Notes

Introduction: Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin

1Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xxviii.

2Cedric J. Robinson, quoted in “An Anthropology of Marxism,” chapter 17 of Avery F. Gordon’s Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People (Boulder, CO: Great Barrington Books, 2004), 134; this chapter originally appeared as the preface to Cedric J. Robinson’s An Anthropology of Marxism (Oxford: Ashgate, 2001), i–xvi.

3Robinson, Black Marxism, xxx.

4Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 57–96.

5Robinson, Black Marxism, xxxii.

6Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

7Robinson, Black Marxism, xxxii.

8See Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), xii.

9Ibid., xii–xiii.

Chapter 1: Class Suicide: The Black Radical Tradition, Radical Scholarship, and the Neoliberal Turn

1Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 145.

2Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xxxv.

3Lester K. Spence, Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (New York: Punctum Books, 2015), 3–25.

4Cedric J. Robinson, “What Is to Be Done? The Future of Critical Ethnic Studies,” plenary session, Critical Ethnic Studies Conference, Chicago, September 21, 2013, quoted from the author’s notes.

5Ibid.

6Ibid.

7W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (Toronto: Dover, 1994), iv.

8Robinson referenced the scholarship of sociologist Jon Cruz in his discussion of spirituals: Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

9Robinson, “What Is to Be Done?”.

10George Lipsitz, American Studies at a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: Universty of Minnesota Press, 2001), 282.

11Robinson, Black Marxism, xxx.

12I use the classical Marxist term “petit bourgeois” to describe the class position of many intellectuals and scholars. The petit bourgeois is the middle strata, or professional middle class, under the capitalist system.

13I use the term “mandarin” in reference to the mandarinate bureaucracy of the Chinese Empire. Members of this bureaucracy served as intellectuals for the elites, as many intellectuals and petite bourgeoisie do today.

14Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 136.

15For a discussion of the crisis of global capitalism, see William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

16Richard Kersley and Markus Stierli, Global Wealth Report 2015 (Credit Suisse Research Institute, October 2015), available at publications.credit-suisse.com.

17Oxfam, “An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped” (Oxfam, January 18, 2016), available at oxfam.org.

18Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us (Institute for Policy Studies, December 2015), available at ips-dc.org.

19Los Angeles 2020 Commission, A Time for Truth (Los Angeles, December 2013), available at la2020reports.org.

20United Way of Southern California, L. A. County 10 Years Later: A Tale of Two Cities, One Future (Los Angeles, February 2010), available at wlac.edu.

21Robinson, Black Marxism, 2.

22Kyra R. Greene, “Why We Need More Marxism in the Sociology of Race,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 13, no. 2 (2011): 168.

23Ibid., 166.

24Spence, Knocking the Hustle.

25Stuart Hall, “The Neoliberal Revolution,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 48 (2011): 10.

26David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 16.

27Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 30.

28Spence, Knocking the Hustle, 38.

29Amaad Rivera, Brenda Cotto-Escalera, Anisha Desair, and Jeannette Huezo, Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008 (Boston: United for a Fair Economy, 2008), available at faireconomy.org/reports.

30Brown, Undoing the Demos, 177.

31Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1978), 482.

32Immanuel Wallerstein, Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commision on the Restructuring of the Social Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 7.

33Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Public Enemies and Private Intellectuals: Apartheid USA,” Race and Class 35, no. 69 (1993).

34Ibid., 71–2.

35Ibid., 73.

36Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz, “Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times: Countering the Pedagogies of Neoliberalism,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 35, no. 1 (2013): 17.

37Although we must also challenge the rules and logics of academic research, which often reproduces white supremacy and class oppression. See Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds., White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

38Gilmore, “Public Enemies and Private Intellectuals,” 73.

39Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publisher, 1971), 10.

40Robinson, Black Marxism, 184.

41Michael Hanchard, “Contours of Black Political Thought: An Introduction and Perspective,” Political Theory 38 (2010): 512.

42Robinson, Black Marxism, 310.

43Ibid.

44Ibid., 317.

45Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 5.

46For a discussion of “accompaniment,” see Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz, “American Studies as Accompaniment,” American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2013).

47H. L. T. Quan, “Geniuses of Resistance: Feminist Consciousness and the Black Radical Tradition,” Race and Class 47, no. 2 (2005): 49.

48Robinson, Black Marxism, 184.

49Stuart Hall, “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, & Society 5, no. 1 (1992): 17.

50Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 135.

51Ibid., 136.

52Ibid.

53Cedric J. Robinson, “Amilcar Cabral and the Dialectic of Portuguese Colonialism,” Radical America 15, no. 3 (1981).

54Cabral, Unity and Struggle, xi.

55Robinson, “Amilcar Cabral.”

56Ibid., 50.

57Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 157.

58Ibid.

59Ibid., 158.

60Patrick Chabal, Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War (London: Africa World Press, 2003), 180.

61Quoted in Robinson, “Amilcar Cabral,” 54.

62Cedric J. Robinson, “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon,” Race & Class 35, no. 1 (1993).

63Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1.

64Quoted in Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), 35.

65Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 99.

66Ibid., 11.

67Ibid.

68Ibid., 99.

69Ibid., 173.

70Ibid., 167.

71Robinson, “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon,” 84.

72Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981[1972]), 90.

73Ibid., 27.

74Ibid., 21.

75Ibid., 22.

76Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1996[1969]), 62–3.

77Ibid.

78Walter Rodney, “Crisis in the Periphery of the World System, Africa and the Caribbean,” speech delivered at an unknown university (1978). See the Walter Rodney papers, 1960–1987, Box 31, Robert W. Woodruff Library at the Atlanta University Center.

79Ibid.

80Ibid.

81Robinson, Black Marxism, xxxv.

82Maria Poblet, “Lessons from Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Democracy, Class-Consciousness, and Cross-Class Movement Building,” Left Roots, available at left roots.net.

83I learned this as a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, while “choppin’ it up” with Cedric J. Robinson and Clyde A. Woods. I will be forever grateful for this experience and their guidance.

Chapter 2: On Race, Violence, and “So-Called Primitive Accumulation”

1Anupama Rao encouraged me to write the original version of this essay. I thank her and the participants in the Caste and Race Workshop at Columbia University in October 2013 for their engagement with this work. I especially want to thank Harry Harootunian, Tavia Nyong’o, Neferti Tadiar, and Jennifer Morgan for their critical and generative comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

2Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, eds. John R. McKivigan, Peter P. Hinks, and Heather L. Kaufman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001[1845]), 71.

3Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993[1857]), 163–4. Emphasis added.

4Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, vol. 3, The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012[1881]), 163. Emphasis added.

5For an original and exemplary statement of this viewpoint, see: Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past and Present 70 (February 1976): 30–75. Brenner sharpens the polemical stakes of this argument, taking on various modes of “dependency” and “world-systems theory” which he faults for “displac[ing] class relations from the center of economic development,” and for failing to recognize “the productivity of labor as the essence and key of [capitalist] economic development.” See also Brenner’s “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review 104 (July–August 1977).

6Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002). Following Brenner, Wood writes, “The wealth amassed from [slavery and] colonial exploitation may have contributed substantially to further development, even if it was not the necessary precondition for the origin of capitalism … If wealth from the colonies and the slave trade contributed to Britain’s industrial revolution, it was because the British economy had already for a long time been structured by capitalist property relations” (149).

7Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from African to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). As much as any other contemporary thinker, Smallwood strives to link the logics of slavery as social death and as a novel form of commodification: “The Atlantic market for slaves changed what it meant to be a socially, politically or economically marginalized person … Captivity … was not a temporary status … not [a situation] of extreme alienation within the community, but rather of absolute exclusion from any community,” the fashioning of “bodies animated only by others’ calculated investment in their physical capacity” (30, 35).

8Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton (New York: Vintage, 2014), 92, 114. Also see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Putnam, 1966[1944]). Important contributors to the contemporary resurgence of this argument include Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist, Stephanie Smallwood, and Julia Ott, but its key originator was Eric Williams, who argued that slavery profits were central to industrial capitalist takeoff. This controversial thesis (which bears the traces of stagist thinking) died by a thousand historiographical cuts in the decades following the publication of Williams’s book. What was arguably most disturbing about Williams’s argument was his more fundamental challenge to those who emphasized slavery’s relative historical insignificance in order to moralize and legitimate subsequent capitalist development—in effect, freeing capitalism from a debt to slavery. Writing in a period in which international capitalism spearheaded by the United States sought to detach itself from the racism and imperialism from which it had developed, Williams provided an unsettling dose of skepticism: “This does not invalidate the arguments for democracy, for freedom now or for freedom after the war … But mutatis mutandis the arguments have a familiar ring,” he wrote. “We have to be on our guard, not only against the old prejudices, but against the new which are being constantly created” (210–12). Historian Frank Tannenbaum exemplified the kind of orthodoxy that Williams unsettled in his writing. “The Negro race has been given an additional large share of the face of the globe for its own. It received this territory as a kind of unplanned gift,” Tannenbaum wrote. “It is in its own nature, no different than the process which has occurred as a result of the allurement which led millions of Americans to labor in American mines, fields, and factories … The result has been moral. It has proved a good thing for the Negroes in the long run. They have achieved a status both spiritually and materially, in the new home to which they were brought as chattels.” Frank Tannenbaum, “A Note on the Economic Interpretation of History,” Political Science Quarterly 61 (1946): 248–9.

9Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capitalism,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 653.

10For a powerful contemporary theory that develops this view, see: Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015).

11Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1967[1867]), 925, 374–81, 225. Here are the respective quotations in full: “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New world as its pedestal” (925). “Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of the life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our profit (pleasure)?” (381). “If labor-power can be supplied from foreign preserves … the duration of [the worker’s] life becomes a matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts … It is accordingly a maxim of slave management in slave importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost of exertion that it is capable of putting forth” (225).

12Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society,” Social Identities 9, no. 3 (2003): 230. For a related argument more in keeping with the spirit of my approach in this essay, see Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 2004): 299–308.

13Jennifer Morgan, “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism: An Afterword,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (2015). Also see Morgan, “Partus Sequitur Ventrum: Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery” (forthcoming).

14Frederick Douglass, “Reception Speech at Finsbury Chapel, Moorfield, England, May 12, 1846,” in My Bondage and My Freedom (New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855). “We have in the US slave-breeding states … where men, women and children are reared for the market, just as horses, sheep and swine are raised for the market. Slave-rearing is there looked upon as a legitimate trade; the law sanctions it, public opinion upholds it, the church does not condemn it. It goes on in all its bloody horrors, sustained by the auctioneer’s block” (412).

15What Wilderson has termed “gratuitous violence” retained an instrumental value as exemplary violence in the face of much feared resistance and revolt. More recently Edward Baptist has also made a compelling case for the relationship between bodily torture and surplus extraction under slavery: The Half That Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

16The notion of accumulation by dispossession is a contemporary reframing of Marx’s “so-called primitive accumulation.” See Gillian Hart, “Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in an Age of Resurgent Imperialism,” Research Report 27, UC Berkeley (2004). Also see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

17Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001[1944]). By describing land, labor, and money as “fictitious commodities,” Polanyi emphasizes the imposition of the logic of the self-regulating market and universal commodification as the defining features of capitalism. Further, he emphasizes how processes of commodification broadly encompass not only the domain of labor and its social and biological reproduction, but also the ecological matrix of life itself, as well as the mediums and modes of exchange that constitute social horizons. The subjection of all three domains to the “market mechanism” threatens the very conditions of social existence, stripping human beings of “the protective covering of cultural institutions,” “defiling neighborhoods and landscapes,” and subjecting purchasing power to disastrous “shortages and surfeits of money” (76). This formulation challenges both liberal and Marxist tendencies to construct the economy as an analytically autonomous domain. At its best, the notion of fictitious commodification draws our attention to the ongoing, state-enforced, noncontractual, and dominating bases of capital accumulation, as well as to dynamics of “social protection” or resistance that often draw upon non-market norms of land, labor, and money (including, potentially, reactionary ones). “Laissez-faire was planned, planning was not,” Polanyi famously writes, and “the stark utopia” of the free market was the fascist response to its deepening crisis. See also Fred Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing of ‘The Great Transformation’,” Theory and Society 32, no. 3 (2003): 275–306, and Nancy Fraser, “Can Society Be Commodities All the Way Down? Polanyian Reflections on Capitalist Crisis,” Fondation Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, Working Papers Series, no. 18 (August 2012).

18Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 866–905.

19David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

20The literature on varieties of capitalism argues that there is no capitalist mode of production compatible with actually existing capitalism, only “configurations” or “forms of capitalism” “compatible with a variety of forms of labor-exploitation.” See Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (London: Historical Materialism, 2010), 11.

21Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 875. Italics added

22Marx, Grundrisse, 400. Italics added.

23Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 784, 789, 793, 797.

24The slave and lumpenproletariat may resemble each other when outside a relationship of capitalist exploitation. This insight, for which I am indebted to Tavia Nyong’o, is not pursued here but, of course, has been a spur to thinkers like Fanon and George Jackson. See Peter Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Representations 31 (1990): 81.

25Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 940, 899. Emphasis added.

26Quoted in Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity,” 84.

27Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 937. Marx writes: “In the old civilized countries the worker, although free, is by a law of nature dependent on the capitalist; in the colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.” (Note: he is not referring to slavery here, but his comments are applicable to it.) The problem of the colonies is that there is too much freedom for workers to opt out and become “independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour market.” Marx also hastens to add: “We are not concerned here with the condition of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World” (936, 940).

28Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 873, 915.

29Marx, Grundrisse, 164.

30Ibid., 164.

31Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1031, 1033. Emphasis in original.

32Marx, Grundrisse, 326.

33David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working-Class (New York: Verso, 2007).

34Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877 (New York: Haymarket Books, 2012).

35Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 391.

36Banaji, Theory as History, 13.

37Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 382. Just as the worker’s feeling of freedom has important material effects, so too does the transformation of freedom into a kind of status distinction. “Capital … takes no account of the health and length of the life of the worker,” Marx writes, “unless society forces it to do so.” This is of course a reference to the English class struggle, mostly one-sided in Marx’s view, in which the worker may achieve a normal working day, but is “compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labor in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.”

38Ibid., 414.

39C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage, 1989[1938]), 86.

40Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 211.

41Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 345.

42Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery Tyranny and the Power of Life Over Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 366.

43Heide Gerstenberger, “The Political Economy of Capitalist Labor,” Viewpoint Magazine (September 2014), available at viewpointmag.com.

44Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 925. Postlethwayt is quoted in David Waldstreicher, Slavery’ Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 27.

45Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick, 21; Marx, Grundrisse, 464.

46Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishers, 1958[1847]), 125. Gopal Balakrishnan describes the early Marx of this period as an “abolitionist” in a set of brilliant essays, writing, “Only later would Marx come to see a contradiction between free wage labor and slavery. Now he assumed that American slavery was an integral part of the world system of bourgeois society … The Marx of this period was a ruthless abolitionist.” Gopal Balakrishnan, “The Abolitionist—II,” New Left Review 91 (January–February 2015).

47Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

48Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 124.

49Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 91.

50W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 632–4.

51It is important to note that the term “proletariat” in Marx literally means “those without reserves.” As Michael Denning writes, it is not a synonym for wage labor “but for dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market.” Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (November–December 2010): 81.

52Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968 [1951]), 372.

53Marx, Grundrisse, 109; Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), 51.

54Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2009), 353.

55Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 260. While Foucault develops an idea of “race war” as integral to modern statecraft, his account is idiosyncratic and noncommittal. He appears to view Nazi violence through the lens of exceptionalism: “A society which generalized biopower in an absolute sense … has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two mechanisms—the classic, archaic mechanism that gave the State the right of life and death over its citizens, and the new mechanism organized around discipline and regulation … of biopower—coincide exactly … We can therefore say this: The Nazi state makes the field of life it manages, protects, guarantees and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people.” Discussing the “final solution,” he writes, “Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this play is in fact inscribed in the workings of all states. In all modern states, in all capitalist States? Perhaps not.”

56Jason Moore, “Endless Accumulation, Endless (Unpaid) Work?,” The Occupied Times (2015), available at theoccupiedtimes.org.

57Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 70, 224. Also see Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 35.

58This discussion is heavily indebted to Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, especially chapter 10 and the epilogue.

59Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in a Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 60.

60Daniel Bensaid, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique (New York: Verso, 2002), 23.

Chapter 3: Dissonance in Time: (Un)Making and (Re)Mapping of Blackness

1Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning,” in Charles R. Hale and Craig Calhoun, eds., Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 31–61.

2Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 26.

3Ellen Swartz, “Emancipatory Narratives: Rewriting the Master Script in the School Curriculum,” Journal of Negro Education 61, no. 3 (1992): 341–55.

4Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), xv.

5Allison Samuels, “Oprah Goes to School,” Newsweek (January 7, 2007), available at news-week.com.

6Ibid.

7Julie Bosman, “Obama Calls for More Responsibility From Black Fathers,” New York Times (June 16, 2008), available at nytimes.com.

8Robinson, Black Marxism, 169.

Chapter 4: Racial Capitalocene

1United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: 1987).

2Ibid, xiv.

3United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries, Toxic Waste and Race at Twenty, 1987–2007: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States (March 2007), 11.

4First People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, “Principles of Economic Justice” (1991), available at ejnet.org.

5United Church of Christ, Toxic Waste and Race at Twenty, 14.

6Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 1983), 309. Emphasis in original.

7Robinson, Black Marxism, 307.

8Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’,” International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme 41 (2000): 17–18.

9See William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, eds., Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

10Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.

11Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” in Pramod K. Nayar, ed., Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 144–57, 145, and 154.

12Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Whose Anthropocene? A Response,” RCC Perpsectives: Transformations in Environment and Society, no. 2 (2016), 112.

13Aaron Vansintjan, “Going Beyond the ‘Ecological Turn’ in the Humanities,” ENTITLE blog: A Collaborative Writing Project on Political Ecology (March 1, 2016), available at entitleblog. org.

14Ibid.

15Jason Moore, “The Capitalocene Part I: On the Nature & Origins of Our Ecological Crisis” (January 2014), available at jasonwmoore.com. Emphasis in original.

16Zoe Todd, “Relationships,” Cultural Anthropology (January 21, 2016), available at culanth. org.

17Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), 271.

18Elizabeth Reddy, “What Does It Mean to Do Anthropology in the Anthropocene?” Platypus: The CASTAC Blog (April 8, 2014), available at blog.castac.org.

19Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I.”

20Ibid.

21Jason Moore, “Beyond the ‘Exploitation of Nature’? A World-Ecological Alternative” (April 25, 2014), available at jasonwmoore.wordpress.com.

22Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Random House, 1906), 786.

23Joachim Radkau, Power and Nature: A Global History of the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 153.

24Malm, Fossil Capital, 9.

25Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991).

26Cited in McKenzie Wark, “Climate and Colonialism” (November 5, 2015), available at publicseminar.org.

27In the late 1950s, at a series of World Congresses on world population, representatives of the US government started an ideological campaign in which they argued that global security and peace were tied to a low birth rate in the Third World. It became a truth: Third World countries were said to be condemned to poverty and underdevelopment if their birth rate was not controlled.

28Jason Moore, “The End of Cheap Nature. Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about ‘the’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism,” in C. Suter and C. Chase-Dunn, eds., Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation (Berlin: LIT, 2014), 285–314.

29See arborgen.com.

30Emily Matthews et al., The Weight of Nations: Material Outflows from Industrial Economies (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 2000).

Chapter 5: Improvement and Preservation: Or, Usufruct and Use

1G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 88. Emphasis in original.

2Ibid., 376.

3Ibid., 90. Emphasis in original.

4Ibid.

5Ibid., 91.

6Conversation with Jeff Mao at the Red Bull Music Academy, quoted in Matthew Trammell, “How to Stay Cool as Fuck Forever, According to George Clinton,” The Fader (May 14, 2015), available at thefader.com.

7Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 306.

Chapter 6: The World We Want: An Interview with Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson

1Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

2Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: New York Review of Books, 1967); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: The Academic Press, 1974), and Wallerstein, The Modern World System II (New York: Academic Press, 1980).

3Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

4Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

5H. L. T. Quan, “Geniuses of Resistance: Feminist Consciousness and the Black Radical Tradition,” Race & Class 47, no. 2 (2005): 39–53.

6Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Oxford: Ashgate, 2001).

7Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).

8Erica Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 2012).

9E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966).

10W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: The Free Press, 1992), 358.

11C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 86.

12Robin D. G. Kelley, “Foreword,” Black Marxism, xi-xxiii.

13Cedric J. Robinson, Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (1980; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

14Cedric J. Robinson and Elizabeth Robinson, “Ferguson, Gaza, and Iraq: An Outline of the Official Narrative in ‘Post-Racial’ America,” Commonware, September 4, 2013, commonware.com.

15Robinson and Robinson, “Ferguson, Gaza, and Iraq.”

16Quoted in Robinson, Forgeries, 82.

Chapter 7: What Is This Black in the Black Radical Tradition?

1Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 171.

2Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 308.

3Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 97.

4Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973); Steven H. Marshall, The City on the Hill from Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

5Robinson, Black Movements in America, 11.

6Ibid., 19–20.

7John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford, 1987); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 1976); Camp, Closer to Freedom.

8Robinson, Black Movements in America, 13.

9Ibid., 18.

10Ibid., 20.

11Marshall, The City on the Hill, 53.

12Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 206.

13Robinson, Black Movements in America, 96.

14Ibid., 96.

15Marshall, The City on the Hill, 93–9.

16Patricia A. Turner, Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009).

17Camp, Closer to Freedom, 73–4.

18Theophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford, 1994), 31.

19Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1984), 158.

20Donald Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

21Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 142.

22Ibid., 138, 142.

23Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 86, 81.

24Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, 42–3.

25Camp, Closer to Freedom, 69.

26Small, Music of the Common Tongue, 86.

27Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (February 2015): 4.

28Ibid.

29Ibid., 9.

30Percy Green, Robin D. G. Kelley, George Lipsitz, Tef Poe, Jamala Rogers, Elizabeth Hinton, and Walter Johnson, “Generations of Struggle: Panel Discussion on Protest Before, During, and After the Ferguson Rebellion,” Kalfou 3, no. 1 (2016).

31Robinson, Black Movements in America, 141.

32Green et al., “Generations of Struggle.”

33Ibid.

34Robinson, Black Marxism, 318.

Chapter 8: Birth of a (Zionist) Nation: Black Radicalism and the Future of Palestine

1Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 153.

2Fawaz Turki, “Meaning in Palestinian History: Text and Context,” Arab Studies Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1981): 381.

3Quoted in Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Representations 9 (1985): 151.

4Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007), 82–126. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as Cedric J. Robinson, “In the Year 1915: D. W. Griffith and the Whitening of America,” Social Identities 3, no. 2 (1997): 161–92.

5As Robinson writes, “From the 1890s to World War I the country had no national political consciousness, no hegemonic cultural core, no dominant historical identity, no definite social solidarity.” Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 181.

6Ibid., 108.

7Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000[1983]), 80.

8David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms: Some Thoughts on Method,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 7 (2009): 1271–82.

9See, for instance, Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (New York: Zed Books, 2012); Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (New York: Verso, 2008); Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University, 2013); Steven Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; and Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (New York: Cassell, 1999). See also Maxime Rodinson’s pathbreaking Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, trans. David Thorstad (New York: Pathfinder, 1973).

10On the Black Panther Party meetings with Fatah, see Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 81–6. On Palestinian hip-hop, see Sunaina Maira, “‘We Ain’t Missing’: Palestinian Hip Hop—A Transnational Youth Movement,” CR: The New Centennial Review 8, no. 2 (2008): 161–92; and Sunaina Maira and Magid Shihade, “Hip Hop from ’48 Palestine: Youth, Music, and the Present/Absent,” Social Text 30, no. 3 (2012): 1–26.

11On the Palestinian “Freedom Riders,” see Maryam S. Griffin, “Freedom Rides in Palestine: Racial Segregation and Grassroots Politics on the Bus,” Race and Class 56, no. 4 (2015): 73–84.

12June Jordan, Moving Toward Home: Political Essays (London: Virago, 1989); Remi Kanazi, Poetic Injustice: Writings on Resistance and Palestine (New York: RoR, 2011); and Suheir Hammad, Born Palestinian, Born Black (Brooklyn: UpSet, 2010[1996]).

13The George Jackson exhibit was curated by Tufts University professor Greg Thomas based on his ongoing research. See Rebecca Pierce, “How the Sun of Palestine Reached a Black Panther in Jail,” Electronic Intifada (December 15, 2015), available at electronicintifada.net.

14See my essay, “Palestine in Black and White: White Settler-Colonialism and the Specter of Transnational Black Power,” in Sunaina Maira and Paola Bacchetta, eds., Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

15Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016); Alex Kane, “‘A Level of Racist Violence I Have Never Seen’: UCLA Professor Robin D. G. Kelley on Palestine and the BDS Movement,” Mondoweiss (February 16, 2012), available on mondoweiss.net; Robin D. G. Kelley, “Another Freedom Summer,” Journal of Palestine Studies 44, no. 1 (2014): 29–41; Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine; and Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014). See also “Roundtable on Anti-Blackness and Black-Palestinian Solidarity,” Jadaliyya (June 3, 2015), available at jadaliyya.com. For an earlier discussion of Black–Palestinian ties, see Lewis Young, “American Blacks and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Journal of Palestine Studies 2, no. 1 (1972): 70–85.

16For instance, after the American Studies Association (ASA) passed a resolution in 2013 endorsing the Palestinian call to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Israeli regime (BDS), California-based academic Nicholas Brady authored an online editorial which denounced the ASA’s position as one “aris[ing] from an anti-black calculus.” Moreover, in a 2014 interview, Frank Wilderson similarly derided Black–Palestinian solidarity as “bullshit.” In his words, “The Arabs and the Jews are as much a part of the Black slave trade … as anyone else … Anti-Blackness is as important and necessary to the formation of Arab psychic life as it is to the formation of Jewish psychic life.” Going even further, Wilderson warned the Black community against “bonding with people who are really, primarily, using Black energy to catalyze and energize their [own] struggle.” See Nicholas Brady, “The Void Speaks Back: Black Suffering as the Unthought of the American Studies Association’s Academic Boycott of Israel,” Out of Nowhere (December 23, 2013), available at outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com. For Wilderson’s original interview, see I Mix What I Like!, “Irreconcilable Anti-Blackness and Police Violence” (October 1, 2014), available at imixwhatilike. org. For the transcript, see “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson: An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III,” Ill Will Editions, available at ill-will-editions.tumblr.com.

17The most glaring exception to this overall focus is Robinson’s short book An Anthropology of Marxism, which includes a discussion of medieval poverty movements in Europe as an example of pre-Marxist socialism. See Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Oxford: Ashgate, 2001).

18“Golda Meir Scorns Soviets: Israeli Premier Explains Stand on Big-4 Talks, Security,” Washington Post (June 16, 1969); and Matt Payton, “Israeli MP Claims the Palestine Nation Cannot Exist ‘Because They Can’t Pronounce the Letter P,’” The Independent (February 11, 2016), available at independent.co.uk.

19Quoted in Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, 17.

20See Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).

21Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa’di, “Introduction: The Claims of Memory,” in Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 4.

22Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 209.

23Annemarie Jacir, “Coming Home: Palestinian Cinema,” Electronic Intifada (February 27, 2007), available at electronicintifada.net. See also Ghassan Kanafani, “Returning to Haifa,” in Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, trans. Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 149–96.

24On the significance of the Nakba to Palestinian cinema, see Haim Bresheeth, “The Continuity of Trauma and Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the Nakba,” in Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, eds., Nakba, 161–87; and Nadia G. Yaqub, “Narrating the Nakba: Palestinian Filmmakers Revisit 1948,” in Dina Matar and Zahera Harb, eds., Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 225–47.

25C. L. R. James, “Revolution and the Negro,” in Scott McLemee and Paul le Blanc, eds., C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C. L. R. James, 1939–1949 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1994), 77.

26Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1998[1948]).

27Robinson, Black Marxism, 121–2.

28Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2010), 280, 47.

29Wilderson perversely makes a similar point in his effort to distinguish the Africans’ experience of slavery from the Jews who were exterminated in the Nazi genocide. As he writes, “Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust.” Ibid., 38.

30Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 246–7.

31As Rashid Khalidi writes, “Although the Zionist challenge definitely helped to shape the specific form Palestinian national identification took, it is a serious mistake to suggest that Palestinian identity emerged mainly as a response to Zionism.” Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010[1997]), 20. See also Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003[1994]).

32Robinson, Black Movements in America, 13.

33As Robinson contends, “American maroon communities frequently acquired the multicultural and multiracial character that liberal historians of the early twentieth century had expected of the whole nation.” Ibid., 13. On the original Rainbow Coalition, see Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011); and Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2013).

34Alistair Dawber, “‘Come Here, Obama, and Visit the Museum of Apartheid’: Pro-Palestinian Protesters Clash with Army in West Bank as US President Arrives in Tel Aviv,” The Independent (March 20, 2013), available at independent.co.uk; and David Shulman, “Hope in Hebron,” New York Review of Books blog (March 22, 2013), available at nybooks.com.

35Caleb Smith and Catherine Zaw, “Students Shut Down San Mateo–Hayward Bridge; 68 People Arrested, 11 Jailed,” Stanford Daily (January 19, 2015), available at stanforddaily.com.

36Robinson, Black Marxism, 318.

37Elias Sanbar, “Out of Place, Out of Time,” Mediterranean Historical Review 16, no. 1 (2001): 87–94.

38Wilderson sees a similar temporal dynamic at work with respect to Black Americans. As he argues, “The Black lost the coherence of space and time in the hold of the Middle Passage.” Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 315.

39This is precisely how Fred Moten describes the role of the prophet who, he writes, “is the one who tells the brutal truth, who has the capacity to see the absolute brutality of the already-existing and to point it out and to tell that truth, but also to see the other way, to see what it could be.” Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 131. Emphasis added.

40Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism, 138–9; and Robinson, Black Movements in America, 153.

41Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986[1959]), 1374; and C. L. R. James, Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1980), 79.

Chapter 9: Anti-Imperialism as a Way of Life: Emancipatory Internationalism and the Black Radical Tradition in the Americas

1I owe a debt of gratitude to Genesis Lara, Richard Lainez, Brittney Meija, and Yareliz Mendez-Zamora, staff members of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program’s Latina/o Diaspora in the Americas Research Project, for their editing and translation expertise.

2“Letter from B. F. Remington,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (February 19, 1852).

3See: “Says Sandino Served,” New York Times (January 6, 1928) and “Republic or Empire?” New York Amsterdam News (February 22, 1928). See also: “Nicaraguan War as a Forum Topic,” Amsterdam News (January 25, 1928).

4“Uncle Sam’s Hot Potato,” Pittsburg Courier (January 14, 1928); “Nicaraguan War as Forum Topic”; Neill MacAulay, The Sandino Affair (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967); Thomas W. Walker, Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle (Cambridge: Westview Press, 2003); Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 231–52.

5“Our Nicaraguan War,” Norfolk Journal and Guide (July 23, 1927).

6Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000[1983]). Robinson’s work is a reminder that Black radical intellectuals have long studied the relationship between slavery, racial capitalism, and imperialism. See: T. Thomas Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1884); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: A History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998[1935]), C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Vintage Books, 1989[1938]); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Doubleday, 1948); Paul Ortiz and Derrick White, “C. L. R. James on Oliver Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race: An Introduction,” New Politics XV, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 43–7; and C. L. R. James, “The Class Basis of the Race Question in the United States,” New Politics XV, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 48–60.

7I expand on these themes in An African American and Latinx History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, forthcoming). See also: Paul Ortiz, “Making History Matter: Teaching Comparative African American and Latina/o Histories in an Age of Neoliberal Crisis,” Kalfou 3, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 125–46.

8Elizabeth Martinez, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views For a Multi-Colored Century (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), 48.

9Sentimientos De La Nación de José María Morelos: Antología Documental (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México, 2013), 116–24. For broader treatments of the Mexican War of Independence, see: Theodore G. Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s First Black Indian President (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001); Virginia Guedea, “The Process of Mexican Independence,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (February 2000): 116–30; Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “The Mexican Declaration of Independence,” Journal of American History 85, no. 4 (March 1999): 1362–9. George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 53–115.

10Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain With Physical Sections and Maps, vol. 1, trans. John Black (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, et al., 1811), 246. For discussions of slavery, the imperial Spanish casta system and racial formation in colonial New Spain, see: Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Reconstructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Dennis N. Valdés, “The Decline of Slavery in Mexico,” The Americas 44, no. 2 (October 1987): 167–94.

11On Morelos and his role in the Mexican War of Independence, see: Rubén Hermensdorf, Morelos: Hombre Fundamental de México (Mexico: Aeromexico-Grijalbo, 1985); John Charles Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89–121; Wilbert H. Timmons, Morelos: Priest, Soldier, Statesman of Mexico (El Paso: Texas Western College Press, 1963); Peter F. Guardino, “The War of Independence in Guerrero, New Spain, 1808–1821,” in Christon I. Archer, ed., The Wars of Independence in Spanish America (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

12Eqbal Ahmad, “The Nature of Counterinsurgency,” in Carollee Bengelsdoorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani, eds., The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 55.

13Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, 84; Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 87.

14H. G. Ward, Mexico in 1827 (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 185.

15From: “Pastoral Letter of November 28, 1812, Addressed to Parish Priests and Other Clergy of the Diocese of Durango by the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral,” in Caste and Politics in the Struggle for Mexican Independence, The Newberry Library, n.d., available at dcc.newberry.org.

16Guedea, “The Process of Mexican Independence,” 119. For a comparative assessment, see: Marixa Lasso, “Race War and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena, 1810–1832,” American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (April 2006): 338.

17Ward, Mexico in 1827, 512.

18Ibid., 203; Peter B. Hammond, “Mexico’s Negro President,” Negro Digest (May 1951), 11.

19Ward, Mexico in 1827, 197.

20Bengelsdoorf et al., eds., Selected Writings.

21“To James Madison from José Maria Morelos” Founders Online, National Archives (July 14, 1815), available at founders.archives.gov. Translation by author.

22Ibid.

23For the Latin American wars of independence, see: Andrews: Afro-Latin America; Chasteen, Americanos; Peter Winn, Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 39–90.

24“From John Quincy Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, 14 April 1818,” Founders Online, National Archives, available at founders.archives.gov. For elaboration on John Quincy Adams’s views on slavery and racial capitalism, see also: “John Quincy Adams to John Adams” (December 21, 1817), in Worthington Chauncy Ford, ed., The Writings of John Quincy Adams, vol. 6 (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 276.

25“John Quincy Adams to George William Erving” (November 28, 1818), in Ford, ed., The Writings of John Quincy Adams, vol. 6, 486–7. For information on Erving, see: J. L. M. Curry, Diplomatic Services of George William Erving (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1890).

26“John Quincy Adams to George William Erving.” See also: Lynn Hudson Parsons, “In Which the Political Becomes the Personal, and Vice Versa: The Last Ten Years of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 438. For the Negro Fort, see: Matthew J. Clavin, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

27“Our Country,” The Colored American (September 22, 1838). Black newspapers and the journals of abolitionists featured numerous anti-imperial critiques of US foreign policy. For examples, see: “Manifesto of the Mexican Congress Concerning the Rebellion in Texas,” National Enquirer (December 10, 1836); “Southern Patriotism & Florida War,” National Enquirer (January 28, 1837); “Mr. Editor,” The Colored American (February 17, 1838); “Cuba,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (October 29, 1852); ‘‘Cuba and the United States,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (September 4, 1851); “Cuba—The Reason,” Provincial Freeman (June 3, 1854).

28“Letter from Frederick Douglass,” The National Anti-Slavery Standard (September 9, 1847). Speaking to members of the Sixth Congregational Church in Cincinnati, Martin Delany excoriated the United States for its imperialism and “affirmed that the war was instigated for the acquisition of slave territory, at the behest of Southern slaveholders.” “M. R. Delany,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (May 19, 1848). US newspapers accused Douglass and other abolitionists who spoke against the war on these terms as traitors. See: “The Negro Douglass,” National Anti-Slavery Standard (September 9, 1847).

29See: “Southern Patriotism & Florida War”; “Mr. Editor,” The Colored American (February 17, 1838); “Our Country”; “The Present Position of Mexico,” The Colored American (February 2, 1839); “Cuba and the United States”; “Cuba,” The Colored American (October 29, 1852).

30A correspondent from Mexico reported in an article titled “A New Plot of the Slave-Drivers” in the National Anti-Slavery Standard that slave owners were “trying to acquire Mexican territory, to own slaves there, but to also keep those regions from being available to fugitive slaves to hide” (August 4, 1855). On this topic, see Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s important work: Freedom’s Seekers: Essays on Comparative Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 21–40. Proof of enduring anti-slavery beliefs among Mexicans can be found in: “Speech of Mr. Clay, of Kentucky, in Support of His Propositions to Compromise on the Slavery Question in the Senate of the United States, February 5, 1850” (Washington: J. T. Towers, 1850), 6–7; “Speech of John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives, on the State of the Nation: Delivered May 25, 1836” (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010); Paul Bryan Gray, A Clamor for Equality: Emergence and Exile of Californio Activist Francisco P. Ramirez (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012).

31“Texas, Slavery, and American Prosperity: An Address Delivered in Belfast, Ireland,” Belfast News Letter (January 2, 1846), in John Blassingame et al., eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One–Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, available at glc.yale.edu.

32“The Word to America,” National Anti-Slavery Standard (July 8, 1847).

33“On Mexico,” The Liberator (June 8, 1849). See also: Editorial in The North Star (January 21, 1848).

34Robinson, Black Marxism.

35I expand on these themes in An African American and Latinx History of the United States. See also: Paul Ortiz, “‘Washington, Toussaint, and Bolívar, The Glorious Advocates of Liberty’: Black Internationalism and Reimagining Emancipation,” in William Link and James Broomall, eds., Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest For Black Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 187–215; Paul Ortiz, “Black History Month and the Cuban Solidarity Movement of the 1870s,” Beacon Broadside (February 25, 2015), available at beaconbroadside.com.

36I see emancipatory internationalism as a specific form of Black internationalism, the literature on which includes: Julius Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” PhD diss., Duke University (1986); Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1045–77; St. Clair Drake, “Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism,” in Joseph E. Harris, ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, 2nd ed. (Washington DC: Howard University, 1993), 11–40; Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

37Stephen Chambers, No God but Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States (London: Verso, 2015).

38“The Revolt in Texas,” Freedom’s Journal (April 20, 1827). Freedom’s Journal’s analysis of the outcome of the Latin American independence wars was a bit exaggerated; the final abolition of slavery in Colombia did not occur until 1851. The newspaper’s main argument however was that it was necessary to look to Mexico and to Latin America if one hoped to gain greater knowledge about the process of emancipation and freedom writ large.

39C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in (London: University Press of New England, 2001[1953]).

40“Slavery,” Freedom’s Journal (November 30, 1827).

41William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Williams, “Empire as a Way of Life,” The Nation (August 2–9, 1980): 104–19.

42“What Is to Be Done?” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (May 6, 1852).

43“Domestic Slave Trade,” National Anti-Slavery Standard (July 17, 1845); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 243; “A Bitter Inner Harbor Legacy: The Slave Trade,” Baltimore Sun (July 12, 2000); “The Secret History of the Slave Trade [in Baltimore],” Baltimore Sun (June 20, 1999).

44Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999[1950]), 196.

45“Benjamin Lundy and His Times,” Baltimore Sun (January 27, 1872). See also: Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Robert L. Hall, “Slave Resistance in Baltimore City and County, 1747–1790,” Maryland Historical Magazine 84 (1989): 305–18; Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

46“Underground Railroad Made Stops in Baltimore,” Baltimore Sun (October 22, 1993).

47“Twenty-Ninth Congress,” Baltimore Sun (March 19, 1846). “Stampede Among the Slaves—The Underground Railroad,” Baltimore Sun (October 27, 1849); “Opposition to the Underground Railroad,” Baltimore Sun (October 29, 1849). Well into the twenty-first century, archaeologists continue to discover hidden tunnels, camouflaged cisterns, and secret compartments in church basements that harbored fugitive slaves in Baltimore and its environs.

48See: The Life, Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy: Including His Journeys (Philadelphia: William D. Parish, 1847), 206–7; and Ralph Clayton, “Baltimore’s Own Version of ‘Amistad’: Slave Revolt,” Baltimore Chronicle (January 7, 1998), available at baltimorechronicle.com; Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 147–50.

49Ralph Clayton, Cash for Blood: The Baltimore to New Orleans Domestic Slave Trade (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2002).

50“Methodism and Slavery,” Freedom’s Journal (November 23, 1827).

51“Haytien Independence,” The Genius of Universal Emancipation and Baltimore Courier (September 12, 1825).

52Over the next century, African American communities continued to accord a place of honor to Bolívar alongside heroes of Latin American, African, and Irish anticolonialism. See: “William Whipper’s Letters, No. II,” The Colored American (February 20, 1841); “Gen. Antonio Maceo,” The Freeman (Indianapolis) (October 30, 1897); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001[1915]), 176, 182. For African American culture in Baltimore, see: Fields, Slavery and Freedom; Hall, “Slave Resistance in Baltimore”; Phillips, Freedom’s Port.

53Jack O’Dell, “Foundations of Racism in American Life,” Freedomways 4, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 98–9.

54“Speech of Frederick Douglass on the War,” Douglass Monthly, February 1862.

55We need much more research on the intimate relationships between freedom struggles in Mexico and the United States. Important works in this vein include: Gerald Horne, Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Christina L. Heatherton, The Color Line and the Class Struggle: The Mexican Revolution and Convergences of Radical Internationalism, 1910–1946, PhD diss., University of Southern California (2012); Bobby Vaughn and Ben Vinson III, “Unfinished Migrations: From the Mexican South to the American South—Impressions on Afro-Mexican Migration to North Carolina,” in Darién J. Davis, ed., Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 223–45.

56W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 15–16.

Chapter 10: Cedric J. Robinson’s Meditation on Malcolm X’s Black Internationalism and the Future of the Black Radical Tradition

1Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

2Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 134.

3Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 2005[1965]), 22–3.

4Ibid., 135.

5Michael C. Dawson, Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), ix–x.

6Robinson, Black Movements in America, 51.

7Ibid., 101.

8Ibid., 153.

9Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 183.

10E. U. Esien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for Identity in America (New York: Dell, 1969), 33–6.

11Edward E. Curtis, The Call of Bilal: Islam in the African Diaspora (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

12Marcus Garvey, “African Fundamentalism,” in Tony Martin, ed., African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey’s Harlem Renaissance (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1991), 4–6.

13Michael Omi and Howard Winant, eds., Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 82.

14Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 44–84.

15Mark Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy: The African American Foreign Affairs Network (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 140.

16Ibid., 142.

17John Henrik Clarke, Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), xix–xx.

18Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 25–6.

19Ibid., 27.

20This passage is from a speech Malcolm made in 1963 following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

21Darryl C. Thomas, The Theory and Practice of Third World Solidarity (Westport and London: Praeger Publishers, 2001), 29–30.

22Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, eds., Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 153; Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon, 26.

23Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy, 128.

24Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon, 4.

25Ibid., 5; Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy, 142–5.

26Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy, 147; Louis A. DeCaro, On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), 195.

27Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon, 38.

28John Henrik Clarke, Africans at the Crossroads: Notes for an African World Revolution (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), xxiii.

29Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964), 350.

30James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 208. Sohail Daulatzai makes a similar observation in Black Star, Crescent Moon, 39.

31Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy, 148.

32Ibid.

33Michael LeMay, The Perennial Struggle: Race, Ethnicity and Minority Group Relations in the United State, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004), 215.

34Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 173.

35Ibid., 175.

36Ibid.

37Ibid.

38See Edward E. Curtis, The Call of Bilal: Islam in the African Diaspora (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Michael A. Gomez, The Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); and Robinson, Black Marxism.

39Richard Benson, Fighting for Our Place in the Sun: Malcolm X and the Radicalization of the Black Student Movement, 1960–1973 (New York, Bern, and Berlin: Peter Lang, 2015), 39.

40Ibid., 39–40.

41Ibid., 41–2.

42See Michael L. Clemons, ed., African Americans in Global Affairs: Contemporary Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2010); Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy.

43Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 21.

44Ibid.

45Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharris, and Komozi Woodard Gore, eds., Want To Start A Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009), 131; Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy, 152.

46Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy, 152.

47Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis, 22.

48Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (New York: Oxford University, 2005), 16.

49Ibid.

50Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon, 5.

51Louis A. DeCaro, On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), 239.

52Daulatzai, Black Star Crescent Moon, 42–3.

53Frederick C. Harris, The Price of the Ticket (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.

54Ibid.

55Ibid., 5.

56Ibid., 6.

57Ali A. Mazrui and Lindah L. Mhando, Julius Nyerere, Africa’s Titan on a Global Stage: Perspectives from Arusha to Obama (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2012), 37.

58Hanes Walton, Jr. and Robert Smith, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, sixth edition (Pearson, 2015).

59Ibid., 38.

60Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenge to American National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

61Ibid., 285.

62Ibid., 286.

63Ibid., 314.

64Ibid., 365.

65Ledwidge, “Barack Obama,” 72.

Chapter 11: “It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel”: Democratic Living and the Radical Reimagining of Old Worlds

1Please note that a version of this essay was presented at the 2013 Historical Materialism Conference in London. I want to thank Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin for their saintly patience and generous editorial support. I also want to acknowledge C. A. Griffith’s endless suggestions and feedback. This essay remained 85 percent done for over eight months due to grief and heartbreak. I always imagined having the feedback of my friend and teacher of three decades, Cedric J. Robinson, before sending it to the editors. Even without the benefit of his review, I will always be in Cedric’s debt.

2US president Barack H. Obama at the Democratic National Convention (July 27, 2016).

3See the work of Mohammed Arkoun, especially Islam: To Reform or to Subvert, 2nd ed. (London: Saqi, 2006), for an exposition and deep analysis of modern discursive investments and the many missed opportunities to explore the unthought, especially in Islamic studies.

4In The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016[1980]), Cedric J. Robinson suggests that an obsession with political leadership and political authority as order has governed much of Western social thought, especially American political science. See also the welcome reprint with an instructive foreword by Erica R. Edwards: Robinson, The Terms of Order.

5Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

6Here I am appropriating Ahmed’s notion of a “willful subject,” who refuses to be governed by normative notions of happiness or to be complicit with the existing social orders and dominions, implicitly rejecting a futurist happiness. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014).

7By democratic living, I am less concerned with democratic governance (or democracy with a capital D) and not at all with the Democrats (another capital D). Instead, I am concerned with the art of living democratically, even under tyrannical regimes, however these regimes are characterized.

8While the Black Radical Tradition encompasses centuries of Black resistance against racial capitalism and hetero-patriarchal white supremacy throughout the modern world (see Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition [London: Zed Press, 1983]), I am limiting my coverage of Black resistance to the United States for the purposes of this essay.

9James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

10Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Robinson, Black Marxism and Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).

11Avery Gordon, Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), 187; Robinson, The Terms of Order and Black Movements in America.

12Even among those who study social movements and popular resistance, many are preoccupied with governing and rule making. Theorizing about governance and social protests thus centers largely on the one hand on Foucault’s exposition of “biopolitics” and “governmentality” to get at the varying practices of governing and, on the other hand, the Hegelian and Marxian treatment of popular resistance as a dialectical response to structural domination and oppression. Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).

13Building on Robinson’s critique (The Terms of Order), elsewhere I have argued that this is distinct from Western anarchism because the ungovernable seeks alternative to order, not necessarily an alternative order (H. L. T. Quan, “Emancipatory Social Inquiry: Democratic Anarchism and the Robinsonian Method,” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 16.

14Richard Rose, Governing and “Ungovernability”: A Sceptical Inquiry, Center for the Study of Public Policy (Glasgow: University of Stratchlyde, 1977), 1.

15Ibid.

16Interestingly, in many of President Barack Obama’s speeches about his approach to “global terrorism” and especially to ISIS, and (in constrast to his Republican opponents) despite his refusal to use the inflammatory language of “radical Islamic fundamentalism,” he rarely strays from the essential narrative of the problem/ungovernable subject, frequently characterizing ISIS fighters and their sympathizers as fundamentally distinct from “us,” even while explicitly acknowledging that they are “not an existentialist threat.” “Remarks by President Obama and President Macri of Argentina in Joint Press Conference,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary (March 23, 2016), available at whitehouse.gov.

17Consistent with this narrative, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign responded to the formidable challenge of her opponent thus: “We don’t need to make America great again because America is already great!” For an examination of Obama’s usage of “American exceptionalism,” see Greg Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism: How Obama Has Used His Presidency to Redefine ‘American Exceptionalism’,” Washington Post (June 3, 2015), available at washingtonpost.com.

18Robinson, The Terms of Order.

19The fear of a tyrannical, all-powerful state ironically does not seem to help analysts appreciate the many instances of failures by state actors. This is most apparent when critics of tyrannical regimes endow the state with such power and intelligence that they fail to seize on opportunities to expose the state’s ever-present incompentence and delinquency. That both major political parties in the US failed miserably to contain internal dissents, individual grafts and collective ambitions, and so were unable to enforce discipline on the electoral pageantry that led to the elevation of an undiscipline, corrupt, political novice, in the form of Donald Trump as the nominal head of the American empire should, at a minimum, warrant some reflections on the presumed compentency and rationality of the state.

20As cited in Friedrich Balke, “Derrida and Foucault on Sovereignty,” German Law Journal/Special Issue: A Dedication to Jacques Derrida 6, no. 1 (2005): 76.

21Ibid.

22Here I am appropriating Drucilla Cornell’s concept of “the imaginary domain” to draw attention to the psychic space where differences and various social identities are formed and reworked, though I argue that space is not necessarily individualized or autonomous. That is to say, the imaginary domain can be porous, individual, and collective. Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography and Sexual Harassment (New York: Routledge, 1995).

23On “necropolitics,” see Archille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

24Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

25David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 31. Emphasis added.

26Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

27James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

28The state (through its bureaucratic, coercive, and cultural apparatuses) naturalizes its authority and rationalizes its containment of people and communities through mechanisms of violence and narratives of exceptional authority and dominions over life.

29There are indeed instances of ungovernability from the top, but as pointed out earlier, ungovernability from the top cannot be equated with the absence of governing. For instance, it is not difficult to verify or controversial to assert that the hyperspeculative nature of today’s financial system is, to a degree, ungovernable. It seems dubious however, to characterize the 2013 US federal government shutdown as ungoverning; though some have taken to describing the House of Representatives as ungovernable. I think this is so because there are many individuals within the state apparatus that explicitly adhere to a neoliberal ideology, so that the state in itself can be said to be governed by neoliberalism: Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (London: Zone Books, 2015). Neoliberal state actors typically seek to dismantle whatever remnants are left of the social welfare contract so that ruling apparatuses appear to take on what Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as the antistate state form: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” in INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed., The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2009), 41–52. The antistate antics displayed by many state actors are political theater and should not be confused with the absence of governing from the top. Take the 2013 federal government shutdown, for example. It was the Republican Congressional rebels that caused financial instability and social disruption, not the forces of Occupy Wall Street or organized labor. Plato understood this when he noted that social instability typically stems from the top. Moreover, and despite the fact that it was the circuit of financialism and its agents that harassed the Congressional rebels into finally ending the shutdown, we continue to speak of the “White House” and “Congress” as if they were not merely anthropomorphized actors on a much bigger stage. The frequent staging of populism by the Republican Party, including the anti-bank and anti–Wall Street varieties, can be similarly characterized as theater. It was also the threat of a financial default that ended the shutdown—a default that translated to potentially real instability in the financial markets and huge losses to bondholders and other investors. It certainly was not the disruption of domestic welfare provisions that ultimately halted the false rebels in their tracks. Indeed, there is little evidence that there was an absence of governing during the shutdown. Therefore, it is unintelligible to speak of the US government as ungoverning when its Treasury, Defense Department, and surveillance apparatuses did not cease operation at any moment during the entire “shutdown.”

30Or, as Rose and Miller put it: “Political power is exercise … through a profusion of shifting alliances between diverse authorities in projects to govern a multitude of faces of economic activity, social life and individual conduct.” Nikolas S. Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology 61 (2010): 272.

31The problem is, as Foucault observed, that we have not succeeded in cutting off the king’s head, even more than two centuries after monarchist absolutism went out of fashion. This is what Foucault called “the great trap” and what I call state addiction—the tendency to conflate all things powerful with the sovereign. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).

32A focus on the “state of exception” and on “governmentality” and its corresponding apparatuses has fashioned this body of work, with the state continuing to signify the mightiest of all powers. A confluence of factors may explain this, namely: 1) the formalization of the US “global war on terror”; 2) the rediscovery of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology and his critique of universal claims of rights for the “human”; and, 3) Foucault’s work on biopolitics and governmentality (Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”).

33This reification, however unintended, is the reauthorization of the state as the center of governmental power.

34Giorgio Agamben is credited with reigniting interest in the state and in Carl Schmitt’s work at the start of the twenty-first century, especially in the power of the sovereign. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Meridian (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)—the first of a multivolume exposition on the sovereign—bare life is understood as life stripped of legal status, without rights, inhabiting the threshold of the juridico-political community. Schmitt was a jurist and theorist; his theory of the sovereign relies on the notion of the state of exception. He served as counsel for the Reich government in 1932, became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933, participated in the burning of books by Jewish authors, and called for more extensive purging of any works that embraced Jewish ideas. Also in 1933, Hermann Göring appointed Schmitt state councilor for Prussia. That same year, Schmitt became the president of the Union of National-Socialist Jurists, or the Nazi equivalent of the American Bar Association. As a professor at the University of Berlin, he was the Nazi intellectual—and his theoretical work served as the ideological foundation for Nazism and as justification for the autocratic state (auctoritas).

35Schmitt’s thesis grounds the exception for sovereignty in the Hobbesian presupposition of human nature and the exclusionary technologies of the global racial/sexual contracts. See Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2007).

36Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 280.

37Moments of partial consciousness that there is something beyond and perhaps more powerful than the state exist precisely not only because life is just as much, if not more compelling than death, but also because the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the ungovernable.

38Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

39Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.

40Ibid., iv.

41Short of anarchy or civil wars.

42Gordon calls upon something “more powerful than skepticism” as a practical utopian standpoint, a necessary stance for livable life. Keeping Good Time, 205.

43Robinson, The Terms of Order, 7, xi.

44This is best encapsulated in Western anarchism, whose rejection of the state merely represents an “alternate order,” not an “alternative to order.” Ibid.

45The elevation of Donald Trump, who is perceived as unacceptable by most of the establishment, nevertheless failed to persuade the “unruly mass,” especially as the majority of the (white) Republican electorate publically embraces the most virulent articulations of white nativism and bigotry, despite public disavowals by said establishment.

46For an exposition on the awesome power of the national security state, see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

47In Beloved, Toni Morrison (New York: Knopf, 1987) introduced the concept of “rememory” as remembering memories. She suggests that the practice of deliberate recalling is part of a larger process of countering willful forgetting.

48Robinson, Black Marxism, 243.

49Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1983), 1. The most significant example of marronage is the Quilombo dos Palmares in Brazil, where, for more than a century, an independent community of former slaves co-existed with and fought against first the Dutch and then the Portuguese slave plantocracies: Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

50Price, Maroon Societies, 2.

51Robinson, Black Movements in America.

52Indeed, “individual fugitives banding together to create independent communities of their own … struck directly at the foundations of the plantation system” (Price, Maroon Societies, 2–3).

53As Price explains: “Such communities stood out as an heroic challenge to white authority, and as the living proof of the existence of a slave consciousness that refused to be limited by the whites’ conception or manipulation of it” (Ibid., 3).

54Douglass captured well this fear when he argued against publicizing knowledge of the Underground Railroad. He explained it this way: “Such is my detestation of slavery that I would keep the merciless slaveholder ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave. He should be left to imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors, ever ready to snatch, from his eternal grasp, his trembling prey. In pursing his victim, let him be left to feel his way in the dark; let shades of darkness, commensurate with his crime, shut every ray of light from his pathway; and let him be made to feel, that, at every step he takes, with the hellish purpose of reducing a brother man to slavery, he is running the frightful risk of having his hot brains dashed out by an invisible hand” (Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 324).

55Samuel A. Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” Debow’s Review XI (1851).

56Eduardo Galeano and Mark Fried, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History (New York: Nation Books, 2013), 25.

57Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (London: Zed Books, 1987), 262.

58See the feature-length documentary América’s Home (dirs. C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan, QUAD Productions 2012).

59Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

60In the forms of Jim Crow, debt peonage, and mass incarceration, to name a few. Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

61Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) is a wonderful exception. For Browne, dark souveillance is a continuous practice throughout the history of Black resistance. It is part of the larger praxis of fugitivity. Dark souveillance fundamentally subverts rule-making projects and renders Blackness illegible to the state and other forms of dominions.

62Even in the critical work on mass incarceration, the prison industrial complex and prison abolitionism relies on slavery’s afterlife (e.g., the convict lease system) to learn about slavery of a previous era, not of the current one. To be sure, this looking back is essential to both the theoretical production about prisons as a system and social praxis, as well as formulating critical resistance to mass incarceration.

63W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: A History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998[1935]); Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois was quite explicit about the failure of post-reconstruction reforms to abolish slavery as an economic, cultural, and political institution in total.

64Official estimates list 29.8 million (The Global Slavery Index 2013, Walk Free Foundation, available at walkfreefoundation.org).

65Gordon (Keeping Good Time) points to Toni Cade Bambara’s utopian thought and suggests that part of being free is being “unavailable for servitude.” I am extending this line of argument to include the refusal to be governed.

66Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd, To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

67Ibid., 145.

68Ibid., 149–50.

69Ibid., 155–6.

70Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 279.

71Robinson, Black Marxism.

72Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 273.

73“Q.U.E.E.N,” a neo-soul song, appears on Monáe’s album The Electric Lady (2013) and was produced by Chuck Lightning, Nate Rocket, and Monáe. It was nominated for multiple awards, including the Soul Train Music Award for Best Dance Performance and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Song.

74Clearly this is a riff on the medulla oblongata, a portion of the hindbrain that is responsible for autonomic functions and relaying messages between the brain and the spinal cord. So presumably for the Ministry, Badu is genetically predisposed to be baaaad! Or badly subversive.

75Robinson, Black Marxism; Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

76I am grateful to Erica R. Edwards for insisting, nearly a decade ago, that I “need to check out” Monáe’s work.

77Moten, In the Break, 2.

78Ibid., 255.

79In Precarious Life, Judith Butler (Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence [New York: Verso, 2004]) astutely observes: “The differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?” While this consideration of grievability is within the context of the war dead, Butler’s observation is cogent here insofar as Black people who are killed, especially by the police, are nearly always perceived as not deserving of public mourning and retributive or reparative justice, as evident by the majority of officers who killed who are either not charged or not convicted of any wrongdoing (Naomi Zack, White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of US Police Racial Profiling and Homicide [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015]). For further information on police homicides, especially of unarmed Black and brown people, see updated compilations by The Guardian (Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, and Jamiles Lartey, “The Counted: People Killed by Police in the US,” available at theguardian.com), The Washington Post (Kimberly Kindy, Marcy Fisher, Julie Tate, and Jennifer Jenkins, “A Year of Reckoning: Police Fatally Shoot Nearly 1,000,” available at washingtonpost.com), and, the Mapping Police Violence project (available at mappingpoliceviolence.org).

80In a remarkable reflection on the epidemic of police homicides of Black people in the United States, the philosopher Naomi Zack (White Privilege and Black Rights) argues that because “police racial profiling and homicide have been found to be bounded by law, individual misinformation, distorted cultural association of crime and race, and the legacies of earlier injustice” (93), not having to worry about police killing is less about white privilege and more about Black people’s rights. Therefore, we need an “applicative justice [that can] bring the legal treatments of black people with the legal treatments of white people beyond written law, into real life practice” (95). Until then, “simply reiterating how whites are ‘privileged’ is not an effective response” for academics or activists.

81For further information, consult Anne Bowler’s informative essay “Politics as Art: Italian Futurism and Fascism,” Theory and Society 20, no. 6 (December 1991): 763–94.

82Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds., Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 49–53.

83For an English translation of The Fascist Manifesto, see conservapedia.com.

84Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 9.

85Susana M. Morris, “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, nos. 3 and 4 (2012): 148–9.

86Current arms conflicts include, in alphabetical order: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. According to Nick Turse of The Nation, this list does not include the various operations by US Special Operation Command (SOCOM), which has special operation forces (SOFs) in 134 countries for the purpose of combat, special missions, or advising and training: “America’s Secret War in 134 Countries,” The Nation (January 16, 2014), available at thenation.com.

87I am not alone in characterizing the incoming US president as a proto-fascist. Ironically, some of the most decisive assertions have come from neoconservatives. Among them, Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is most insightful in his analysis of the abject failure of the Republican Party to reject its own presidential nominee. As he warns in the May 18, 2016 column: “This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ‘tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party—out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear—falling into line behind him” (Robert Kagan, “This Is How Fascism Comes to America,” Washington Post [May 18, 2016], available at washingtonpost.com). Unlike Kagan and other neoconservatives, I take a cue from Oliver Cromwell Cox (1964) when he suggested that fascism is not alien to or deviant from the US brand of capitalist democracy. Cox explained that fascists are the “capitalists and their sympathizers who have achieved political class consciousness [and] have become organized” as a class against workers in defense of capitalism (as cited in H. L. T. Quan, Growth Against Democracy: Savage Developmentalism in the Modern World [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012], 195). The fact that the nominally civilian administration in waiting is utterly reliant on the sensibilities and interests of generals and extremely wealthy corporate representatives suggests an intentional coupling of militarist and capitalist ideologies, not uncommon in many fascist regimes.

88Elsewhere in my work, I use the term “savage developmentalism” to characterize key features of such a regime. I define savage developmentalism as the overarching logic of modern economic thought and developmental programs that rely on expansionism, order, and antidemocracy; and, the consequences of which necessarily entail a great deal of violence, cruelty, and dehumanization. For further reference, see Quan, Growth Against Democracy. See also Brown, Undoing the Demos for neoliberalism’s “stealth revolution” against democracy.

89See, for instance, the many millionaires and billionaires who are deemed worthy of holding public offices simply because they are “successful,” or nearly two decades worth of Hollywood movies about wealthy superheroes (e.g., Batman, Iron Man), not to mention episodic television shows featuring billionaire saviors.

Chapter 12: The Bruise Blues

1Chuck Morse, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999).

2See Berlin filmmaker Philip Scheffner’s new film Havarie (2016), an extraordinarily powerful and visually experimental treatment of thirteen Algerian men floating in a rubber dinghy in the Mediterranean Sea, awaiting the arrival of the Spanish Coast Guard. See Avery F. Gordon, “Keeping Eye Contact,” Berlinale Forum 2016, available at arsenal-berlin.de/fileadmin/user_upload/forum/pdf2016/forum_englisch/E_Havarie.pdf.

3Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 214.

4Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), xii—xiii.

5See Camden Art Centre’s website for a description and images of the exhibition, available at camdenartscentre.org.

6Personal correspondence from Nisha Matthews, whom I thank for inviting me to participate in the panel on January 10, 2015, and for prompting the writing of this piece. These ideas were further developed for Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s session on violence and the problem of the visual at the CASAR Annual Conference held at the American University of Beirut in January 2016.

7Rich Juzwiak and Aleksander Chan, “Unarmed People of Color Killed by Police, 1999–2014,” Gawker (December 8, 2014), available at gawker.com and at huffingtonpost.com; Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, and Jamiles Lartey, “The Counted: People Killed by Police in the US,” available at theguardian.com. The Guardian began its project because the US government has no comprehensive record of people killed by the police and other law enforcement agencies.

8James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation (July 11, 1966).

9“The degeneration of racial regimes occurs with some frequency for two reasons. First, apparent difference in identity is an attempt to mask shared identities … A second source of regime entropy ensues from the fact that because the regimes are cultural artifices, which catalog only fragments of the real, they inevitably generate fugitive, unaccounted-for elements of reality. Abraham Lincoln’s insistence that fugitive slaves were “contraband” (in effect, property which had illegally seized itself) did not prepare the president for their role in subverting his war aims. Lincoln believed reuniting the nation did not require the abolition of human property. As fugitives, troops, and sailors, that same property disabused him of his delusional political program. This was an instance of what Hegel termed the negation of the negation, flawed or delinquent comprehension colliding with the real.” Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, xiii–xiv.

10See Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Whiteness of Police,” American Quarterly (2014): 1091–9; Pasquale Pasquino, “Theatrum Politicum: The Geneaology of Capital—Police and the State of Prosperity” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); George S. Rigakos, John L. McMullan, Joshua Johnson, and Guilden Ozcan, eds., A General Police System: Political Economy and Security in the Age of Enlightenment (Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2009); Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Markus Dirk Dubber, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

11To watch Bobby Seale deliver BPP Executive Mandate No. 1 outside the lawn of the California statehouse, see pbs.org/hueypnewton/actions/actions_capitolmarch.html. On the American Revolution, see Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

12Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

13Singh, “The Whiteness of Police.”

14See Avery F. Gordon, “Some Thoughts on the Utopian,” “Something More Powerful Than Skepticism” (on Toni Cade Bambara), and “An Anthropology of Marxism” (on Cedric J. Robinson) in Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), and Avery F. Gordon, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

15Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (London: Verso, 1998), 16.

16Ibid, 39.

17Ibid., 20.

18Ibid., 27. See Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

19Reich’s Come Out can be found on YouTube.

20This is not an unreasonable response, given Ligon’s work and the making of Live for an exhibition with two major works in relation to the Harlem 6. But it is also an analytic stretch. Glenn Ligon has had a long engagement with Richard Pryor, including a series of neon color paintings made in 2004 that consist of words taken from Pryor’s standup routines, and thus there is another context for interpretation I ignore here.

21On criminal anthropology and race-making, see Avery F. Gordon, “‘I’m Already in a Sort of Tomb’: A Reply to Philip Scheffner’s The Halfmoon Files,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 121–54.

22It has also been predictive to the extent that in the United States especially, the criminalization of Black people operates like a kind of laboratory for experimentation in procedure, legitimation, and management, thus enabling application to other groups.

23Here the work of groups such as Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence are crucial for leading the way in finding alternative languages and practices to policing and incarceration. See, for example, Critical Resistance’s Abolitionist Toolkit at criticalresistance.org and INCITE!’s Anti–Police Brutality Palm Card available at incite-national.org. See also Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012) and Sarah Lamble, “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action” in Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, eds. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011).

24Evident, he thought, in Ligon’s Pryor paintings. See Simpson, “Pryor Versions.”

25We might also see respect in the fact that Live begins and ends with the film Live on the Sunset Strip shown in its integrity on all seven screens, which enables the artist and the viewer who watches the entire installation to credit the makers of the film. It also reminds us that in the beginning and in the end there is a whole person before the cuts.

26Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000[1983]), xxx.

27At the conference “Confronting Racial Capitalism: The Black Radical Tradition and Cultures of Liberation” held at the CUNY Graduate Center on November 20–1, 2014, and organized by Jordan Camp, Christina Heatherton, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the “Black Radical Internationalist Tradition” was the term Barbara Ransby used in her presentation to signify and distinguish the specific standpoint represented there and among most of the contributors to this volume. At that conference, Cedric Robinson nominated the word “ideology” as the tradition’s key watchword. He said, “It’s not experience that frames our conduct but ideology.”

28Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2001), 157.

29Ibid.

Chapter 13: “The People Who Keep on Going”: A Listening Party, Vol. I

1Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940).

2Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1983), xxx.

3Ibid., xxxii.

4Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1998).

5Amiri Baraka, Black Music (New York: W. Morrow, 1967).

6Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 11.

7Ingrid Monson, “Jazz Articles: Revisited! The Freedom Now Suite,” JazzTimes (September 2001), available at jazztimes.com.

8Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 115.

9Robinson, Black Marxism, 170–1.

10“Is It Cos I Is Black?,” The Guardian (January 12, 2000), available at theguardian.com.

11Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton, The Subcultures Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), 420.

12Robinson, Black Marxism, 171.

13Ibid., 291.

14Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Dictionary of African Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54.

15Miriam Makeba, Jonas Gwangwa, and E. John Miller, The World of African Song (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 11.

16Nompumelelo Zondi, “Bahlabelelelani: Why Do They Sing? Gender and Power in Contemporary Women’s Songs,” PhD diss., University of KwaZulu-Natal (2008).

17Translation by Zanele Netshapapame.

18John Western, “A Divided City: Cape Town,” Political Geography 21, no. 5 (2002): 711–16.

19Bantu Affairs Committee, Second Report from the Sessional Committee on Bantu Affairs (1968).

20Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 87.

21Virginia Hamilton, Leo Dillon, and Diane Dillon, The People Could Fly (New York: Knopf, 1985), 142.

22The Great Debaters [film], dir. Denzel Washington (USA: Weinstein Company, 2007).

23Robinson, Black Marxism, 124. Emphasis in original.

24Robinson, Black Marxism, 170.

25Alexa Teodoro, “OCnotes on Why Black Weirdo Matters,” Seattle Weekly (February 17, 2015), available at seattleweekly.com.

26“Black Weirdo of the Week 3: OCnotes,” Black Weirdo (February 25, 2014), available at uniquenoir.tumblr.com.

27Quoted in Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, Keywords for American Cultural Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 73.

28Matthew Schnipper, “Staff Lists: The 100 Best Tracks of 2015,” Pitchfork (December 14, 2015), available at pitchfork.com.

29“Activists Chant Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright’ in Protest at Police Harassment,” FACT (July 9, 2015), available at factmag.com.

30Chris Barsanti, “Don’t Call Them Proto-Punk: A Band Called Death,” Popmatters (July 3, 2013), available at popmatters.com.

31By 2010, Detroit’s population was less than half what it had been fifty years prior (Detroit’s Financial Crisis [Detroit: State of Michigan, 2013], available at michigan.gov/documents/detroit-cantwait/DetroitFactSheet_412909_7.pdf).

32Plagued by the decline of the automobile industry, urban decay, unemployment, and poverty, Detroit became the largest American city to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in 2013 and has come to be known as a “ghost town” (“Detroit: Now A Ghost Town,” Time [2009], available at content.time.com).

33Stephen Thompson, “Death: A ’70s Rock Trailblazer, Reborn,” NPR (March 17, 2010), available at npr.org.

34In a further example of language transformation, “downpression” is the Rastafarian term for “oppression,” which is used because oppression holds you down, rather than lifts you up, where “up” and “opp” are homophonic prefixes.

35Klaus De Albuquerque, Millenarian Movements and the Politics of Liberation (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1977).

36Barry Chevannes, “Rastafari: Towards a New Approach,” New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 64, nos. 3–4 (1990): 127–48.

37Walter Rodney, A. M. Babu, and Vincent Harding, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981 [1972]), 131.

38Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 11.

39Aisha Harris, “Janelle Monáe Brings a Powerful New Protest Song to the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Slate (August 14, 2015), available at slate.com.

40“Rnb Sensation Janelle Monáe Is Here Because We Need Her,” Evening Standard (July 4, 2011), available at standard.co.uk.

41Janelle Monáe, “Hell You Talmbout” [image] (2015), available at instagram.com/p/6VNc3hn_m1.

42Karas Lamb, “Ray Angry Stirs Revolution with ‘Celebration of Life Suite’,” Revive Music (August 24, 2015), available at revive-music.com.

43George Lewis, “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Cultures in Voyager,” Leonardo Music Journal 10 (2000): 33–9.

44Ibid., 33, 37.

45Maureen Jenkins, “African-Americans in Paris: ‘It’s Always Been About Freedom for Us’,” CNN (February 26, 2013), available at edition.cnn.com.

46Philip Sherburne, “Thundercat: ‘Paris’,” Pitchfork (November 18, 2015), available at pitchfork.com.

Chapter 14: Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence

1Versions of this lecture were delivered at the twenty-ninth annual Sojourner Truth Lecture for the Department of Africana Studies of the Claremont Colleges (September 2014); Confronting Racial Capitalism: A Conference in Honor of Cedric Robinson at the CUNY Graduate Center (November 2014); the Antipode Institute for Geographies of Justice, Women’s Gaol, Johannesburg (July 2015); the American Studies Association (October 2015); and the biannual conference of the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut (January 2016). The author is grateful to the editors of this volume and to many interlocutors for encouraging criticism.

2China Miéville, Embassytown (New York: Del Rey, 2011), 191.

Chapter 15: An Interview on the Futures of Black Radicalism

1Interview with Cedric Robinson by H. L. T. Quan, quoted in Quan, “Geniuses of Resistance: Feminist Consciousness and the Black Radical Tradition,” Race and Class 47, no. 2 (October 2005): 47.

2June Jordan, “Moving Towards Home,” in Living Room.

3The members of the delegation were: Rabab Abdulhadi, San Francisco State University; Ayoka Chenzira, artist and filmmaker, Atlanta, GA; Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz; Gina Dent, University of California, Santa Cruz; G. Melissa Garcia, Dickinson College; Anna Romina Guevarra, author and sociologist, Chicago, IL; Beverly Guy-Sheft all, author, Atlanta, GA; Premilla Nadasen, author, New York, NY; Barbara Ransby, author and historian, Chicago, IL; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University; and Waziyatawin, University of Victoria.

4See Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, eds., Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, CA, and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2015).

5See Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Cedric People

1Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 239.

2Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (Oakland, CA: University of California Press), 128.

3Robin D. G. Kelley, “Foreword,” in Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xx.

4Ibid.

5Avery Gordon, “Preface,” in Cedric J. Robinson, ed., An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Burlington Ashgate, 2001), xi.

6Robinson, Black Marxism, 171. Emphasis added.

7Ibid., 169.

8Ibid., 316.

Winston Whiteside and the Politics of the Possible

1Cedric J. Robinson, remarks at Critical Ethnic Studies Conference (September 20, 2013), audio recording in author’s possession.

2Cedric J. Robinson, “Amilcar Cabral and the Dialectic of Portuguese Colonialism,” Radical America 15, no. 3 (May–June 1981): 39–57.

3Go to Cedric’s Wikipedia page and you will see Mr. Whiteside mentioned, but nothing identifying him or his history.

4Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 169.

5Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 116. Note that in most of the archival documents Mrs. Whiteside’s first name is spelled “Cecelia,” but for the purposes of consistency I will use “Cecilia” as it appears in Black Movements in America.

6US Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900 (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1900), T623.

7US Census, 1850, Polk, Rutherford, North Carolina, roll M432_644, page 250A, image 44. US Bureau of the Census, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860: Slave Schedules (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1860), M653.

8Lenwood Davis, The Black Heritage of Western North Carolina (Asheville, NC: The Southern Highlands Research Collection, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 1986), 13.

9There was another Benjamin Whiteside who joined the Sixtieth Regiment US Colored Troops and fought in Arkansas, but he hailed from Missouri where he enlisted in 1863. Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served the United States Colored Troops: 56th–Í38th USCT Infantry, 1864–1866, National Archives, available at https://www.fold3.com/document/302330834.

10US Census, 1870, Mobile Ward 7, Mobile, Alabama, roll M593_31, page 224B.

11US Census, 1870, Mobile Ward 7, Mobile, Alabama, roll M593_31, page 224B; Alabama, Select Marriages, 1816–1942, available at ancestry.com.

12Mobile, Alabama, City Directory, 1876.

13Mobile, Alabama, City Directory, 1883, 1885, 1901, 1909; US Census, 1900, T623. The first notice I found of Benjamin Whiteside’s wood business was in the 1901 city directory, listed at 613 N. Jackson Street, which would have been next door to their house. The 1900 census lists the family residence as 613 N. Jackson, but all city directories and other documents identified their residence as 615. Since other families would come to occupy 613, it can be assumed that Benjamin Whiteside either rented it or purchased it and later rented it out. To settle this matter will require further research. On A. C. Danner & Co. and R. L. Maupin & Co., see John E. Land, Mobile: Her Trade, Commerce and Industries, 1883–1884 (Mobile: Author, 1884), 55 and 84; Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 135.

14Mobile, Alabama, City Directory, 1898 and 1899.

15US Census, 1910, Mobile Ward 1, Mobile, Alabama, roll T624_27, page 4B, enumeration district 0078, FHL microfilm 1374040.

16Alabama, Deaths and Burials Index, 1881–1974, film number 1894077, available at ancestry.com.

17Alabama, Death Index, 1908–1959, vol. 28, certificate 335, available at ancestry.com.

18US Census, 1900, Mobile Ward 1, Mobile, Alabama, roll 31, page 4B, enumeration district 0095, FHL microfilm 1240031. According to family lore, Ella was “three-quarters Indian and one-quarter French” and Corine’s father was an Irishman named Lorenzo Cunningham. But, according to the Census, Ella was just another Negro like the rest of her family and neighbors, and the two Lorenzo Cunninghams I could find in Mobile at the time were both “colored”—one a barber and the other a public-school teacher. Handwritten letter in Elizabeth Robinson’s possession dated 1975; Mobile, Alabama, City Directory, 1900 and 1901; US Census, 1900, Mobile Ward 7, Mobile, Alabama, roll 32, page 15A, enumeration district 0106, FHL microfilm 1240032.

19US Census, 1920, Mobile Ward 1, Mobile, Alabama, roll T625_34, page 3B, enumeration district 96, image 860; Winston Wilmer Whiteside, WWI Draft Registration Card, Mobile, Alabama, roll 1509409, Draft Board 1; Mobile, City Directory, 1918, 1920, 1922.

20Mobile, Alabama, City Directory, 1924 and 1926; Cecelia T. Whiteside, Social Security Death Index; their daughters are identified by their new names in the 1930 Census. US Census, 1930, Oakland, Alameda, California, roll 102, page 14B, enumeration district 0023, image 28.0, FHL microfilm 2339837.

21Oakland City Directory, 1927, 1928, 1933; US Census, 1930, Oakland, Alameda, California, roll 102, page 14B, enumeration district 0023, image 28.0, FHL microfilm 2339837.

22Elizabeth Robinson interview with author, August 12, 2016.

23Elizabeth Robinson interview with author, June 28, 2016; State of California, California Birth Index, 1905–1995 (Sacramento, CA: State of California Department of Health Services, Center for Health Statistics).

24In 1942, Whiteside lists his place of employment as the County Courthouse, 200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Winston Wilmer Whiteside, Draft Registration Cards for Fourth Registration for California, 04/27/1942–04/27/1942, NAI number 603155, Records of the Selective Service System, record group number 147.

25Beryl Warren interview with author, July 5, 2016.

26Robinson, Black Marxism, 168. Césaire introduces the concept of “thingification” in Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000[1950]), 62.