing in the ensuing decade. Tracking the crime war's influence on the police procedurals of Joseph Wambaugh; the Black radical novels of Sam Greenlee, John A. Williams, and John Edgar Wideman; and the vigilante fiction of Donald Goines and Brian Garfield, I argue that crime fiction in the War-on-Crime era emerged as a key cultural site for managing divergent political responses to a regime of social control that worked by criminalizing both race and revolt. By studying how novelists responded to the formative years of the War on Crime, we can begin to understand the complex role that literature played in alternately contesting and abetting the postwar transformation of the United States into a carceral state.

Kerri K. Greenidge. Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter.

Kerri K. Greenidge has written a magnificent biography of William Monroe Trotter, the legendary Boston newspaper editor. Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter is also a history of grassroots black politics from the 1880s through the 1920s. African Americans confronted stifling oppression in cities such as Boston, but they also fought back with their voices and their votes. William Monroe Trotter “used the Guardian to vent the blind outrage that black people felt, but rarely expressed.” He “galvanized black working people to recognize and embrace their political power” (xii). Trotter was tireless and uncompromising. He insisted that the federal government enforce the Reconstruction amendments and pass anti-lynching legislation. By the time of his death in 1934, those demands were accepted as mainstream among civil rights activists. Greenidge distinguishes Trotter’s politics not just from the conservatism of Booker T. Washington, but also from the NAACP, which was...

Editors’ Introduction: “You Can Still Fight”: The Black Radical Tradition, Healing, and Literacies

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Catch Me When I Fall! Resiliency, Freedom and Black Sisterhood in the Academy

Many Black women academics feel caged in their ‘subject position[s]’ within the academy. They are challenged by lack of opportunities and mentorship, isolation, explicit racism, micro-aggressions and stereotyping. Despite the ways in which their bodies are marked by racist sexism, Black women faculty take on an inordinate amount of unrecognized, differentiated labour and service work in the academy. They tend to assist other racialized colleagues, graduate and undergraduate students to achieve academic success. There is a common thread of resiliency among these women who successfully navigate their paths in the academy through applications of the concept of Radical Black Academic Sisterhood. This is an interpretive praxis that utilizes both an oppositional stance and creates brave spaces to deal with experiences of being caged.

Unfit for Subjection: Mental Illness, Mental Health, and the University Undercommons

This colloquy, by graduate-student-led collective Project Spectrum, attempts to map out existing discussions around inclusion and equity in music academia, with a specific focus on identifying and analyzing the structures in academia that work against minoritized and historically excluded scholars. &#x0D; Sarah Hankins shares thoughts on mental illness, arguing that it is a gap in our discourse. Hankins asks us to bear witness to experiences of those who boldly declare that they are “unfit” for the pipeline—“unfit” to survive the pipeline, to have access to the pipeline, and for the so-called promises at the end of the pipeline. Following the work of Black studies, queer of color critique, Black radicalism, Afropessimism, and especially the writings of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Hankins’s intervention in this colloquy demands pause in academia’s system of perpetual motion.

Henrietta Crawford: Radical Black Evangelist in Post-Civil War New Jersey

Representing Black feminisms of the so-called, “First Wave era of American feminism,” forgotten icon Henrietta Crawford impacted Black political representation in southern New Jersey during the post-Civil War decades. As a noted evangelist, universal suffragist, Black community organizer, Civil Rights activist, homemaker, and intergenerational caregiver for minor dependents, Crawford crafted an intersectional legacy worthy of commemorative re-remembrance. Collectively, scattered bits and pieces of information recorded over the past eighty years in newspapers and in recent scholarly accounts offer an incoherent combination of disparate hints at Henrietta’s historical significance. Buttressed, however, by historical insight, contemporary newspaper accounts, Civil War pension file records, real estate deed transactions, federal and state census records, vital statistics data, the evidentiary record sheds light on Crawford’s important role in the operation of historically significant Mt. Pisgah [U.A.M.E.] Church in Vineland and her associated development and implementation of important social justice initiatives. In 1948, a fifty-year commemorative notation about James and Henrietta Crawford’s 1898 departure from Vineland was published in the Daily Journal newspaper. Twenty-five years later “New Jersey Mother of the Year Award” recipient Rebecca Lassiter noted the Crawfords' important role in her life as foster parents. In year seventy-three since the Daily Journal’s acknowledgement, this essay conveys Henrietta Crawford’s legacy to students, scholars, and the general readership for current and future generations. As the present confluence of national political and economic crises resolves within an encapsulating global pandemic that is exacerbating socio-economic inequalities, Crawford’s life and record offers a critical example of faith-based social-justice activism and the seamless role of African American women in American history.

From Morning to Mourning: A Meditation on Possibility in Black Education

ABSTRACT This article insists on a reframe of mourning, away from a period of sadness or weeping alone, to a vision of its merits for discovering and unlocking possibility in Black Education. For example, mourning might be understood as involuntarily surrendered time necessary to properly grieve, concede, and embrace Black people’s subject position in the US sociopolitical context. Turning towards mourning, the dark moments that urge it and the dark(er) moments that it may produce, is argued as a launch pad to more fully understanding the depth and reach of Black people’s possibility. To make such an argument the author contemplates how mourning, and subsequent meditations on possibility, might have informed the activism of leaders in the Black radical tradition who urgently insisted that Black people’s human dignity be recognized and properly acknowledged. The article concludes with discussion of the significance of possibility to advance equity and excellence in education.