Revolutionary Suicide Research Articles

White Lens of Crime Media

True crime’s popularity has never been higher. However, true crime media largely ignores offenses by authority figures, and creators use their outreach to monetize viewership with cold cases rather than making critiques of the societal structures in the United States. Most true crime media is also favored towards “missing white woman syndrome” and ignores the plights of marginalized communities, including Black and Native Americans. This bias makes it harder for the stories of minority groups to be heard and can be damaging to their communities in the long run. Following this, my argument will use Huey P Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide as a historical representation and firsthand accounting of the ways in which the judicial system is inherently biased towards minority groups, and how their representation in the media makes them more likely to be targeted by police, as well as a contemporary comparison and analysis of these issues. The media around Newton’s case, although he was later acquitted of all charges, painted Newton as a deviant simply because he was in a Black organization. Applying the lens of Critical Race Theory, as explained by Bryan Warde and Edward Taylor, to these events, we can begin to see the racist groundwork on which many of our institutions of law are built upon and how media’s favor of sensationalism over accurate representation is hurtful to already vulnerable members of the American public.

Stop drinking the waipiro! A critique of the government's ‘why’ behind Te Mana o te Wai

Stop drinking the waipiro! A critique of the government's ‘why’ behind Te Mana o te Wai

The Socratic Black Panther: Reading Huey P. Newton Reading Plato

This essay examines the role of Platonic literature and philosophy in part 2 of Newton’s (1973) Revolutionary Suicide (RS) and argues that Plato’s Republic, as the seminal text in Newton’s early adult life, intertextually directs the course of events, both the ways Newton describes the plight of Black America and how Newton engages other literary texts, poetry in particular. Over the course of part 2 of RS, Newton increasingly adopts the guise of a modern day Socrates, confounding his white opponents and revealing the truth about racial oppression. Studying prose texts, especially philosophy, becomes (inter)textually symbolic for racial enlightenment, on the one hand, and for the responsibility Newton sees of himself to share that enlightenment with those still chained in the dark recesses of the cave, on the other.

Toward a Theorization of Black Maternal Grief as Analytic

AbstractThis essay explores the interanimations between grievance and archetypes of Black motherhood that produce popular representations of Black maternal resilience, the most circulated being that of the “strong Black mother” and, what I term, icons of Black maternal mourning. I argue that these images circumscribe which maternal responses to trauma are legible and acceptable within public spheres, and enforce how Black mothers should “productively” cope with loss that is predicated on their continued presence and/or attempts for judicial redress. Thus I forward Black maternal grief as an analytic, which is animated by silence, unintelligible responses, and vulnerability. Formulated on the death of my paternal grandmother, I bring together Huey Newton's articulation of “revolutionary suicide,” concepts of public cultures, and resistive performances of Black women entertainers to work toward an analytical practice that conceptualizes grief as a location and tactic Black mothers have deployed. This essay's primary aim is to widen our lens to the myriad ways Black mothers deal with traumatic loss, and to understand the salience of grief in formations of Black women.

Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States by Adrienne Carey Hurley

Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States by Adrienne Carey Hurley

Admixture of socio-personal history in the biographies of The Black Panthers

The paper is an endeavour to study the revolution brought about by the Black Panther Party through a detailed study of the two autobiographies: ‘Revolutionary Suicide’ by Huey P. Newton and ‘Seize the Time’ by Bobby Seale. Formed in 1966, in the United States of America, The Black Panther Party for self-defence was a revolutionary organisation that served the community. The Black Panther Party was not only political, but a counter cultural movement which brought about a revolution in art and literature as well. It was an iconic counter cultural movement which became the seat of revolutionary ideas. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale were the founders of the party. The Panthers were such an organization that inspired many following generations to rise in struggle against the oppressive system. They achieved this by systematic resistance through the tools of literature, rewriting history, development of political aesthetics, but above all, a personal commitment to the organization of African-Americans. The autobiographies of the two leaders of the party, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale can provide vital insights into the revolution which strived to bring about a change in the status of African-Americans. Key words: The Black Panther Party, autobiographies, counter culture, literature as a tool for revolution, African-American Revolution.

Revolutionary Suicide

Revolutionary Suicide

Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States (review)

Reviewed by: Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States Eiko Maruko Siniawer (bio) Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States. By Adrienne Carey Hurley. Duke University Press, Durham, 2011. xii, 272 pages. $89.95, cloth; $24.95, paper. With deep empathy for the experiences of children and youth, Adrienne Carey Hurley examines representations of child abuse and youth violence in the United States and Japan from a place of profound moral and political conviction. Her perspective is one of an intellectual whose commitment to children and youth has extended beyond the halls of academia as a court appointed special advocate for abused youth in California and a founder and director of the University of Iowa Youth Empowerment Academy. She brings this considerable and varied experience to bear on Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures, in which she unequivocally rejects the idea that child abuse and youth violence are “inexplicable” (p. 32). She argues instead that adults are not only “complicit in the conditions that engender violence” but also are responsible for the betrayal of youth and [End Page 185] thus for the (often violent) “desperate measures” to which they may resort. So egregious has been adult abandonment of children and youth, suggests Hurley, that reparations must be paid as one facet of “do[ing] better by your youth” (pp. 216–17). The first of two main parts of the book explores how the act of storytelling can help victims survive child sexual assault and develop an identity as an adult survivor by tapping into and expressing Orpha—“the ‘organizing life instincts’ that propel the victim toward self-preservation” (pp. 34–35). Originally named by Elizabeth Severn, a patient of psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, Orpha is of central theoretical importance to Hurley, who illustrates how it can function by analyzing the storytelling strategies of the main characters in two novels: Shizuko in Uchida Shungiku’s Fazā fakkā (Father fucker) and Bone in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, both published in 1993. The second part of the book moves from the topic of child abuse to violence committed by youth, the somewhat awkward transition explained as one “between a moment of violation and the aftermath of a violent response to that violation” (p. 109). Hurley seems to imply here that youth violence might be understood and considered sympathetically as a response to child abuse. She then contextualizes youth violence further by suggesting that it is mediated by stifling hierarchical relationships of power (parent and child, state and citizen, emperor and subject). By analyzing fiction, poetry, and media portrayals of youth violence as well as the voices of youth themselves, she illustrates how figures like the violent teenager and young anarchist are constructed as societal dangers to be feared. And Hoshino Tomoyuki’s novel Ronrii hātsu kirā (Lonely hearts killer) is read closely to demonstrate how representational violence can push back against such hierarchies and fears. The book’s overarching claim that adults disappoint children and youth is generally convincing but diffuse, largely because of a methodology that merits greater and more explicit discussion of its assumptions and implications. In this analysis of cultural discourse, there are no distinctions made between mediums of representation (literary, journalistic, filmic) or between fictional and nonfictional representations. Fictional characters are treated as psychological case studies; literary analysis is interwoven with descriptions of places or events not necessarily mentioned in the work itself; and the shifts from discussions of newspapers to novels to films are seamless. These decisions were surely intentional and most likely informed by potentially thought-provoking ideas about the definition of truth, the meanings of fiction, and the nature of discourse. But without elaboration on what informs and underpins this methodology, the reader is left to speculate about its logic and the door is opened to doubt about whether written and visual texts with different aims, methods of production and dissemination, readership/ [End Page 186] viewership, modes of communication, and reception should be treated as indistinguishable. Such elaboration would have been particularly helpful on the question of how the author views the...

Race, gender and class in the autobiography of Huey P. Newton

No abstract available.

Thomas Pynchon and the Black Panther Party: Revolutionary Suicide in Gravity's Rainbow

This article pertains to the recent upsurge of interest in the politics of Thomas Pynchon. It considers Pynchon as an author very much of the 1960s counterculture, and explores the countercultural values and ideals expressed in Gravity's Rainbow, with particular emphasis on revealing the novel's attitude to the Black Panther Party. Close textual analysis suggests Pynchon's essential respect for Huey P. Newton's concept of revolutionary suicide, and his contempt for Marxist dialectical materialism, two core elements of Panther political theory. Drawing on an analogy between the BPP and Pynchon's Schwarzkommando, an assessment is made of the novel's perspective on the part played by various factors – including the Panthers’ aggressive militancy, the rise of Eldridge Cleaver through the leadership, and the subtle influence of a logic of power influenced by scientific rationalism – in bringing about the disintegration of the Panther organization by the early 1970s. Given the similarities between the paths taken by the BPP and the wider counterculture in the late 1960s, the article considers Pynchon's commentary on the Panthers to be part of a cautionary tale for future revolutionaries fighting similar forms of oppression.

Adrienne Carey Hurley. Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (2011). 259 pp. $24.92 (Paperback). (ISBN 978-0822349617)

Adrienne Carey Hurley. Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (2011). 259 pp. $24.92 (Paperback). (ISBN 978-0822349617). Un article de la revue McGill Journal of Education / Revue des sciences de l'éducation de McGill (Volume 47, numéro 1, winter 2012, p. 5-141) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The Cult Leader as Agent of a Psychotic Fantasy of Masochistic Group Death: The Revolutionary Suicide in Jonestown

The Cult Leader as Agent of a Psychotic Fantasy of Masochistic Group Death: The Revolutionary Suicide in Jonestown

Permeable Borders and American Prisons: Malcolm Braly’s <i>On the Yard</i>

Permeable Borders and American Prisons: Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard Katy Ryan Malcolm Braly’s fourth novel begins simply enough: “Society Red was the first man on the yard that morning” (3). An account of men living slow days in San Quentin in the 1960s—their fantasies, interactions, supreme boredom—On the Yard (1967) continues in this direct, unembellished style for well over three hundred pages. Braly’s novel is, as Jonathan Lethem notes in his fine introduction to the most recent edition, as -ical as its title” (vii). Our need to have “prisons be one simple thing — either horrific zoos for the irretrievably demented and corrupt, or inhumane machines which grind down innocent men” —is unsatisfied by Braly’s writing (Lethem, vii). Praised by critics and declared by Kurt Vonnegut “the great American prison novel,” On the Yard has been out of print twice and has received little scholarly attention.1 In 2002 the New York Review of Books republished the novel as part of its lost classics series. Braly, who spent much of his adult life in prison for burglary and armed robbery convictions, composed three novels while incarcerated: Felony Tank (1961), Shake Him Till He Rattles (1963), and It’s Cold Out There (1966). After his final release from San Quentin, published, in addition to On the Yard, an autobiography, False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons (1976), and another novel, The Protector (1979). At the time of his death in 1980, he was, according to H. Bruce Franklin, “beginning to attain recognition as one of the finest novelists to emerge from America’s prisons” (Prison Writing, 217). On the Yard emerges at a critical moment in U.S. American literary history. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965, marks the beginning of what Franklin calls “an unprecedented surge of prison literature” (Prison Writing, 12). Among the more well-known of these works are Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968), George Jackson’s Soledad, Brother (1970), Robert Beck’s The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (1971), Manuel Piñero’s Short Eyes (1972), Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide (1973), James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could [End Page 285] Talk (1974), and Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974). Franklin identifies the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s as the motivating context for this literature; Dylan Rodriguez develops his theory of “radical prison praxis” from the same time period; and Michael Hames-García engages with this body of literature in order to theorize and put into practice its ethical and moral insights. Yet Braly’s novel is not political in the way much of this writing is. It does not provide an exposé or analysis of the dire failings of the criminal judicial system. Nor does it attempt to explain, or even represent, the disproportionate impact of mass incarceration on racial minorities. In a 1971 New York Times op-ed piece on George Jackson, Braly expressed his impatience with “the mistaken assumptions, exaggerations, and, sometimes, outright lies on which liberals and radical writers base their current outrage at prison conditions” (35). Braly maintained that there was no “systematic political prejudice” against black Americans in the justice system, though he admitted individual instances of bias in the California prison system. His inaccurate assessments of both the role race plays in judicial processes and the cultural significance of black liberation struggles arguably interfere with his ability to tell a reliable tale about U.S. American prisons.2 Franklin summarizes, “Because his vision did not encompass the historical significance of the changes going on both in the prison and on the outside, Malcolm Braly remained limited in range as a novelist, despite all his profound insights” (Prison Literature, 206).3 What contributions, then, can Braly make to American literary and cultural history? It was to the novel that Braly first turned, a genre utilized less often by writers dealing with prison than autobiography, poetry, oratory, and essay. And it is precisely the dialogic structure of On the Yard that generates its most important social commentary. Franklin credits the artistic success of On the Yard to...

Melancholia as Resistance in Contemporary African American Literature

Dualism in ralph ellison's invisible man I am outside of history, i wash i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in its cage i am inside of history, its hungrier than i thot --Ishmael Reed (1972) The fields of African American literature and studies have only recently begun to inform each other's critical discourses. Many of the existing critical works about in African American literature primarily focus on the body and the literary portrayal and role of physical disabilities. (1) In Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson makes the compelling argument that African American writers such as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Ann Petry offer an African-American female self grounded in the singular body that the etchings of history and whose validation, power, and identity derive from physical difference and resistance to cultural norms (105, emphasis added). In light of American history's traumatic impact on the African American body, the discussion of physical difference and in African American literature needs further analysis. Additionally, critics need to theorize the different mind in African American literature, which, as I argue below, in many ways bears the etchings of history. More specifically, contemporary African American literature has portrayed characters with different, melancholic minds as figures who are not to be pathologized but who must be read as subjects engaged in acts of political resistance to dominant versions of memory and historiography. While has traditionally been understood as a personal, disabling mental or emotional condition, I argue that contemporary African American literature has claimed this form of mental difference as a source of political empowerment, while simultaneously holding a white racist system responsible for the emergence of this condition of emotional difference. Esther Sanchez-Pardo has examined the link between melancholia, modernism, sexuality, and race; she argues that melancholia has a constitutive role in modernist sexualities (2). I would like to expand on this examination by offering a discussion of Freudian ideas of and their relationship to contemporary African American literature. Perhaps the closest link between studies and the theorization of mental or emotional difference in contemporary African American literature can be located in the growing field of trauma studies. In recent years J. Brooks Bouson, Lisa Garbus, Robert Holton, Deborah Horvitz, Lisa Woolfork, and other critics have drawn on Cathy Caruth's works to discuss the wounded, altered, and literally or metaphorically disabled black self in African American literature. Another form of mental difference has been examined by Katy Ryan in Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction. Ryan discusses the role of what may be the ultimate self-inflicted disability in Morrison's works. None of these critical examinations, however, has established an explicit link with studies. My discussion of in contemporary African American literature draws on both studies and trauma studies in an attempt to formulate a new theory of loss in African American literature. Traditional western theories of mourning and define as a mental or emotional condition that has the potential to disable a subject to the point of death or, more precisely, suicide. However, in thinking through the role of in twentieth-century African American literature one must engage a series of problems. First, it is imperative to revisit western definitions and theories of the mourning or melancholic subject. Most of these theories build on Freudian approaches to mourning. Beyond an assessment of what it means to mourn or to be melancholic according to traditional western classifications, it is crucial to explore the extent to which antebellum African Americans were allowed access to such emotional expressions and how antebellum realities have left an imprint on twentieth-century African American literature. …

Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction

[On slaveships, some Igbos] wished to die on idea that they should then get back to their own country. The captain in order to obviate this idea, thought of an expedient viz. to cut off heads of those who died intimating to them that if determined to go, they must return without heads. The slaves were accordingly brought up to witness operation. One of them by violent exertion got loose and to where nettings had been unloosed in order to empty tubs, he darted overboard. The ship brought to, man was placed in main chains to catch him which he perceiving, signs which words cannot express expressive of his in escaping. He then went down and was seen no more. (qtd. in Cowley and Mannix 108) In this recollection of 1788 slaveship, Dr. Ecroide Claxton admits inadequacy of language to convey escaping man's happiness: He made signs which words cannot express. Suicide often provokes rhetorical impasse here encountered; sign is clear but incommunicable. Claxton cannot translate joy of man who, flying to place of escape, found way out of horror and defied captain's command that Africans remain onboard. During Middle Passage, some people fought back physically; others survived in more covert ways; still others jumped overboard. On several ships, was an epidemic of suicide at last minute (Cowley and Mannix 111). [1] Although this leap to freedom, and death, haunts African American literature (Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, James Baldwin's Another Country, Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of Last Black Man in Whole Entire World, Dawn Turner Trice's Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven, Shay Youngblood's Shakin' Mess Outta M isery), act of suicide often goes unnamed. And potential of Africans and African Americans as an imagistic and thematic trope has generated far more critical discussion than its metonymic twin, suicide. [2] Despite number of self-inflicted deaths in Toni Morrison's novels and fact that she wrote her master's thesis on alienation and suicide in William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, there has been little critical attention given to repetition of self-destruction in her own work. [3] In Beloved (1988), woman jumps overboard during Middle Passage; in Jazz (1992), Violet's mother, Rose Dear, climbs into well, drowning herself in 1892; in Sula (1973), shell-shocked veteran Shadrack institutes National Suicide Day on 3 January 1920; on opening page of Song of Solomon (1977), Robert Smith leaps from top of Mercy Hospital on 18 February 1931; in The Bluest Eye (1970), Pecola Breedlove wills self-disappearance through longing to possess eyes of another face ('Please God . . . Please make me disappear' [59]). These bodies do not tell of capitulation to dominant powers but comprise one part of larger multivalent narrative of black survival in North America. The act of self -destruction overtly participates in racial and class struggles, revealing, to borrow phrase from Michel Foucault, a body totally imprinted by history (148). [4] A dual impulse toward erasure and survival, corresponding to happiness of man who leapt off ship in 1788, distinguishes Morrison's thematic. In A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown traces Black Power Movement in United States to African insurrections and to the first Africans who had leaped from slave ships in suicidal rejection of slavery (355). In Morrison's work, suicide operates on two revolutionary levels: Within story, it functions as political form of resistance--a break in history--and within narrative structure, it comprises discursive strategy, an organizational axis around which meanings revolve--a break in textual time. First, I want to discuss difficulty of talking about suicide and its ontological relevance to revolutionary struggles. …

Revolutionary suicide and commonwealth disarray: Grenada, October 1983

Revolutionary suicide and commonwealth disarray: Grenada, October 1983

Books for Young Adults: 1974 Honor Listing

ALIVE by Piers Paul Reed, 352 pp. Lippincott, 1974, $10.00. AS WE ARE NOW by May Sarton, 133 pp. W. W. Norton, 1973, $5.95. THE CHOCOLATE WAR by Robert Cormier, 253 pp. Pantheon, 1974, $5.95. CHRISTIE MALRY'S OWN DOUBLE-ENTRY by B. S. Johnson, 183 pp. Viking, 1973, $5.95. DUTCH UNCLE by Marilyn Durham, 303 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, $7.50. FAIRY TALE by Eric Segal (Drawings by Dino Kotopoulis), 46 pp. Harper and Row, 1973, $4.95. THE FALLING MAN by Warren Forma, 99 pp. Crowell, 1973, $4.95. THE GIFT by Pete Hamill, 83 pp. Random House, 1973, $4.95. A HERO AIN'T NOTHIN' BUT A SANDWICH by Alice Childress, 126 pp. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $5.95. THE HONORARY CONSUL by Graham Greene, 315 pp. Simon and Schuster, 1973, $7.95. Pocket Books, 1974. I'M SOMEBODY IMPORTANT: Young Black Voices from Rural Georgia by George Mitchell, 242 pp. University of Illinois, 1973, $7.95. JOSHUA, SON OF NONE by Nancy Freedman, 291 pp. Delacorte, 1973, $7.95. Dell, 1974. JOURNEY TO IXTLAN by Carlos Castaneda, 315 pp. Simon and Schuster, 1972, $7.95. TouchstoneClarion, 1973. KINGDOM COME by Gwen Davis, 160 pp. Putnam, 1973, $5.95. LET ME HEAR YOU WHISPER by Paul Zindel (Drawings by Stephen Gammell), 44 pp. Harper & Row, 1974, $4.95. LOOPHOLE OR HOW TO ROB A BANK by Robert Pollock, 192 pp. Dutton, 1973, $5.95. THE MEMORY OF OLD JACK by Wendell Berry, 233 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, $7.95. THE PRINCESS BRIDE by William Goldman, 308 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, $7.95. RICHIE by Thomas Thompson, 308 pp. Saturday Review Press, 1973, $7.95. Bantam, 1974. REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE by Huey P. Newton, 333 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, $8.95. SERPICO by Peter Maas, 314 pp. Viking, 1973, $7.95. Bantam, 1974. THE SON OF SOMEONE FAMOUS by M. E. Kerr, 226 pp. Harper & Row, 1974, $4.95. A SPORTING PROPOSITION by James Aldridge, 206 pp. Little, Brown, 1973, $5.95. THE SUMMER BEFORE by Patricia Windsor, 241 pp. Harper & Row, 1973, $4.79. THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE