Our final issue of 2018, “Returnings,” is now available. Featuring cover art by artist and teacher John Jennings, the issue includes an interview with Jennings that was conducted by Stephanie L. Batiste, Mary Anne Boelcskevy, and Shireen K. Lewis. Their discussion focuses on Jennings’s process of co-creating the 2018 Eisner Award-winning graphic novelization of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and includes unused draft panels and alternative covers. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post of additional unpublished images.

The issue also includes “Revisiting the Gomez Imperative: Exchanging Our Country Marks and the Africana Studies Tradition, ASWAD, 2017” by Monique Bedasse, “Organized Disorder: The New York City Jail Rebellion of 1970” by Orisanmi Burton, “Blackness and Becoming: Édouard Glissant’s Retour” by Louis Chude-Sokei, and “The Political Legacy of Thabo Mbeki” by Sanya Osha. The editor’s note, “Black Studies Post-Janus,” was written by TBS associate editor Jonathan Fenderson.

For a limited time, the editor’s note and the interview with John Jennings are free to download and read.

Support The Black Scholar by subscribing to print and digital issues here.

Upcoming 2019 issues include…

• Black Queer and Trans* Aesthetics
• Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability
• Black Performance issues 1 & 2

Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure (call for papers can be found here)
• Black Girls and Girlhood (call for papers can be found here)
• Death of Black Studies?
• And more…

 

Jakari Sherman, the former Artistic Director of Step Afrika!, recently finished a two-year tour with The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence, of which he is also the director. Under Sherman’s guidance, the production brings the kinetic energy of step, tap, and other dance traditions to the famous sixty-piece collection of paintings that Lawrence finished at the age of 25. Engaging the movement of people with the movement of dance, Step Afrika!’s Migration begins by contextualizing Lawrence’s work within a narrative of the African diaspora to America: the talking drum in Africa, the turmoil of slavery and the theft of the drum, and the creation of new artistic traditions in the wake of these traumas. The first half of the production ends with a piece called “Wade Suite,” using “Wade in the Water” to emphasize the importance of the church as a site of Black American culture and spirituality. The second half directly enacts the iconic central images from Lawrence’s collection, including the extraordinary voyage North by train and the separation and reunion of families. Here, the number called “Trane Suite” tells of the journey of three men as they explore the cityscapes of the North along with their wives that join them. The production closes with a piece entitled “Chicago,” highlighting what the program calls the “collective self-transformation of those who made it North.”

Originally a commission from Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection, which holds half of Lawrence’s series, The Migration has taken Step Afrika! across the country. The production has received several awards along the way, headlining the Presidential Black History Month Reception in 2016 and appearing at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The piece is a triumph for Sherman, whose work as a dancer and dance educator—from competitions in his youth to studying ethnochoreology at the University of Limerick—has affirmed step’s vital place in American culture. As Artistic Director for the first professional company devoted to step, Sherman has dedicated his life to educating audiences about its unique history.

I talked with Sherman at a café in Washington, D.C., right as the current run of The Migration had ended.

. . . .

You’ve been traveling with The Migration for a while now. But you are based out of both Houston and D.C.?

Yeah, I’ve been going back and forth throughout this Migration tour, in town or on the road, traveling for the show. But Houston is my home.

And you just finished a run here in D.C.?

We did. We were at the Hartke Theater, which is on the campus of Catholic University. We were there for a two-week run, and it was amazing. We’ve been touring now for two years. We started in DC and we finished the run in DC. This is the end of The Migration for now, which is kind of bittersweet.

Now that you’re at the end of this run, would you mind walking us through where step began for you?

Growing up, I was into music and the sciences. Art through music essentially was my thing. I found my way into stepping via percussion. I was in marching band, and I found a love for stepping because of its rhythm. In Houston, competitive stepping during the early nineties was really big. I started off competing with my school step team and just found a love for it. Then I stepped when I went to college. During and after college, I went back and worked with children and the step team I had been in. They got noticed by the Houston Rockets and they asked me to form the first NBA Step Team. So that was the beginning of my professional stepping career.

I came to Step Afrika! in 2005, after joining them for a trip to South Africa in 2004. I really liked their work and it felt like I could contribute to what they were doing artistically. So, I came into the company in 2005, and by 2007, I was tapped to be Artistic Director of the company, and I did that for seven years until I went to Ireland for my Master’s degree. Shortly after I came back from Ireland, we began the Migration run.

That’s quite a journey. So many people get into step in college, but you were already well versed by the time you got there.

I think that discovering step in college has traditionally been the pathway. But at this point the youth stepping world has really grown, and there are stepping leagues now with a lot more people getting into step earlier in life. They are given access by members of fraternities and sororities who, because of their missions related to community service, were going out teaching stepping, like I did, in their high school or maybe their church or other community centers. So now there’s much more access to the form than there was.

What was it like getting your Masters in Ethnochoreology at the University of Limerick?

Going to Ireland and doing ethnochoreology was an important step in my own need to understand the tradition and art form of stepping in a greater way, as well as to lay the foundation for scholarly research connected to the form. In seeking to do graduate work here in the States, there was the challenge of not having formal dance training because most programs are based in classical ballet or modern dance. I didn’t come up through dance, I came up through drums and percussion and inheriting the tradition of stepping, so that was a challenge for me. I went to Ireland in part because of their tradition of percussive dance and in part because it was a welcoming place. I discovered a lot of similarities in Irish step dance culture and stepping culture, especially as it relates to competition, which has been the basis of the form.

Did you find it illuminating to study the ethnographic elements of choreography in an academic institution?

The folks who are really passionate about stepping, they’re really seeking to understand the art form more. They’re seeking a sense of legitimacy. I’ve always been seeking that, and one of the ways I did this was trying to get people to see stepping as an art form. Going to Ireland really helped me to problematize the idea of stepping as an art form, because doing so seeks to elevate it to a point where it’s just something that is done for entertainment. Going to Ireland helped me to recognize step for the tradition that it is, as a folk tradition beyond just being an art form. Because I think we try to elevate things to art to legitimize them.

What similarities or differences did you find in how ethnochoreology approaches dance relative to what you learned in Houston?

In our culture, stepping isn’t seen as something on par with the other legitimate art forms, so we seek to compare it to ballet. Going to Ireland really strengthened me to accept step for what it is, to present it for what it is, and to teach people about the parts of the tradition that are beyond the performative—and to use that to educate people about the form and why it’s meaningful to people. That sort of work is not even about establishing the legitimacy of step anymore, but as a byproduct of these efforts, the legitimation ends up happening.

Where are your studies taking you now?

I found Ireland to be a nurturing environment, and it really helped me to develop a greater sense of compassion for people as I’m studying everything that relates to dance. So now my research involves diving into the history of stepping, and I have a theoretical basis and framework through which to view that. It has given me a great position to now speak to people about the form and bring greater understanding—even for myself—about why we do what we do. It has helped me to explain where step comes from, and to dispel a lot of myths about stepping and its history.

What makes Step Afrika! unique as a dance company?

Step Afrika! was created to share the culture of stepping and to expose people to the art form, because early on the only people exposed to stepping were those in a fraternity or who were on a college campus where this was happening. Step Afrika!’s aesthetic is a blend of the whole of stepping rather than specific to one fraternity or one sorority. It’s evident when people come into the company—they come in with a particular style. Even when folks are not Greek, they maybe only stepped in high school or with their dorm, but they still have a very distinct style. When they join Step Afrika!, they have to break that and learn to engage with a lot of different step aesthetics. We are trying to represent all of stepping to the fullest extent possible.

Then there’s another layer of using step for narrative or even experimentally, like blending stepping with rock music or classical music or jazz, as you saw in Migration. And now we’re taking other forms, like visual art, and creating stories with all of these artistic mashups.

One of the things that was amazing about The Migration was that it involved step, tap, soft shoe, and European traditional dance. It was this amazing amalgam of recognizable Black dance, but it was also in conversation with European dance traditions.

We have so many different artists in the company, so many different talents. When we initially created the Migration in 2011, we ran it for a few weeks here in DC, building the show around the talents of the artists that we had at the time. We had tap dancers, we had modern dancers, we had a few West African dancers—and of course, stepping is the backbone of it all. So we built The Migration with those wide-ranging skill sets. We decided not to create everything based in stepping, forcing the whole company to learn and adapt to that, but instead asked how we could create work for the people that we have in the company to showcase their talents, and that’s how the show came to be.

But now that The Migration is established, you now recruit to fill specific roles?

Exactly. I think the development of Migration was an interesting process, a bit of growth and experimentation that landed really well with the company. Because we have so many people in the company, you don’t often get people who come into Step Afrika! who are really refined steppers. Most people do step for a couple years in college and that’s the extent of their stepping career. At most, someone would do it for three years, or maybe they learned in high school, but it’s not something they’re necessarily engaged in or practicing every day.

When you learn to step, it’s not like you start after school at 5.

Yeah, while modern dancers start when they’re three and then when they go to college there’s a whole curriculum available to them. There’s a learning and refining process that we go through in the company so we are able to incorporate these skill sets that people have honed over a long time and blend those with the stepping.

How did the production process of The Migration begin?

Brian Williams is the founder and executive director of Step Afrika! The Phillips Collection, here in D.C., was interested in doing something around the Jacob Lawrence series, and they had some conversations with Brian. They commissioned us to come up with something to connect with Jacob Lawrence’s work. It launched a period of research for me to just learn as much as I could about Jacob Lawrence and about The Migration, and that was the beginning of our work.

What proved to be the most valuable research for the production?

What was most valuable for me early on was spending a lot of time at the Schomburg in Harlem. There were some reference books that I used to study the series. But the first thing was just going there and reviewing archival material from the time period: some of the letters that were written from the people in the South to the people in the North, or the job postings calling people to come to the North. Those sources gave me texture, just looking at these old papers, they gave me a sense of the time period and allowed me to begin to create something that was—I hate using the word “authentic,” that’s such a problematic word—but something that I felt could connect to the texture of that time period. We knew that the through-line was Jacob Lawrence’s work and we knew what the narrative was, but how do we tie in the visual art with the stepping, with the music, with all these different dance styles? I think that early research really helped those elements to gel.

I was amazed by the ways your interpretation seemed to be responsive to Jacob Lawrence, the history of Black dance, and the existing repertoire of Step Afrika!

It was sort of kismet the way it all came down from the Phillips Collection. “Trane,” for example, was a piece that we already had been working on for a while, and “Wade in the Water” was part of Step Afrika!’s repertoire for a long time, and they just all fit together in the piece. We start with the drum on what we imagine is the west coast of Africa and then the Middle Passage section. And then all of the scenes lead up to the drums being taken away, and what that meant not only for art but for spiritual traditions. Drums and music were such a big part of spiritual traditions, as we see through “Wade in the Water” and the messages that were passed through African American spirituals, and this narrative was woven into the Migration story.

How do you interact with audiences that have never seen step?

We want people to know about the history of stepping, a dance form created by African American students. It’s percussive, it involves using our hands and our feet to make music. I think it’s important for people to understand that making sound, making music, and making gesture are equally important in the form. We are the music, essentially. These are just some of the identifying features about stepping that people see but maybe don’t always recognize. So we want to have people understand the tradition and that it comes out of fraternity and sorority culture.

One of the misunderstandings is when people try to connect stepping directly to Africa. A lot of people say stepping comes from Africa, whereas we would recognize the lineage of stepping in forms that originate in African culture or in the culture of Africans who were brought here. Stepping was created here in America, in part as a response to drums being taken away and the forms that evolved because of that. Those are some of the aspects of step that people don’t necessarily know about.

Do you get a lot of people who confuse step for tap?

Yeah, they look at tap dance and they’re curious about the connection. There’s a need to talk about the grammar and the language of stepping and what we call it. For the most part, people are very open to receiving knowledge about what stepping is.

Are there people who were originators or progenitors of stepping that you’d like audiences to be aware of?

It’s less about individuals and more about groups of people. We look at folks who were instrumental to the Civil Rights movement on their college campuses, and how their activism gave form to a lot of the fraternity and sorority culture. The way that they moved, the sense of militancy, gave form to a lot of the rituals and activities of fraternities and sororities. Those forms found their way into stepping. There’s a clear delineation when those movements started and how they changed the aesthetic of stepping.

There were folks who came around in the nineties in California who brought stepping to television. You have shows like School Daze and A Different World on television. You have these people who brought stepping to the forefront, but then there were all these folks who are sort of nameless, who were creating steps, who were the early choreographers who didn’t call themselves choreographers but maybe were step masters, who created a culture from which School Daze and A Different World could draw. Those are the real forebears of the form. We may never know their names, but I think it’s about honoring their legacy by sharing the stories and the lifestyles and the lives that they had to lead in order for us to have this tradition and this art form that we call stepping.

Where is your current research headed? What’s next for you?

I’m currently engaged in a project called Who Are the Step Masters? I am seeking to understand the history and the form of stepping through a search for the people who are important to the development of the form. I’m touring the country interviewing people of various ages. Right now, I’m focused on the older generations, those who would have been in college during the 1940s and 50s, who maybe were a part of sororities or fraternities and can tell me about the early days of the movement that evolved into stepping. I’m working on a photobook as part of that project, and a documentary play and documentary film. That’s where my time and energy are going.

What’s next for Step Afrika!?

Step Afrika! is engaged in figuring out the follow up to Migration. We’re asking what it is that we want to say at this point, how much we want to spin off from The Migration. We are interested in the story of the drum and the drum folk and how the drums were lost, but also how we have reclaimed the drum, whether it be through hip hop music or through other forms like the turntables or beat boxing. We’re looking at these as some of the starting points of the next production after Migration.

Thank you for talking the time to sit with me to discuss your work.

It was my pleasure.

 

Paul J. Edwards is a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University and the book reviews editor for The Black Scholar.

This article originally appeared in ASAP/Journal.

I’ve always thought that the problem with the literary and cultural politics of the Anglophone world was that we’ve never had an actual, formal surrealist movement. Yes, there are writers and thinkers in the English-speaking world that are verifiably surreal (though not members of the official movement) and many that are described as surrealist, for example the writer who is the focus of this essay, the recently deceased Guyanese novelist, critic, and visionary, Wilson Harris, who passed away in March of this year. And yes, the impact of the Surrealist International was global. As I will discuss, it had a significant impact in the Caribbean, which is partly what justifies discussing Wilson Harris in this context. Though seen as a minor or cult figure, or an example of “art brut,” I’d like to help make clear his standing in a richer tradition of thinking and writing than previously acknowledged. I’d like to also suggest ways that his legacy can and should make a difference.

I’m also not ignoring the final impact and commodification of Surrealism as it made its way first to New York City and then to Hollywood only to become as much a feature of advertising and cinema as it would become a tool of now mundane representations of the human mind. Surrealism as an artistic and literary style, and a mode of psychological inquiry, was present in England as early as 1935 and its influence was felt in American art in the 1940s in advance of the arrival of actual surrealists as refugees from World War II. However, as an open and ongoing critical tendency with specific habits and practices, it hasn’t gone as far politically in English as in other linguistic worlds. This is particularly the case in its fetish for wild juxtapositions and radical combinations meant to jar or shock the viewer/reader into new perceptions of reality, in which differences and oppositions seemed less alien to each other and their hierarchies questioned if not suspended. It is also the case in the movement’s assumption that “reality” was itself constituted by radical juxtapositions and wild combinations—which is to say, as post-structuralist thinkers later would, an endless play of differences. These techniques have become fundamental to artistic and media practice; but the political assumptions behind them have not translated widely. Because it is the surrealist politics of cultural difference that matters here and its implications for power relationships. Though the impact of surrealism on the wider Caribbean or the black world in general is woefully understudied, it is this awareness of poetics and power that will manifest most strongly in the colonial Caribbean, and the broader archipelagic context that introduces Wilson Harris to the Anglophone world.

The surrealist commitment to juxtaposition and difference is best articulated by the movement’s foundational notion of beauty as produced by “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” sourced from Les Chants de Maldoror by Uruguayan-French poet (and innovative plagiarist) Isidore Lucien Ducasse (Compte de Lautréamont). The founders of surrealism would hail him as prophet. This fact of their methodology has been much discussed and researched, but that scrutiny has focused on the relationship between metaphor or metonym (the former suppressive and the latter combinatory, as Jacques Lacan would have it), the role of the unconscious in making object relationships, and the implications of a radical decentering of knowledge that is made possible by juxtaposition and collage. What has been missed are the implications of Lautremont’s definition—of decontextualized mixture—for cultural politics in a world made by colonialism and slavery.

That surrealist founder André Breton would be so inspired by the work of Martinquan poet, Aimé Césaire, presaged the movement’s increasing interest in the broader cultural productions and cosmologies of native and indigenous peoples in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania. This “exotic” material enabled their leveling of cultural value by juxtaposing a seemingly random display of items, images, and artifacts—a process emboldened by new technologies such as photography, film, and to a lesser extent sound. This reminds us that the surrealists saw race and colonialism as central to their logic and poetics of difference; and they would manifest through these techniques a critique one could legitimately describe as “cross-cultural” (it’s not clear that those neo-surrealist movements in England or those influenced by surrealism in America fully grasped that aspect of the ideology, just as it’s not clear that the generation of Structuralist bricolage—from Levi-Strauss to Derrida to Deleuze and Guattari and British Cultural Studies—could make much of the racial implications of this mode of production or see in it alternative methods of social arrangement or definitions of cultural identity).

Race as central to surrealist method may have veered deeply into racial romanticism or romantic racism—examples of this are legion, so much so that it’s no surprise to encounter those who will describe much of the movement as actually racist, especially since it was flagrantly primitivist; but anti-colonialism at least was firmly and openly doctrine, as was a desire to problematize the European subject or psyche as the “center” of knowing if not power. Describing the intent of the work as “cross-cultural” is in no way to neglect the fact that it did privilege European subjectivity while attempting to decenter it, and its fascination for non-Western or non-White cultures were manifestly patronizing, paternalistic and from our vantage point cringeworthy.

Aimé Césaire and the Negritude movement of which he was a signal part would share that primitivism and that racial romanticism. It would also not be without a similar degree of cringe when compatriots of his like Léopold Sédar Senghor dug too deeply into an alleged racial essence. Despite his own considerable essentialism, Césaire would seize on cross-cultural juxtaposition as a fully realized anti-colonial poetics from the perspective of the colonized. Juxtaposition or blending or contrast in this work was deployed against the racial modes of knowing and racist social arrangements established by French colonialism and white supremacy.

Forms of Negritude continue to be primary fallback positions for much of the Anglophone black world; but in the Francophone world it would eventually become an obstacle for the generation of Caribbean writers and thinkers after Césaire. This is truly important. The rejection of Negritude needs more attention beyond the Francophone Caribbean because it enabled possibilities we are sorely in need of exploring. Harris himself spoke of such a need when he argued that juxtaposition could or would transform racial essentialism: “the rubbing together which we may visualize between endemic malaise and Surreal vessels of the imagination provides a residue in depth which becomes I think the potential seed and branch and tree of a black creativity beyond negritude to deepen resources of memory and imagination in a plagued humanity.”

The “rubbing together” of Negritude and Surrealism would allow the Caribbean to transform both into something else—a distinct conceptual space that will clear the way for, most notably, an Édouard Glissant in the Francophone world but also a Wilson Harris in the Anglophone. The work of these two writers and critics manifests—or perhaps straddles—both Surrealism and its transcendence; and given that Negritude was a movement rooted also in anti-colonial racial nationalism, both writers would side-step that as well whilst continually reminding us of its perils.

But to the rejection of Negritude: famously it was manifest in the manifesto, Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphaël Confiant in 1989. It dared challenge Negritude (and Césaire), partly for a racial romanticism that would edify Africa and thereby anchor Caribbean identity in a singular root. In philosophical terms current with the manifesto, Negritude prioritized an essential being over a far more dynamic becoming. “Africa” became a barrier, and the identity claims necessary for anti-colonial resistance became the burden of political independence, particularly in composite societies in the New World.

The race-consciousness of Negritude may have emerged from dehumanization, racial violence, and the deracination of slavery, and it may have led to an overwhelming desire to return to or reconstruct a fixed past; but for the Créolistes it occluded and prevented the necessary embracing of an already transformed and multiply rooted present, one present in their creole language. Though he may have been the great poet of neologism, of creating novelty in language, Césaire remained committed to French. And as an elected official, that commitment was viewed in line with his support for the departmentalization of Martinique rather than independence from its colonial power.

It is through Édouard Glissant, however, that we’ve come to discuss if not embrace the poetics and politics of creolization in the literary and cultural politics of the Anglophone world in the wake of Negritude. It is through him that we can then make sense of Wilson Harris in an Anglophone world that is without the historical superstructure or intellectual continuum to support or acknowledge him, save for post-colonial notions of “hybridity” fashionable a decade or two ago. Harris was of the same generation as Glissant but produced his work on the margins of the literary and cultural history sketched above. He was clearly aware of Negritude and was a critical but enthusiastic reader of the work of André Breton, Michel Leiris, and other surrealists who he engaged first from the intellectual distance of a colonial Guyana and then from the heart of empire itself, England. Just as the landscape of the Guyanese rainforests utterly dominate much of his fiction—he was a government surveyor for some years—it’s hard to ignore the cultural politics of his country. After all, despite its postcolonial history of inter-ethnic tension, Guyana lacks the cultural resources or raw numbers to be ultimately defined by any of its specific ethnic groupings. That he himself was radically mixed—indigenous Caribbean/South Asian/Black/European—perhaps also made a “consolidation of identity,” to use his words, difficult to politically achieve.

Creolization and what Harris would call “the cross cultural” are deeply related. They address the process by which oppositions allow for juxtaposition, collage, and bricolage but then inevitably blend and blur while reshaping the very memory or intentions of what initially brought them together. In Harris’s words, oppositions and differences enact a cross-cultural dialogue in which they consume their own biases, because within them —in a phrase that should be tattooed and spray painted everywhere—is “a curious half-blind groping” towards alternate modes of community and/or modes of being or knowing “beyond static cultural imperatives.” Because self and other are twins not oppositions—“carnival twinships” as he once put it—because they are performances not identities, they are each other’s destiny, hence the endless mirrors, rivers, streams and reflective surfaces that suffuse his fiction rendering reality much like as through a prism. The goal was to explore and enact a model of cultural difference in which elements were not negatively opposed as was/is the case in colonial and racist modes of apprehension and social arrangement.

This is what lies beyond Negritude. As both Glissant and Harris note, Negritude merely consolidated and reified those modes of apprehension and social arrangement, even if it reversed their value or position. This is at the root of my initial complaint that the Anglophone world has yet to produce a politically valid (not self-hating) anti-Negritudist movement or a legitimately black anti-essentialist or ultimately anti-identitarian sensibility. Yes, we critique essentialism, problematize identity, and reject totalizing racial assessments; yet we ever revert to a blackness that cannot function without endless defense and justification and is rooted in totalizing racial assessments of our own. However, that endless defense might be its own justification. It’s clearly the engine behind the commodification of blackness that proliferates in our knowledge industries.

An Anglophone surrealism and a post-Negritude response would likely have helped free racial thinking from the endless and oftentimes narcissistic thickets of this extreme identitarianism and would have impelled us to reimagine fundamental notions of community. Because of this lack, those attending to racial transformation and cultural becoming have Wilson Harris to represent such a break. And in a moment when whiteness, capital, and colonial power have furiously retrenched and “consolidated,” the temptation for us to respond with consolidations of our own—the Negritude response—can only be avoided with effort and legitimately radical alternatives. Harris’s attempt to narrate a world without centers or borders or identities was therefore prescient, far more so than Glissant, who despite his hostility to nationalism and colonial power dynamics has been easily recuperated by critics who ignore or evade his hostility to notions of fixed identity, historical “roots,” or conventional notions of resistance.

Harris, however, is patently and gloriously irrecuperable, at least so far. Though his work does allow for the same amount of “post-colonial” critique as Glissant’s, it is also explicitly focused on the complex process of renewing and reimagining community across cultural, racial, and historical barriers. Our notions of resistance aren’t enough here. They are radically challenged in that they can feed the consolidation of identity, that “conquistadorial habit,” he’s called it. And his decentering of subjectivity—all subjectivity, not just that of the colonizer—was not just an attack on the hierarchies of European knowledge as it was with surrealism. It was a necessary prologue to enabling that “curious half-blind groping” mentioned earlier.

Now the consensus is that Harris’s irrecuperability and his minor or cult status is largely due to his prose. It’s true that its complexity and density, whether fiction or non-fiction, regularly ban him from course syllabi and the rituals of literary culture, even in the Caribbean. But considering that he was first introduced to many of us at the high point of post-structuralist theory when we were also introduced to Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and then via postcolonial thought, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and given that we would then engage Judith Butler and now Sylvia Wynter and Edouard Glissant, it’s hard to merit his critical prose with such intractability. And in the wake of radical modernism his fiction isn’t any more challenging than Faulkner’s, Woolf’s, or Joyce’s. It really is that assault on identity, that challenge, one that goes so far in his work that the very environment as well as myth, dream, fantasy, and artistic creation are all given an equality of perspective and sentience, and therefore render knowledge, history, and resistance difficult to fathom much less claim. And his habit of rendering the other as partial self, or seeing the self partially in the other; in his civilizational perspective that renders our struggles against the staggering vistas of History; these work against the narcissism of those who comb his work for specific evidence against specific oppressions.

But it’s really all about the admittedly inelegant term, “groping,” which is hard to articulate in our contemporary cultural and political climate, without its suggestion of impropriety and unwelcome sexual advances. This only emphasizes just how rooted creolization is in the notion of unwelcome physical and cultural border crossings and also how such transgressions have regularly been policed or exploited.  In Harris’s mythopoeia, as a historical and metaphysical process this “groping” must be “half-blind” and uncertain since knowledge, like subjectivity, is endlessly partial yet forever seeks its own reinvention. That dynamic process is central to the work, so much so that the term is arguably the most notable word in his oeuvre, possibly second only to “quantum” in its frequency. The latter is similar in that it implies probability, chance, and uncertainty, Werner Heisenberg—he of the “uncertainty principle” in physics—being an influence. But that restlessness characterizes his prose, and is what makes it difficult to settle on a specific character or setting or to fetishize specific situations or power dynamics. It’s all partial, shifting, and evanescent and difficult to appropriate for specific political ends, particularly those rooted in race or identity.

Or, again, in the “rubbing together” of sex. As others have argued (Robert J.C. Young most prominently), metaphors of blending like creolization or hybridity are always rooted in sex—heterosexual sex to be clear. Speaking in metaphorical terms, cross-racial sex and desire have long been narrative clichés for cross-cultural intimacy and of course the “birth” of something different from foundational elements. The torrid plantation soft-core melodramas of Edgar Mittelholzer, the other major postcolonial Guyanese author, are far from Harris’s vision. Harris is the least sexual writer one can imagine, unless one describes the sensual excess of his landscapes and language as pornographic, or argues that his ontology was libidinal in its promiscuous drive towards fecundity in both the natural world and the infinite, possible worlds of cross-culturality.

There is, though, a radicalism in that ontological promiscuity, in submitting to its breathless uncertainty. It was perhaps too quiet for the nationalism that initially surrounded Harris’s work and the anti-colonial fervor that continues to feed much of the cultural and literary work of the Anglophone Caribbean; it certainly can seem a hyper-mystical or quasi-religious quietism. But when we realize that reducing meaning to binaries is not enough, and that rejecting them has largely led to reversing not transcending them; when the relationship between humans and the environment demands to be replaced by a greater mutuality, a distinctly non-human centered one; or when we realize that cultures themselves do hunger for otherness and transformation and intimacy, and that there are ways to encourage those heretical or even perverse movements that reject the inhuman logic of centralized power; when the old rhetoric of self and other has once again failed, perhaps then we will be truly ready for the Palace of the Peacock.

 

Louis Chude-Sokei is the Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar.

Given our momentous political turmoil and a still unclear sense of what is to be done, our current issue “Pragmatic Utopias” features “Get in Formation: Black Women’s Participation in the Women’s March on Washington as an Act of Pragmatic Utopianism,” a thoughtful and deeply informative essay by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi & Candis Watts Smith. After all, if anything points the way forward—or orients us towards movement—it is clearly Black women’s thought and activism. This issue also includes Erik Gleibermann’s “Challenging the Stigma of an All-Black School: The Selma High Story,” a reflection on the legacy and possibilities of all-Black education in the wake of the failure of the “post-racial” and, arguably, of state-sanctioned multiculturalism. “We Are Not an Organically City People”: Black Modernity and the Afterimages of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust” is an innovative essay by Pacharee Sudhinaraset that returns to the work of filmmaker Julie Dash through a post-Lemonade lens. Finally, the issue features Bernie Lombardi’s pointed interview with acclaimed queer Nigerian writer, Chinelo Okparanta.

For a limited time, we are offering free access to download and read the introduction by senior editor, Shireen Lewis, here. Readers can also download and read “Get in Formation: Black Women’s Participation in the Women’s March on Washington as an Act of Pragmatic Utopianism.”

Please join our growing community of online and print readers by following us on Facebook and Twitter, and certainly by subscribing.

Upcoming issues include:

• Our final issue of 2018. Projected content includes the following:
  • Organized Disorder: The New York City Jail Rebellion of 1970, by Orisanmi Burton
  • An interview with Eisner Award winning artist, professor, and frequent TBS cover art contributor John Jennings about his graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred
  • The Political Legacy of Thabo Mbeki, by Sanya Osha
  • Blackness and Becoming: Edouard Glissant’s Retour, by TBS editor-in-chief, Louis Chude-Sokei
  • And, as always, more book reviews!
• Black Queer and Trans Aesthetics
• Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability
• Black Performance
• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure
• Black Girlhood
• And more exciting content to celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2020!

John “Bushmaster” McIver (Mustafa Shakir) and Luke Cage (Mike Colter) in a scene from Marvel’s Luke Cage (2018). Available on Netflix June 22, 2018

Since its premiere in 2016, the Marvel series, Luke Cage has used the comic book genre of storytelling to examine the impact of interlocking systems of racial, gender and economic oppression on Black Americans’ relationships to each other. In season one the show focused on the conflict between the heroes, Luke Cage and Detective Misty Knight and the villains, Cornel “Cottonmouth” Stokes, Mariah Dillard née Stokes and Cage’s estranged brother, Willis “Diamondback” Stryker. In season two, American-Jamaican antihero, John “Bushmaster” McIver enters the fray and disrupts what was previously an exclusively Black American battle to dominate Harlem.

Most reviewers have only briefly discussed this season’s subplot around intra-racial Black American-Black Jamaican conflict. However, the ethnic/national conflict in the storyline is one of its most crucial contributions to the series’ ongoing interrogations of Black diasporic experiences.  In an interview with Angelica Bastién of Vulture, showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker stated that he pursued this storyline because he saw it as an opportunity to recognize Jamaican contributions to the development of U.S. Black popular culture (in particular, hip hop music) and explore different forms of race consciousness among Black Americans and Black Jamaicans. The fact that Luke Cage became a popular topic of discussion this summer among Jamaicans, is testament to the importance of exploring these transnational Black connections, including conflicts.

The show has received widespread praise for featuring the most Jamaican characters ever seen on a U.S. television show, as well as criticism from Jamaicans and non-Jamaicans for the clearly uneven accents among the Black American actors who played Jamaicans. Many viewers, like me, enjoyed season two, while agreeing that it would have been stronger aesthetically with better accent work and subtitling that accurately reflected Jamaican language. For others, the accents were completely unrepresentative of Jamaican speech and inexcusable. The discourses around intra-Black conflicts and hierarchies therefore operate within the storyline as well as the space of public opinion about the show’s Jamaican accents and limited casting of Jamaicans.

Critics of Luke Cage’s casting decisions have mostly focused on the producers’ oversights, without a larger effort to probe the mostly white-controlled U.S. television industry as a whole. As in the fictional storyline where Black people battle to dominate Harlem, white supremacy looms in the background as the initiator of intra-Black creative hierarchies in U.S. television and film. Some critics of Luke Cage have argued that the series has not focused enough on white anti-Black racism. I agree that there is room for stories that more closely examine structural racism in the U.S., such as gentrification in Harlem. However, the series’ current focus on intra-racial conflicts is also crucial to an understanding of anti-Black racism. I therefore want to offer the following insights:  First, Luke Cage contains important commentary about white supremacy’s fundamental role in the characters’ intra-racial tensions. This is discernible in the backstory of the McIver/Stokes-Dillard feud, which involved the American Stokes’ collusion with white people to betray the Jamaican McIvers. In order to analyze the effects of anti-Black racism, we must not only examine its direct manifestations through white and Black conflicts, but also its latent impact on intra-Black relationships. Second, to engender a deeper conversation about the accent/casting controversy, we should assess the broader context of creative hierarchies in the U.S. television and film industries. This includes examining the historical misrepresentations of Jamaicans/Caribbeans, including by Black Americans. These misrepresentations are the root of the cynicism which many Jamaicans have for American producers. Here, the opinions of Jamaicans in the film and TV industries can add a crucial insight into their positioning within these industries globally. Both the series’ juxtaposing of Black American and Black Jamaican racial experiences; as well as the conversations about flawed accents and casting are important to assessing Luke Cage’s contribution to candidly highlighting ethnic/national conflicts among Black people. This is unprecedented on U.S. television. Luke Cage season two could therefore serve as a useful popular cultural reference for Black studies’ ongoing project to deconstruct Blackness in all of its manifestations, and question the limits of the discipline’s current emphasis on U.S. Black experiences.[1]

The turf war that defines most of Luke Cage season two is very similar to the civil war that takes place in its Marvel movie counterpart, Black Panther (2018). In both cases, the intra-racial battle to control physical space and military and socio-economic power indexes wider struggles for Black self-determination that have existed since the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Harlem is an excellent place in which to explore these contentions given its centrality in Black/African Diasporic history as a main site for internal U.S. and global Black immigration during the twentieth century. Though its historical title, “The Black Mecca” is not often used today, Harlem remains significant to studies of Black diasporic mobilities.

Each of the show’s major characters have staked a claim on Harlem in different ways. Following her murder of her cousin, Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali) in season one, Mariah Dillard née Stokes (Alfre Woodard), has asserted that she is queen of Harlem and is on a mission to “keep Harlem Black,” while John “Bushmaster” McIver (Mustafa Shakir) sees the control of Harlem as his birthright, which was stolen by Mariah’s family. Detective Misty Knight (Simone Missick) and Luke Cage (Mike Colter) endeavor to keep Harlem safe from the criminals who would destroy it, namely Dillard and McIver. The main personal conflicts are between Dillard, McIver, and Cage,[2] with control of the nightclub, Harlem’s Paradise, serving as a prerequisite for control of Harlem. Bushmaster—a moniker taken from his family’s brand of rum[3]—is a U.S.-born, Jamaican-raised don who heads Jamaica’s main gang with plans to conquer the Black criminal enterprise in New York as well. Like Cage, he has superhuman abilities of strength and regeneration. He harnesses his power through a fictional herbal mixture called nightshade, and practices the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira. The producers’ choices to make McIver Jamaican (and not from an unnamed Caribbean country as in the comics), credit Afro-Caribbean naturopathy as the harnesser of his strength, and designate capoeira as his characteristic fighting genre indicates a conscious engagement with Black culture that is limited in the comics.[4] These creative choices also underscore McIver’s assertion of a Black identity that is very reflective of continental African influences in the Americas and a Black radical tradition forged within a Black majority context. As I discuss later, the different forms of Black consciousness articulated by the Jamaican and American characters are key to how their conflicts unfold.

Harlem’s Paradise, Bushmaster Rum and the Stokes-Dillard wealth are John McIver’s birthright since the Jamaican McIver and American Stokes patriarchs founded the businesses decades ago, before the Stokes family colluded with Irish and Italian gangsters to murder John’s parents. McIver is not a classic villain; he mostly kills characters the viewers dislike, and his major objective is to enact vengeance on Dillard. Most accurately, he is the antagonist to Cage’s protagonist, and the only character who can beat Cage in a fair fight. Unsurprisingly, he sees an affinity between himself and Cage, uttering more than once, “We cudda been bredren (brothers/friends),” and suggests that they join forces. Cage’s humiliation at being bested by McIver and his obsession with distancing himself from him, ultimately leads him to almost strangle his antagonist in the final episode.

Eventually, Dillard is murdered by her own daughter and Cage becomes the new owner of Harlem’s Paradise, which she has cunningly willed to him. He is about to meet with the Italian crime family and attempting to reconcile between his need to be Harlem’s law-abiding hero and traversing the criminal enterprise that is linked to that place’s power hierarchies.  Meanwhile, McIver is back in Jamaica recovering from his defeat. His tragic flaw was that he underestimated his outsider status. Though he is American by birth, his Jamaican parentage and upbringing mark him as an alien. This is represented mostly in hilarious comments made by the Black American characters about Jamaicans, but this hilarity is accompanied by a more pernicious animosity. Essentially, McIver and his family become symbols for the othering of Jamaicans by U.S-born and raised Blacks, and in effect un-American Blackness. They also forcefully resist this othering.

In episode ten, the conflict between Jamaican immigrants and native-born Black Americans get articulated in an argument between Paul “Anansi” Mackintosh (Sahr Ngaujah), John McIver’s uncle, and Mariah Dillard. Referencing the Stokes family’s betrayal of his own, he declares that Black Americans are “lazy” and complicit in white imperialism. This is an insult commonly used by Africans and Caribbeans against Black Americans. Dillard hits back: “Every Jamaican likes to talk that maroon shit!” and states that the country got “enslaved by the World Bank.” This is essentially a debate about which Black person is more liberated. Caribbeans’ history of Black radicalism was forged through resistance to slavery and British colonialism. Within this Black majority context, self-government is a major source of pride. McIver asserts several times his admiration for Jamaican historical icons like global Black nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey and Ashanti/Jamaican warrior queen, Nanny of the Maroons. The fact that he is incapable of distinguishing between his quest for vengeance on the Stokes-Dillard family and Jamaican anti-colonial activism, underscores that he considers his Black enemies to be tools of the larger white power structure.

Dillard, like Luke Cage and the other Black American characters, assert a Black consciousness borne from survival of direct domination in a white majority country, including slavery, Jim Crow segregation and current manifestations of anti-Black racism. Cage struggles between being a respectable Black man in America and releasing his anger at systemic racism, while Dillard’s experiences with colorism, sexism, and racism become key motivators in her mission to rule Harlem. She has chosen to cooperate with whites in order to accumulate wealth and power while “keeping Harlem Black”. Of course, the characters’ choices are not bound by their different expressions of race consciousness, and Black radicalism in Jamaica and the United States is far more nuanced than what is portrayed on the show. However, the Stokes’ betrayal of the McIvers in collusion with white people, is amplified because of the two families’ different ethnicities/nationalities. Dillard continues this racial betrayal when she conspires with Asian gangsters to frame John McIver for producing a deadly strain of heroin as part of her plan to get rid of him. Similarly, the feuds between McIver’s hero, Marcus Garvey, and other Black leaders went beyond ideology; it was also a contention between a native-born U.S. Black leadership and the influence of a foreigner, though not all of Garvey’s Black detractors were American. The “Garvey Must Go” campaign formed by prominent Black American men in the 1920s and the Black spies that infiltrated the Universal Negro Improvement Association worked parallel to and with the white U.S. government to have him imprisoned then deported – exploiting his foreign status.

Fans will likely sympathize with McIver, and many, including me want the character to return in season three. This might indicate the show’s successful exploration of the intersections of race, ethnicity, and nationality in Black people’s marginalization.  However, the producers may not have expected that they would be accused of marginalizing Jamaicans through their casting choices and representations of the accent.

Luke Cage has inadvertently added another dimension to an ongoing debate about creative hierarchies among Black people in the U.S. television and film industries. An example of this is the 2017 controversy following Samuel L. Jackson’s critique of the casting of Black British actor, Daniel Kaluuya as the star of the American film, Get Out (2017), and Hollywood’s purported privileging of Black British actors over Black American ones. Jackson was called out by Kaluuya and others for being ethnocentric. For some commentators, his statement was also oblivious to the representational advantages Black American actors have, and the numerous chances they get to depict African and Caribbean people.

As an American TV show, it follows logically that most of Luke Cage’s actors would be American, and for the scenes filmed in Jamaica, Jamaicans  were cast in speaking roles. However, the central Jamaican characters, most supporting roles and limited-speaking roles were played by Americans, and there were obvious inconsistencies in their accents. I disagree with the broad critical position some people have taken in scrutinizing all of the non-Jamaican actors; and some of these criticisms border on cultural policing.[5] My own opinion is that while some accents were appalling, others like those of the actors playing McIver and his aunt and uncle (Mustafa Shakir, Sahr Ngaujah, and Heather Alicia Simms) were satisfactory or very good. Having had my Jamaican play produced in the U.S. with mostly American actors I know how difficult it is for Americans to sound Jamaican. I have also had to do foreign accents a few times as an actor. It is grueling, which is why the ideal is to cast native speakers.

There were open auditions for the speaking roles, including for the lead Jamaican character, John “Bushmaster” McIver. However, filming takes place in New York where there are many Jamaicans and Jamaican-descended actors, raising questions – particularly regarding the casting of speaking extras like the members of the Brooklyn-based Stylers posse. The presumed oversight generated a Twitter thread between disgruntled viewers, showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker and Mustafa Shakir, who plays John “Bushmaster” McIver. This thread adds an important dimension to the controversy by displaying how viewers/fans spoke back to the producers and got responses. The viewers asked why the producers did not work harder to develop the accents and/or cast more Jamaicans. In their responses, Coker and Shakir emphasized the positive visibilities that Luke Cage has provided around Jamaica’s history of Black radicalism, including its discussions of historical figures like Nanny of the Maroons and Marcus Garvey. These responses appeared dismissive and were called out as such. Shakir and Coker subsequently apologized for the unintentional offense in their previous responses and emphasized their love and respect for Jamaicans. Consequently, each side seemed to be using different notions of what constituted proper Jamaican representation.

Many shows have been critiqued for flawed accents. However, there are racial-national implications when people of color are being depicted. For a long time, Hollywood and the TV industry have reinforced exotic notions of Caribbean people,[6] which the region’s tourism industry has also reproduced. This exoticism has roots in transatlantic slavery and colonialism, and Europeans’ racist obsession with consuming the Caribbean Other for economic gain, sexual pleasure and entertainment. The development of modern theatre and film throughout the Americas is marked by these racialized legacies that were most clearly manifested in blackface minstrelsy, and carnivalesque and popular theatre traditions that both subverted and reinforced stereotypes. The influences of historical racial caricaturing even appear in some Caribbean plays, films, and TV shows.

Most criticisms of Caribbean exoticism in the media have been directed at Hollywood.[7] However, the TV industry has arguably been more offensive. The random Jamaican characters on U.S. television, including shows produced by Black people, have usually bordered on, or displayed explicit caricaturing. This includes the character, Russell Montego on the Black sitcom, Living Single and the famous parody of Jamaican dancehall artiste, Shabba Ranks on the Wayans’ In Living Color. Jamaica also occasionally emerges as a punchline in standup comedy, like Chris Rock’s Netflix special, Tamborine (2018). The character of Lester Tibideaux on The Cosby Show, played by Jamaican actor/director/writer, Dennis Scott, is an exception to the rule because he was not the butt of the joke and Scott’s real accent added another layer of complexity to the role. Within this historical context, authentic-sounding accents come to serve as criteria on which to measure producers’ interest in the country’s complexities. Even actors who try but fail to develop good accents might be equated unfairly with those who intentionally distort it.

In the above-cited Twitter discussion, Shakir stated that the producers put significant thought into the Jamaican representations including trying not to “play into past stereotypes.” This wasn’t entirely successful, particularly in a scene where McIver misuses what seems to be an obeah ritual. However, in many ways Luke Cage subverts the norm of other American TV shows by creating fascinating Jamaican characters. The character of John McIver, despite the violence he commits, is emotionally layered and this nuance is accentuated by Shakir’s performance. Additionally, the show’s juxtaposition of McIver’s criminality with the respectability of his law-abiding aunt and uncle introduces a story of Jamaican immigrant ingenuity which is not usually visible in mainstream U.S. media. Coker is correct that the show also provides a glimpse into Jamaican history, with which most Americans are unfamiliar. Luke Cage also engages Jamaican language. The Jamaican characters’ code-switching between English and Patwa and use of distinctly Jamaican/Caribbean terms, indicates to me that the producers aimed to connect affectively with Jamaican/Caribbean viewers. But these transnational connections are fraught with tensions, buoyed by Americans’ relative cultural, economic and other privileges in global mass media. If they further explore the Jamaican element of the storyline in season three, this might provide an opportunity for Luke Cage’s producers to engage more profoundly with Jamaica, including through accent work and casting.

With the aim of obtaining a Jamaican actor’s perspective on the accent/ casting controversy, I spoke with Karl O’Brien Williams, a New York-based Jamaican actor and playwright who began his career in Jamaican theatre and film. Williams cannot represent the entire Jamaican acting community in the U.S., but his experiential insights are important. He didn’t audition for any of the roles in Luke Cage because he had another job. He is also unperturbed by the show’s accent/casting issues, because the Jamaican accent is hard to master, and he thinks by fixating on it critics risk reducing Jamaicanness to speech. We discussed structural factors that determine Jamaican actors’ visibilities globally, including casting networks, actors’ unions and color/racial typecasting; and the need for more opportunities for Caribbean writers, producers and casting agents in regional and global film and TV industries. He also stated that in the white-controlled Marvel Cinematic Universe, Cheo Coker may not be as powerful as his critics believe him to be. The conflict about creative authority is therefore fundamentally a clash about which Black people have the most real or imagined proximity to predominantly white-controlled power structures. It is the root of the McIver/Stokes feud in Luke Cage and of ongoing intra-racial ethnic/national/economic tensions throughout the world.

The previously discussed argument between Luke Cage’s characters, Mariah Dillard and Paul Mackintosh offers a glimpse into how unpacking ethnic/national conflicts, instead of ignoring them, can ultimately enable a more penetrating view of white supremacy as a global superstructure. When Dillard disparages Jamaica’s anti-colonial project in response to Mackintosh’s disparaging of America’s racial integration project it is primarily a retort to his efforts to shame her. However, at its core the insult asserts that no Black community/ethnicity is immune to white hegemony. As I write this, Jamaicans and other Caribbean people are confronting the rapid privatization of our beaches and sale of beachfront property to European hoteliers; in cities worldwide, gentrification is displacing mostly people of color; and the abuse of Black people in penal systems is globally normalized. There are emotional, psychic, and material stakes involved in a transnational understanding of Black experiences. This is why our intellectual project within Black studies to deconstruct intra-racial ethnic/ national conflicts and hierarchies is so urgent.

 

Notes

[1] As part of this project, the 4^th Symposium of the Dakar Institute of African Studies held in Senegal this year, had as its first objective, the need to “consider the limits of the U.S.-centered Black studies model” and its geographic, and epistemological constraints.

[2] Misty Knight (Simone Missick) has outgrown the series in my opinion and needs her own show. Not only do we need a Black woman protagonist in a superhero TV show, she is one of the most compelling characters and often upstages Cage. The writers are obviously aware of this and poked fun of it in a hilarious dialogue between the two characters in one episode where they debated who was whose sidekick.

[3] I am aware that Bushmaster is the name of a type of gun, and has connotations within the rudeboy/gangster culture of the late 1970s to early 1980s in Jamaica. However, I don’t know whether this influenced the moniker, Bushmaster, which originated in the comics.

[4] They also do this through the character of Tilda Johnson, Mariah Dillard’s estranged daughter and owner of a herbal pharmacy.

[5] One of these is the notion that it is implausible for McIver to be a capoeira practitioner, which is of African/Brazilian origin, and that this is an indication of the producers’ lack of research into Jamaican culture. This undermines the work of the capoeira community in Jamaica and the character’s trait as a man who consciously grounds himself in transnational Black culture.

[6] Jamaica is sometimes conflated with the rest of the Caribbean in U.S. films.

[7] For a critical discussion on Jamaican representations in Hollywood, see Tanya Batson-Savage, “Through the Eyes of Hollywood: Reading Representations of Jamaicans in American Cinema” Small Axe (2010) 14 (2 (32): 42-55; Kevin Frank, “‘Whether Beast or Human’: The Cultural Legacies of Dread, Locks, and Dystopia.” Small Axe 11 No. 2 (2007): 46-62.

 

Nicosia Shakes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at The College of Wooster, Ohio. She earned her PhD in Africana Studies in 2017 from Brown University. Her book manuscript, Gender, Race and Performance Space won the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize and is under contract with UIP. www.nicosiashakes.com

 

Best-selling author, acclaimed psychiatrist, visionary management consultant, and noted civil rights leader, Dr. Price M. Cobbs died on June 25, 2018 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of complications related to a heart procedure. He was eighty-nine years old.

Born in Los Angeles on November 2, 1928, Dr. Cobbs was the son of Dr. Peter Price Cobbs and Rosa Mashaw Cobbs. The elder Dr. Cobbs was one of the first practicing Black physicians in Los Angeles, and Mrs. Cobbs was a school teacher. After attending UCLA, son Price received his bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, he received his medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee in 1958, and was board certified as a psychiatrist in 1966.

In private practice in northern California later in the 1960s, Dr. Cobbs made the acquaintance of another Black psychiatrist, Dr. William H. Grier, and they discussed the fact that there had been no serious study of the plight of Black people in the United States from a trained psychiatric point of view.

The memory of slavery was palpable throughout the Black community. Anti-Black Jim Crow laws were still much in place. It was true that significant changes had been made. President Harry Truman had integrated the armed forces in 1948. The Civil Rights Movement led by Black people themselves had resulted in the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the equally potent Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibited race-based voting restrictions nationwide. Black people were moving into the work force and other areas of endeavor in ways never before seen.

Nonetheless, Drs. Cobbs and Grier recognized that the realities of the previous 350 years of racist mistreatment had affected the psyches of most Black people. The two physicians set out to write a book that would articulate what those effects were.

The result was Black Rage, published by Basic Books in 1968.

What they intended as “a clinical handbook spelling out in the clearest possible language certain special aspects of the psychiatric treatment of blacks” became an immediate national bestseller. It was the clearest explanation so far of what the authors described as “the essence of what it [means] to be a black American in a nation that [has] reserved…a uniquely disfavored place for its black citizens.” The many individual stories in Black Rage come from every level of Black society, and are uniquely personal and finely written. The psychiatric analysis of each story as provided by Drs. Cobbs and Grier is equally memorable. A follow-up book titled The Jesus Bag was soon on bookstore shelves.

But what about real solutions?

While co-writing Black Rage, Dr. Cobbs had noted the usual call for “a conversation about race” whenever a violent outbreak of racial conflict occurred in some American city. He thought of such “conversations” between Black and white notables as generally quiet and polite. A panel would be named. Some suggestions for the end of racial strife would be made. A few new study groups or panels would be suggested. And in the end, little that led to the resolution of such strife would be accomplished.

Drs. Cobbs and Grier felt that a more direct process was needed. They determined that combative, noisy, and even very aggressive argument about each other between whites and Blacks, in a controlled environment in which physical violence was not permitted, could lead to long-term positive results in the racial divide. The idea was revolutionary and deemed by some critics as literally dangerous. The two physicians, though, believed they were on to something truly important. While in a conference at the Esalen Institute in California in 1967, they developed the structure of racial confrontation groups, a plan that, when implemented and pursued, in fact led to real understanding and what would be lifetime commitments to each other among the groups’ participants.

Dr. Cobbs described one of the breakthroughs that, among many, became routine in such groups.

“The whites, who were almost all professionals, would have a black work partner or two who were also professionals, and who, the whites understood, had clearly faced some kind of discrimination. But surely, they felt, these black people would not have suffered the kinds of anger and rage that a common black man on the street, having come from poverty and Jim Crow, might routinely feel. For the whites in our groups, the understanding that personal rage among black people was universal was eye opening, and very helpful to what we were trying to get to. Such anger is across the board with black people. Everyone.”

Dr. Cobbs formed a company, Pacific Management Systems, that would train white and Black practitioners in the metal health professions to implement such confrontation groups throughout the United States.

Dr. Cobbs became a senior consultant to the Executive Leadership Council, an organization of Black U.S. corporate business executives and entrepreneurs. He recognized that “without executives, managers and employees who can cope with the critical new demands of a diverse workforce, productivity is reduced by tension, polarization, high turnover, litigation, and untapped potential. Productivity is increased in an environment where each employee’s skills and potential are being fully utilized.” With this in mind, Dr. Cobbs set out with the essential purpose of introducing Black people to the middle- and senior-management levels of American corporations, and vice versa. He remained directly active in the endeavor until his passing. In the meantime, Dr. Cobbs also co-authored, with Judith L. Turnock, Cracking The Corporate Code, which details the experiences up the corporate ladder of thirty-two Black executives.

His biographical memoir, My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement, was published in 2005 by Atria Books.

Dr. Cobbs was a member of the National Medical Association and a Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of The World Academy of Art and Science, as well as a founder of the African American Leadership Institute at the Anderson School of Business at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a Charter Member of the Urban League, a Life Member of the NAACP, on the Advisory Board of The Black Scholar, and a former member of the Board of Directors of Shared Interest.

Dr. Cobbs is survived by his wife of thirty-three years, Frederica Maxwell Cobbs of San Francisco; his children Renata Cobbs-Fletcher of Philadelphia, and Price Priester Cobbs of San Francisco (whose mother was the late Evadne Priester Cobbs); and his grandchildren Kendall, Kristopher, and David.

***

Terence Clarke was the lead developmental editor of Dr. Price M. Cobbs’s My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement. His most recent book, the story collection New York, was published in 2017.

 

Arguably there is no African American writer who is currently as influential as the late Octavia Butler. Working from within the once-marginalized genre of science fiction and with a perspective rooted in the historical experiences of Black people and women, her visionary work has become so central to contemporary thinking on science fiction, feminism, African American literature, and Afrofuturism. And it is no secret that her work will soon be appearing on the big screen (though one desperately hopes they don’t mess that up). In 1985, just as her work was beginning to spread beyond the science fiction ghetto, The Black Scholar conducted this interview. We present it as a summer gift to our readers, old and new.

Click on the green PDF button for the option to download or read interactive PDF.

The legacy of Chokwe Lumumba is built on the principles of social justice and unity my grandparents taught my father as a child. He grew into manhood in the Black Power and New Afrikan independence movements. Chokwe Lumumba was a revolutionary who loved his people and humanity. His love for the people is reflected in his work as an organizer, lawyer, and elected official. This special issue on his legacy helps interpret his work and love for our people and our current work to build people’s power in Jackson and Mississippi. 

The People Must Decide! 

Free the land!

Chokwe Antar Lumumba

Mayor, City of Jackson, MS

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On May 21, 2013, revolutionary attorney and New Afrikan independence activist Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Lumumba’s election was celebrated by elements of the Black Liberation and progressive forces throughout the United States and signaled a new political model and momentum for grassroots activism. Jackson, Mississippi and Movement activists nationally and internationally mourned Lumumba’s untimely death in February of 2014. This issue of The Black Scholar highlights the political legacy of Chokwe Lumumba and is edited by a former comrade of Lumumba, Akinyele Umoja. Umoja is Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University and has spent decades as an activist in the Black freedom struggle.

Most of the contributions in this issue are from activist intellectuals uniquely qualified to provide analysis of Lumumba’s contributions. Scholar-activist and cultural worker Michael Simanga worked with Lumumba in Detroit and in the Black Liberation movement. Simanga analyzes the political significance of Lumumba’s electoral campaigns. Kent State University Professor Asantewa Sunni-Ali interviews Lumumba’s children, Rukia and Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba. With Rukia serving as a co-coordinator of the campaign, Chokwe Antar was elected mayor of Jackson in 2017. Sunni-Ali is in a unique position to conduct and interpret Rukia and Chokwe Antar’s experience because she is the daughter of two revolutionary New Afrikan activists and comrades of Lumumba, Bilal and Fulani Sunni-Ali. Venezuela Consul to the U.S. and Afro-descendant activist and scholar Jesus “Chucho” Garcia worked with Lumumba and hosted the New Afrikan revolutionary in Venezuela in 2011. Finally, our guest editor, Umoja, worked with Lumumba since 1979. Along with several others, he and Lumumba co-founded two organizations, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Umoja’s essay, “The People Must Decide: Chokwe Lumumba, New Black Power, and the Potential for Participatory Democracy in Mississippi,” interprets Lumumba’s role as a revolutionary democrat and how his and Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s political victories in Mississippi inform the movement for Black power in the 21^st century. While much of the issue focuses on Lumumba’s work in Jackson as an elected official, this issue also features two of his contributions to The Black Scholar, “Repression and Black Liberation” (1973) and “Perspectives on Human Rights: A Question of Alliances in a State of War” (1980). These articles give his perspective on the covert war on the Black liberation struggle and his internationalist outlook. Cover art for this volume was provided by Jackson, Mississippi visual artist Derek Perkins.

Preview the issue here. For a limited time, readers have free access to download and read Akinyele Umoja’s introduction to the issue along with Asantewa Fulani Sunni-Ali’s interview, “Living Lumumba’s Legacy and Manifesting the People’s Platform: A Conversation with Rukia and Chokwe Antar Lumumba.”

To read the entire issue, subscribe to volume 48 here. More information on upcoming issues in this and future volumes can be found here. For a limited time, use the discount code RTBSDIS for 10% off a personal subscription. As they become available and while supplies last, individual copies are available for purchase in our online store.

Like so many other movie-goers, I went to Black Panther expecting to fall in love with writer-director Ryan Coogler’s beautiful vision of Wakanda. The symbolic importance of this fantastical African nation, untouched by slavery or colonization and filled with Black images of grandeur, cannot be overstated. Our romanticized vision of what Africa could have been had the continent not been brutalized for capitalist gain – or what Black people could be in a world free from White Supremacy – is the Wakandan Dream.

But instead of allowing us to revel in the Wakandan Dream, Coogler exposes its naiveté by revealing Wakanda to be tainted with elitist, selfish, isolationist notions that make it, at best, uninterested in any connection with the African diaspora, and at worst, complicit in the oppression of Black people worldwide.

What he builds in its place could be called a New Wakanda: a vision for Black excellence where our achievement, in the absence of uplift, is not enough and may even be problematic. This is not the Wakanda we were expecting, but I think it might be the Wakanda we need as we contemplate our place in the struggle for justice in the twenty-first Century.

I saw Ryan Coogler give a lecture at the University of Chicago in 2016. At some point during his talk on his journey as a filmmaker he asked if there were any African American Studies majors in the crowd. When Black students responded by saying African American Studies wasn’t offered as a major at the school, Coogler raised his eyebrows and said, “Y’all are doing something about that, right?”

It was this question, even more so than his impressive film resume and intellectual acuity, that made me confident he was going to give us something special with Black Panther. Making it, whether in Hollywood or at an elite University, isn’t enough; the next step was to create change for themselves and those that come after. Coming from Coogler, a thirty-one-year old Black man from Oakland who still talks like a thirty-one-year old Black man from Oakland—in other words, not like Hollywood, this exhortation felt natural and inspiring. This is the lesson we are meant to take from the New Wakanda.

I’ve been watching Black people and people of color react to the Black Panther film and hype on social media for some time. A few years back, the hashtag #BlackPantherSoLit celebrated the number and quality of Black actors that were being cast. And some weeks before the movie came out the hashtag #WhatBlackPantherMeansToMe offered love notes to the filmmakers, expressing how powerful its images were for us personally, and as a people, even before we were able to see it in theaters.

One video posted on Twitter showed a group of Black folks hugging a Black Panther movie poster, marveling that Whites were able to experience the satisfaction of being empowered by representation in movies on a regular basis. One man in the video says, “This what y’all feel like all the time? I would love this country too.”

Much of the conversation around why Black Panther was so powerful, apart from the idea of on-screen representation, was the setting. The movie takes place in Wakanda: beautiful, powerful, un-colonized, and technologically superior to the West. Wakanda flips the narrative that characterizes Africans as unsophisticated and offers an alternative to the racial power dynamics that structure our everyday interactions.

My favorite scene is when the CIA’s Agent Ross, the only White man shown in Wakanda, starts to “mansplain” in front of Lord M’Baku, the ruler of the Jabari Tribe. M’Baku responds by barking at him in an aggressive manner, shutting him up. His soldiers join in the jeering, and the result is terrifying. You can almost see Agent Ross, portrayed by The Hobbit’s Martin Freeman, transform back into the undersized Bilbo Baggins. “You cannot talk,” M’Baku tells him. We are used to Hollywood giving us movies where White men are the saviors (think The Last Samurai or The Last of the Mohicans), not movies where they are stripped of their unearned privileges.

The Wakandan Dream is disrupted, however, not because of White intervention, but because Coogler pushes us to reflect on what the country means for Black people.

He forces us to ask the question, if Wakanda is the most technologically advanced country on the planet, and has been for over a millennium, what must their internal dynamics, foreign policy, and attitudes towards outsiders have been over the past 500 years as they watched—from near and afar and without compunction—the brutal oppression of Black people all over the globe?

Where was Wakanda when Europeans invaded the African continent, murdering and enslaving millions, stealing natural resources and destroying histories and cultures? Where was Wakanda when Europeans created the concept of race in order to justify their brutal oppression of Black people who they characterized as less than human?

Racism did not happen by accident. It is an invention of capitalism, intentionally weaponized in order to create and maintain renewable and exploitable resources and workers around the globe. As the most advanced civilization on the planet, Wakanda could potentially have not only stopped colonization and slavery, but also the development of the ideology of racism in the first place.

Instead, Wakanda allowed the myth of race to become codified and ingrained in institutions, policies, governments, hearts and minds across the globe, all while hiding its technological marvels behind a stereotypical curtain of villages and third-world living conditions that match the inaccurate portrayals of Africa that dominate the media.

We saw Wakanda as a Black Garden of Eden unblemished by the sin of White Supremacy. But Coogler showed us that just because Wakanda was uncolonized, that does not mean it escaped the horrors of colonization.

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Coogler uses three key moments in Black Panther to break down the Wakandan Dream before replacing it with the New Wakanda. The first blemish on the Wakandan Dream is revealed as we learn about the contemporary motivations and manifestations of the nation’s isolationist international policies. T’Challa, ruler of Wakanda and the titular hero, talks with his friend W’Kabi about whether Wakanda should be doing more to help the world through aid or refugee programs. W’Kabi responds by saying, “If you let the refugees in, they bring their problems, and then Wakanda is like everywhere else.”

This sentiment sounds eerily similar to the views held by y’all’s President. How do we make sense of this Alt-Right-style understanding of the perils of open borders, or the way Wakandans seem to think so little of their African neighbors? At first, I rationalized this as being just one voice among many. W’Kabi could be an outlier whose perspective was being used to drive conflict in a movie about Wakandan’s internal politics, right?

Not quite. W’Kabi’s attitude actually exemplifies the mentality that has guided Wakandan international and immigrant policy for hundreds of years. Wakandan borders were closed to outsiders as they chose to hide their technology and resources in order to stay safe. Trump wants his wall, and Wakanda has its vibranium-powered hologram.

W’Kabi’s position is in contrast with that of Nakia, T’Challa’s ex-lover, who insists that Wakanda has a duty to the world and is better equipped to help than any other nation, a fact that T’Challa takes an entire movie to learn. This inaction is not enough to mar the Wakandan Dream, but does get us to start questioning it.

The second strike against the Dream is more damning: we learn the way Wakandan leaders have actively used lies and murder to hide the truth about issues affecting the country.

We see King T’Chaka, T’Challa’s late father and the former Black Panther, travel to Oakland, CA to confront his brother, Prince N’Jobu. We are told that N’Jobu had been radicalized while working in Oakland as a War Dog and had helped an outsider set off a bomb and steal vibranium, Wakanda’s most precious natural resource and the catalyst for their technological advancement.

But being radicalized can have a different meaning for Black folks in Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Prince N’Jobu explains his need for the vibranium by referencing the Black struggle in America, saying, “Their leaders have been assassinated, communities flooded with drugs and weapons, they are overly policed and incarcerated.”  Because T’Chaka and Wakanda were unwilling to help, Prince N’Jobu took it upon himself to take and use vibranium to empower Black folks to be able to achieve freedom and self-determination.

We don’t get a chance to react to the idea that with Wakanda’s help Black people could be free because after N’Jobu pulled a gun on Zuri, who he had just learned was not his friend but a Wakandan sent to spy on him, he was killed by his brother T’Chaka.

Not only did this act of fratricide save T’Chaka the embarrassment of the rest of Wakanda knowing that a member of the royal family had been behind the worst attack on the country in recent history, but it also ensured that the Wakandan people would never hear N’Jobo’s impassioned articulation of the brutalities facing Blacks around the globe or his radical and convincing argument for how Wakanda could be central to their freedom.

The third and final strike at the Wakandan Dream comes from Killmonger, the son of Prince N’Jobu who grew up in Oakland but aspires to rule Wakanda. In the opening scene of the movie, Prince N’Jobu tells a young Killmonger the history of Wakanda, the unique power of vibranium, and the way Wakanda hid itself from the world and the world’s problems in order to protect itself. But Killmonger, a Prince who was orphaned by a King and abandoned in enemy territory, had his sweet Wakandan Dream turn to bitterness as his acute awareness of racial oppression conflicted with his knowledge of the tools that could free our bonds if only his royal family would be willing to lift a hand.

Throughout the film, Killmonger’s precise, succinct, and aggressive articulation of the way Blacks are oppressed is reminiscent of Black activists dragging racists on twitter, except his twitter fingers turn to trigger fingers without discretion.

After killing and manipulating his way into Wakanda, Killmonger stands before King T’Challa and the royal council and explains his reasons for coming, saying, “Y’all look pretty comfortable—must feel good. It’s two billion people in the world who look like us, but their lives are a lot harder. Wakanda has the tools to liberate ‘em all.”

His proposal is intriguing. After 500 years of oppression, worldwide freedom in the fullest sense has never really been on the table for Black folks, even in fiction. In the US, our demands are typically less ambitious. We want the police to stop killing us, equal shots at jobs, access to healthcare, and our kids to go to schools that work.

In this universe, however, the richest and most technologically advanced nation in the world is Black. We have seen that Wakandan technology borders on magic; wounds that would be life threatening anywhere in the world are healed overnight in Wakanda. Killmonger, therefore, asks a reasonable question—why haven’t these resources been used to free our people?

Later on, after defeating T’Challa in one-on-one combat and taking the throne, Killmonger tells the council the details of his plan. He wants to arm Black folks around the world so that they can kill their oppressors, including, he notes, “their children, and anyone else who takes their side.”

This line reveals the biggest problem with Killmonger’s vision for Black power; it is based not on an abolitionists desire for freedom, but on a colonialist’s desire for domination. Killmonger suggests an inversion of the power structure that kills and subjugates Whites the same way Whites did—and still do—Blacks and people of color in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. This is revenge, not justice or restoration.

Killmonger could have been a revolutionary, but instead reveals himself to be what the Jeff Sessionses of the world want Black leaders to be—dangerous Black Identity Extremists. They wish we hated them as much as they hate us so that they could justify silencing our movements with murder and incarceration, and so that the brutality of oppression could be morally defensible.

This is why radical Black movements have to deal with the intentional misrepresentation of their motives. Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, said, “The examiner made a report in last Sunday’s paper that we were anti-White . . . this is a boldface lie. We don’t hate nobody because of their color, we hate oppression. We hate murder of Black people in our communities.” In the same vein, prominent voices from the Movement for Black Lives have to consistently combat the myth that the Movement is in any way in favor of violence against Whites or the police.

In the end, the audience cannot accept Killmonger’s vision for a Wakandan empire not because we find revolution distasteful, but because his idea of Black empowerment has been infected by the tools and motives of White supremacy. Remember that the CIA-trained Killmonger says more than once, “I know how the oppressor thinks,” and aims to use their methods against them. But he also uses the colonizer’s methods to take over Wakanda, and is blind or indifferent to the damage this Western-style proclivity towards domination has on the nation and its people. During the final battle scene, T’Challa makes this point as he says to Killmonger regarding the oppressors he hates, “You have become them.”

These faults add complexity to one of the most compelling and empathetic villains we have seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But despite his colonialist-contaminated plan, Killmonger’s character strikes the final blow against the Wakandan Dream, which is revealed to be no Dream at all. We believed in the Wakandan Dream because we thought it was untouched by the evils of racism, slavery, colonization, and oppression. But through Killmonger T’Challa learned that far from being immune to these evils, Wakanda enabled them with its decision to isolate itself and ignore the problems of the world.

T’Challa confronts this truth when he journeys to the ancestral plane, an afterlife of sorts. He yells at his father and at all other Black Panthers past: “You were wrong! All of you were wrong!”

In true heroic form, T’Challa returns to the land of the living to not only defeat the antagonist Killmonger in battle, but also to introduce the world to the New Wakanda, which will no longer prioritize secrecy over justice, nor be complicit in the continued oppression of the African Diaspora.

One of the final scenes of the film shows T’Challa’s New Wakanda at work. He and his tech genius sister Shuri travel to Oakland where T’Challa reveals his plan for the first International Wakandan Outreach Center. We don’t know enough about this center to critique it as an intervention model, but we know it represents a shift in Wakandan policy. T’Challa ends Wakanda’s decision to hide its technology when he takes his airplane off invisibility-mode and Shuri begins to talk to children in the community about the futuristic jet they can only describe as a “Bugatti spaceship.”

This marriage of policy and community work is reminiscent of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, who despite being primarily remembered for its Police Watch and powerful demonstrations, spent more time serving people in the community than protesting. The legacy of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense includes its free breakfast and community health care services that became models for national education and public health programs. In this tradition, T’Challa’s first step in Oakland indicates that the political decision to no longer stand by as the world falls apart will be accompanied with action.

The Wakandan Dream is enticing because we have never been given such a beautiful picture of Black excellence in a mainstream film and because the American Dream has been out of reach for most of us for the past four hundred years. But being both powerful and uncolonized in a fictional world where colonization did indeed take place is nothing to be proud of; it is something to be ashamed of. It only could have happened if those Blacks with the power and resources chose to stand by as an entire continent was brutalized.

Ryan Coogler killed the Wakandan Dream because it was a Dream that was contingent on Black suffering. In contrast, the New Wakanda he erects in its place serves as an example of what Black achievement can be. Nakia articulated a vision for the New Wakanda in the first few minutes of the movie, saying, “Wakanda is strong enough to help others and protect ourselves at the same time.”

Black advancement in token quantities has often been used by conservatives as evidence that racism is dead—If Dr. so-and-so made it out of the inner-city, why can’t they all make it? If we buy into this myth, which is especially tempting when it positions us as being more talented or hard working than others, we are complicit in legitimizing an unequal system.

We don’t have the gift, vibranium, but we do have other gifts. And it is up to us to decide whether we use them to make ourselves the successful exception to the rules of racial oppression (the Wakanda hiding in the midst of a colonized land) or rule changers (the Wakanda that uses its strengths to weaken oppression everywhere). Black excellence, from this point of view, is more than just Blacks doing well despite a world that wants them to fail. It’s Blacks challenging the system that was designed to entrap them.

As I wrote this last paragraph, my 5-year old son walked down the stairs wearing a Black Panther mask and claws. I got down on one knee and asked, in my best Wakandan accent, what I could do to serve the King. Like millions of other parents, I marvel at the images of Black excellence that our children are being exposed to in this film and love to see their impact on young people. They give us joy, for good reason. But, images are just the first stage of the New Wakandan vision for Black excellence.

The next stage is action. Some of us are successful despite the racism that limits our opportunities, and those in power hope this will appease us. But our communities are still plagued with unequal access to healthcare and education. We are still jailed at disproportionate rates and given longer sentences for the same crimes. And, it is clear from the police violence epidemic that after 150 years of freedom, the state still does not value Black lives.

Coogler is raising his eyebrows at us again. “Y’all are doing something about that, right?”

 

Robert D. Eschmann is a professor at Boston University where he teaches classes on racial justice. His research examines the intersections between race, education, and social media. Dr. Eschmann received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2017, and he has also been a part of several projects that explore the relationship between social media and gang violence, with an emphasis on technology-based intervention methods. Dr. Eschmann is also an avid reader and re-reader of fantasy fiction who uses his children as a justification for his continued interest in young-adult fiction, weekly trips to the comic book store, and video game budget. He is a hip-hop connoisseur who taught kids to rap, and think critically about rap in Chicago Public Schools.

 

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” – Audre Lorde

 

On March 13, 2018, Marielle Franco, a black queer woman, mother, sociologist, socialist, human rights defender, councilwoman from the favela of Maré, tweeted about 23-year-old Matheus Melo de Castro, who was shot in Rio: “Another killing of a young person possibly committed by the Military Police (PM). Matheus was leaving church. How many more must die for this war to end?” The next day, as she was leaving an event,“Jovens Negras Movendo as Estruturas” (“Young Black Women Moving Structures”), in the neighborhood of Lapa in Rio de Janeiro, she was executed. Around 9:30pm, an unidentified car pulled up alongside hers and assassin(s) shot thirteen shots into the car, murdering  Marielle and her driver Anderson Pedro Gomes, leaving her assistant alive. The 9mm bullets that hit Marielle in her head and neck came from a lot of ammunition the Federal Police had purchased in Brasília in 2006. Military Police used bullets from this same lot to massacre 17 people in Barueri and Osasco (the São Paulo metropolitan area) in 2015.

 

As black feminist scholars from the United States whose work focuses on racism, sexism, and anti-black violence in Brazil, we stand in solidarity with black women and black communities in Brazil who are mourning the politically-motivated assassination of Marielle Franco. We recognize Marielle’s death as part of a larger pattern of state-sponsored killing, terrorization and silencing of black Brazilian communities. We know that she was killed because she identified and denounced anti-black state violence, particularly that tied to the current federally backed military occupation of Rio de Janeiro. We also know that she was killed not solely because of her race, gender, sexuality, class or political beliefs but because of all of those things combined. Her death is an alarming, brazen, political act of violence. Marielle was a black woman who espoused black feminism, denounced police violence, spoke out boldly and unabashedly about racism and classism, and fiercely defended and invested in her community (a favela). As such, she was a threat to the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist global social order. But her death is not a sign of the strength of this order. Rather, it is a sign of its ever-expanding weakness.

 

Marielle was born and raised in the Complexo da Maré, and she died representing this community. Maré and other communities like it have long served as a laboratory for brutal policies of austerity, violent policing, and military occupation. Her master’s thesis in sociology explored this brutality at length, particularly tying it to the militarization of the Brazilian police forces and the occupation of the majority black, majority poor favelas of her city, Rio de Janeiro. As an active member of the Party for Socialism and Liberty (PSOL), Marielle challenged the status quo of negligence and abuse waged by so many political parties on poor people of color in Brazil. It is no accident that just days before her assassination, she was slated to be the rapporteur of the committee to review the recent federal intervention in the military occupation of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro.

 

We are aware of the transnational significance of Marielle’s murder and its links to global practices of anti-black genocide. Brazil’s black population is the second-largest African descendant population in the world, and it has been the target of brutal and violent policing practices for decades. Brazil’s crisis of police violence cannot be separated from the context of anti-black, deadly policing in the United States that motivated three black queer women to initiate the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2013 and expand it into the Movement for Black Lives. However, it is important to recognize that Black Brazilians have also been speaking out and organizing against anti-black police lethality and brutality for generations. Black resistance can be traced back as far as the wars between slavery-era quilombos (maroon communities) and Portuguese military forces. This is important to remember if we consider that contemporary police apparatuses emerged throughout the Americas first in direct response to the threat of black revolt during slavery. As such, black people have resisted violent, racialized policing since the epoch of slavery throughout the entire region.

 

Thus, we have come full circle. While there are explicit and implicit connections between the U.S. Movement for Black Lives and Brazil, the current movement against anti-black genocide in Brazil is an organic extension of generations of resistance against anti-black state violence in Brazil. Marielle was one of a cohort of black queer women leading the global fight to end anti-black state-sponsored terror. She had even committed herself to learning English through intensive readings of the works of black feminist scholars such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, among others, as a concrete way to link Brazilian movements to ideas and struggles for freedom and justice taking place around the world. If we recognize the Movement for Black Lives as a global coalition to fight against anti-black state violence, then Marielle Franco is yet another martyr for this global movement.

 

We feel compelled to place Marielle’s life, activism, and untimely death within this broader context of Brazil’s 500-hundred-year history of oppressing African descendant and indigenous peoples, and ongoing struggles for inclusive citizenship and democracy within the context of increasing authoritarianism. According to Human Rights Watch, in 2016 the police killed 4,224 people in Brazil. It may come as no surprise that the majority of those killed are black. If recent experiences of police killings of black people in Brazil tell us anything, they tell us that police often act with impunity. Let us not forget the case of Claudia Ferreira da Silva, a black Brazilian woman who was killed by police officers in Rio de Janeiro on March 16, 2014–nearly four years to the day before Marielle was killed. Claudia was shot by police during a gun battle with alleged drug traffickers in her neighborhood. After she was wounded she was stuffed in the trunk of a police car and her body was dragged for approximately 250 meters before the two officers stopped the car and stuffed her limp body back inside. She was dead by the time she arrived at the hospital. The officers charged with her death were never convicted, and have even been involved in eight more murders in the last four years. Marielle’s story also reminds us of the killing of Luana Barbosa dos Reis–a 34 year-old black woman from São Paulo who was beaten and killed by police officers in Riberão Preto. What precipitated her beating is telling: a masculine-identified lesbian, Luana protested when police officers stopped her and insisted on frisking her as if she were a man. When she refused to comply with being patted down by men, police officers beat her so badly that she suffered internal bleeding and eventually died of a stroke.

 

Marielle Franco’s brutal murder highlights disturbing practices of state violence and repression in Brazil, as they impact the black, and particularly black poor, population. This continual oppression has long been overlooked by the international media and in much academic scholarship. As a city council member and activist in Rio de Janeiro, Marielle defended the rights of black women, favela residents, and the LGBTQ community in a highly unequal and segregated city. While Rio de Janeiro was in the international spotlight just two short years ago as the host of the 2016 Summer Olympics, the police and military occupation of the city’s majority-black favelas was largely hidden from mainstream Brazilian public discourse. Policies of genocide and extermination have been enacted against black communities in major cities throughout Brazil since its founding, and have only heightened in recent years. In this sense, Marielle’s murder is a continuation of a long-standing state practice of killing Black people.

 

The fact that Brazil’s current political situation is eerily similar to the country’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) is cause for international alarm and action. The coup that forced Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, from office in August 2016 has hastened the country’s downward political spiral and the swift reversal of democratic and inclusive policies that were, hard won by black activists – and black women activists in particular. The country’s rightward shift has exacerbated a political climate in which activists, even those as prominent as Marielle, can be killed. We are particularly concerned about the impact of the current democratic crisis in Brazil on black communities, and its relationship to increasing rates of state-sponsored anti-black violence and death. As progressive communities throughout the world mourn the death of Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, we should also realize that her tragic murder is but one of thousands that are committed against black women, men and children in Brazil every year. It is estimated that a black person is killed in Brazil every 23 minutes. 

 

The egregiousness of the targeted assassination of an elected official has mobilized people throughout Brazil and around the world. We must maintain this momentum if we want ensure the safety and well being of black women like Marielle and communities like Maré. As tragic and shocking as it was, sadly, Marielle’s assassination was not an anomaly. In Brazil there have been at least 194 politicians and activists killed in the past five years. Many of them have been killed for daring to question the hegemonic social structures intertwined with U.S interests. We cannot mourn her tragic death while ignoring our own government’s complicity and involvement in her death. Brazilian police forces responsible for brutality have been trained by the FBI and the New York Police Department. Agricultural oligarchs with ties to U.S. multinational corporations and politicians routinely kill indigenous people in land speculation disputes. And we cannot forget that Marielle spoke out boldly against the coup that ousted Brazil’s democratically-elected president with support from the U.S. State Department. Given the global dimensions of anti-blackness and the transnational circulation of practices of state violence and militarized policing, we believe profoundly that we must organize on a hemispheric and global level.

 

Marielle will forever be remembered by those she represented, and those she inspired, for recognizing their humanity while others only saw them as targets to be marginalized or annihilated. On the night of her death, Marielle quoted Audre Lorde saying, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own” (1981, “The Uses of Anger”). As black people in the Americas we must commit ourselves to continuing the work for which Marielle died. We must affirm the need to center black women’s lives and experiences in our struggles for liberation, not at the expense of our broader multi-gendered communities, but precisely because “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Combahee River Collective Statement).

 

Collective vision for liberation is necessarily transnational–our struggles are inherently connected. We are heartened that the world has been moved by Marielle’s death. This show of international solidarity is a turning point. But we call on all of us to maintain this watchful eye for the months and years to come. Marielle’s assassination was not the first, and unfortunately, it is most likely not the last bellicose act in this global struggle. The fight for black life requires us to remain vigilant at home and abroad. Justice for Marielle means justice for us all.

 

Marielle, presente! Avante pretas! A luta é de todos nós!

 

—

Kia L. Caldwell, African, African American & Diaspora Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill

Wendi Muse, History, New York University

Tianna S. Paschel, African American Studies, UC-Berkeley

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Africana Studies, Brown University

Christen A. Smith, African and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

Erica L. Williams, Sociology and Anthropology, Spelman College