The following interview was conducted by Casey Goonan, an editor with True Leap Press. It originally appeared in the independent, open-access journal Propter Nos. 

Casey Goonan: The US white-supremacist state operates today through a different set of discourses and cultural structures than in previous epochs. Your work interrogates such shifts at a level of depth and nuance that is of particular importance for emergent struggles against racist state violence. “Multiculturalist white supremacy,” “post-racial liberal optimism,” “white academic raciality”—such terms are utilized throughout your work to interrogate a myriad of theoretical and historical conundrums that define the post-Civil Rights era, particularly in regards to racial violence and subjectivity. Can you, in very broad strokes, lay out what you are trying to accomplish with these interventions in the discourses, practices, and forms of embodiment that so violently delimit the possibilities for radical social change in the United States?

Dylan Rodríguez: The aftermath of American apartheid’s formal abolition has been overwhelmed by a grand national-cultural vindication of “Civil Rights” as the vessel of fully actualized gendered-racial citizenship. This fraud has, in various ways, facilitated rather than interrupted the full, horrific exercise of a domestic war-waging regime. For the sake of momentary simplicity, we can think about it along these lines: the half-century narrative of Civil Rights victory rests on an always-fragile but persistent common sense—the idea that national political culture (“America”) and the spirit of law and statecraft (let’s call this “The Dream”) endorse formal racial equality. Bound by this narrative-political context, the racist state’s mechanics shift and multiply to rearticulate a condition of normalized racist violence that is condoned or even applauded by the institutionalized regimes of Civil Rights. (It is not difficult to see how the NAACP, JACL, LULAC, Lambda, NOW, Urban League and other like-minded organizations condone or applaud domestic racial war, so long as it is directed at the correct targets: gang members, drug dealers, “violent criminals,” terrorists, etc.). In other words, the contemporary crisis of racist state violence is not reducible to “police brutality” and homicidal policing, or even the structuring asymmetries of incarceration: it is also a primary derivative of the Civil Rights regime.

This regime is in some ways inseparable from the emergence of post-1960s technologies of criminalization that resonate with—rather than offend—the (defrauded) dream of vindicated Civil Rights citizenship. After all, the racial/racist state is still being called upon to legislate, protect, and serve the Civil Rights Citizen, even as it is the subject of militant demands for reform that will align it with the Civil Rights versions of America and The Dream. This is the contradiction that yields more and more layers of gendered racist statecraft in the post-optimist’s Age of Obama.

The widespread, Black-populated and Black-led resistance and revolt that is responding to legally-sanctioned racist police killings should therefore be interpreted as a complex form of insurgency. It is, in significant part, a strike against the respectable, non-scandalous, legitimated forms of policing that have constituted the everyday racist truth of post-Civil Rights nation-building. This insurgency is also, then, a critique of the Civil Rights regime’s complicity in that fifty-year process of national-racial reconstruction.

So the racist state has metastasized in the last half century, and created new infrastructures and protocols of civil and social death (the industrialized, militarized policing and criminalization complexes) as well as proto-genocidal methods of targeted, utterly normalized suffering, misery, and physiological vulnerability for peoples on the other side of White Being (the paradigm and methodology of human being that we have inherited as universal, unquestioned, and godlike—here I’m referencing Sylvia Wynter’s lifework, of course). I’m thinking, among so many other things, of the levees in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, strategic ecological disruption of indigenous lifeways throughout the hemisphere and in Native Hawaii, redirection and isolation of toxic water to the poorest, Blackest, and Brownest of places, and the seemingly endless continuity of legalized police assassinations of ordinary (and asymmetrically poor, Black, and Brown) people that stretches back as far as modern policing has existed.

So, if shit is this bad—and it’s so, so stunningly clear that it is almost always worse than we want to believe it is—what is the historical responsibility borne by people who differently inherit and inhabit this condition?

I am against “unity”—militantly so—and full of desire for radical community (militantly so). At the risk of making the case too bluntly: we experience and condone banal liberal calls to unity (which are often depressingly nationalist or patriotic) so incessantly that they are inescapable (e.g. those stupid fucking French flag colors that folks superimposed on their Facebook profile pictures after the street attacks in Paris, which was like global advertising for White Lives Matter; or the absurd compulsion to insist that one is not “anti-police” when mourning yet another life destroyed by the full force of the police apparatus—because it’s never just one or two or five racist cops, it’s what protects and enables them). These are concessions to a form of political life (which is to say a particular genre of human life—White Being) that cannot be tolerated as such, if some of us expect to live or see others live. I think such concessions must be critically exposed for what they are: disciplinary exercises in assimilating different peoples’ political dreams to the conformities of White Being. At the very same time—and this is the hard part—these critical gestures have to somehow participate in creating possibilities for collective exercises of radical, creative, political-cultural genius that demystify White Being and embolden (or even productively weaponize) other insurgent practices and methodologies of human life. This is difficult, scary, and beautiful work. And if more people don’t attempt to engage in it, we know who will be the first to disappear.

Casey: Could you speak a bit more on what you mean by emphasizing the need to “embolden” and “productively weaponize” other practices and methodologies of human life?

Dylan: I’m talking about how necessary it is to take seriously how peoples (in the most differentiated sense of the notion of “peoples”) have created forms of relationality, cultural reproduction, survival, revolt, and collective being under the eviscerating conditions of this Civilization. This happens everywhere, all the time. In 1496, 1896, and 2016. Down the street and on the other side of the planet. It’s the underside of human being that the official scripts and dominant narratives of the modern world can never adequately rationalize or eliminate. This is to say that decisively displacing the universality of the White Being—and of any such universality altogether—is only a fraction of what is at stake. The fact is—and this is a long-running fact, at least half a millennium old—there are other ways of inhabiting “human being” that are constituted by the violent vulnerabilities normalized by global white-supremacist power, in all of its misogynist, colonial, chattel, and sexual normative (including “homonormative”) iterations. This is just what the fuck it means to try to live under the Civilizational regime. And this work of living, of being, of figuring out ways to thrive, when and where possible, absolutely does not require trying to deform and self-mutilate into the “human” methodologies of the White Being. Peoples everywhere have proved this.

Look, I also don’t want to be too easily mis-read here. There isn’t just one way of White Being, and we cannot overemphasize enough that White Being cannot be conflated with “white people.” Undoubtedly, Fanon is still correct in stressing the epidermalized, physiologically activated structure of power that inheres in white bodies (however white bodies are socio-politically formed and institutionalized in a given moment). My point here is that White Being constitutes another layer of dominance precisely because it is capable of hailing other beings, inviting them, seducing them—and this is yet another method to humiliate and degrade (perhaps even “de-humanize”) the “underside peoples” I am referencing.

Finally, we have to admit to ourselves that one of the most important struggles is against the desire to coalesce with White Being, both in the sense of political affinity and the conception of good living. It doesn’t make sense to funnel all manner of insurgent activities (art, organized protest, underground political work, etc.) into demands, of this particular global racial order, that peoples targeted by White Being (now and forever) be enfolded into White Being, whether by virtue of Rights, Citizenship, Marriage, or something else. Those demands may be momentarily necessary and vital for the sake of resisting state violence, but have been demonstrated over and again to work, in the longer historical span, in the service of White Being and no other beings. What, then, would it mean to not only decisively displace the ascendancy of White Being (Civilization), but to also seek to thrive as the descendants of our particular, differentiated conditions of historical vulnerability?

Casey: Thank you for clarifying that point. Given your work as a scholar and student of radical movements that are engaged in political activity from within what you consider to be civil society’s carceral underside (i.e. the US jail/prison), what would you say are the most significant contradictions or points of antagonism arising between the terms of engagement which define the current phase of popular movement addressing criminalization and police violence and the current (and ongoing) work of imprisoned activists and intellectuals? One place we might start is recalling the aftermath of the assassination of Yogi Pinell last year at New Folsom. In this moment, it became rather apparent that a number of theoretical and practical fractures still exist between popular mobilizations on the “outside” and the political labors (and lives) of imprisoned activists “inside.” Just going off the basic fact that news of the murder of this beloved elder in the Black/Prisoner liberation struggle (clearly orchestrated by the CA prison regime) scarcely circulated in the public discourse, barely galvanizing the sentiment of free world activists (outside of certain political circles), I believe, is revealing of the types of slippages and antagonisms I am alluding to.

Dylan: This is difficult to cleanly answer, because in my view (and experience), there are sites and moments of overlap between these forms of political and cultural movement that both illuminate and blur the assumptive alienation between prison/jail and the “free world.” Further, my perspective is deformed by the fact that I am at best a reader, theorist, and interpreter of incarcerated radical praxis. Still, I think it’s possible to identify a couple points of contradiction and antagonism between: 1.) movements by and of incarcerated people and 2.) movements of revolt against anti-Black racism and homicidal police violence that are based in spheres of civil society.

First, while it is not always the case that carceral insurgencies are led or predominated by Black people held captive, it is very often a fact that such movements explicitly recognize the carceral regime as a paradigm of anti-Black violence. This is why recent political and cultural movements by incarcerated people so consistently make use of the rhetorics, symbols, and legal archives of racial chattel slavery in their internal and public discourses (including platforms and demands issued by captive people engaging in hunger strikes in places like Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere). On the other hand, I think there is work to be done to adequately understand whether and how current, free world-based struggles against anti-Black racist state violence may be hanging onto a fraudulent dream of (Black) citizenship even as they catalyze forms of art, critical thought, liberationist praxis, and (Black) human being that push the imagination against and past the delimited institution of citizenship (a stand-in for White Being) and toward other kinds of political-cultural vistas. That’s one thing.

The other thing is this: the weight of institutionalized dehumanization (and that’s what the carceral regime is, in its gendered-racial violence) is mind-numbing, vast, and almost entirely incalculable. We can recite statistics all day, but there is no way to adequately communicate how the last half-century of criminalization and human captivity has permanently altered peoples’ worlds. Here’s the thing, though: people who are or have been incarcerated for any length of time spend a lot of energy—during and after their actual incarceration—trying to narrate and communicate this mind-numbing, vast, incalculable violence anyway. Consider it the voice of a human species that is illegible to White Being, and is largely illegible to those of us invited by or seduced into the ceremonies of White Being.

Casey: It would be helpful here if you could briefly walk us through how the “inside”/“outside” relation operates in the discourses and political imagination of the Establishment Left. I am also really curious to hear you speak more on the possibilities that “Black Lives Matter” offers as a mobilizing paradigm capable of disrupting this “inside” versus “outside” mode of thinking and seeing?

Dylan: Central to the formation of the contemporary Establishment Left in the US and elsewhere has been the emergence of a nonprofit/NGO complex, planned and funded by a collaboration between state, philanthropic, and corporate bodies (that is, both individual people and officials representing organizations). It barely takes three clicks into a Google search to see how the “inside/outside” relation is established by the Establishment Left. Incarcerated people (and formerly incarcerated people) are overwhelmingly addressed as clients or impersonal constituencies, and are invoked in rhetorics of state criminological reform. This is what leads to the Establishment Left’s persistent return to notions of “nonviolent crime,” “disparity,” and “mass incarceration.”

In their totality, these rhetorics reproduce problems inherent to liberal- progressive political desires, including the fabrication of a vacillating definition of those worthy of decarceration, and those whose criminality requires their civil carceral death. In none of this is there anything approaching a serious attempt to clarify, much less directly engage with, the unfolding half century infrastructure of gendered racial domestic warfare. “Disparity” is a bullshit concept, when we already know that the inception of criminal justice is the de-criminalization of white people, particularly propertied white citizens and those willing to bear arms to defend the white world. “Mass Incarceration” is worse than meaningless, when it’s not the “masses” who are being criminalized and locked up. So there is some furtive and fatal white entitlement involved in this discursive political structure. As far as Black Lives Matter goes, I think it’s imperative to appreciate the spectrum of people and political positions that inhabit this movement, and to constantly pay attention to how its place in the public discourse creates both opportunities for radical departures and burdens of political respectability that constantly attempt to domesticate its own insurgent tendencies. 

Casey: And it’s these liberal-progressive political desires that we must now more than ever be vigilantly criticizing in our writings, analyses, discussions, and pedagogy, correct? Even amidst the possibility of having a classically “Right-wing” reactionary iteration of white nationalist subjectivity, once again, residing in the Oval Office? I know you have written about a particular notion of fascism, as it relates to the idea of liberal capitalist democracy—one that builds on the incarcerated writings of Angela Davis and George Jackson from the early 1970s. Would you say a broader public conversation about fascism and its relationship to the liberal-progressive political desires you are speaking about is necessary?

Dylan: I think people are already having the conversations about white nationalism and fascism in various ways, although once again, the problem is that these problems are reduced to a narrowed, particular, spectacular set of articulations (i.e. Muslim expulsion, Great Wall of ‘Merica, Blue Lives Matter, etc.) rather than analyzed as the generalized political framework through which most acceptable, or “hegemonic” notions of politics and political culture unfold. I think Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump are pretty much first cousins (though maybe estranged first cousins), in this sense. If we take a serious approach to the analytics of fascism, updated for the contemporary condition, the differences across this hegemonic political-cultural spectrum tend to be a matter of degree, not of kind. It’s pretty easy to see, for example, the ways that Trumpism installs assumptively extremist positions and proposals into the public discourse in ways that catalyze and legitimate reactionary white (and overwhelmingly male) violence through symbolic, state, and physical forms. What a lot of us are in denial about, however, is how much this moment of reactionary white nationalism overlaps with the prior decade of multiculturalist white supremacy and the refabrication of US patriotism via “postracialism.” So while not everyone agrees with subjecting Muslims to an American Inquisition, for example, there are some guiding agreements about whether and how people of Arab and Middle Eastern descent ought to be subjected to rationalized, responsible forms of profiling and policing. And the bottom line of this still-unfolding, historically specific policing and criminalization technology is, of course, the Civilizational formation of racial chattel and land-ecological conquest as the permanent (that is, not historically episodic) condition of political discourse generally. So what we are seeing now is a pretty fucked up situation in which some of us are actually surprised that people who look like us, and share genealogical blood with us, are fully in favor of Trump’s Bozo the Clown burlesque act. We are indignant and shocked silent when we encounter other Black, Brown, Indigenous, and queer people outside of academic left and activist circles who tell us they might—or will— cast a worthless ballot for that dude. We should not be that surprised. 

Casey: I agree, we cannot be surprised. And, accompanying these reactionary articulations, there is an entire other side of the fascist problematic, right? The gradualist reformers who “mediate” the crisis . . . who co-opt, defuse, and redirect oppositional energies into the projects of the Establishment Left. Here you have a range of “compassionate” and “caring” folks—from petite bourgeois liberals to progressive nationalists to an array of “color-blind” white left-folk—all of whom, it seems, desire more so to distance themselves from the backwards or “regressive” whiteness embodied in the Trump campaign, rather than challenge it in any serious or politically meaningful way. And when the desire to confront it doesexist—when it is out there, loud and visible—that very desire appears to be a force that legitimates their own privileged positions. They become the “reasonable” whites . . . the “civil” whites . . . the transcendent historical subjects capable of continuing the white-supremacist nation-building project. “I am not Donald Trump,” therefore my presence and manner of being/Being is universally justified. Or “I am not that murderous pig,” therefore my imagined physiological integrity, my chauvinistic comportment, my freedom of bodily mobility couldn’t possibly be linked in a parasitic way to the policing and criminalization of Black people, or that which necessitates the crisis of racialized capture and incarceration. It’s a kind of postracial desire characteristic of left-liberal whiteness in the post-Civil Rights era: a move (whether conscious or not) to disaffiliate from the cultural and political spheres of “old-school” white racist identity, which in turn only serves to shore up and affirm their own comfortable inhabitations of civil society, of “rationality,” of white life, of “White Being” (as you have so eloquently described it). But I guess that’s what you’ve been saying throughout this entire interview, right? It’s a constant evasion of political and “ethical” responsibilities that is systemically condoned. The problem lays with White Being as a larger, enveloping aspect of the fascist social condition we all (albeit differentially) inhabit. 

Dylan: And to add to your entirely appropriate and necessary polemic against (white) liberalism—a task that I am happy you embrace so urgently given your own social and gendered racial position in the world—I have to stress that there are other layers to the violence of White Being that have nothing to do with the “problem of white people.” There are specific ways, in this moment of compulsory diversity and institutionalized multiculturalism, where the post-apartheid United States is actually doubling down on gendered-racist state violence by fostering delimited avenues of social mobility (i.e. affirmative action and its aftermath) and ideologies of “empowerment.” These are usually affixed to spectacles of dark-skinned peoples’ exceptional achievements, talents, and rarified “opportunities” that work, always and incessantly, to ideologically crowd out the everyday social truths of systemic degradation and evisceration. This is just a glimpse of the mess that the ascendancy of White Being creates in its extra-supremacist moments, when it thrives on gestures of seduction, invitation, and inclusion that accompany the sturdy apparatuses of warfare, policing, and incarceration. A lot of us would kill (and sometimes do kill) for the chance to have “White People Problems” on a constant, uninterrupted basis, you know? That’s the fatal, violent, sometimes auto-homicidal and suicidal dilemma I’m talking about.

Casey: So then, what would you suggest . . . or maybe . . . how do you envision a revolutionary politics being further proliferated in the current historical conjuncture; in terms of organization and strategy, principles and program? For instance, given the current political climate, how might a more deeply radical consciousness be fostered in the institutional and organizational spaces one inhabits? Are there useful historical approaches to oppositional intellectual work that could be revisited and revised to broaden the public discussion of political possibilities? 

Dylan: I’m only capable of offering a minor, situated, fragment of a response to this question, given my own limitations of experience, position, and insight. Here’s how i’ll respond: the question is not whether there is some kind of activist praxis, organizing method, or cultural strategy that can incite radical-to-revolutionary possibilities in-and-of-themselves. Rather, in this particular moment, I think the question is how to create, exemplify, and experiment in rigorously scholarly, thoughtful, historically situated forms of praxis (which may or may not take a typically “activist” form). Whether people are nourished by Sylvia Rivera or Malcolm X, the Zapatistas or the Panthers, AIM or Idle No More, there are so many exemplary forms of radical work that are also radical in their intellectual-theoretical contributions to the historical record of revolt against Civilization. This fact should enable us to engage in our creative, experimental practices in a manner that is both humbled and deeply emboldened. 

Casey: I have some questions prepared about revolutionary organization and the politics of “spontaneity” that I would like to briefly pose before we wrap this interview up. First off, what are some central themes that must be accounted for in the formation of principled “aboveground” and “underground” counter-state organizational structures? Do you see something still useful in distinguishing a relationship between the two? What must occur differently today than in past iterations of the above/below-ground split?

Dylan: This is not something I’d want to substantively write or talk about on the record, right now. What I will say is that yes, there is absolutely a need and usefulness to drawing clear practical, strategic and theoretical distinctions between legal and illicit, “responsible” and explosively contentious, aboveground and underground forms of praxis and organizing. I will say that I am in a privileged position to work in the generalized realm of aboveground, legal activities but this does not mean that I abstain from supporting, theorizing, and critiquing other kinds of political work.

Casey: What of political action that appears at first to be “spontaneous,” for example, street skirmishes and larger, more organic insurrectionary mobilizations such as riots? Could you say these have a dimension of organization to them as well?

Dylan: Yes, always. Spontaneity is usually in the eye of the beholder. Shit doesn’t just go down because of a random act of God, or some kind of incomprehensible magic. There is always a reason: as we know, these spontaneous irruptions are often counter-insurgency tactics employed by the state and reactionary elements who wish to provoke popular backlash against a particular community or insurgent movement; other times, people have simply had enough, and are unwilling to tolerate dying and suffering “peacefully,” or “nonviolently.” And if that’s not a praxis of human being against White Being, I don’t know what is.

Casey: Do you have any suggestions about the role of writing and public intellectual work during (and in the immediate aftermath of) rioting and other forms of open insurrectionary struggle? You know . . . these periods of heightening antagonisms that disrupt the quotidian, everyday reproduction (the so-called “peace”) of white civic life. And this question doesn’t only have to be directed towards instances such as Baltimore or Milwaukee recently. It could even be expanded to encompass the phase of struggle inaugurated this summer more generally (with its array of direct actions, traffic blockades, and protest mobilizations). These are periods when clarity and sober reflection on reactionary shifts in the hegemony of “law and order” are needed in the public discourse—especially if we wish counter the effects of a state and corporate media apparatus that dehumanizes insurgency and strives to appropriate grassroots revolt into dominant cultural and political blocs.

Dylan: We’re talking about the radical, indispensable work of speaking and writing a historical record, and compiling a present tense archive. There are so many cultural forces and institutional forms that mitigate against this work, and which try to discipline and bully people out of their obligation to undertake this labor and art form (all narrative is art, don’t get it twisted). My word of encouragement and incitement is this: while there are people who are employed or otherwise materially rewarded to do the work of writing, talking, and critical reflection, the fullest sense of the radical archive draws on the creativity endemic to the practice of human being against the ascendancy of White Being. This means the historical obligation to do the work—to produce the art—is far-reaching.

Casey: Who are some central thinkers that you would recommend aspiring young activists and students in the movement read and listen to today, in regards to the strategic dimensions of radical anti-racist and Black liberationist struggles? 

Dylan: I suggest a deeper, collective, critical reading and discussion of those folks in the Hall of Fame: Audre Lorde, W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Angela Davis, Paolo Freire, Haunani Kay Trask, Stuart Hall, the Combahee River Collective, Toni Morrison (recall the “Seven Days” organization from Song of Solomon), Ida B. Wells, the Civil Rights Congress (We Charge Genocide, 1951), Sonia Sanchez, Vine Deloria, and so many others. The point is not merely to read and listen, it’s to read and listen actively, collectively, and in conversation with other people.

Casey: Okay, so one last question for you Dylan. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. Do you see any major differences that need to be accounted for in the ways that student activists mobilize on campuses and attempt to struggle today, as opposed to previous eras? Over the course of your work in the university, have you seen any transformations in the way students mobilize around racist policing, surveillance, and imprisonment (for better or worse)?

Dylan: The campus—whether university, junior college, high school, or some other schooling site—has played a significant role in almost every major or minor transformation of oppressive and systemically violent conditions in the history of this wretched Civilization. Students face a compounded problem in the current iteration of the neoliberal white-supremacist university/college regime, however, because they tend to be subjected to untenable financial and hence labor burdens as soon as they set foot on school grounds. So students engaged in activist work today must bear even heavier demands on their energy, and are forced to survive different and often heavier physiological stresses than their counterparts from, say, 15 years ago. (Come to think of it, maybe there is a way that students today can politicize their burdens and collective immiseration in a manner that doesn’t rely on the grandstanding of Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.) Finally, the most profound difference I have seen in recent years of student activism around criminalization, policing, and incarceration has been the circulation of the political identity “abolitionist.” Far, far greater numbers of students are embracing this position, and many are doing so even when their professed political beliefs are closer to anti-racist reform (of police, laws, etc.) or progressive decarceration (of those deemed most deserving of release from prison/jail). In other words, many student activists call themselves “abolitionists” when their political agendas are fundamentally opposed to abolition! So that leaves us with the task of teaching and demonstrating what it means to inhabit the long historical responsibilities that accompany the declaration that one is an abolitionist. You have to be willing and able to say that shit to Sojourner Truth’s ghost.

The download link for the full issue can be found here.

Dylan Rodríguez is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. He was elected Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate by his faculty peers in 2016. He is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the US Prison Regime (2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (2009). His current thinking, writing, and teaching focus on how regimes of social liquidation, cultural extermination, physiological evisceration, and racist terror become normalized features of everyday life in the “post-Civil Rights” and “post-racial” moments. How do the historical logics of racial and racial-colonial genocide permeate our most familiar systems of state violence, cultural production, institutionalized knowledge, liberation struggle, and social identity? How do people inhabit these structures and logics—make sense of it, narrate it, suffer it, and revolt against it? What forms of collective genius and creativity emerge from such conditions, and how do these insurgencies envision—and practice—transformations of power and community?

This post originally appeared on Futuristically Ancient

“…What will matter in the long term is the impact we have on the (Sci-fi) genre itself, not on its packaging or clichés…”

4) Science fiction and fantasy have in the past been centered around European/Western stories and tropes and even in Afrofuturism, it was promoted previously as mostly Western/U.S.-centric. Briefly, how do you see Caribbean cultures, African cultures and other cultures around the world as early incubators, already exploring those ideas of science fiction, fantasy and futurism? Why is it important to explore those ideas in these cultures?

Science Fiction (SF) itself was produced directly by the response to slavery and colonialism in England and America. This is a fact. Therefore SF has always had within its DNA racial, colonial and sexual concerns—so its a mistake to see the genre as either “white” or “Western” or “European” since all of those categories depend on slavery and colonialism and, of course, industrialization. As such it isn’t necessarily anything-“centric,” though the modern history of SF hasn’t been as good as it should be about making all of this clear, hence the necessary interruption that is Afrofuturism as well as the explosion of global SF.

The reason SF has such heavily metaphoric resonances with blacks, women, minorities and immigrants is specifically because those groups generated the need for SF in the first place–as a metaphor for material tensions and cultural anxieties! That’s why I’ve never felt the need to claim SF/Fantasy or remake its genres in my cultural image: they emerge from that image or fears of it in the first place. Race and sex are already primary incubators of SF.

Bringing all of this to light in the early history of the genre and tracing it throughout contemporary SF has been a real obligation for me because too much black thinking about SF deeply misunderstands SF itself, and too many misrepresentations of the genre are at the core of Afrofuturism.

This all being said, Caribbean and African and Asian, Latin American and Russian cultures have been present in SF from before Afrofuturism, though admittedly there haven’t been as many writers of color on the scene as there are today. SF being a conduit for myth and history, it is inevitable that folks will use it as a technique of historical interrogation and as a method of generating new types of imaginations coming from distinct cultural and historical frameworks. There really is nothing special about that.

As to the importance and value of what they are bringing to it—well for me as a hardcore genre enthusiast, it depends on the quality of the work but I know that many people of color only pay attention to something if it’s festooned with “cultural” or “ethnic” symbols or if it exploits nakedly identitarian signifiers. What will matter in the long term is the impact we have on the genre itself, not on its packaging or clichés.

“…”And the robot—as my book maps—is historically connected to the minstrel, with the cyborg being a more scientifically accurate and historically sensitive image of hybridity, mixture and creolization…”

5) I have been developing an interest in trickster/cyborg mythology that I see in works like Ellison’s Invisible Man. Do you see trickster archetype as giving a context to your work? Did trickster stories influence you in any way?

Well, this is at the core of my work on Bert Williams and Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter, which came via Ralph Ellison who said exactly this: the blackface minstrel is a trickster! That’s why the minstrel continues to offend, hurt and befuddle! Blackface is how the trickster makes it into modernism and into contemporary popular culture—the mask, the two-facedness, the laughing instead of crying, the dancing and singing, the joke at the core of an American fantasy of freedom, the double-voicedness, the looking backwards and forwards at the same time (ancient and future), the ambiguity of dominance and submission, joy and pain, and the destabilizing of norms and the fluctuating of identity.

And the robot—as my book maps—is historically connected to the minstrel, with the cyborg being a more scientifically accurate and historically sensitive image of hybridity, mixture and creolization.

However, what we forget about the trickster—or don’t fully appreciate—is that the trickster “fools” everyone and isn’t on anyone’s “side.” Tricksters are as much a symbol of the oppressed as they are a sign of the pleasures of power, as much the hustler as the hustled. They cannot be claimed or contained by any ideology, even those of resistance because tricksters are anarchic figures, pure chaos with creased slacks and a crooked smile. Tricksters disrupt, not just other people but also us and certainly you and me.

“…the equally long-standing intimacy between blacks and music must be read and heard as having always been about our engaging technology. It’s not just about lyrics and rhythm, it’s been about informatics…”

6) What would you like readers to take away from reading Sound of Culture?

First, the long-standing intimacy between race and technology, and black peoples and Science Fiction — the genre hasn’t just become amenable to our rapprochement due to Afrofuturism, it was founded on the tensions and anxieties of the modern world: slavery, colonialism and industrialization, which is to say, race, Diaspora and technology. Science Fiction was and continues to be the primary space for dealing with these questions, it’s just that not enough of us have been sensitive enough to its meanings and are still slow to acknowledge its implications (don’t blame the genre, blame your reading of it).

Second, that the equally long-standing intimacy between blacks and music must be read and heard as having always been about our engaging technology. It’s not just about lyrics and rhythm, it’s been about informatics.

And finally, that if we are really interested in the future, truly committed to a realm of open possibility, then we will have to embark on a fundamental reimagining of our sense of community that might threaten our current political priorities. There is great risk in that and black folks need to take that risk urgently. I’ll leave this last point enigmatic and point to the book for clarity (though if you hate theory/criticism you probably won’t find enough clarity at all in it but I won’t apologize for that).

7) Since my blog is Futuristically Ancient, do you see your work as both ancient and futuristic? If yes, how so?

My work is ancient in that it’s committed to the crusty, dusty and dangerous corners of the global historical archive—parts that many of us would rather shun because they don’t suit a contemporary political urge or popular therapeutic narrative. The past isn’t there to make you feel good about yourself, though the struggle with it can do precisely that; but that’s not the point.

It’s futuristic because it looks and listens through the detritus of history for things and tools that we have ignored or hidden and that can be only valued in the wake of our current cultural habits and political conventions. It’s focused on that next shit: sounds, words and images fueled by a commitment to bastardization, cultural appropriation and heresy, and disciplined by material history, actual facts and a faith in the knowledge that even the things we’ve fought the hardest for—like our identities—are temporary.

As Ellison said, even skin too must eventually be shed.

Watch the trailer for The Sound of Culture below and buy a copy here!

Tara Aisha Willis: This special issue, Black Moves: New Research in Black Dance Studies, was your brainchild, one a few different publication projects coming out of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD) consortium conference in 2014. I’m interested in hearing about the significance of having these pieces come out in this format, at this moment, and in TBS.

Thomas F. DeFrantz: First, let’s talk about collective action. I was trained at a time, back in the 90s, when we thought carefully about minoritarian action as being resistant and collective. I still abide by those ways of thinking. So, I don’t think of these projects as being initiated by me or coming from a single place. When we decided to form CADD, the idea at that moment was, “Let’s see what it could be.” Astonishingly, when the conference happened, it was clear that there were lots of ideas circulating that didn’t have a way to reach a larger public. We realized we should think about publication. The field could use more written documents, or different kinds of histories or theorizations, that can be circulated. These publications come from that abundance of new research that was emerging. So, this feels like a collective action. You and I are doing the editorial work here, but even that’s collective. We’re working together because we thought it would be an interesting thing to do across generations.

“Generations” always seems funny to me because, as we mature, we start to understand that it’s about differences. We start our conversations from different perspectives even though we’re currently sharing a journey. Where are you in your research and how do you feel it being mobilized by age, cycle of life, or your work as an artist? How does it work in a larger frame of black dance studies as you understand it?

TAW: I feel so thrilled to have your mentorship while I’m in the middle of my degree. I’m finishing my prospectus this week, and preparing to teach for the first time. Through this editorial process I’ve come of age, in terms of figuring out what I’m doing within my doctorate. Working at The Drama Review and being involved with Women & Performance I’ve gotten to see the other side of making a special issue. But having your guidance in how to be a guest editor—that more curatorial role of caring for the articles in a one-on-one way with authors—has been a really unique experience amongst my peers. I think it’s exemplary of the CADD community, which is at an intersection of two fields, dance studies and black studies, where we’re always the one in the room representing. CADD felt like an incredibly joyful reunion of family I’d never met before—even though I didn’t know many people at the conference, my research is really different from a lot of the scholars there, and I had many debates with people over the course of the weekend. It felt overwhelmingly like we’re in such a crucial position, being there in a room with the relatively small contingency of people doing the same kind of work, caring about the same ideas, people, and cultural forms.

I think that intergenerational work is exemplary of the black dance studies community. We have to stick together because so often, away from the conference, we have to stand alone in our departments. We can really support each other, bring up the next generation, and not be afraid to find mentorship where it exists.

TFD: For me it’s also about being willing to not know and to learn. These are actually pretty terrific feminist/womynist politics to engage. Working with researchers who are still in graduate school or just out, I learn so much about how the world feels in different keys. On the other side of getting a job, or on the other side of tenure, things keep changing. The river Styx keeps taking you and showing you new landscapes. If you stay on the route of an academic career—or you don’t, it doesn’t matter—as I did, you stay in this space that keeps changing. By working with you I get to hear about new or different questions, or rethink questions with more care and particularity. It’s an opportunity to work across differences.

Our issue is subtitled New Research in Black Dance Studies. This idea of “new” is something we tend to be skeptical of. What’s really new or current? What’s old? Maybe we don’t want to think in terms of linear time. That said, many of the pieces in this issue are by folx offering up an originary research manifesto to their larger projects.

TAW: They’re each bringing different pieces of black dance studies to the table, which is really significant because it’s very new for TBS to publish so much dance research. It was important for us to bring together pieces that are very different from each other, that are working in different methodologies. We have archival research, historic, ethnographic, the pedagogy piece, and dance and performance theory. All are looking at “black moves” in different places, cultural contexts, and times. I think we’re very conscious of creating a holistic issue that’s bringing the richness of the conference and the field to bear on the larger black studies conversation.

TFD: We also know as artists these various methodologies that we think of as separate are all present and constantly competing; all these things are happening at the same time in bits and pieces. When I dance, the variety of methods, starting places, or ways to think about analysis or creativity are all simultaneously present. So, I’m working through being born in Indianapolis but moving to San Francisco, in an ethnographic way. I’m working through theories of representation: who do I think is in the audience, and how do I think they’re seeing me, and what do I want to resist? I’m working through technique and what my teachers taught me or reminded me of, what I know about my body and what I can or can’t do, or how I can maybe stretch that. I’m working through family history. I’m working through my spiritual self—Christian or not—and how it relates to spiritual practice, whether that’s a memory of someone else’s spirit or my own sense of ecstasy or deliverance that I can manufacture or recycle through my body. I feel our issue tries to remind us not that you can work in these different directions, but that these different ways of being are constantly implicated in our creative lives.

TAW: That’s a beautiful way of putting it. The issue as a whole is illustrating—is performing, is dancing—what already exists in the moment of movement, of black movement in particular. My favorite word is reverence, instead of spiritual. I think of it in terms of scholarly work, this citational practice we’re always engaged in: looking back to produce something in the moment, and for others to use in the future. Again, to stay out of linear time, we can think of that in a circular way. Reverence allows us to revere things that already exist, but it refers to this present moment action. It has a physical manifestation, a spiritual manifestation, and intellectual and emotional ones as well. The conference these pieces come out of, the writing these researchers are doing, and the editorial project are all a kind of reverence for the field, the performances, and black moves.

I was just reading the “Blacking Queer Dance” piece you wrote in 2002, and you ask, “But what about dance studies and black studies? Why do these areas consistently disconnect?” (104). I think this special issue is an inroad into that question. In the introduction we wrote, “…the capacities of Black Studies to accommodate nuanced, careful discussions of dance as a site and symptom of historical, contemporary, and future modes of black life.” Black dance studies has the capacity to consider dance, corporeality, and movement in a nuanced way in order to get into black life more richly. That’s what the issue is performing, dancing.

TFD: This idea of “symptom” is interesting. With the three publications coming from that first conference—and CADD is having its next conference in February 2016—it seems to me that there’s a wealth of material now finding its way into different publics. By the time we get through editing—and anybody who’s edited knows it’s hard work—and are able to say, “Here’s what we made. We hope you’ll be able to engage it, that something else is possible because the information is available,” the information is already circulating. It’s in the dances, in the way these seven researchers are thinking through the people they’re working with. These essays represent a distillation of information and ideology, but those ideas are already moving. There’s a ton of research happening in artistic practice and historical archival research around black people in motion, but we’re trying to say, “It’s okay to publish that, too.” Not that publishing is the most important thing—it’s just another place where the information can circulate. It’s not that this stuff isn’t around, it’s that in this moment we’re finding ways to publish it that we didn’t have fifteen years ago.

TAW: Framing it together in anthologies or special issues brings things together that have been bubbling for decades, centuries even, but haven’t been recognized as a coherent field.

TFD: But it’s also in the dancing. That’s the thing about black performance. The theory, history, and practice are so deeply implicated in each other that the translation into literary text is something we’ve been rightfully suspicious of. Reverence doesn’t want to be fixed. It’s not adulation, it’s not cult-making. Reverence is movable and needs to be. Black moves are about response, reverence, remembering, imagining forward. Writing often wants to be fixed. That’s what I love about our issue. We’re not trying to fix but to offer strategies to engage.

TAW: That’s a great word, “strategy.” It comes up in a lot of the articles. They try to share with readers the ways that dance works for artists, performers, or practitioners as a strategy for black life.

TFD: In black studies, performance and dance are always referred to, but usually with this quick, passing motion. Those of us who are working in black dance especially, understand that there’s much more in that moment. Maybe what we’re trying to do collectively is inspire all of us to engage reverence for those moments when our embodied practices line up with our identities, aspirations, wonderings, desires, and intellects. Maybe that’s something that we’re sharing with each other.

TAW: So often when I’m reading black scholarship I think, “Wait, but right there. If you dug into that performance or that movement moment it would give you a whole other level of nuance.”

TFD: I hope our issue will encourage the process of reverence. We’re affirming, by digging into a moment, larger structure, or the entirety of a choreography, that any of these modes can open up and allow us to re-strategize how black lives matter—to use that urgent kind of rhetoric—and how we matter for ourselves as a group through our dances. It’s such a huge part of how we understand what it is to be black. So let’s keep moving.

For a limited time, read the introduction and Tara Willis’ article for free. Subscribe to access the entire issue and receive the print version with cover art by Ian Douglas.

Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University, and founding member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance.  He is also director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. His books include Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004), and Black Performance Theory, co-edited  with Anita Gonzalez (2014).

Tara Aisha Willis is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies, NYU, an editor for TDR/The Drama Review and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, and a summer Thesis Writing Mentor for Hollins University’s Dance MFA. She is Coordinator of Diversity Initiatives for Movement Research, an artist services organization for NYC experimental dance, and a choreographer, dancer, and dance writer, including publication in The Brooklyn Rail and the Movement Research Performance Journal.

This post originally appeared on Futuristically Ancient

Modern Griots Interviews: Louis Chude-Sokei [Editor-in-Chief for TBS]

Part 1

Last year, I introduced to you all to the upcoming release of Louis Chude-Sokei’s The Sound of Culture. Well, the book is finally here and I had the privilege to interview Louis about his book and his research. Louis is a truth-speaker and an illusion-breaker who is not afraid to challenge and enlighten us on preconceived notions about our identities and histories. That is what I enjoy about this is exploring and presenting the numerous looks into our past that help us to understand and weave together our current time and move us forward! Enjoy Part 1 of Louis’ interview today and part 2 on Wednesday!

“…I also began to think through theories of masquerade and carnival as a way of apprehending the productive instability of so-called “blackness” and to subject American racial thinking to a more diasporic lens…”

1) How did you get started in your research? What led you to your interest in studying minstrelsy and its links to race, performance/masquerade, history, music and technology?

As a writer and scholar, one is always surrounded by or immersed in one’s interests and ideas as well as those of others.  Research is an ongoing state of being, and that’s a great privilege as well as accomplishment. With the topic of minstrelsy, I came to it accidentally while focusing on black immigrants in America during the period critics call “modernism.”  For black Americans, this is the “Harlem Renaissance.”  I’d always known that Caribbean blacks played a significant role in that movement and in the birth of pan-Africanism, but their roles were often tempered as they were historicized as “black,” which is to say African American.

In exploring the process by which “blackness” can erase cultural distinctions (often in the name of solidarity) and establish its own hierarchies, I began to hear calypso differently (seeing its participation in the Harlems Renaissance alongside jazz and blues); I began reading Claude McKay, Eric Walrond and Eulalie Spence differently (as black immigrants struggling with racism as well as an American form of blackness that sometimes had little room for divergence and diversity). Additionally, I began to focus on what we tend not to focus on: how blacks see, represent and relate to other types of blacks—a topic that I think is sorely under-theorized and is in fact feared and avoided.

It was after erecting the theoretical architecture of this black on black cross-cultural dynamic that I “discovered” Bert Williams, the black minstrel superstar that arguably helped make the Harlem Renaissance possible, had helped start the black recording industry, had integrated Broadway, had become the first black movie star, and had achieved all that via the blackface mask.

Bert Williams was a black immigrant, a Caribbean person who “played” a racist stereotype and attempted to humanize it and change its racist meanings from behind the mask. It blew me away to discover in his writings that he’d seen that stereotype as specifically being of African-Americans, not Caribbean blacks and certainly not of himself. Through that I began to think about the way race is performed by and amongst different types of blacks as they interact with each other, particularly in America.  I also began to think through theories of masquerade and carnival as a way of apprehending the productive instability of so-called “blackness” and to subject American racial thinking to a more diasporic lens.

The new book, The Sound of Culture, isn’t about blackface, however.  But since minstrelsy is at the heart of the technologization of race via film and recording, as well as central to the performance of identity in a hierarchical society, it is as inescapable as our futile attempts to escape it.

“…Avoiding trauma or historical complexity is not my strong suit.  I’m not sympathetic to those who wish to maintain fantasies of racial innocence and fragility…”

2)  What was the process like and your favorite part about putting together the book, Sound of Culture? Do you have a favorite essay?

The book can be traced back to a series of essays I’ve published over the last 20 years about reggae, hip hop, and DJ-culture as products of black on black cross cultural interaction, immigration and new modes of technological engagement in the wake of pan-Africanism and black nationalism.  It also includes work I’ve done on African Internet crime, minstrelsy and phonography, and the increasing science-fiction-ality of global black popular culture.  This began when I was a DJ/musician and a SF-head way before Afrofuturism became a “thing,” so I found myself working in parallel with that movement.

The process was easy in that I just returned to the essays (which can easily be found but will be collected in one volume next year), and decided to write a broader historical and theoretical narrative around them — one that would make them conceivable even though they were written first (kind of like Michael Thelwell’s attempt to write the novel The Harder They Come as if it could have been the source of the film had the book appeared first).  The best part was listening to the sounds that feature in the book and inspired it: jazz and dub, primarily, and tracing the literature and thinking around them, from slavery to cybernetics.

I can’t identify a favorite chapter since they are all so different and cover so much ground: but I particularly love the end of the introduction where I discuss the dub album by The Mad Professor called “A Caribbean Taste of Technology.”

3) What is your response to those who react strongly against blackface and minstrelsy, who might be turned off from studying it?

I’ve definitely had to suffer the brunt of having not only written a black book on minstrelsy (or a black book about black minstrelsy), but for suggesting that it’s necessary to return to blackface to make sense of our current moment as well as our future.  Not everyone has been happy about that, or about the resurgence of interest it helped generate. Avoiding trauma or historical complexity is not my strong suit.  I’m not sympathetic to those who wish to maintain fantasies of racial innocence and fragility.  We owe it to those who made unimaginable choices in the past to study the nature and impact of those choices: without their compromises we wouldn’t have the luxury of complaint.  That’s what I would say if I were moved to say anything at all.

But minstrelsy’s importance is due to its capacity to hurt, and therefore speaks for itself.  It is literally at the core of American popular culture and its cross-racial, cross-sexual and immigrant traditions.  It was the ground from which the first professional black performing artists grew as well as the science and art of recording sound; and due to the fact of its profound influence in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, Mexico and Latin America (where it is still very much alive), it’s central to other popular cultures as well.

It’s also crucial to know that exclusively negative assessments of blackface didn’t begin until the 1960s, and so much of our hostility is produced less by knowledge of it but instead by shifts in black cultural politics, which themselves need to be understood and critiqued.  It was never always assessed as a negative phenomenon, especially given the fact that many blacks that put on the mask did it for quite activist and racially assertive reasons.

…To be continued.

Watch the trailer for the book and buy yourself a copy here!

Educator and writer David Austin is among the foremost chroniclers of Pan-Africanism, Black Power, and West Indian intellectual and political history in the Americas. He has three books to his name: A View for Freedom, an oral history of the late St. Vincents-born, Montreal-based cricketer and organizer Alphonso Theodore “Alfie” Roberts, You Don’t Play with Revolution, an edited collection of CLR James’ Montreal lectures and talks, and Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in 1960s Montreal. The winner of the 2014 Casa de las Americas Prize in Caribbean Literature in English or Creole, Fear of a Black Nation was recently translated into Spanish as Miedo a una nación negra: Raza, sexo y seguridad en el Montreal de los años sesenta and into French as Nègres noirs, Nègres blancs: Race, sexe et politique dans les années 1960 à Montréal.

Fear of a Black Nation is a book of burning relevance to our times. Its analysis of surveillance, sex, and the security state, on one hand, and race, revolution, and repression on the other, provides a historical perspective on modern-day, state-sponsored regimes of anti-Black terrorism and crypto-fascist intelligence gathering — from carding to Bill C-51 and from stop and frisk to the NSA. Austin does not stop there, however. He also documents the transnational and cross-racial Black-led political and literary movements of the 1960s and unearths the fervent connections between Quebec and the Caribbean and Montreal and the Black world. An extended interview with Austin titled “Research, Repression and Revolution: On Montreal and the Black Radical Tradition” was recently published in the CLR James Journal. Here, The Public Archive happily offers the unpublished outtakes of that interview – including Austin’s thoughts on CLR and Selma James, on Blackness and the politics of nationalism in Quebec, and on the connections between Montreal, Haiti, and the greater Caribbean.

PH: It has been noted that CLR James wrote almost nothing on Haiti’s political world post-1804. Following this, I’m wondering if you could say something about the relationship of the Anglophone Black World to Haiti and Haitians in Montreal during the late 1960s. In Fear of a Black Nation, you briefly mention individuals such as Elder Thébaud and Philippe Fils-Aimé, but was there a connection between West Indians in Montreal and anti-Duvalier Marxists?

DA: This raises some interesting issues. First, although the book was released in the late spring of 2013, if I had a chance to do it over, and with more time, I would have benefited from more recent work on the Haitian left in Montreal and would have had more to say about Montreal as an important home of Haitian intellectuals and political figures, many of whom worked alongside Anglophone Caribbeans. There is, for example, historian Sean Mills’ impeccably researched work in the Canadian Historical Review on the Haitian deportation crisis, and his forthcoming book examines the presence of Haitian political and literary figures in the Quebec. What I did in a very limited way is touch on the links between members of the Haitian and Anglo Caribbean and Black left by alluding to individuals such as Max Chancy, Elder Thébaud, and Philippe Fils-Aimé, but this is far from sufficient. They all worked closely with people from the Anglophone Caribbean in Montreal. I wish I had known more about the Chancy family. As Désiree Rochat has researched, Adeline Chancy was very active within the Haitian left (see Rochat’s La vie caribéenne au Québec: L’histoire des années 60, 70 et 80 en photos/ Caribbean life in Quebec: A pictorial history of the 60s, 70s and 80s, published by CIDIHCA). Chancy played a major role in establishing institutions that served the Haitian community, including La Maison d’Haiti, when Haitians were migrating to the city in large numbers in the sixties and seventies. She was one of a number of Haitian women who were active in Haitian community politics, and she also assisted James in preparing the presentation that he delivered during the Congress of Black Writers on Negritude. Max Chancy was a well-known Haitian Marxist who also fled the Duvalier regime in Haiti and made a home in Montreal where he continued to be politically active as a Haitian exile while teaching. He and Adeline were part of a tradition of the Haitian left, a long intellectual tradition of thinkers, writers and organizers that also left a mark on Quebec society through their intellectual-political and cultural presence, and as educators and builders of institutions.

At the risk of romanticizing the past, which is always a danger, it has become apparent that there was a lot more integration in the 1960s and 1970s between the Caribbean communities, but that this has changed quite dramatically in more recent times. This may have something to do with Quebec politics, which has become largely divided along linguistic lines (English and French); and as a result of the human geography of the city in which Francophones largely live in the east and north of the island and Anglophones largely in the west and south. Language, culture, and one’s sense of community – including what media a person accesses – largely determine which Quebec and Montreal we experience. There are middle grounds where cultural and linguistic groups meet, and today the definition of who is an Anglophone and Francophone is shifting, as is the definition of what it means to be a Quebecer. For example, I teach in a English college in Quebec, but many of my students are Francophones and I often have Indigenous students in my classes, alongside people of African, Caribbean, Asian, and Middle Eastern descent, all of which makes for interesting conversations at times about memory, history, and national identity.

PH: Continuing on this theme, one of the striking features of Fear of a Black Nation is your mapping of the connections between Antillean, African-American, French Canadian, and Anglophone Caribbean literary and political movements. It recalls the evocation of what Brent Hayes Edwards has termed the “practice of diaspora” yet while Edwards focuses on the discursive lags occurring during cross-Atlantic acts of translation and interpretation, you present something altogether more dynamic and eminently more political. Can talk about the challenges and difficulties you faced in writing across the Anglophone-Francophone divide? And can you say something on the role of Aimé Césaire and other French West Indian writers within the French Canadian literary and political imagination?

DA: I think Brent Edwards notion of diaspora as a practice represents an important step in thinking about diaspora in a more dynamic way, and allows us to think about this practice and its politics in different contexts. This said, the Quebec context is unique in that not only were Caribbean women and men reading the three Martiniquan theorists you mention, but so too were French Quebecers. Quebec is such an interesting province. In addition to Indigenous peoples in the territory, it consists of migrants: the French who colonized and displaced Indigenous peoples and forced them onto reserves and residential schools, and the English who later colonized the French. The French majority is now the dominant power, but following the conquest of 1760, the British assumed power in the province and its French majority became a kind of “lost tribe” of France and treated like an inferior minority by the English in Quebec. The period of the “Quiet Revolution” in the 1960s, which in so many respects was everything but quiet, began a process of making French Quebecers master “chez nous” as they put it, in their own homes. As a result, over time the English minority that once dominated Quebec economically and politically have become a lost English tribe among the Quebec majority, a tribe that often harkens back to the good old days like in Gone with the Wind. But French Quebecers, or at least many among the power-elite, still project a fear English Canada’s political and cultural domination. In the meantime, Montreal Anglophone’s Black community has become a lost tribe too in relation to Blacks in the rest of Canada, though it is true that Francophone Blacks (and these categories can be quite fluid) do not fair much better in Quebec. All of this, plus the contrived fear of the cultural and religious values and practices of growing numbers of people of Asian and Middle Eastern descent embodied in the Quebec Charter of Values that is being promoted by the Parti Québécois government – all of this has made for a very peculiar, tense, and volatile situation within the current context of Quebec nationalism.

Quebec nationalism has become increasingly parochial and exclusive. Today official nationalism has assumed xenophobic forms in which the presence and authenticity of non-French Quebecers is constantly being called into question. This is not simply a linguistic issue in terms of preserving the French language in Quebec in relation to English Canada, or about preserving French Quebec culture. These are important considerations, but it is obvious that, as the French Quebec population continues to decrease in relation to the rest of the population, there is a fear, especially in Montreal, that it will both be outnumbered and be absorbed or racially mixed out of existence. In other words, Quebec nationalism also operates on the level of biology and biopolitics.

The late Hubert Aquin is arguably Quebec’s most important writer, and he was very influenced by African independence movements and was involved in the production of several films on the subject in the 1960s. But in addition to African struggles, Aimé Césaire along with Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon played a very important role in Quebec in the sixties and seventies. This role has essentially been forgotten or omitted, and is very instructive in terms of understanding the selective nature of Quebec’s recent nationalist history. French Quebecers read these thinkers in the fifties and sixties in French before their writing was widely available in English in North America. Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land [pdf] was profoundly important to some of French Quebec’s most important writers and poets such as Gerald Godin, Paul Chamberlain, Andrée Ferretti, Yves Préfontaine, and Pierre Vallières. Vallières authored the famous book Nègres blancs d’Amerique (The White Niggers of America), a book that was very much influenced by Fanon’s writing on decolonization and race. Like other members of the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ), the leading nationalist organization of the sixties, he was also profoundly shaped by the Black Power movement in the U.S. and anti-colonial struggles in Africa and other parts of the world. Part of Fanon’s appeal as Quebec attempted to free itself from control of the English elite and the Catholic Church in the province was his critical analysis of nationalist leaders and how they betray the majority of the population once they assume power. The FLQ was also attracted to Fanon’s analysis of violence and they carried out a series of bomb attacks and kidnappings of a British diplomat, James Cross, and a Quebec Liberal politician, Pierre Laporte (Laporte was eventually killed in their custody). I would suggest that the FLQ misread Fanon’s analysis of violence as, although Fanon does not disavow it as part of anti-colonial struggle, he also discusses how colonial conditions make forms of violence, including fratricide, inevitable as colonialism itself is a violent process.

Glissant’s influence in Quebec was different because he actually had a physical presence in Montreal and was a close friend of Gaston Miron, one of French Quebec’s most important poets and literary figures. Miron was a Quebec nationalist and Glissant engaged Miron and other French Quebec Writers in discussions about the use Joual, French Quebecers version of Creole, in literature, comparing it to the use of Creole in literary circles in Martinique, both languages having roots in rural regions. Glissant understood French Quebecers as an oppressed group, but was fully aware of the conditions of Indigenous peoples in Quebec who had been colonized by the French and British and stopped short of referring to the French in Quebec as a colonized people. When we add this to the fact that Quebec nationalism was also very much influenced by anti-colonial movements in Africa and other parts of the world, along with the Black Power movement in the U.S., it is obvious that there clearly needs to be a new narrative about the history of Quebec and Quebec nationalism. French Quebecers came to see themselves as nègres blancs, or the white niggers of America. But this raises the question of the invisibility of actual nègres in Quebec at this time, at least prior to the Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams protest.

PH: During your interview with Selma James at her home in London in 2004 you discovered you were the first person to interview her about C.L.R. What came out of the interview in terms of her personal reminisces of James, about their relationship? And given Selma James’ commitment to the wages for housework campaign, did she speak of CLR’s relationship to feminist organizing and the politics of gender?

DA: I think that it is a shame that she has not been interviewed more, or at least that was true at the time. I know that there is a tendency to write without conducting interviews with individuals but in this case, this tendency also has something to do with gender and race. Selma James is a woman, and is white and she perhaps does not fit with the perception of James the autonomous Caribbean, Black, Marxist intellectual. We know that James was a brilliant theorist with extraordinary intellectual gifts. But it is also true that he had collaborators, and his chief collaborators in the U.S. during what was in some respects his most fertile intellectual period were women, including Grace Lee Boggs and Raya Dunayevskaya with whom he was in constant dialogue. As James’s wife, Selma James is seen as less of a collaborator. This, coupled with her no-nonsense political outlook, have perhaps made potential interviewers leery, but to the detriment of understanding her, her work, and James’s historical legacy. Selma James was very important to C.L.R. James in terms of encouraging him to think seriously about gender and power relations between women and men. As much as she was devoted to C.L.R.’s ideas, her work and ideas also informed his and she is obviously an important thinker in her own right. Walter Rodney understood this and in Walter Rodney Speaks he made a point of discussing her importance to the London study group in the James home in the early sixties.

It is worth noting that Selma James’s work played a role in Canada, collaborating with former CLR James Study Circle (CLRJSC) member Anne Cools who had become quite close to C.L.R. James and who had helped to raise funds for her legal fees after she was arrested for her role in the Sir George Williams protest. Cools was essentially the only women who played an active intellectual-political role in the small CLRJSC group. She later became an important feminist in Montreal, collaborating with French Quebec feminists and women across Canada. She is also said to have established the first or one of the first women’s shelters in Canada. Anne Cools did not write much and has been largely written out of Canada’s feminist history, in part because she became quite conservative. But you cannot un-write history. In a short article, “Womanhood,” (published in the February 1971 “Black Spark Edition” of the McGill Free Press) she discussed the unequal relationship between Black women and Black men and argued that there could be no genuine liberation without addressing this issue. I think this essay is a critique of her male peers in the Caribbean Conference Committee and the CLRJSC, of Black and Caribbean politics in Montreal in general.

Within the parameters of what I was writing about in Fear of a Black Nation, I tried to very consciously address the gender imbalance in my own writing and to seriously think about the roles that women played in that historical moment (1960s and 1970s); how both women and men understood their roles and the roles of the opposite genders; and without dismissing the reality that gender and sexuality exist on spectrums or represent gradations of being as opposed to fixed anatomical or sexual categories. Several theorists were very helpful as I worked through this. The work of Carol Boyce Davies, especially Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, was helpful in terms of thinking about the relationship between feminism, gender, and black identity. So too was the work of Audre Lorde; and Angela Davis’s book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billy Holiday, which framed these singers as important women’s voices, feminists in their own right, but without the title. The work of Saba Mahmood was very helpful, especially her book The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject which argues that women are able to exercise degrees of agency and autonomy despite male dominance within Islam in Egypt. All of these theorist, including Natasha Barnes, Belinda Edmondson and Patricia Hill Collins, whose Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and Politics I had read as a university undergraduate. I also have to add Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal and Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. These books and authors were important, not only in terms of attempting to understand male dominance and how women have been historically been pushed into the background of social movements, but also why, for example, women who played active political roles in movements or groups often minimized their involvement when I interviewed them, deferring to the roles that men had played in the movement. I was also very fortunate to have a loose circle of friends and colleagues in Montreal who were also thinking about these questions and with whom I could discuss these ideas. I don’t think we can overestimate the importance of that kind of discussion.

PH: Over the years, you have become close to the economist and former New World Group member Kari Polyani-Levitt. What is the nature of the influence that she has had on you, personally, and how would you assess the legacy of Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada in Canada?

DA: I have known Kari for nine or ten years now but have known of her for much longer. Her name would come up in conversations about the Caribbean left and Caribbean thought in Montreal and economic policies in the Caribbean in the sixties and seventies, and in relation to Lloyd Best and other Caribbean economists that lived or sojourned in Montreal during that period and with whom she collaborated. I sought her out in relation to her work on the Caribbean and her involvement in the New World Group. In fact the essay that developed into the book Silent Surrender was first published in the New World journal. Lessons from the book have definitely been lost or ignored by economic policymakers in Canada. Silent Surrender argued that Canada was essentially capitulating to U.S. economic interests and that this practice would have dire consequences for Canadian autonomy. This was written long before Free Trade and today Canada’s economy is more embedded than ever with the U.S.’s which now relies on Canada’s oil reserves in the Tar Sands of Alberta, as an example, for much of its oil, and the oil is extracted using the hazardous fracking or hydraulic fracturing method that is threatening water supplies and the general natural environment.

Kari’s reflections on the Caribbean and Canada in the sixties and seventies have been helpful for me in terms of understanding that moment in Montreal and in relation to the Caribbean where she spent a good portion of academic and professional life. After a while, we began talking about other issues, including her father, theorist Karl Polanyi, and economics. Kari serves as a constant reminder of the importance of economic questions and her most recent book, a collection of essay entitled From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization: On Karl Polanyi and Other Essays, is very helpful in terms of understanding the historical context that has brought us to the current juncture in global economics and neoliberalism. So much of what is written today in the social sciences speaks about social phenomena as if it is divorced from economics. Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade become about race in-and-of-itself, ignoring the fact that the slave trade was part of an economic system for which Black labor assumed a central role. This is why today there is so much difficulty accepting that Black labor and Black laborers do not simply produce surplus labor, but in the post-plantation and post-plant era, have become surplus laborers in many respects, many of whom live behind prison bars or are tied up in the judicial system because the labor force cannot absorb them and because, as the Civil Rights and Black Power demonstrated in the 1960s and 1970s, they represent a potentially transformative force and catalyst. This represents a modern crisis, but not a new one, and it is part of the afterlife of slavery in the Americas, Du Bois’ unresolved problem of what to do with manumitted Black labor whose physicality is sometimes desirable, but whose overall presence by-and-large is seen as an unwelcome threat. This is not without contradiction as Black popular culture is embedded in the culture of the Americas; but even then, the writing is perhaps on the wall in terms of White surrogates whose emulation of Black popular culture demonstrates that the Black reign in this domain potentially has an expiry date.

PH: For you what is most relevant in James’ writing and thought for understanding the situation of Blacks in contemporary Canada?

DA: “Allow me to say once that this recognition of my work and of all of it by a group of West Indians centred in Canada seems to me to have political implications of far more than a merely national significance.” ~C.L.R. James to Robert Hill, December 31, 1965.

That’s a hard one. From the quote, James obviously had some sense that interest in his work in Canada was significant, but he doesn’t elaborate. I think James’s belief in the underclass and the ability for ordinary people to organize themselves for change as shapers of history is important. This is what happened in Canada in the 1960s, but I mention Montreal in particular because James was connected to people that were involved in both the Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams protest as a result of his sojourn in Canada in 1966-1967. Rinaldo Walcott has written an insightful unpublished paper, “Within the ‘archipelagos of poverty’: CLR James, Sylvia Wynter and ‘wasted lives,’” in which he applies Sylvia Wynter and James’s work to the Canadian context. He draws on a 1971 statement by James about the indelible presence of Blacks in England, a country whose fate is tied to that of a growing Black population that refuses to accept second-class status. Rinaldo then suggests that James’s remarks can be applied to Blacks in Canada. James thought about Caribbean people as a new people – I am trying to avoid the word modern and the implications of the word modernity – who, shorn of certain cultural-historical “baggage,” engendered the possibility of creating a new Caribbean society. But I think we can say that of the Black diaspora in general and this notion of the Black “modern” is akin to what Richard Iton suggests about the political implications of diaspora precisely because of its essential homelessness in In Search of the Black Fantastic. Blacks in Canada live in a kind of liminal space in which, despite an over three hundred-year presence in this country, are yet to be acknowledged as full citizens. But, as Iton and Walcott’s more recent work suggests, and James’s work implies, we need to think beyond conventional notions of citizenship entitlements and inclusion and towards how our experience can be channeled in ways that encourage us to work toward creatively recreating society, refashioning it through our own self-activity in ways that radically transform its current destructive social and environmental course, and with a vision that extends beyond nation states. This is part of what the diaspora’s history tells us – that our struggles have often been at the forefront of human struggles for emancipation, or at least cast light on human possibilities, even though this is rarely acknowledged.

*It should be noted that a historical error creeps into the CLR James Journal interview that was missed by editor, interviewer, and interviewee. Austin states that CLR James co-wrote Facing Reality with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs. In fact, Facing Reality was co-written with Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Lee Boggs. We thank Professor Robert Hill for bringing this error to our attention.

Reposted from The Public Archive, with permission of the author

Peter James Hudson, Ph.D. teaches in theDepartment of African American Studies at UCLA. He recently co-edited a special issue of the CLR James Journal on “Black Canadian Thought.”

The Black Scholar recently interviewed Shireen K. Lewis, scholar, Senior Editor of TBS, Executive Director of EduSeed and founder of its SisterMentors Program, Washington D.C.

Q: Shireen, could you give us some background on the non-profit you work with? Feel free to give us some highs and lows as well as general information about how it started and its achievements.

A: I had the idea for women of color doctoral students creating community around the dissertation very early one morning. The idea came after a very tough week working on a dissertation chapter. I was raised in a very small community and so I knew what it felt like when people came together to help each other. I think it is Tracy Chapman who asks “why are there so many of us yet people are still so alone?” The group of women who came together broke through the isolation that we were experiencing during the dissertation writing. About four years later, after we saw our success, we decided to give back by mentoring girls of color from low income families. Most of us were earning our doctorates from predominantly white institutions and we were either the only ones or one of a handful of black and brown women in our departments. We knew that was because the pipeline was not being fed and we wanted to do something about that. So that is how the mentoring of girls began.

So what do we do today? Today, we are still doing the same thing but in a more sustainable manner. SisterMentors is under the umbrella of EduSeed, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Our goal is to increase the number of women of color who earn doctorates and help girls of color from low income families to go to college and earn a Bachelor’s degree.

SisterMentors is a unique mentoring program in many ways. It is comprised of three groups: girls of color in first through twelve grades, young women in college, and women of color doctoral students. The program has helped 26 young women to go to college and 53 women of color to earn doctorates including in Math, Science and Economics. The core of our work lies in our long-term commitment to the women and girls. The girls join our program in elementary or middle school and stay through high school and college graduation and the women stay in our program anywhere from two and a half to five years. The women doctoral students that we serve mentor girls while they are with us.

Like most nonprofits, the most challenging aspect of our work is raising funds. I spend a lot of my time fundraising and I am also involved in program activities. The work is very rewarding and I have received recognition including an Honorary Doctorate from Rutgers University and SisterMentors has been recognized by the District of Columbia for its many years of service to the city.

Q: How exactly does the work you do with the nonprofit connect with your scholarship or does it? 

A: My scholarship is about moving intellectuals from the margin to the center. My book, Race, Culture and Identity: Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité traces a literary tradition of black francophone literature from after the first world war to the late twentieth century. So I start with black radical scholars living in Paris in the 1930s affiliated with the manifesto Légitime Défense and end with another manifesto written in 1990’s titled Eloge de la Créolité. I include black intellectuals like Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Paulette Nardal, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau and Jean Bernabé. I emphasize the important role women like Nardal played in pioneering this modern literary movement.

It is the same thing that we do at SisterMentors. Our work is to move women and girls from the margins to the center by empowering them through education. Growing up I saw women around me, including my mother and grandmother, who were smart and self-confident but were unable to advance their education because of lack of opportunity and gender-based societal pressures and expectations.

Q: What’s your personal background as a scholar?

My background as a scholar was greatly influenced by the fact that I grew up in a country where the leader was a scholar, an intellectual and a prolific writer of history books that are still being taught at universities today. Eric Williams became prime minister of Trinidad shortly after I was born. He had a Ph.D. in history from Oxford University, was a professor at Howard University and published many books even during his tenure as prime minister. I grew up hearing my parents describing Williams as “brilliant” and saying that “he has brains that he hasn’t even used yet.” So I always wanted to get a Ph.D. so that I, too, could be “brilliant.” I also grew up hearing about the Black Power movement in the U.S., witnessing large scale protests by oilfield workers organized by their trade union (against multinational oil companies which were profiting from the exploration of oil where we lived, and in Trinidad in general), and learning about women’s inequality from books I read and from witnessing women’s lives.

All of my learning from kindergarten to post-secondary took place in Trinidad. I began learning French and Spanish vocabulary and grammar in secondary school in Trinidad. I then transitioned to reading the works of intellectuals from France and Spain when I did “A” levels (two years of study after secondary school which was a prerequisite for university). I then began serious study of social issues in France and Latin America when I came to the U.S. and began college because I double majored in French and Spanish. And then, of course, I did more in-depth readings and analysis of French and Francophone literature to earn my Ph.D. in French.   My readings of French Enlightenment philosophers, such as Rousseau and Montesquieu, and modern scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir and Michele Foucault, and my engagement with liberation theology through novels and films from Latin America, have influenced my thinking on social justice for women and marginalized communities and have certainly influenced my scholarship.

Q: Do you think of yourself or your work as activism?

A: It depends on your definition of the word. I truly believe that we will begin to see radical change in this world only when women leaders become a critical mass. So that is why my work is focused on women and girls. I am hopeful that women and girls, including those who benefit from SisterMentors, will become leaders who work to empower the powerless and better the lives of the disadvantaged. Once that happens, we will move toward peace and justice in this world.

Q: What do you hope for your work with TBS?

A: I am working with colleagues who are dedicated to continuing the high caliber of this journal nurtured by Robert Chrisman. I am honored and excited to be part of this team. I would like to help TBS continue to publish articles that are on the cutting edge – that no other journal is focused on. For example, the issue of how climate change affects black people and the black community. This is a very important issue that we should all be talking about.

Q: Where were you born and how did your surroundings affect how you grew up and who you are today?

A: I was born in a village in the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago, located in the Caribbean. The village is called Pepper Village and is connected to a town called Fyzabad on the island of Trinidad. I grew up in the early post-independence years when Trinidad and Tobago had gained independence from Britain. The village itself did not have a school so I went to the first school in my village when I was about 8 years old. Prior to that, I went to a school many miles away which was overcrowded and was difficult to get to because of unreliable transportation. Once I got to that school in my village, I blossomed and began to excel in academics and this was mainly because of the close personal attention of the teachers and their commitment to the students. The youngest teacher at the school, whose name was Dora, took me under her wing and pushed me to excel in all areas of my life. That first school in my village profoundly changed my life and is responsible, in large part, for who I am today. Today, I am a lawyer and a Ph.D. with a strong sense of how education can change one’s life and the positive role that mentors play in children’s lives.