CANEBRAKE

Black radical thought at the hinterlands

[jmjafrx]

“The traditional notion of colonial power views it as the work of men operating in a masculine environment of governors and commandants, interpreters and traders, priests and pastors, kings and clerics. And yet colonialism worked its way into the intimate spaces of home, courtyard, kitchen and bedroom occupied predominantly by women.”

Hilary Jones, 6-7 (via jmjafrx)

[thesubversivesound]

Written by ex-Black Panther turned anarchist Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution is both an easy-to-read introduction to the fundamental principles of class struggle anarchism and an analysis of their relevance to the black liberation movement. Also contains a good section on why the author is an anarchist and why non-class struggle anarchists are useless.

Anarchism and the Black Revolution.pdf

[mb3cr3w]

“The Anarchist movement,which is overwhelmingly white, must start to understand that they need to do propaganda work among the Black and other oppressed community, and they need to make it possible for non-white Anarchists to organize in their communities by providing them with technical resources (printing of zines, video and audio cassette production, etc.) and assisting with financial resources.”

“One reason there are so few Black Anarchists is because the movement provides no means to reach people of color,win them over to Anarchism and help them organize themselves.This must change if we want the social revolution to take place in America, and if we want North American Anarchism to be more than“white rights”movement”

Truth

[mb3cr3w]

Facts

[canebrake--blog]

To my folks of color: COME ENVISION…envision a world, of worlds within our world where there’s principled co-existence within the wonderful diversity of the Black Community. Harlems / Spanish harlems / watts / hip-hop communities / villages of the Carolina coast / college communities / gay-lesbian-transgender communities / zulu nation / new afrikan / religious communities that come together mainly on Saturday or Sunday / squatter communities / outlaw communities / kemetic communities / ibo-ghanaian-sierra leonean-ethiopian-rasta neighborhoods / nomadic poet-artist tribes / and then those of us who just be plain ignant and harmless and crazy when we have to be and fun-loving and like to journey through and between communities and sometimes just create new mixed ones…WHAT IF ? …and HOW ? Ella Baker said we can do it if we can trust ourselves and get away from leadership-led revolution; Kwesi Balagoon said we can do it if we willing to create a chaos that will shut this mutha down; Audre Lorde said we can do it if we LEARN TO LOVE AND RESPECT OUR BEAUTIFUL DIVERSITY and reject the tools of our oppressors; Harriet Tubman daid aint a better way t live THAN AT-WAR FOR A RIGHTEOUS CASUE; and Franz Fanon said if we smack that mutha across the face, drive that pig outta your territory at the point of a gun IS LIBERATING FOR THE SOUL. WHAT IF ? Envision it…HOW?…

Ashanti Alston, Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It (from Anarchist Panther zine #1)

[canebrake--blog]

Chuck Morse: The [Black Radical] Tradition is by now well prepared to defend itself against attempts to colonize it: after all Black revolutionists were working with George Washington Carver at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee preserve. Imagine the contradictions!

Cedric Robinson: The conflicted relationship between intellectuals and popular movements is an important theme in your work. Does the emergence of high-profile Black Studies departments (at Harvard, example) and the popularity of writers such as Cornell West, bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates Jr., etc. mark a new stage in the relationship between Black intellectuals and movements?

Hegemonic control of Black Studies is as important to capital as any other field of knowledge production. The selective breeding of Black intellectuals in this country is even older than the appearance of the philanthropic Black colleges of the late 19th century; and the necessity of dominating Black knowledge production finds a template in the Gunnar Myrdahl enterprise in the years of World War II.

However, Black Studies is revolutionary in its political and historical origins and intellectual impulses. To paraphrase C.L.R. James, who insisted that Black Studies was the study of Western Civilization, Black Studies is a critique of Western Civilization. This is all too apparent in one of the first articulations of radicalism by David Walker in 1829. Modern slavery, Walker demonstrated, was not like Ancient Mediterranean slavery; modern Christianity could not oblige a Just God; education had to have a revolutionary emancipation as its central virtue, etc. So at those sites of its inception, Black Studies was seen as preparatory to re-articulating justice and the Good.

Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson

[canebrake--blog]

Jaye Austin Williams: It seems that what continues to "trend" in Hollywood is the privileging of whiteness on the screen. Now that the virtual era has solidly arrived, there appears to be a real investment in continuing to stake a claim in the imaginary realm as a lasting vestige of white "life"... This "virtual life" and the technical acumen and abundance of resources required to execute it contribute to the quashing of the black intellectual "noise" that dares to critique that project. And it's the same in the world of theatre, I'm afraid; a world that continues to uphold a stalwart commitment to the pursuit of craft excellence, while largely refusing to confront any questions about what that craft is in service to, ethically and politically, not just culturally and artistically. What does the pursuit of "good craftsmanship" really mean, beyond the people in the last row being able to (physically) hear what is being said? Being able to isolate the head's movements or hand gestures from the body, or correctly utilize the head and chest resonators for good vocal production all contribute to good technical acumen and clear presentation. But do they constitute an ethically-engaged, rigorous-thinking, well-read performer? Because that's a different question altogether, isn't it? Don't get me wrong; I value and respect solid craft. I practice it. But again: it's not just about "telling a 'good' story," but about telling one that is vivified by thought, reflexivity, and a series of ethical questions that guide one's entry into the world of a play so as to really get the playwright's "deep-tissue" labor.

Staging (Within) Violence: A Conversation with Frank Wilderson and Jaye Austin Williams

[canebrake--blog]

The proper recourses (space) Black(ened) folks are afforded within the ‘fair and just’ legal framework—if we are discriminated against—serve as disciplinary techniques that reinforce the subjected status of the Black: if we are to be thought of as properly ‘integrated’ or ‘civilized’, we have no other option but to pursue these avenues. Moreover, these proper avenues force us to align ourselves with the state (by requiring us to actively collaborate with the surveillance apparatus). The purpose of neoliberal (state-sanctioned) ‘anti-racist’ politics is, thus, not to bring about the end of an anti-black world, but to redirect anti-colonial struggles into safe business models, such as anti-discrimination agency, which, in a larger sense, manage, redirect, and defuse Black rage. These agencies give us a false sense of hope.

Egbert Alejandro Martina, “The Machinery of Dehumanization”

[canebrake--blog]

The narrative trajectory of institutionalized anti-racism, which is premised on the resolution of individual charges, represses the unacknowledged paradigmatic violence of White supremacy which makes absolute “the niggerization of African peoples.” What is ultimately restored is not a condition in which non-racism is the norm (which would be impossible in the world as we know it), but the innocence with which the Dutch state is associated; what is recuperated is stability and invisibilization of systemic proto-genocidal anti-black violence. ‘Peaceful coexistence’ of difference in the neoliberal multiracial society can only be achieved through anti-black violence. What institutionalized anti-racism helps sustain is the illusion that the society we live in is fair and just. Thus, as institutions that are essential to the well-being of a diverse civil society, anti-discrimination agencies perform an important role. They are crucial channels in the state-sanctioned framework, through which the illusion of a ‘democratic’ and ‘just’ society is perpetuated.

Egbert Alejandro Martina, “The Machinery of Dehumanization”

[canebrake--blog]

The legal system is the prime mechanism through which both racial violence and its ‘redress’ are carried out (let’s not pretend, to echo the analytical attitude of Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, that the quotation marks do not matter). This isn’t by accident: there is no inconsistency between the law and its application. Saidiya Hartman tells us, that “the proposed remedies and correctives to [structural racism]—inclusion, protection, and greater access to opportunity—do not ultimately challenge the economy of racial production or its truth claims or interrogate the exclusion constitutive of the norm but instead seek to gain equality, liberation, and redress within its confines.” The solutions proffered—inclusion, protection, and greater access to opportunity—are geared toward the preservation of a sustainable neoliberal multiracial society. The nature of anti-racism is seen as a narrative of progress, which is conceived as structurally similar to the equilibrium—disequilibrium—equilibrium trajectory of narrative. To elaborate, what is presupposed is that the state of equilibrium—a state of non-racism—is disrupted by a racist instance, after which anti-discrimination bureaus intervene in order to facilitate a return to a state of equilibrium. However, this narrative arc makes sense only from the point of view of the White subject. For the Black life form the supposed state of equilibrium is an illusory trick; racism is always already there. From the positionality of the Black there is no “unniggarized vantage point from which to see the world or be seen by the world.”

Egbert Alejandro Martina, “The Machinery of Dehumanization”

[canebrake--blog]

i am defending the revolution, the state’s arrangements are of no consequence. It does not matter what the legal outcome will be. Our fates are not in the hands of the state, but in the hands of the masses of New Afrikan people. In revolution, 1 either wins or dies. This case awaits a bigger jury.

Kuwasi Balagoon, Brink’s Trial Opening Statement, July 11, 1983

Read the full opening statement: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kuwasi-balagoon-brink-s-trial-opening-statement

[profkew]

Life In The Great Dismal Swamp - Archaeological Conservancy

In the decades after the first enslaved Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619, some slaves escaped from plantations seeking refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp, where Native Americans had already pioneered small settlements and bounty-hunting slave catchers were loathe to venture. The escapees were known as Maroons. Now, thanks to more than a decade of sloshing, slashing, and digging by archaeologists, the wetland is yielding insights into the lives of the Maroons. Since the early 2000s, a project led by archaeologist Daniel Sayers of American University has excavated five sites within the swamp.

[canebrake--blog]

And what do we admit, who do we reveal ourselves as, what do we risk if we say that we are loving Black life more than makes (Enlightenment) sense? Sylvia Wynter is still here with me, speaking about the potential of the so-called void. And for me it is important to remember, as Audre Lorde always asked us to remember, that not all of this is happening on the conscious level. What Freud called the subconscious, Audre Lorde called the “non-european consciousness.” And the questions become more and more specific. When am I not loving Black life over being compensated, understandable, respectable, sensible…whatever? And how does it show up specifically?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “A Spillage of the Fugitive Variety”

[guerrillamamamedicine]

A white artist “showing the world” Black suffering in an artistic statement would necessitate a look in the mirror, not at the Black bodies on the ground. It would show Schutz and Moore over the bodies of Till and Brown, holding the gun and barbed wire. Mamie’s statement was so powerful because Emmett was her baby. She chose Black media specifically to reprint the images. But under the hand of the likes of Schutz and Moore, Black death becomes less a call to awareness, more a titillating spectacle, using non-Black media and galleries to recreate images of it with no regard to the fact that they were once lives–once loved. Einstein once famously said “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” This type of work does nothing but encourage more looking and nothing–more danger for Black people. By now it should be clear that these type of well-meaning artists don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. What they are doing with capitalizing Black death and turning them into their activist statements can be easily understood as fraudulent when the shoe is placed on the other foot. As writer Robert Jones Jr. states, “I want a black artist to start painting graphic scenes of real-life mutilation, dehumanization, murder, and disrespect of white people to profit from. Paint Jon Benet Ramsey’s murder scene, for example, with all sorts of horrible disrespectful depictions and violations of her. Let’s see which galleries will tout them and pay the artist mounds of money and say it’s all about “The Art!"™. Let’s see if all these freedoms work in both directions.” We all know the answer to this. It’s always tempting to give some leeway when it seems white liberals are at least acknowledging racism exists. How could someone so seemingly sincere about caring about Black issues do something so horribly offensive on purpose? But what needs to finally be recognized is that anti-Blackness is not and has never been intended to simply offend, cannot be fixed by sadistic acknowledgment alone, and is not disproven by showing attention to Black people. Anti-Blackness is a centuries old practice that has always been meant to keep in place a system in which Black people aren’t seen as human so that others can attain their humanity. It’s time to accept that white liberals like Schutz and Moore place the disregard of Black people front and center not in a misguided attempt to challenge this dehumanization, but to reinforce the regard–and money (let’s not ignore how the spectacles of Black death they appropriate are always only the popular ones)–they receive in their own life, whether they “care about” Black people or not.

Why do white liberal artists love Black death so much? - AFROPUNK (via guerrillamamamedicine)

[canebrake--blog]

And yes. It is a threat. It is the threat the world we think we know (the world we know to think) is built to deny and evade. Is it working? What is dangerous, what is fugitive about Black women is the evidence of a life more guided by a relationship to that dark feminine creative energy that precedes and forever exceeds capitalism and other forms of violence. Who is being punished, ridiculed again and again in this society? The person who cares more about Black life than anything. Cares more about Black life than about being understandable. Cares more about Black life than about being compensated. Cares more about Black life than about respectability, even Black respectability. Cares more about Black life than about how much it hurts. Cares more about Black life than about what is sold to us as life, defined against Blackness. And the life you live when that relationship is first and last, on purpose, or by accident, whether you are a Black woman or not, is a Black feminist fugitive life.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “A Spillage of the Fugitive Variety”

[canebrake--blog]

Marquis Bey: Your last sentence—“The escaping isn’t easy, but it always escapes”—is really profound. The necessarily difficult escape is something that seems to be critical to understand. It also seems to be the texture of living at the nexus of Black and woman or of living with and dwelling with and through Black feminism. Could you maybe say more about what living Black feminist fugitivity might look like, feel like—or even think like?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Well, the short answer would be…no. I hope the scenes in the book are examples of what living Black feminist fugitivity might look, feel, or think like, but I don’t think of the book as prescriptive. Although “Black feminist fugitivity” and other phrases like “Black girl magic,” for example, have some different energy around them, they both defy and escape all our elaborations. Black femininity exceeds description either way. As I have said elsewhere (when asked to explain Black girl magic): “If I could define black girl magic, I wouldn’t. Just watch. That might be one of the first rules of black girl magic. Black girl magic isn’t the type of thing to be defined. Given the opportunity to conform, it transforms. And there is so much opportunity to conform. How do we nurture it though? Love. Loving our own selves, loving the selves of each other. And the other selves. I nurture black girl magic by breathing, dreaming, eating well, sleeping well. And witnessing.”

A Spillage of the Fugitive Variety

[canebrake--blog]

As I often say, Black feminist theory and Black feminist poetry are complicated, but not more complicated, never more rigorous than living as a Black woman in a world structured around the organizing concepts of slavery and rape. The Black feminist fugitive impetus behind all of this for me is that the systemic reality of the world we live in is an ongoing lie, enforced by violence at every turn. And it’s a lie that Black women contradict in our being and doing and are punished for every day. It’s also a lie we retell ourselves and the people around us in the hope of mitigating pain. So the fugitive impulse behind our daily being, behind my writing and thinking and living is the fact that underneath all the lies (including the internalized lies I tell myself about myself), there is freedom. And that freedom is asking me to live in accordance with the reality that love came first and still comes first and last, that a love that I can only describe as as Black as the universe that holds the stars and the planet and as feminine as change herself created everything. Answering that freedom in the midst of the afterlife of slavery is, as my late mentor Cheryll Greene would have said, “more than a notion.”

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “A Spillage of the Fugitive Variety”

[guerrillamamamedicine]

lex talks black women, fugitivity, and freedom…

[canebrake--blog]

The great Alexis Pauline Gumbs!

[canebrake--blog]

Perhaps that's the difference between a theory and a tendency, a tendency and an impulse, an impulse and a wish. For if Afro-Pessimism is defined by anything—a theory or theorem, a method or approach, a motley crew or citational network, an ensemble of questions or set of postulates—then it may be the motive force of a singular wish inherited in no small part from black women's traditions of analysis, interpretation, invention, and survival; what sometime social commentator Cedric Kyles, in a moment of comic insight, once termed "the wish factor." Born of a confrontational style that assumes a general antagonism, the wish factor contrasts sharply with "the hope creed" characteristic of those engaging the politics of everyday life through the assumption of a general consensus disrupted by conflict.

Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word”