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Azaria Mbatha, The Greetings Nativity, 1964.

John Muafangejo, Zulu Land, 1974.

“Benjamin Rush’s ‘Observations Intended to Favor a Supposition that the Black Color (As It is Called) of the Negroes is Derived from Leprosy’ provides a fantastical solution to the problem of blackness and its terrifying phenomenology. Rush’s “altruistic” intention in this study is to prove “that all the claims of superiority of the whites over the blacks, on account of their color, are founded alike in ignorance and inhumanity. If the color of the Negroes be the effect of a disease, instead of inviting us to tyrannize over them, it should entitle them to a double portion of our humanity, for disease all over the world has always been the signal for immediate and universal compassion” (295). Because the black presence contaminates Civil Society by embodying the collapse of sacred boundaries, it is impossible to incorporate blacks into Civil Society and maintain it at the same time. This startling reality perplexed many “abolitionist”—I use scare quotes here because abolitionists really did not abolish the problem of blackness in modernity; they merely advocated for blacks to be regulated to a state of exception. The conundrum of blackness and Civil Society came to be known as “the Negro Question,” and this question served as the limit of abolitionist fantasies of black freedom, equality, or retribution. The black presence, whether as captive or as emancipated, would always threaten to unravel the fabric of anti-black Civil Society. One solution to the problem was simply to remove blacks physically from the United States. Colonization societies emerged in the United States and advised masters and the State to “encourage” free blacks to emigrate and settle in Africa. This solution was not quite successful, owing to the cost of the enterprise and difficult logistics. Dr. Benjamin Rush, the father of American Psychiatry, provides an absolute solution to the problem of blackness: eliminate it. This solution belongs to a class of genocidal discourses that seek to eliminate blackness itself, although Rush disavows such internecine implications. Observations is not the typical genocidal enterprise, although there was discussion about literal genocide against free blacks in the mid-nineteenth century; instead of destroying the body, he simply wanted to remove blackness from the individual—in essence transform the abject black into white (the “natural” color of humans, as Rush would suggest.) This genocidal enterprise encodes itself in the discourses of abolition and epidemiology. In particular, Rush believed that leprosy caused the skin to become black, the lips to become big, the hair to become woolly, and the nose to become flat, and if left “untreated” it would pass along through generations. The danger of “black leprosy” (‘Negritude,’ as he called it) is apparent for Rush since “a white woman in North Carolina not only acquired a dark color, but several of the features of a Negro, by marrying and living with a black husband” (294). Blackness is the ultimate pathogen. It not only threatens to injure blacks but also whites, if whites come in close contact with blacks.”

— Calvin Warren - Black Interiority, Freedom, and the Impossibility of Living (2016) [Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 38:2, 107-121]

#black nihilism #blackness #anti-blackness #civil society

Jean-René Jérôme, Woman with Pigeon, 1973.

#art #jean-rené jérôme #haiti

Petion Savain - La Case de Damballah (1939)

Ernest Crichlow, Lovers, 1938.

#art #ernest crichlow #brooklyn

“To be blunt, Afropessimism is wordplay and sophistry. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection is a formalist exercise of linking airy ontological assertions to their apparent logical negations; although her moves are often clever on their own terms, their argumentative effect is that nothing ever changes. Wilderson makes bold, empirically groundless assertions, repeats them emphatically and relentlessly, and spins accounts of how things would seem to be if those assertions were correct. And he often extrapolates the bold assertions from fiction—the film 12 Years a Slave (AP 276); the Sethe character in Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved (AP 242, 303); and an episode of the reactionary television series, Homeland (AP 192f)—which he then blends with and takes as the normative basis for interpreting actual events. Critical appraisals of Wilderson’s work in particular can be read allegorically as a contemporary update of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The gullible and the dilettantish strain to argue that Wilderson’s and other Afropessimists’ more outlandish, clearly absurd assertions should not be read as intended to be claims of literal fact.[11] Academic reception of Wilderson is even more revealing than the popular assessments. I daresay that, if the academy were more like an honest craft guild, professors who blurbed his Afropessimism or otherwise have praised and recommended it might be at risk of having their doctorates revoked, as could happen, say, to a shoddy and irresponsible member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the quality of American intellectual life, particularly at its nexus with civic and political concerns, few acknowledge the extent of social harms that can ensue from academic malpractice.”

Adolph Reed, Jr. - Afropessimism, or Black Studies as a Class Project (2022)

#critique #afropessimism #black studies #frank wilderson

La Familia. Photo by Jamel Shabazz.

#kings county #new york city #jamel shabazz #photography

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De Schuurman - Fucked Up Industrie

#de schuurman #bubbling #the netherlands #holland

A group of young boys enjoy a hot summer day in Brownsville, Brooklyn (1980). Photo by Jamal Shabazz.

#jamel shabazz #photography #brownsville #brooklyn #nyc

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“While in Britain cultural studies evolved on the margins of sociology departments, in the U.S. such study has been prominent in literature departments. More and more ensconced within the postcolonial field, it has come to be increasingly indebted to psychoanalytic, especially Lacanian, methodologies. At least in its U.S. housing the division between cultural studies and postcolonial studies is not evident. In many cases postcolonialism is seen as a subfield of cultural studies. If Critical Fanonism is a weathervane then we should be wary of the way the cultural studies of Fanon have shied away from engaging politically or philosophically with Fanon as a revolutionary and political actor. Additionally, the image of the “Birmingham School” of cultural studies as rooted in Marx and Gramsci is not entirely correct. As Colin Sparks argues in his essay “Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and Marxism,” the identification of Marxism and cultural studies “lasted about four years” (1996, 72) and was “more contingent and transitory than it once appeared to its main actors” (1996, 97). In its present-day poststructualist phase, cultural studies finds a closer affinity with the insights from postcolonialism that have developed through a Lacanian frame than through Marxism. And, even if he wants to bring additional issues to the table, Stuart Hall (an earlier advocate of a Gramscian cultural studies) agrees with Homi Bhabha’s approach to Fanon (see Hall 1996). The context of an elective affinity between cultural studies (i.e., Hall) and postcolonial theory (i.e., Bhabha) is also particularly important for any study of the recent dispersion of “Black British cultural studies” into the U.S. academy. Postcolonialism blossomed as a field of enquiry in the 1980s, having less to do with developments in post-colonial societies themselves than with a reflection of the restructuring of the American national cultural identity in the universities (see King 1997, 7 n. 1). The new Fanon of postcoloniality, reflects, as Kobena Mercer has put it, the “fading fortunes of the independent left in the 1980s” (Hall 1996, 16). It is a Fanon that, as Bhabha does, emphasizes uncertainty and fragmentation, almost replacing social analysis with psychoanalysis.”

— Nigel Gibson - Thoughts About Doing Fanonism in the 1990s [College Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 1999), pp. 96-117]

#fanonism #cultural studies #postcolonial studies #disciplinary formation #afropessimism

Alesha Dixon, Sabrina Washington and Su-Elise Nash from Mis-Teeq (2002). Photo by Tim Roney.

#mis-teeq #black britain

Ultimate Kaos (1993). Photo by Mike Prior.

#ultimate kaos #black britain

Michelle Gayle (1995). Photo by Tim Roney

#actress #singer #black britain

“The British government needed a generous line of credit to fulfill the terms of the Slavery Abolition Act and relied on banks to supply it. The Rothschilds, the famed banking family, stepped forward to finance the British government’s plans to pay a huge compensation to slave-owners. In 1835, under the direction of family patriarch, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who passed away soon afterward in 1836, the Rothschilds bank purchased £15 million in British government bonds on the condition of receiving various benefits. These bonds, called gilts or 3 percent consols, were perpetual. This meant that the bonds had no set redemption date and could conceivably earn interest for decades or even centuries. To finance the West India Loan, the Rothschilds also purchased additional short-term stocks worth £101,875. The government made the offer more favorable by giving the Rothschilds a 2 percent discount on the price of government bonds. This would have benefited the Rothschilds if or when they chose to sell the government debt on the bond market.[26] The Slavery Abolition Act bonds, no trace of which seems to appear at the Rothschilds Archive in London, could have been resold, for a profit, by different members of Rothschild family or else kept in perpetuity. Records show that in 1835 more than fifteen members of the Rothschild extended family held consol bonds, and many children in the family had bonds purchased in their name.[27] The Rothschild bank has refused to comment on the West India Loan bonds, and the complete ownership legacy of the bonds is still unknown.[28] These bonds continued to earn interest for 180 years, financed by the British taxpayer. Abolition debt was repeatedly repackaged, creating a tidal wave of annuity interest and remittances. The government debt represented by the Slavery Abolition Act bonds came to be divided among 11,098 different accounts, and those accounts shared the total final redemption value of £218,388,715.22 in February 2015. Over almost two centuries, black people across the British Caribbean and UK taxpayers were forced to pay a host of undisclosed beneficiaries hundreds of millions of pounds in interest on the original 1835 principal.[29]”

Kris Manjapra - Black Ghost of Empire (2022: 105-106)

#political economy #slavery #compensation #britain #caribbean #west indies #history #abolition

Johnny Pitts and Roger Robinson - Home Is Not A Place (2022: 3) [Used as the album cover for Blood Orange’s Essex Honey]

#photography #black britain

London, 1980s. Photo by Harry Jacobs.

#photography #black britain

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