Black Radical Thought

One of the more striking features of the Black Lives Matter movement against racialized police brutality has been the focus on violence inflicted on " black bodies. " On one hand, the language of " black bodies, " as opposed to simply " black people " or " black personhood, " makes the issue of racial violence more visceral and immediate to white audiences otherwise indisposed to perceive black pain as a moral problem. On the other hand, it represents a theoretical challenge to dominant understandings of pain, suffering, and individuality based on liberal subjectivity. Exemplifying both these aspects, Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent work, Between the World and Me, provides a deep philosophical reflection on the moral and political problem of " black disembodiment. " This article tracks the theme of disembodiment in Coates's book by foregrounding the role that feminist theories of embodiment play in his exploration of the contemporary black condition in America.

Thomas Sankara (1949–87) was one of the most important anti-imperialist leaders of twentieth-century Africa. This book examines Sankara’s political philosophies and legacies and their relevance today. Contributors analyze his synthesis of Pan-Africanism and humanist Marxist politics, as well as his approach to gender, development, ecology, and decolonization.

Neste ensaio, fruto da experiência docente na periferia colonial do capitalismo racializado brasileiro retomo, muito brevemente, a conexão
encontrada na filosofia ocidental entre ontologia e linguagem para dar explicitude aos fundamentos da virada linguística e para apontar a transição para uma virada ontológica, discutida dessa forma em
duas instâncias, que parecem ter estado até então incomunicáveis. O perspectivismo ameríndio, que poderíamos talvez considerar um capítulo da virada ontológica mais ampla na antropologia social contemporânea, e o afropessimismo afroamericano, descendente das tradições do
radicalismo negro norte-americano e da Africa e diáspora.

The “end of the World” trope can be crushingly rote in apocalyptic discourses, but its critical deployment is not, and it goes to the heart of rhetoric’s self-concept.  My starting point is obvious and well-marked: world is not severable from Man, so the end of the world is about the end of Man.  Etymologically, the term “world” derives from Germanic languages and refers to the life of mankind, being a compound term of “man” and “age” with the literal meaning of “age of man.”  Unsurprisingly, the “end of the world” invoked by many feminist, post-structural, and posthuman theorists, as well as  by Black, decolonial, and science studies scholars is often a comment on the death of Man’s entitlement as the organizing matrix for life on earth.  I’ll pull at three threads of “end of the world” troping, all of which revolve around diffracted conceptions of world and, concomitantly, humanity.  Then I pose two questions raised by multi-world ontologies for the potential of humanism in rhetoric:  First, how do diffracted ‘worlds’ impact rhetoric’s know-ability?  Second, can co-extensive being function as an orienting heart of ‘worlds’ without contradicting a logic of diffraction?

In this unfinished rough powerpoint for a series of lectures I explore why the United States is markedly different from other representative democracies and welfare states.  I trace the tradition of using a combination of bribery and corruption of the Congress and Judiciary, and violence and racist terror as a means of marginalizing organized labour and frustrating democratic control.  I explore how the contemporary crisis of social inequality, political corruption and racist authoritarian government long predates Trump, first emerging after Reconstruction in the Kleptocracy of the Gilded Age, receding somewhat under Roosevelt's leadership and with the Bretton Woods consensus, only to re-emerge with the Reagan revolution and the political triumph of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, and the radicalism of the 1960s.  On the foreign policy side, the resurgent power of the oligarchy within the country and the brutal repression of the poor and marginalization of labour and the voices of the black radical tradition, symbolized by the ruins of Detroit and the South Bronx, would be matched by the consolidation of the policies of the so-called Washington Consensus.  This policy approach, enforced by the IMF, World Bank, and American military force and paramilitary violence, is often sold as Globalization, critiqued as Neo-liberalism, but might more accurately be described as a return to racist colonialism of the filibusters, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.  The talk, which is intended to engage non-academic audiences and avoid jargon and theory, ought to be read in conjunction with Richard Iton's Solidarity Blues, and WIlkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level.

This article examines the rise of neoliberalism through the work of Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron’s spoken word traced the evolution of the various processes of modernity within the trajectory of U.S. history across the 1970s through the 2000s.  In particular, he marked important turning points characterizing the rise of neoliberalism from the dusk of the civil rights/Black Power era to the dawn of President Reagan’s administration. His work marked the longue durée continuity of the black radical tradition, its critique of the processes of modernity (imperialism and colonialism, capitalism, the Atlantic slave trade, the enlightenment and nationalism), and the ongoing relevance of this epoch-spanning set of relationships characterizing culture and economics throughout American history.

To view Best as part of the Radical Caribbean Tradition potentially misunderstands the man, his thought, and his lifework. It would amount to a serious error. We would more accurately speak of Best AGAINST the “Radical Caribbean Tradition,” about which he is very sceptical at the minimum, and directly hostile to, at the extreme.

Furthermore, if we are honest, we will acknowledge that over the years the feeling has been mutual: in Trinidad, Jamaica, and elsewhere. To more fully explain, this paper elaborates Best’s thought and lifework under the headings “orientation” and “method.” Best does not share with the Radical Tradition – in the Caribbean or elsewhere – its apocalyptic and millenarian vision – Marxist, Garveyite, or other – of working-class, racial, or nationalist triumph. Indeed, since the beginning of New World, Best has explicitly opposed these orientations and objectives. It seems to me that Best sees the crucial task in the West Indies to construct a society, not to destroy or to found it anew.

Best’s method has been Participant Observation, literally, with both parts having equal weight. Observation is crucial, and must be minute and patient. It requires years of intense work. And the accidents of living are crucial to gaining deep understanding. Indeed, I believe that Best is one of the only three people that truly understand Trinidad and Tobago. The other two are Vidia Naipaul and Eric Williams.

If the Caribbean Radicals are coming around to Best, it is perhaps because they are learning from him, or reaching similar conclusions independently. Best, however, stands against the Caribbean Radical Tradition, which has led so many of our best minds astray. As any perusal of his work from 1963 to the present will confirm, Best, though weathered by the sea, has stood as firm as a rock, above the shifting sands.

From 1963 to 1966, Radio Free Dixie broadcast from Havana, Cuba, to the United States. Launched by civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, Radio Free Dixie distributed militant messages to black audiences in the United States. This article examines the content of the Radio Free broadcasts and
the ways that the messages of Williams were framed as both national and transnational symbols of black struggle within the context of the Cold War. It contributes to the history of black journalism by highlighting how black media in the United States have used both national and transnational politics to link historical debates about race, self-defense, and US imperialism.

This article explores Simone Weil’s concept of ‘affliction’ and the black poetics of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten in relation to two nonfiction films: Artur Aristakisyan’s Palms (1993) and Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black (1962). The films’ contentiousness springs from their provocative depictions of suffering, presented not as a social ill but as a defiant mode of being outside of institutional power. Supplanting the search for a cure with the search for salvation, the films transcend the socially-conscious logic of documentary in favour of a ‘religious algorithm’ of profound but recalcitrant weakness. As alternative ‘city symphonies’, Palms and The House Is Black’s municipal visions complement Hartman and Moten’s vivid accounts of insurgent black life in American cities.

This paper is a close reading of Du Bois, in order to mark out the forgotten or ignored dark corners of his work. In particular, I suggest that Du Bois’ work remains haunted by, and deeply invested in, the unacknowledged settler colonial present in which he lived - and in which we continue live.
Throughout Souls, Du Bois frequently makes oblique, metaphorical, and handful of direct comments about ‘Indians’. By his recurrent summonings of this figurative ‘Indian’, Du Bois’ writing typifies Kēhaulani Kauanui’s (Kanaka Maoli) observation that Indigenous peoples have consistently “haunted a long night of American dreams”. I propose to trace the spectral figure of the “Indian” in Souls, with the particular aim of parsing how it acts as a refractionary element within Du Bois’ writing - that is, as a point of deflection that directs his thought. I assert that Du Bois’ work in Souls regularly invokes, and subsequently refuses, ‘Indianness’ - occasionally directly, more regularly through mnemonic chains - in order to organize his thinking and the political project that grows out of this work.
Unpublished; All Rights Reserved; Do Not Copy, Print or Site without the express permission of the Author

Curated by Travelling Communiqué (Armin Linke, Doreen Mende and Milica Tomić with conceptual support by Kodwo Eshun and Branimir Stojanović, cinematic programming by Miroljub Miki Stojanović, archival rendition by Museum of Yugoslav History curators Radovan Cukić, Ivan Manojlović and Mirjana Slavković, typographic conceptualisation by Žiga Testen, architectural interventions by Milica Lopičić, structural endurance by Fabian Bechtle, research support by Mirjana Dragosavljević, and editorial precision by Vanessa Vasić-Janeković)

The Travelling Communiqué project undertakes a durational investigation into the photographic archive of the presidential Photo Service of the Yugoslav Partisan leader and statesman Josip Broz Tito, through a range of contemporary practices, from art, through theory, history, architecture, typography, to cinema and education. The project’s point of entry into the archive of approximately 300,000 photographic records, permanently housed at the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, is the collection of 1,200 photographs taken during the first Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), held in Belgrade from 1st to 6th September in 1961, at the moment of an acute Cold War crisis.

Travelling Communiqué fosters a t rans-disciplinary way of working together towards the idea of political friendship. At work since 2012, it has been initiating its own conditions of production within current globalising forces. Most of the exposed contributions are new materials, ideas and concepts as consequences of joint research processes that are translated into the space of exhibiting: projects, proposals and films are equal to fragile vocabularies, educational sessions, students’ work, group constellations and means of articulation still to arrive.