Of Black Study 0745344135, 9780745344133

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Of Black Study

“This magnificent book is the best recent treatment we have of the great Black Radical Tradition! Joshua Myers’s powerful and profound examination of his towering figures lays bare the silences and evasions of contemporary Black academic studies. His vision of an alternative world grounded in the practices of Black everyday people is a clarion call for Black intellectual creativity and courage—just like the best of our Black musicians!” —Cornel West “Joshua Myers continues to perform the deep scholarly exploration into Black Studies and its intellectual foundation. His book is a blueprint manual that helps to elevate the Black imagination so that a new architecture can create a better world. His reference to the work of Sylvia Wynter, June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara gives visibility to Black women as thinkers and not individuals standing in the shadows of men. This is long overdue.” —E. Ethelbert Miller, writer and literary activist “In a sustained flash of deep, critical devotion, Joshua Myers has become one of our most important intellectual historians and the preeminent theorist of Black Study. His engagement with ‘knowledge otherwise’ in Of Black Study is beautifully indispensable.” —Fred Moten, cultural theorist, poet and scholar, New York University  “For those who are, or wish to become, engaged in this work of radical re-thinkings, Myers’s Of Black Study is a necessary consideration.” —Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.), Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University “Joshua Myers has blown the abeng. Through a beautifully woven, ethically attuned communion with Du Bois, Wynter, Carruthers, Robinson, Jordan, and Bambara, Myers charts a habit of thought that for more than a century has produced a body of knowledge robust enough to elaborate the fullness of Black life. Let us answer the call Of Black Study.” —Minkah Makalani, Director, Center for Africana Studies

Black Critique Series editors: Anthony Bogues and Bedour Alagraa We live in a troubled world. The rise of authoritarianism marks the dominant current political order. The end of colonial empires did not inaugurate a more humane world; rather, the old order reasserted itself. In opposition, throughout the twentieth century and until today, anti-racist, radical decolonization struggles attempted to create new forms of thought. Figures from Ida B. Wells to W.E.B. Du Bois and Steve Biko, from Claudia Jones to Walter Rodney and Amílcar Cabral produced work which drew from the historical experiences of Africa and the African diaspora. They drew inspiration from the Haitian revolution, radical Black abolitionist thought and practice, and other currents that marked the contours of a Black radical intellectual and political tradition. The Black Critique series operates squarely within this tradition of ideas and political struggles. It includes books which foreground this rich and complex history. At a time when there is a deep desire for change, Black radicalism is one of the most underexplored traditions that can drive emancipatory change today. This series highlights these critical ideas from anywhere in the Black world, creating a new history of radical thought for our times. Also available: Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness Edited and with an Introduction by David Austin Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin After the Postcolonial Caribbean: Memory, Imagination, Hope Brian Meeks A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara Edited by Amber Murrey

Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance Edited by H.L.T. Quan Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X Michael Sawyer Red International and Black Caribbean Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919–1939 Margaret Stevens The Point Is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye Edited by Alissa Trotz

Of Black Study Joshua Myers

First published 2023 by Pluto Press New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA and Pluto Press Inc. 1930 Village Center Circle, 3-834, Las Vegas, NV 89134 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Joshua Myers 2023 The right of Joshua Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 4412 6 Paperback ISBN 978 0 7453 4416 4 PDF ISBN 978 0 7453 4414 0 EPUB

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

For all past, present, and future members of the Kwame Ture Society for Africana Studies and their students and children

Contents

Introduction: Living—June Jordan

1

1. Of Hesitance—W.E.B. Du Bois

14

2. Of Human—Sylvia Wynter

52

3. Of Speech—Jacob H. Carruthers Jr.

100

4. Of Order—Cedric J. Robinson

140

Conclusion: Dreams—Toni Cade Bambara

183

Acknowledgments192 Notes196 Index258

Introduction: Living June Jordan “Black Studies. The engineer, the chemist, the teacher, the lawyer, the architect, if he is Black, he cannot honorably engage career except as Black engineer, Black architect. Of course, he must master the competence, the perspectives of physics, chemistry, economics, and so forth. But he cannot honorably, or realistically, forsake the origins of his possible person. Or she cannot. Nor can he escape the tyranny of ignorance except as he displaces ignorance with study: study of the impersonal, the amorality of the sciences anchored by Black Studies. The urgency of his heart, his breath, demands the knowing of the truth about himself: the truth of Black experience. And so, Black students, looking for the truth, demand teachers least likely to lie, least likely to perpetuate the traditions of lying: lies that deface the father from the memory of the child. We request Black teachers of Black studies. It is not that we believe only Black people can understand the Black experience. It is, rather, that we acknowledge the difference between reality and criticism as the difference between the Host and Parasite.” June Jordan, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person”1 We are surrounded. We who are in the academy, looking for community, like June Jordan and her students in 1969, are still surrounded. We have also made it inside the gate, but we are now cornered. This place, the university, is the destination, they said. We were told that we had to be inside or else. And now that we are here, they lie to us. Just as they lied to Jordan’s students. Just as they lied to the Black professors they hired when they demanded teachers less likely to lie. Just as they lied to the Black teachers who went to college in order to teach those Black professors long before 1969. They lied about us. About why we are here, how we got here, and what it means to be here. Although they would eventually again shut the gates, some of us made it through and have been here for a long time now. Which means we have listened to these lies for a long time now. The lies have changed. But they are still lies. Every now and then, there is a slip, an exposure, a seam opens. We seize on those moments because the lie that sustains what Jordan called

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this system’s “exploitation of human life, for material gain” cannot exist forever. 2 We say, we believe. We enter a tradition of recognizing that this place and its knowledges are all “a logical bundling of lies that mutilate and kill.”3 That knowledge we call “normative,” “objective,” and therefore “universal” is not only or simply a fiction or construct; it is a mechanism of power, a force that imposes a particular kind of regime of truth on those who they lie about, who are said to have no knowledge to counter the lie. As we have queried the meaning of these lies, we have come up with many answers. Even as there are deeper questions we know we should ask. But sometimes it feels like there are too few of us. Left alone, left with questions unanswered, some of us feel we have to participate in the lies in order to make do. The excuses mount. We turn our contempt inward. We call ourselves impostors. We rationalize other kinds of harms, perhaps believing that in the end, the academy’s rewards will suit us just fine. When we have been inside the gates for so long, there is a tendency to adjust. But even this self-criticism has its limits. For it is the gates that surround us. It is not us—it is them. It is the gates that suffocate the life out of us. It is the gates that suppress our desires, assaults our capacities to evacuate the lies out of us. We are not the problem, though we have been told this over and over. And we have suffered for so long as their conception of the problem. The gates have enforced the logics of coloniality and state power. It is the settler and the police that guard these gates. Who then teach us their knowledges. Only they call themselves scholars. Yet their ideas manifest harm. For it is their job. In the face of such duress, such pervasive hardship, such overwhelming trauma, we must build spaces to re-member that we Black folk have a tradition of recognizing that it is all a lie. Of Black Study is a re-membering of that tradition through the lens and lives of four Black intellectuals who questioned the lie at its most fundamental core: the very meaning of knowledge.4 They came to the university with questions. Questions that were not simply driven by why Black folk caught hell, not simply why poverty existed, not simply why there were disparities, lack, deprivation, deviance—not simply if we were in fact surrounded. They asked questions like how the nature of knowledge and knowing itself became the structure that housed the lies. How the architecture of the lie was not inherent in the lie itself. How it must have come from some logic that preceded it. So it was not enough to

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respond to the sorts of lies Jordan wrote about with simple “corrections,” to ask whether the liars believed themselves to be telling the truth, to ask whether they understood what it was they were saying about us. There are lies and there are intellectual traditions founded on lies. There is dishonesty and there is a whole philosophy of life premised on particular assumptions of who we are. There is bad faith and then there is a panoply of interests served by the lie for those who require them. In other words, asking what produces the lie, rather than what constitutes the lie, is a more necessary response than simply refuting the lie. For the lie, this capacity for lying, is the very idea of the West. * * * June Jordan was writing during a time of great promise. At City College, alongside Barbara Christian, Addison Gayle, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara—the latter of whom told her on her first day of teaching, “Anything you have to give, just give it to them … They’ll be grateful for it”—she met students who would struggle to create a “Free University” and attempt to “realize the dream of a Black University.” In order to do so, they would have to shut down the college as it had been known before.5 It was a moment where Black and “Third World” students were not only critical of the lie but had begun to think of alternative, otherwise forms of thinking and creating. One should never forget the roles of the artists and poets, many of whom were the original Black Studies faculty members. Their students were the ones who would continue that creative push to narrate Black life in the pages of the many Black Studies newsletters and organs and on the lists of Black publishing houses, eventually creating one of the most important moments of literary production in the seventies and eighties. That now celebrated, if still misunderstood, struggle for a Black writing, free of a white gaze emerged from Black spaces and was affirmed in Black spaces.6 Black Studies was such a Black space. And this meant something much more profound than the racialized signifier of “Black” that was violently created to order human groups. It was about experience. There was the lie, and then there was life—living. This struggle for life was oriented toward a declaration, synthesized beautifully by Jordan’s poetic invocation: “We are the Truth: We are the living Black experience, and therefore, we are the primary sources of information. For us, there is nothing optional about Black Experience and/or ‘Black Studies’: we must

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know ourselves.”7 We could oppose the lie. And then live. Maybe Black Studies could become something like “White studies: Revised.” But there was the question of whether or not the university truly had the capacity to do this work for and with us. Could it be a space that moved against its tradition of affirming the rationality of plunder and pain? Could it “teach us something new”?8 Most of us can say now that it most likely cannot. But fewer of us seem to be able to explain why. There is much to learn from Jordan’s insistence on asking the question in the way she did and the conversations it might lead to concerning where we are. Such conversations should in fact take us far beyond the logic of the curriculum as it had always existed, far beyond the disciplines that structured the academy, and far beyond the philosophical foundation on which those disciplines depended. For what underpinned Jordan’s questioning was a groping for the deeper questions of life. We once knew the university for what it was, for what it was teaching. We once knew that we could not accept it. As Jordan put it: “How shall we humanly compose the knowledge that troubles the mind into ideas of life? How can be who we are?”9 We once knew that the curriculum was blind to such questions of life. It had been too implicated in our deaths. We once knew Black Studies as a struggle for a “life appealing to live, and to be, and to know a community that will protect the living simply because we are alive.”10 We once knew that. And we still do. Surrounded and cornered within the deathly gates of the academy, by a Western knowledge complex that was also prevalent and predatory to students at other levels of the educational system, Jordan, in a 1969 speech to graduating eighth graders in Ocean Hill Brownsville, framed Black Studies as “Life Studies.” Therefore, as you enter high school, and as you undertake different courses, I hope you will remember this truth: the truth of your absolute value as a human life. Use this truth as your rule in measuring the education offered to you. Let me urge you to examine every subject given to you for study, and every assignment demanded of you. Ask this question, again and again, and again: How does this study, how does this subject, relate to the truth of my life?11

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She continued: I hope you will insist that your studies shall become Life Studies: Black Studies. Urban Studies. Environmental Studies. The American evidence of contempt for our Afro-American lives can easily be seen when you realize that we who are Black, and we who live in urban centers of the country, and we who poison ourselves simply by breathing the air, and we who swallow soap and worms, and worse than that, when we drink a glass of water—we cannot come into any classroom and learn what we need to know. Where are the central, required courses that will teach us our real heritage of heroes and heroines, rebellion, and loving accomplishment? Where are the central, required courses that will teach us how to design and govern cities so that the cities will function as great temples of life that welcome us inside[,] that welcomes our lives? Where are the central required courses that teach us how to destroy the enemy, urban situation that threatens all life now dwelling inside our city walls?12 The curriculum was composed of a reading of history that was a record not of human life but of power and war, “of the crimes of dollar blood,” of “battles and death and slavery and arrogance and suffering.” Politics was not about “justice or goodness”; it was about the management of those power relations created through slavery, colonialism, and death.13 Jordan called for an approach to study that turned away from the use and abuse of politics and power, for a study enlivened by the “profoundly human wish” for freedom. She declared: “Let us have no more to do with such power. Instead, let us, take control. Let us take responsibility for the freedom and wellbeing of each other.”14 What we once knew and must now be able to explain and remain bold enough to assert is that Jordan’s words—such a declaration, such a demand, such a dream—were a “menace to university curriculum and standards.”15 What we also knew then was that we needed other institutional forms. We created Black Studies programs and we imagined a Black University based on but ultimately going beyond the intent of historically Black colleges and universities.16 We struggled within Black Student Unions and we built intellectual spaces designed for community beyond the gates. We studied for credit and then we studied for life. There was the Institute of the Black World and the New School for Afro-American Thought and Malcolm X Liberation College and Drum and Spear, and the many other

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examples of Black Study as simultaneously invested in but much larger than what happened on the Yard.17 These formations raised key questions about race, class, gender, sexuality, colonialism and imperialism, and power. Yet their living archives are barely recognized in some corners.18 These groups and institutions housed important discussions where consensus was not always easy. Some of us believed in the materiality of our conditions and strongly asserted that it be privileged. Others felt that marginalized identities within the category of “Black” placed pressure on race as the only relevant category of analysis. Still others felt that this had all gone too far, that we should be struggling within traditional intellectual spaces to achieve our goals. While there were those who made autonomy the bellwether of Black Studies, only achievable by departmental status, others were just fine with a kind of structural interdisciplinarity that assumed we could only survive if attached to the “traditional disciplines.” As we became more and more institutionalized, the work being done outside the gates became less accessible to students and faculty. Some of that work disappeared and was disappeared. So some of us chose to become policy experts rather than organizers (a dichotomy that perhaps need not be). Some chose to be celebrities and entrepreneurs rather than intellectuals committed to the people. Some chose to try to return Black Studies to the disciplines we left behind. Such compromises are the marks of a certain kind of failure of the political imagination. Yet these were also all disagreements that mirrored ideological streams that went beyond the university’s gates. They are still present in discussions of what Black Studies should be almost three generations later. We can no longer act as though the current iterations of these debates were the first time that they were raised.19 Meanwhile, the university still produces knowledge that grins and lies. We must rip off its mask. And this is why re-membering is important. Lest we allow the debates and discussions that animated the Black Studies tradition to get framed as diversity and inclusion, as antiracism, or as a liberal project for pluralist democracy.20 As the university became more and more “neoliberal,” individual academics more entrepreneurial, and human life and possibility more vulnerable, the “legitimization and institutionalization” of Black Studies in the 1980s made sustaining the originary radical communal impulse all the more difficult.21 So we sought alternative formations within the gates again. The 1980s were a moment when that need to “come together as students, Black students” was again necessary.22 As Molefi Kete Asante’s “alternative epis-

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temology” of Afrocentricity created the first terminal degree program in African American Studies at Temple University, Black Studies’ momentum was buoyed by the youth-inspired hip hop movement, as well as Pan African political struggle emanating from southern Africa.23 Young people came to the university with questions—and new demands for Black Studies. Demands for its continued growth and development. Demands for an Afrocentric-focused and radical discipline. Demands for the discipline’s autonomy. But such demands existed alongside those consistent attempts to fuse the discipline back into the domains of traditional disciplinary categories. So by the end of the nineties, when several more universities offered the PhD, with differing foci and interests under the broad umbrella of Black nationalist, radical, and liberal traditions, there was a noticeable difference. The ceding of “normative theoretical space” to interdisciplinary formats, both administratively and methodologically, had become the de rigueur format of producing Black Studies in the US academy. Through joint appointments and other mechanisms, we now fold ourselves into “traditional” disciplines that were never unmade and have not changed. Our mere presence in these spaces allows them to claim that they have. The disciplines get to claim Black Studies by our proxy and by our unwillingness to reject them. This is not just an institutional or organizational concern. As what Greg Carr calls the “African study of phenomena and experience” was reduced to “the study of Black stuff,” the practices of Black Study receded from view.24 But they did not disappear. In their work The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten imagine Black Study as both a strategy and form of critique, as well as perhaps a “location” for that strategy and critique. It was a place where study happened, where thinking on different terms happened. Harney and Moten’s conceptual work repositions what the academy casts as norms for study and what the disciplines imagine as the goal of intellectual work, asserting that such norms merely work to maintain systems of governance and control that Black Studies, in turn, works and has always worked to undermine. To choose Black Study is to choose to “be different”25 in the face of bureaucratic discipline: “Some still stay, committed to black study in the university’s undercommon rooms. They study without an end, plan without a pause, rebel without a policy, conserve without a patrimony. They study in the university and the university forces them under.”26 There is a relationship between debt and knowledge, between management and scholarship. If the managerial elite is a new function of university governance, it is also inscribed in

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the history of intellectual traditions that enforce control and social order. Reckoning with the university, then, requires imagining an arrangement of knowledge that privileges a different order, a different set of interests. What passes for academic knowledge, the lies that Jordan evokes, will no longer suffice, and indeed have never sufficed. This tradition of study— Black Study—has its genesis in a long past. And so here Black Study means that tradition of refusal of the knowledge of the world as it was given to us by those committed to colonial and racial order—and all the ways we still experience it, the many othering practices it generated. It is a refusal of the blessings of liberal humanism and its variants, the philosophy of life and living that is really only about the political same, a violent reanimation of the status quo, the Western conceptions of what has and should always be. It is in refusing that we created Black Study as the places—in the margins and contentedly so— that challenged everything the university handed down to us as the only possible reality. There is indeed an alternative and a tradition of study that rests upon the translation and recovery of different ways of knowing— this is our mission, and it is also that of Black Study. For Black peoples, forced into these spaces, have always had to make it so. For everything that the university represents has caused us to want and be different. Occasioned by an academic moment when it seems something about that refusal has been lost, missing, and adrift, Of Black Study tries to add more to what we know about those who knew and worked for a conception of Black intellectual life that could not be folded into the worst of America’s tradition of incorporating Black history into its own national myth; those who worked for a philosophy of liberation that could not be made into a Black version of the Enlightenment; those who realized also that Black liberation was inconceivable without revolution. While there is a great deal of attention paid to politics and ideology—categories that become reified as necessary and universal to all forms of reality—this book focuses on figures for whom the intellectual domain itself had to be undone in order to know something about the world around us. Their work was not as simple or as easy as a mere “revision” of white studies, as Jordan gestured toward. Black Studies “was a critique of Western Civilization” altogether.27 And just as much, an imagining of an otherwise. * * * Of Black Study is an exploration of the ways that W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson arrived at that critique of

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Western knowledge. In their unique ways, they constituted and extended a tradition of intellectual work—of Black Study—that went beyond the imperative to produce knowledge out of the framings and categorical logic of Western epistemologies. In their pursuit of a conceptual and epistemological freedom, they exposed the ways in which the knowledge foundations embraced in the university reflected the racial and colonial logic of modernity, and in doing so, these thinkers posited not “alternative modernities” but “alternatives to modernity.”28 In the writings of these intellectuals, the academic disciplines come under severe scrutiny. Not only did they recover the roots of these academic formations, but their work also framed their claims of and for scientific legitimacy as similarly vexed, beholden in fact to a conceptual world that could only reveal their objects of analysis within certain codes and orders of arrangement. In other words, knowledge of the world was filtered through disciplines, which were themselves filtered through a particular way of conceiving reality. One could not simply apply them to Black experiences without care. Or without acknowledging how Black life was connected to the very contexts through which disciplines emerged. As similar critiques evolved from others who nevertheless remained committed to knowledge within the gates, the clear lines of difference were Black Study’s declaration of different stakes for such an inquiry.29 For Du Bois, there was a desire to reveal the inadequacy of the prevailing norms of scientific inquiry, both on their own terms as well as their ability to reveal the Truth of the Black experience. His work continued a process of thinking beyond discipline, beyond even interdisciplines, in order to access that Truth. In that conception, Du Bois would have heirs who would take this further. His example was foundational to how they regarded the world. And just as Of Black Study grapples with Du Bois’s legacy in ways that are different from those texts that seek to exalt him as the founding father of several disciplines, it connects his confrontation with those disciplines to a genealogy of Black thinkers who extended his example in the early days of Black Studies. Sylvia Wynter’s approach to the ideas of Enlightenment and humanism is a critique that is becoming more necessary even as her work is becoming more widely read. This work reveals the fraught foundations of liberalism at a time when it is still being hailed as the answer to the problems of Western society. Her work reveals that this hegemonic assumption of liberal ontologies can be dangerous, locating much of her critique in the question of “the human.” Jacob Carruthers’s work is sited

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in the broad tradition of cultural nationalism, but it was premised on both critique and reconstruction. Carruthers’s Black Study helped locate an approach to culture that did not map Blackness back onto the categories that Wynter and others critiqued. His invocation of speech as foundational to African life introduced a complex conceptual system and methodology for thinking about reality that has not been considered together with many recent Black Studies interventions. Finally, Cedric Robinson’s understanding of the political nature of Western societies—a sadly unheralded component of his work if recent attention is a guide— was necessary for his development of the concept of the Black Radical tradition and emerged in part as a refutation of disciplinary categorization. For Robinson, the meaning of order could be seen as antithetical to certain African systems of society, and the academic disciplines that support order were unwelcome tools for excavating Black radicalism. To be of Black Study is to be against the ways in which Western knowledge has influenced how reality—particularly the reality that has applied to Black life—has been presented to us. The forms of these presentations take their blueprint from the disciplines of knowledge, formations that emerged from the requirements of Western civilization, read here as that intellectual tradition that inspired the modern world. Implicit in the disciplines are the ways in which they represent themselves as real and logical and thus applicable to domains that are larger than their originary conceptual frames. It is of course beyond their purview to see the ways in which they became real. That is to say, it is perhaps illogical for disciplines to realize how they originate in ways that would demonstrate their constructedness, and even their arbitrariness, when the very point of disciplinary histories is to argue for their necessity.30 This lack of awareness has enabled some to easily characterize Black Studies as “inherently” interdisciplinary. It is supposed that we can only be because the “traditional” disciplines exist. And because they exist, surely they must have always existed.31 But at best, the interdisciplinary formats of early Black Studies were a temporary compromise. Those committed to theorizing Africana Studies knew that a real reckoning with Black knowledges would mean disciplinary suicide. As Mack Jones once put it, “We have not shown an inclination to question them (our white mentors) in their entirety, their total beings, nor have we demonstrated a willingness to question their knowledge in its totality.”32 We would have to leave what was for some our deeply troublesome academic homes. And had we really left, we would

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never be able to return. As early as the mid-1970s, Cedric Robinson had realized as much. This statement is worth quoting at length: For many scholars of Black Studies, it was apparent quite early that the discipline of Black Studies would have to break the bounds, the traditional organization, of academic learning, research and scholarship that had emerged in American and European thought by the late 19th century. One needed more tools, more intellectual groundings than were present in the singular discipline of that tradition. For some of these Black Studies scholars, the most readily accessible solution was to construct this new discipline along multidisciplinary or, further, interdisciplinary lines. Presumably this would allow the new discipline the necessary longitude it required while providing enough familiarity for those academicians (and academic structures) with whom its proponents would have to articulate. Black Studies programs simply incorporated men and women trained in the traditional fields of history, sociology, political science, anthropology, ad seriatim. This was both possible and probably appropriate during the earliest phase of the development of the field. It was not, however, a definitive nor ultimately a satisfactory solution. Such a procedure could not address in powerful, authentic terms the social and historical ordering, the crucial sensibilities which were concomitants in ideological and sociological form to the persistence of African peoples beyond the advent of modern industrial systems of production and social organization. Too much depended upon the sensibilities, the conceptualizations, the categories of experience, and the perceptions of African peoples being similar to those of non-African (specially, European and Euro-American) peoples. African notions of time, space, explanation, and the order of things, that is rationalization, had to resemble enough what is made of them in Western experience in order to be submitted to treatment according to the peculiar organization of knowledge which Westerners now think of as universal. This was the epistemological thrust which accompanied the early development of Black Studies and which contributed some misdirection.33 This misdirection lingers and lingers. So there is now a generation who repeats the canard of interdisciplinarity as a guiding principle of Black Studies. Their veil of ignorance has become a useful tool for compromising our historical struggle for autonomy in hiring, promotion, and

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even teaching. One simply frames Black Studies as Black content studies, leaving unaddressed the question of what it is we have done and do that is in fact different, in a space created for the purposes of intellectual transformation and human liberation rather than mere representation and recognition within what already is. In this corruption of our work, one also manufactured by administrative fiat and neoliberal priorities, we increasingly encounter an intellectual situation in which questions of theory and methodology come from the home of an individual’s joint appointment rather than from a Black Studies tradition. To those who genuinely want to escape, Black Studies can be such a space. But there are theories and methodologies all our own, ways of entering into a Black Studies “disciplinary” territory all our own. They must be renewed, yes. But first they must be known. We already have relationships to the traditional disciplines. And it was not always a given that we would merely compromise and accept the university’s offers of peace. A lot of times it was intellectual warfare that defined that relation. For a critical contingent of Black Studies thinkers, the traditional disciplines and their relationship to Black Studies mirrored the relationship of every other Western mechanism of control and management in their relationship to Black life. Like the maroons, there would be a place in Black Studies waiting for those ready and willing to make the necessary break. So it is here where we might continue to think and utilize perceptions of African time, space, and explanation, à la Robinson, to eventually think beyond and break from even the category of “discipline.” To think otherwise. Of Black Study is concerned with this concept of “otherwise,” to follow the thinking of writers like Ashon Crawley. In his beautiful analysis of the forms of Black pentecostal aesthetics that have been influential to Black self-actualization, Crawley makes the claim that Western modes of knowing could not reveal them for what they really were. Attached to Crawley’s argument that Western theology and philosophy were constructed on aversion, on the propensity to not see Blackness in its fullness, is the idea of Black Study: “a mode of approaching objects, a form of intellectual practice, that resists the stilling and stasis of abstraction through language, and through quantifying … concerned with the world, with the destruction of inequity and the imagining and material realizing of otherwise worlds, otherwise possibilities.”34 In thinking otherwise, we remove the conceptual and disciplinary logics supporting and reifying race, gender, otherness, and the related political projects that ensue from

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them, while allowing other ways of being to animate how we know the world. Du Bois, Wynter, Carruthers, and Robinson write and theorize about this tradition of Black livingness, while simultaneously participating in the same political and ideological struggles that grounded them, creating a rich form of inquiry that possesses an urgency, an authenticity, a grounding that affirms that there is in fact a beyond—that there is more to Black thought than mere critique. This book also imagines that beyond, that desire to frame a world and an African sense of being that exists in that world that is different from the worlds and the image of “the African” constituted by the modern. These, too, were part of explicit acts of resistance, struggles that continued into the twentieth century, where they were picked up by the intellectuals treated in this text. In their conceptions of liberation, the thinkers explored here, however, center ways of being and existing and of making worlds differently as the meaning and nature of freedom. It is Du Bois’s declaration that to the formerly enslaved freedom was God, the human rhythms of a general strike found in something more than just the American economic order; it is Wynter’s excavation of Black ritual and “jazz-life” as foundational to oppositions to New World economic arrangements; it is Carruthers’s ability to see in both Black intellectual traditions and Black struggles in revolutionary Haiti, the continuity of an ancient African tradition of “Deep Thought” concerned with the nature of the moral-spiritual universe; and it is Robinson’s Black Radical tradition as a way of accessing the meaning of how to live against Western notions of “the political.” These were their terms for “otherwise.” While there are differences in their projects, the question of how peoples of African descent live and might live is at the core of their Black Study. Life Studies as Black Study. Black Study as the beautiful ways in which Africans have always made meaning out of “this battlefield called life, called life, called life, called life.”35 Black Study as the beautiful ways we do, feel, theorize, write, and teach our Lives. Black Study as the beautiful ways that we have always recognized that in an academic setting where we are surrounded by ideas and practices that steal life, we will continue to live, and we will continue to choose to “believe in life.”36

1 Of Hesitance W.E.B. Du Bois “Looking over the world, we see evidence of the reign of Law; as we rise, however, from the physical to the human there comes not simply complication and interaction of forces but traces of indeterminate force until in the realm of higher human action we have Chance—that is actions undetermined by and independent of actions gone before. The duty of science, then, is to measure carefully the limits of this Chance in human conduct.” W.E.B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant”1 “I write then in a field devastated by passion and belief. Naturally, as a Negro, I cannot do this writing without believing in the essential humanity of Negroes, in their ability to be educated, to do the work of the modern world, to take their place as equal citizens with others. I cannot for a moment subscribe to that bizarre doctrine of race that makes most men inferior to the few. But, too, as a student of science, I want to be fair, objective and judicial; to let no searing of the memory by intolerable insult and cruelty make me fail to sympathize with human frailties and contradiction, in the eternal paradox of good and evil. But armed and warned by all this, and fortified by long study of the facts, I stand at the end of this writing, literally aghast at what American historians have done to this field.” W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America2

open mind Beginning at 4'29'', the bridge of the Derrick Hodge composition “Open Mind,” recorded by the Robert Glasper Experiment, features drummer Chris Dave soloing with a beautifully paced snare roll. Building as in the intensity of a ring shout, it exists underneath polyrhythmic shots, accented all the way, moving into a place that is seemingly but never out of rhythm, always with a hesitance at each new beginning of the cycle.

of hesitance—w.e.b. du bois  .  15

Not out of rhythm, but necessarily pausing and restarting, moving in and out, this hesitation is a breaking open of a new vista of the song. By the end of the bridge, we have moved to a heightening of our consciousness of the shift toward a space we had not expected to go. Dave’s halting and starting is a breaking that is necessarily full of potential. But we are never told what to expect once the break is done and after the bridge is crossed. Yet there is something there, before the next movement. It is an expectation, a radical expectation, for us to be open. It is the hesitance that prefaces each rhythm, each accent that prepares us to confront what it is that exists throughout the entirety of the composition, before and after the break, after the pause.3 Hesitation is a creative force. To hesitate is to pause and to consider. It is not merely not knowing, or the absolute state of being unsure. Rather, it is being sure that we can only be unsure of a certain kind of sureness, a certain kind of closure. Space must be created to make sure we do not close off other kinds of possibilities. So, hesitation is a moment of both refusal and imagination. It is never one or the other. But it is not closure. Hesitance is not the achievement of resolution. Resolution is only possible when a destination is chosen, a route taken. Hesitation is a break that nevertheless allows us to remain open, listening for what can be. For what has never been. Hesitance is essential to being. If it is a mode of tentativeness, it is only because it must be. For to be unsure often means to not know what lies in the beyond, the undiscovered, the unthought. This moment of hesitation is only a beginning. From a break, we can imagine what it is to be on the road to repair, to life transformed by breaking free.4 We do not always know what we can be. But there is something inside us that tells us that what we have been is not enough. To hesitate is to break so those submerged ways of existing, of being, can be. Hesitance is preparatory to a freedom from restriction. To be categorized—to become a data set, a line item, a variable—is to be restricted. So we hesitate so that we can think beyond that restriction, as restriction requires negation. To hesitate is to begin to resist one’s negation. So let us now take a break, fully aware of the reality that the world we now inhabit is certain and has been certain of our negation. * * * William Edward Burghardt Du Bois practiced this hesitance. It is inscribed in his choice to name his 1905 essay “Sociology Hesitant.” But

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it is also inscribed in how he thought of the nature of scientific practice and knowledge itself. His unwillingness to accept that the Negro could be understood within what then passed for scientific knowledge led Du Bois to a break. The figure of the Negro was neither merely a Problem nor a negligible presence in what is assumed as an otherwise perfectible modernity. This was a recognition made possible through a break, through hesitance. It was an opening for Black Study. For Du Bois, this hesitance was not about abandonment, as much as it was a way to question. His thought raised questions that linger for the project of sociology, for the writing of history, for the whole of disciplinary and academic knowledge production. That was so, because these questions were formulated as a consequence of the way he saw the world beyond the gates of the university. They are questions we should continue to ask. Du Bois’s openness to an otherwise social science is a practice made available to us, “for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than [he] could have done.”5 We cannot concede to a norm that makes of Black life a collection of historical or social data. What makes us Black is not simply the objective conditions we face. What also remains is that spiritual message—what Du Bois once called “the gift of Black folk”—that we have to give to the world. It is present in everything we have created. It must be explicitly connected to how we study.6 It is Black Study that embraces and embodies the surplus of this gift. And it is the surplus of the not yet imagined, the not yet realized, that animates our being. To retread Du Bois’s path toward the break, we need less adherence to the imperfect tools that he may have used for understanding the external world. For such research methodologies were not the ends themselves. Instead, we should recognize how he understood their limitations. For what is at the heart of “the study of Negro problems” was a desire for Black folk to just be. So, we must understand his hesitance, so we can be.

du bois as On February 17, 2012, the University of Pennsylvania posthumously appointed W.E.B. Du Bois to its faculty. Its purpose was to correct a historical wrong. For Du Bois, the first PhD-trained Black social scientist to have been offered a research position, was never given a true faculty appointment at one of the nation’s venerable institutions. Although given the assignment of producing a social study that charted new ways for thinking—a study wherein he practiced this hesitance, against every

of hesitance—w.e.b. du bois  .  17

expectation of its funders7—he was never allowed to teach or to occupy the space held for scientists befitting his academic training.8 Organized by sociologist Tukufu Zuberi, the occasion was accompanied by three panels of “Du Bois scholars,” an art installation, and a concert. Of interest are the panels that took up Du Bois’s biography, as well as his approach to social science, and his relationship to Africana Studies—the two “disciplinary” homes of his appointment. For even in death we are forced into joint appointments. Goaded by the desires to assert Du Bois as the exemplar for their work, scholars in the social sciences made cases for the urgency in that moment of connecting his legacy to those intellectual concerns that relate to the questions of social reality and Black life.9 Panelists imagined what that work might look like now—now that we occupy the space denied to Du Bois. Because it was they, us, the modern Black scholar, who are heirs to a tradition “founded” by Du Bois. For the Du Bois scholar is never merely an admirer of the work; the Du Bois scholar is one who tries to claim Du Bois and to make of Du Bois’s scholarly claims a ground on which they can stand. It is in that sense that this moment occurring as it did was peculiar. This meeting was one of many that have taken place in the wake of the explosion of Du Boisian studies, a wave of activity that one of the speakers at the Penn gathering, Anthony Monteiro, traces to the post-1989 geopolitical moment. That is to say, that Du Bois’s thought is now academically safe in a world where global Communism no longer poses an existential threat to the American project, a project imagined and conspired into existence in tandem with the university.10 The Penn gathering, however, was unlike many of the previous major gatherings. It occurred in the Obama era, a moment, it is now clear to say, that was misread by many Black academics. It was a moment that demonstrated a certain confusion that betrayed an ignorance of the ways in which Du Bois thought about and read the question of American and Western civilization. In some cases, the “disciplining” of Du Bois made these misapprehensions possible. This is to say, the tendency to link him to the normative logics of American exceptionalism, or even broader conceptions of liberalism, is actually a disciplinary positioning that parallels the idea that Blackness or Black people are the key to redeeming America. Instead of following Du Bois’s work toward a radical break that led him to a deep suspicion, if not wholesale rejection, of American liberalism, many Black academics “followed” him to an embrace of Barack Obama.11

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There have since been many other conferences. Even as the tenor of Obama-era optimism transitioned to the latest iteration of an obscene white nationalism, Du Bois has also been deployed to read this moment.12 But the rhythm barely changed. Black thought merely becomes the missing pages of Western theory. The standard approach to the ubiquitous presence of conferences, edited volumes, tributes, and memorials is often framed around the capacity of Du Bois to redeem a particular discipline, sometimes even missing the insurgent possibilities that guide the project. It is as if Du Bois’s work was about seeking recognition or tenure from the leading figures in these disciplines. Our investments in disciplinarities conceal what Mia Bay writing about The Philadelphia Negro several years ago had seen—that this work was less a “project of one of the still-forming social science disciplines” than it was about practicing “iconoclastic study” of the Negro problem.13 By reducing this work to the academic logic of disciplinarity, we have made Du Bois more legible to the intellectual and institutional power he sought to undermine. If the price of that legibility is recognition rather than revolution, we are not following in his footsteps. The idea that the University of Pennsylvania can now “honor” Du Bois is part of a larger intellectual environment where Du Bois’s thought has been championed by the spaces that once opposed him, and thus simultaneously defanged by the ideological constraints that frame the modes of celebration. We are left honoring an imagined Du Bois, allowing us to feel like we belong to the spaces where we were once strangers. However, when we consider the idea of Black Studies, the conceptual and political terms begin to change. For James Stewart, who has written of Du Bois as an exemplar for this project, Black Studies requires a paradigm that is “inter-disciplinary” or, more aptly, “non-disciplinary,” and one that would give “direction to teaching, research, and social change activities.”14 And just as critical, a conception of Black Study requires a suspicion and critique of the modes of inquiry that Du Bois scholars have “disciplined” into Du Bois’s thought. The final panel at the Penn Conference, which was on Africana Studies, came closest to this formulation, opening the possibility for doing something else, something closer to Du Bois. The philosopher Lewis Gordon directly challenged the desire to frame Du Bois as the foundation for certain disciplinary practices as well as those attempts to frame Du Bois as an interdisciplinary thinker, asserting that they mischaracterize the extent to which his work “challenges the fetishized notions of legitimacy

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by which those disciplines assert themselves as true meta-critical positions on knowledge itself.” Arguing that Du Bois’s ideas went beyond disciplinary self-actualization, Gordon asserts that Du Bois’s aim was to “deal with human experiences.”15 Monteiro asserted that the “problem and the crisis of the white academy has been the absence of Du Bois.”16 But it is not merely that this absence can be corrected by simply making Du Bois visible. Rather, the absence was there because Du Bois’s thought was indicative of a crisis of thought and epistemology; it was indicative of a beyond, one that challenged the norms that grounded inquiry in the Western academy. The failure to understand the ways that Du Bois made such an intervention has led to what Monteiro calls the “‘Du Bois as movement.” Rather than take Du Bois on his own terms, our understandings of Du Bois can only exist vis-à-vis his thought as some thing or someone else—Du Bois as [insert your desired paradigm].17 Du Bois is reduced to either one of his influences or one of his projects or one of his methodologies. We never reach the place of understanding Du Bois as Du Bois, the full range of which would reveal the fallacies of maintaining the piecemeal conceptions of his work disavowed by Bay, Gordon, Monteiro, and others. It is not just a matter of intellectual clarity—there are political stakes as well. As historian Gerald Horne, who argued as much in a similar forum at Du Bois’s Clark Atlanta University a year later, put it, our inability to appreciate that range constituted the “failure” of a “lost generation.”18 What is Du Bois’s intellectual work without the disciplinary categories that so order how we think of it? In the early twentieth century, Du Bois stood hesitant before the white Western academy; it was a radical tentativeness to the conceptual frames and to its epistemologies and their capacities to frame the Truth. If “science” was possible it was going to have to be grounded elsewhere, in other kinds of commitments than those that had then animated the academy and the disciplines that were coming into formation. That hesitance continued throughout his life. It was deeply political. That is, it was concerned with radical transformation. And while Horne’s comments spoke to the failure of Black intellectuals to take up the political concerns that made Du Bois such a danger to American empire, the question of political freedom was connected to an intellectual freedom from Western disciplinary practices, a freedom that would precede how we construct the future world we would inhabit, a world unlike the world we live in today. A world free from this world that Du Bois once described as Hell.19

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limits, or a something incalculable To conceive of W.E.B. Du Bois as exemplar for Black Study, as hesitant to the project of Western knowledges, requires a rereading of both wellknown texts and a recovery of the lesser-known documents and fragments he purposely left behind. Mentioned only briefly in various biographical treatments, “Sociology Hesitant” was long thought lost before Ronald A. T. Judy published it, alongside his own commentary, as part of a special issue of boundary 2 in 2000.20 Though the word “sociology” appears in the title and serves as the impetus of the short piece, it is really about Du Bois’s philosophy of science writ large. It is this essay that serves as an opening of the way. The context of its composition was the occasion of the Congress of Arts and Sciences held in conjunction with the St. Louis Exposition the prior year, which included, as such events often did, a collection of reports on the status of human knowledge. “Sociology Hesitant” begins with a kind of throwaway statement concerning the ways in which the congress organized that corpus of knowledge. But in reality, this statement was not a benign observation when we consider the impact of the discipline of sociology on the world: “a thing called ‘Sociology’ [was] hidden under Mental Science, and the things really sociological ranged in a rag-bag and labeled ‘Social Regulation.’”21 What is sociological was regulation. And in order for this to be true, Du Bois argued that part of what had compromised the validity of sociology was its attempt to create a science of human action that was grounded in the search for natural laws. Perhaps this search might be viable in the physical sciences—and even then it would be fraught with difficulties22—but the human sciences required a different nexus for thinking. In the essay, Du Bois directly engages August Comte’s positivism, which essentially sought to generate a hierarchy of human knowledge by liberating “society” as a conceptual category, and develops a critique of Herbert Spencer, who brought the science of evolutionary biology to the fount of the social. He ultimately argues that both thinkers could not usefully generate a science of human action that made sense of how humans actually make and produce meaningful lives. For Du Bois, such meanings were irreducible to the logics of what he understood as “Law.” The naturalism that Comte and Spencer argued inhered in human relationships emerged in a particular time and place, and such desires to create laws around those relationships could not be divorced from their moorings in this adolescent stage of capitalism

of hesitance—w.e.b. du bois  .  21

and the maturation of the modern state, with the advent of imperialism as we know it not far behind. At the close of the nineteenth century, the Negro would need more and more regulation. It is no mistake, nor irony, then, that both Comte and Spencer were also key contributors to the racial capitalist foundations of sociology as a discipline. Though it was Comte who famously coined the term “sociology,” Herbert Spencer’s contributions to the early moments of the discipline are critical. His Synthetic Philosophy was a grand attempt to develop a comprehensive understanding of the role of evolution in human communities through an exploration of the sciences. It included the multi-volume Principles of Sociology, which, along with a separate text, The Study of Sociology, offered that there was no reason to suppose that human nature could not be reducible to natural laws. Not only was a social science possible; it was critical for modernity. Only savages lived within an unorderly socio. Questions of superiority and inferiority were inscribed in nature. Spencer proclaimed: likenesses of nature holding throughout certain of the human races, will originate likenesses of nature in the nations arising out of them; and that such peculiar traits as are possessed by the highest varieties of men, must result in distinctive characters possessed in common by the communities into which they organize themselves.23 It was therefore necessary to assign that category of “primitive” to a visible population, to “the varieties of uncivilized men and the structures of their tribes, and, on the other hand, at the varieties of civilized men and the structures of their nations, to see inference verified by fact.”24 Spencer imagined a determinism that often viewed the Negro as deficient, lacking human capacity—their inferiority supposedly a fact of nature. According to Herman and Julia Schwendinger, the discipline’s “reform Darwinism” was inspired by his “theory” and “was permeated with racist ideas.” For Spencer, “‘savage’ and ‘semicivilized’ people represented a lower stage of biological evolution.”25 Spencer’s popularity in the United States cannot be underestimated. The Study of Sociology was commissioned by Edward Youmans, the educator and founder of Popular Science Monthly, and came to be wildly popular.26 Perhaps this is how Du Bois came into awareness of Spencer’s ideas. But he was not as impressed. In Dusk of Dawn, he recalled his own thinking: “Herbert Spencer finished his ten volumes of Synthetic Phi-

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losophy in 1896. The biological analogy, the vast generalizations, were striking, but actual scientific accomplishment lagged. … I could not lull my mind to hypnosis by regarding a phrase like ‘consciousness of kind’ as a scientific law.”27 There were also problems with Comte’s transcendent vision of sociology. Arguing that the final duty of science was to commence a “social physics,” this “positive philosophy” was fundamentally about achieving rational closure and the derivation of natural law “relating to the study of social phenomena.”28 Coming as it did in the wake of the age of revolutions and the ensuing crises “in which most civilized nations [had] found themselves for so long,” Comte imagined the triumph of positive philosophy as the reestablishment of “order in society.”29 Whether seen as a project aimed toward the restoration of order or as the culmination of the movements set in motion by the French Revolution, the reality of the first half of the nineteenth century was the setting for both Comte’s understanding of the crisis as well as an intellectual solution.30 But that crisis was both domestic and transnational, and it touched on the question of colonialism. Just as the Revolution could not sidestep slavery in the French colonies, Comte could not truly imagine a positive philosophy or his spiritual-political idea of a Religion of Humanity without confronting the specter of empire. In charting the emergence of the modern world as it advanced toward positivism, Comte rightly condemned African slavery but was somehow unable to see how it was connected to the industrial and colonial orders he believed important and necessary for that progress.31 This would have epistemological consequences. In “Sociology Hesitant,” Du Bois showed that Comte’s positivism relied on three contextual terms: “the Novel, the Trust, and the Expansion of Europe.”32 To create European social order, both extraction of resources and knowledge of this outside world was essential. With capital and imperial expansion came the conception of a political and social order that was constituted to make the world available for the “age of Europe”; all people were either citizens/humans or savages/other. Within and included or outside and beyond. It is from these terms that the “abstraction” of “Society” would emerge—to indicate the “grouping of men, the changing of government, the agreement in thought” that became a version of “reality” ignorant of the ways human communities actually lived.33 As Judy has argued, to then take such complexities of human life and render them quantifiable, to imagine the “absolute arithmetization of any and all phenomena” as reducible to Law, was, for Du Bois, a step too far.34

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Any sociology founded on the ideas of Comte and Spencer, then, was a project founded on the episteme of Western Man—a science of European confrontation with itself and the larger world. Where in his earlier “The Study of Negro Problems” Du Bois would characterize such an episteme as a kind of racist “faith” not grounded in careful study, in “Sociology Hesitant” he saw that the “metaphysical wanderings” of the discipline were based on “hearsay, rumor and tradition, vague speculations, travellor’s [sic] tales, legends and imperfect documents, the memory of memories and historic error.”35 The question for “Sociology Hesitant” would revolve around examining the extent to which we can assure ourselves of useful knowledges from foundations shrouded in such “wanderings.” And for those who need W.E.B. Du Bois to be the founder of a discipline called “sociology,” the question becomes the extent to which these racist foundations may have contributed to a real or imagined genealogy of the discipline bearing that name. What, after all, does a disciplinary history mean for the actual practices of a discipline? Does the installation of a new founder erase the intellectual debt that the discipline owes to figures like Comte or Spencer? But that is sociology’s problem. For us, who are committed to Black Study, Du Bois’s work was a radical departure. It was not so much debate and disagreement with sociology’s founders as much as it was an attempt to practice science differently. What Comte imagined could not be done. Or, rather, it could not produce the kind of Truth Du Bois was after. Perhaps something called sociology could one day be achieved, but there was not yet a methodology that could wrest something that was true from the then prevailing philosophies of science. Du Bois believed that Comte’s reliance on such “metaphysical wanderings” prevented the study of “the Things themselves” and imputed the gaps in knowledge that created a “mystical Whole which it was argued bravely they did form because they logically must.”36 Knowledge was replaced by myth. And one of the prevailing myths in Western thought was the Negro’s incapacity for life and living—that is, those mythic foundations of race, otherwise known as the Negro problem. Du Bois’s life was what he would later call an “autobiography of the race concept,” the subtitle of his 1940 memoir Dusk of Dawn. There, he examined the possibilities in conceiving the problem of philosophy of science through the problematics of race: “But turning my gaze from fruitless world-twisting and facing the facts of my own social situation and racial world, I determined to put science into sociology through a

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study of the condition and problems of my own group.”37 While others imagined human development through a liberal reform Darwinism that had captured the trajectory of the discipline, Du Bois “easily grasped the idea of a changing developing society rather than a fixed social structure.”38 Race was more about the former than the latter. He was moving toward something like Black Study. Rather than law, Du Bois argued that the role of any human science should be to search for and understand the nature of chance. There were those “actions undetermined by and independent of actions gone before.”39 This was chance. It was the unknowable, the limit of human knowledge—a “something Incalculable.”40 But it was also that which power needed to effectively diminish in order to enact order upon chaos, and “society” upon anarchy. From the desire to render the natural world in exact terms came the assumption that the “rhythm of human action” might also be so determined. For Du Bois: This assumption is ever with us; it pervades all our thinking, all our science, all our literature; it lies at the bottom of our conception of legal enactments, philanthropy, crime, education, and ethics; and language has crystallized the thought and belief in Ought and May and Choice. Now, in the face of this, to propose calmly the launching of a science which would discover and formulate the exact laws of human action and parallel “Heat as a mode of motion” with a mathematical formula of “Shakespeare as pure Energy,” or “Edison as electrical force”—simply to propose such a thing seemed to be and was preposterous.41 Though “preposterous,” this desire to know human action was an essential feature of modern social science by the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was built on several articles of faith: One could not build knowledge on the unknown; the goal of science was to know as much as possible about the nature of human life; all metaphysical and theological matters were remanded to the premodern dustbin (though even Comte conceded that the premodern stage was an “indispensable stimulus” even as mature human reason no longer required it);42 and, finally, if we could only know that which we could see, the thinking went, this would mean also that observable human actions could be reduced to the “exact discovery of these laws.”43 But one could not wish unknowability away. Neither could the theological and metaphysical be entirely transcended. It remained present in

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often subtle ways. For Du Bois, modern science was attempting to solve this conundrum by transmuting chance into law, by making the unknowability of human action into something measurable, something orderly, something predictable. The abstraction of society became not only observable; it was a “real” thing. Reason demanded it. With the “help of the biological analogy,” they sought the germ, the “Sociological Element.” Society was a “mode of mental action.” But it was here where sociology became hesitant. Du Bois asked: why, in fact, did Comte and others hesitate, and privilege “Society” over the “parts which constitute[d] it”?44 Du Bois understood and shared the desire to know all that could be known. His break was not with that project or ambition. Yet he saw problems with the current formulation. There was something sinister laying at the heart of the desire to have all the facts, to produce law. Sociology was inherently connected to processes of state and market power. The university and its disciplines were not spaces of neutrality. Inspired by Spencerian evolution and Comtean positivism, the founding generation of American sociology—some of whom brought the discipline into the university and created its first professional organizations—became authorities on the nature of human society and its relationship to the ideal state, while theorizing justifications for American interventions abroad. Though they critiqued aspects of the Comte-Spencer heritage, figures such as Lester Ward, Albion Small, Franklin Giddings, and William Graham Sumner injected the embryonic discipline with a belief that the basis for understanding the interdependence of human communities lay in the concept of the organic system, the idea of natural and physical laws, and the possibility of fact-based analyses.45 In the moments of upheaval that marked the closing decades of the nineteenth century, concepts such as interests, assimilation, race conflict, and folkways represented the routes toward understanding how knowledge might be formulated in order to perpetuate what Luther L. Bernard called an “objective standard of social control.”46 By the 1920s, sociology had achieved this “scientism,” an authority that it utilized to project concepts of order that were useful to corporate and state power, especially as it operated in an environment that had already overturned anti-capitalist perspectives in social science.47 In his early essays, Du Bois was beginning to see the racial implications of this scientific “progress with a capital P” as it was being formulated in the 1890s.48 But it would not come easily. While still at Harvard, Du Bois’s only problem with the world was his own exclusion:

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I was not questioning the world movement in itself. What the world was doing, its goals and ideals, I had not doubted were quite right. What was wrong was that I and people like me and thousands of others who might have my ability and aspiration, were refused permission to be a part of this world.49 But by the end of the century, he came to see that there was more to this exclusion, that Black exploitation was necessary for this world movement. As Nahum Dimitri Chandler relates, Du Bois’s writings during this era simultaneously addressed the “interwoven development of his conception of the position of African Americans, both as to their historical situation and as to the question of their identity” and a “formulation of a conception of global modernity as a whole, namely … his nascent idea of a global ‘problem of the color line.’”50 As Western social science continued to perpetuate myths of inferiority, eventually moving from biological to environmental explanations, the idea that social forces shaping the world could be rendered in exact terms was increasingly utilized to demonstrate that Black social life was only knowable through measurement. Left to these sorts of methods, the objective knowledge produced by American sociology could only imagine a “sociocracy” where Black exploitation was rendered normative.51 The Negro problem was a “fact” of Black life, and what Ward called their “wayward tendencies” needed to be subjected to social control for society to become ideal, or orderly.52 At the close of the nineteenth century, Du Bois could not fully escape these assumptions. For his early sociological studies were conducted in this environment, producing contradictions that he recognized and struggled to transcend. As much as we laud the pioneering efforts of his sociological studies, the contexts driving their production and their reception tell us much more about the links between the discipline and the exploitation of Black people. As is commonly argued, his late nineteenth-century study, The Philadelphia Negro offered new methodologies for studying urban communities, that were absent in American sociology prior to its publication.53 Using models borrowed from Charles Booth and Jane Addams, non-sociologists who were part of the settlement movement, Du Bois deployed the methods of the census taker, deriving meaning out of the information given to him by five thousand Black folk and recorded on schedules. These facts of life constituted sociological data.54

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But as Saidiya Hartman points out, these methods of “sociological study” made it impossible to appreciate the rhythms of human action of those deemed criminal and the wayward, the shiftless, those young Black women who lamented work and sought pleasure, those who Du Bois tended to read as a cautionary tale rather than as Black people who imagined the “possibility and the promise of the errant path.”55 While he necessarily pointed out that the larger structurally racist environment, as opposed to innate biological differences, placed enormous pressure on Black life, there was much in the study that reduced Black life to a lower grade of culture, one inhibiting our entrance into “society.” Ironically enough, the academic contributions we commemorate did less to celebrate or reveal much about us. Du Bois knew even then that “statistical method” and “general observation” were subject to “ineradicable” faults and error, that even the most “cold-blooded” scientific approach would generate “diffidence” in an honest researcher.56 But what was “sociological” about the project was also commensurable with Victorian cultural sensibilities and progressive uplift ideology. Statistical methods do not often operate outside of categories and logics that reinscribe norms. Such influences had Du Bois offering what was in effect a call for greater access, for assimilation, rather than full structural transformation.57 And yet even as it subjected Black people to the gaze of a supposedly disinterested and objective practice of science-making, Du Bois wrote against the political intentions of those who hired him and funded the study. To their eyes, the purpose of sociology was to further, what were to Du Bois’s eyes, myths and half-truths about the Black experience. They wanted Du Bois to bolster these fictions, to assign some internal blame for Black group behavior, in order to perhaps remake and fortify the logics of Black containment and control. Invited to conduct the study by Penn scholar Samuel McCune Lindsay, acting on behalf of the university and the College Settlement Association, Du Bois recalled learning later that he was expected to assign the underlying causes of the recent problems in the city to “the corrupt, semi-criminal vote of the Negro Seventh Ward.”58 But Du Bois tended to reject these stakes. While he believed that “systematic investigation and intelligent understanding” might shift the meter of public opinion about Black folk in Philadelphia and “that the ultimate evil was stupidity,” he also stated that “of the theory back of the plan of this study of Negroes I neither knew nor cared.”59 In the end, Du Bois could not escape what he learned about and from the Black community in Philadelphia—their hopes, their dreams, all

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those immeasurables that had then evaded sociological method. He concluded that they in and of themselves were not a “problem” to be solved: It was as complete a scientific study and answer as could have then been given, with defective facts and statistics, one lone worker and little money. It revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historical development and not a transient occurrence.60 It was this reading of the Negro problem more than the methods that, in effect, made the project relevant. Perhaps that was too much for the University of Pennsylvania. We know it was too much for the discipline of sociology. According to Tukufu Zuberi, “the field of sociology did not appreciate Du Bois’s model of investigation. The Philadelphia Negro was not seen as a theoretical text; at best, sociologists saw it as a historical example.”61 Such disavowals came not only from the discipline of sociology and the university. This kind of rejection also came from the state. Interested in studying landownership, labor, and the impact of industrial development on Black communities, Du Bois approached the Bureau of Labor’s Carroll Wright to investigate the circumstances of Black life and labor in rural Farmville, Virginia, in 1896. Over the next several years, he led collective efforts to complete similar studies in Georgia and Alabama. Unlike other studies that the Bureau sponsored, Du Bois eschewed social Darwinist assumptions in painting the picture of Black life. He still believed in a notion of objective scholarship that would help ameliorate the conditions of Black folk.62 But even the best of liberal thinking rendered the prospect of “accurate” information on Black life to be threatening to the social order. While the Farmville study as well as two studies on Black life in Georgia were published by the Bureau—and became the basis for essay treatments in The Souls of Black Folk—when Du Bois attempted to replicate that work three years later in Lowndes County, Alabama, the results of his investigation were “deliberately destroyed” by the United States government. Losing the support of Wright, who had left his position, officials in the government deemed it too “political.”63 His faith in the liberatory potential of objective facts alone was breaking. While Du Bois was working on the Lowndes study, the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 brought the racial crisis directly to his front door. Fearing the worst, he hurried home, posting watch on the steps of Atlanta University’s

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South Hall with a shotgun in his lap, lest the mob threaten his wife, Nina, and their young daughter, Yolande.64 On the train from Alabama, he resorted to religious imagery to explain the racial violence then gripping his adopted home. The result was a poem entitled “A Litany at Atlanta,” where he called out to a God, for whom Justice was real. His prayer was for Black folk whose “faces” were “dark with doubt,” yet remained “with uplifted hands.” It was those people, “a mobbed and mocked and murdered people” who knew most the “blood of Thy crucified Christ.” So, in the midst of the white supremacist pogrom, Du Bois asked: “Who made these devils?”65 It was not his first confrontation with such wickedness. Having moved back south to develop the Atlanta University Publications in 1897, it had been a long decade. He knew the indignities of segregation and the Jim Crow car, the general impoverishment of Black people in both the cities and countryside, and the tragic and preventable loss of his firstborn son. Several years earlier before the riot, he famously recalled what it was like seeing the remains of the lynched Sam Hose on display in a downtown store window. And as he bore witness to this level of evil, he began moving toward a realization, toward a break, toward this hesitance. Reflecting on this moment, Du Bois famously related: Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing, as I had confidently assumed would be easily forthcoming. I regarded it as axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth were sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort. This was, of course, but a young man’s idealism, not by any means false, but also never universally true.66 In those comments, of course, are the realizations that the tools available to the sociologist were not all we would need. Yet the Atlanta University publications were an important contribution to addressing the nature and conditions of Black life at those limits. In fact, under Du Bois’s editorship of these volumes we see the beginnings of not only the Black Studies orientation but the idea that historically Black colleges must be different, that they must produce different knowledges. If his time as an

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undergraduate at Fisk University in Nashville and his summers in rural Tennessee gave him an appreciation of the depth of Blackness, it was in Atlanta where Du Bois would gain a deeper sense of the seeming intractability of Jim Crow and the political compromises of segments of the Black elite. It was the age of Booker T. Washington. The Atlanta University Conferences and studies would become in many respects a counter to the Hampton and Tuskegee annual conferences, which Du Bois dismissed as propaganda for Washington’s brand of social uplift ideology. Originally planned to take place during the same Atlanta Exposition where Washington had offered his Compromise speech, the inaugural conference was delayed until the next year. By the time Du Bois took over its leadership, it was clear that the Atlanta University project would stand for systematic inquiry and an honest recounting of the facts.67 In a 1904 Voice of the Negro article, he recalled again that it was the Negro problem that placed pressure and called into doubt the idea and project of social science.68 In connecting the promise of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory to the dominant logic of sociology, a discipline he read as then in a “critical” moment, a discipline that had “said many things well” but had not “permanently increased the amount of our own knowledge nor introduced in the maze of fact any illuminating system or satisfying interpretation,” Du Bois asked: What is human progress and how is it emphasized? How do nations rise and fall? What is the meaning and value of certain human actions? Is there rhythm and law in the mass of the deeds of men—and if so how can it best be measured and stated—all such questions can be studied and answered in the case of the American Negro, if he shall be studied closely enough in a way to enlighten science and inspire philanthropy.69 The first two conferences and the studies that accompanied them were conducted by Atlanta University trustee George Bradford. But President Horace Bumstead believed that the studies called for the leadership of a Black scholar.70 Having just completed The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois was called in to continue this work in Atlanta. He developed a method for studying social problems, “deliberately put[ting] an ‘s’ upon ‘problem.’”71 He then imagined a hundred-year cycle of research, selecting ten social issues, then dedicating a year for studying and examining each, hosting a conference that presented its findings, publishing a volume that would

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be widely disseminated, and then repeating the process after a decade to determine any changes or progress.72 In the third number, Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment, there is a discernible element that was unique to Du Bois’s approach. Though the topic itself was chosen by Bradford, Du Bois placed emphasis on the historical development of both the people and social problems. The studies even advanced an early analysis of the African background of Black social and religious cultures.73 Du Bois was also beginning to read these problems through a sociopolitical lens that understood ever so deliberately that Black life was subjected to historical and systemic forces that constituted a crack in the foundation of society. And yet, the publications emphasized the strengths of Black communities in spite of these challenges. By bringing in deep historical context, questioning the logics of race science and the myths of inferiority, and signaling the advantages that Black folk may have had that were silenced and ignored by mainstream academic schools, Du Bois was building the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory on a different foundation.74 This was no “car-window” sociology.75 Letters were soon pouring in to Atlanta requesting copies of the texts as well as offering congratulations to Du Bois and others. One could not do work on the Black American experience without citing it. It was clear that this work was having an impact, even beyond the narrow confines of American academic circles.76 In its direct challenge to scientific racism, several scholars now assert that the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory was the first sociological “school,” offering pioneering new methods for the study of social reality.77 In 1900, Du Bois and his team of researchers were approached by Thomas Junius Calloway, who had petitioned the United States government to include a section on Black America in the nation’s exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. In the award-winning exhibit, Du Bois presented data portraits, produced by the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, that intended to portray the life conditions of Black folk on a global stage. Perhaps this world that was thinking stupidly about race might think again.78 Yet despite these successes, other challenges remained. While some have pointed to the influence of the German school of historical economics on these early social science methods, Du Bois, in retrospect, only lamented that the work did not include more of the influences of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He wanted to understand “the economic side”

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more deeply, more systematically. Without interrogating these radical thinkers, Du Bois believed that the studies bypassed or misunderstood the depth of capitalist exploitation that was at the heart of Black life.79 But that was only one element of the challenge. Similar political factors that imperiled his other projects soon conspired to prevent Du Bois from realizing the completion of his hundred-year study of Black life.80 Between scientific accomplishment and truth was the prevailing political ethos. But there were also epistemological issues that Du Bois often glimpsed, even as he continued to posit that scientific laws might be gleaned from the study of Black life. The political and the epistemological together shaped what could be known. They were limits as science imagined and produced other limits.

against the law We cannot celebrate the accomplishments of Du Bois’s early sociology without joining him in understanding these limits. This is where “Sociology Hesitant” becomes a critical essay—especially when it is read alongside others from this period.81 Even as the essay discusses philosophy of science without directly addressing the evolution of race and Black life, that issue is fundamentally at play. As R. A. Judy has argued, it is difficult to “disassociate” the world of Blackness and agency from the world of abstract reason and intelligence.82 Just as it was for the many articles that fell from Du Bois’s pen during the close of the nineteenth century. What we find in texts like “The Study of Negro Problems,” “Development of a People,” “The Conservation of Races,” and the “The Strivings of the Negro People” is Du Bois’s insistence on the relationship between knowledge of the Negro and the particular contexts that prevented the manifestation of their Truths, whether they were the domains of Southern ignorance or the requirements of global empires. Du Bois had a front-row seat to the ways in which science would converge with capital and with empire in the late nineteenth century. There was no better place to witness such a convergence than Harvard and Berlin. And no better place to witness the deprivation of exclusion than Atlanta. Increasingly, questions of science and wealth were matters that would be connected to the economic exploitation of Africans around the world. And though he often groped for these connections, it was clear even in 1905 that at the heart of Du Bois’s inquiry into the domains of the human and social

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sciences was this question of the Negro, who, as Judy argued, sat “at the edge” of “Sociology Hesitant.”83 The metaphysical abstractions that Du Bois lamented could only see the Negro as abject and subhuman. A sociology founded upon those abstractions would be of no use to him. It had no liberating potential because it resolutely stood upon the idea that “Negroes are not ordinary human beings.”84 Yet Du Bois remained hopeful that the Atlanta school could transcend such presumptions. Their attempt to imagine differently is why the Atlanta school had to be erased from history. Sociology’s reluctant and belated acknowledgment of Du Bois is perhaps because those “influences of prejudice” he once thought could be transcended in the “study of men” were actually hardwired in the vain pursuit of a thing called social law.85 As Avery Gordon would later assert, “sociology’s dominant disciplinary methods and theoretical assumptions constantly struggle against the fictive.” It is in “the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices, narrative densities, and eccentric traces of power’s presence” where we find the commonplaces of Negro inferiority.86 Social science had conflated empirical reality with abstraction, facts with whim, and law with chance. It created a fictional world that justified the Negro as an/the Other of modernity. This is, of course, why we find pioneering sociologist Franklin Giddings championing imperialism or disciplinary founders like Albion Small and the influential progressive sociologist Edward Ross as infamous eugenicists. They were not exceptional.87 Anti-Negro sentiment was written into the law. Or, as Nahum Dimitri Chandler argues, the “power, authority, and law” that structured the discourses of who and what is human could only produce the Negro as “an exorbitance for thought: an instance outside of all forms of being that truly matter.”88 Focusing on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century iterations of this discourse, Chandler asserted that Western thought constructed this purity on metaphysical materials that reified race as determinant of citizenship and for humanity. And thus for the capacity for thought: “That is to say, something called the Negro is understood as approachable or nameable from within the architectonic of reason as nonetheless privative and withdrawn in the telic unfolding that is recognized as the claim of reason.”89 Sociology—like all other social sciences born in this era— claimed this meaning of reason. Which meant that it claimed these logics of race. These logics were the law.

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If Black folk represented “unreason,” we also represented a danger to any conception of society. As a consequence, the relationship between society and its “non-humans” or “not fully humans” became a problem to be theorized and eventually managed on behalf of an authoritative regime. This Negro problem, initially structured by ontological order, became a sociological question. When the vaunted Chicago school of sociology was at its height in the 1920s and 1930s, these were the assumptions that had begun to guide inquiry within the discipline. Instead of directly questioning the humanity of Black people per se, another set of questions was asked: Were Black people assimilable? Or were Black folk a population that needed further disciplining, further control? A discipline that had been famous for exposing “vicious cycles” reinvigorated yet another: The Negro problem is the result of the group’s inability to assimilate and enter society. Consequently, the Negro participates in society as an outsider, which causes “damage” to their psyche and to our society as a whole. We have two nations: one Black, one white. Let us observe, measure, and derive these facts.90 In such a predicament, law had to dominate. Facts and objective knowledge were a better grounding for solving problems, of course. But by operating under these logics, social laws could erase what needed not be known, those knowledges labeled subversive, dangerous, threatening. And perhaps most significant, what evaded the sociological were those knowledges that revealed that its very claims for knowing were necessarily linked to the structuring ethos of the modern world—a “social reality” that produced the project of racial difference, the boundary of every single discipline—all of which based their norms, mores, and ideals on what Sylvia Wynter called “Man.”91 It was a colonial encounter that helped produce Man, and it was reason that lawlikely governed the sense of reality that made racism make sense. The preoccupation with social laws that guided nineteenth-century philosophy was connected to and preceded by another conception of law. Sociological thought was another occasion for sovereign law, the exceptional moment that Carl Schmitt has argued was responsible for producing political authority.92 This recognition or discovery of law was not merely an intellectual solution for resolving large questions of the social universe; it was also given the imprimatur of force. If reason created order, violence was its mode of enactment.93 Neither of these conceptions of law were in any sense “natural,” nor were they really “social.” The fiction that this lawmaking practice is

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what social scientists were doing was a useful one, because it gave scientific sanction to continue the practice of excluding non-humans by law. Western thought went to sociology in order to explain chance away. A notion of a perfectibility that grounded the search for a law made possible the assumed hard limits through which reality could be accessed and through which the Other could be subjected. It was a rationality that needed to quarantine chance in order to be legible. For Du Bois, however, chance explained those primary rhythms, such as birth rate and distribution of sex, that gave way to secondary rhythms, the realm of human conduct that attempted to give social life some sort of structure through customs and laws. Sociology was to study those rhythms, that indeterminate force that ultimately determined how humans lived and how they structured their lives: “we must assume Law and Chance working in conjunction—Chance being the scientific side of inexplicable Will. Sociology, then, is the Science that seeks the limits of Chance in human conduct.”94 Studying social reality without taking into account this indeterminate force would only lead to the reassertion of hard-and-fast limits to human possibility. For those who were in power, it would make social life more manageable. For those without power, the boundaries of social law were akin to a prison. The origins and meaning of racism could be better understood through chance rather than law. Expressed as social facts, scientific racism and its derivatives were a conceptual limit. But meta-critical knowledge on the roots of racial oppression was an expansive opening. In a more widely read review of his scientific views written in 1944, Du Bois continued to hold on to a belief that chance could provide more clarity on this “world of interracial discord”: “I saw the physical law in the actions of men; but I saw more than that: I saw rhythms and tendencies; coincidences and probabilities, and I saw that, which for want of any other word, I must in accord with the strict tenets of Science, call Chance.”95 Perhaps thinking about the nature and limits of chance could do more than help us understand social reality. Maybe it could produce ethical alternatives to the racist status quo that was dominated by imperialism abroad and Jim Crow in the United States. For sociologists, this was the path that was not taken.96 But it probably could not have been. Instead, the social sciences gave us more and more laws that rationalized race difference, or hard “facts” masquerading as explanations for dynamic change and human complexity. Instead of studies of the relationship between chance and Black life and self-determination, we got deviance.

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That his critique of science continued into the 1940s is critical. In many ways, categorizing his thought as “early Du Bois” and “later Du Bois,” or “liberal Du Bois” and “radical Du Bois,” fails to see these continuities. In the years after it was solidly established in the academy, Du Bois assessed the evolution of sociology in a review of the work of Pitirim Sorokin, cowritten with Atlanta University colleague Rushton Coulborn, where they argued that the discipline remained mired in a form of inquiry that only produced lifeless statistics and mechanical thinking. If Sorokin was trying to understand the systems that guide human life, the limits of sociological method led him to static interpretations even as his work was supposed to offer dynamic ones.97 The kind of sociology Sorokin and others imagined was one where the “little or nothing is left for human initiative,” where social systems are intelligible by recourse to some dominant, often nameless power or force guiding their assent to naturalism and universalism.98 Was this recognition of sociology’s failures a limit to Du Bois’s scientific career? Was studying the Negro in order to demonstrate sociology’s failure too large a critique to overcome? His return to Atlanta in the mid-1930s was certainly a moment full of possibility. Yet it was also in that moment where he was passed over by white foundations supposedly interested in studies of the Negro because he could not be trusted to be objective. So Du Bois decided to make HBCUs the base for a science of Negro life that would perhaps be different. But it was not to be. For the balance of his life, while he was consistently more interested in contemplating a science of free will, a human science that could address larger questions of human existence and what structured human motivations, the discipline of sociology consistently matured into whatever the racist political order that it supported required. Between the launching of his first Atlanta project and his dream for HBCUs in the 1940s, he had witnessed so much “chance” transmuted into “law.” A war, based on Africa, was soon raging, so colonial knowledges were necessary. The Great Migration flooded American cities with Black laborers, so social adjustment was required. Revolution emerged, so counterrevolution was rationalized. Capital expanded then faced a mortal crisis, before stabilizing itself upon the shoals of order. And Southern trees continued to bear a strange fruit. Yet Black self-determination as a mode of human emancipation constituted a non-starter for those who were committed to the maintenance or simple adjustment of this kind of social reality.99 The

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management of deviance was given as the cold, rational logic that allowed the abstraction of society to thrive. What could really be known about Black people in such a moment? A generation of Black sociologists, many of them Chicago school–trained, would address this concern. Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier were perhaps the most famous of them. Sometimes against the grain of their mentors, they tried to develop a sociology of race that addressed the Black predicament, believing perhaps sincerely that sociological knowledge could serve a useful meliorative function.100 But what this quite naturally evaded was that all sociology was a sociology of race. The Other would be permanently outside, as long as the conceptual foundations of sociological discourse remained intact. What was at the center of sociology’s hesitance—and thus Du Bois’s subsequent hesitance—is the ways that race structured what could become law, and that engagement with the qualities of chance must be disavowed, for it might help explain and overcome the human motivations structuring the racism that grounded modern life. Science had made it work for generations by reducing the Negro to something less than human, and thus incapable of life. But as we redefined and asserted our humanity, what would happen to science? What would it mean to have “second-sight” in a racist society, in a scholarly world that only privileged a certain kind of observable reality?101 What does it mean to emerge from the world of the so-called “unthought,”102 from those who were to have contributed little to the world, to practice a science that had, at best, only vaguely hinted at their humanity? If a “Black sociology,” inspired by Du Bois’s thinking or otherwise, were possible, it would have to be positioned around an intellectual practice that privileged the undoing of a conception of rationality as constituted by law. But there was more. According to Judy, Du Bois had found that no theory of the Negro had followed or predicted social praxis, that sociology needed to be “untethered from its foundation in the study of axiomatic principles of relations, hypostatized as the laws of social action.”103 For it was not just that the results of sociological inquiry produced a claim of deviance. It was not only that “bad science” was the consequence of that inquiry. It was that the search for law, with all the attendant assumptions about its meaning and validity, was inherently flawed. It was not simply the answers it provided; the problem with the sciences was in the form of the question. The failure was that the sociological project did not always appreciate what Judy via Du Bois describes as the “limit for understanding the situatedness of knowledge,” or understand “that

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the situation is so infinite in its regress that it cannot justify its precepts except hypothetically.”104 A Black sociology would have to be an opening to an altogether alternative way of conceiving the structure of reality, and thus of society. If really thinking the Negro was, as Chandler argues, thinking “the limit of world,” Du Bois’s dream of knowing and perhaps even intuiting the limits of chance in human conduct might be realized by reexamining our relationships to the empiricist logics that required the derivation of social laws, perhaps by thinking through and beyond that world.105 The question Du Bois’s musings on science provide us with is clear: Can thinking about chance create the possibility of an otherwise? In several ways, Du Bois’s thought offered an escape from this vicious cycle, even if he did not always take the road himself. By positing a “something Incalculable,” but also something that resisted the incarceration of conceptualization and control, Du Bois’s hesitance eventually broke with the “faith” of sociologists and social reformers who maintained the fiction of the Negro’s deviance.106 Though scholars debate Du Bois’s religious views, it is clear that his belief in liberation was “built upon a faith” that did not require that the Negro be understood as the problem, that did not require that our existence be reduced to an objective measure of social control, and that did not require law as it was constituted by those in power.107 Lest we forget, “Sociology Hesitant” was written in the same period as “Credo,” a composition of both prayer and proposition, an assertion of Black humanity that was grounded in knowledge and science but affirmed by faith and hope.108 And by Du Bois’s belief in the “beauty and genius” of the Negro race and in “the sweetness of its soul.” An affirmation of its “meekness which shall soon inherit the earth” was a simultaneous rejection of injustice and a future possibility of “Life lit by some large vision of beauty and goodness and truth.”109 In a series of prayers given during commencement and other rituals at Atlanta University, he asked God to reveal to his students and to his people the meanings of lives made of sacrifice and service, to realize a world free of poverty, pain, and pestilence, and to affirm the liberating power of work and knowledge. Out of his abiding love for the changing of the seasons came an appeal to God for a different future for Black people: “Out of the death of winter comes ever and again the resurrection of spring: so out of evil bring good, O God, and out of doubt determination.”110 Yet if “faith, hope, and love” were the motivating forces behind Du Bois’s belief, “the greatest of these” was

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“love.”111 This was a love that was clearly manifest in his prayers for Black people: “make us, O God, true to ourselves, to the race that needs us.”112 This faith must be juxtaposed to what Judy and Chandler have theorized as the expansive mode of thinking that Du Bois’s philosophy of science opens up. If chance could be made a mode for rethinking scientific truth, then the agency of Black folk might also be imagined as an ethical tradition of human action and struggle, ways of being opposed to law and its representative force. Black resistance could not be “counted” or counted on, but its indeterminacy did not make it less real. For Judy, the implications of “Sociology Hesitant,” as well as other writings, were that Du Bois was practicing a form of asymptotic thinking. Freedom for Du Bois, however, is not the grounds for judgment but an asymptote. It is the postulate of the infinity of thinking and so is an enactment of that very unbridled imagination Kant sought to discipline to the law of reason and categorical thought. The indeterminate Kantian ego that Du Bois explicitly invokes at the end of the essay as remedy to the Spencerian positivism is that particular intelligence articulated in the encounter of thought and that force somehow beyond thought and reason which Kant called lawless, while recognizing that it haunts human thinking like “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to open to our gaze.” Aristotle already knew the dynamism of this phantasia, already sought to account for the indeterminate agency of figure in his thinking. In “Sociology Hesitant,” Du Bois attempts to provide his own account of dynamism. Like Aristotle, he does so in the effort to formulate some theory of soul as the dynamic possibility of intelligence, articulated as thinking. This dynamic, for him, was enacted by the figure of the Negro.113 Judy takes the idea of the asymptote from a letter Du Bois wrote to Herbert Aptheker in 1956, where he explained the origins of his concept of science: I gave up the search of “Absolute” Truth; not from doubt of the existence of reality, but because I believe that our limited knowledge and clumsy methods of research made it impossible now completely to apprehend Truth. I nevertheless firmly believed that gradually the human mind and absolute and provable truth would approach each other and like

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the “Asymptotes of the Hyperbola” (I learned the phrase in high school and was ever after fascinated by it) would approach each other nearer and nearer and yet never in all eternity meet.114 The more we thought, the more we practiced, the more we got closer and closer to a useful conception of reality. The area of the hyperbola was where the work lay, and not in the achievement of universal truth, which was not possible. In his unpublished essay “Steps Toward a Science of How Men Act,” Du Bois asserts that truth is but the evolution of first our emotions and feelings that then produce assumptions about the outside world that humans work out through constant attempts at hypostatization. What we call science is a compromise with unknowability: Here the great scientific tool of the Hypothesis is discovered; we assume that certain things are true; we act as though this assumption is Truth. The ensuing facts of our experience arrange themselves in accord with our assumption. Therefore our assumption is True; or the facts agree except in certain particulars; we rearrange our assumptions to fit the new experience or more fully explain the old. The new Hypothesis becomes accepted Truth. But all Truth, save our own feeling, we hold tentatively and watchfully … 115 For Judy, such an approach was not necessarily the disavowal of the search for ultimate scientific meaning, but a call for “an assemblage of heteronomous thinkings capable of modeling the dynamic correlation of physical and intellectual energy.”116 Determinism and absolutism had only caricatured the Negro: “ontology is a hindrance to black folks being. And, insofar as their way of being is one of the multiplicities of Homo sapiens in-action that are called ‘human,’ what ontology hinders is a more historically dynamic connotation of that term.”117 Du Bois, then, used Blackness as a way to challenge the philosophical assumptions of science, rendering the ontological assumptions embedded in the Negro problem irrelevant and moot. His “intellect-in-action” offered him no other choice, no other possibility, no other grounds for liberation.118 But inherent in the “multiplicity of multiplicities”119 that represented this break was a notion of Blackness that was not simply about rejection of ontological determinism but also an eventual embrace of Africa as a site and orientation for thinking.

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Perhaps a better way to frame it is Anthony Monteiro’s idea of “being African in the world.” It was in his embrace of African ways of knowing that Du Bois found a way to address the question of race and science. Du Bois’s rupture with a capitalist and imperialist world order was also an epistemic rupture with Western civilization. In promoting a world of natural law, Western philosophy of sciences had constructed the notion of race. But race denoted “more than race. It would in its deepest sense reference civilization.”120 Race was not merely a feature of bad biological science or the results of the mistaken assumptions of the human sciences. In order to truly understand the racist foundations of the modern world, “a multidisciplinary exploration of knowledge itself as well as the objects of knowledge—in this instance, race and civilization—was required. A great intellectual leap would be called for.”121 Both the origins and current practices of the disciplines revealed that they could only fail; a different foundation for social reality had to be constructed. To the extent that Western disciplinary practices treated African ways of being in the world as a “conceptual impossibility,” Du Bois had no choice but to think beyond them.122 He once famously wrote, “Always Africa is giving us something new.”123 What it gave to him was a way of seeing the world. For Du Bois, science meant Truth, which meant that it could not be subordinated or even aligned in any way to the question of capitalist expediency or even the moral claims at the heart of Western culture. He had written on this concept of an ethical foundation for knowing as early as an 1889 essay while studying with William James at Harvard.124 And by the end of his life, he continued to lament the modern dichotomy between science and ethics. In Africa, he found a way to resolve or contend with such seemingly disparate worlds. From his bungalow in Accra, he asked: “What has a dream to do with the future?” Scientists had dismissed dreams as “nothing … unsubstantial shadows floating alongside Fact.” Ethics declared it “everything … drawn right it draws us to good, drawn wrong it enthrones Evil and destruction.” Du Bois addressed this contradiction by remembering his earliest dreams of Africa and juxtaposing them with the realities he would face. The myth of a dark continent that had been provided to him as a scientific fact undergirded everything that the colonialism it supported intended to conceal: African people had history. So, it was not to the “facts” then written of Africa that Du Bois initially appealed; it was to his own ancestors: “I built an Africa of mighty folk who happened to be of black skin but just as human as others who were brown, yellow, red or pink. This is I knew because I

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knew black folk.”125 Du Bois continued to dream this dream, and along with “thousands of minds and millions of sweating backs and gripping hands,” the dream of an Africa moving toward independence “no longer remain[ed] a dream, it has already become a measurable scientific fact.” Though “not yet a complete accomplishment,” the gulf between the free Africa of dreams and the rising of Africa as observable fact had been breached. Scientific effort followed faith.126 This was less and less acknowledged by midcentury sociologists. And as a consequence, Black thinkers attracted to the discipline continued to struggle with its many contradictions. After the Black student movement of the late 1960s, a new generation emerged and collectively called for “the death of white sociology.” In the 1973 anthology of that name edited by activist-turned-scholar Joyce Ladner, contributors made note of racism in the field and the social sciences writ large, pointing out the problems with the Chicago school’s approach to urban sociology and studies like the Moynihan Report.127 But they were also not satisfied with simply calling out racism within sociology. Theirs was also a call for a Black social science. It is ultimately this call that continues to lie fallow. It is a call that requires an appreciation of the hesitance, and of every epistemological break that Du Bois made. For we still live in a world of law and chance. And so much more.

freedom was god Of the more interesting episodes of reaction to the New York Times’s 1619 Project were those liberal historians who believed that its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, had overdetermined the impact of racism and slavery in the conception of the United States. Though the project was clearly an attempt to read Blackness into the very architectonics of American exceptionalism, defenders of all ideological stripes, including several Black historians, loudly rejected this perceived assault on the precious national origin story. But even more curious was one attempt to link this critique of Hannah-Jones to W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of the “propaganda of history.” At the 2020 meeting of the American Historical Association, historian Sean Wilentz declared without a hint of irony that the Times’s project was akin to the Dunning school propaganda that Du Bois openly abhorred at the end of his 1935 text Black Reconstruction in America.128 Writing in the pages of the Atlantic weeks later, he argued: “Only by carefully marshaling the facts was Du Bois able to establish the truth about Reconstruction.

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Indifference to the facts … had led even intelligent scholars into ‘wide error.’ Du Bois’s lesson should not be lost.”129 The Du Bois whose “contribution to the American historical tradition” was once treated with “vilification and neglect” as a consequence of its “origins independent of the impulses of radical and liberal traditions” is now weaponized to defend the discipline against an imaginary threat to the American national myth.130 Never mind that there are historians who critiqued the 1619 Project who also have little respect for Du Bois’s reading of Reconstruction, which was roundly criticized in its own time.131 Never mind that Du Bois’s “Truth” did not align politically or intellectually with the criticism of the project.132 What was most critical to Wilentz was the rejection of propaganda and the restoration of a Rankean-inspired idea that “good” history was equal to an adherence to “facts.”133 The contents of Du Bois’s “facts” were curiously unimportant. His usefulness to the discipline mattered more. This anxiety of the historian is connected to the idea that a “perfect” scientific convergence with facts of the past is unobtainable. They have often uncritically accepted positivism as a goal, and have routinely failed to meet its standards.134 And while it was true that in “Propaganda of History,” Du Bois marshals the authority of facts against lies, he was doing so against another kind of authority—white supremacy: “We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race.”135 The American historiography that Du Bois critiqued, of course, was never about “facts.” It was about crafting a national story. The problem with the Dunning School was not simply its factual errors, it was in its fealty to national identity and the mythmaking required to imagine a country. It just so happened that national belonging was inherently racial. By critiquing this school of thought, Du Bois was impugning the racist authority of the discipline, and the nationalist propaganda it conflated with Truth.136 Black Reconstruction was a moral and ethical rejoinder to an entire regime of truth that could not afford to admit that “Negroes were ordinary human beings.”137 Much like in the discipline of sociology, it was not simply a choice. Black inferiority was a prerequisite to imagining the true subject of history; it was ingrained in the very disciplinary practices that provided the methodological and philosophical standards that are now being weaponized in order to preserve the foremost national myth: America is the land of the free, despite some blemishes. It is a myth that Wilentz could not let go of. And tellingly, neither could Hannah-Jones.138

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Du Bois’s radical historiography could take us in more productive directions. As Cedric Robinson argues, “the urgency, and [the] priority of his moral assertion must be preserved.”139 Though it may have been partially inspired by the myth of the Negro’s historical absence, Du Bois’s historical writings were not a contribution to a mythical narrative of a progressive America. At Harvard, he had learned the basic function of historiography from Albert Bushnell Hart, who taught that the past could be known through a convergence between archives and facts. In his dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States,” Du Bois applied these methods to the question of America and its relationship to the global commerce in African people.140 Yet we also see Du Bois’s desire to do something more with history. The desire to recount the facts was coupled with the desire to know something of ourselves, so that we might know something about how this political system had effected our negation and required us to practice the recovery of our very different stories of the past. But even this was not enough; more than just a project of recovery, knowing the past— the African past—could be the foundation for thinking differently about the world and how Africans might live differently—how we might live beyond its limits, to put it in Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s terms.141 If the discipline of history has only belatedly recognized Du Bois, this may be a more honest cause for that silencing. It was his insistence on using history to not only attack the myths of America but also build a future world that acknowledged and ultimately rendered settler and racial antagonisms and American imperialism as the critical limit to human freedom. And as history has remained a space in the academy that has held onto national mythmaking as its raison d’être, Black history has had to contend with more than just locating Black people within that sort of story.142 As Black history, rather than the mere study of Blacks in history, Du Bois’s work was radical.143 For in his historiography of America’s Reconstruction and in his writings on Africa, one finds not simply a historical contribution but a poetic and political break with the imperatives of persevering a form of national memory. And an opening to otherwise. There are many ways to tell the story of the emergence of Black Reconstruction in America and to tell the story of the story it tells. In the first place, the emergence of the text goes back to Du Bois’s earliest writings on American history. In the 1910s, Du Bois began to map the meaning of Reconstruction and what he had earlier called “the development of a people.”144 Likely prodded by Anna Julia Cooper, he began the process

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of extending these thoughts to a book-length project at a time where his major organizing vehicle, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was undergoing a fundamental rethinking of its purpose.145 It was to the NAACP that Du Bois retreated after his work as a social scientist in Atlanta began to lose support. And it was in his role as a “master propagandist” that he began to write history. By the 1930s, a world in the throes of depression had made the economic meaning of the Negro problem a priority. In 1933, Du Bois and several younger scholars and activists met at Joel Spingarn’s Troutbeck Estate in upstate New York, at what has come to be known as the Amenia II Conference, to imagine a future direction for the organization and for Black organizing. Several of the attendees were Marxists more attuned to a class basis for understanding Black life during the depression. After all, Black people were workers, and it was capitalism that was collapsing. If the NAACP was to be relevant to Black people, it would have to recognize this fact.146 Du Bois, however, was more concerned about the autonomy of Black struggle. The economic facts of Black life were real, but they were uniquely faced as Black people. By proposing a project of economic cooperation, he addressed these conditions while acknowledging the brute facts of Jim Crow, the draw of Black nationalism, the failures of labor to acknowledge questions of race, and the contradictions of the New Deal. But that acknowledgment became the grounds for Du Bois’s dismissal both from the NAACP and from the good graces of the “Young Turks” who lamented what was to them a retrenchment to racial chauvinism, the same old liberalism of the early days of the civil rights struggle.147 As he was putting the final touches on Black Reconstruction, Du Bois was preparing a volume for Alain Locke’s Bronze Booklets Series, which clarified the concerns of Black organizing during the Depression and added analytical force to his views on economic cooperation. Unfortunately, the views were too unorthodox, and the publication of “The Negro and Social Reconstruction” was blocked.148 Yet, as Robinson maintains, this search for an organizational matrix and program for true social revolution inspired the main lines of argument that Du Bois would then connect to that history: “The emphasis was on the relations of things.”149 The story Black Reconstruction tells is one inspired by this sense of autonomy. Du Bois’s study of Karl Marx’s ideas had given him an appreciation of economic forces and proletarian struggle.150 Black Reconstruction exhibited a keen understanding of the various ways in which capital

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sought to dominate Black and white working-class life before and after the war. Du Bois writes that it was in fact Northern capital that betrayed a more progressive political result that might have resulted in a true democratic order based on an alliance between white and Black labor.151 And it had to. Race obviously mattered to the maintenance of American capitalism. But this was not all Black Reconstruction was doing. It also reframed the people who were the proletariat. Yes, our ancestors were Black workers, but they were also “everything African.”152 They were the “founding stone” of a changing capitalist system, but they had also brought to the New World, a “philosophy of life and action” based on the “subtle folklore of Africa, with whimsy and parable, veiled wish and wisdom; and above all fell the anointing chrism of the slave music.”153 It was a deep religiosity that was the source of the courage of the General Strike. Emancipation was “the coming of the Lord.”154 The self-activity that created acts of self-emancipation was inspired by otherworldly promise, and abolition was an occasion for religious ecstasy. Du Bois had learned as much in his own sojourn through rural Tennessee and in his writings on the ancient roots of the Black church. There was power in the word, the music, and the frenzy. A power that would inspire revolutionary struggles against slavery.155 It is this “psychological” element that mattered too. As C.L.R. James commented thirty years later, “[Du Bois] was very clear as to the economic and political development, the political manifestation. But he saw something else which few historians could see. He was able to penetrate into the minds of the black slaves who, in addition to doing these political things, had an idea, had ideas of their own.”156 All of this was too profound for then president Andrew Johnson who warned that Black suffrage would mean the Africanization of America.157 Yet Du Bois’s poetic invocation of the past showed us that Black folk exhibited a sense of freedom that was more profound than whatever had passed for American democracy. What some may have called “experiments” in places like Slabtown, Virginia and Corinth, Mississippi, the new lives constructed by those who worked with Ulysses Houston on Skidaway Island or of Tunis Campbell of Saint Catherines on the Georgia Sea Islands, the desire to learn, to reconnect with families, or even the attitudes that defeated southerners labeled “insolence,” were all inspired by something higher.158 When it proved useful, Black folks participated in profound ways in the reconstructed systems of democracy all throughout the South. And when it failed, they continued to practice forms of self-de-

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termination that sought to ensure their own safety. The use of the ballot was just as important as the ethics of care and the ability to work the land and acquire knowledge. None could be reduced to the other because none was more important than what inspired the fight for each.159 Du Bois declared that “to the Negro ‘Freedom’ was God.”160 Which is to say that liberation was an attempt to create one’s heaven on earth. The land had to be freed. Schools had to be created. The economic interests of the state had to be subordinate to human needs. Life on wholly different terms was possible. Yet to the defeated white southerner, however, freedom was “control of the poor worker.” And to the Northern capitalist, freedom was “opportunity to get rich.”161 Black visions of liberation had to be violently repressed. Property in whiteness was reaffirmed and distributed to what Du Bois had called the “police force” of the slave system—the poor white.162 The result was disaster. A descent back into Hell. But “that mattered little to an unbelieving age.”163 Du Bois’s radical historiography had re-membered the revolutionary tradition of the Black masses and had recalled the links between slavery and global capitalism, between Black labor and industrial change, and between whiteness and class differentiation.164 And it also reminded us that Black struggle was a simultaneous assault against all of these forces. That struggle was larger than America.

africa is to du bois It bears repeating that it was Africa that was always giving Du Bois something new. Although Du Bois’s biographers rarely fail to mention that he was the honorary chairman of the Fifth Pan African Congress in Manchester, England, they routinely neglect that he and Cheikh Anta Diop were honored at the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar as the two African scholars who had exerted the most influence on African thought in the twentieth century.165 Diop’s Nations Negres et Cultures had essentially reclaimed African antiquity, picking up boldly in many ways where Du Bois’s generation had left off.166 But for many, Du Bois’s connection to this intellectual genealogy, so important to the organizers of the festival at Dakar, is concealed by a kind of Black American exceptionalist reading of his life. His Pan Africanism becomes a side dalliance, and his decision to live his remaining years in Ghana a bitter resolution to America’s treatment of him at the end.167 There is more to it.

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And there is also more to the relationship between Africa and how we might think of Du Bois, the scholar. It was the site of another kind of hesitance. Just as was the case with his philosophy of science, Du Bois’s orientation toward Africa is a critical lens through which to understand his historiography. It was not just the horizon of his political world. Over time, Africa became more and more a point of departure for his thinking. Not unlike Diop, Anthony Monteiro argues: “What the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modern science are to European thought, Africa is to Du Bois.”168 If that were true, the long view of the African past had to be re-membered alongside the revolutionary tradition of Black resistance to slavery and colonialism. It was the story of a dream, that feeling that he could feel but never fully explain.169 To abuse the lies and support his Pan Africanist politics, Du Bois authored several book-length treatments of African history. His 1915 text The Negro, Nahum Dimitri Chandler asserts, was a “pioneering statement” for a different kind of African Studies, founded on the desire to “think the Continent and its Diaspora” together—another path not taken, this time by Africanists.170 There could be no purely domestic Negro problem. Africa was a key to that horizon.171 His history of Africa was revised at least two more times in print. And if we count the unpublished variations, the total number goes to four.172 There was certainly something about Africa. Yet, for all the certainties that Du Bois expressed about many of his other ideas, these histories were provisional. In the extended revision of The Negro, which he retitled The World and Africa, Du Bois writes: I still labor under the difficultly of the persistent lack of interest in Africa so long characteristic of modern history and sociology. The careful, detailed researches into the history of Negroid peoples have only begun, and the need for them is not yet clear to the thinking world. I feel compelled nevertheless to go ahead with my interpretation, even though that interpretation has here and there but slender historical proof. I believe that in the main my story is true, despite the fact that so often between the American Civil War and World War I the weight of history and science supports me only in part and in some cases appears violently to contradict me. At any rate, here is a history of the world written from the African point of view; or better, a history of the Negro as part of the world which now lies about us in ruins.173

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Here again, the weight of scientific inquiry was no aid to what Du Bois was after. Africa had been denigrated much like the sociological assumptions about Black humanity. He was on a perpetual search for what a “distorted science” had not fully concealed.174 It was history written with a political urgency and a desire to unite African peoples in the wake of years of disaster, a history written because our world lay in ruins. And what of the tale, the history, that Du Bois wanted to recall? The World and Africa had to work with limited sources (though certainly more than he had in The Negro), but it was nevertheless not short on its ultimate mission. There was a veritable past of not merely achievements and contributions but complex relations between culture and power. And it was this orientation that preceded what could be learned from the documents.175 With that orientation, The World and Africa ended up charting a path for subsequent histories of Africa. Starting from the need to first acknowledge the mere existence of African civilizations, it moves from very beginnings of humankind to the Nile Valley to the Western Sudan, with important connections to the Asian world.176 But perhaps peculiarly, the text begins with “the collapse of Europe.” It was important for Du Bois to first acknowledge why this historiography was in tatters. Coming as it did in the wake of destructive global war, Du Bois returns us to a major thesis of his works on Africa: the imperatives of European colonialism and imperial order required both African resources and a particular kind of erasure of who and what Africa was.177 It was Africa and Asia that lay at the roots of the project of Western civilization. Yet that larger picture could only be fully understood through an engagement with what was being erased with these fabulist accounts of the past.178 Still, it was not only a question of historical events that could be carefully documented. The problem was again the relation between knowing the past and knowing the people who constituted that past: their “memory” and “the powerful testimony of habits, customs, and ideals, which echo and reflect vast stretches of past time.”179 This was the only way to imagine “a history of the world written from the African point of view.”180 In the chapter on West Africa, Du Bois speaks to the urgency of the recovery of that memory in the wake of global war. How, in fact, had the world become so engulfed in the assumptions of European superiority? “Mechanical power,” he wrote, “not deep human emotion nor creative genius nor ethical concepts of justice, has made Europe ruler of the world.”181 Africa’s “negation,” if you will, was a consequence of a culture that had valued technological prowess and progress over ethics.

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Du Bois saw in atomic fission not an opportunity for scientific advancement (let alone American leadership in that venue) but another preview of disaster. He asks: “Was there no other way for the advance of mankind? Were there no other cultural patterns, ways of action, goals of progress, which might and may lead man to something finer and higher? Africa saw the stars of God; Asia saw the soul of man; Europe saw and only sees man’s body, which it feeds and polishes until it is fat, gross, and cruel.”182 It was in that sense that the academic disciplines foreclosed the possibility for knowing Africa on its own terms. They were part of the negation. The nineteenth-century beginnings of disciplinarity were coincident with European colonialism. As Du Bois wrote: “Science was called to help.”183 And it was still there to help in the 1940s, when Du Bois sat down to write The World and Africa. He lamented then that science was “becoming increasingly not the work of free universities but the property of organizations for private profit and directed to their objects.”184 As the scientific establishment expanded and universities grew rich from government investment, Du Bois was again offering a warning. The state that supported colonialism could not innocently support scientific advancement without compromising the latter. In this era of prosperity for the university, Du Bois’s writings on Africa prefigured the staging of yet another epistemological break, which could not have happened without an ethics of refusal of the politics of this era. As Monteiro writes, the intellectual leaders of the disciplines were moving to the right, “retreating into new forms of positivism,” as Du Bois was moving further left, “searching for new modes to critically investigate the epistemologies, methods, and politics of the socials sciences.” For the human sciences could not be truly human if they were not rooted in “anticolonial and anti-White supremacist liberation struggles.”185 For Du Bois, the solution was “not a matter of law, it is a matter of the human heart.”186 Yes, we need archives. But our understanding of the past should be more than a recitation of what exists in those documents. Du Bois’s work modeled a way for us to exceed the documents while remaining true to our realities. Any history of Africa had to be about “the people” in the realest sense. For even as we struggle with the reality that Africa was and is a site of intense exploitation that is foundational to the current antagonisms of the world, we also have much to learn from Africa about how to be human in and despite that world.

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an opening Nearing the end of his life, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that his work remained unfinished. This might be read as a lament that he was not able to complete some of his major dream projects, such as the Encyclopedia Africana. It can be read also as an indication that the dream of liberation had not been realized. But completeness may not be the most useful way to think about what is left to do. In some ways, Du Bois was writing against the idea of completeness, his philosophy of science a warning against the idea of ever conceiving an end point, some horizon of “perfect knowledge” of the whole of reality. What is left to do, then, is to think about Du Bois’s work as opening. His world of chance is our conception of what may be possible in our future world. He was not alone in widening a field assumed closed and impossible to open. The study of Black life is an ever-widening and expansive space to observe, measure, but also feel and imagine what it is that African people have said and are always saying about reality. In addressing the harms meted out by white world supremacy, Du Bois noticed something about the disciplines of knowledge. He realized that they ultimately practiced a form of knowing that rendered Black folk and our ideas as knowable only as absence, deviance, and lack. The disciplines hesitated. And so he was hesitant. Yet the difference was that Du Bois used his break as a way to practice something we call Black Study. A practice whose beginnings were inscribed in both the past he helped recover as well as in the project of recovery itself. And it is in the way of practicing, performing this task of break—of turning away from Western civilization and toward the darker world, of turning away from the individual self and turning inward to community—that is offered to us as a model and guide. Du Bois is exemplar for Black Studies not for being “right” or having the correct line at all times, but for his practice of critical reflection and deep suspicion of the civilizational project of the so-called age of Europe. He did not complete his work. It is necessarily ongoing, for others to do better than he had done. And perhaps then the contribution that African people might make, “which no other race can make,” might be realized, fortified, and renewed so that we can begin again; or widen what it has already opened.187

2 Of Human Sylvia Wynter “The psychological subjugation of the conquered peoples would be ensured by the pen and the printing press as their physical subjugation had been assured by the gun. The coercive power of the one could be made to imply the coercive power of the other: power came out of the barrel of a gun, humanity resided in writing. The oral culture of the indigenous civilization was therefore a non-culture, was ‘barbarous.’ By a process of repetition, ‘humanity’ came to be synonymous with European culture. To be non-European was to be non-human. This myth of the cultural void was to be central to the ideology which the West would use in its rise to world domination.” Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis1 “‘It’s the Black ones that are dying,’ as Sistah Souljah pointed out. Their death is the ‘price of our ticket,’ our canon, of our treason as intellectuals.” Sylvia Wynter, “A Black Studies Manifesto”2 “Thus, what the range of anticolonial movements at the level of the global (as well the multiple) social movements internal to the United States and other First-World countries that took place during the fifties and sixties fundamentally revealed was the gap that exists between our present ‘mental construction of reality’ as one projected from the perspective (and to the adaptive advantage) of our present ethnoclass genre of the human, Man, and its biocentric descriptive statement, and the way our global social reality veridically is out there; that is, outside the viewpoint of ethnoclass Man—of its genre of being, of truth, of freedom—as all three are articulated in the disciplines of our present epistemological order and its biocentric disciplinary discourses.” Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/ Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument”3

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“Black Studies was to be incorporated into the mainstream only at the cost of the pacification of its original thrust, by means of its redefinition in Man’s normative terminology, no longer as a Black utopian mode of thought.” Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre”4

stories are all we have There are only stories. No matter how hard we try, we cannot escape the stories we have told of who we are and what we are. When Africans arrived to the so-called New World, forcibly taken from home, it was in consequence of a story. Yet those same Africans told stories too. They passed down memories of how we got here/there, who we were before, and who we are now. They told us of “the coming,” and what it meant.5 Yet there were other kinds of stories. They gathered together tales of how community was forged, how we defined ourselves amid the disaster. And they used stories to tell us how to survive, constructing wisdom texts with moral lessons on the meanings of trust, love, and right.6 Those texts archived our past long before the penetration of the Black elite into Western academic spaces. We had our languages and our names stripped from us, but not the real meanings of the words. Our music was attacked, but they could never steal the rhythm and the Blues. Our foodways and methods for healing were disrupted, so we found spices, roots otherwise. And these are all stories. The memory of how to create, survive, improvise, and never forget the source of our world and word is how we got over. And these are all stories. The refusal to consent to degradation created the foundations for the Black Radical tradition. And these are all stories. We made meaning out of a way, out of no way. We re-membered a God who came to our aid in the time of need, opening the way with our song and dance. And our stories.7 * * * Sylvia Wynter was shaped by these stories. It was her grounding in these traditions, her search inward, that allowed her to see that the present order of knowledge was also a story. Like so many of us, she was thrust into an intellectual world that disrupted the consciousness she brought

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to those institutions. She turned to the Jonkonnu ritual, she turned to the Rastafarians, she turned to the Blues. She turned to “a cultural matrix … that is not frozen into dogma, into a ritual. Not dead, and therefore dangerous. Not mannered, not repetitive, not gesture, not posture. Not the regulation.”8 This “turning to” is a form of Black Study, a kind of break and intervention that is about “unsettling” and “undoing” what Western thought thinks it knows about Black people.9 But her Human Project has never lost sight of the fact that the story they tell has never negated our story. Yes, it converges with it, producing the volatile confrontations that make us vulnerable and threatened. But we have yet to fully concede the Blues. There is strength in our story, a strength that is rooted in materials different from the “biocentric” assumptions embedded in such police concepts as “No Humans Involved.” Such police concepts as eugenics. Such police concepts as Western philosophy. If what it means to be human is but a story, we have to remind ourselves constantly that it is not a singular one, no matter how powerful or painful we think the current order is. For after all, as Wynter wrote, “it is it or us.”10 So we must think about the us as much as we think about the it. The concept of the human, then, is not about closure—unless we mean a liberal monohumanist closure and exclusion. What Wynter is after and what we must be after is a Human Project that is an invitation to ourselves, that re-initiates us into what we were doing before we were so rudely interrupted by the present order of knowledge, the plantation regime that inaugurated the modern-world system. It is because the academic disciplines are to blame in these stories of Man’s overrepresentation as human, that Black Study becomes necessarily something other than an interdisciplinary project. The disciplines are not the route to the horizon of possibilities after Man. Black Studies can be a route, but we will have to tell different stories. We will have to tell our stories. We find ourselves in a moment where again there is some contestation on the meaning of the past. On the one hand there are those who believe it can be objectively known, and on the other there are those who believe some “radicals” are inventing stories of the past to suit their politics. And there is a lot of in-between.11 It calls to mind how in some Black traditions to lie is to tell a “story.” Some of us grew up in communities where we were prohibited from even saying the word “lie.” To convey the untruth, you said, “Oh, they tellin’ a story.” Maybe we were thinking of the “story” that we were told about our-

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selves or about this society; the story that became the histories we were taught and are now contesting. In these same vernacular traditions, there is also a tradition of telling “lies.” Both anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and poet and professor Sterling Brown recall that folktales were considered “lying.” In Brown’s case, his students were most fond of the fact that he loved telling “lies.” Which is to say, he loved passing down the wisdom of our ancestors that was embedded in the folktale, the wisdom of who we really were.12 They told stories. We told “lies.” We often challenged what we knew were untruths embedded in their stories. It is an interesting use of language. But the central thread is the same. As Wynter told Black Studies scholar Bedour Alagraa, “Our bodies do not precede the stories we tell about ourselves.”13 While this challenges the notion that history is “scientific,”14 sometimes that recognition emanates from unexpected corners. One notable example was in the fifth season of the History Channel show Vikings—a dramatic rendering of the Norse sagas, so consequential to European national identities and memories—where a leader by the name of King Olaf the Stout, portrayed by Steven Berkoff, known for his poetic license and rhetorical flourish, recites the myth of Ragnarok, a fated moment where the gods would be destroyed. In the myths it was an event precipitated by a battle between brothers, an event that the warlords were about to make historical in the context of the show’s plot. When a fellow leader attempts to pierce the drama with the realist response that “it’s only a story,” Olaf responds ruefully, “Stories are all we have.”15

the map and territory of black study As an early architect of Black Studies, Gerald McWorter offered comments at the 1968 Yale Black Studies Conference that pointed to W.E.B. Du Bois’s hesitance, his break from the assumption that mere appeals to “truth wins.” Reading Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud had induced Du Bois to search for something beyond the Truth in an “abstract, universal sense.”16 In “How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre,” Sylvia Wynter seized on McWorter’s reading of Du Bois in her description of the original desires of Black Studies as an insistence on the particularism of Black thought and thinking, a “revalorization of their ‘racial blackness,’” akin to the Black Power and Black Arts movements. She situated Du Bois’s work—and his desire for non-abstract, non-universal truth and

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its connection to his concept of double consciousness as a way to imagine an anticolonial future—as a route toward conceiving of Black Studies as “territory.” Or as a way to perceive the real issues that lie at the heart of studying our current moment: to think about what “structures” the “nature of human consciousness.”17 For understanding the devalorization of Black people was only “the map,” a mere function of a more intractable concern. The failure to conceive of the territory constitutes a disavowal of what Du Bois and others were pointing us toward. For Wynter, that erasure was part of a multiculturalist move that remade Black Studies into “African-American Studies,” rooted in an attempt to diversify the canon in order “to do for the now newly incorporated black middle class what the Euro-American literary canon did and continues to do for the generic, because white, and hegemonically Euroamerican middle classes.”18 The earliest conversations in Black Studies were concerned with “a point of view alternative to the ‘rationalizations of Western thought’ as well as to the ‘monopoly of humanity’ of its aesthetics.”19 To truly understand this process, Wynter argues, we need to understand not simply our own devalorization but how the episteme that made it possible was ordered. Although the reduction of Black Studies to another ethnic studies category is real, the struggle for what Lucius Outlaw Jr. called “normative theory” continued in the decades after its institutionalization.20 Still, it is true that maps have replaced territory. In too many places, Black Studies is what Greg Carr characterizes as a “mediation of ‘Black’ identity in the social and cultural context of and responses to ‘whiteness’” and a reinscription of “existing knowledge orders,” rather than an understanding of the conceptual terms under which Du Bois and others sought to recover that which laid outside that mediation and that order.21 The sixties moment that Wynter references pointed us here rather than where we are. To be clear, this is not originalist nostalgia nor a conservative critique. It is simply an assertion that the evolution of the Black Studies project has been systematically delinked from any real connections to these frames for knowing and the cultural and social movements that supported them. Such is the nature of the academy. But some of us have slipped through. The question for us now is to continue to make, as Wynter does, a distinction between the maps and the territory. One way this shows up in her itinerary is through a critique of disciplinarity. In order to truly appreciate her vision not only of Black Studies but also for the re-narrativization

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of the human, we might think with her engagement with the question of discipline, with the canon, and with the meta-assumptions of Western knowledge production. Its implications for Black Study are profound.

the word made human Just as the meaning of the human is a consequence of a story, so, too, is the emergence of academic disciplines. They do not precede the stories they themselves create. It just so happens that one function of disciplines is to craft stories that position their appearance as uncreated, as always having been there. Or as inevitable, as a mark of intellectual and human progress.22 Even in genealogical accounts these senses of inevitability or progress (or decline) are difficult to abandon.23 That they resemble a sort of divine authority or providential design is not accidental, given what they sought to replace. Yet these self-actualized accounts of the creation of disciplines are only possible, and the categories of modern knowledge are indeed discernible, because of a conceptual or epistemic break from their past. It is the latter that frames Sylvia Wynter’s understanding of Western knowledge production and its most treasured subject: “Man.” Not simply historical, not simply genealogical, the emphasis in her account was on the conception of what can be known and thought and how. And how in that process the word was made human. This present order of knowledge, as Wynter would later name it, was revealed through a deft reading of Renaissance humanism. Wynter’s academic training converged with the intellectual concerns of the Renaissance. As she recalls, her scholarship to study at King’s College in London was a result of her interest in reading texts, and in the method of how to read a text—the criticist project she imbibed while still in Jamaica from her secondary school teacher, Bruce Wardropper. A Cambridge graduate, Wardropper was an adherent of the “new criticism,” a twentieth-century movement that emphasized that the meaning of a text was inherent in the text itself. It was a form of engaging the word that would have been most familiar to the humanists of centuries past. But if their aim was similar to humanists of the past, the New Critics developed tools that were unique to their times, a cache of conceptual methods that revolved around how to practice close readings that would produce a true and specific meaning of texts. There was something—perhaps professional envy toward their natural science counterparts in the age of increased disciplinarity—that caused literary scholars to pursue the idea

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that something resembling scientific certainty could also be rendered through textual analysis.24 If nothing else, what Wynter also seemed to learn from these English critics, whether intentional or not, was that aesthetic choices were not neutral; they bore consequences that went beyond questions of individual taste. In both her specific focus on Spanish literature and on this method of criticism, the curriculum she would find in the Romance languages department at King’s College embodied the continuity of a particularly humanist method of inquiry and demonstrated its impact on the structure of knowledge in the English university, as well as the Western university writ large. Approaches to close reading inculcated an appreciation for the ways “major themes” of a piece of literature, “as well as its politics” were “enacted by the work of a specific system of configuration, of imagery.” According to Wynter, she learned from Wardropper “what texts do!”25 And what do they do? For humanists of the past and contemporary humanities scholars, this work was guided by the belief that the traditions embedded in the past were the key to unlocking the sense of what it is to be human.26 It was a conservative idealism that was thought to privilege elite taste, genteel values, and cultural identities that transcended the decadence of industrialization.27 But Wynter would later bristle against the supposed disinterestedness of this critical project.28 In many ways, the idea that rigorous study of a text could both reveal and inculcate those ideals that made humans human became an opening for deeper inquiry. The humanist method has implications for understanding the humanist story, and for the humanities as a collection of human stories. It was for this reason that Wynter placed the humanist movement, and its concern with language, translations, and the meaning of a text, as the conceptual site for uncovering what she would describe as “Man, and its overrepresentation,” rather than framing the ascendancy of the modern human subject with the Enlightenment, as so many others would have it.29 The break that humanism represented is better understood by remembering Europe’s preoccupation with the question of revelation. Before the ascent of humanism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the dominant belief was that human beings were blessed with the faculty of reason only insofar as an omniscient God had blessed them with the ability to know Him and His creation. This was as much a theological-conceptual project as it was politically useful. Cedric Robinson reminds us that as a political project “Europe was God’s world, the focus of divine atten-

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tion; the rest of mankind belonged for the moment to Satan.”30 In other words, Europe was essentially a theocracy governed through the imperatives of the Catholic Church. In her writings, Wynter points to the role of the celibate clergy as the scholars par excellence, the sources of an intellectual culture that legislated right and wrong in the here and now, as well as the guarantors, to a degree, of “Eternal Salvation.”31 In generating a bifurcation between the holy and the pagan, between good and evil, they were also constructing one between truth and falsehood, knowledge and anti-knowledge. All intellectual matters were inherently theological, and theological matters were often political solutions to non-Christian threats to order.32 The medieval institutions that housed the teaching of theology were the monastic orders as well as the courtly cathedral schools, the most critical sites of intellectual development prior to the creation of the university. Dating back to the eighth century and the needs of Charlemagne and the Carolingian empire, the most important of these institutions were the cathedral schools in Germany and France—Wurzburg, Cologne, Laon, Chartres, Rheims, and St. Victor—but they were present throughout Christian Europe. These places of learning were examples of the fluidity of church and state, as the demands for secular knowledge of administration were just as critical to the development and preservation of speculative theological thought. But their earlier foundations were in a system of moral discipline that taught manners. Prior to the twelfth century’s emphasis on texts, students sat at the feet of charismatic schoolmasters hoping to earn a place as clergy or as clerical authorities within the ever-widening domains of Christendom. Of the principles that guided these masters’ educational philosophy was the power of “discipline,” here read as the inculcation of an ethic of morality, a culture of proper comportment. Students had to be molded and shaped—often through actual whippings, which were used to instill such values. Even the word disciplinae had come to mean “scourge,” given its association with flagellation in monastic contexts. The administering of such beatings, physically and mentally, supposedly encouraged good behavior and good character.33 And in the words of C. Stephen Jaeger, the life of the teacher was the model for that character: “the teacher is the bearer and conveyor of real presence. His person is the lesson; it communicates ‘knowledge,’ wisdom, and eloquence.”34 The charisma of the individual scholar as the “star” was present if not defined in this era of the Western education.35

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In the twelfth century, the schools would grow to feature a relatively stable foundational curriculum that featured the study of logic and grammar, which were appropriate for thinking through, or logically deducing, the possibility of such concerns as the nature and existence of God and the possible nature of His creation, the significance of the Eucharist, and such existential concerns as the blessings of redemption and salvation. “The new learning” emphasized logic and grammar, which could serve as the techniques for understanding these more significant issues, while utilizing whatever philosophical-metaphysical theories that were available to help resolve these questions. The authority of the person was being supplanted by textual authorities. In many respects, the masters became scholars, the de facto philosophers of the period. Their role as teachers necessarily generated the need to produce texts that served as pedagogical tools as well as to develop their own views on theological matters. Importantly, this occurred against the backdrop of a Western Europe in transition, beset by invasions from “pagan” and “barbarian” outsiders, which forced proto-state formations into temporary alliances and new market relationships. This religious warfare, combined with the maintenance of a political system driven by feudal order and “noble” dreams of territorial expansion and reconquest, would not leave the intellectual thrust of European systems of learning untouched. And even as it was followed by moments of stability, the memories of conflict with pagan invaders would have been sufficient to deepen the vigilance of church and state. Theological certainty and moral clarity were all the more important when pagans were at the door, when heretics were creating millenarian movements that threatened the authority of church doctrine.36 When medievalists speak of a twelfth-century renaissance, they are noting the intellectual currents driven not simply by the stability achieved politically during this period but also by fresh translations and new approaches to teaching “the classical heritage”—that corpus of literature that constituted the ancient learning and its most important commentators: the patristic tradition, or the church fathers. The ability to travel without the fear of harm allowed many teachers the ability to attract large student bodies from longer distances. But it was the development of the “new method,” a body of interpretive tactics that would energize the pursuit of divine revelation as theological schools began to open in the new institutions called the studium generale, the progenitor of the university.37 It was the perfect setting for the new learning. Its most important beneficiary was the discipline of logic, which generated throngs of

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students looking for a conceptual tool to resolve the major theological issues of the day. With the addition of new bodies of knowledge in both theology (Peter Lombard’s Sentences) and law (Gratian’s Decretum), new approaches to logic stood poised to become the most significant advance of the nascent university. The collection of teachers that proposed a new approach to logic were known as the scholastics. The art of logic, also known as dialectics, had its most famous adherent in the twelfth century, the French scholar Peter Abelard, who has been called “the first ‘academic.’”38 His method utilized both the lecture and disputation model (lectio and disputatio) and the pedagogical deployment of statements of fact to be discussed (sententia or quaestiones). Matters of theological significance were explained through readings of the Bible, and glosses (summa) were produced that challenged or supported those biblical commentaries that were passed down by the church fathers. When larger segments of the Aristotelian corpus became available in the ensuing decades, the challenges it presented to revelation would be added to the list of statements to be glossed and disputed. To aid and eventually popularize this method, Abelard compiled a series of statements that had bearing on church doctrine and demonstrated through textual sources from the church fathers how they had been argued for and argued against. The “yes and no” method made famous in Abelard’s Sic et Non sought to use the method of disputatio as a way to enthrone logic as the art of resolving the perennial concerns of the faith. In presenting both sides, it was on students to derive a resolution using their faculty of reason. Scholasticism, then, was the mature form of combining logic with biblical authority present in the late medieval university. It was primarily defined as a way of thinking about texts and taking language apart in order to reveal eternal truths. Discipline and authority would now mean a fealty to textual analysis.39 Its popularity was assured by the development of several compendiums during the twelfth century that gave students more opportunities to practice logic to master the most significant elements of Christian doctrine. Alongside Abelard’s Sic et Non, Peter Lombard compiled The Sentences (c. 1155), a four-volume compendium of biblical and patristic statements about the nature of the trinity, of creation, of the word, and of the signs, which pupils of the theological masters not only had to know, but upon which they needed to be able to offer commentaries often in order to graduate. The Sentences would serve as the most popular textbook for centuries and as the source material for the most significant

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advances in theology before the humanist era.40 The universities were also energized by the growth of the fields of law and medicine. In the former, the same methods that were generated to resolve purely theological problems were given over to students of law, who used Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1142) as a compendium of canon law, bearing directly on matters of how to manage the rapidly changing political systems of late medieval Europe. Gratian, a monk from Bologna, was part of the intellectual trajectory that established universities as critical training grounds for those who would comprise the power structure of the church.41 In matters of faith and matters of law, several scholastics believed that reason could harmonize human and divine affairs and produce the knowledge that would ultimately provide a sense of stability on earth as it was in heaven. On these matters, there was often a range of opinion, which produced intense debate and very real fears that logic might one day compete with the authority of theology. Despite its service to theological speculation, historian Edward Grant offers that the intellectual environment of medieval scholasticism prepared the ground conceptually for the liberation of the rationality that would shape the scientific practices of the modern era.42 But more importantly, for our purposes, the legacy of scholastic thinking was its emphasis on a form of rationality that was inherently Divine—driven by the imperatives of the church and the deeper issues of revelation. Scholasticism was necessarily a product of Christendom. One of its major functions was the refutation of those heretical movements that dared question the essential primacy of the Catholic Church. Perhaps ironically, many theologians who veered too closely to logical methods as ends themselves would be accused of heretical leanings. For in the medieval world of logic, one thing mattered above all: The word was God. Human thinkers were only His companions and they remained subordinate as “the handmaidens” to His truth.43 As new Arabic translations of the missing components of the classical heritage increased in intensity in the thirteenth century, the universities were energized and ultimately remade. The commentaries on the Aristotelian corpus, like those of the Muslim cleric Averroes, offered a challenge to many of the tenets of Christian faith. And as the scholastics held on to method as a way to refute those challenges, the church often responded by banning these texts. In 1210, the Council of Sens submitted bans on the teaching of Aristotle and the commentaries that accompanied the corpus within the all-important theological schools of Paris. Yet the bans did not prevent students from studying these works. When the 1255 artes

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syllabus established at Paris fully embraced the translations of Aristotle’s major works, the church silently relented. This curriculum would stand for almost two centuries. What is often called “the new logic,” energized by Aristotle’s writings on the natural world, found philosophers and theologians establishing more stable grounds to examine the world around them as much as they sought to engage the unseen.44 In the fourteenth century, Thomas Aquinas would offer the most significant scholastic reconciliation of pure Aristotelian thought and divine revelation. The Thomist method allowed the Catholic universities across Europe to embrace the concept of scientia—while theology itself remained the highest form of science.45 But humanism was another kind of threat. It was in part as a reaction to this scholastic reconciliation that what Wynter calls a “degodding/de-supernaturalizing” of Western intellectual life would occur. While many scholastics believed in the necessity and usefulness of non-Christian pagan writings, the humanists would go much further. The philosophies and ideals of human ingenuity would acquire a greater and different sort of authority.46 With humanism, Western man upgraded his place in the Chain of Being. In the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola’s formulation, as Wynter showed in her “Ethno or Socio Poetics,” man had moved from a place between angels and animals, to become the new angels.47 While it did not necessarily immediately displace scholastic theology, it asserted that the authority of what we know issued from the rigorous study of texts, of history. These fields became a more secure foundation for crafting an ideal—an ideal world, but also an ideal man to force it into being.48 Language, too, particularly the study of Greek, made manifest this humanist rupture. All the better when it could be read in the original or translated into vernacular tongues. The attempts to synthesize Christian doctrine with the new translations—the old scholastic compromise—were falling away as the trivium came into its own, shedding its merely “propaedeutic” relationship to theology. Near the end of the Middle Ages, the arts faculties at Paris and Oxford moved toward a “more restricted view of epistemology, bounded by more strictly defined notions of evidence and demonstration, and closely connected with terminism and natural philosophy in substituting a logical and physical for a metaphysical approach to both knowledge and reality.”49 But this “methodical humanism” had been preceded by approaches that circulated in the Italian schools throughout the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Notable humanist philosophers

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Francesco Petrarch and Coluccio Salutati were joined by schoolmasters like Guarino Guarini, Cristoforo Landino, Giovanni Pietro, and Lorenzo Valla, grammarians and rhetoricians who would influence the teachers of humanist methods in Northern Europe, including most notably Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Petrus Ramus. By the sixteenth century, humanists had replaced what they felt was the staid approach to scholastic thinking—which had become, from their perspectives, a form of empty signifying on the works of Aristotle—with an appreciation for the word in its human form.50 It was all about the oft-quoted “best that has been thought and said” by humankind. Humanists were not only the new angels; they were also dwarfs standing on the shoulders of the giants, as another well-traveled metaphor signaled. Just as the earlier cathedral schoolmasters had believed, humanist philosophers laid claim to the special duty of cultivating the ideal citizen, the moral exemplar. This time the charismatic appeal was given over to ancient texts, which compromised the studia humanitatis, the predecessor of what in the current academy are known as the humanities.51 In this course of study, two of the seven liberal arts— grammar and rhetoric—were given primacy. They would grow into the modern disciplines of philology, history, and ethics or moral philosophy. The intellectual energy of the studia humanitatis eventually helped recalibrate the entire curriculum of the arts (the seven liberal arts: the trivium, consisting of logic, grammar, and rhetoric; and quadrivium, music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy) and philosophy (moral, metaphysical, and natural), placing the modern disciplines in more or less their familiar places.52 As Europe experienced the shocks of Reformation, humanism and lay knowledges combined to imagine a tradition. It was tradition that would inspire settlement and order. The most popular application of humanism by the end of the sixteenth century was jurisprudence. And as Wynter writes, “the authority of Reason, the Reason coded by the Natural Logos of humanism based on the explanatory principle of a Natural Causality verified by the truth of empirical reality, moved into the place of the vanished authority.”53 The law had acquired all of the trappings of disciplinae and charismatic authority. The Absolutist state was its mode of discharge. That this occurred in the midst of the European Age of Discovery and the “conquest” of the New World is perhaps no coincidence. In her 1984 essay “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” Wynter elaborates upon the implications of Mirandola’s evocation of

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Man as angel: “Instead of subordinating the lay activity of learning to the authority of theology, theology was now being submitted to the authority of the lay activity of textual and philological scrutiny in the name of accuracy of historical meaning.”54 Vernacular traditions were necessary for the new-world-a-coming. They would order the appearance of Man as the subject of his own life; a subject that would soon engage the world beyond the West. The humanist tradition gave him the confidence to read aright what this all meant and could mean. As men became angels, so, too, did the presumption that meaning could be precise, or even certain, which would open the door for acceptance and belief of the idea of positive knowledge. And because that happened, a new story of human thinking was required—one that the modern disciplines would all inherit. If the organization and arrangement of modern disciplines were coming into place by the beginning of the modern era, the prevailing methodological assumptions guiding scientific inquiry were soon to be realized. For Wynter, it was this newfound emphasis on humanist reason that was also responsible for what we know now as the modern practices of natural and exact science. Liberated from the doctrinal requirements of subordination, human authorities could now verify what was right or wrong within Aristotelian natural philosophy through direct experiment and experience and through a new mechanical philosophy that undermined the metaphysics of the past. This well-known pivot describes what historians have labeled as the breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution.55 But what Wynter shows is that the Copernican leap, Galileo’s interventions, and all subsequent scientific revolutions were possible primarily because of a shift in stories, a shift in the very meaning of who or what constituted the human and not simply the embrace of a new method. It had occurred because human capacities for knowledge production were now enthroned. Citing historian Kurt Hubner, Wynter writes in “The Ceremony Must Be Found”: Humanism and the Studia’s projection of Natural Man with his Natural Logos was, therefore, as Hubner notes, part of a comprehensive thrust in which “the entire world had begun to transform itself ” pari passu with the “discovery of new continents and new seas,” which was to bring in changes that shook the hitherto entrenched “sacred” structures of society, as the secularization of the State and the printing presses and the rise of the middle classes destroyed the “old hierarchies

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and privileged classes.” Out of this train of events, a mutation of the human cognitive mechanisms was set in motion, one in which the idea rose “that the Divine Creation, like the construction of a great cosmic machine had to be understandable by and through human reason.” It was in the context of this special and overall mutation of the cultural imagination of the human, that the discontinuity that would constitute the new order of the natural sciences had begun, and that the later technology of Galileo’s telescope had its origins.56 The break from the Christian feudal order allowed men of “lower birth” to potentially have access to wealth and power. The merchant bourgeoisie, to take a prominent example, could now rise without having to be part of an established aristocracy. That there was a whole other world to be known and discovered—and plundered—made the breaking of this order even more necessary.57 But it was not a total break. It rarely is. This departure energized European social and intellectual life, taking it into new directions, but it never fully deviated from the symbolic code of redeemed spirit and fallen flesh that constituted the Catholic orientation that had suffused scholasticism as well as earlier models. Wynter’s argument is that this code was merely reapplied once God was replaced by homo politicus, or Man1, as the authority that structures life and death. It would be the Other to this Western construction of Man that would now represent symbolic death, the lack of reason, the fallen flesh of the new angels. As historian Walter Rüegg shows, much of this revaluation took place in the university and within disciplines: “the studia humanitatis led to far-reaching reforms within certain disciplines in the faculties of arts at the universities.”58 He continues: In so far as they placed at the centre of their intellectual interests the understanding which human beings have of themselves and the world, and the social activities of human beings as potential sources of conflict, they opened up a new epoch in the history of universities. In this new epoch, human experience and its translation in verbal and mathematical form became the task of the “scientific revolution”—or, more precisely expressed, the substantive extension, empirical deepening, methodological reformation and conceptual systematization of the results of scientific and scholarly research and their communication through teaching.59

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The arts and their successors, housed in universities, would play a critical role in remaking and fortifying this symbolic code, this construction of Man, and his overrepresentation as the human. Despite what some believe is a “rationale problem,” the conceptual purchase of the studia humanitatis remains intact.60 For many, the ideals for which the studia were developed require our defense. No one, save anti-intellectual conservatives, would dare imagine a world without the small liberal arts college. We are consistently told that we must save the humanities (and that science has little to nothing to do with them).61 By taking us to the true fount of the crisis, Wynter’s work exposed something more dangerous than our reified accounts of the origins of our academic fields and their “indispensability” to our educational system. What is concealed in the debates about the humanities are how “our own disciplines,” she argued, “continue to function … as a language-capacitated form of life, to ensure that we continue to know our present order of social reality, and rigorously so, in the adaptive ‘truth-for’ terms needed to conserve our present descriptive statement.”62 It is that disciplines conserve the present order of knowledge. And that is the crisis. So much more is at stake.

of metamorphosis and man(1)(2) Edward Long’s History of Jamaica is full of it. It is replete with the new meanings of humanism in the context of the New World. He was a settler in Jamaica, a planter-historian who documented the Jonkonnu ritual, who tried to understand the Coromantee and their revolts against slavery in service to anti-abolitionist debates, and he was an intellectual who asserted that whiteness was the norm, that the enslaved occupied a place between human and animal.63 Long’s project was not only his own; it was an “integral part” of the entirely scholarly system that asserted “the idea of the black as inhabiting a cultural void, of Africa as being the negation of culture.”64 Jamaica was a site of a political and economic project that was underpinned by a historical and philosophical one. The exploitation of the land and of the laborers gave rise to both modern capitalism and to a scholarly discourse that extended the humanist project. Only now, whiteness would stand in for the vanquished authority of God. And to those who could not be white—much like the schoolboys of the cathedrals who lacked ethical comportment—discipline was required. Long could not understand how the enslaved faced that plantation-style disci-

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pline with courage, without fear, how they could “smile in agony.” So he resorted to the only available conclusion to those who could accept the intellectual premises of whiteness: “they despise death (more through stupidity than fortitude).” As his fellow Enlightenment ideologue, Voltaire put it: “Barbarians always die without regret. What attachment have they to life?”65 These are terms for knowing that Sylvia Wynter, a Jamaican, a New Native in the New World, would not accept. In citing Long here we are following Wynter’s engagement with a tradition she would have encountered in academia. But it was a tradition that would not have made sense to her people, a people who had not degodded their worlds, a people who had resisted in part by reaffirming their gods under the duress of the systems that had made Long possible and had given him intellectual authority. We can more than infer from Wynter’s argument that Long’s consideration of Black folk traditions could not reveal everything, for they emerged within a hierarchy driven by the logics and convergences of class and race in the plantation system. Long could not really read her world. The resistances to slavery that defined Jamaican national history were of course part of a larger process that would appear to a young Wynter as the upheavals of her youth. It was the revolutionary movements of late 1940s Jamaica that were formative for her, that were an entrance into the tradition. In 1999, she told anthropologist David Scott that it was this movement that “determined everything I was going to be or have been.”66 As Wynter came of age, the momentum shifted but never died, leading to the more vexing challenge of sovereignty, or self-government. Her role in that tradition was to become a writer, a path she pursued alongside her vocation as a dancer and actress in her years in Europe. Dance became about more than the puerile, inward-gazing Western-oriented pursuit of beauty. It was for Wynter a way to move deeper into a movement, one that had been responsible for the memory and recovery of our ancestors. The rhythms of dance were the same rhythms of the underlife, the Black Radical tradition. While in college, she joined Boscoe Holder’s dance troupe. As a native Trinidadian, Holder’s troupe was creating a common West Indian identity, embracing students from across the Caribbean. At the same time, Katherine Dunham was projecting dance as a unifier of diasporic traditions and identity. Recalling the Dunham company’s performance in London, Wynter remembered: “I could almost have fallen out. I had never heard such rhythm in my life and the power of that rhythm.”67 Whether it was dancing with Holder and

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witnessing diasporic technique brought forth with Dunham, Wynter was experiencing an “awakening to all the possibilities” that she “had never thought could be possibilities before.”68 She connected these to anticolonial struggle. Dance was a practice of recovery and memory that ranged far beyond the project of History and “official cultures.” A decade prior to the heyday of social history in the 1970s, Wynter had argued for a form and mode of thinking to recover what lay “in the interstices of history,” where “we see, in glimpses, evidences of a powerful and pervasive cultural process which has largely determined the unconscious springs of our beings … a process whose agent and product was Jamaican folklore, folksong, folk-tales, folk-dance.”69 In other words, a process Long saw but did not really see. In her early theatrical writings, Wynter sought to capture a way of seeing that did not revolve around the reification of the norm. These are people who were non-normed. But they were much more. What was so special about their lives? And what did it reveal about the larger, modern world that they inhabited? Taking all the elements of what they produced, how they created culture, Wynter landed upon a conceptualization she called “indigenization”: Black peoples in Jamaica and the larger diaspora had constructed a culture of resistance from the material circumstances of life in the New World, a culture that generated from the spiritual traditions of their African past.70 To write our lives, to re-narrate the meaning of our lives, her words, like the posture and movement of the dancer, would also have to capture this powerful and pervasive cultural process. What began as a job with the BBC grew to encompass this recovery project. Alongside her then partner, Guyanese writer Jan Carew, theater and narrative fiction were vehicles that coincided with the late 1950s and early 1960s phase of the radical anticolonial struggle. Though she wrote many stories and plays, her most celebrated work of this period, the 1962 novel The Hills of Hebron, was nothing if not the evocation of the lifeworlds of her people, these “maroon people” who had to negotiate both the terms of their coloniality and the inner workings of their own societies, those spaces they created for themselves.71 Wynter’s own connections to these rural folks taught her something of the values of those inner workings, their terms for how to be human. During holidays with her grandparents, these “self-contained peasants” would grant Wynter the memories of a world where charity and justice were actually real and productive of a “shared happiness.”72 It was that “realness” that Wynter would

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offer in the worlds of Hebron. Though she would later admit that perhaps elements of magic would have been more effective over the “realist” approach, the attempt to showcase a kind of sovereign cultural imagination was reflective of a desire that her people be really known. And felt.73 The New Believers of Hebron are the ones. They are not the expected vanguard of socialist revolution. But they are the ones who through belief imagine an otherwise possibility. Material deprivation is an obvious source of pain. The status of the non-norm, the “nigger,” is their social location. But charismatic expectation is their grounds for believing that this trouble would not last always. In this insistence they joined others in the diaspora who refused to be negated by a system hell-bent on their negation. But it was not a refusal in search of recognition. The expectation was about being able to create and live differently.74 In this, the characters of The Hills of Hebron, reprised in her play Maskarade, remind us that the people who are expected to have nothing, to be nothing, possess something that cannot be captured fully, certainly not by the tools available to the historian-planter. This non-capturable ethos of self-preservation against the odds—the “mathematics of Black life”75 that say we are not supposed to survive—is best captured in the hopes and dreams of the New Believers: They sang joyously and tears rolled down their cheeks. They clapped their rough hands together and banished silence from the hills and valleys. They held themselves erect for the first time in their lives. Were they not the disposed on earth about to inherent all the vast spaces of heaven? Were they not outcasts, prodigal sons, trekking back home after epochs of homelessness?76 And to these questions we might add: should not our God be one of us? The Black God that Moses, leader of Hebron, evoked was an alternative vision. The carvings that Obadiah made were the residue of a deeper memory, a reservoir of otherwise. In Kate, in Rose, and in Miss Gatha, the pain and struggle of living that otherwise could produce very real suffering and very real harm. And yet it did not mean that we should not try. These were people who needed to believe in something that went beyond everything that colonialism had labeled religion, had labeled knowledge. If these folk could be known, if these folk could be felt, perhaps we could understand how to truly differentiate who we were from what we were in the colonial imagination. As she wrote these lives, Wynter continued

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to think about the powerful traditions embodied in the dancing, and the masquerades, the joyous possibilities embedded in living ritual practices. It was something in the deep reservoir of her memory as a child, but also something that was available for her children, too, to encounter. In 1961, she moved with Carew to Guyana, where they would contribute to an anticolonial project then underway, joining the information service under premier Cheddi Jagan. But it was a moment of bitter turmoil, a struggle between nationalism and communism that often mirrored the divisions that were set up through British colonial labor protocols. The racialized nature of the riots that came next created a volatile situation for all. And the radical ideologies then available to the intellectual leadership were unequal to the task of achieving a political unity arrayed against the real antagonist: Western imperialism.77 The coalescing of the New World group, a region-wide collective of radical intellectuals, offered perhaps a viable alternative to a Western radical thought that failed to center the Caribbean as a critical site of exploitation. Though she never formally joined the group, Wynter shared their desire to understand the plantation model as the domain for understanding global capitalism and development. And perhaps more importantly, that Black modes of life on and against the plantation were critical for understanding resistance to capitalism.78 But Jagan, a committed Marxist intellectual, preferred to view these conditions more rigidly through the structural terms of base and superstructure, as if what Marx was providing was a formula to be applied to every instance and example of class struggle and oppression.79 Of this moment, Wynter remembers feeling that there was something about that Marxist interpretation that could not fully explain their world. She recalled: like most of my generation, I was a Marxist because Marxism gave you a key which said look, you can understand the reality of which you’re a part. This was my thinking until then. But from that moment I said, no, there is something important this paradigm cannot deal with. A lot of my rethinking came of that experience. It was not a matter of negating the Marxian paradigm but of realizing that it was one aspect of something that was larger.80 In the end, the Guyanese struggle proved too complicated, perhaps inhospitable, for working out these larger ideas. So in 1963, she brought her children back to Jamaica. And it was during a moment in the middle

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of the 1960s that Wynter began in earnest to think about that “something that was larger.” She accepted a job teaching languages at the University of West Indies and began her role as a major contributor to Jamaica Journal, an organ of the Institute of Jamaica. It was Wynter who conceived of the name, borrowing it from an earlier colonial, planter-class magazine. But the visual component came from its editor Alex Gradussov, a German-Russian who was a teacher in Jamaica. In the foreword to the inaugural issue, he imagined the journal as a home for Jamaicans, a place that was also for “new directions of our own, new lines of thought; to help in the essential task of groping towards the creation of ‘standards’ valid to our own experience.”81 Wynter recalls that Gradussov had experienced life as the “underman” to the “‘pure’ Aryan” in Nazi Germany.82 But the project of thinking the relation of sixties-era radicalism to the Jamaican historical experience was another thing. And this was especially the aim for scholars like Wynter who would later characterize the work of Jamaica Journal as synonymous with her project of Black Study. The point was to go beyond what she described as a “cheap and easy radicalism” in order to “reconceptualize” the past, to “assume our entire past.”83 That reconceptualization included rethinking the dominant modes of thinking, rethinking their role in the project of colonial subjugation. The past that was all around them was a past that had not been really known, for it had been treated as a literary object reducible to the terms of colonial occupation. Early on, this work included treatments of colonial Jamaica, with profiles of Lady Nugent and Bernardo de Balbuena, exponents themselves of humanist and Enlightenment ideals.84 It also included her work alongside her brother, Hector, a government minister, and others in ensuring that the heroes of Black resistance in Jamaica were properly remembered as such.85 But it was Wynter’s assault on West Indian literary criticism that stands out, that in many respects, actually inaugurates much of her rethinking of the human, and by extension the disciplinary traditions and projects it instituted. For literary criticism was a project that issued from the “branch plant” university, where critics were “safely ‘home and dry’” while the writers were “scattered, in exile.”86 In two parts, “‘We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture’: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism” explores the failure of the “acquiescent critic” and imagines the promise of a criticist project that took West Indian folk traditions seriously as the bar for understanding the Black literary tradition of the Caribbean.87 As she thought with writers like George Lamming and others, Wynter concluded that Caliban

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was having his say, but Prospero was telling the world what it all meant. So she asked us to consider how we might understand Caliban’s world: This Caliban, transformed at night before the fire, talking, singing, involved in ritual and religion which was still arranged around a spiritual altar of African gods, created the culture out of which the Haitian revolution, fused into an equally revolutionary European cultural tradition, sprang. The night gathering about the fire had tremendous relevance. Around the fire the Native took hold of the Word. And it was His Word in his own mouth, fired by his own dream.88 The ground for thinking the meaning of West Indian writing was its relationship to this larger project of an awareness “of the unreality [,] of the unauthenticity of the so called real.” To ultimately comprehend it so that the writer might “commit oneself to a constant revolutionary assault against it.”89 The university was the home to a literary criticist project that was perhaps inevitably linked to the status quo, and to a project that silenced Caliban at best. Wynter critiqued the university and the discipline for its inability and unwillingness to transform its “goals, curriculum” and its “standards,”90 especially in the wake of the disappearance of the “imperial flag.”91 The incomplete project of freedom had prevented the return of the writer, the return of Caliban, from exile. Liberation had to mean the rejection of a society that required his “unjust relation” to Prospero, which created the “historical necessity” that had “impelled exploitation of some by others, and still impels it.”92 What might the Black writer bring to the university? To a different kind of university? One that was imagined as a site for Blues knowledge, as a site unimpressed and unimpeded by the acquiescence of literary criticism? This remains an open question. But as Wynter asks, “If we don’t sing the blues for our own pain, who will sing the blues for them?”93 These ideas were expanded in other important Caribbean literary spaces. In 1971, Wynter’s comments at the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Conference (ACLALS) spoke to the unreality of Western knowledge from yet another angle. In “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” she read the discipline of the history as a plantation mode of knowledge, and the West Indian novel as a site, the plot, for transformative possibility. If the plantation needed History, the literary freedoms worked out upon the plot—the provision grounds

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where different values reign—would re-narrate the past on our terms: “the plot too has its own history.”94 We might think differently from there. Two years later, “Creole Criticism” was published in New World Journal. It was a more direct critique and polemical assault on the “Creole” lens of critic Kenneth Ramchand and his defense of the Western project of criticism. But it was in his rejection of African ways of knowing, the cultural foundation of the peasant masses in the Caribbean, that Wynter finds grounds to reject that lens and ultimately distance herself from the normative forms of literary criticism, which had at that point still viewed Black folk as tabula rasa.95 As Norval Edwards writes, in these essays were moments where we see the early foundations of Wynter’s own critique of the human and of “Western reason, epistemology, and authority.”96 That it would occur in the domain of the humanities is no coincidence. Perhaps Wynter’s most significant forays into theory in these days were in the projection of a cultural process at play in the folk traditions of Jamaica, most evident in her exploration of Jonkonnu in the pages of Jamaica Journal. She positioned Jonkonnu, a ritual that was part of the larger universe of Afro-Caribbean dance and spirituality, as connected to a process of becoming, a process of resisting, a process of the human capacity to engender love and care and solidarity. This process was a procession—a celebratory dance through the streets, the rhythm, the music, the drum beat, the mask, the play—a second line. In a most striking sense, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica” was an attempt to reimagine the disciplinary traditions that thought the Caribbean. As “unofficial” history, conceptions of folk-dance had been buried in lieu of “the official culture of the Caribbean.” She writes that “history has mainly been about the European super structure of civilization.”97 So Jonkonnu was concealed; it became all jester and no gods.98 But to recover Jonkonnu was not merely to state that it existed historically or to describe it anthropologically. It was an instance of “black studies: the need for a reevaluation and renaissance of black culture.”99 It was to join the ancestral procession. Dance was again an opening. It is often the case that scholars pick up on Wynter’s thinking much later, often in the mid-1980s. But we might understand the beginnings of Wynter’s critical project here—in the work of Jamaica Journal and the simultaneous fallout of the “postcolonial” political experiences of Black folk in Jamaica and the broader Caribbean (not to mention Africa itself). It is only then that we can make sense of Man and make better sense of ourselves.100

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To assume our entire past was not simply an intra-Caribbean affair. The Caribbean could be the grounds for thinking the entire world, the entire complex of modernity and its political and economic structures. If we were to understand the coloniality of our being, and of our very conception of being itself, we would have to see it as metamorphosis. The work of writing, of dancing, of the poetic, of criticism, had already affirmed that while sociopolitically her ancestors, our ancestors, were reduced to Negro, to piezas, to cargo—this was not all that we were. For Wynter, our process for staying true to who we were and remembering what we must be could be better understood by thinking through the contexts of our “transplantation” and the disruptive forces that made us into “new natives.”101 Her Black Metamorphosis would do both and more. The idea of a “new native” stemmed from Wynter’s appreciation of the work of Gabriel R. Coulthard and its elaboration of indigenismo and of Léopold Sédar and the concept of Negritude. Both were ideas that sought to challenge the assumptions of non-white inferiority present at the creation of coloniality.102 As twentieth-century anticolonial conceptualizations, both ideas were preceded in many ways by Jean Price-Mars’s reading of the Haitian revolutionary impulse. It was an impulse that stemmed from a people who were not tabula rasa, and yet the particular folkloric practices that animated the people were simultaneously rooted in Africa and manifest in the soil of a New World colonialism that necessitated the recovery of that memory in order to survive and resist. European practices of genocide in the Caribbean made Africans the new native. And the cultures they brought with them had to be adapted and improvised.103 That Price-Mars’s situating of the Haitian struggle could serve as a model for both indigenismo and was connected to the Negritude movement was instructive for Wynter. The transplantation of Africa in Haiti had remade the soil. So, too, the larger diaspora. This is the metamorphosis that historian Vincent Harding saw in Wynter’s early drafts of the manuscript, which inspired him to suggest the eventual title of the project, one that was conceived when she met him in 1971 at the aforementioned ACLALS convening.104 As director of the Institute of the Black World, Harding was instrumental in the development of Black Studies curricula and the convening of seminars for department heads of the nascent field. Although the Institute was based in Atlanta and loosely connected to the HBCUs in the Atlanta University Center, it reflected the global Black experience as its name suggested. Harding desired a publication that spoke to the global meanings of the

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Afro-Caribbean cultural experience and suggested that Wynter might contribute a volume that would serve as a companion to his work on resistance in African America. Although its initial focus was solely on the racist imitations that constituted the minstrel show as a form of cultural negation that disrupted folk theater, Wynter’s project grew to the larger treatment of the new native that was Black Metamorphosis.105 It is important here to briefly connect that larger ethos to the project of Black Studies as understood by members of the Institute. Along with Harding, scholars associated with this work included William Strickland, Gerald McWorter, Walter Rodney, Robert Hill, Joyce Ladner, and Howard Dodson.106 In their varied ways, they would touch on the spirit of Black Studies, the spirit that Wynter wrote about in her later work as the true territory. But it is Harding who in conceptualizing Black Studies was also contributing to the imagination of a Black University, and to the idea of what a Black scholar was and might be. What he called the “vocation of the Black scholar” was a direct challenge to the academic culture of disinterest and individual achievement. His entreaty that we become possessed by this vocation to speak the truth of our people was an insistence—six years after the founding of the first departments—that Black Studies was inherently linked to Pan African struggle, to the ongoing revolutionary political movements. But this was, perhaps as significantly, also a methodological question. For Harding, it was necessary that we reject the artificial barriers of the academic disciplines to seek the human unity which underlies the experience of our people. Just as the best of the anti-colonial revolutionary leaders reject the national political, economic and social systems created by the colonizers, so do we deny a priori validity of methodological disciplines, concepts, and “fields” which have been established without our participation, and which have often worked against the best intellectual and political interests of the African peoples.107 So what Wynter was writing in Black Metamorphosis was indeed in line with this anti-disciplinarity. She was among the scholars who Harding believed had “moved continuously beyond, and sometimes against, the disciplines assigned to them by the university.”108 It was the only way to accomplish what was necessary to reveal the lives of the new natives. Very early on in the manuscript, she offers the concept of a “Sepúlveda syndrome,” which had permeated Western thought. A term inspired by

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Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, this syndrome was a name for the Western assumption that non-Europeans were irrational beings with no real humanity to speak of, and thus subject to political discipline and management.109 It was a syndrome that was refracted through the disciplines. These disciplines were also rooted in the assumption that rationality gave Man power over nature: “this revolutionary new relation to Nature initiated by Western Man began to realize itself with the discovery of the New World … Nature became land, conceivably only in terms of property, laid bare of myth, custom, tradition. Land if it were to function as land, needed not men, nor communities, but so many units of labor-power.”110 This not only explained the need for the Middle Passage but also offered a conceptual understanding of how modernity required a wholesale disruption of a previous episteme. Modern capitalism, then, is also an epistemic monster. And ways of thinking that are in hock to that monster, even as an internal critique, are limited in their capacity to reveal its monstrosity. For Wynter, capitalist systems imputed more than a class system. It inculcated a system of valuation that was both about the construction of a working class, or a proletariat, and also about the negation of those whose labor was foundational to that system: the African became “the nigger,” a commodity and instrument of exchange. Such a categorization made Africans subject to pieza valuation, whereby each individual, based upon their physical characterizations, was valued with reference to the average “negro.” All others were counted as “pieces” of this new and very different sort of norm. A linchpin of the argument of Black Metamorphosis is how the pieza system could not be fully understood within the domains of orthodox or traditional Marxist conceptualizations of labor even as enslaved labor was connected to the factory system: “The later large-scale dehumanization of the European proletariat, followed on and did not precede the total negation of the black as human.”111 If this plantation archipelago is foundational to capitalism, then we must rethink how we conceptualize that system and what it means for people to be negated culturally as they are exploited economically.112 Especially since that negation would continue in other forms across that archipelago. Throughout the manuscript, Wynter would connect it to the concept of the quashie, the Jim Crow system, and the claim of deviance assigned to Black life. Turning to the United States and using Richard Wright’s Black Boy as a critical source, Wynter explores the heterodox forms of class ascription embedded in American social reality. Class was differential. The poor

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whites and fellow workers Pease and Reynolds could only see Richard Wright a particular way. Wynter relates a story where Wright is accused of neglecting to refer to Pease as “Mr. Pease.” More than an assault against Southern manners, it was an assertion of the power of a symbolic code. They needed Wright to perform, to become Sambo, in order to find or re-member their identity within that code. Wright was forced to either admit that he did forget (a violation) or accuse his accuser of lying (also a violation). It was a double bind meant not only to demean but to affirm whiteness in its place.113 Rather than dismiss this as “false consciousness,” or a backroom conspiracy to divide the working classes, Wynter uses the anecdote as an opportunity to demonstrate that whiteness was a way of reinscribing the pieza valuation that is at the foundation of capitalism: What Pease and Reynolds as real whites do in their interaction with Wright is to compel him as real black to occupy the Symbolic place of Sambo so that they can activate the experience of participating in Symbolic Whiteness, of privilege and of relative power. For this privilege they are prepared to act so as to socially and psychologically repress Wright as they repress within themselves any subversive desire which flow outside the prescribed and regulated desires of the social order.114 It was a necessary concomitant to Man, to the concept of rationality, to the ways that Western theory apprehended the social and the political. Pease and Reynolds’s job was never to overthrow the system or build class solidarity; it was to become white, to become Man. The same is true of Mr. Covey, who Wynter engages via Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to show how central “nigger-breaking” was to the project of Man. It was Covey, the niggerbreaker, whose assigned role was to become the mechanism through which enslaved labor became more efficient, whose capacity for violence upon Black peoples had productive value within a racialized system. As a Black laborer, Frederick Douglass had to be broken first.115 As a category, the white working class realized their privileged status as normative labor not from the fact of their “use-value,” or from the fact that they “performed the same work.” Wynter emphatically declared that their MARKET EXCHANGE VALUE WAS DIFFERENT, HENCE THE CONTRADICTION AND TENSION IN THE UNITED STATES REALITY. THE

of human—sylvia wynter  .  79 IDEALS OF ITS SUPERSTRUCTURE PROCLAIMED THE EQUALITY OF ALL MEN, OF THEIR USE-VALUE AS MEN; THE REALITY OF ITS DOMINANT MARKET STRUCTURE VALUED MEN RELATIVELY AS MORE AND LESS EQUAL THAN OTHERS … THE BLACK EMBODIES THIS PRINCIPAL CONTRADICTION IN ITS ULTIMATE FORM.116

In the end, her major argument with reference to Marxist social and revolutionary theory was that alienation was an impoverished way to understand the labor exploitation of the Negro. It was a question of the colonization of consciousness that the capitalist system intended to impose: “The expropriation of the means of production by the bourgeoisie is only a means of its more total purpose—the expropriation of the means of symbolization, and thereby, of the expropriation of the means of the constitution of social reality.”117 It is this critique that opens the door for a deeper understanding of the trajectory of the Negro and quashie, to the deviant and inmate, and to the constellation of othering projects that are both economic and symbolic. And if the real meaning of our oppression is this confluence of capital and the intellectual-cultural matrix, if the social reality that dominates us is the target, then Black resistance targets that project.

the procession of black study We could read Black Metamorphosis as making a double move. It is engaged in exploring the nature of the conceptual system that has produced the social reality we inhabit. And in the second move, Wynter explores what that system was unable to actually negate. She shares with Cedric Robinson a refusal to see the system as determinative and all-powerful to the extent that we are fully and irrevocably subject to what it decides we are.118 It is again the power of the rhythm that guides how Wynter narrates Black people’s refusal. It is something she witnessed and participated in. It is that process again. It is also a procession, a constant movement and march. Like Jonkonnu. Black Study is a way of taking that procession, continuing it, being it. Which means the ways that Black folk resisted and refused the social reality that called them “nigger” is also for Black Studies a lesson that we might refuse the academic logics of that social reality. It is a lesson that we have not fully lost, but we often need reminders. It is in the narration

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of the Black underlife that Wynter located that refusal. And perhaps that underlife can again permeate what we mean by Black Studies. In Black Metamorphosis these ways of knowing are immediately linked to their contexts in the New World. To be a new native was to seek the restoration, if at all possible, of a way of valuation that rejected the pieza system. The worldviews that created Myalism, Jonkonnu, Afro-Christianity, the Blues, jazz, reggae—forms that have been reduced to cultural expressions (even commodities themselves) that told of the slave’s plight— were modes of being that indexed this desire. Some have even linked these forms, particularly those that emerged in the United States, to the fulfillment of American democracy. For Wynter, it is much deeper. Life as it was conceived in the New World was unacceptable. These were the cultural forms that sought the restoration of a value system that had been challenged but not lost, compromised but not erased. Wynter returns us to the continent, in order to return us to the idea of use-value. Many of the economic systems of West African peoples conceptualized value on terms that were not present in Western capitalism. Humans could not also be a “thing” called “commodities.”119 But more than that, the function of society was not to accumulate wealth, it was to regenerate. If the revolt of the enslaved was among the most original forms of resistance to modern capitalism, then it was idea of generation that guided them. In a dynamic chapter entitled “The Middle Passage Reversed,” Wynter conceptualizes this model of generation as a mode of production where there is no binary opposition between the living and the dead. Following Dennis Duerden’s research on several traditions of West African art, Wynter explores a metaphor that explains the ways that the natural world was intimately connected to humanity. It expressed the idea that all trees grow on soil “fertilized by the elders who have died.”120 Those ancestors are then remembered through rituals, often using the wood from the trees as their symbolic and material trace. But that ants feed on those trees in order to have life, reminds us that everything is reversible, that humans are not masters over nature, that we exist to continue a life cycle, we generate and regenerate each other as the earth does. This natural phenomenon was mirrored in social relation. An individual human, represented by the “shade” of their tree, cannot exert that powerful force for long before its limbs fall, before new growth takes over in the place that had formerly been the shade. Harmony and change are twins, and no single human or “king” has the power to determine destiny. The true source of power was embedded in something akin to the order of the universe. The

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ancestors of the enslaved would not have been able to render the natural world in “objective” terms, a scientific tradition “central to the culture of production” that “sanctifies the product of man, delegitimating him as its mere appendage—as producer.”121 Duerden’s thesis focused primarily on the “nonindustrial” art of ethnic groups primarily in Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon. We now know much more about the ways that enslaved Africans from these areas “exchanged their country marks” in the Western Hemisphere.122 Of the more prominent and influential forms that gave life to this tradition was Black music. Of those musics, Wynter argues that the transplantation of the concepts can be seen in the significant cultural contribution which grew out of the interaction of the transplanted cultures with the pressures of the new circumstances. This cultural contribution was, of course, jazz. It was a musical form, which like all African art strove to avoid permanent constants.123 If enslavement was the reduction of life to the time of the plantation (“lifetime converted into labour time”124), a mode of production that rendered human life as “work,” the improvisatory nature of Black music was moving away from time as this singular experience. The play, the sound, was a reminder that “labour time was not life-time.”125 To reach for life was to create something else with time, beyond that labor time. An entirely new relation: Against the criteria of the pervasive technological rationality of our times, the jazz culture opposes [via] the criterion of “emotional truth.” One must pay one’s dues to sing the blues—one cannot pay them by proxy. One must “know” as the “Gnosists” knew through participation in experience. One has to love, as Armstrong insists, to be able to play.126 The Rastafarians would also insist “on a mode of life, not based on production, in which man is longer producer, object-being, but the heir of Jah whose destiny is to generate and regenerate his unique sonship—his I-manity.”127 In other words, “it is this time that the marginal men of the Kingston ghettoes have created in the Reggae experience and out of which they write and sing their songs” and where they imagine “an alternative not only to the status quo of Jamaican society, but to the entire complex

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of Western values, that structure the imitative culture and reality of the Jamaican status quo.”128 Liberation then becomes a struggle for transformation, consummated by the ultimate act of love and recognition of the common relation between all members of a collective. It is the music. Because these expressions lay outside of the conceptual law of value, outside of the time of Man, attempts to truly commodify them fall short of capturing the creative possibilities inherent in that expression. In fact, as the musician Nicholas Payton has argued constantly, the very term “jazz” was created to ultimately attempt that commodification—which is why many practitioners of the form historically rejected the label and what it suggests.129 So much of Wynter’s writing shares the spirit of that rejection. But it is not music writing or music criticism; it is her reading of its connection to resistance that makes her appreciation here different. It is the procession of “non-conforming cults,” which were revealed through Myalism and “jazz,” through reggae and Black dance traditions, that held together the model of generation, and thus were the foundation for “marronage,” and for revolt. Revolutionary consciousness, as both Wynter and Robinson would write, emanated from these cultural traditions.130 It is also from the way that these forms model African ideas about the relationship to nature that they offer a refusal of the attempted project of dehumanization, what Wynter calls the “denied self.”131 While she explores the dynamics of self-denial, there is also an emphasis upon how radical and social movements sought to address that question. In the context of this analysis, she offers a broad reading of cultural nationalism through the lens and work of psychologist Wade Nobles. Wynter shared with Nobles a particular disdain for the ways that Black middle-class scholars—“trapped in the conceptual incarceration resulting from the ‘imposition’ of a Western world view”—read Black family life through a lens of deviance.132 Black cultural survival was premised on an African mode of being that Nobles argued provided a better conceptual foundation for understanding the nature of the African American family. For Wynter, diasporic cultural life had metamorphosed from those African foundations in the ways she described throughout the manuscript. It was this process that necessarily constituted a more relevant point of departure than what passed for Western disciplinary appraisals of Black social life.133 Nobles’s target was a Western worldview that informed the normative ideals of social science. The Sixties Revolution, then, was also an attack on disciplinarily constituted reality, a project of rehumanization that was

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rooted in the depths of Black resistance for several centuries. So Black Metamorphosis was the recognition that Western traditions of thought were the preserve of the denial of Africa, of the pervasive explanation of African “lack” as constitutive of who we were. And it was also and perhaps most critically a recognition of the historical and ongoing tasks of Black scholarship, of Black Study. The Sixties was a moment that “called into question the entire social valuation system not only of the United States, but of the bourgeois/Western mode of social relations” and “Black Studies in the university was central to this revolt.”134 It must now become “the site of a revolution in the American cultural and mental structures.”135 Writing at the close of the 1970s, Wynter asserted that Black scholars must “continue the theoretical delegitimation of the cultural universe of the bourgeoise, of its representation of reality, of its control of the way we view reality.”136

man problems As she was writing Black Metamorphosis, Wynter was moving through the United States academy. Beginning in the early 1970s, she taught a minicourse at the University of Michigan, where she was invited by faculty that included Nancy Hartsock and Cedric Robinson of the Black Matters Committee.137 She would later join the full-time faculty of the University of California, San Diego, where Sherley Anne Williams and Frederic Jameson had been teaching in the Literature department, continuing to focus on the relationship between literature and the Third World.138 Then in 1977, she moved to Stanford University, where she taught Spanish and Portuguese and would eventually chair the Black Studies program. The essential task outlined at the end of Black Metamorphosis would become her work over the next few decades. Later characterizing these early years at Stanford as a moment responsible for so much of her thinking, the global Third World and the shock of viewing Black American oppressions up close, what she called “the totality” of their “negation,” caused her to return to her background in Spanish literature, to deepen her understanding of “the origin of the modern world,” of the cultural universe of the bourgeoisie that had caused us so much pain.139 Wynter remarked that her “breakthrough” was the publication of the aforementioned “The Ceremony Must Be Found” in 1984 in boundary 2.140 It was in this article where she had linked the studia humanitatis to the elevation of Man, showing how such an epistemological break had

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made possible the geographic discoveries of the New World and also the declaration of the non-human and non-rational Other that would apply to the indigenous and the African. The study and writing of literature solidified the image, reified the epistemological break, and constituted a form of criticism that replicated the status quo. It was autopoietic, the othering was system-specific, which is to say that it operated almost machine-like, on its own terms.141 And only an outside, liminal perspective could offer a vantage point for what it really was. This article inaugurated Wynter’s most well-known period of activity that saw her not only chronicle the origins of modernity, and the conceptual systems that produced enslavement and settler colonialism, but also articulate a critical perspective on the humanities and sciences and their connection to the cultural universe of the bourgeoisie. She would elaborate upon the “Sepúlveda syndrome” hinted at in Black Metamorphosis and further connect the sociopolitical aspects of the Renaissance to the project of modernity and its relation to the New World. Both scholasticism and Renaissance humanism, as projections of scholarly imaginations, had real-world implications. The Renaissance converged with the European Age of Discovery. Cartography and navigation were popular and even taught in the universities. The commercial activity of shipbuilding and the finance capital that supported the trade were located in cities that also had vital intellectual communities. Indeed, the city itself was a concept that could not exist without these intellectual imperatives. So what was earlier called practical sciences, or engineering, were disciplines that were also forged in these domains of the coloniality of being.142 As first movers, the Portuguese moved from the countryside into the cities, and out of these ports into the sea, believing themselves to be in search for a mythical Christian kingdom (among other motivating interests)—a search that took them directly into the orbit of “enemies of Christ” who blocked the way.143 When they went south, instead of west, they encountered not Arabs but West Africans, a group that constituted a different “genre” of a pagan otherness. But Portuguese desires to convert them revealed that Wynter’s spirit/flesh distinction was fully in play in those first moments of modernity. The idea that they could be converted and thus made into “humans,” however, would not last. Even as Africans, particularly in the Kongo kingdom converted to Catholicism, their Blackness would eventually stand in for a category of “irrational” beings that were incapable of being redeemed—much to the chagrin of King Afonso who pleaded with the enslavers in their own

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terms to put an end to the practice. Where their fallen flesh could once be redeemed through enslavement and their introduction to salvation, the degodding of the European conceptual world, nearly completed by the sixteenth century, meant the Negro was simply labor, and could never be human: “[in] the classificatory logic of [the Portuguese king] … both as a Christian … as well as a Renaissance European monarch … all blackskinned people, whether as slaves or free men and women, were there to be exploited for the benefit of his own territorial imperial expansion as well as of his country’s enrichment.”144 Said another way: mankind’s enslavement was no longer projected as being to the negative legacy of Adamic Original Sin, the concept of enslavement was carried over and redescribed as being, now, to the irrational aspects of mankind’s human nature. This redescription had, in turn, enabled the new behavior-motivating “plan of salvation” to be secularized in the political terms of the this-worldly goals of the state.145 Wynter would tell the story of this shift through a treatment of a coterie of thinkers shaped by the studia humanitatis. The Portuguese were not alone. The “discovery” of the New World provided an occasion for the extension of these values to new populations in the Americas. Throughout the 1980s, Wynter prepared herself to mark the quincentenary of 1492, by arguing that the Columbian expeditions had made possible a new intellectual dispensation while also making it possible to justify mass genocide and enslavement. Liberation would require a perspective that truly allowed us to recognize our beingness apart from the one instituted by Renaissance discourse and its successors (some of which were “radical”).146 This, too, was a return to an earlier intellectual concern. In a fourpart series appearing in Jamaica Journal in 1969 and 1970, Wynter had already explored how humanist thought shaped the poetics and politics of Bernardo de Balbuena, the author of the “earliest book published by a resident in Jamaica” in 1624.147 A dyed-in-the-wool humanist educated in the scholastic theology that was the core of the pedagogy of the major Iberian universities, including those which emerged in the New World, Balbuena’s epic poem The Bernard demonstrated the increasing salience of national identity and imperial destiny. The humanist, Wynter argued, was concerned with imagining “moral perfection” and molding an “ideal human type.”148 For the world of Catholicism, it was a dire concern,

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given the ways that both the Reformation and secular philosophy had challenged the source of this ideal. The challenge was to find an earthly ideal that could approximate or prefigure a heavenly one. It just so happened that Balbuena’s personal background was itself compromised by an absence of “purity of blood”—his illegitimacy.149 His lack of purity could only be solved by his devotion to a humanist appreciation of man’s capacity to reach the perfection of God. Could the epic poem, borrowed and updated from the classical tradition, reimagine the terms and ideals of belonging and “fulfil the national destiny willed by the gods”?150 During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the challenge of the humanist was ultimately to justify the legitimacy of empire and who deserved to benefit. As abbot of Jamaica and, later, bishop of the church in Puerto Rico, Balbuena had less to say about the morality of a nation and empire made possible initially by the encomienda system and later by the trade in Africans, a group he encountered on the very ship that took him from Spain to Jamaica. A group that was reduced to “another and more profitable kind of goods, in the travel ledger of the voyage.”151 While he was open about certain miseries and a feeling of being “bewitched” by his experiences in Jamaica, which during the time of his abbacy in the seventeenth century was considered somewhat of an outpost to the empire, the very existence of Jamaica did not give him pause.152 And though Wynter noted that there was a generic critique of the emphasis on wealth over fame and immortality as contained in the epic, she also showed that his sense of what mattered—“the destiny of Spain in the New World will be nothing less than the revelation of the Kingdom of God in history”—was a view of the ideal order that was quickly losing purchase.153 This outdated form of Christian humanism would soon be subsumed under the economic logics that the New World had opened up, where the ideal type became the amoral property owner, the rights-bearing political subject.154 Balbuena’s movements across the Atlantic world—from Mexico City to Seville to Jamaica and finally to Puerto Rico—were significant for another reason. They demonstrated the ways that the Spanish empire offered opportunities for both clerics and a hidalgo elite to not only observe but tinker with the new sorts of political projects made possible by colonial plunder. To truly make a New World would require a pact with an intellectual order that had to be theorized and adapted. Tracing this lineage through Spanish intellectual history allowed Wynter a vantage point to one of the most consequential debates on the meaning of the human and

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its relation to the emergent market society. Before Balbuena ever entered Jamaica, the intellectual terms of the both the economic and political situation that he would confront were already set, if not perfected. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolome de las Casas could only be products of the Spanish sixteenth century. Though the dates themselves are somewhat arbitrary, the expulsion of the Moors, the political and economic shifts occasioned by Columbus’s voyages, the religious legacies of the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation, and their impact on the so-called new knowledges then being produced in the academy were powerful markers of profound change. If the Portuguese and their incursions into West-Central Africa tested the assumptions of the African conversion experience, the Spanish invasion of the Western Hemisphere during the 1500s further set the terms for the philosophical debate that would rechristen the modern human and propel the shift from a theocentric description to a biocentric—and thus racial—description. It was here where Wynter’s now well-known reading of Sepúlveda and de las Casas provided key insights. In the early 1980s, she was approached by the Jamaican government to do a study on the history of Spanish colonialism on the island, work that took her to the archives of Seville.155 One of the products of that research was a 1984 Jamaica Journal series that considered the meaning of las Casas’s “conversion experience.” Born in 1474 of a father that had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, las Casas was an unquestioned adherent to what Wynter calls the “complexes” of limpieza nobleza de sangre (cleanliness/purity of blood) and hidalguia (the noble, crusading spirit), which were deeply consequential to the philosophies of life that governed life in the modern and colonial worlds.156 These were complexes that were borne out of the Spanish confrontation with non-Christian others on the Iberian peninsula, complexes that would soon be grafted onto to confrontations with the Indigenous as well as negotiated with by those who were considered the dregs of Spanish society. Wynter asserts that those who could not possess the ideal character suggested by these complexes “carried a stigma as powerful as that of Blackness in the pre-1938 Caribbean.”157 And so it is in these moments that we find the connections to the logics of anti-Blackness so present today. One of the paradoxes that Wynter notes is that this meaning perhaps did not occur as easily to las Casas, who had directly benefited from the encomienda system from his perch in Cuba, and obviously “shared this pyscho­ economic motivation.”158

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But to witness the brutal effects of colonialism was bracing. One could not really be unaffected. And by the 1510s, las Casas would attempt a break from the system, after being struck by a verse he had read in Ecclesiasticus: “stained is the offering of him that sacrificeth from a thing wrongfully gotten.”159 His partner, Pablo de la Renteria, too, would question the ill-gotten gains of the system and its treatment of Indigenous labor, passionately defending their capacity for Christian salvation rather than extermination. Yet, for Wynter, the conversion experiences of de la Renteria and las Casas and the philosophical debates they engendered introduced another paradox: the still-unrealized possibility of an inter-human understanding of rationality, beyond domination and hierarchy.160 But it all went unheeded. Continuing into the 1990s, Wynter explored las Casas’s thought and debate with Sepúlveda and its centrality to New World colonialism over several articles. One of the more extended treatments, a series of lectures delivered at Binghamton University entitled “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” reviewed the 1550s debate over the fate of the “Indians.” She explained that the issue at play in this debate had to do with a “central obstacle”: all the basic concepts of the theological system of legitimation—i.e., that the lands of non-Christian princes were terra nullius and as such justly expropriable by Christian princes; that the indigenous peoples could be enserfed or even enslaved where necessary—had come to founder upon a stubborn fact. This was that the indigenous peoples of the New World could not be classified as Enemies-of-Christ, since Christ’s apostles had never reached the New World, never preached the Word of the Gospel to them.161 Just title—the doctrine of legitimation for colonial violence—was now in flux. That colonialism could ever be “just,” however, remained part of the Western toolbox. But for now there was a political crisis. The indios were innocent, proclaimed las Casas. They could not be held to a legal code that justified their own genocide, because they were not given the option of saying yea or nay. Unfortunately, las Casas believed that Africans could and were. Though he later admitted his mistake, his belated mea culpa was too late to stop what his earlier belief had set in motion—the uncountable millions of Africans torn away from their homes.162

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Yet this is much deeper than what Wynter described as the liberal historian’s “Africans replaced Indians” thesis.163 What that idea obscured was the secularization of the “Enemies-of-Christ” label and the creation of another justification for fallenness, for the infidel. In response to las Casas’s defense, which had argued for a transcultural valuation or appreciation of Indigenous ways of knowing, Sepúlveda based his rationalization of imperialism on natural law, the epistemological effect of the degodding move. He would help inaugurate an order of knowledge that in Wynter’s words “transumed” the values of the church’s notion of fallen humanity to those people deemed beyond the pale of reason, and thus not really people. Sepúlveda asserted that the indios could not be defended, for they were irrational and subhuman. And here was the shift. The formation of natural law and the imperialists who used these arguments that negated the humanity of the Indigenous were the architects of the modern political system, a state form that relied on the authority of reason. An authority that might as well have been seen as divine, because it functioned in the same way. Wynter explains: This meant that the primary behavior-motivating goal, rather than that of seeking salvation in the civitas dei, was now that of adhering to the goal of the civitas saecularis: the goal, that is, of seeking to ensure the stability, order, and territorial expansion of the state in a competitive rivalry with other European states. This at the same time as the primacy of the earlier religious ethic, as defended by Las Casas from a universalistic Christian perspective, was replaced by the new ethic of “reasons of state,” as the ethic carried by a Sepúlveda whose civic humanist values were still, at the time, only incipiently emergent. However, it is the latter ethic that, given the existential sociopolitical and commercial, on-the-ground processes that were to lead to the rapid rise of the centralizing state, to its replacement of the medieval system-ensemble with its monarchical own, and to the expanding mercantilism with its extra-European territorial conquests, exponentially accelerated was soon to triumph and become the accepted doctrine of the times.164 So the story of homo politicus, Man1, was written. Wynter would argue that in the wake of this transuming, the modern initiation of Africans in the New World was also to mean that this label of irrationality, this Human Othering project, would be extended to them.

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Black life changed dramatically alongside the imperial imperatives of expanding European societies and the creation of modern state systems that were functionally tied to the security of capital. Citing the arguments of both Sepúlveda and John Mair, the new grounds for exploitation became the Aristotelian notion that Africans were slaves by nature. The authority of natural law was unchanging.165 We were forever irrational, forever enslaved. Blackness was the antithesis of freedom, of power, of truth, of being—of humanity. These were their assumptions, the organizing logic of their worlds. It was, of course, not those of the enslaved.166 Nevertheless, the legitimating project had powerful backing from not just the state, but the university, and from capital.167 With the secular state and the colonial universities born in these eras came a further distancing of the idea that the word of God was the only authority over what can be known. Without these colonial conditions, there could be no modern science, no modern world. Without which there would have been no African slavery. This is the territory.

discipline and man The second part of Wynter’s account traced this predicament through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If Man’s authority would create the revolutions of the physical sciences, which in turn developed the concept of homo politicus (Man1), the ensuing years characterized by Enlightenment were to further the projection of this idea of a natural order of things. At roughly the same time, Isaac Newton opened a new vista for thinking the laws of motion. Though he was also interested in the supernatural, Newton and others like Francis Bacon had begun to elevate the search for the laws of nature as a central concern of both philosophy and science. Their “discoveries” influenced elements of Enlightenment thinking. If there was a natural order to the universe, then there must be a natural order to human reason. Not only that, this move produced, in Michael Finkenthal’s words, a commitment to “disciplinarian thinking.” Science was not only given the imprimatur of a kind of universalist naturalism; the idea that the physical world could be categorized and studied independently of other aspects of reality became increasingly justifiable with each and every advance. Disciplinarian thinking meant not only a specialized treatment of a particular subject matter but a specialized treatment that was authoritative. It was essentially about control.168

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Man could control chaos through reason. But what was man’s nature? Philosophers dreamt of discovering a natural law for human conduct. And in order to fulfill that dream, the meaning of human nature had to be captured. Perhaps “man” could take control, but “man” had to first be known. So it was with these questions that Western philosophy intensified its celebrated discovery of a conceptual order that could satisfy the demands of the new age. Both colonial conquest and the emergence of the “common man” provided liberalism with the first fruits of its tradition. “Conservative” and “progressive” intellectuals alike shared in the bounty. John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and others set out to bring philosophy to bear upon the European world’s most vexing problem: Who was this Man and how does he think? And perhaps more significantly, where does he think? Together, they conceived of an order, a form of society, that provided a new home for homo politicus—a conception of the democratic state.169 But Enlightenment also had costs. And the Sepúlveda syndrome had legs. Studies of human nature privileged one set of human actors while simultaneously demoting others. An intellectual project called “natural history” proposed an inborn hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being. The humans were Western “Man” and subhumans were the colonial subjects who were often brought to Europe to be poked and prodded and examined. Western conceptions of science became even more entrenched in these moments of skepticism and groping for a conceptual basis for defining reason. It was, then, no mistake that everyone from Kant to David Hume—utilizing in some cases data sets generated from the colonized New World—uttered inane racist broadsides when it came to thinking the African.170 Enlightenment would not work without it. The colonial state would not either. Wynter’s “reasons of state” would comprise an inherently racialized legacy, an exclusionary definition of the human that would also include othering projects around gender, sexuality, and other norming practices coming out of Western conceptions of the ideal. We tend to say that “everything is political.” Perhaps this is because one of the other legacies of Enlightenment and thus disciplinarian thinking is that a thing called political societies replaced the theocentric order. The political essentially becomes the new grand explanation, the natural way to live. The human subject, the rational actor sat at the center of this new subjectivity. But the human subject was really Wynter’s Man1. There was no guarantee even within Western contexts what kind of society Man1 would now create. The Enlightenment has been credited with both the

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despotism of Frederick II and the radicalism of the French Revolution. Marxist and feminist traditions have also at various points embraced it. It is the supposed fount of both the “rights of man” and the “rights of property.” Some have even linked it to America’s settler-colonial project, declaring that the United States democracy was where the Enlightenment “first came down to Earth.”171 Despite the tendencies across all ideological persuasions to claim Enlightenment, the notion of a “many Enlightenments,” or even the idea that Africans produced the Age of Revolution, is a framing that misses that so much of the Black Radical tradition lay outside of the conceptions of the biocentric order that initiated the Enlightenment.172 Wynter’s account of the development of Western intellectual movements and categories, then, is one of the most important space-clearing acts for Black Study. The nineteenth century was an era of great change. For Wynter, it was where the “progress” of Western thought reached a point of systematizing the biocentric account of who and what a human could be. The sciences of man, the biological sciences, were to converge with the search for natural physical laws to produce the present order. The development of the research seminar and the doctorate degree rerouted the earlier faculties of philosophy and allowed students to focus on a particular aspect under the guidance of specialized scholars. As the Industrial Age succeeded the Age of Revolution, the intellectual concerns of Enlightenment philosophy inspired mature versions of the social sciences that arose to make sense of the changes of that period—and in many cases to order them. What in the early days of the university was called “moral philosophy” further fragmented and branched out to the earliest forms of social science: economics, anthropology, some aspects of history, and later the study of politics and society. By the time August Comte, Herbert Spencer, and other grand theorists arrived to the scene, disciplinarian thinking had become common sense.173 The unities of the social and natural sciences were assumed apparent. All of reality was governed by discoverable laws. And as the state systems came into place, and European nationalist imperatives were put to work, anthropology and biology united to produce some of the most well-known justifications for enslavement and colonialism. Literature, and the larger world of the humanities, would do the same.174 These new disciplines were required to further solidify what was ultimately a conceit: that there was order to human agency. But that conceit was necessary, for what was at stake was a state system that governed

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on behalf of a newly founded industrial one. Man’s overdetermination was not a conceptual mistake in an otherwise neutral or universal philosophy of society. It was constituted by that philosophy and by its many predecessors. The figure of Man2, what Wynter calls homo oeconomicus, inaugurated what we now have inherited in the world—an unrepentant market logic that suffuses every order of knowledge, even Western radicalism. She asserts that this is how the biocentric conceit actually works; it formalized market behavior and its many political and legal justifications as human nature or natural law.175 So what we had observed and experienced as the terror of slavery and colonialism have simply become manifestations of how normative human systems were inevitably meant to stabilize. So now politico-economics regulates behavior in the same way theology had once achieved. In Wynter’s beehive analogy, we have an example of how these sciences conceived of their task as it performed this work. The promise of these human sciences was to understand, like bees functioning in a beehive, how human systems and structures actually worked. Bees work within the context of a beehive; everything that constitutes their being exists in relationship to that hive. All we need to do, then, is observe the hive to know what is happening. But our capacities for knowing the bee and the beehive are not given in the autonomous functioning of the hive. That is to say, biology is a story we tell ourselves about what we are observing, not something inherent to the thing being observed. Human systems, Wynter argued, were the same. Knowledge of human reality is, then, a consequence of a notion of “reality” that is at once an ideologically driven intellectual project, which, in a “lawlike manner,” presumes to objectively confirm the salience of any social order.176 If we have pre-existing stories of who human beings are, no set of empirical observations will lie outside those stories, or the terms produced by that order. No matter how scientifically rigorous. For human systems are “autopoietic” ones that function at the level of both bios and mythoi.177 The modern Western mythoi all starts and continues with Charles Darwin. In assigning meaning to the natural and biologically centered definitions of human, he was merely continuing a tradition. But what he set in motion was a further hardening of those definitions, a further degodding of the meaning of humanity into natural law. Which is also to say a furthering of the racialized and gendered order that it prescribed for maintenance of society. The danger was that Darwin’s story was as Wynter believed both part of natural science as well as a myth. The theory

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of natural selection was another story that had mirrored the idea of an elect—so foundational to Christianity, but it was founded on real-world “observations.” In a world that was moving toward revealed knowledge as the grounds for building the future, it was more convincing than a God that no one had ever seen. Yet somehow the Christian myth of a Hamitic curse survived these observations. As did the Elect. There were those who were naturally selected that became the honored; the status of the dyselected—those formerly cursed—was reserved for the dishonored. Black life was not fit to survive. We were now subrational rather than subhuman. Yet as W.E.B. Du Bois was to counter, the dishonored were not dishonored by nature. They were dishonored by the very epistemological assumption that they could be understood by nature, the bios and mythoi, which Darwin’s generation had inherited from Europe’s encounter with the world.178 On this question, Wynter was to extend from Du Bois and others like Frantz Fanon the idea that evolution was a question not simply of phylogeny or ontogeny but of sociogeny. What it is to be human was a matter of socialization. This is the Third Event.179 The impact of the Darwinian moment on each nascent social science discipline was profound and devastating. Here was a secular explanation, rooted in scientific discovery, of how human differentiation came to be. Here was a great discovery that could provide conceptual tools to effectively plan and order the world. Humans could now be managed and chaos averted. Because the disciplines imbibed this code of the selected/dysselected, their orienting frames made it impossible for them to view the other as anything other than as beings devoid of reason, and thus of humanity. This framing perfectly aligned with the colonial/imperial agenda of homo economicus. Both the philosophical and colonial ruptures were to provide the “new” ground for this “Two Cultures” organization/ order of knowledge. That is, as one whose disciplinary fields were to be all based on the new description of the human as a purely biocentric being, and in whose terms not only the peoples of the Black Diaspora, but this time the peoples of Black Africa itself (as well as their continent, Africa), together with all the colonized dark-skinned “natives” of the world and the darker-skinned and poorer European peoples themselves, were now to find themselves/ourselves as discursively and institutionally imprisoned as the Indians, the Negroes-as-slaves and

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the Mad had been discursively and institutionally imprisoned in the terms of the descriptive statement of the earlier form of Man1.180 To take sociogeny seriously, then, “every discipline you are practicing ceases to exist.”181 In both European and Western Hemispheric universities, the professional associations attached to these new disciplines would burst onto the scene at the precise moment that the white man’s burden played itself out in the colonial outposts of the world. These learned societies gave disciplinary practitioners the licensure to influence generations of students, but also future government officials, leaders, and colonial administrators.182 But through professional conferences and publishing houses, they also set the normative standard for what an acceptable scientific procedure was and should be, what the appropriate spaces of knowing and thinking in that field were, and how to be “objective.”183 These standards simply gave cover to the conceit. And so it is with her conceptions of Man1 and Man2 that Wynter was able to, following Amiri Baraka, “exoticize Western thought.”184 Her largescale account of the present order of knowledge, then, provides one level at which we may see the meaning of disciplinarian thinking, and thus prepare ourselves for what would occur in our attempts to reveal it: “THE HERESY THAT I’M PUTTING FORWARD IS THAT CAPITALISM IS ITSELF A FUNCTION OF THE REPRODUCTION OF ‘MAN,’ THAT ‘MAN’ WHOSE CONCEPTION WE INSTITUTE IN OUR DISCIPLINES. So then you can

understand why I’d expect blows!?!”185

demonic grounds, autonomous frames Sylvia Wynter’s relationship to feminism has been a point of much academic contention. Her refusal to label herself a feminist led Natasha Barnes to frame her as the “reluctant matriarch” of Caribbean women writers and thinkers.186 In 2006, Wynter would famously clarify, stating: “It is not that I am against feminism: I’m appalled at what it became. Originally, there was nothing wrong with my seeing myself as a feminist; I thought it was adding to how we were going to understand this world.”187 But engaging a group of white feminists around this idea in the early 1980s, Wynter would notice that there was something akin to the denial of women’s intellectual capacity that was also true for how the African was similarly negated as incapable of reason. She would find much to

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agree with in their analysis of patriarchy and in their attempts to go back to the origins of humankind to make sense of it. The word “gender” itself, she argued, was but an adaptation of the word “genre,” for “kind,” and therefore useful for a biocentric conceptualization of human anatomical difference, much like conceptions of scientific racism. But when rendered as a supracultural phenomenon, Wynter argued that gender categories could not constitute a universal class. It was part of a class of “something else.”188 And in understanding that “something else,” we might understand the process through which the feminist movement became a bourgeois movement, where “what they’ve done is to fight to be equal breadwinners.”189 In her 1982 talk “Beyond Liberal and Marxist-Leninist Feminisms,” Wynter would develop the term “classarchy”—premised on the model of patriarchy and monarchy—to describe the forms of subjectivity that were inaugurated in the modern era. It was through the “Western middle classes” that the projects of colonialism and capitalism were initiated, and that the “morphogentic fantasy” that had rendered woman as the “key representant, the Symbolic Other” was updated.190 Wynter argues that Man-as-Father was reframed as Man-as-Liber, and under the Marxist tradition, with Man-as-Labor. While woman remained subordinate, the Negro became “irrational.” Wynter would later argue that “‘race’ is really a code-word for ‘genre.’”191 All notions of lack, of unnaturalness, including sexualities, were, then, threats to that landed mercantile, middle-class notion of subjecthood that represented modern Man. Insofar as feminism was defined as becoming “liber” or becoming “productive labor,” it would not displace the antagonism. Liberal and Marxist-Leninist feminisms had only reinscribed the code. It was only from an “autonomous frame of reference”192 that liberation might occur. As Wynter put it, “our liberation as women must be necessarily co-evolutionary with a general liberation of concrete men and women from the governing categories of Western classarchy; from the master conceptions of its ‘global tyrannising discourses.’”193 This important talk, however, remained unpublished. Originally presented at an American Sociological Association panel entitled “Feminism at the Crossroads,” Wynter’s assumed vexatious relationship to feminist thought was the background for Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido’s decision to ask her to contribute the afterword to their groundbreaking work, Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Davies recalls that it was Abdul JanMohamed who suggested that Wynter’s

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talk had been “misunderstood and this was a good opportunity to get her ideas into circulation to a different audience.” Such was the genesis of her most well-known “reengagement with the topic,” her essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Woman. ”194 This essay was a clarion call to unsilence African-descended women. Recalling The Tempest, Wynter notes the curious “absence of Caliban’s woman,” or a female counterpart to the representation of the enslaved and colonized.195 That absence, she argues was constituted by the conceptual system itself, that could only render Caliban’s desire as a desire for Miranda—that is, the subordinated woman of Prospero, his master. And it could only render this desire as normal within the structuring code of modernity. Wynter perceptively asks: “What is the systemic function of her own silencing, both as women and, more totally, as ‘native’ women? Of what mode of speech is that absence of speech both as women (masculinist discourse) and as ‘native’ women (feminist discourse) as imperative function?”196 The “demonic grounds” of Caliban’s woman, “a vantage point outside the space-time orientation” of the regulatory code that doubly silences her, become grounds for addressing and speaking beyond the “ontological difference” that produces the violence of Prospero.197 Caribbean women’s literature that addresses itself to those grounds is a site for that subversion—and must be.

no humans In the wake of the 1992 verdict that exonerated the brutalizers of Rodney King, Black folks took to the streets and sought to unmake the reservations, the ghettoes that warehoused Black life. Such movements only further activated the police, and particularly Los Angeles’s contingent, whose motto “to serve and protect” has become perhaps the most successful public relations coup in the history of law enforcement. Their reactions to the rebellions revealed that what was really in need of serving and protecting was capital.198 And even beyond that cardinal purpose, the property logics of modern capitalism still revolved around Man2. For the young, “jobless Black men” (and women, though Wynter does not mention them) who reports indicated had been labeled by the law enforcement apparatus as “NHI”—“no humans involved”—and thus not existing in the category of the protected, the idea of Man was not metaphorical.199 Writing to her fellow Stanford colleagues, Wynter asked:

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How did they come to conceive of what it means to be both human and North American in the kinds of terms (i.e. to be White, of Euroamerican culture and descent, middle-class, college-educated and suburban) within whose logic, the jobless and usually school drop-out/push-out category young Black males can be perceived, and therefore behaved towards, only as the Lack of the human, the Conceptual Other to being North American?200 It would become a question of knowledge, the kinds of knowledge produced at Stanford, the kinds of knowledge produced out of disciplines, the kinds of knowledges that were constructed by Western civilization. It was a way of knowing that had beaten Rodney King, a way of knowing that had rendered the rebellious as lacking humanity.201 This would be Wynter’s point of entrance into the culture wars, a period that saw her produce an assault against multicultural education, Do Not Call Us Negros, as well as host a conference entitled The Two Reservations—which revisited the work of Harold Cruse, and for her students to develop Institute: NHI, among other projects.202 As she would write in “A Black Studies Manifesto,” what many of the multiculturalists could not conceive—and were lawlikely prevented from conceiving—was that a “move beyond the Western episteme—canons, ‘bell curves’ and all—that is our war now.”203 * * * The logics of the culture wars were never truly resolved. They cannot be under the present order of knowledge. For three decades, Wynter’s call was for a new science of the Word, a call inspired in part by her readings of Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire. Each essay ends with a rearticulation of the necessity of new stories, of new languages, of an episteme that would finally “unspeak Man.”204 This break, she has consistently argued, can only come from a liminal space, a beyond space, a marginal space. It is not about becoming a part of the canon, of being human in terms they recognize. Liberation will not come from within the house. The house is implicated. In a conversation with Bedour Alagraa in 2020, Sylvia Wynter would once again make this escape route plain, linking it squarely to the project of Black Studies: Language is the way that we will carry ourselves out of these problems we have—that is what is important now to remember about Black

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studies during those early years, that it was one part of a bigger project of developing a transformation of knowledge and therefore the transformation of the whole of society, by using a different language to address these intellectual concerns.205 And if “it is Africa that gives us so much of our language world,”206 therein lies the otherwise possibility for rethinking our world, rethinking our stories, rethinking Black Study.

3 Of Speech Jacob H. Carruthers Jr. “First, we must understand more precisely why scientific methodology has such a limited usefulness for oppressed people. The answer, in short, is that it is the Master’s science, not only in the sense that he uses it to control his subjects, but also in the sense that it was established through and for oppression. That is, the original assumptions are oppression, suppression, and repression. Thus, the science of methodology is not neutral or objective; it is the science of control through intervention and/or the unnatural alteration—if possible—of all objects.” Jacob H. Carruthers Jr., Science and Oppression1 “If the great illuminating impact of African Nile Valley civilization on world history made Pan-African renaissance possible, the devasting impact of Western European historiography of lies and atrocities made it necessary. Africans had to develop a new approach to the study of the past.” Jacob H. Carruthers Jr., “The Weheme Mesu and Pan African Historiography”2 “We can say at this point that the battle to liberate African thought from nonexistence has been decisively won! The African defenders and European saviors have demolished the fabricators and their collaborating African scholars on that front. Now we must rescue the victim from European philosophy and science. African Deep Thought must now speak for itself. Rather than set up an interview schedule containing the great issues of European philosophical inquiry, African champions must break the chain that links African ideas to European ideas and listen to the voice of the ancestors without European interpreters.” Jacob H. Carruthers Jr., Mdw Ntr3

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whose speech is good Khun Inpu was a farmer.4 His material existence depended on an ability to produce from the ground and to trade that produce in the market. His life was shaped by an economy that rewarded humble work and good character. But some people forget these ideals. Societies often have opportunists. Sometimes it takes a farmer. And although Khun Inpu was just a farmer, he was a farmer whose speech was good. A fact of real consequence. After loading his goods and traveling into town one day to trade and restock, Khun Inpu made his way through an area known as the Den of Vipers. Coveting his “fortune,” a corrupt government official, Nemtynakht, or “strong robber,” devised an elaborate ruse. As manager of the town’s public farm, Nemtynakht placed a sheet on the road, forcing Khun Inpu to travel through the pasture. While he confronted the official, Khun Inpu’s donkey stopped to graze in the field, giving Nemtynakht all the pretext he needed to reprimand the humble farmer. When he protested, Nemtynakht beat him and brought his case before his corrupt friends in the magistrate, who would subsequently rule that all of Khun Inpu’s goods be seized. But Khun Inpu knew that a great injustice had been committed. His name meant “protected by Inpu,” the deity responsible for ensuring rightness, for judging whether the lightness of one’s heart would enable them to enter the afterlife. Nemtynakht chose the wrong one. For redress, Khun Inpu appealed directly to Rensi, Nemtynakht’s superior, and a government official with a direct line to the ruler. But Rensi, as his name implied, was a “shuffler.” He was wont to side with the Vipers. But Khun Inpu had no fear of this sort of authority. His was an appeal to an ideal more profound than corrupted human power, an ideal that resists Western disciplinary categorization, an ideal called ma’at. What was at issue was not a crime against property or person, but against ma’at. And just what was ma’at? In this context, it was a concept that comes closest to the English words “truth” and “justice.” Which is to say that these ideas, separate in the English language, were combined in one word and existed within the same conceptual space in the world of Khun Inpu. And even that is only the surface.5 Impressed by this argument, Rensi alerted the king, Nebkaure, informing him that the farmer’s speech was “good.” Not merely “enjoyable” or “entertaining,” it was right. So the king ordered that Khun Inpu’s words be marked down for prosperity. For he knew that a violation of ma’at

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would place society itself in jeopardy. A society needed to re-member its wisdom. In response to this edict, Rensi strategically stayed silent to allow Khun Inpu to dispense this wisdom. Nebkaure secretly provided resources to Khun Inpu’s family over the course of the appeal. Khun Inpu would offer eight more petitions. Each time, he laid down the principles that had been forgotten by the Vipers but also by Rensi himself. The ethical and spiritual dimensions of violation and theft, of poverty and power, are weighed against the necessity of repair and restoration. In the eighth petition, Khun Inpu summarized all of his arguments with a demand that Rensi “speak ma’at, do ma’at.” As the “leader” of the society, Rensi’s duty was to match his actions with the goodness of speech or face the wrath of a power higher than earthly authority, as Khun Inpu warned in the ninth and final petition. Ultimately, Khun Inpu reminds him that the source of his speech was Divine. He had become a teacher, a Divine vessel for the re-membering of the society. After the ninth petition, Khun Inpu was summoned back by Rensi, fully expecting to be beaten or executed. Instead, the Shuffler offered reparations by not only restoring his seized goods but awarding him Nemtynakht’s entire estate. A story of the early Middle Kingdom, this text, titled by Egyptologists “The Eloquent Peasant,” is perhaps one of the oldest preserved African texts that explores what many believe to be questions of ethics, of justice. It has been used to explore Egyptian notions of law and order, class relations, and leadership. Still others marvel at that apparent oxymoron that a peasant can also be “eloquent.”6 Eschewing much of these meanings, Jacob H. Carruthers Jr. deployed this text to explore the inseparability between mdw nfr (good speech), mdw ntr (Divine speech), and ma’at. He reminded us that the text was written in a moment when Egyptian life was undergoing a tumultuous transition that gave rise to “petty officials.” It was a moment when a broken society required a re-membering of ways of resolving such complex ethical and moral problems.7 It is not so much the eloquence that matters here. It is rather the recovery of the principles of good speech. In fact, Carruthers retitled the story “The Nine Petitions of the Farmer Whose Speech Is Good,” in order to retain “the judgment expressed in the text itself.” Upon hearing Khun Inpu’s initial appeal, Rensi was to say, “I have found one among those farmers whose speech is good, of true essence.”8 The concepts of mdw nfr (good speech) and mdw ntr (Divine speech) are the entire point. Their elevation as a central concern for the cohesion

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of society is the lesson of the story. Any collection of human beings living together must have a way to resolve questions of difference. Indeed, this is the crux of the conceptual rationale for modern politics and its emphasis on reason. Yet for the Africans in “The Nine Petitions of the Farmer Whose Speech Was Good,” it is good speech that became a mode for establishing a standard of conduct and character; ma’at was the essential glue that held it together. It was not equated with rhetorical flourish or with eloquence. It was not about being persuasive or cunning. It was ma’at that mattered. Further, good speech was not a jealously regarded mode of articulation held exclusively by high officials, the educated, or the wealthy. It was a collective possession and responsibility. And although human differences could often result in harm and violence, Khun Inpu’s story is an indication that all who master speech also master the meaning of right living. It is a principle that never loses.9 * * * The concept of speech in the work of Jacob Carruthers allows us to rethink the categorizations of knowledge we have been given to study ourselves. Good speech can move us toward a reconceptualization of the idea of disciplinarity. For Carruthers, “African Deep Thought” is a more expansive phrase to account for the various ways that Africans across time and space made sense of their reality and their worlds.10 In his methodology, the disruptions of modernity are there, but they matter far less than our abilities to find continuities.11 It is indeed those continuities that will ultimately displace the modern era—what Carruthers famously called “this mess that we’re in”—and usher us into a different kind of future.12 Much of that work has included taking stock of the nature of Western civilization and European thought, if only to understand what our miseducation has wrought. Black Studies has long grappled with the effects of the erasure and recovery of African pasts, and most fundamentally, how they relate to the on-the-ground conditions of Black folk.13 For Carruthers, the recovery of our memory is intellectual warfare, part of the long-view struggle to link a rethinking of history to the possibilities of a future world founded on otherwise terms. Or as Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o put it: “Memory is the link between the past and the present, between space and time, and it is the base of our dreams. Writers and the intellectuals in these movements are aware that without a reconnection with African memory, there

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is no wholeness.”14 The African liberation struggle then requires, as it always has, a dip into this “Deep Well of African thought.”15 For the study of this past becomes a window into the relationship between African ways of knowing and how to live and be in light of that knowledge. As Khun Inpu exemplified, we too can speak ma’at, in order to do ma’at.

all my teachers were black Jacob Hudson Carruthers Jr. was born during the first months of the Great Depression in Dallas, Texas. For the next thirty-four years of his life, he remained in Texas, and would be shaped by a political system that inherently denied Black people’s right to life. But more profoundly, he was also forged in a community of Black folk for whom that denial meant an even more necessary insistence on upliftment, love, and righteousness. His was a family of institution-builders. His mother’s grandfather, Henry Taylor, was a Houston-based tailor who migrated from Alabama after emancipation. His paternal great-great grandfather, Henry Carruthers, had helped found an all-Black farming community near Waco, after the Civil War, originally named Forks of the Creek and later renamed Pelham, Texas. It was here, in this relatively self-sustaining community, where a young Carruthers would spend his summers.16 And there was also the church. His father, Jacob, Sr., a former pitcher in the Negro Leagues, earned his degree in theology from Gammon Theological Seminary and became an itinerant minister in the United Methodist church. The Carruthers family “moved often and lived throughout the state of Texas in cities from north to south and east to west, such as San Angelo, Houston, Fort Worth, and San Antonio.”17 Like most Africans in the United States South, the church was the literal fount of community, a place that connected spiritual health to material well-being. Not unconnected to that were the educational options available to Black children in the segregated schools. Though often starved of resources, the true strength of these schools were Black teachers. “All my teachers were Black,” Carruthers remembered, “from kindergarten through high school, through baccalaureate, through the master’s degree.”18 One of his principals, John Caldwell, had even earned a PhD and became a role model—not unheard of in the era of Jim Crow education. Ms. Bailey, one of those teachers at Dallas’s B.F. Darrell Junior High School, had initially exposed him to the story of the Haitian Revolution. There was also Ms. Brooks and Ms. Pendleton, Carruthers’s biology teacher and liter-

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ature teachers, respectively. Ms. Pendleton, Carruthers, recalls “taught me more than any other teacher that I ran into until I got to graduate school.”19 They, alongside his parents, cultivated a love of reading. His first “Black book” was W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn. Even as a child and high school student, he was unafraid to challenge authority, particularly as it related to Black folk and their rights. Though he was almost expelled for organizing a strike as student council president, Carruthers graduated from Phillis Wheatley High School at the age of sixteen. The next fall, he entered Sam Huston College, an HBCU in Austin, Texas, where he would encounter important Black educators like Karl E. Downs and J. Leonard Farmer, the father of Congress for Racial Equality founder, James Farmer. After four years, Carruthers earned his BA in Political Science and set his sights on graduate school, intent on earning a PhD. But this was the era of desegregation. And in Texas, like in many other states, there were efforts to integrate professional schools for aspiring Black lawyers.20 Carruthers had already been accepted to the University of Texas under the proviso that he attend a segregated off-campus facility. But when the Supreme Court struck down the university’s segregation statute in Sweatt v. Painter, the NAACP asked Carruthers to shift his plans and go to law school, joining Heman Sweatt and a group that included Virgil C. Lott, Dudley D. Redd, George Washington Jr., and Elwin Franklin Jarmon in order that no one experience the desegregation process on their own. It was a full-circle moment, where Carruthers was poised to fulfill a childhood dream of becoming a lawyer. But it was not to be. In his words, they “had hell.”21 According to Ifé Carruthers, when they entered they were “surrounded by a hostile Ku Klux Klan and a heckling, name-calling mob of hate mongers. The group experienced daily indignities from their fellow students, professors, and the outside community.”22 There were systematic attempts to discourage them from finishing. Sweatt himself had flunked out. And for Carruthers, it was not something to be endured. He was “unwilling to submit to the humiliating, dehumanizing, daily torture, and firmly convinced that the law was not for him, he left the Law School in the middle of his second semester.”23 It was 1951 and war was raging in Korea. Black folk were being forced into the draft and many were dying on the front lines. Carruthers, hoping to avoid the draft, volunteered for the Air Force. After a year, he was discharged due to an illness and took a job reporting for the Houston Informer. While there, he began to cover and investigate stories of police

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brutality in Texas and was eventually hired as an investigator for the NAACP. In one headlining article, he asked “Who’s Going to Protect Us from the Protectors?” in the wake of a Black Houstonian being so battered by law enforcement that his injuries required nineteen stiches to close a head wound.24 After two years, Carruthers moved on to the post office, an often underground site for Black consciousness-raising and political activism. It was where Heman Sweatt was previously employed before deciding to join the desegregation battle.25 While working at the post office, Carruthers attended Texas Southern University—the Black university created to sidestep the specter of desegregation represented by the Sweatt case—and earned a MA degree in political science. In 1961, after five years at the post office, he joined the faculty of Prairie View A&M College of Texas, another HBCU. During his tenure there, Carruthers participated alongside eight other faculty members in a boycott of the segregated facilities of Hempstead, Texas. The 1963 boycott grew to include two thousand students after they went on strike when the Prairie View administration refused to support it. Much like across parts of the South, business interests were forced to concede. But not before a white business owner angrily lashed out at Carruthers. As a Texas native, Carruthers was supposed to know how to go along to get along. But that was never his style. These sorts of actions came at a cost. The city fathers did relent, but the faculty members who had forced their hand ultimately had to go. While the administration could not fire the activists outright, Carruthers and the eight other faculty activists were out of Prairie View within the space of a year. They would all become personae non gratae within what Carruthers called the “Booker T. Washington network,” the collective of HBCU presidents who shared intelligence on troublemakers in the professoriate.26 In 1964, after the boycott, Carruthers moved to Boulder, Colorado, to enroll in a political science PhD program at the University of Colorado. While there he was a part of a local chapter of the Friends of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), but soon soured on the tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. Those experiences, together with his own activist history and the ongoing struggles in the South, led him to write a dissertation titled “The Theory of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience.” Focusing on the ideas of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Luthuli, and Bertrand Russell, and case studies that included general strikes, the student movement at University of California, Berkeley, and the US Southern-based civil rights struggle, the dissertation argued that

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nonviolence as an absolute was immoral because it subjected people to violent reprisals without any guarantee of positive change. There was no reason to conclude that nonviolent disobedience was more effective, more just, “even in the most liberal parts of the contemporary world.”27 The dissertation masterfully walked through the development of state theory as well as contract theory, focusing on the duty of obligation as a key mode of social control arrayed against the idea of disobedience. From John Locke to John Stuart Mill, to T. H. Green and Harold Laski, the evolution of the practice of political theory seemed to be wired to prevent the sorts of disobedience that were being practiced as part of anticolonial and anti–Jim Crow movements, those sorts of resistance that went to the very core of society. Carruthers wrote: “The modern political theorists reviewed above (with the possible exceptions of Marx, and to some extent Rousseau) have concentrated on institutional arrangements that are designed to overcome the necessity of revolution.”28 Intellectually, Carruthers sharply critiqued the tendency of state bureaucracies to absorb and demobilize leaders of nonviolent movements, even pointing out that scholars in his home discipline of political science were trusty experts who produced recommendations “designed to render the system more responsible and responsive and efficient,” and “to keep people from doing things for themselves.”29 Politically, he felt that goals of the civil rights movement were important but had serious disagreements with the tactics of nonviolent discipline.30 It simply produced a moment where the state could respond with “public charity” rather than the “opportunity for social regeneration. Police are increased in lieu of social order. Elections to poverty boards are given instead of avenues for self-help.”31 In the end, the nonviolent leader was a “gadfly,” whose eventual absorption left the masses “outside the gates of effective power.”32 After defending the dissertation, Carruthers knew that he would be unable to obtain another job at an HBCU because of his disruptive activism at Prairie View. So after a short stint at historically white Kansas State College, where he was the lone Black professor and supported striking students, a tenure denial led to his resignation and his recruitment to Northeastern Illinois University’s Center for Inner City Studies in Chicago.33 Chicago in 1968 was a veritable Black Power epicenter. Every element of the Black liberation struggle—from radical bookstores to avant-garde jazz to Black Studies—had a Chicago wing. Carruthers would be introduced to this world through his colleague and soon-to-be best friend, Anderson

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Thompson.34 A key thinker and activist in his own right, Thompson was a Chicago native and leading figure in Chicago’s Black nationalist community.35 Whether it was the National Association of Afro-American Educators or the Organization of Black American Culture, the DuSable Museum or the Communiversity, Thompson was either directly affiliated or close to the members of these critical formations. After serving as the acting principal of Forestville High School, he joined the Center for Inner City Studies as a professor in 1966.36 The Center for Inner City Studies was operated by Don Smith, Nancy Arnez, and Sonja Stone, the latter of whom was the founding director. But the idea of Inner City Studies came from the United States Department of Education. It was designed to be a liberal attempt to orient schoolteachers to the various challenges they might face with students from the Southside and Westside of Chicago. Located seventeen miles away from the NEIU’s man campus, the Center’s home was traditionally a hub of Black activity for Black social and cultural organizations. But the Center’s ideological assumptions were straight from Western social-scientific thought and practice, some of which came from their Southside neighbors at the University of Chicago.37 The Department of Education’s idea of teacher training was shrouded in the dominant liberal assumptions of that era. The pathology of Black students was assumed. Over the next several years, Carruthers became the department chair and helped build a full-time curriculum. Alongside his colleagues, they would displace this normative model.38 The problem was that Inner City Studies was dominated by a premise that reified “the city” as an ideal. Western sociology had nominated urban environments as a site to study the question of social adjustment and assimilation.39 But the city was also a site for Black people’s negation, both politically and culturally. Ghettoization and development produced environmental constraints that sociologists believed explained poverty. Yet it was not only that environmental explanations of poverty were wanting; it was also that those explanations could never reveal the real issue—that the city was a product of a decidedly Western worldview.40 Carruthers’s sense that Black people were not the problem likely came from both his familial background and his deft readings of political authority. He had already noticed the ways that disciplines had a way of concealing their relation to power. What social scientists said about Black folk in the inner city could not be trusted. Carruthers, Thompson, and others would rethink Inner City Studies by starting from the basic

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foundation of the worldviews that conspired to formulate the notion of the city, the ghetto, the political, as a site for oppressive domination. In so doing, students were initiated into a discourse that did not take philosophers such as Plato or G.W.F. Hegel for granted as the founders of academic fields who could logically explain reality. Rather, they returned them to their contexts. The disciplines they were said to have founded were rethought as “logical systems,” and their complicity in “the project of world hegemony and exploitation” were fully articulated.41 Carruthers explains: What we started realizing is that, as long as we were using the methodology of the standard disciplines, sociology, history, political science, economics, and so forth and so on, that we really weren’t producing the kind of knowledge that was necessary to change what was happening to African people throughout the world.42 How might Inner City Studies critique or read the world from a different frame, one that acknowledged that these were Black children, children of African descent? How did these children understand the meaning of the city in their lives? With Carruthers as chair, they began to address the needs of the community by essentially pursuing an Africana Studies methodology.43 This approach was quite interesting to consider amid the backdrop of other ideological forces in Chicago. The assertion of the need to construct an African frame for thinking history and historiography was one of the most important developments. Anderson Thompson’s brainchild, the Association of African Historians, was such a vehicle, founded “to reconstruct and interpret African history and culture from an Afro-centric view.”44 In February 1972, the Association invited Harold Cruse to the Center to speak to the ongoing questions raised by his The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. The attraction of Cruse spoke to the central and growing importance of a nationalist political orientation as the grounds for their reframing of history and for thinking the inner city.45 But Chicago was simultaneously home to a range of political and ideological perspectives. There were those, like Robert Rhodes and Abdul Alkalimat, who remained attached to Marxist-Leninist readings of the Black condition. Some of these Marxist organizers connected such readings to revolutionary nationalist and Pan Africanist political movements. Alongside political formations like the Congress of Racial Equality,

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the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panthers, there were Black educator-activists like Barbara Sizemore and Hugh Lane, Black Studies formations at Malcolm X College and Northwestern, the speakers at the Washington Park Forum, the preachings of the Nation of Islam, booksellers like Hammurabi, poets and artists of the rank of Gwendolyn Brooks, AfriCOBRA, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and publishers like Don Lee (Haki Madhubuti) of Third World Press.46 There were also those who studied the psychological nature of white supremacy like Frances Cress Welsing and Bobby Wright, who came to be part of what was known as the “Chicago group” that would develop critiques of many of these other approaches to questions of liberation. Along with Thompson and Carruthers, other Association of African Historians members included Harold Pates, Cliff Washington, Conrad Worrill, Leon Harris, and Lorenzo Martin. They would eventually create The Afrocentric World Review, where over several volumes the Chicago group developed the idea of an African worldview while offering penetrating critiques of Western liberal and radical theory.47 The Association argued that “Afrocentrality” was “the plateau from which we launch our dialogues with those who are dedicated to the establishment of power among African peoples.” Offering an early definition of the term, they viewed “Afrocentrism” as an intellectual project that reinforced “the New African Frame of Reference being forged by Black brothers all over the world. It seeks a collective identity founded on Black ideas, rather than the ideas of non-Blacks.”48 It was a “methodological directive” that required the space-clearing efforts of producing “Black Studies about non-Blacks.”49 Throughout its short run, the journal featured articles on historical Black-White alliances, the nature of Arabic imperialism, and organizational analyses of the First International, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the African Blood Brotherhood, among others. But the first number led with Carruthers’s “Marx and the Negro.” Published a year after the Cruse symposium, the essay begins with a response to The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual as well as several other publications and speeches given by Cruse in the intervening years that addressed the “relevancy” of the works of “Karl Marx and his ‘professed’ followers.”50 Among other ideas, Cruse had argued for a reimagining of Marxism for American racial contexts. Yet for Carruthers, it was also necessary to re-engage Marx on Marx’s own terms in order to clarify the distinction between the theory of Karl Marx and the tradition of Marxism. It was an

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uncritical acceptance of the scientific validity of historical materialism— which did not acknowledge Marx’s own hesitance and acknowledgments of its limitations—that had produced a moment of sectarian tension in Chicago and elsewhere, and in some cases stalled important organizing activities among Black activists.51 Yet this was more than empty ideological posturing and fruitless gestures. For Carruthers, it was not that Marx was silent on race (he acknowledged that Marx was not); it was that Marx’s theory of history seemed to require the colonized world to encounter Europe to be deemed “historical.” That a universalist conception of socialism revolved around modernity required that Western societies be seen as progressive, which meant that the creation of a colonial order was a necessary precondition. This had serious implications for both the content and theory of Marxist thought and practice under the sign of scientific socialism: The analysis that flows from the Marxian method of analysis asserts by explicit judgements and by implications that desirable human development started among Europeans; that all non-Europeans remained in the first form of society until they were penetrated by advanced Western European Nations. This conclusion, inseparable from the method, whatever the case otherwise, presents a curious implication: Since Europeans were and always have been a minority of the world population, why would one posit their life patterns as normal and the majority of life as abnormal or better yet subnormal. To this must be added another concern: that the force applied by the developed nations in their dominion over and exploitation of these “idyllic” oriental and barbaric communities, while unspeakably inhumane, was necessary for their development from a general humanitarian standpoint; but, (and this is crucial) also from the standpoint of the interest of the European workers. The fact that Marx’s theory required the foreceable [sic] overthrow of a small of group of hard core Capitalistic Monopolists, and their hired lackies, offers little consolation.52 These projections of time (as modernity), space (as Europe, as New World colonial geography), and progress (as inevitable) were only indicators of a deeper problem: The epistemological foundation of Marxist theory was necessarily Western, not universal. In a follow-up article, “Christian and Capitalistic Roots of Karl Marx’s Communist Theory,” published in 1975, Carruthers offered a review of that genealogy. In this

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article, which included explorations of French socialism, British political economy, and German idealism—Marx’s named influences—Carruthers generated an understanding of the similarities and common ground between Marx and Friedrich Engels’s theory of human emancipation and the development of modern Western thought. It was less a radical departure than it was an extension of the very architectures and blueprints of modern science and order.53 For the Association of African Historians, these forays were part of a larger project of uncovering the central elements of the European worldview, a critical intervention made by a coterie of Black social scientists in the seventies. But one can only appreciate the depth of that intervention if we further interrogate Carruthers’s approach to the idea of Western disciplinarity.

science and oppression One of the most potent opening salvos to these discussions throughout the seventies was a short essay written by Carruthers that circulated as a pamphlet entitled Science and Oppression. First published in 1972, it had been the result of several conversations among academics at the Center. But as Carruthers wrote at the beginning of the essay, it was also a nod to the energy of Black people outside the gates, epitomized by H. Rap Brown.54 In the course of revising the curriculum of Inner City Studies, members of the faculty were embroiled in a debate about the appropriateness of “the modern Western intellectual project” and its most cherished invention: scientific methodology. Carruthers and the larger Chicago group had begun to adopt the position outlined above: Inner City Studies was part of a larger Western worldview, where many of its problems were rooted. But colleagues at the Center argued that these problems did not compromise the practices of science as such. They were simply biases in the humanities, and more specifically, the social sciences. They were merely examples of bad science. Science, properly practiced, offered universal standards for the discovery of knowledge. Carruthers did not accept this framing. Writing in the preface to the fourth edition of the pamphlet, Carruthers recalls his response that bias within the social sciences was at best a “secondary or tertiary problem.”55 What his colleagues and others were calling universal standards, whether they were linked to the “hard” or “soft” sciences, had been actually shaped in a very real way by a modern social world that explained their emergence and their success. The sciences, for Carruthers—and as Sylvia

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Wynter would also argue—were the product of a “modern period when the ancient moral and theological barriers to its open embracement were eliminated.”56 Modern science developed a practice and crafted its own rationale independent of and hostile toward many of the approaches that preceded it. Its supposed universality was useful vanity. The pamphlet was a critical attempt to name and contextualize the essence of that conceit in order to assess the utility of Western science for Inner City Studies. Carruthers’s mode of addressing this question returned us to the question of epistemology. Modern theories of knowledge were founded on what scientists have called the “gold standard” of experimentation.57 Carruthers reminds us that “when one analyzes the experimental methods, he soon sees that this particular methodology is itself considered science.”58 First imagined as the route toward exact knowledge of the physical world, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European scientists and philosophers began to apply similar methods to the “social organism”—a practice, as we have seen, that W.E.B. Du Bois found particularly wanting.59 But Carruthers would go further. It was essential to point out that such attempts to describe the “time and space” of the social world erased, minimized, or converted “qualitative distinctions” into “quantitative distinctions,” created hierarchies, rankings, and other ways of developing “ordinal classifications” with respect to human life.60 Carruthers asserted that the sorts of “cultural Darwinism” and theories of “social progress” they spawned were innate features of scientism.61 The creation of binaries, of juxtapositions, the constructions of models and exemplars became ways of explaining differences in nature in a workable manner that reified that there was a norm and a standard. Science became the practice of measuring differences or departures from that norm. From there a researcher could make a hypothesis, select an experimental method, and make sense of any social reality. This was scientific discovery. And if that discovery challenged the old norm, a new paradigm could be imagined, a new norm constructed. For Carruthers, this idea of discovery was more about “widespread and longstanding agreements among members of the scientific community” and less about the continual improvement, correction, and realization of some universal standard for knowing reality. And importantly, discovery also had a deeper and more sinister purpose: conquest.62 Western scientific methodology was premised on “control through intervention and/or unnatural alteration—if possible—of all objects.” It was a response to a belief system that “nature is uneven in supply-

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ing the needs of man.”63 And so nature must be modified to fit man’s desires and needs. Nature must be conquered in the name of knowledge, for “implicit in the scientific methodology is the command that no mountain will be unscaled, no fact will remain unexplained.”64 Science was an “endless frontier.”65 But the last two centuries or so had demonstrated that the success and improvement of scientific method was also the success and improvement of imperialism. Technological innovation could not be abstracted from the perpetuation of European capitalist order—the research university was an open demonstration of this reality. This objective of social control—as practiced by pioneering political scientists and sociologists—was deeply colonial in its projection of human difference and inferiority. But so, too, was the relationship between basic science and the natural world. The hard-versus-soft dichotomy obscured this relation. Carruthers shows that the need to dominate its subject was not only true of colonial subjugation but intrinsic to natural science: “the conquest of Africa is not basically different from the conquest of uranium.”66 The disruption of Black life is intimately connected to climate catastrophe.67 The monstrosity of racialization is deeply rooted in these foundations. Carruthers shared these positions with both Wynter—who during this period elaborated in Black Metamorphosis on the racist material consequences of a scientific tradition hell-bent on control—and Cedric Robinson—who was to offer in 1977 that liberal ideas around scientific reality was not Reality, it was “that aspect of Reality which is manageable.”68 That this manageable reality was responsible for the oppressive regimes faced by Black folk was implicit in the dominant conceptions of Western scientific methodology. While Carruthers sympathized with the notion that it was necessary for the oppressed to know Western thought in order to oppose it, he expressed that the idea that we could simply flip or improve this scientism would only rearrange or reorder the antagonism.69 Unfortunately, “scientific socialism” would offer no escape route, insofar as it traded in the universalism that denied that there were “sciences rather than science.”70 The only path of escape was in the collective wisdom of those oppressed by the system. This was the other inspiration for the pamphlet, embodied in the historian Carter Godwin Woodson, who had so beautifully argued that miseducation was perhaps the reason that so many Black educated intellectuals abandoned that wisdom despite its power to also know reality.71 In a short paper, Carruthers had done more to clarify

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the meaning of scientific methodology and its significance for oppressed people than what any of the faculty had previously encountered in their graduate studies. It was an argument that resonated so much that Nancy Arnez had Science and Oppression published and circulated.72 Only six pages in length, its powerful message has reverberated across generations. There are now seven editions. As declared in The Afrocentric World Review, the sources of the wisdom that might displace this defective science were in our deep pasts. Members of the Chicago group began engaging and reading the work of a cadre of African historians—some “without portfolio”—including those who walked out of the white-controlled African Studies Association (ASA) in 1969.73 John Henrik Clarke, an Alabama-born, Harlem-based scholar rooted in the Pan African nationalist movement, was one of the thinkers who would have an immense impact on the Chicago group.74 It was he who, along with members of the African Heritage Studies Association, which initially began as a breakaway faction of the ASA, articulated the importance of history along “Afrocentric lines.”75 And it was he who introduced Carruthers and the Chicago group to the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop.76 In the late 1950s, Clarke had encountered Diop’s words in the proceedings of the Congress of Black Writers and Artists. From then on, he was involved in promoting Diop’s ideas to Black audiences in the United States, eventually shepherding the translations of his Nations négre et culture (1954) and L’unite culturellé de l’Afrique Noire (1959) into print—a task made more difficult by the lack of interest in such work among American publishers.77 Born in Caytu in the region of Diourbel, Senegal, Diop was a product of the Murid tradition, an expression of African Islam formulated to explicitly oppose European colonialism.78 This milieu was formative. It was a revolutionary environment that drove Diop’s desire to know his people’s cultural heritage more deeply. Even as a secondary school student, he began his journey into the study of languages by developing a Wolof alphabet.79 That work would grow by leaps and bounds as he encountered the larger valences of African life and history. Like many in the Francophone African world, he was further educated in Paris, where he was part of student struggles during an exciting moment, what he later called an “African renaissance.” The appeal of relating and comparing West African languages and the promise of Wolof in illuminating scientific and technological ideas became more resonant during the student movement days and remained a critical intellectual concern.80

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This background explains the intellectual insurgency that culminated as Nations. The revulsion of the French academic establishment was some indication of the break Diop was executing. His historical work posited an interpretation of Nile Valley history that linked its ancient inhabitants to the whole of the rest of the continent. But as a linguist and natural scientist, he would bring other approaches to bear on this large-scale question of African cultural identity and its centrality to how we might imagine the renaissance that needed to occur in the twentieth century. While it has been drilled down to the question of the race of the ancient Egyptians, the meaning of Diop’s work was really a reassertion of the importance of the systematic excavation of African history and culture to the contemporary struggles for liberation.81 His other works were interested in the nature of ancient modes of production in Africa, in developing arguments for the political federation of Africa, and offered a robust critique of anthropology and Western knowledge in its relationship to African history, culture, and the intellectual and scientific legacies of African people.82 Diop’s concerns were wide-ranging, but very much rooted in the cultural autonomy of Africa. As mentioned earlier, in 1966 Diop was named alongside W.E.B. Du Bois as one of the two scholars whose work had exerted the greatest influence on the African world.83 Yet he was also marginalized politically and professionally by his rival, the Negritude poet and president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Even after being allowed to return to public life, Diop had been somewhat relegated to the Radiocarbon Laboratory within the Institut Francophone d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) at the University of Dakar, where he was a practicing scientist.84 Here again the contradictions of nation and intellectual independence reared its head in “postcolonial” Africa. But Diop’s resolve was not dampened. The desire to connect the past to present struggles never wavered. The study of ancient Nile Valley civilizations was only one point of entry, but an important one. Carruthers and others would soon recognize the importance of reclaiming the Nile Valley as part of a reclamation project of African history. After the translation of his books into English, the Association of African Historians dove headlong into Diop’s ideas. Together with Clarke, as well as historians Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Chancellor Williams, and John G. Jackson, the battle to realize African history on African-centered terms was well underway. But Carruthers soon recognized that there was a missing element.

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In 1975, he experienced an exchange that changed this dynamic forever. Deciding to deepen his engagement with African history, Carruthers took a leave of absence from the Center for a year of study and travel. Part of his itinerary was devised by Clarke who strongly advised that he visit Dakar. Armed with a letter of introduction from Clarke, Carruthers would spend hours engaging Diop on what the Chicago group had been up to.85 Diop was fresh off a challenge he and Congolese scholar Theophile Obenga had launched to a contingent of Egyptologists at the 1974 Cairo conference on the Peopling of the Nile Valley and the Deciphering the Meroitic Script—a discussion that Diop had initiated at the behest of the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization (UNESCO). At the convening, Obenga had presented compelling evidence of a linguistic basis for that cultural unity which connected the Nile Valley to the rest of Africa.86 But there was more work to do. With Afro-Cuban activist Carlos Moore serving as a translator, Diop encouraged Carruthers to seriously study the language of the Egyptians. While others on the continent were engaging in anthropological and archaeological study of African material cultures and their links to ancient Africa, there was a need to extend that analysis to the collective wisdom of Africa that was contained in the word. Letting the ancestors speak for themselves would become a mantra for the Chicago group from that point on. Carruthers began taking classes in Middle Egyptian at the Oriental Institute. But he deepened his knowledge of the language by teaching it at the Center for Inner City Studies in a course entitled African Civilizations. By the end of the decade, Carruthers had mastered the language he called mdw ntr (Divine speech). And with others in that circle, he established the Kemetic Institute in 1978. Ever the institution builder.87 His career as a social scientist was almost fully in the rearview. As the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) was organizing vis-à-vis the American Political Science Association (APSA), along much the same lines as the African Heritage Studies Association, Carruthers was imagining what he called in an article “An Alternative to Political Science.”88 If the ideas of the inner city that came from Western science were increasingly irrelevant to our conception of ourselves, then the discipline of political science was largely irrelevant too. There were those in NCOBPS who simply wanted to diversify the discipline. And there were also those Black political scientists who were arguing for the need for a different epistemological base, one that centered Black political behavior within the system. But for Carruthers, the “more fundamental

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problem” was the “usefulness of political science” as a whole “for Black people.”89 “An Alternative to Political Science” begins from the simplistic premise that political science’s problem was a lack of diversity in order to reach for that more fundamental problem. Citing both the 1977 Paul L. Puryear, Maurice Woodard, and Vernon Gray study on the academic status of Black political science as well as the silencing of pioneering Black political scientists and social scientists such as W.E.B. Du Bois in the discipline’s dominant histories, Carruthers makes a critical point: The racist histories of the founders of the discipline—John W. Burgess being an especially egregious example—were not some accidental feature of the development of an otherwise usable discipline. The very idea of politics is fraught, specious, even poisonous.90 Political science was a discipline founded on the logic of the polis, a formation of an inherently interest-based society. Here again, we find Carruthers ruminating on the Western city, but this time taking it back to the Greek foundations of the concept, which were for political scientists the foundation of representative democracy.91 He argued that in Greece, “each city is hopelessly divided between the few and the many, the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots, the oligarches [sic] and the demos. What is advantageous to one group is disadvantageous to the other. Thus, each city is two nations and the perennial problem of actual politics and theoretical politics (political science) is the resolution of that conflict.”92 Perhaps Black people’s interests would be served by a more deft treatment of Black political behavior within the power centers of the discipline. Much of the Black presence within APSA was betting that more accurate data or a better handle on the questions of ideology and political behavior could lead to the resolution of the inherent conflict set up by a racist political society that had determined advantage and disadvantage.93 Yet for Carruthers, we were better served imagining an alternative, rather than playing the game of politics or placing all our hope on political representation within an unchanged system. Our interests were not going to be honored. And further, the have-nots would not be liberated simply by replacing the haves. We were not going to be free by flipping the logics of the nation. Indeed, it might not even possible to do that. Ancient Egypt was one source of an alternative epistemology. The question of the political did not arise in this world, a society that did not value group interest over and against the values that tied it together: “interest was never considered the foundation of the juridical order.”94 It

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was not a political philosophy that governed, but one that could only be called nonpolitical or antepolitical. Every human society was not reducible to political logics, but this did not make them utopian. Still, the differences mattered to Carruthers: “I am by no means romanticizing the culture of ancient Egypt. There were many instances of wrongdoing and petty hustling but these were never elevated to a level of dignity as serious contenders for the ethics of the society as is true in Greece and Rome and Europe.”95 And as is true in modern Western societies. Some of the most serious breaches of ethical conduct in human history of course could be found in a modern “democratic” project that could sustain a racial hierarchy and the ensuing violence of the maafa. When American political science offered scientific rationalizations to that racial degradation, it was merely attempting to restore dignity to “democracy.”96 For Carruthers, an “African human science” on the model of Cheikh Anta Diop’s work would not only prevent African reliance on Greek and Western models, it would seriously consider the profound differences found in the many systems of African governance where “the political” was not the foundation of order.97 The seventies saw Africans on the continent and in the diaspora so “entrenched in Machiavellianism and Madisonianism” that our conception of national life was mired in the question of party politics and party interests. The Sixth Pan African Congress, which Anderson Thompson had attended, was one example of this tension. More than anything, Black Studies needed what Carruthers characterized as “frank and open study and discourse on the possibility of the wisdom of African governance as an alternative to political science.”98 In 1982, these themes formed the basis of yet another treatment of this question. Carruthers’s essay “Thinking about European Thought” emerged from the consideration that the focus on the contradiction of Western ideas of freedom and their actual practices was a well-worn and tired trope that missed the mark. Carruthers offered instead a formulation that the Western idea of freedom was in fact doing exactly what it intended. His lens for thinking this question was the concept of “work”— the focus of both liberal and radical notions of “economic value and moral virtue,” the source of the good life or revolutionary subject.99 Man was a product of the work ethic, which had meaning for both the liberal premises upon which modern capitalism had been structured as well as for the revolutionary project of Marxism. This could only be true if they were both rooted in a precedent philosophy of life.

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Carruthers again traces this philosophy to an ancient foundation, focusing on Hesiod’s Work and Days and its significance for Greek society. In this world, work was honored but was also demoted to drudgery. The “cosmic conflict” that had ushered the world into being nominated Zeus as a supreme being who was also free—to do whatever he pleased.100 This seemed to naturally lead to conflict, to what G.W.F. Hegel would later name as “the dialectic.” Reality is the contradiction between opposing forces.101 In such a situation, work became what separated the winners and losers in this competitive matrix. But it also introduced the idea that work was reserved for certain categories of people, including women who had been, in the image of Pandora, “the ‘ruin of mankind.’”102 The competition and conflict that dominated Greek society would only be resolved by “politics.” But ironically, those who were free to participate in the political process were only free because they had been “saved” from work by those who could not participate. Western freedom was both the ability to work and to work over others. A cosmic conflict refracted through material circumstances.103 This was the germ of Western life that would infect the modern world. Carruthers imputed this sense of the significance of work to a construct he called “fundamental alienation.” Because of these conflicts, man was alienated from God. Warfare and strife were going concerns, and hostility was the supposed state of nature.104 As one of the modern initiators of the scientific spirit, Francis Bacon could only define nature in terms that were about “dominion, over things.” The inductive method was the “working over of nature” to benefit man, who in his alienation needed to continually accumulate in order to exercise his free will.105 John Locke would connect this ethos to the land itself. Property and enclosure were productive spaces from which to work and increase one’s wealth, making it possible for one to compete in the marketplace.106 But such modes of being and existence inevitably maintained conflict as an ever-present condition. So man needed a referee. The state was born into these environs.107 In Carruthers’s reading of Western philosophy of science, the material realities of scarcity and private property (which required workers) were indeed connected to the cosmic conflict that had truly ordered the European mind. The radical European thinkers, he would argue, were just as much beholden to these problems as the traditional adherents. Human beings are forever workers, bit players in a conflict of forces, forever stuck in a dialectic.

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This was a philosophy of science that was a philosophy of life. To point out the racist statements of those philosophers was to only scratch the surface of something far more troublesome. These philosophers, like all human beings, inherited entire worldviews. Insofar as they suggested that we were all brought into this matrix as workers or as people who were freed from work, they gave explanations for what they believed was a natural condition, a perennial, universal idea of what is to be human. But it was their philosophy of life, which had created the terms for defining freedom for themselves and denying it to “the Other” in such complex ways.

the divine conversation As Carruthers was articulating this necessary break with social science, alongside members of the Kemetic Institute he was developing a program that would fulfill our need for a source of African collective wisdom— what he would later call “African Deep Thought.” The decision to focus on Ancient Egypt came after much debate. But armed with the rationales of Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga, who had demonstrated the necessity of studying ancient African languages as well as the realization that the ancient Egyptians had left an immense a corpus of knowledge, they decided that an emphasis on the Nile Valley as a point of departure was appropriate and would be well worth the intellectual effort.108 As Diop and Obenga had experienced firsthand in Cairo, Egyptology was a racist project. There had been notable attempts to “whiten” African antiquity, but the more pertinent issue was the systematic delinking of northeast Africa from the rest of the continent.109 From the very beginning, their objective was to study the Nile Valley in relationship and in connection to the whole of Africa. But this approach was at odds with Egyptology and the idea of Near Eastern Studies. Even the term “Egypt” was a foreign imposition. Purposely choosing to use terminology from Africans themselves, the group chose to name their collective after the ancient term Kemet, a word that though often translated as “the Black land” also signified, perhaps more critically, a “community.”110 To truly reimagine the whole of African history would require similar departures from Western academic convention. In March 1979, the Kemetic Institute sponsored a series of lectures in which they laid out their position. In “Orientation and Problems in the Redemption of Ancient Egypt,” Carruthers asserted the need to take seriously the questions raised in Diop’s analysis of the “two cradles” that

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characterized life in Europe and Africa, the problems of spatial orientation, and perhaps most significantly, the need for a new historiography and its link to the “importance of the linguistic context.” On the latter, Carruthers was to maintain that “until we have a body of African scholars trained not only in the ancient Egyptian language, but also in the traditional languages of Africa and the ancient languages of the world, our efforts to command world history will be hampered.”111 Problems of interpretation of African pasts by Egyptologists and other Africanists constituted the “stumbling blocks” of even our best scholars in Africana Studies, unable to interrogate the primary texts for themselves.112 To read what the Greeks called “hieroglyphics,” Carruthers reminds us, was an “esoteric” undertaking reserved for specialists and exclusionary to Black scholars.113 But in its own context, what the Egyptians called mdw ntr was a Divine conversation available to all. It was the foundation of scribal and clerical education, as well as the proper basis for all the modes of living and working in harmony that were present in their world. Only the study of language would unlock this wisdom. It was from here where the Kemetic Institute would proceed. But the Chicago group was not alone. In the very year that Carruthers published the 1979 lectures as Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies, a major convening of other Black American devotees to the study of African civilizations took place in Los Angeles from February 24–26, 1984. Originally convened to discuss an association that would support Guyanese historian Ivan Van Sertima’s Journal of African Civilizations, the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC) became something more. A federation of different groups devoted to the study of African antiquity, its founding directors represented important areas within Black radical and nationalist communities: Maulana Karenga (Los Angeles); Asa Hilliard (Atlanta); and John Henrik Clarke, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and Leonard Jeffries (New York). Representing the Chicago group, Carruthers would serve as a founding director and was elected first president of the Association after its second major conference in 1985 held at the Center for Inner City Studies. Principally engaged in the building of study groups and the promotion of research, the Association’s second meeting the following year was held at the other important base for the study of African history by Africans in America: New York City. That year also saw the publication of Kemet and the African Worldview, a major initial foray that clarified the work of the new Association. Along with research, the organization created three other commissions that

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would advance its mission: spirituality, education, and creative productions. The momentum continued to grow, and by 1987 the Association made the monumental decision to hold its annual conference in Egypt, bringing one thousand African Americans to Aswan. With the work of the Association, the study of Africa was becoming popularized. But the group’s central thrust remained unchanged. After passing the baton of leadership to Nzinga Ratibisha Heru in 1990, Carruthers sat down to complete perhaps his most significant treatment of the meaning of that work.114 Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought from the Time of the Pharaohs to the Present (1995) was an extension of many of the ideas contained in Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies as well as in other articles and speeches. It was a text that skillfully mixed intellectual history with linguistic analysis and read African primary texts alongside critiques of Western thought. But its major purpose was to clearly establish African ideas of speech as foundational to knowing. Understanding the role and function of speech within the practices of African Deep Thought was a vehicle for intellectual freedom and for imagining a liberated future for Africa and her children. But “speech” was not as simple as “talking.” Nor was Carruthers offering an endorsement of political rhetoric. For Africans in both the context of antiquity and throughout the continent and diaspora, speech had a meaning that went beyond the political, and even beyond philosophy. This was critical. For it was philosophy that had been foundational to all the Western disciplines of knowledge and therefore to all Western economic logics and political order.115 If we were to ever fully make the break with the terms of our oppression, then the category of philosophy had to be questioned. To begin that process, the first chapter of Mdw Ntr, entitled “Modern African Thinking about African Thought,” opens with a statement by the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. At the end of his career, Frazier had written the acerbic “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual,” where he castigated African American thinkers for focusing on the problem of assimilation rather than the deeper problems of human life and living, of “human culture and personality”—the supposed domains of philosophy.116 Writing in the wake of the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959), Frazier asserted that Black thought in the United States lagged behind in its awareness of some of the more salient issues raised by continental African and Afro-Caribbean thinkers. Just what role could we play if we understood the philosophy of life

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“implicit in the Negro’s folklore”? How that folkloric tradition might have something to say about the “meaning or lack of meaning of human existence”?117 Though Frazier perhaps overemphasized the lack, eventually conceding that some scholars and artists such as Langston Hughes did in fact base at least some of their thinking on Black cultural authority, it could not be denied that middle-class Black American scholars focused squarely on the problem of integration. Frazier feared that such an emphasis would come at the cost of Black cultural “annihilation” and “self-effacement.”118 It was clear he knew the phenomenon well, given that as a scholar trained in Western sociology and mired in struggles against Jim Crow he felt something was amiss.119 But for Carruthers, it allowed for another question. If there was something implicit in Black folk life that answered the same questions that philosophy sought to answer, and thus might be useful in our liberation struggle, could there be such a thing as African philosophy? There were essentially two schools of thinking. Carruthers called the first “The African Authentic Philosophers,” and the other “The Champions of African Deep Thought.” For the authentic philosophers, the defining tenets of philosophy were well established by Western traditions. Philosophy was that form of thought that originated in Greece and was developed by the Enlightenment thinkers who liberated human reason from the domains of the church. Its entrance into the universities allowed its spread to those who would encounter it in the colonial world. Africans adapting these methods were the only “African philosophers.” According to this school, typified by P. O. Bondurin and Paulin Hountondji whose work on this question in the 1980s contributed to the debate, authenticity was granted by professional and scientific rigor, rather than folk or “ethno-philosophy.”120 They certainly did not reach for a foundation for philosophy in the African past. That would be the approach of the Champions. For these thinkers, however “philosophy” was defined, it had first emerged in Africa. The genealogy of the Champions was much longer, dating back to the nineteenth century.121 However, in reviewing the arguments of the Champions from Martin Delany to George G. M. James to Cheikh Anta Diop, Carruthers finds elements of the Greek debt thesis wanting, notwithstanding its popularity among both adherents and detractors. Among the Champions, there was a tendency to overstate the extent to which Greek thought was a carbon copy of Egyptian ideas. Carruthers took particular issue with the assertion that there was an African background to the Greek idea of chaos and

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the “four elements” as the foundation of the universe; the idea of a “law of opposites” with respect to first principles; and the relationship of these ideas to some notion of inherent conflict.122 Carruthers’s argument did not award the whole of Western thought to African precursors. Instead, he proposed that we abandon both positions and leave the category of philosophy to Western civilization. Even if it was true, as Theophile Obenga, Martin Bernal, and others had theorized, that the very word “philosophy” had no Greek origins and a plausible African one, Carruthers insisted that the intellectual practices of Africans could only be intelligible in their own terms.123 What we were looking for under the sign of African philosophy was really Divine speech—mdw ntr: It is not sufficient to assert that African “philosophy” exists. One must prove the point—not because of European imposed criteria as some of the “young philosophers” imply, but because “philosophy” as a descriptive term is so wedded to the particular historical conditions out of which the discipline of the lover of wisdom emerged and developed that it is only with some risk that the term can be applied to African thought. Therefore my suggestion is, let us put it aside and use a term which can be found in the Kemetic vocabulary—that term as previously stated and as will be amplified below is Mdw Ntr which may be roughly translated into English as Divine Speech or into “universal,” scholarly Europeanese as Theology. Therefore, let the young philosophers and their European mentors keep their philosophy and we will keep our African thought.124 Carruthers’s clarity on this question is profound and even more necessary as we today witness the continued attraction of “African-as-adjectiveto-Western-concept” arguments for the validity of a Black presence in the disciplines—and, relatedly, in certain Western political ideologies and persuasions. In the end, African ideas do not need such warrants for their own existence. That there is the continued desire to suggest such framings—to make Blackness legible or unsilenced—might suggest motives different from the pursuit of the intellectual freedom Frazier desired.125 After having dispensed with philosophy, Carruthers frames the concept of mdw ntr by connecting it to a series of Kemetic texts. The concept of mdw ntr incorporated what Western thought would categorize as theology, at the same time that it was also “philosophical” and “scien-

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tific.”126 There was no alienation between these domains. The Creator was not distant, but was related to the people. Human beings, too, could learn, write, and practice mdw ntr. Indeed, it was often necessary in a society where ma’at was critical. Therefore, in order to understand the role of speech in Kemetic society, Carruthers turned to creation stories. One of the most famous accounts, known as the Memphite Theology, offered an important statement on the relationship between speech and thought. Carruthers’s translation of the relevant portion reads: The power of the mind and tongue are in the limbs. The seeing of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, the sniffing of the nose, are elevated to the mind, which causes every perception to come forth. Then the tongue repeats the thoughts of the mind; so all of the creative forces are born, Atum and his Primeval Powers. All divine speech happened in the thoughts of the mind and the commands of the tongue … So all the works and arts were made, the making of the two hands, the walking of the two feet, the movement of all limbs; in accordance with his command. The speech of the thinking mind comes forth from the tongue and makes the specialization of everything … So Ptah was satisfied after making all things, that is all divine speech (or all speech is divine).127 In this text, the Egyptians were showing that all that can be observed and thought can only be known through speech, which is also evidence of the Creator who created speech for that purpose. Knowledge, then, requires a careful consideration of the power of the tongue. Evil speech (mdw dj) and idle chatter128 (tf tf) are purposively eschewed.129 The value of speech was creation, and if the Creator spoke reality into existence, what we call “knowledge” was the human ability to replicate that speech. To act purposefully was to understand and comprehend that which was spoken. A known thing could only be known if it was indeed both given in the conceptual frames of the Divine Conversation and if it was acted out in the material world.130 In another example, Carruthers showed how the so-called Coffin Texts and Pyramid Texts offer more substance to the ideas of the order of creation and human relationships. The existence of the world for the Egyptians was the product of Uncreated principles—that which always was, and thus cannot be fully known—and the Divine creation (through self-creation) of nine created divinities, that represented air, moisture, earth, sky, and the first five human beings. These divinities were couples,

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connected by a purpose and responsibility to manifest all the things humans needed in order to survive “on top of the earth.”131 These divinities appeared as complements, pairs, a demonstration of the principle of ma’at, which was also depicted as a goddess. There was no inevitable conflict, no law of opposites. More importantly, these created divinities are creations of speech—of speech “happening.” Carruthers’s translation of text from the “Book of Knowing in the Appearance of Re” reads: “Speech spoken: The Lord of the universe says/When I happen, happening itself happens/Thus I happen in the happening (advent) of the Happener/who happens on the First Occasion.”132 And thus, everything that exists is the product of a Divine happening, which happens on the First Occasion (the rise of the sun that enabled creation) and also always happens (the rise of the sun that marks the beginning of each day). Eternity was created by speech. Our day-to-day lives are created by speech. We experience time and eternity simultaneously.133 But we understand what we are experiencing when we understand mdw ntr. In order to reach that comprehension, the Egyptians had mechanisms in place for education, which was the domain of good speech (mdw nfr). These areas approximate disciplines in the sense that they prepared the grounds for understanding the ways in which making sense of material and earthly reality was connected to the creative powers of the Divine. These domains included the areas of Instructions, History, Mathematics, and Medicine, each a space where practitioners centered the importance of speech in securing knowledge and perpetuating the values and ideals of society.134 They remained important areas of inquiry, for the ideals were not automatically revealed; they had to be studied and learned. In fact, Carruthers closes the chapter with several examples of how the Divine Conversation was embraced to resolve disputes that threatened society. On each occasion, ma’at was restored only when wisdom was re-membered, was spoken.135 In other words, a society that could abandon the power of speech as a moral and ethical standard could also allow for the introduction of destructive values, which would render everyone vulnerable. Just as the story of Khun Inpu revealed, mdw ntr was a mode of knowledge that reminded the people what really mattered. Matters of life, death, creation, survival, and peace were all realized through values that speech articulated and solidified. Speech was the way, the arbiter, the revealer of the authoritative ideals that produced life. As Carruthers would show in the chapter “The Deep Thought of Basic Africa,” it continues to produce life, for speech is a “living tradi-

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tion.”136 These words were borrowed from the Bambara thinker Amadou Hampaté Bâ, who, having been initiated in the djeli tradition of West Africa, would also write: “What puts a thing into condition … ? Speech. What damages a thing? Speech. What keeps a thing as it is? Speech.”137 Speech was movement. Speech was authority. Speech was how we experienced each other, the world around us, the universe itself. Speech was all possibility; it was otherwise possibility. The oral traditions of the djelis, known sometimes as the griots, are part of a well-known anthropological literature, but Bâ’s invocation of speech demonstrates the cultural unity between West African cultures of the contemporary era and the Nile Valley. Along with the Bambara, Carruthers examines the connections between Divine speech and creation and between human knowledge and the domains of oral authority in the conceptual systems of the Dinka of the Sudan; the Yoruba, Akan, and Dogon of West Africa; the SotoTswana of southern Africa; as well as the Gikuyu of East Africa.138 In each example, there is a unity around the sacred nature of speech (often reduced to “religion” in the anthropological literature) that for Carruthers is also linked to the African conversation on the capacity to make sense of the material world. Additionally, what we encounter in the Nile Valley is likely not the source of this insistence on speech. Carruthers does not here make the claim that civilization—and thus Divine speech— begins in Kemet and is then spread throughout the continent. But rather, with more research on the question of anteriority, we might in fact reveal that it was this oral culture found across Africa that would help us better understand Kemet.139 It was of course this oral culture that would travel across the Atlantic under duress but nevertheless intact. While Carruthers does not explicitly focus on the diaspora in Mdw Ntr, the essential link between Divine speech and the cultures of resistance in the Black Radical tradition are hard to miss. Because these ideals were necessary knowledges for sustaining life, they were tools that would aid in the attempts to resist the imposition of a system that insisted on both our physical and spiritual deaths. The development of everything from the Blues to the sermon, from the rituals of Vodou and Ifa to the power of hip hop, are powerful demonstrations of the living tradition of Divine speech. The word could pierce the lies of Western civilization; the African word was an active force, an activating impulse for life otherwise than Western colonial order.140

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Carruthers’s book-length essay on the significance of race vindication in the context of the Haitian Revolution, The Irritated Genie (1985), framed the true impulse of the revolution within the revolutionary tradition of the maroons and the anticolonial revolts that had preceded the French presence on the island. It was a revolutionary movement that could not proceed without African Deep Thought, without Divine speech, without what Jean-Jacques Dessalines had called “the irritated genie.” This presence was “looming out of the bosom of the sea,” ready to stir “up storms” with hands ready to smash and scatter the ships of the French.141 Carruthers maintained that success on the part of the leaders was related to the extent to which they were inspired by the Irritated Genie or possessed by the Spirit of the Haitian Revolution. Race Vindication, with its core of vengeance, was the only realistic revolutionary philosophy. Those leaders who were possessed by it formulated realistic goals, strategies and tactics. Those who abandoned it formulated unachievable goals and thus misdirected strategic and tactical operations. Leaders who followed the Genie not only were in harmony with the aspirations of the masses, they were also realistic in assessing the nature of the problem and in pursuing solutions which were workable.142 It was indeed Dessalines, Cécile Fatiman, Boukman Dutty, and countless others who could only represent that ideal through Divine speech, through an invocation of Ogun, as a motive force to avenge the wrongs of the European slaveocracy. Dutty’s famous prayer calling on the people to reject the god of their oppressors was the real opening of the way. As such, this Genie was opposed to the “Phantom of Liberty,” the false promises of a European natural rights tradition, or, in other words, the idea that we could be “free and French.”143 It was the presence of African Deep Thought that made the difference clear. Independence meant the assertion that Black life was worthy of life, that ways and modes of governance must center who they were, that salvation existed only in the resolve to be “free by ourselves, and for ourselves.”144 Their fight forced the world to realize that no system of oppression lasts forever, that “African people will never be permanently enslaved or oppressed.”145 Dessalines and the many people who fought alongside him were activating a Black Radical tradition called into existence by Dutty’s word—his speech. Post-emancipation Black life would be life on differ-

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ent terms, a form of living together that honored how African people saw each other.146 Black Study is also the insistence on these connections between ancient African ways of knowing and their connections to the larger diaspora, what Greg Carr following Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o frames as the “translation and recovery” of our meaning-making.147 For Carruthers, that recovery cannot proceed from the mere adaptation of Western disciplines. In a return to themes from his earlier essay on the subject, he followed up his discussion on basic Africa in Mdw Ntr with a treatment of “the metaphysics of alienation.” Discussing the relationships of both ancient Mesopotamia and Greece to Kemet, he shows that although there were borrowed elements within both cultures, there were also the influence of a tradition of alienation that led to conflict, where drudgery and war, violence and hierarchy, became valued. In modern Western Europe, those principles would emerge in the conflicts between Christendom and human reason. The challenge for the latter was to ultimately resolve the conflict and contradiction and to seek a form of mastery that maintained order.148 There was no consensus on what method would work, creating the inherent diversity in Western political ideologies. Yet the sense of rootlessness and the search for a usable tradition is a mainstay of a Western modernity always on a quest for order. It just so happens that that search has often meant a relation to the rest of the world resulting in forms of rationality that are violent to those people deemed inferior. To W.E.B. Du Bois’s question in The World and Africa, of whether there was another way for humankind to advance, Carruthers’s Mdw Ntr points to a possible answer.149 Modernity was not inevitable. The second part of Mdw Ntr offers the aforementioned story of Khun Inpu as well as The Instructions of Ptahhotep, as ancient texts that serve as African examples of how to deal with complex issues of life and governance on wholly different terms from those which came from and for oppression. The promise of this approach is the possibility that the recovery of more and more of these stories might well reveal that the Divine Conversation may be the best answer to Du Bois’s query.

the whm msw Around the same time Mdw Ntr was released, key members of ASCAC met in Detroit to develop a major piece of Carruthers’s and the larger Chicago group’s intellectual agenda: the creation of an African world

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history. The idea dated back at least two decades. In a 1975 Black Books Bulletin article, Anderson Thompson had argued for the necessity of such an undertaking. “Developing an Afrikan Historiography” was a watershed publication.150 Thompson’s assertion that history was the West’s most important battleground, “the mother science of European ideological warfare,” demonstrated the connection between the discipline and the realm of white supremacist dominance.151 History was not simply knowledge of the past; it was a justification for a particular kind of world in the present. This was not merely a question of the hunter telling the tale of the hunt. It was not as simple as one’s perspective or standpoint. It was a question of the very logics of narrating the past—a question of historiography. And Western historiography, “the hidden partner” of history, was constructed out of first principles that reified conquest and thus rationalized colonial order.152 The modes of inquiry, the assumed scientific rigor, and related methodological premises of the discipline—which, we might recall, emerged out of the nineteenth-century contexts of European nationalism and imperialism—were key to understanding how history actually functioned.153 One of the critical questions Thompson raised concerned whether and how a discipline formulated on the logics of Western rule could effectively address Black issues. As within other social sciences, the issue was reduced to “the Negro Question.”154 In this view, history became a record of Eurasian encounters with the world. In the case of Africa and the African diaspora, the existence of the Negro was a problem to be solved. Western historiography of Africa, then, could not provide a meaningful rendering of the African past. The Negro was only known in relation to colonialism or slavery, if mentioned at all. Africa was only acted upon. This was “Sambo historiography,” where Black characters in the Western historical drama were “a pitiful caricature,” their depiction a ploy to “reduce the threat of any organized resistance and guarantee a high degree of social control over the black population.”155 Western philosophy of history was only another form of captivity. But as Thompson shows, this strategy would undergo revision by the middle of the twentieth century. In its updated version, the African past is reduced to “a kind of entertainment history written primarily for a rich, unseen, white audience to a victimized, visible, black leadership and the black masses in order to prove the Negro’s fitness for admission into Western Civilization.” This writing of the past had attracted many well-subsidized “Negro supporters” who read the Black past as the

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struggle for the realization of the “American Creed so concretized in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.”156 In the process, such histories erased the Negro’s relationship to Africa. Inspired by earlier exemplars such as Chancellor Williams, Thompson’s critique was not only about the function of history; it was about how history indicated what sort of future lay before African people around the world. Beyond liberal and integrationist rationales was Thompson’s idea of an “African Principle,” defined as “the moral centerhood of the entire African World Community.”157 Among the ideological streams in the Black community, the African Principle represented the maroon strata for whom liberation was the ability to live on one’s own terms. If unfreedom issued from the “ideological captivity” of Western historical thought, then one needed to abandon the discipline wholesale. The development of a theory of history and historiography that started from the premise of Africa and its relationship to the larger world—a theory emanating from a tradition of African self-determination—was a necessary tool to oppose the “propaganda war called social science.”158 The struggle for African freedom would be “meaningless if there is no African framework.”159 The necessity of such a framework would become more apparent several years later in the wake of the 1981 publication of the initial volumes of UNESCO’s General History of Africa. Responding to that volume and to Thompson’s earlier call, Carruthers issued a document entitled “A Memorandum on an African World History Project” in January 1982. With the development of the General History of Africa, he felt that the stage of relying on Eurocentric sources to develop an African history had passed. The effort of bringing together scholars from all across the African world was a monumental achievement, but it was now time to add another layer. It was time for African scholars to write a history of the world. Such a project had been presaged by several individual African scholars, dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These “old scrappers” were an essential component of African intellectual genealogies.160 Yet they were limited by an inability to interpret primary African documents from the ancient past. Their reliance on Eurasian interpretations of those sources was a severe constraint, as those sources were read through the lens of Eurasian philosophy. The result was that many histories of the world had been saturated with “nomadic historiography.” An approach that was part of the Greek historical tradition, Carruthers’s idea of nomadic historiography was perhaps best crystallized by an Arab scholar named Ibn Khaldun who saw the history of

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the world as the history of conquest and conciliation.161 In this reading, territorial wars, the containment of savagery, and the inevitability of submission led to “civilization.” This was the approach that would jibe with the later historiographical works of Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon.162 And in several ways, variations of nomadic historiography are present in more contemporary attempts to explain the modern Western world. In these frames, colonialism becomes progressive. Imperialism is an innovation. And even historical attempts to overcome these conditions on the behalf of the colonized are tempered by a framing of liberalism as a more rational alternative than militant revolution. The terms of conquest are irreversible.163 Historiography under different assumptions was necessary for an African world history project. What was required was a principle of movement and change that did not read human nature through this lens of inevitable conflict and violent warfare. This necessarily required the displacement of European readings of ancient Africa and the prioritization of fresh interpretations from the documents left by Africans themselves. Language study again became a critical prerequisite for such a historiographical project. In addition, one of the areas that would have to be rethought was the received ideas of historical time and space, for even they, too, were subject to the privileging of the nomadic frame.164 Along with Carruthers’s memo and Thompson’s paper, there were several workshops and seminars that led to the development of the ASCAC Research Agenda and further solidified the need to develop an African world history.165 Then in 1995 at the Association’s annual conference, San Francisco–based scholar Vulindlela Wobogo presented a “radical reconceptualization” of ancient African chronology based on a rereading of Kemetic texts.166 This was the spark that would lead to the discussion held in Detroit and the eventual publication of ASCAC’s The Preliminary Challenge (1997). In Detroit, key members of the Chicago group, including Thompson, Harold Pates, and Yvonne Jones, would be joined by Theophile Obenga, who had moved to the United States in 1993 and was teaching in the Department of African American Studies at Temple, which at the time granted the only PhD in the discipline under the leadership of Molefi Kete Asante.167 One of the world’s greatest teachers of ancient Egyptian language, Obenga’s presence at Temple catalyzed the African-centered study of Africa, which was promoted under the rubric of Afrocentricity as elaborated in Asante’s work. Yet there was no real consensus on what this

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could mean for our conceptions of the past.168 Carruthers’s reimagination of Inner City Studies through a distillation of the African worldview certainly had resonances with the Afrocentric project. But in certain respects, it was dissimilar. Africana Studies required something more systematic than a rhetorical assertion of centeredness.169 Both language study and a different frame for history were part of the methodological intervention that defined Carruthers’s approach. And Obenga also believed that a strong foundation in African language required a certain level of dedication and rigor. He was known as a taskmaster when it came to mastering Middle Egyptian. So it was important that present in Detroit were some of Obenga’s top students at Temple, including Mario Beatty, Greg Carr, and Valethia Watkins, who had already been brought into ASCAC in 1990. A younger generation, dubbed the “New Jack Scholars,” they would play a critical role in the work of the African World History Project in their own right.170 Other contributors to the conversation included the Caribbean historian Tony Martin and the psychologist Adisa Ajamu.171 Over two days, the group discussed several issues concerning the development of this historiographical intervention. Reiterating the lack of a coherent philosophy of history within the General History of Africa, both Carruthers and Obenga asserted the urgency of developing a conceptual foundation for a unified approach to the writing of an African history of the world. Importantly, this was not to be a “universal” history to be imposed upon the rest of humanity à la the West.172 Rather, it would be a history built upon terms that were recognizable and legible to the ways in which African people experienced reality. The committee decided that this would only work with serious commitments to the question of language, to issues of time (chronology) and space (geography), and to the construction of an account of the ways that Black scholars had attempted to tell these stories before—an intellectual genealogy. Obenga, in particular, stressed that the fragmentation of the African experience through the imposition of academic disciplines had made such a task difficult. And that the questions raised under the rubric of philosophy and science—separate discourses in Western thought—would have to be reconnected if the project was to honor the ways Africans understood the nature of reality.173 In service to that point, Carruthers offered a mode for considering the meaning of historical change that could be applied to African life in his conceptualization of the whm msw, which was translated as “rebirth” or “repetition of the birth.” This idea was a prominent theme in Kemetic

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reckonings with questions of time and era, and at the same time it was a formulation that recognized the centrality of enduring values, such as ma’at, as necessary for the perpetuation and flourishing of life. To repeat the birth was an admonition and ritual that was invoked in times of trouble, moments when human survival is threatened, when renewal was required. It was a restorative practice that reminded the people that the best weapons for addressing large-scale threats were found in collective memories. One of the reasons Carruthers would suggest this particular concept as a mode of historiography was that it had resonances all across Africa and the diaspora. Bâ’s living tradition and Boukman Dutty’s prayer were two important examples of life and rebirth.174 In fact, Sylvia Wynter’s characterization of the intellectual movement of the sixties as a call for the study and renewal of the radical traditions that had ensured our survival in the diaspora, was for Tony Martin just another form of whm msw.175 How could an African historiography of the world be written as a mode of whm msw? How might we conceptualize Black radicalism in the period of the maafa if we understood it as inspired by the need to “repeat the birth”? Appearing two years later, The Preliminary Challenge would address such questions of methodology and the process of achieving whm msw. Many of the articles that would appear were devoted to exploring the necessary elements for imagining an African world history read through an African lens, one that would displace a hegemonic Western disciplinary historiography. For Carruthers’s part, his examination of the concept of whm msw became a signal contribution titled “An African Historiography for the 21st Century.” Previously circulated in Detroit, the published version would stake out the conceptual space for the eventual projection of a new historiography. In an extension of his critique from the 1982 Memorandum, this article further traced the flaws of nomadic historiography. It was not just that conquest was centered; it was also that these histories were written within the context of millenarian and apocalyptic visions that designated certain peoples as “chosen.” Those not chosen were either ignored or fabricated. History became a question of the triumph of the civilized. With Enlightenment, these eschatological assumptions were maintained. But now, rather than a march to restore God’s plan for the world, history was written as the triumph of a people especially armed with reason to realize the highest forms of life. This universal theory of history rendered human life as existing in stages from the primitive to the advanced. Progress was

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a matter of reaching the highest stage of development.176 By the nineteenth century, these historical assumptions were the background to most of the social theory that defined the human sciences. The inventions of anthropology and Egyptology were grounded in evolutionary logics. African Studies was only a minor revision that substituted colonialism and post-colonialism as the “stages” to be understood.177 Carruthers argued that “lapses” in thinking did not explain the racist statements by many Western historical thinkers.178 Their idea and philosophy of history was the culprit. The Western historiography of Kemet that emphasized dynasties and intermediate periods and read its past as a record of conquests and invasions was not unaffected. But in directly reading the texts of African antiquity, Carruthers argued that a more appropriate approach would focus on whm msw. The examples of the efficacy of this vision were premised on his reading of the ascendancy of Amen M Hat (Amenemhat) in what Egyptologists called the Middle Kingdom. This was a story of an outside threat to “national memory.”179 But in taking the moniker of whm msw, Amen M Hat declared that Kemetic society must return to the source. Unlike the Greek approach to history, which was in many ways centered on a conflict with tradition, Amen M Hat relied on a creative extension of Kemetic traditions.180 As a result, the Middle Kingdom saw the rewriting and reappraisal of wisdom texts from earlier generations. It is in that sense that whm msw has also been translated as “renaissance.”181 The assertion of a whm msw was the means through which Africans in this era made sense of what needed to happen to improve their lives. What is important here is that each whm msw creatively built upon the foundational memories of the past in order to reaffirm the principles of ma’at, the defining ethos of what it is to live. It generated new ways of being out of the old. Memory did not mean a static repetition; it was a vibrant improvisation of the ways of the ancestors in the face of episodic challenges. There were many examples of this cycle in ancient African history.182 But we find evidence of this sense of historical logic in other moments. Carruthers describes the influx of the proselytizing religions of Christianity and Islam as the First and Second Comings. During the First Coming, these traditions were “Africanized.” But increasingly they became tools for a destructive form of intervention. The most devastating, of course, was the Second Coming of Christianity half a millennia ago, for with it came the slave trade that created the modern world.183

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Carruthers then reviews how whm msw was practiced in the wake of that destabilizing and debilitating moment, and how Black folk executed intellectual assaults against Western historical knowledge. On the continent, some doggedly held on to the living tradition, often having to hide it for safekeeping. Its reemergence is the basis of talk of an African renaissance today. In the diaspora, the recovery of African history was a weapon in our long battle against white supremacist negation.184 But whm msw was not simply a practice of writers and intellectuals. As Carruthers showed with the Haitian Revolution, whm msw was an active force in revolution and restoration. For the Bakongo who mapped life in their cosmogram, the four moments of the sun described history as much as it gave us a sense of what life could and should be. It was a cycle that repeated our births. In the Bambara worldview, good speech created the Blues, which found new grounds for articulation in the Mississippi Delta and provided us a means for making worlds of our own. The examples are endless: the clave rhythm in Afro-Cuba, the ring-dances of the US South and Caribbean, the cultural work of maroon life in Suriname. These are Africans listening to a voice of liberty that sounds and feels different.185 African practices of resistance were about renewal and reconstruction— not merely opposition to their negation, but a sensibility that defined life otherwise. Resistance charted the path for the reassertion of speech, for the intellectual resistance that was passed down in sometimes fragmented ways but nevertheless ensured that we would re-member.186 Such is the intellectual genealogy of at least some practices in Black Studies. Carruthers labeled those who saw liberation in these terms as “foundationalists,” whose objective was “to restore African Civilization.”187 If we think of Black Studies as an extension of whm msw, the meaning of our work suddenly becomes much clearer. In 2018, ASCAC’s journal The Compass posthumously published Carruthers’s most comprehensive treatment of this question, “The Weheme Mesu and Pan African Historiography.” Together with a commentary on several texts from the historical whm msw of Amen M Hat, later Kemetic iterations, as well as more examples from the Bambara, Zulu, and Buganda, this extensive article reviews the connections between Mesopotamian, Jewish, Greek, Christian, and Muslim treatments of world history and the developments of modern Western philosophies of history. In these treatments, the demands of global domination, justified either through religion or secular authorities, had unfortunately required that

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Africa undergo a “transmutation.”188 But the struggle for a Pan African historiography has long roots. The whm msw continues. * * * Jacob Carruthers insisted on a deeper understanding of the nature of Western science, so that we would not be convinced that it was the key to ending our oppressions. In a moment where the mantra “believe science” has taken on liberal prominence, which is an attempt to re-instill faith in a conceptual system with especially deep flaws—but also in the face of a revanchist conversative assault against (but also from within) that same system—it is necessary to revisit and extend this thinking.189 Carruthers’s was not an assault against making informed decisions. It was rather a disavowal of a system for knowing that managed to project itself as universal through force. The crumbling world we have inhabited was made as a consequence of the violation of the peoples who were said to have no art, no science, no history, no respect. So Carruthers’s critique of science was wedded to his critique of Western politics, a project that was only possible because of that science and its propensity to dominate its subject. It was a critique embedded in the belief that those who were said to have nothing were full of otherwise possibility. It was this assertion that Western thought simply could not abide. And still cannot. If there is one thing that liberals and conservatives agree on, it is that the West is uniquely qualified to “lead.” As there are increasing attempts to wed Black Studies knowledges to the project of STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—we must, as Carruthers warned, think critically about the nature and purpose of the methodologies of these ideas and develop appropriate approaches that enable us to fully wield the tools we need for our liberation.190 For the balance of Carruthers’s career, his work demonstrated that it would be in the domain of African ways of knowing that we will achieve intellectual freedom. In what should also resonate in this moment, Carruthers in the early eighties pointedly called out those liberals and radicals working in the social sciences who were content with merely performing antiracist work within European categories of thought. This ploy, akin to a multicultural or pluralist position, merely left Western thought intact with minor revisions. It did not get to the root of the mess. On antiracism, Carruthers argued:

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It is true that race analysis alone is not a valid Black intellectual response to the condition that Black people are in today. Indeed, racism is not all that is wrong with Western society. But race/class analysis together are not enough and capitalism and imperialism ain’t the only deficiencies in Western life and thought.191 His work on fundamental alienation was an attempt to name the real deficiencies. The wisdom of Africa was right there, all around us. It was present in Jacob Carruthers’s life from the beginning. His approach to Black Study was essentially to bring it along, to allow it to reach intellectual and methodological acuity by linking it to the profound deep well that existed in ancient African history.192 The result was an appreciation for speech as a way to name the Western deficiency responsible for our condition, and to articulate and embody an alternative to what that deficiency occluded, silenced, and ignored through the disciplines of knowledge. It was true intellectual freedom. And it was only this intellectual freedom that would make us “independent of white thought” and “force us to our own traditions where the guidance and wisdom exists … which is the prologue to our actual freedom.”193

4 Of Order Cedric J. Robinson “Black Studies is a critique of Western civilization.” Cedric J. Robinson, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition”1 “By identifying the concept of political order as a mythology, I do not intend to argue that because it is, it is of no use, for such a presumption would ultimately contradict the fundamental relationship which is human knowledge; that is the relationship between existential consciousness and truth systems. To the contrary, what I mean to say is that as a myth, as the dominating myth of our consciousness of being together, it is contingent and therefore replaceable. As such there are two uses, each in its own way antipolitical, to which it must be applied. The first application is the utilization of the political to defend ourselves from the destructive objectivation of the myth … The second application, coterminous with the resistance which is the first, is to subvert that way of realizing ourselves.” Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order2

this order Order is how we think about that which is. Order is how that which is might be that which should and must be. Order presumes a way, and when that way is not the way, there is disorder. Disorder can only be resolved by order. Disorder is a crisis because it subverts order, which is singular—and, as such, manageable. Order is management, and to keep disorder at bay, humans must be managed. Management and containment produce order. Management resolves human distinctions, relationships, and disagreements. Such resolution is order. Order, then, produces justice. The law must be fulfilled by order.

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We “order” those whom we believe require direction: “I order you to cease and desist”; “I order you to comply.” And we “order” those who must comply in order to satiate our human needs and desires: “May I take your order?”; “I did not order this … ” These commands are also expressions of a worldview that believes things are set, are just so, are only movable to the extent that they can be reset. Their essential natures are what they are. Order is an arrangement. Order is a pattern. Order is something discernible, and thus knowable. It is judgment. It is empirical. It is reasonable. It is stability. It is stasis. And it is progressive, even as progress entails a kind of negation of the past. That is, order contains the presumption that even as it is singular, as it is stable, it can still be “improved.” We need not worry. It can be made more efficient. For it is the only way. But what if disorder is not chaos? What if the word given as order’s opposite does not capture how human beings make sense of the patterns, rhythms, and ways of meaning-making that give them a sense of their lives? What if order nominates and labels these otherwise ways of being as disorder in order to remain in control? What if management, containment, resolution—and all the things we think of when we assume the idea of order—is not order? What if this “stability” is what is producing something we should rightly call chaotic? Something that appears to us not as “justice” but as terror? What if this order is unstable, unwieldy, driven by violent political activities and exclusive social groundings? And perhaps most importantly, what if there is a conception of reality that lies outside of this dyad, this duality? * * * By most accounts, the domain for considerations of the meanings and practices of order is the discipline of political theory. Along with political science, it is believed to have developed to provide theoretical ballast and rational justifications for power’s need to establish stability, to control chaos, to bring something like a just world into existence.3 But one cannot think the meaning of political theory in the modern world without thinking of the ways in which Blackness has been framed as a threat to such conceptions of the proper forms of order and the ways that power organized itself to provide stability to an abstraction they called the political system.4 And this has important implications for the very idea of political theory, for the very practice of political science.

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This is one issue that has occupied the thought and work of Cedric J. Robinson. As a Black Studies scholar, the question of the nature of the political system to which Black folk were “marginally integrated” provided a crucial “vantage point” for his understanding of what the political was and what it was not.5 Robinson demonstrated more than anything that any conception of Black Studies must encompass the idea that Black thought can read the world from its own social and cultural foundations, that Black thought could be conceived as a “normative language” that could read through the assumptions of order that permeate Western political theory.6 If we are to find a way, that is not this way, Black Study’s critique of order demands our attention, for it might reveal something else, something other than what this order claims as order. For what if life was rhythm, rather than the stasis of order? What if being was improvisation, rather than simply the repetition of order? Could these forms of existence give us something we might call society, or community, or another concept that better names our ability to be with and for each other? Does this order presume that all human life is reducible to social or political order? Can we be more than what this order would have us be?7 For Robinson, there was something just beneath the expectations and consciousness of those who imposed order on Black life, something their social and political worlds could not conceive.8 It was something he called the Black Radical tradition.

collective intelligence Of the more critical interventions in the study of Black thought, Cedric Robinson’s notion of a Black Radical tradition, elaborated most fully in his 1983 work Black Marxism, has remained prescient. It was a tradition not in the conservative sense of a library of sacred texts and heroes to be memorialized and preserved, but in a sense of what guides and gives meanings to human action.9 “Tradition” indicated a common awareness of the foundations of the oppressive world we had inherited, and an idea of what we might do to fuse our belief of what life should be with the appropriate actions for creating another kind of world. This was “collective intelligence gathered from struggle.”10 And its essential nature gave primacy to the myriad ways African conceptions of material existence and metaphysical and spiritual worlds came together to not only oppose Western political order but imagine life and living on their own terms.11

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Of all the ink spilled engaging and quite often misreading its approach to understanding Black struggle, few interlocutors have been able to comprehend that at its core, Robinson’s theorization of Black radicalism was premised on more than a simple dichotomy of Black philosophical idealism against historical materialism, or Black thought as a simple negation of European modernity. Robinson’s thought represented a problem of knowledge, and how what can be known about Black people was often submerged in the muddy waters of a Western episteme that could accommodate neither the historical foundations nor the powerful contemporary currents of Blackness in its fraught definition of the human. In place of fully understanding the project that Black Marxism made manifest, partisans of certain ideological persuasions, almost all of them bound up with the epistemological fetters of Enlightenment rationality, have taken the text to be only an endorsement or challenge to the doctrinal verities of historical materialism, or in other cases as a philosophical rumination on the idea that there could exist an autochthonous Black thinking tradition.12 And this is among those who have actually taken the time to critically engage the text. Far more thinkers have taken this work to be simply another History, another Sociological intervention, another statement about Marxism. The concerns of most who offer interpretations about the work often stem from a desire to take elements of Black Marxism and to discipline them. Rather than follow Robinson’s path for new understandings of the nature of knowledge, especially Black knowledges, such interpretations direct us back to the very disciplinary interpretations of the realities it questioned. What most people expect from knowledge is bounded by how knowledge is already academically structured and organized. As a result, honest and insightful engagements with the text that do occur often center questions related to Blackness and the elaboration of capitalist world systems; or read this work’s discussion as an implicit demonstration of Black resistance; or engage its reading of Black intellectual history in order to critique the ways Robinson assigns particular individuals to particular traditions; or, finally, see in this work a grand theory of European racism—what Robinson called “racial capitalism.”13 Such understandings and critiques of the work have much to offer, and help us better situate Robinson’s readings of concerns as diverse as world-systems theory and the gender dynamics of enslaved African people’s revolts. But it is also necessary to understand that the core of Robinson’s work is about some-

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thing more than contributing to these areas of discipline-based inquiry, be they historical, sociological, political, or even Marxist. The idea of a Black Radical tradition and variations of “radicalism” have come to signify an assortment of ideological and political predilections that boil down to “resistance” and/or “opposition.” But the Black Radical tradition is more than simple opposition; it is a kind of opposition. The kernel of Robinson’s reading of Black radicalism is not in the mere fact of resistance or in the documentation of our people’s reaction to negative stimuli. It is a detailing of the metaphysical and epistemological and ideological meanings of human action, ones grounded in the “sort of people” that Africans are.14 Robinson argued that “Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology, and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality.” And it was these that “were the actual terms of their humanity.”15 And it was how and why and for what they resisted. That this conception of the Black Radical tradition has been rendered as merely “resistance” or “opposition” is perhaps a political choice, and if so, it is one with consequences for how we narrate and define struggles for liberation. If the reduction of the Black Radical tradition simplifies it as mere resistance, then any range of politics can become radical. This is both an evasion of Robinson’s methodology as well an aversion to the sorts of radicalism that he documented. It may even be, for some thinkers, a concession to the idea that Black radicalism, the desire to name it as such, was and is meaningless in the first place.16 So it is necessary to repeat what had already been stated. For Robinson, the Black Radical tradition had at its foundation a genealogy of thought and movement; it “was an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle. In the daily encounters and petty resistances to domination, slaves had acquired a sense of the calculus of oppression as well as its overt organization and instrumentation.”17 But it was not conceived as simply a response that was informed by the conceptual or even physical demands of Western societies and civilizations; it was “an essentially African response, strewn across the physical and temporal terrain of societies conceived in Western civilization. … The social cauldron of Black radicalism is Western society. Western society, however, has been its location and its objective condition but not— except in a most perverse fashion—its specific inspiration.”18 And finally,

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the Black radical tradition had at its foundation a desire for re-creation, rebuilding, and preservation: For those African men and women whose lives were interrupted by enslavement and transportation, it was reasonable to expect that they would attempt, and in some ways, realize the recreation of their lives. It was not, however, an understanding of the Europeans that preserved those Africans in the grasp of slavers, planters, merchants, and colonizers. Rather, it was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination, and repression. This was the raw material of the Black radical tradition, the values, ideas, conceptions, and constructions of reality from which resistance was manufactured.19 The very real variations notwithstanding, that precedent metaphysic struggled for the “preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses.”20 These struggles, their meanings, their histories were to be recovered by an intelligentsia whose primary “tools” were “words,” whose social upbringing was generally and most consistently lodged in the given responsibilities of the native petit bourgeoisies, and whose renegade consciousness had been shaped by the fires of revolutionary political imaginaries found in the struggles of these ancestors.21 That renegade intelligentsia would forward the memories of the tradition to us. It was they who would construct through radical writing a foundation on which the tradition would mount itself and make itself known to us. It was they who would make marronage the desire not simply to retreat, as it had necessarily been, but the desire to transform the very societies, the very worlds, that created the desire for maroon space in the first place.22 Perhaps a new world based upon the maroon sensibility to oppose everything on the plantation in order to live differently could be created. So it is their work that continues. It is work that Robinson continued. Reading his other works clarifies the ways that Black Marxism as a foundational study of the Black Radical tradition was part of a larger intellectual objective—as opposed to the objective itself. If it was true that Black life was rendered as non-human or less than human, imposed upon by a violent racial capitalist apparatus manifesting in numerous ways, and reified as “nothingness” by a modern

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episteme of truth and reason, then the political “order” that crafted and maintained such a set of relationships had to be understood. If order constituted the mechanism that organized and made real the “inventions” of the Negro, then perhaps it was order that needed to be conceptually undone.23 Coming as it did at roughly the same time as Robinson’s work on demystifying political theory, another reading of the collective intelligence of the Black Radical tradition as it appeared in Black Marxism was that it required a rejection of a particular way of looking at the world, and a way of conceiving a reality alternative to order. Cedric Robinson’s Black Study was a critique of Western civilization, but it was not simply that. Just as the Black radical tradition was a “negation of Western civilization but not in the direct sense of a simple dialectical negation,” Robinson did not critique the West to simply negate its negation. There was another component to his work, one that created space for us to see ourselves anew, for “black radicalism” could not “be understood within the particular context of its genesis.” Robinson’s work imagined the West as the conceptual interdiction of a way of being in the world, a way that “specifically” characterized African life.24 Being whole required that we understand and ultimately subvert this interdiction, to recover this way, to truly arrive at a comprehension of this Relation.25 Only a reading of all of his works together will get us here. But such a reading would necessarily need to be understood as a product of an intellectual genealogy—not ironically, the very genealogy Robinson narrates in Black Marxism and in other writings. In this intellectual work, Black Study is an ongoing tradition of resistance and a way of conceiving it. So, then, is the collective intelligence of the Black Radical tradition that it extends.

ordinary life Cedric Robinson’s biography gives us a lens, a way of perceiving how one comes to Black Study. How do we understand and write about life? About Black life? How is that life connected to the practice of narrating traditions of thought? Any individual life that is animated by Black Study is necessarily made through Black lives, by collective practices that enact spaces for such thinking and being. These are Black lives understood here as both ordinary and extraordinary, which is to say, everything that our lives already are as well as our capacity to live otherwise, to imagine the

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lives we want to live. Writing Black lives, then, is intimately connected to one’s Black life. The lives of “ordinary” Black people and the political sensibilities that structured their ethos and ethics produced Cedric J. Robinson. Born in Oakland, California, in 1940, he was a descendant of a genealogy of Black “bad men” from Alabama. His grandfather Winston “Cap” Whiteside was responsible for an act that doubtless informed Robinson’s earliest intellectual sensibilities. Responding to an assault of his wife, Whiteside took matters into his own hands, beating the alleged attacker and tying him up in the hotel’s cold storage before eventually ending up in Oakland and later sending for his family to avoid an inevitable lynching.26 Encapsulated in this episode are the central motives of the Black Radical tradition that Robinson would later narrate. It was both direct confrontation and flight—and confrontation in flight. In these ordinary people, in the bad men and their ways of moving about the world, reside impulses that are resonant features of Black radicalism.27 Robinson’s task was to make that tradition visible so that we might not simply develop academic theories of Black resistance, but connect theory with their desires for a different world, to understand how their oppositions were conceptualized differently from the epistemic registers of order and its manifestations. West Oakland was a Black enclave of an essentially working-class city. Perhaps these realities explain why it was here that Black radical sensibilities consistently flourished, and why its concomitant management was also consistent, thereby producing violent conflagrations that further inspired Black folks’ willingness to resist.28 Born in a single-parent household and being raised by his grandparents and a larger Black family within a larger Black community, these were the terms of a young Cedric’s sensibility toward living and being. His doting mother, Clara, inculcated a pride in his academic achievement, while his Aunt Wilma introduced him to the history and culture of Black folk. His father, Frederick Hill, was a prominent figure in the nightlife business scene, while his grandparents were devout Seventh Day Adventists. These diverse but clearly Black spaces existed alongside the racial discrimination faced by the Black middle class as well as the repression and policing experienced by the newer migrants to the society. In Oakland, one never lacked reminders of what it was to be Black; one never experienced the absence of the real meaning of political order.29 Robinson’s educational experience was somewhat unique. Able to attend Berkeley High School in large part due to his mother’s marriage

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and move to a home on Calmar Avenue, he was nevertheless in an environment that had lower expectations for Black students. Yet in his earlier educational experiences there had been Black teachers who cared deeply for him, which was key in preparing him to navigate the racially mixed environment in high school. After graduation, he was able to apply and get accepted to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958, becoming one of a handful of Black students from his school.30 The small cadre of Black students at UC became exceptionally close. They organized, studied, and ultimately tried to make sense of both the local environment and global relevance of their education. Though he was often quiet, he was serious and committed. He became the vice president of the campus chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which organized several major initiatives on campus and in the community in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That he had time for politics is all the more remarkable. As a first-generation college student who had to spend summers working in factories, busing tables, and cleaning his way through college in order to afford his student fees and help his family, it must have been easy to see how his life was already determined by political forces. It would have certainly been clear to him and other Black students that there was a major difference in how they had to negotiate the world of higher education. As a matter of accessing and understanding why, one would have needed to ensure that there was always time for thinking and acting against the current. As long as these were the terms that determined Black experiences, as long as this was how Black people had to exist even within the gates of the university, we would have to resist. As they sought answers to large questions like the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 or the meaning of the southern student movement, they realized they could not find answers in their curriculum. In order to find themselves, and understand their experiences and their lives, they would have to build the spaces themselves. In a return visit years later, Robinson would describe this early 1960s moment as the foundation for Black Studies: We matriculated in the conventional ways, earning degrees in Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, Political Science, and the like. But the most vital of our intellectual experiences occurred elsewhere: on the Terrace, outside the Reserved Books Room of the main library, in the music booths in the Student Union, in Stiles Hall, in one or two coffee houses on Telegraph Ave., and in our rooms.

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We re-invented Black Studies since we had only an inkling of the intellectual literature of the 19th century (an inkling which was a great deal more than our professors possessed, to be sure). But we scoured the library for its then pathetically small holdings in Black scholarship and literature; and scrounged the local book shops for used and out-ofprint editions of work by Black scholars and writers. We had brought a certain knowledge of America and Afro-America with us to the university—what our parents and grandparents thought we should know (and some other things they believed we hadn’t overheard); and we used that as an evaluative base to measure the Academy. We, of course, found the Academy inadequate.31 This form of Black Study was “struggle which was engendered by and in position to American apartheid.”32 And there were plenty of opportunities for political struggle within and around the university. Robinson’s political activities included protesting the Bay of Pigs invasion, bringing Robert F. Williams to campus, and being rebuffed in attempts to also bring Malcolm X. He also traveled to Mexico, helped by the fact that the Bay of Pigs protest resulted in discipline from UC. From the outskirts of Mexico City, he saw a world rent as it was with anticolonial and anti-imperial fervor, the dawn of independence and self-determination, and the displacing of the West’s political consensus as the only possible way of life. This propelled his thinking about Black life and about radical possibility.33 A crucial example of the deepening of these ideological and cultural experiences was a trip to southern Rhodesia with Operation Crossroads Africa in the summer of 1962. Robinson found not only inspiration but theoretical direction for how to think about Black resistance. Often leaving the group and fostering relationships with the folk outside the bounds of the official mission of the program, including with the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, Robinson again learned and lived Black Study. This would result in a sensibility that maintained a particular connection with the ideas and with the memory of a people that inculcated an approach to understanding Africa and Africans that never left his consciousness. Southern Africa remained with him for the rest of his life. The lessons learned there resonated and informed ways for thinking of a liberatory, anticolonial future. They would appear in his work again and again.34 Seeing the Black world of the Bay Area and the larger Black and Third World during the sixties became generative contexts for probing questions

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around the idea of political order. One could have accessed debates and organizing opportunities around socialism, Pan Africanism, Marxism, and Black nationalism relatively easily. By the time of his 1963 graduation from Berkeley, Robinson had been part of organizing around Williams and the Monroe, North Carolina, defendants’ case; the work of the campus NAACP, which would morph into Donald Warden’s Afro-American Association (and later the Revolutionary Action Movement); and anti-interventionist rallies around US foreign policy in Cuba. He had also cultivated friendships with a host of Bay Area young radicals who would burst onto the scene by the mid-1960s and met and in some cases spent considerable time in conversation with Williams, Malcolm X, William and Louise Thompson Patterson, Matt and Evelyn Crawford, Ndabaningi Sithole, and Jomo Kenyatta, among others. After being drafted into the army but avoiding Vietnam, Robinson would meet his wife, Elizabeth, during a stint at the Alameda County Probation Office. He soon decided to return to school, enrolling in a political science master’s program at San Francisco State College in 1967, just as the Third World Strike was looming on the horizon.35 From there, he was recruited to Stanford where he decided to study political theory in an eclectic way that the political science department did not fully endorse. Spending four years at the probation office and engaging Black youth and the criminal justice system from the inside, Robinson would have gained a different vantage point for seeing “the problem” than what could have been accessed solely from campus. The discipline of political science could only give him so much of what he really desired to know. After several years of coursework where he was engaged in questions of the southern African struggle as well as a deep dive into the question of charisma and Malcolm X, Robinson began work on his dissertation. In part due to the inadequacy of political theory at Stanford, and on the advice of his committee, Robinson spent a year in Brighton, England. At the University of Sussex, he studied with the social scientist Zevedei Barbu and historian Norman Cohn. But perhaps more critically, together with Elizabeth, they met and built community with the many Third World students in the area.36 The late 1960s had clarified that this was both a world of order and subversions to the myth that order was stable. By the time Robinson was ready to submit his dissertation, the foundations for at least one element of his approach to Black Studies were solidly in place. But this would also mean that his work would not make sense within the normative bounds

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of political science—a warning he had issued upon acceptance into the program, and a warning that went unheeded.37 As an assault upon the precepts of the discipline, the intent of his dissertation was never to find space to improve political theory or contribute to its way of producing knowledge; it was an “attempt to abuse the political consciousness.”38 The dissertation, “Leadership: A Mythic Paradigm,” was completed by the early 1970s and never quite understood by most of the scholars who were to evaluate him. With the exception of Charles Drekmeier, they were behavioralists, trained not only to assume political leadership but to see it as eternal. Robinson’s dissertation not only wrote against the “political” grain of the West; it was a consideration of the West that simultaneously troubled the categories that structured its episteme. But it did not stop there. There had to be other forms of living. He returned, at least theoretically, to the cultures of southern Africa, where being meant something different.39 It was this practice of recovery that made and animated the other element of his approach to Black Studies: the realization of another way. Not surprisingly, Robinson had to fight to gain the credential that would become his entrée into the academy and more critically into many of the circles of engaged intellectuals who sought a better way—many who were also sited beyond these institutions. As his dissertation battle ensued, Robinson found such an intellectual community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was appointed initially as a lecturer in political science and in the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. He immediately began to offer space for a coterie of young Black intellectuals in the creation of the Black Matters Committee, a convening of Black radical faculty and graduate students recruited to the university through the organizing victories of the Black Action Movement. Developing radical courses around the questions of prisons as well as helping to secure visiting professorships for both C.L.R. James and Sylvia Wynter, Robinson and the Black Matters Committee managed to help make the university’s offerings more relevant to the Black students who had come from all over. In addition, the Robinsons convened meetings in their home and on campus, inviting speakers like James, Robert F. Williams, and James and Grace Lee Boggs to early Saturday morning sessions where they addressed burning questions of movement and ideology.40 The Robinsons entered an Ann Arbor-Detroit nexus, which was notable as a vibrant site of Black radical politics, particularly when it came to perspectives that sought to unpack

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socioeconomic class, American capitalism, and Marxist theory. It was here that the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and its successors existed alongside more nationalist organizations like the Republic of New Afrika, no doubt helping to frame Robinson’s thinking. In some ways it might have felt like a replay of Oakland of the early sixties. But institutionally, Michigan was also a place that was not very hospitable to this sort of thinking. Feeling the grass may be greener elsewhere, they moved on. As did many other members of the Black Matters Committee.41 In the fall of 1973, the Robinsons moved to Binghamton and to Cedric’s first tenure-track position in Black Studies, where they would make critical connections and enduring friendships at the home of what became world-systems theory under the direction of Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein. Both Cedric and Elizabeth played organizational roles in the institutional formation of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems, and Civilizations. But theoretically, Robinson was attracted to the ways that Oliver C. Cox and W.E.B. Du Bois’s approach to theory-building was premised on uncovering both local and global systems of racialization, ideas that would only appear in later iterations of world-systems theory.42 Robinson’s participation in the formative moments of the Braudel Center notwithstanding, his work was not necessarily always driven by the same motivations that dominated its early methodology and he often strongly diverged from the several of the central tenets of the group.43 In one proposal written during these early days, he argued for both the centrality of Black Studies practices within conceptions of the world system and the insufficiency of interdisciplinarity within its formations. Such approaches relied too heavily on disciplines and thus conceptions of reality that mirrored Western ideas. The peoples in the core-periphery relation possessed a consciousness, a way of seeing, that needed to be included in as a component of any revolutionary project.44 As was true of his dissertation, what was needed for Black Studies was a counter-science, counter-knowledges, counter-ways of knowing in order to displace the conceits that had rendered themselves universal. These were the conceptual foundations of the approach that would eventuate in Black Marxism, a book that had its beginnings during these Michigan and Binghamton years.45 But after another battle with the university, the Binghamton journey also somewhat abruptly ended. As Robinson accepted a position as director of the Center for Black Studies at the University of Califor-

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nia, Santa Barbara, in late 1978, he had completed several sections of Black Marxism that would be published over the next several years in the London journal Race and Class.46 Produced by the Institute of Race Relations, the journal became a radical home for Robinson’s writings and more.47 In establishing a relationship with A. Sivanandan, Colin Prescod, Hazel Waters, and others at the Institute, the Robinsons developed a transnational intellectual community and network for radical thought. When they returned in 1981, they deepened their connections to the Institute and Black radicalism in England, a crossroads traversed by many global Black thinkers that enabled considerations of race and imperialism, and the relation of both to political order. The United Kingdom was a place where one could see the critical foundations of racial capitalism in their very formation and in their continuity. In addition to engaging thinkers within the Institute, as well as others like Peter Blackman, Gus John, and Paul Gilroy, Robinson would also introduce thinkers like Toni Cade Bambara to Black British circles. Black Study took on a discernibly unique cast in places like London, attracting many who were drawn to an analytic of Black radicalism and Black resistance that had ensured that the sun did in fact set on the British Empire. But this setting of the sun was not to be the end of their work. There were other tasks to be done in the shadow of empire’s capital. The early 1980s inaugurated a conceptual shift that Robinson would note in his work and participate in struggles to overcome. It was now neoliberalism’s capital. Witnessing and studying the foundations of the convulsions of Thatcherism, the continuity of Irish resistance movements, the resistances to settler colonialism in Africa, the problems of structural adjustment in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the discussions of the nature of theory and thought from England’s Black radical centers, it would become readily apparent that these and other events were indeed signs of a collapsing world.48 Writing in the short-lived radical London journal Emergency, Robinson closed an article with these words: Every conscious effort must be made to construct a Black liberation movement which marshals the maximum of the human resource contained in our communities. This means a cultural movement which transcends mere political objectives. We will be Black not because we are not white, but because of our history and the achievements of our struggle. Our ideologues and intellectuals must follow us into this new universe of work and thought. They must be disciplined in new ways

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so that they may strengthen our articulation in the political struggle against racist States and the systemic discriminations we oppose in our jobs, in housing, our communities and in educating our children. We must forge our organizations into political steel with the capacities for breaching national boundaries and forming alliances with international organizations and multinational volunteer agencies alike. We must not fail. We cannot concede. We must succeed for ourselves and for all those others who are threatened.49 The Robinsons then returned to neoliberal America. At UCSB, as Robinson brought the community of Santa Barbara into the work of the Center for Black Studies, he would also build levels of camaraderie with thinkers like Otis Madison and Gerard Pigeon, other radical faculty, and many, many students. Cedric, Elizabeth, and others would create the critical Third World News Review, while spending the next several decades organizing and supporting political organizers in and around the city as well as abroad, cultivating a loving family and household that extended to the larger community all the while.50 These meanings of Black Study were also critical.

the order of racial capitalism In 1994, Robinson joined several scholars at Stanford University, invited by Sylvia Wynter, to discuss the significance of the work of Harold Cruse in the wake of both the increasing prominence of Black scholarship in the academy and the increasing vulnerability of Black life in the world. Robinson’s paper, entitled “Toward Fascism? Race, The Two Reservations, and the Materiality of Theory,” elaborated the ongoing evolution of racial capitalism while placing hope in the recent uprisings of Black folk in the ghettoes, folk who needed no direction from academics, a group who could only “help it along.”51 In a moment where fascism threatened, the histories of Black resistance were critical in Black Studies’ quest to generate a “native theory of transformation.”52 In a draft version of this paper, he described what he had meant by “racial capitalism,” a concept he had put forth eleven years earlier. Racial Capitalism … is a system of production and exploitation whose natural development propels the social categories of class and achieves its epistemological justifications in the creeds of individualism and

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logical positivism. Modern capitalism, however, assumed its historical character within the race epistemes consequent to slave economies among Europeans (and much later, instituted by Europeans). Race orderings (which in the nineteenth century race sciences extended to females) ruptured the calculi of capitalism, suborning class, liberalism, and scientific discourse. And I believe that the persistence of race wars all over Europe confirms the antiquity of these epistemes.53 Racial capitalism had deeper origins and more consequential foundations than what theorists had linked to the conditions of the modern era. And this was why Robinson could conclude that “its natural end was fascism.” Black cultures of resistance were our only hope, for we had “intervened before.”54 If the idea of the Black Radical tradition has been misunderstood, this idea of racial capitalism has been both misunderstood and hotly contested.55 At stake in many of these discussions are considerations of whether or not capitalism is the source of racism. If it is, then the route to cleansing the world of racism and racialism is a clear one. If it is not, the question of a post-capitalist future is fraught with danger, compromised by the continuity of racial inequality and racialist thinking. And then there are those who view these issues a bit more flexibly, taking a middle-ground position, asserting that while capitalism may not be racism’s origin, we should nevertheless privilege anti-capitalist strategies as pathways to erecting antiracist societies. Whether racism is inherent to Western society determines how radical thinkers and their liberal counterparts imagine the future, or what is to be done in the present. In their hands, racial capitalism is a tool to critique economic exploitation and racism and their coarticulation. Connected to the debates about racial capitalism are historical subfields that have begun to reinterrogate the nexus between slavery and capitalism, the history of racial inequality, as well as the racial critiques of various iterations of organized Marxism.56 This conversation, of course, is not limited to historians. Others in many different fields have taken the conceptual foundations of racism in the modern world as cues for studying its contemporary meaning and impact, all the while never forgetting to remind us of its social constructedness. Within this work, most commentators have sought to analyze the ways that peoples of African descent and other raced populations have had their lives upended by

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white supremacy, and how they have understood, struggled, and resisted this incursion.57 In recent years, these studies cite Robinson and racial capitalism almost as a matter of course. And there is now a growing, if not mature, discourse that offers “racial capitalism” as a necessary beginning point to theorize our moment.58 But that is usually where the engagements end. This work mostly examines questions of race as a modern problem, and usually in a United States context. Liberal articulations of race and racism tend to associate both within a constellation of material and psychic processes. Racism is embedded in the American soul. In these framings, race is seen as a limit to collective advancement. Studies of racial capitalism become another variation of Negro Problem Studies, resulting in an intellectual practice that contains humans within racial logics, even when it struggles against them. A vision of the future world, the arguments go, is one where we achieve racial “progress” through antiracist intervention that would heal a divided country. This idea of progress is assumed, at the same time that there is the possibility of regression, which must be avoided at all costs. That is, capitalist modernity has to be seen as either inevitable or progressive, but at all times capable of being “improved” through antiracism. Inequalities can be made equal. Disparities can be addressed with public policy, better laws, and changed hearts and minds.59 When the white left is not congratulating itself for belatedly, and hesitantly, having a racial analytic at all, they argue that race is simply a modern construct that was only relevant with the appearance of capitalism, and eradicable not through liberal intervention but through workers’ struggles. Black leftist thought has traditionally shared variations of this position, but has also attempted to move beyond race as the primary or only signifier for Black political expressions in order to reveal the ways that Black elite articulations of “the problem” tended to obscure the materialist foundations of racism. For these thinkers, a radical politics constituted the ability to see the problems with Black bourgeoisie dreams of progress. The Black left continues to vociferously attack the liberal concern with disparities, arguing that equality is a false promise under a class system. Further, their argument broadens racial capitalism to a global question. America is not a moral authority with a broken wing. It is a global hegemon that utilizes race to establish imperial power. Racial exploitation secures these ends, which are material, this-worldly necessities. Blackness is as an economic category. Racial “progress” entails the

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eradication of exploitative conditions. We defeat race by defeating capitalism. We defeat race by defeating imperialism. Racial capitalism is nothing but a conceptual language to understand this war.60 In sum, whether as a byproduct of capitalism or otherwise, race has to be seen as consonant with capitalism. It is simply presumed that it is in capitalism that we live and move and have our being. And it is in capitalism—only in capitalism—that Blackness makes sense. We may struggle, but we may not imagine a world beyond what the modern is and has been. There are elements of Robinson’s work that find resonance with many of the current usages of racial capitalism on the left. In his final book, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, he offers the idea of the racial regime to understand the evolution of racial capitalism in the modern world. These racial regimes were “constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power.”61 It was the creation of a constellation of forces of state and industry, which together produce and reproduce racialized discourses and popular imagery, within the arts and entertainment spaces that reaffirm Black and non-white life as inferior, as abject creatures in need of control. But these “mythic discourses,” as much as they “masqueraded” as truth, are unstable, always subject to exposure, which also makes the racial regime hostile and always interested in its own maintenance. The demands of industry need the racial regime to be continuously updated as it faces unique challenges in the world.62 Yet his conception of racial capitalism is after something more. For Robinson, the point was never to adjudicate a debate between liberal antiracists who merely wanted to reform capitalism and socialists who believed the abolition of race would come with the abolition of capitalism. Neither was it to participate in some Hegelian exercise about capitalist modernity’s evolution and eventual flowering in the West. Racial capitalism was an attempt to explain questions of order, and how order came to construct and rely upon human differences. And it was theorized during a period when Robinson’s larger work attempted to unpack the meaning of power, the ability to create certain kinds of meaning, to justify certain ways of ordering society. The deployment of this view of racial capitalism was neither an evasion of political struggle, nor was it the endorsement of either side of the often false binaries erected in many of the struggles between materialists and idealists, race-first or class-first analyses, and others. It was about whole structures of thought, whole structures of being.

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While there have been critiques of Robinson’s actual argument, much of the contested nature of what constitutes racial capitalism does not proceed by way of engaging how or why Robinson employed the term.63 Racial capitalism, if we follow Robinson’s thinking, became a way to see the ways that racism was bound up with capitalism not merely because of some economic rationale but because it was necessarily connected to the ways humanity was perceived in European life: The historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism. This could only be true if the social, psychological, and cultural origins of racism and nationalism both anticipated capitalism in time and formed a piece with those events that contributed directly to its organization of production and exchange.64 As a historical force and an “enduring form of European social order,” racism was “particular not to an era, but to the civilization itself.”65 At the core of Robinson’s use of history was an emphasis on relations of power, which relied on the question of who could constitute definitions of the human. Clearly, these systems of power and control were not solely products of capitalism, but of a religious and feudal order that could be found at the very birth of the idea of Europe, itself a construction of different polities held together by conceptual systems that reified human difference as useful mechanisms for social order. Racial capitalism is both product of the very specific “modern” era, and the residue of a long-view genealogy. Like Wynter, Robinson located the origins of the propensity to differentiate long before the introduction of the “African subject.” It began as an internal matter. * * * The question we might ask, then, is, in the midst of political struggles during the seventies and eighties, why did Robinson seek to make this work his life’s work? Why not participate alongside those who struggle within the existing meanings of the political, within the existing conceptual bifurcations present in liberal and radical traditions? Why even bother to study feudalism or medieval assumptions about religion, when that “historical stage” had already been transcended? Were these ideological debates not, after all, simply evidence that everything is dialectical? Robinson’s approach to Black Studies provides some answers. As mentioned above, this approach, as described by Erica Edwards, contained

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two elements: 1) to “carefully excavate the mechanisms of power” in order to 2) “detail the radical epistemologies and ontologies that those mechanisms have been erected to restrain.” The quest to understand that which was at the core of these mechanisms, Edwards argues, led Robinson to an indictment of “the whole of Western social science.”66 Not only was power instantiated in the physical demands of enslavement and enclosure; it also erected conceptual impediments in the form of political, historical, and scientific discourses that limited how we might think of ourselves, and our realities. The task of the scholar was, for Robinson, the dismantling of “the assumptions that found political science, Western statecraft, and the very idea of the political.”67 Rather than “Black scholasticism,” the idea and work of Black scholars who were simply content to add “new “facts” or the challenge to old ones (revisionism),” Robinson’s work imagined how the facts came to be.68 In Black Marxism and in all of his work, Robinson explored the logics of ideas, the roots of thought. The ideas of scientia or ratio did not emerge ex nihilo. He would insist that the problems of race and difference, which so many believe is the raison d’être for Black Studies, actually came from modes of thought that preceded the familiar origin stories we have inherited from doctrine and disciplines. And at the same time, Robinson would rely on a tradition that could not be imagined in what we had received from those stories: the capacity of Black folk to think on their own terms. As Avery Gordon argues, radical scholarship and Robinson’s work was not merely about exposing blind spots in the prevailing knowledge traditions, but rather to think about what can be known by focusing upon those “living and breathing in the place blinded from view.” Gordon continues: “And what’s in the place blinded from view, is an entire theoretical standpoint—a practical mode of comprehension that Cedric calls the Black radical tradition; not nothing or merely some missing information or a few neglected individuals.” Such was the difference, she describes, between “being an example of a superior person’s or system’s faulty thinking (the paradigmatic mistake) and being an example of the better thinking you are trying to generate.”69 Both Gordon and Edwards capture the stakes in Robinson’s thinking around racial capitalism and in his work writ large. It was a disavowal of disciplinary convention. As Robin D. G. Kelley puts it: “No discipline could contain him. No geography or era was beyond his reach … he threw down the gauntlet before the altar of ‘Social Sciences,’ and challenged Black Studies to embrace its radical mission, which he once described as

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‘a critique of Western Civilization.’”70 And in the introduction to a special issue of Race Class on Robinson, A. Sivanandan and Hazel Waters offer this characterization: History, philosophy, rhetoric are claimed to be the very foundations of western scholarship: from them we construct our knowledge of the world, our understanding of that knowledge and our power of conveying that understanding; they are the root of all social conceptualization. Yet what if history, philosophy, rhetoric, have themselves been stunted at birth, diminished in their capacities, crammed into spaces too small to contain them? What would that mean for the ways in which we conceive and bring about the transformation of our societies? What would it mean for our understanding of how to effect social justice? It is a question that scarcely even occurs within the academy, let alone the busy workaday world of getting and spending and laying waste our powers. It is a question forbidden by the habits of thought, the presumptions, the assumptions that render us quiescent to power. But it is the question at the heart of Cedric Robinson’s life-work.71 The point was to exceed the conceptual limitations of disciplinarity and to access ways of being radical proclaimed “unthinkable” within the logics that structure knowledge production in the academy.72 Racial capitalism could only be understood by unthinking the epistemological grounds of modernity. The shared epistemology of Black radicalism was made of an entirely different matter. The result would be for Robinson as he in fact had argued it was for Amilcar Cabral: the “recovery” of our “people’s collective intent and their collective system of signification as these had evolved as responses to changing historical circumstance over generations.”73 Order was preparatory to articulating the “militant declaration” that scientism, as order’s signification, was a “superior form of knowledge.”74 Black Study, by contrast, became the only space from which to launch what Cabral had envisioned. As a “critique of Western civilization,” it was “preparatory to re-articulating justice and the Good.”75 It was a way out. The differences were and remain significant.

the order of politicality To think the terms of order was unthinkable. What Robinson called “the political” or “the order of politicality” could only grow from a sensibil-

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ity to unthink social science itself. Yet there were other concerns, other critical considerations that made such thinking and unthinking dangerous. If political order and the forms of leadership and authority that existed to enact it were in fact mythologies, then it would stand to reason that they were, as he concludes, a “temporarily convenient, illusion.”76 In The Terms of Order (1980), the published version of his dissertation, Robinson elucidates a method for conceiving the meanings of the political and of the ways it had insinuated itself in the lives of people in the modern era through the ideas of authority and order and the convergence of these with leadership. But his was not simply a project of understanding how authority, order, and political leadership produced quotidian violence and misery. It was an attempt to think those ideas conceptually. It was an attempt to think those conceptual logics that made their emergence possible. The Terms of Order is a work of metascience.77 Knowledge of the political could not be granted by political science alone. As Robinson put it at the outset of the text: “one would be led, finally, to the conclusion that one cannot resolve the question of the nature of the political by the process of distilling it from a science of politics.”78 The only possible conclusion to be gained from within the discipline was how to theorize the maintenance of order, rather than its architecture or how it might be dismantled. In order to get at what the political could not reveal, Robinson deployed what Michel Foucault called the “Counter-sciences,” those “instruments, approaches which have a marginal relationship to the ‘world hypothesis’ of political order.”79 The work appeared at a time where such techniques were being thought about and advanced in critical schools of thought around the globe. Knowledge was no longer stable, the conceit of objectivity was threatened, and its monopoly on human progress was being called into question. For Foucault, the question of intellectual genealogy was one that required the derivation of “archaeologies of knowledge,” of “the order of things,” as he would name it. Disciplines were to be revealed for the relationships that they had to power and right. For Robinson, “power/knowledge” was also a key consideration, but it moved beyond the question of the modern—though it necessarily converged with it as well. As with Robinson’s critique of racial capitalism, questions of authority and order and ideas of leadership were deeply engrained in Western civilization, not just its modern evolution. The counter-sciences and the critical turn they initiated were internal critiques of these meanings.80

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But they were imperfect tools. Yet in considering their utility, Robinson did not seek perfection. It was a question of how these related to the disciplinarian requirements of power—a regime that Foucault notes was premised on the convergence of disciplinary thought with right and sovereignty.81 Maybe it would be an effective method to think the political by thinking of not only its social construction but the ways in which it was constituted as real, as a philosophical and linguistic construction. By clearing this space, one could then prepare the ground for a Black Study that did not require the assumptions of the political, assumptions ingrained in the academic spaces in which Black Studies formations were forced to exist. But by far the most critical epistemological statement was one that we have already reviewed. In the preface to the volume, Robinson argues that his perspective stemmed from “a vantage point inherited from a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual streams,” from a people who could see the political differently.82 This was more effective than any counter-science. Of the elements of The Terms of Order that remain prescient are Robinson’s discussion of the question of the political and its relationship to rationality, his consideration of the foundations and ideological trajectories of the idea of charisma, and his treatment of the principle of incompleteness. They have enduring meaning for our understanding of order. First, what is to be understood by the term “the political”? How might we generate a clearer meaning of a concept that has so determined how we think about the world? Robinson returns us to the basics. “The political” is the conceptual field that determines how—that is, through what processes and mechanisms—decisions affecting members of a particular society or polity are made. This definition, while revealing its basic function, is nevertheless unsatisfying. As Carruthers also discussed, the concept of the political presupposes a particular form of society. And beyond that, it presupposes who can be within and outside of that society—which ends up determining who gets to make such decisions and on whose behalf. The Greek term politaea can be translated in myriad ways as “the constitution” of citizens, and of their arrangement of life in the city.83 In fact, we might simply characterize it as Right, the process that facilitates entitlements, power, standing. Yet Greek society, for Robinson, was foundationally opposed to the kind of democracy it has been imagined to model.84 Aristotle’s “natural slavery” and Plato’s presumptions regarding

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the exclusionary “racial” modes of democratic rule would languish under the decay of European life before being revived centuries later to facilitate the replacement of the political authority of Christendom with purely civic rule. Killing God meant creating a secular order. The Enlightenment would need a theory of rulership.85 For Robinson, as it was for Carruthers and Sylvia Wynter, the fact that this concept of political life emerged out of humanist and Enlightenment intellectual contexts has implications for how we understand the problematics of race, for what it eventually became. Building upon this Aristotelian tradition were those early modern philosophers who attempted to produce a justification for the idea of man governing man. Theorizing the meaning of the rule of man were those concerned with excavating what was circularly imagined as the “state of the nature.” For Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Machiavelli, and others, the requirements of human nature meant that order was necessary and would require a political costume.86 And it was this order that Robinson’s work so ably exposed. In the last century, the German theorist Carl Schmitt was to argue that the order of the political assumed an innate friend-enemy distinction that characterizes human formations and how civil society might be organized. Establishing the difference between the political and all other concepts, such as the religious and the legal, he plainly asserted: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”87 Further, for Schmitt, it was the sovereign that is endowed with the exceptional capability to make decisions impacting the lives of members of both the in-group and the out-group, whether or not those decisions are enshrined by the “constitution” of the polity or not.88 These mechanisms were thought to enact and produce the modern forms of governance so cherished and so celebrated as normative. Though there are different forms of the political, the basic assumptions structuring these forms continue to revolve around the ideas of sovereignty, both as territorial space and as the special endowment of the leader. What friends needed most was protection from their enemies. Therefore, what was needed were politicians, police, and borders. Such “protection” amounted merely to the security of national and private interests. Defined in many ways, the ultimate goal of the secular order of political societies was the protection of people and property, of the people to secure property. What we are calling the political is premised

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only on an arbitrary set of arrangements that ensure that certain interests are secure. Yet the arbitrariness of the political would not fully explain its true and necessary meaning for us: the experiences of violent subjection at the heart of its project of exclusion. It is here where Africans—the nominated enemies of those sovereign friends—were introduced to an ongoing struggle that had marked the evolution of Western civilization. It is here where Africans en masse became “entangled” in the political.89 The meaning of the political for peoples of African descent in the modern world has been captivity and exclusion. Modernity has rendered the political as the space beyond accessibility for racialized others: those it constitutes as less than human and thus less than rational. Even in a moment where groups of those previously excluded have achieved middle-class status and have occupied space within its orbit, the political has rendered their presence abnormal, if not inherently problematic, and in most cases contingent on other sorts of exclusions. To the security of property and interests, there are necessary exclusions and necessary negations. Thus, while political theory—which relies on and justifies the concept of the political—might help clarify certain truths pertaining to Western civilization and its presumptions about the good life, it is also insufficient as a vehicle for African and human liberation because of these built-in exclusions, negations, and distinctions. In the first chapter of The Terms of Order, Robinson puts together how this order came to exist. Utilizing models of philosophy of science both gleaned from and in tension with the work of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, his argument asserts that “power” constitutes the basis for how we think of political science’s object. Yet the assumption and assertion of power is rarely, if ever, questioned. Political theory rarely, if ever, asks the question whether power is itself a good or moral thing for anyone—it is just there, available to produce things that can be good or evil. In a critique of the idea of American democracy, Robinson shows that embedded in American political science was this notion of not only power’s existence but the ideological posture that American political interests must necessarily include “just force.”90 And that force is used as a feature of a state that is governed through a sovereignty that has already decided its friends and enemies. In the American experiment, the political emerges as power and force, but in disciplinary political science, it is understood as inherently just. These are contradictions one might find throughout modern political societies—the crux of which Robinson locates in the original Greek. And

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yet the strength of Robinson’s argument is not necessarily in the identification of the contradiction. It is in locating the philosophical meanings, the presumptions of logic that make these systems seemingly the only possible formations for human organization. As the two final sections in this chapter demonstrate, it was through authority and order that these ideas became identifiable, recognizable, and “real.” Authority was a Machiavellian-derived political authority—“clawing respect not from the bequest of a ‘true order of things’ but from fear, not from a foundation and obligation drawn up in antiquity for eternity but from demonstrated diffuseness … [a] ‘repressive organized force.’”91And order, those “integrations, institutions, and patterns” that were necessary “to satisfy the images of the mind and the skills of the brain and eye.”92 Authority, cleaved from its quite different Greek usages, obtained purchase in medieval political societies by way of the idea of political leadership, and order by way of a psychological and perceptual formation that inscribes processes of recognition and observance and conflates them with our capacity for imaginative possibilities. That is, “order” becomes the “real.” And the “authoritative” leader possesses the “exceptional” capability to represent this order to the masses, while also representing power and being the representative of people to power.93 The characterizations of leadership as synonymous with authority precede the emergence of the academic disciplines and thus cannot be decoupled from how they are practiced, how they are instituted, and how disciplinary knowledge is categorized and produced. In other words, the very idea of rationality was reified through what has become a disciplinary practice that renders the uncategorized, the unordered, Ella Baker’s notion of leaderlessness—that is, the irrational—as not only a problem for political order but a problem for thought. To resist order, then, is to be radical. But this is not inherently observable or imagined in the narrative of Western civilization’s emergence. The occlusion of those that resisted the political’s rationalization of itself within Western societies remained a concern within Robinson’s work. He would find evidence of this resistance in religious expression and charisma and the struggle to be free from the political’s containment. Political leadership’s ability to grasp whatever illusions of power it arrogated to itself by appropriating this charismatic event and rendering forms of religious experience unreal, remanded such anti-orderliness to the space of the irrational. Charisma, the gift of grace, was made into something political, something bureaucratic. Taking us through a range of thought traditions

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including the history of religious thought, psychoanalysis, as well as the history of fascism, Robinson constructs what he calls a “mixed paradigm” that he utilizes to develop a useful lens for considering the meaning and disavowal of charisma: “We must then anticipate and affirm a continuous interaction between the rational and the irrational, between words whose meaning begins and ends with other words and therefore have no singular integrity for they are merely elements of bounded semantic experience.”94 It would not be enough to relegate experience to a domain independent of the words that narrate and define them. Words, by themselves, also would not be enough. Robinson’s search resulted in capturing and thinking experiences that did not require the introduction of new concepts, only their reinterpretation and reanimation. In his reading of the idea of charisma, we discover how Western thought retrieved political leadership from religious expression, its very opposite, while denying that it was ever there. It is intended here that what one discovers in the relationship between the event and the concept of charisma, its phenomenology, and the development of an explanatory paradigm for leadership in political science, will reveal the degree of coherence possible in an epistemological system founded on contradiction.95 Charismatic leadership, for Robinson, is a contradictory construction, embodying both the irrational elements and those rational presumptions of leadership. And yet its force is that political leadership comes to occupy space it appropriated from the power of salvation. Followers impose order on their own lives through a messianic devotion to leadership. That it is both fictional and misplaced, however, should not cause us to also render it immaterial. For if charisma signifies anything resembling an experience that connects this world to other worlds, then it is radical possibility. The problem is not charisma, it is its appropriation by power. To understand the force of this corruption of charisma involves a deeper understanding of the nature of the charismatic event. If the idea of personal and collective transformation can be made to function as a political process, rather than a religious or spiritual one, what does it mean when those who benefit from that process act as leaders do? A way to witness the divergence between this experience of charisma and the reality of the political is Black life. Robinson demonstrated that charis-

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mata was a concept that could help explain Black resistance struggles going back to the early centuries of the modern period.96 Yet in recent years, charismatic leadership has been critiqued for its failures to reflect mass-oriented goals and objectives. Contra the ideas of Ella Baker, the assumption has often been that “the problem” of Black political life has been a lack of leadership. Erica Edwards’s Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership demonstrates the issues with this appropriation of charisma through the contradictory concept of “Black leadership.” Blackness was supposed to be irrational. Black resistance was supposed to be a threat to rational order. Black revolutions imagined the overthrow of racial capitalism. But at the height of the movement energies of the twentieth century, we were given an idea of leadership as the solution. How might we understand this? The political insinuated itself into a Black Radical tradition and we became people with interests to protect. Drawing in part on Robinson’s work, Edwards shows how often elite notions of the necessity of leadership merely reflected a fiction embedded in normative politics, and one we also find present in the study and practice of Black politics.97 As Richard Iton argues, there is more hope in a “Black fantastic.”98 There is something beyond the comprehension of political science’s disciplinary structures that produces Robinson’s understanding of charisma. A something that makes it unthinkable within those structures. Perhaps it is also not ironic, then, that another field of appropriation for the concept has been the research university, the very institution that produced disciplines and sought to order knowledge. Much like the political, and in connection with them, the university and the disciplines of knowledge disavow the radical power of charisma by applying it to practices inimical to salvation.99 By extension, science becomes order, “the reduction of chaos,” and intellectuals in the academy possess a kind of authority. But here the force of that authority is philosophical and conceptual (though it necessarily manifests in real violence).100 Robinson argued that: As political science, sociology and economics (and their progeny in schools of history) have evolved into scientism—the progression of empiricism, analyticism, and quantitativism from approach to ideology—their probings into the nature of human organization have become situation-specific to a particular case of that organization: Western industrialized society, and have settled down into a tangential, self-indulging universe of queries and data indices. And as they

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have done so they have sought the measure and dimensions of reality by positing for every particle in their systems an existence exorcised from the presence of any other thing: reification.101 Importantly, this reading allows us to see the political for what it really is. But it is not and should not be read as an evasion of political struggle. More accurately, it is an evasion of what Robinson characterizes as those ways of “realizing ourselves.”102 In the process of getting to that place of seeing and realizing, we are to engage in struggle, but to do so under different presumptions than those that render life and society as necessarily hierarchal, as necessarily driven by leadership, as necessarily modern. It is the Ila-Tonga that provide for Robinson a lesson on how to realize this self upon different terms. Here the task became the fulfillment of the other portion of Edwards’s description of Robinson’s method: revealing the other ways of being radical, of being. In the Ila-Tonga, Robinson sought a continuous and transferable example of a conception of society that remarkably did not require the forms of hierarchy and violence that had marked Western conceptions of the idea. While the tools for excavating this example—functional anthropology—were just as compromised, Robinson’s analysis was able to avoid the assumption that the absence of order necessarily produced chaos, or what anthropologists labeled “primitive society.”103 In the Ila-Tonga, Robinson sensed a society that found ways of resolving human problems from first-order premises that did not rely on violence and coercion and hierarchal order, but on the notion that humans were not indivisible from their own (the Ila-Tonga’s mukowa, roughly translated as “clan”) and from every other being in the universe (including the ancestors, mizimu).104 This required forms of authority based on kinship rather than order or political leadership. Making sense of their world and relationships that inhered within it required what Robinson called the “principle of incompleteness.”105 For the Ila-Tonga, nothing is “done.” Everything is open. But more, everything can be more or less than what it is at any given moment in time. The Ila-Tonga did not craft reality in ways that required quantitative precision and exactness, what Robinson described as “discrete organistic integrity.”106 The conception of social cohesion within the mukowa was not a question of a ranked system of legislated power. Each element of the mukowa, everyone and everything necessary for the production of life, was inherently connected to the other: “a game of life of running, jumping,

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spinning for a thousand-headed, millipede beast whose members would each, if severed, be unfit to survive.”107 The principle of incompleteness allows us to understand that life is always unfolding, and we participate in that unfolding on our individual and collective terms. It was a society where no one was unimportant, yet no one was also singularly important. Conflict was resolved through a tradition of joking. Questions of work and labor and ownership were linked not to individual success but to a fluctuating process of belonging and the transference of duties, responsibilities, and love. What they did for each other mattered. Authority did not inhere in some sovereign; order was not a natural law that could predict and control reality. Existence was rhythm, a dance, a psychic-social process concerned with extending and affirming kinship and togetherness, dynamic enough to encompass the multiple ways that we could be “one” with another and “with all.”108 Always in time, but not bounded by time.109 It recalls the idea so foundational in The Instructions of Ptahhotep that “no one is born wise” and “the limits of art are not reached.” From this and other forms of sebayet (instructions), we also get the idea that human development is never complete, but always derived from a clear moral and ethical foundation, one that is imposed not as a matter of discipline or via coercion but as “wisdom instructions.”110 There is also here a connection to the Yoruba emphasis on moral character (iwa pele) as both grounded in destiny but also in the ability for humans to learn, in order to become more human, to practice iwa pele—an ongoing, constant practice. To think about and work on one’s character is conjoined as well to questions of truth, knowledge, and thus questions of how to relate one to another and, per the root meaning of iwa, how to exist.111 Culturally, we see evidence of what the Ila-Tonga represented in the modus operandi of Black dance traditions that are polyrhythmic and curvilinear in orientation to allow for an eternal openness or in jazz music that requires complimentary modes of being together while also ensuring that we remain open to improvisation, for without the latter we would never know ourselves. There are no restrictions on existing or being; there is only the requirement that we work with one another, in community, in order to become.112 Life is a cycle. Collectively, then, the principle of incompleteness reveals that questions of normative judgments that rely on closed systems, or what scientists might call “natural law,” and the ways in which these presumptions shaped the management of Western societies, do not figure in the

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societies of the Ila-Tonga. Anthropology would have trouble assigning them to a “category,” perhaps unaware that the point was to resist the very categorization so central to conceptual closedness, and thus decadence. And thus order. In the binary readings of Western philosophical traditions, the IlaTonga can only be stateless, and thus anarchic. Or they can be orderly, perpetually reducing chaos, or rational. Not beholden to such readings, Robinson’s work allows us to understand that what the Ila-Tonga represented was an altogether different foundation for knowing questions of order, and more fundamentally, for founding social existence. What I am arguing is that the Tonga positivity is an anthropological critique of social order as political order as rational order. The Tonga are not an alternative but a negation (one could say a negation by parallax). They are a negation in the mind of the analyst, a perceptual and conceptual negation, not an historical one.113 If Black Study represents this ideal of always accessing this “otherwise,” then Robinson’s invocation of the Ila-Tonga provides us the beginnings of thinking ourselves, realizing ourselves, from completely different presumptions. What if the question is not whether or not Africans created states or stateless societies (or empires, etc.), but rather, without presuming that a state114 is what humans organize around or against, asking: what were their internal conceptions of the nature of the societies they created?

the order of black politics The Terms of Order showed how the political as a justification for conceptions of leadership and authority projected itself as orderly and rational. In Robinson’s reading, then, political science is the study of the management and rationalization of this leadership and authority. It is a discipline that relies on the fiction that it is only within these domains that human societies can properly function. What emanated from theory also had an impact on movement work and activism, as The Terms of Order also demonstrated how Western thought in its most anti-orderly costume, that of anarchism, failed to completely overcome these presumptions of authority and political leadership.115 Robinson’s critique of Western social science shares much with Jacob Carruthers’s Science and Oppression. Their reading of Greek society and

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the early modern philosophical records are similarly concerned with the relationship between interests, order, and subjugation. Carruthers’s prevailing argument that Western thought is both immanently material and rooted in a “metaphysics” of conflict and control finds resonance with Robinson’s arguments concerning political theory and scientism.116 Where Robinson went to the Ila-Tonga in search of a non-political society, Carruthers argued for the study of expansive ideas of African governance as otherwise ways of executing “order.”117 It should then come as no surprise that neither Robinson’s nor Carruthers’s work found a home in either disciplinary political science or the development of Black politics. Though they of course had much to say about some of the many questions raised in these domains, their work did not revolve around a commitment to diversifying and contributing Black perspectives on Western political thought. The development of a Black politics can be generally traced to the generation of Black political scientists who earned their PhDs, alongside Carruthers and Robinson, in the mid to late 1960s. This generation critiqued the racist foundations of political science and dreamed of a Black behavioralism that would more readily generate a political ethic for studying and thinking Black freedom. The founding of the National Council of Black Political Scientists (NCOPBS) was an indication that such work could not be approached under the aegis of the discipline proper. Robinson participated in the boycott of the American Political Science Association’s 1970 meeting in Los Angeles and also contributed to their National Political Science Review.118 In addition, after having served an earlier stint on the Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession, Carruthers was known to attend their annual conferences on occasion. However, despite NCOBPS’s disengagement with the disciplinary apparatus of political science (which itself was uneven), there was never an outright abandonment of “the political” conceptually. And for Ronald W. Walters, who debated this point strenuously with Mack H. Jones, neither was there an extensive reckoning with the legacy and conceits of the empiricism that grounded the scientific method.119 While the study of Black politics by thinkers associated with NCOPBS developed an important insurgent tradition of rethinking Black political behavior along conceptual and epistemological trajectories still largely ignored and unacknowledged by the discipline, the sorts of interventions that Robinson and Carruthers believed were required would mean an intense questioning and eventual abandonment of the major doctrines of

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the discipline.120 Theirs was a not a Black Study that maintained an epistemological connection to “politics.” It was a moving away. Theirs was a Black Study that was not interested in interdisciplinarity. It was not interested in compromise.

the order of marxism One can better appreciate Robinson’s approach to Marxist thought with the background of this approach to disciplinary political theory in view. In the introduction to The Terms of Order, Robinson shared his essential agreement with Marx’s 1844 belief that “socialism will throw the political husk away”: “Marx, for the time being, achieved a reconciliation of the political and the antipolitical: though a useful instrument, the political itself would be transformed by a deeper, more profound process—social revolution.”121 Yet Marx’s world was a world of scientism. Speculative thought needed a path to realization. This presaged an approach to knowing the world that created a methodological logic that not only assumed certainty but also required a kind of intellectual discipline. This idea of scientism was, as Robinson wrote in Black Marxism, an “unhappy” legacy of a nineteenth-century industrial era that was attempting to move away from forms of consciousness it relegated to the prerational past.122 It was this scientism that informed a limited conception of scientific socialism that had looked to the revolutionary upheavals of the nineteenth century as “the source of their observational point.”123 It was this scientism that gave scientific socialism, and its pretensions toward exact and precise modes for thinking revolution, the conceptual authority it needed over the irrationality of otherwise modes of resistance, thinking, and being. Science was the revolution’s costume. But what was science, really? Elsewhere, Robinson commented that especially during this period, science dominated what could be effectively known by substituting “know-how” for knowledge. The examples are legion in physical science and in social science. One does a little hand-jive, a little mechanical magic, produces an illusion and looks for uncritical acceptance and obedience from the audience. Scientific thought does not resolve mysteries so much as it defines them out of existence—beyond rational consideration … Reality is not scientific realty. Scientific reality is that aspect of Reality which is man-

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ageable, that aspect of reality which can be controlled. This is modern science, Western science.124 Such a mode of thinking was inscribed in the social thinking of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Marx of course knew something about the “sorcery” through which revolutionary consciousness might occur.125 But in the disciplining of revolutionary thought, in the rationalization and bureaucratization of revolutionary movements, Marxists have gone further than Marx. What was for Marx a mode of thinking that should have been subject to constant revision and openness has become a mode of discipline for Marxist social and revolutionary theory.126 As it struggled within the confines of a Western scientific tradition, as it sought to become and organize itself as a revolutionary political movement, Marxism has generated a body of theories of society, theories of history, and theories of being that look and feel orderly.127 One fits revolution into a formula, makes certain adjustments, develops a hypothesis, and expects results. It is upon these means of thinking the world that Robinson’s persistent critique provides the most resonance. There are elements of Marxist thought that have declared that its way of seeing the world is “the world.” It has reached a point of decadence.128 A point when all of human history is necessarily material and subject to the authority of certain laws, when the real, objective conditions are only those that we see. And that “we” is often the theorist alone. This maintains a problematic and decidedly Western assumption of a split between the material and the ideal, and thus the demotion of the latter into the field of “immateriality.”129 One notices the same thing at work with the rational and the irrational, as outlined in The Terms of Order. And as we shall see, the dichotomies of the material or the ideal, the nominal and the real, were actually choices that would not have logically appeared within other philosophies of life and knowing. They were Western philosophical problems. And yet, when Marxist thinkers evacuated immaterial reality, they were also mystified that there were in fact “ideal” foundations that accounted for the appearance of Marxist thought. Those ideals, of course, often assumed a humanist-Enlightenment definition of “the human.” We therefore have a philosophical cum revolutionary tradition that requires a certain form of being human, one not actually representative of humanity. We have seen the disastrous results of this calculation.130 For both Robinson and Carruthers, this would have represented the initial

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problem, but neither would stop there. For Robinson, what was required was the recovery of other ways of being human, and other ways of being revolutionary that Marxism (un)necessarily obfuscated in order to represent itself as ontological. So here is where we should return to Black Marxism. It has become a classic text for academics and organizers. This work has resonated for its treatment of the meaning of modernity and Black life as well as the prominence and power of African spiritual traditions. For most, however, it was Robinson’s reading of the political traditions they created and continue to create, and the ways that this has and continues to be captured by what he called “the Black radical intelligentsia.”131 Intellectual historians grapple with the chapters on W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright, as well as, not surprisingly, the silences of these chapters.132 Sociologists interpret the questions of race, class, and society, attempting to reckon with the unorthodox ways in which Robinson interprets their historical developments. Marxist organizers come to the text for clarity in considering the question of race. Various interlocutors come with many different intentions.133 For Robinson, however, the book is about “the historical Black struggle,” a struggle that converged upon the revolutionary tradition of Marxism but was nevertheless distinct.134 There is a prevalent notion that the text is about that convergence, that it is an intellectual history of Black people who were Marxists. But it is not. What guided Robinson’s history of Black struggle was a critique of the Marxist conceit that Black people were merely cargo, a laboring class of junior partners in a still-to-come revolution. In telling a story of Black resistance without such crutches, one can see more clearly how a tradition of Black folk who struggled against capitalist modernity devised its own practices of revolution, as well as how it existed alongside other traditions. Black Marxism—as Robinson said of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America—is about “the relations of things.”135 It is something other than a mere disavowal and dismissal of those who have “struggled under the inspiration of Marxism.”136 For Robinson, the problem was the disciplining of thought. In his critique of Black Reconstruction in America, we find Robinson taking pains to excavate the contexts under which W.E.B. Du Bois confronted the misapprehensions of American communism concerning the nature of the American working class. For they were disciplined to regard themselves as the vanguard, and Black identities as subordinate. But Du Bois’s radical historiography of the

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Civil War had demonstrated that Black revolutionary activities required such corporate identities, but not something akin to a vanguard.137 Marxist philosophies of history—let alone those representative of the Dunning school—could not conceive of enslaved people as “divine agents” of their own liberation.138 That disciplining took place in other theaters. Take the following statement about C.L.R. James regarding his Notes on Dialectics, wherein he “supposed Hegel’s dialectic would resolve the dilemma” of the character of the proletariat: The delinquent premise was restated by James in the 1980 edition of the work: “What is then the beginning of the labour movement? We find the historical beginning in the French revolution as Marx saw it.” This was the unchallengeable presupposition: Marxists had to begin where Marx had begun and as Marx had begun. It meant that the assumption made in Marx’s vision of modern history had to persist in James’s consideration of social revolution: the notion that implied that the proletariat constituted a class like the bourgeoisie. Like most Marxists, James was quite unwilling to contemplate that, as Cornelius Castoriadis has made clearer than anyone, since the appearance of the bourgeoisie was historically the origin of the category class it would be philosophically and historically impossible for the proletariat to recapitulate the social and ideological experience of the bourgeoisie. It could not become a class on those terms. But there had to be limits within which the Johnson-Forest tendency was to remain. They had realized almost too late that as Trotskyists, without knowing it, they had flirted with the disintegration of Marxism: “Trotskyist thinking, persisted in, led the posing of the question of the disintegration of Marxist theory, questioning whether we might not have to ask ourselves if it were valid.” Their need to do things differently was to be a disciplined need. And in his consideration of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Marx, James made good use of his predecessors, holding strictly to the lights of the tradition.139 Marxism could not approach human history or assert its historical materialism as universal history without holding strictly to the lights of the tradition. And James could not fully escape the reality that Hegel’s evisceration of the African was of a piece with the concept of the dialectic,

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and of a piece with what empties into Marxist thought. Robinson demonstrated that the most obvious problem stemmed from James’s fascination for Hegel’s mode of argumentation: the distillation of history into rich concentrates used solely for the grounding of abstract discourse. It was also the case that this history was exclusively European—an inadvertent but natural substantiation of Hegel’s own assertion of where history could occur.140 James’s brilliance had disciplinary boundaries. For those who assume that Robinson’s project was to cleanse James and Du Bois of any Marxian association, these remarkable passages are evidence that he never made such a claim.141 The truer claim was that in their attempts to write histories of Black resistance, their work revealed that Marxist thought could not fully unveil the meaning of the Black Radical tradition. Despite creative revisions like The Black Jacobins and exhortations of a “stretched Marxism” for the Third World, there remained a need to reckon with why Marxist historiography had a tradition of producing silences, which were necessary to constitute itself as history, as thought.142 Why did there have to be limits? It was Richard Wright, perhaps closer than James and Du Bois to the class position that represented the Marxian proletariat, who would argue that “Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life.”143 In Wright, we see the principle of incompleteness, the idea that life can be understood but it cannot be made into law. Du Bois’s “rhythm of human action” is again at play, and it would remain for the intelligentsia to take the facts of Black life and to understand the folkways that they represented as something to be discovered, something that was not discoverable by a disciplinary Marxism and its view of life as labor, but by truly apprehending what was already there, all around them.144 Du Bois would find it in the “coming of the Lord,” James in the “medium of the conspiracy,” and Wright in the “blue-jazz” formations of Blackness.145 We might find it, too, if we could try to really see and feel in ways that unmoor us from a purely social-scientific view of reality. When Lawrence Reddick called for “a new interpretation of history,” it constituted a critique of a “Negro History” that saw Black life through a teleology of liberal progress.146 While even that critique has not been fully heeded, we might connect it to the ways Robinson critiqued Marxist his-

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toriography, which in its search for laws of human activity has also had the effect of obscuring the ways of Black folk.147 We still need new histories. Histories that see and sense in the past something other than a confirmation of an existing philosophical-scientific system, something other than political order as a determining force. We need histories of disorder.

(dis)order Robinson located disorder in the precursors to modern European radicalism. This was the subject pursued in his 2001 text An Anthropology of Marxism, originally designed as a set of course lectures on the history of the socialist impulse. While the focus here was not on Black resistance as such, the Black Radical tradition, as a counter-tradition, is resonant in some respects with those strands of resistance internal to the West. The European radicalisms that viewed political order as a constant threat to their ways of being were a critical source for conceptualizing the incompleteness of a system founded by the political. Studying their forms of disorder, their critiques of political order, enable us to understand something about the emergence of the modern world that perhaps would not be otherwise accessible. This internal critique and lack of consensus revealed the lie that the political was the only way, that it was indeed complete. In many subtle ways, these arguments were prefigured in both Black Marxism and in Robinson’s 1997 historical survey Black Movements in America. In the former, Robinson’s treatment of the series of revolts against the emergent bourgeoisie of the late feudal and early modern period aristocracy were of a piece with the eventual manifestations of the socialisms that would emerge before the advent of Marxism.148 And in Black Movements, the identification of religious women as the fount of revolutionary and social change in the distillation of the Black Radical tradition and later in the civil rights generation were critical indicators of Robinson’s thinking.149 These ideas would be more fully elaborated in his treatment of the heretical women who had literally embodied the contradiction at the heart of European thought and order. Elements of An Anthropology of Marxism were also anticipated in The Terms of Order. What would it mean to reclaim the religious experience that had been snatched by political leadership? What were the relationships between materialism, rationality, and religious experience? These and other questions abound in the text that begins with the declaration

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that “the possibilities” of “Western socialism and historical materialism were two elements of general discourse” grounded in a civilizational impulse and “prescribed” by it rather than some “universal human desire.”150 And that even within that civilization, modern socialisms were not unique to the modern era but were “embedded” within Western life, available for Marxism to appropriate and transmute as “proto-forms of itself.” The point here was to free socialist thought from a bourgeoisie historiography—ironically, one relied upon in Marx’s historical vision— in order to substantiate the position that “Marxian socialism was not the first expression of socialism,” and thus that it was “probable that it will not be the last.”151 In service to a bourgeoisie reading of history, Marxian historical materialism would mute the radical religious sects responsible for ushering the idea that materialist consumption was not an honorable human ideal into the interstices of Western civilization. In the late Middle Ages, Robinson found an expression of religious cosmology in the heretical traditions, the peasant revolts, and the poverty movements that rendered the actual world and the ideal world of God as Manichean. In this equation, Earth was, in fact, hell. And the church in its role as handmaiden to capital was the domain of evil: “The inevitable opposition to this identity between wealth, feudal power, and the Church resulted from the massive dislocation of wealth associated with merchant capitalism, the increasing conflict between the cities and their countrysides, and the onus of exploitation and repression associated with feudal relations and authority.”152 Robinson continued: And thus through the purest of syllogisms the Christians’ Jehovah became Satan, the evil god. As one dualist told the bishop of Alet: “Everything that exists under the sun and the moon is but corruption and chaos.” And Peter Garcia, another Manichaean, declared during his interrogation by an Inquisition court: “God is perfect; nothing in the world is perfect; therefore nothing in the world was made by God.”153 Transcending that world required charismatic experience, that coming into awareness of the presence of God and of life itself. Conjoined to radical interpretations of Christianity, then, was a critique of the ideas of order: “From the perspective of eight hundred years or more, the oppositions to feudal rule can be said to have assumed two discrete forms: an

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heretical attack on the Church, and revolutions against the ruling classes. And each achieved a socialist discourse.”154 For Robinson, the Catholic Church and its structures could be thought to represent order. In his reading, the heretics were the opposite of the norm, the accepted. They did not dress, eat, live—they did not exist— as others did. Their lives were unthinkable. But what they did possess, as Robinson indicates, was a consciousness inured to resisting the evils of wealth. They were able to see what was to come, what modernity was to portend. But unlike the tradition that grew around Marx’s thought, the spiritual other-world was just as real.155 That other-world, in fact, provided the model for how to be now. How to make this ideal real on Earth required a form of living that resisted the notion that immateriality meant irrelevance to struggle and to life. This would prove to be incomprehensible to a political science, a history, a Marxism habituated “to the epistemological presumptions of modern science as well as [to] Judeo-Christian monotheism.”156 As religious experience was restricted to a God accessible only through the Church, it would prove quite easy to replace that authority with a materialist eschatology that would erect discernible boundaries around what is possible. This is what made the Church a target. And it is what would also make the ruling classes a target. Of the most dangerous heretics were women, the most serious threat to the Church’s order. In An Anthropology of Marxism, Robinson reviews the question of gender in medieval Europe, showing that women were in fact considered both treacherous and powerful. Because they were women, they were more represented in the heretical movements but were also a defense against heretics because of their supposed higher levels of piety. From both angles, they had to be controlled, lest their minds and bodies corrupt men. Ungodliness was manifested as the image of the woman. And women heretics, according to anti-heretics, were “proof that heresy was ungodly.”157 This negative admiration perhaps adds to our explanations of the positions of women as the not-quite-human subjects of Western civilization. For if they were antithetical to order, then they, too, would be antithetical to conceptions of modernity.158 Robinson’s “anthropology” was more than extracting and discovering the lost sources of Marxism, if that at all. The work is fundamentally a work of Black Study as it is premised upon deconstructing the ideas around which Western knowledge asserts itself as knowledge. And in particular, the ways in which Western thought required the muting of knowledges that are undisciplined and disorderly—or that emerge in consequence of

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a total rejection of conceptual patterns required by order and disciplinarity. The key considerations contained in An Anthropology of Marxism revolve around the losses incurred by disciplinary traditions that rejected ways of being human in the world that are conceived in different registers than those founded on the intellectual genealogy associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. If the state of the planet is any indication, the West has yet to recover from such losses.

the order of things Cedric J. Robinson’s entire oeuvre intended to access “the order of things,” that which constituted the “significances, meanings, and relations” of the world as well as how Black folk experienced life and practiced resistances to violation of their conceptions of life. Our experience of time, history, and memory required us to set terms for studying our own experiences.159 We had experienced “conceptual incarceration,” the practice of appropriating the order of things as we knew it and re-presenting it to us through the imposition of a racial regime.160 Robinson’s work in Black Studies was resistance to this order. In a 2004 symposium on his life and work (which Robinson insisted focus instead on “the tradition”), students and colleagues came together to celebrate and recommit themselves to advancing the tradition in the wake of a world that was both surely changing but in many ways still the same modern one that required the intervention of the Black Radical tradition. In his acknowledgments of his students’ work and their efforts, Robinson stated in a soft but profound tone, “I am you, so I find it difficult to take credit for your being me.”161 A way of thinking collectivity and struggle that we find expressed in numerous ways throughout his body of writings, one grounding the nature of Black Study. It is a living tradition. In the years leading up to his transition in June 2016, Robinson would offer his work on film and theater, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, and continue to live as an example of committed radical beingness that left an imprint upon all of those he touched. Listening to and reading the tributes offered in the wake of his transition is critical evidence of the meaning of Black Study. It is not simply academic; it is life and life-giving. And in those moments of having been given life, Robinson’s work allows us to critically examine what life has been and can always be. In 2013, he succinctly encapsulated it in the words and imagination of enslaved Africans who gave life through the spirituals, what the enslavers thought

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was merely “noise,” nothingness. Robinson expressed that our work must be about the search, that ever-critical discovery of that space of what others assumed was nothing. We must find the “noise.”162 For it is life. Life that was rent but not broken by order. * * * Robinson’s works do not end; they call for a radical continuity for the next round, the next beat. As it has been cited repeatedly throughout this chapter, the words that we encounter in the winding moments of The Terms of Order tell us that we must recover different ways of “realizing ourselves,” reminding us again that liberation was and is first an internal affair.163 From Black Marxism we receive “an ending” as opposed to “the ending,” and its point of disembarkation is: “But for now we must be as one.”164 So we are reminded again. Black Movements in America reaches this point, looking to Black struggle to “obtain that distant land, perhaps even transforming America with it.”165 Therein postulating that what is an internal affair is also about more than us, and is also about a destination that has not yet existed. In a text that undoes the entire edifice of Marxist historiography, An Anthropology of Marxism, we transition to a break with the insistence that it is “immaterial” where “socialism” originates, and more important, that it does.166 His last published text, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, reaches its commencement, however, with the reminder that racial regimes are always working to be “restored,” that whiteness is never one thing; its requirements change.167 This same pattern is discernible in Robinson’s essays and articles in addition to his talks and speeches. What does “closing” with another opening do for us? It is perhaps congruous with what Fred Moten calls “the break.” This work is a “refusal of closure” and “not a rejection but an ongoing and reconstructive improvisation of ensemble.”168 We might conceive of these narrative choices as simply stylistic. Yet the idea that certain forms of closure anticipate containment, and the outright disavowal of such limits in Robinson’s thought, creates space for us. It tells us that openness is what we must do for us. In closing this journey with Robinson, then, we will not call for ending. Let us instead reanimate ways for making our lives continuous with the work we do to recover life. Let us move along with and for the ensemble, in the tradition. After we have finished the work of unthinking the dominant modes of thought, of recovering other moments and forms of thought and being, what is really left? In thinking with Robinson, the possibili-

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ties are abundant. It is far past time to resist disciplinary categories as they contain and contaminate the radical foundations for living in and against the modern world. And we know that in order to live, we must live against modernity. This much is clear. For living against is also living for. The work to be done is about thinking what we are for, what we exist to become. From such foundations, we can begin the more consequential practice of Black Study—that of thinking the world anew, crafting and founding societies upon different modes of relation, being one with each other, being one with the world beyond humanity—so that we can ensure that life is lived free of the constraint of what the present order of knowledge has wrought. Disciplines are merely the product of disciplinarian thinking. It will be necessary to ground Black Studies on our ability to think beyond these logics and framings—that is, beyond the limitations of academic categorization. Against the claim that such terms for thought would destabilize the project of thinking and studying, the injunction that “we find the noise,” and Robinson’s unceasing search for it, ably demonstrates for us that there is a space of inquiry beyond what is categorical, beyond what is rendered by Western thought as comprehensible.169 It is in these spaces where the “incomprehensible” noise becomes the recovery of a different way. One that is not order and what it has meant for us. One that points us to ourselves, to spaces where we can be. We find that what is available in that space was already “all around” us; the order of things can be shared through practices we create and preserve.170 And the work of Cedric Robinson reveals what is possible when these spaces are inhabited, when we are freed and when we are free.

Conclusion: Dreams Toni Cade Bambara “I discovered, among other things, that writing is akin to dreaming. And to make use of either state involves risks. Writing, like dreams, confronts, pushes you up against the evasions, self-deceptions, investments in opinions and interpretations, the clutter that blinds, that disguises that underlying, all-encompassing design within which the perceivable world—in which society would have us stay put—operates.” Toni Cade Bambara, “Salvation Is the Issue”1 “To obtain a relevant, real education, we shall have to either topple the university or set up our own.” Toni Cade Bambara, “Realizing the Dream of a Black University”2 Black Studies contains an immense archive of possibilities yet to be fully examined. The last fifty plus years alone are a treasure trove of Black intellectual engagement that is irreducible to standard historiographical framings of contributionism and diversity. So much more was happening. The question of academic legitimacy and the stability afforded to the discipline by the Western academy pales in comparison to its chief aim: to extend the Black Radical tradition, to extend “the vocation of the Black scholar” so that we can speak the truth, our collective truth.3 This book has tried to offer that one of the elements of this archive of thinking is a conception of Black Study, which is our way toward ourselves, our people, our futures. It is the intellectual conjuration for an otherwise-than-thismess possibility. It is the declaration of an intellectual freedom, and such declarations were the only way to realize a Black University, a space for Black ideas, a space for considerations of Black liberation from the terms of order, from the present order of knowledge. For Toni Cade Bambara, this was the only possible goal for the discipline. We needed to know only so that we can be free to be. Yet Bambara also knew that such grounds for knowing were a dream. Dreams are the province of something real not yet being real. They are realizable but have not yet happened. But the stage of the not-yet-real is

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important, for dreams embody what could or should be real, what is left out, or what is not present in the real that we know. Such dreaming is the province of Black freedom, for us who were never supposed to imagine a reality unstained by the dream of white supremacist Western forms of order. Black folk dreaming is a risk. It is a threat to the “real world” of pragmatic politics, to the desired place of Black life and labor as under, below, out of view (unless as a form of celebrity). That dreams occur while one is at rest, that they only come when we are not moving in relation to capitalist time, also says a lot about the futures they could enact. To dream of freedom is to take seriously the act of stopping to think, pausing to consider—hesitating. The dream occurs in the break. Though there is no inherent righteousness to dreams, to those for whom this real-world reality cannot be accepted, a different kind of reality not yet realized is a beautiful thing.4 Toni Cade Bambara had dreams. But they were not deeply rooted in the American dream. Bambara dreamed of a space inspired by Black women “turning toward each other,”5 a space where they could dismiss the liberal American dream in favor of a Black liberation dream. A space of disavowal and affirmation. No longer would experts determine what Black women’s lives were or were not, no longer would History or Literature frame their reality, no longer would a common notion of womanhood grounded in white feminism frame their ideology, their perception of the struggle. Turning to each other, Black women could be the authorities of their own experiences. Being Black and woman was credential enough to create a revolutionary sisterhood arrayed against the enemy of whiteness, of maleness, of America, of imperialism. For Black women, thinking and writing together was an “embrace, of the community and a hardheaded attempt to get basic with each other.”6 Bambara dreamed of a revolutionary self grounded in “Blackhood,” a way to fully live against the contradictions inherent in the infection of Western thought in Black men and Black women, in our very relationships to each other. We all needed an antidote to the “poison and lies that assault the ego and threaten the heart … that put the entire movement in peril.”7 Black Studies and Third World Studies needed to devise a curriculum that was an alternative to this “white presence” that founded property relations and premised the Fall on the assumed abject category of womanhood.8 We were not “immune,” for we sometimes accepted that premise in our relations. But there was no possibility for revolution under the sign of “this society’s sick definition of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’”9 If

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Black Studies could recover the meanings of the “old relationships,” then perhaps the emergence of a revolutionary self, which explicitly extricated the chauvinistic self, could inspire a common ideal of Selfhood.10 Bambara dreamed of an artistic practice faithful to the ways and souls of ordinary Black folk. Of Miss Grandma Dorothy M’Dear who taught her about a storytelling tradition that preceded theory, that theory could not even capture fully. To make “a story” one needed “mimetic devices so that the tale is memorable, shareable … a story should be grounded in cultural specificity and shaped by the modes of Black art practice—calland-response,” a “modality that bespeaks a communal ethos.”11 The real territory for Black Study could be found in the sounds of “bebop musicians,” and with the “performers and audiences at the Apollo and Harlem Opera House,” and “women getting their heads done in beauty parlors.”12 In all those places of Black creative expression and in the very mode of living Black lives were lessons much deeper than the criticist project. More than that, it was in their language, in their codes, their tellings, that the question of salvation could be truly and faithfully realized. So Bambara dreamed a purpose: “I work to produce stories that save our lives.”13 Bambara wrote her dreams in these stories. She wrote her rage, she wrote laughter, she wrote our capacity to realize powers “lying dormant with neglect; our hesitance to create new power in areas where it never before existed.”14 In her stories are the beauty of Black children living lives untrammeled by the forces of a world that had no place for them. These were Black children whose capacity for life and living was merely assumed, not bargained or pleaded for. These were Black peoples who would be free. Unhampered by industry and academy alike, unbought by the pressures of a world that could have easily made her a celebrity, Bambara storied our dreams of a world deserving of us. She dreamed so that we could dream. And in case we forgot, she re-membered the dreams of those who had gone before, like W.E.B. Du Bois, who she recalls was a formative figure in her quest to “construct her self.”15 He, too, had dreams. And he had prayed that the “Dreams of the Dead” might “rebuke the Blind who think that what is will be forever and teach them that what was worth living for must live again and that which merited death must stay dead … there is no Dream but Deed, there is no Deed but Memory.”16 So it really is these dreams that we must recover, that we must realize. * * *

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Before the university became the behemoth that it is today, it was a place where we could at least dream of thinking about what it meant to “critically re-appraise” humanity’s cultural heritage.17 But even Bambara then saw, as her colleague at City College, June Jordan, had also seen in this moment of upheaval, the Western academy could not do this for us. Writing in a position paper entitled “Realizing the Dream of a Black University,” Bambara argued that too often what was called cultural heritage meant a “mainstream American culture” shrouded in national myth. It was “riddled with too much duplicity (land of the free and home of the brave on the one hand—discrimination, injustice, lynchings on the other), too much illusion (the multiracial melting pot myth on the one hand—conflicting and often antagonistic racial, national, ethnic clusters on the other), too much evasiveness to merely be studied.”18 As Jordan had also written, students were hip to the lie. At City College, as elsewhere, true study of the meaning of that heritage was denied by the very disciplinary traditions that organized intellectual life. The academy produced courses like History I, which became “White Western History”; Art Appreciation, a consideration of those cultures that influenced the standard Western tradition; and Literature, which conceded that Black people could write, too, but were not “serious,” that “Anglo Saxon Literature was the Literature.”19 Students were hip to the lie because they came from worlds in which otherwise knowing was practiced. The disciplinary standards they encountered could be studied, but they were not the only kind of truth. It was these students who desired a “viable alternative to the madness inside these walls.”20 So they dreamed of a Black University. It was that or nothing. Bambara offers that such an intervention might dispense with the traditional forms of expertise, lodged in the “credentials mania” of the academy and that students and teachers might listen and learn from those who knew, regardless of where they were.21 Students brought into the university through programs like SEEK had an honesty that made up for the “lack” of skills, which were a function not of their intellectual capacity but of an unequal secondary education system. Yet this honesty qualified them to be co-creators of a new kind of university, one that would be a place for Black Study.22 Bambara suggested that potential courses such as “American Justice and the Afro-American,” “Negritude,” “Nutrition,” and “Psychology and Blacks” would offer alternatives and give context to the Western thought traditions that produced the “madness we are now objecting to and attempting to extricate ourselves from.”23

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It was her descriptions of two other courses, however, that perhaps have the most relevance to the way we might dream now. A proposed course entitled “Trends in Western Thought” was inspired by a need to examine the three prongs of “existentialism which focuses on man’s reliance on his self, naturalism, which stress[ed] man’s dependency on the forces within his environment, and rationalism which decreed that man needs no other equipment than a firm resolution and faith in the rational faculties.”24 It further offered that we might examine such questions by “tracing the roots of the Great Conceit from Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ up through Descartes, Pascal, Comte, Bacon,” a genealogy of thought responsible for a science that relegated “accident, chance, magic, God, evil, error, love, weakness, dependency” to the dustbin.25 This idea that “scientists who can control their world under good lab conditions—isolating, insulating, manipulation—and demonstrate damn near everything by reason” had, as we have seen, produced “the great rationales for racialist convictions and imperialist adventures.”26 But our dreams cannot and must not end with a real analysis of the problem. So there was the aptly titled “Root Courses,” a space imagined as a way to “move into our roots and hook up with Blacks in areas other than North America.”27 She proposed that it constitute “part workshop or studio dance, part lecture, part lecture-demonstration” and “examine the religious cultures and sects of old and New Africa, the Caribbean, the south U.S., [and] South America” in a Pan African discussion of the connections, common struggles, and common rituals that have emerged to contend with the world around us.28 Bambara’s conception of a Black University aligned almost perfectly with the theoretical work of Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson. With these two courses, and the others mentioned in her paper, Bambara was moving from idea to organization, from concept to concrete manifestation. It was a dream that could be real. Bambara, along with June Jordan, Barbara Christian, Sonia Sanchez, and numerous other notable artists and writers who were interestingly less heralded as scholars of Black Studies, wrote about the question of the nature of this project. In many ways, their ideas welcomed more and more perspectives, approaches, and theories that should be brought back to center stage. But as we recover them, we must remember that as they critiqued, fought and clawed for space, and expanded the field—it was the Blackhood that mattered. Blackhood was soul, it was memory, it was radical. Blackhood was enough for Black Study. It was the thing of dreams.

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* * * What are our dreams now? How is our work connected to the conceptual space created out of a tradition of Black Study called forth through W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson? As well as through so many others we should continue to name: John Henrik Clarke, Vivian Gordon, Vincent Harding, Bertha Maxwell Roddey, Sterling Brown, Bernard Magubane, James E. Turner, Anna Julia Cooper, Abdul Alkalimat, Joyce Ladner, Archie Mafeje, Wole Soyinka, Ronald Walters, Dionne Brand, Manning Marable, John Bracey, Faye Harrison, Theophile Obenga, C.L.R. James, and Eleanor Traylor. As we enter the second half-century of Black Studies, let us continue to re-member the origins of this disciplinary project, its roots in struggle, its promise for another kind of university, its hope for another kind of world. Let us take seriously the path tread through and beyond and not of disciplines, for what is left for us to do is fortify intellectual commitments that are undisciplined, that are gathered together in the name of our people. When we are unmoored from the imperial designs of Western disciplinary thought, we can better see, understand, and study with our people. We can create spaces that are of Black Study. This calls for us to ask questions that move us from “crisis to liberation.”29 In our updated versions of the Negro problem, we have become quite versed in the crisis. If for nothing else, the most recent flowering of work under the imprimatur of Afropessimism has demonstrated a particular kind of awareness of everything that is wrong.30 Conversations around Blackness become simply conversations about white supremacy and our negation.31 Both Black liberal and Marxist thought converge with Black Studies institutional forms to opine and theorize the mess. In new media, experts are called in to tell us about things we already feel, if not know: The planet is imperiled. Black life is especially imperiled. Indeed, most conceptions of life are imperiled. They tell us that we live in market economies that do not recognize our ways of honoring human and natural life. This economic violence structures how we show up in policy discussions and debate. Then we are subject to state violence in the forms of the police and in the guise of war and intervention. And we meet more lies when we are told that becoming indebted students is the only way out of the morass. Those who make it make peace with the system; they become individual exemplars, academic stars, and thought leaders, people who represent to the rest of us how to get over. Yet it never seems to work. When the university is not producing knowledge

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that maintains order, it is perpetuating inequality through an academic bureaucracy that has made knowledge a commodity, the substance be damned—unless it threatens order, of course. We must remain docile and complicit as the neoliberal order fails to meet our basic human needs and makes the planet uninhabitable. A global pandemic exposed what we already knew and simultaneously further enriched the already rich. Still, the experts have not really broken faith with the order that says these problems are solvable with improvement, refinement, better politics, better knowledge. Breaking the chain will be difficult. But do it we must. There are models. Writing in 2011, Africana Studies scholar Greg Carr places such questions of crisis and knowledge production at the center of the future of the Black Studies project: Is our intellectual work in the field being put to the best uses? Are we asking the right questions, or even the same questions our ancestors and those not oriented to our privileged elite class status asked? Are our contemporary questions still deeply relevant, and, as the environmental and experiential conditions that caused us to ask our initial human questions continue to exist, has the circumstance that interrupted and tethered that arc of human inquiry to the problematic of survival so altered it that liberation as a collective practice is no longer conceivable?32 If Black Studies is to answer such questions, it must draw “first on the most familiar, richest and most accessible deep well of human experience, namely the one native to the cultural arc out of which one emerges as a human being.”33 A vision for the future calls for more excavations into these cultural arcs, for more projects to translate and recover them, for more connections to Pan African intellectual frames, for more representative conversations about who African people are and have always been, in the rhythms of our unity and in the beauty of our difference. As Vincent Harding put it, “the old/new philosophies of science and of the universe which are beginning to re-emerge out of the African and other non-Western worlds” have the power to frame reality for us today.34 This is a dream that we can realize. This we know because we have always known each other. * * *

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What we are trying to say is that all is not lost, we have not conceded everything. Black Study is a naming of those practices that allow us to keep on living, to keep on insisting on life, that indeed gave us life of those cycles of life, that disrupt historical time, that show us that we are because others were of the kind of order that cannot be observed by telescopic eyes, the vibrations which cannot measured by tools, that sacred space we make in our utterance of Asé of the authority to radically love each other, to love every living thing, to remember even the dead, that it is right to defend their honor of the belief that everything that happens to us will be recorded, that there is ultimately something resembling, perhaps larger than justice in the offing, that struggle don’ last always of a kind of protection that does not require a market relationship of a kind of care that does not expect a return on investment of a

conclusion: dreams—toni cade bambara  .  191

kind of ethical relationship to provide modes of healing of a responsibility to community. What we are trying to say is that we know what it is to be against, and even what it is to be for still, this space was consecrated by ancestors, by a living tradition, who gave so much so that we could imagine what it is to be of each other, to be of our worlds to be of a practice of study, to be

… Of Black Study.

Acknowledgments This book began its long gestation on the halls of the third floor of Founders Library at Howard University. It exists because of the Kwame Ture Society for Africana Studies who met there weekly long into the nights. It is where I learned about the tradition of Africana Studies. It was with Chigozie Onyema, Ava Tiye Kinsey, Courtney Javois, Jaminnia R. States, Nina Burkett, Justin Dunnavant, Anoa Gibson-Hunter, Michael Leak, Sawdayah Brownlee, Omare Kinsey, Melvin Barrolle, Stephanie Tisdale, Brian Kasoro, James Morgan, Nathalie Pierre, and our founding generation that included Rashauna Johnson. And it was with Greg Kimathi Carr, our teacher, who first showed us the way. It was here where Black Study became real, became life. We are all still committed. So, too, is the generation that has followed, including Sheneese Thompson, Damarius Johnson, Jocelyn Imani, Khari Brooks-Maye, Osceola Ward, Adé Oluokun, Ansharaye Hines, Alfred Burks, Kendall Craig, Chad Kehinde Graham, Carmen Crusoe, Jasmine Vincent, Mary Elizabeth Morall, Kailande Cassamajor, Justin Funnye, Darrell Azubuike Johnson, Malikia Johnson, Makini Johnson, Olivia Harp, Jewell Humphrey, Shekinah Hockenhull, Lennex Cowan, and Alfajiri Shah. And those current Howard University students who continue in this practice every week include Jy’mir Starks, Joseph Sturgeon, Solomon Brooks, Blake Spencer, Folly Kouevi, Teanna Barrett, Kennedi White, Micah Watkins, and Nasir Pouncey. The next chapter was written at Temple University. A riff on my dissertation, this work has endured and been reimagined but bears the mark and influence of my dissertation committee, consisting of Greg Kimathi Carr, Abu Abarry, Wilbert Jenkins, and Edward Lama Wonkeryor. My advisor and academic father, Nathaniel “Pop” Norment, along with Rosemarie “Mom” Norment sustained me emotionally and intellectually and made this work possible. Other professors at Temple also bear some responsibility. A close reader will find Anthony Monteiro speaking through me. Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell Stanford) and Dana King gave me space to think in extended ways about many of the ideas that show up here. The Temple folk who held me close during the earliest writing days are nec-

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essary to mention as well: Heru Heq-M-Ta, Anyabwile Love, and Amy Yeboah Quarkume (now my Howard colleague) helped me as we collectively journeyed through graduate school. I cannot thank Professor Wilbert Roget enough. He was never my professor but showed up to my defense and told me to go read Sylvia Wynter. So I did. As this book transitioned, there were many readers and supporters. I must acknowledge my departmental colleagues at Howard University: Amy Yeboah Quarkume, Mario Beatty, Valethia Watkins, Andreas Woods, E. Ethelbert Miller, our emeritus chair Russell Adams, and Greg Kimathi Carr, our longtime chair. My hope is that one day all the work and sacrifice of this group gets added to the historical annals of Black Studies. There have been other supporters of my work at Howard. Dean Dana A. Williams is a mighty force. David Green, Kola Abimbola, Segun Gbadegesin, the late James Donaldson, Eleanor Traylor, Haile Gerima, Jules Harrell, and others were present in both large and small ways. Shauna M. Morgan was always there. She read whatever I sent. Her words of encouragement were actually true. She is the truth. There were many other readers of parts of this project: Robin D. G. Kelley, Ashon Crawley, Peter James Hudson, Harold Wolfinger, and Charisse Burden-Stelly read the work at the proposal stage and offered critical advice. Robin somehow managed to get another book out of it! I also had the benefit of the deft reading of J. Lafayette Gaston. I was grateful that Ifé Carruthers read elements of this work as well. Before that, the earliest iteration of this book benefited greatly from an anonymous reader for the Issues in Critical Investigation Book Prize at Vanderbilt University. Bry Reed and Zalika U. Ibaorimi “listened” to portions of the work as well. So did my students at Howard! I am grateful for them. Special thanks to Cheyenne Sims, who agreed to be a research assistant, though we never got to make it work. An even greater debt is owed to Alfajiri Shah and Alyssa McKenzie, who painstakingly checked every quote and footnote for accuracy. Then there were the readings. Portions of this work were read at the conferences of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the National Council for Black Studies. The men and women of ASCAC are my guide. They are in everything, but I must single out Ifé Carruthers, Mario Beatty, Kamau Rashid, Yvonne Jones, Charles and Carolyn Grantham, and Muriel Balla for the direct connections they have to this book. I am also grateful to Gashawbeza Bekele and Sekhmet Maat

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at Tennessee State University; Theodore Foster and Maria C. Seger at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette; Brandy S. Faulkner at Virginia Tech University; and Whitney Battle-Baptiste at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for invitations to work some of these ideas out in public at their universities. As well as to the audiences and conversation partners that helped produce clarity around several of these ideas. Shouts to James Pope and the Africa World Now Project Collective for sharing them with a further audience. In 2018, I was awarded a fellowship to mine the archives of the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers at UMass. I’m thankful to Dr. Battle-Baptiste for all the work that she does and my cohort—most notably Ifetayo Flannery, Richard Benson, Phillip Luke Sinitiere—who listened to some of the ideas that made it into this work. Thanks should go to the staff of the Special Collections and University Archives who made sure I had everything that I needed and things I did not know I needed. Thanks also to Matt Harris for organizing Cedric Robinson’s private archive and of course to Elizabeth Robinson for granting my access to that valuable space. Thanks as well to my home librarians at Howard University Libraries. This was the first book I ever sent out for review. But no one responded like Bedour Alagraa. As the Black Critique series coeditor, she encouraged me to send her the proposal. And from that day on, everything was perfect. We have become friends. Every highlight and every flaw has been made easier to accept because of Bedour. Now that it is done, we get to look forward to her “alphet.” A special thank you and appreciation also to Anthony Bogues, series coeditor, a consummate protector of Black people’s ideas. I am honored to work with you. David Shulman, my editor at Pluto, has been patient and reassuring and a pleasure to work with. I spent a month in Atlanta writing much of this text. I am extremely grateful to Melba and Tim Furlow, who provided the perfect space for writing. And to Makina Table and Christina Brantley, who showed up with food and hugs. My most consistent writing companions are the musicians. I cannot name them all. But there is something coming that will name the meaning of their work to me. Some “just because” names: Mario Antwine, Niya Mack, Ashanté Reese, Chelsea Jones, Jahaan Shaheed, Malik Washington, Evie Hightower, Lindsey Cox, DJB, Safiya Farrakhan, Ashley Stoney, Ray Baker, Melech Thomas, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Avery Gordon, Rinaldo Walcott, Christina Sharpe, Addissalem Gebrekidan, Corey D.B. Walker,

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Felicia Denaud, Randi Gill-Sadler, James Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, Rocky Douglas, Kimberly Worthy, Acklyn Lynch, Jawara and Aziza Hunter, James Counts Early, Moriba Kelsey, Ron and Cleanise McCoy, Yaa Asantewaa Blake, Black Nia F.O.R.C.E, Positive Black Folks in Action, and the SNCC Legacy Project. In some way all of you did or said something that mattered. The final words are for all of my friends and family, but namely: Alexsandra Mitchell; Nicole Triplett; Alton Myers; the “cousins” group chat; my parents, James and Joyce Myers; and my siblings, Chris and Jennifer. While this may be the most theoretical of all my work, I know that it will sing your song in the end. My final acknowledgment is to the ancestors and the unborn.

Notes introduction June Jordan, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” in June Jordan, Civil Wars (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), 52; emphasis in the original. 2. Ibid., 53. 3. Ibid., 47. 4. “Re-membering” is from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: “Creative imagination is one of the greatest of re-membering practices. The relationship of writers to their social memory is central to their quest and mission. Memory is the link between the past and the present, between space and time, and it is the base of our dreams.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: BasicCivitas, 2009), 39. 5. Jordan, “Black Studies,” 45–46; Toni Cade Bambara, “Realizing the Dream of a Black University (1969),” in Realizing the Dream of a Black University and Other Writings, Pt. II, eds. Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed (New York: Center for the Humanities, Graduate Center, CUNY, 2017), 13–26. On the struggle for open admissions at City College, see Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 123–41 and Conor Tomás Reed, New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2023). 6. James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 277–82; Joyce A. Joyce, Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 135–61. 7. Jordan, “Black Studies,” 52. 8. Ibid., 53. 9. Ibid., 52. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. June Jordan, “Ocean Hill Brownsville, I.S. 55 Graduation Speech [1970],” in “Life Studies,” 1966–1976, eds. Conor Tomás Reed and Talia Shalev (New York: Center for the Humanities, Graduate Center, CUNY, 2017), 30. 12. Ibid., 31. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 32. 15. Jordan, “Black Studies,” 54. 16. On the idea of a Black University, see Bambara, “Realizing”; Vincent Harding, “Toward the Black University,” Ebony (August 1970): 156–59; Charles Jarmon, ed., Andrew Billingsley: Scholar and Institution Builder: Essays and Tributes (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2021); Abdul Alkali1.

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17.

18. 19.

20.

mat, The History of Black Studies (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 122–27; and Biondi, Black Revolution, 142–53. Derrick E. White, The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Richard D. Benson II, Fighting for Our Place in the Sun: Malcolm X and the Radicalization of the Black Student Movement, 1960–1973 (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). On connecting this longer history of radical study to current iterations of movement work, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review (March-April 2016): 9–20. On the internal debates of Black Studies, see, inter alia, Alkalimat, History of Black Studies; Nick Aaron Ford, Black Studies: Threat or Challenge? (New York: Kennikat Press, 1973); James E. Turner, ed., The Next Decade: Theoretical and Research Issues in Africana Studies (Ithaca, NY: Africana Studies and Research Center, 1984); Nathaniel Norment Jr., ed., The African American Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2007); James B. Stewart, Flight: In Search of Vision (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2004); Perry A. Hall, In the Vineyard: Working in African American Studies (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004); Manning Marable, ed., Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Toni Cade Bambara, “Preface,” in The Black Woman, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: Mentor, 1970), 7–12; Vivian Gordon, Black Women, Feminism, and Black Liberation: Which Way? (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (New York: Feminist Press, 1982); and E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, eds., Queer Black Studies: An Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). See also in particular the recent special issues of Black Studies journals on the status of the discipline: International Journal of Africana Studies (2008); Western Journal of Black Studies (2010); Journal of African American Studies (2011); Socialism and Democracy (2011); The Black Scholar (2014); and Souls (2020). Also instructive is Farah Jasmine Griffin, James B. Stewart, Greg Carr, Noliwe M. Rooks, and Charles McKinney, “Plenary V: What Woodson Willed” (Panel Presentation at 105th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Virtual, September 17, 2020), and Eddie Glaude, Greg Carr, Elizabeth Alexander, and Tricia Rose, “40th Anniversary of African American Studies in Academia,” The Tavis Smiley Radio Show, Public Radio International, September 18, 2009. University administrations reacted to the uprisings of 2020 with commitments to antiracism and diversity, while simultaneously ignoring, incorporating, or reimagining Black Studies formations to align with that limited goal. See the struggles at Stanford University and the University of Chicago for two examples of many we could point out; see Jessie Schrantz,

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“The Battle for Black Studies: Going beyond Anti-Racism,” Stanford Daily, January 27, 2021, stanfordaily.com; Hank Reichman, “More Than Diversity—A Call to Action from the University of Chicago Faculty,” Academe, August 6, 2020, academeblog.org. On pluralism and the disavowal of Black Studies’ original aims, see Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 107–69. On the relationship between the neoliberal university and the “interdisciplines” that emerged to challenge the traditional fields, see Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). And on the neoliberal moment in higher education generally, see Henry Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2015); and Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021). 21. “Legitimization and institutionalization” is from Robert L. Harris Jr., “The Intellectual and Institutional Development of Africana Studies,” in Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States, ed. Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Ford Foundation, 2007), 96. The role of the Ford Foundation in Black Studies is covered in Noliwe M. Rooks, White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006). While it is true that philanthropic influence shaped Black Studies in some ways, Rooks’s work tends to overstate its ability to direct and inform the deeper methodological focus raised by Black scholars. In Rooks’s view, this philanthropic intervention is what has rendered Black Studies as a mechanism for diversity and affirmative action. While this may be true in some respects, there was also a vibrant space for debate that had little, if not anything to do with the Ford Foundation. For another view, see Perry Hall, “History, Memory and Bad Memories,” Black Scholar 36 (Summer/Fall 2006): 55–61. 22. Jordan, “Black Studies,” 52. 23. Greg Carr, “What Black Studies Is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work,” Socialism and Democracy 25 (March 2011): 181. Asante’s intellectual connections to Africana Studies can be gleaned from his own statements; see Molefi Kete Asante, An Afrocentric Manifesto (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007); Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990); and “The Afrocentric Metatheory and Disciplinary Implications,” Afrocentric Scholar 1 (May 1992): 98–117. On Afrocentricity and Black students in the late eighties and early nineties, see Joshua M. Myers, We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 59–65; 180–94.

notes  .  199 24. Carr, “What Black Studies Is Not,” 179–80. 25. In declaring the mission of the Black Matters Committee at a 1972 symposium at the University of Michigan, Cedric Robinson was to assert: “We must see ourselves differently, we must in fact be different.” Cedric Robinson, quoted in Joshua Myers, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), 114. 26. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2013), 67. 27. Chuck Morse, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory (Spring 1999): 8. 28. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), xxviii; emphasis is mine. 29. This internal critique has been linked to critical theory, to postmodern and/or poststructural thought, as well as to the subfield of the history of science. Though not as neat as it is often articulated, the movements of the 1960s inspired additional heft to this internal critique. There has since been an attempt to limit or contain them in order to preserve the disciplinary achievements that preceded them. A sampling of this conversation can be gleaned from Roger P. Mourad Jr., Postmodern Philosophical Critique and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Higher Education (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1997); James J. Sosnoski, Modern Skeletons in Postmodern Closets: A Cultural Studies Alternative (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995); Marcus Peter Ford, Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002); and Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). 30. Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006). 31. “Black Studies” and “interdisciplinary” are too often easily invoked without clarifying what is meant, methodologically and philosophically. It is mostly meant to signify a scholar who is using more than one discipline to understand some aspect of Black life. This obscures the real issues with interdisciplinary knowledge production. For an analysis that takes seriously the idea of interdisciplinarity and the autonomy of Black Studies, see Karla Spurlock, “Toward the Evolution of a Unitary Discipline: Maximizing the Interdisciplinary Concept in African/Afro-American Studies,” Western Journal of Black Studies 1 (1977): 224–28. Scholars who study the concept of interdisciplinarity have not reached a consensus on the effectiveness of interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. In most cases, there is a heavy reliance on discipline itself, which enables these practices of interdisciplinarity. See, among others, Julie Thompson Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Julie Thompson Klein, Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity:

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990); and Lisa R. Lattuca, Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching among College and University Faculty (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001). Mack Jones, “The Epistemological Vacuum in Black Critiques of Contemporary Social Science” (unpublished paper, 1976). Cedric Robinson, “Social Movements and the African Diaspora,” 3–4; emphasis added. Box 16, Folder 750, Fernand Braudel Center Papers, Binghamton Libraries Special Collections, Binghamton University. Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 236. Sonia Sanchez, quoted in Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 135. W.E.B. Du Bois, quoted in St. Clair Drake, “Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life Lived Experimentally and Self-Documented,” Contributions in Black Studies 8 (1986–1987): 112.

chapter 1 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

W.E.B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” boundary 2 27 (Fall 2000): 44. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 2000), 725. Robert Glasper, Double Booked (Blue Note 509996 94244 2 7, 2009, CD). A similar moment is recorded in James Weldon Johnson’s description of swing. Here is Brent Hayes Edwards on Johnson: “‘Swing’ is above all this physical hesitation, this continuing transfer. The rhythm is never lost, but it is never held or captured in the body either: it divides itself into ‘fractions,’ it parcels itself out, jumping from hand to foot, ‘pounding’ and ‘monotonous’ in one hand, ‘juggled’ in the other—and neither beat nor surge is really acceptable as a term because the swinging never settles. It is the ‘play’ of this hesitation that makes the ‘swing’ of black rhythm elusive.” Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 71. Here, I am thinking along with Fred Moten: “What he [Amiri Baraka] sees as a transition phase of his development—ground simply to have been covered or passed through—is a very definite seizure and advent, a musical caesura that demands precisely that immersive lingering that, according to Ralph Ellison, is a necessary preface to action.” Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 85. W.E.B. Du Bois, quoted in St. Clair Drake, “W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life Lived Experimentally and Self-Documented,” Contributions in Black Studies 8 (1986): 112. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Conservation of Races,” in Writings, ed. Nathaniel Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 819.

notes  .  201 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). See also Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). “Penn Will Bestow Long-Overdue Honors on W.E.B. Du Bois,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 31, 2012, www.philly.com/philly/columnists/ annette_john-hall/20120131_Annette_John-Hall__Penn_will_bestow_ long-overdue_honors_on_W_E_B__Du_Bois.html. See excerpted portions of their comments at www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_ Cs65Fpwyo&feature=youtu.be. For more information on the conference, see https://duboisprofessorship.wordpress.com. Anthony Monteiro, “W.E.B. Du Bois: Theorizing Race, Africa and Modernity” (lecture, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, January 19, 2010), and Anthony Monteiro, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Study of Black Humanity: A Rediscovery,” Journal of Black Studies 38 (March 2008): 618. On the university during the Cold War era as well as the American scientific establishment’s relationship to this political moment, see, among others, Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: New Press, 1997); Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 225–364; and Audra J. Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). The standard work on Du Bois and the Cold War environment remains Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). As a representative example of Du Bois’s domestication in the Obama era, see Charles Pete Banner-Haley, From Du Bois to Obama: African American Intellectuals in the Public Forum (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010); and to a lesser extent William Jelani Cobb, The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 3–4. On the nature of Black politics and its negations in the Obama era in general, see Fredrick C. Harris, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Michael Eric Dyson, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (New York: Mariner Books, 2017). Elvira Basevich, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found (Cambridge: Polity, 2021). Mia Bay, “‘The World Was Thinking Wrong About Race’: The Philadelphia Negro and Nineteenth Century,” in Katz and Sugrue, eds., W.E.B. Du Bois, 42.

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14. James B. Stewart, “The Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois for Contemporary Black Studies,” Journal of Negro Education 53 (Summer 1984): 310–11. 15. Lewis Gordon, “W.E.B. Du Bois and Africana Studies” (Panel presentation at the Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois Honorary Emeritus Professorship Conference & Celebration, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, February 17, 2012). 16. Anthony Monteiro, “W.E.B. Du Bois and Africana Studies” (Panel presentation at the Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois Honorary Emeritus Professorship Conference & Celebration, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, February 17, 2012). 17. Monteiro, “W.E.B. Du Bois: Theorizing Race, Africa and Modernity.” 18. Gerald Horne, “Du Bois and the Failure of Contemporary Black Scholars and Intellectuals” (Paper presented at W.E.B. Du Bois and the Wings of Atlanta: The W.E.B. Du Bois International Conference, Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA, February 23, 2013). 19. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 727. 20. For the history of the essay and the context of its first publication, see Ronald A. T. Judy, “Introduction: On W.E.B. Du Bois and Hyperbolic Thinking,” boundary 2 27 (Fall 2000): 4–10. 21. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” 37. 22. As Black scholars like Jacob Carruthers and Toni Cade Bambara have pointed out, the declaration of natural science as the search for eternal laws emanates from cultural and political registers that are beholden to colonialism and modernity. See the discussion in the present volume; see also Jacob Carruthers, Science and Oppression (Chicago: Kemetic Institute, 1972); and Toni Cade Bambara, “Realizing the Dream of a Black University (1969),” in Realizing the Dream of a Black University and Other Writings, Pt. II, eds. Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed (New York: Center for the Humanities, Graduate Center, CUNY, 2017), 24–25. There are of course what we might consider “internal” debates on these questions as well; for a sampling, see Alexander Bird and James Ladyman, eds., Arguing About Science (New York: Routledge, 2013); Jonathan Marks, Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and David Oldroyd, The Arch of Knowledge: An Introductory Study of the History of the Philosophy and Methodology of Science (New York: Methuen, 1986). 23. Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2002), 53. 24. Ibid. 25. Herman Schwendinger and Julia R. Schwendinger, Sociologists of the Chair: A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology (1883–1922) (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 99. For a different view of Spencer, see Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (New York: Routledge, 2007). 26. Robert L. Carneiro, “Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology and the Rise of Sociology in America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society

notes  .  203 118 (December 1974): 540–54. See also Daniel Breslau, “The American Spencerians: Theorizing a New Science,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 39–62. 27. W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 26. For more on Du Bois and Spencer, see R. A. Judy, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 87. 28. Auguste Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy, trans. Frederick Ferré (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 13. 29. Ibid., 28; 30. 30. On this question, see Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. John H. Hallowell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), 170–79. The Schwendingers frame Comte’s project as “counterrevolutionary”; Schwendinger and Schwendinger, Sociologists of the Chair, 80. 31. August Comte, The Positive Philosophy, Vol. 2, trans. Harriet Martineau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 387–89. 32. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” 38. 33. Ibid., 39. 34. Judy, Sentient Flesh, 92. 35. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Study of Negro Problems,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 11 (January 1898): 10; Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” 39. 36. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” 39. 37. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 26. 38. Ibid., 27; Schwendinger and Schwendinger, Sociologists of the Chair, 108–109. 39. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” 44. 40. Ibid., 40. 41. Ibid., 40–41. 42. Comte, Introduction, 6. 43. Ibid., 8. 44. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” 40. 45. See Robert C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1987); Schwendinger and Schwendinger, Sociologists of the Chair, 159–283; Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 85–140. 46. Quoted in Bannister, Sociology and Scientism, 6. 47. Ross, Origins, 138–40; Schwendinger and Schwendinger, Sociologists of the Chair, 162–63. 48. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 13. 49. Ibid., 14. 50. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Introduction: Toward a New History of the Centuries: On the Early Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois,” in W.E.B. Du Bois, The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential

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Early Essays (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 13–14; emphasis in the original. 51. “Sociocracy” is from Lester Ward, Dynamic Sociology: Or Applied Social Science, as Based Upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences 2. Vols. (New York: Appleton, 1883). See Ross, Origins, 90–91. 52. Schwendinger and Schwendinger, Sociologists of the Chair, 188–90. 53. Elijah Anderson, “Introduction,” in Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, xviii–xix; Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 46–47; José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown, The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 115–27. 54. Anderson, “Introduction,” xviii; Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, “Introduction: The Context of The Philadelphia Negro,” in W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and the City, eds. Katz and Sugrue, 12–13; 23. 55. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 93. 56. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 2–3. 57. See, in particular, Tukufu Zuberi, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Sociology: The Philadelphia Negro and Social Science,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595 (September 2004): 156; as well as Katz and Sugrue, “Introduction,” xxv. 58. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing Life from the First Decade of Its Last Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 194. 59. Ibid., 197. 60. Ibid., 198–99. See also Katz and Sugrue, “Introduction,” 14. 61. Zuberi, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Sociology,” 150. 62. Nagueyalti Warren, Grandfather of Black Studies: W.E.B. Du Bois (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2011), 62–67. 63. Du Bois, Autobiography, 204; 226; David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993), 354–56. 64. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 334. 65. W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Litany at Atlanta,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 14–16. 66. Du Bois, Autobiography, 222; See also Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 225–26. 67. Du Bois, Autobiography, 214; Morris, Scholar Denied, 58–59; Earl Wright II, The First American School of Sociology: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Sociological Laboratory (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016), 18–20. 68. Du Bois, Autobiography, 217. 69. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Atlanta Conferences,” in W.E.B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, eds. Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 53–55. See also Du Bois, Autobiography, 217.

notes  .  205 70. Wright, First American School, 17; Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of Race, 218. 71. W.E.B. Du Bois, quoted in Wright, First American School, 19. 72. Du Bois, Autobiography, 216–17. 73. W.E.B. Du Bois, ed., Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1898). 74. Warren, Grandfather, 70–81; Wright, First American School, 20–70; Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 219–23. 75. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 74. 76. Du Bois, Autobiography, 217–19. 77. Morris, Scholar Denied, 61–62; Wright, First American School, 71–90. 78. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, eds., W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018); Eugene Provenzo, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes: African Americans at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). 79. Du Bois, Autobiography, 217. On the question of German historical economics and Du Bois, see Francis Broderick, “German Influence on the Scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois,” The Phylon Quarterly 19 (1958): 367–71; Axel Schafer, “W.E.B. Du Bois, German Social Thought, and the Racial Divide in American Progressivism, 1892–1909,” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 925–49; Barrington Edwards, “W.E.B. Du Bois between Worlds: Berlin, Empirical Social Research, and the Race Question,” Du Bois Review 3 (2006): 395–424. 80. Du Bois, Autobiography, 222–34; 252. 81. In this I am echoing the advice of Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Lucius Outlaw, and Ainsworth Clarke: Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Introduction: Toward a New History of the Centuries: On the Early Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois,” in The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays, ed. Nahum Dimitri Chandler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Lucius Outlaw, “‘Conserve’ Races?: In Defense of W.E.B. Du Bois,” in W.E.B. Du Bois On Race & Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, eds. Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996), 15–37; Ainsworth Clarke, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Fugitive Writing, or Sociology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” CR: The New Centennial Review 15 (Fall 2015): 171–209. 82. Judy, “Introduction,” 14. 83. Ibid.; Clarke, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Fugitive Writing,” 173. 84. Du Bois, “Atlanta Conferences,” 56. 85. Ibid. Both Aldon Morris and Earl Wright suggest that sociology was understood by segments of Black intellectuals as possessing the potential for liberation beyond and despite the intentions of its American founders. In his discussion of the Atlanta University reading lists, which included works by François Guizot and Francis Wayland, Wright asserts: “Atlanta University students were secretly taught the liberating potential of sociology via books

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that did not wholly extract them from the community of humanity.” Wright, First American School, 13. While Morris argues that Black intellectual sociologists “embraced an intellectual discipline as a weapon of liberation … they rushed home and developed sociology courses within the curriculum of segregated black schools so that the masses could be exposed to this secular religion and its promise for social transformation.” Morris, Scholar Denied, 59. Though Morris rightly admits that Giddings—a source of this training—was a eugenicist, it is not clear whether the assertion that Black intellectuals believed that liberation could ensue from such knowledges was an admission of naivete or simply a suggestion that they could ignore or transcend them by developing a “better” sociology. 86. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 25. 87. Schwendinger and Schwendinger, Sociologists of the Chair, 109; 234–35. On racism and American social science thought, see Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); and Jessica Blatt, Race and the Making of American Political Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). In both public and private spaces, Du Bois challenged this thinking. See W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, Review of Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, by Frederick Hoffman, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 9 (January 1897): 127–33; and Carol Taylor, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Challenge to Scientific Racism,” Journal of Black Studies 11 (June 1984): 449–60. See also W.E.B. Du Bois to Alfred Stone, April 13, 1907, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b005-i141. 88. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 23. 89. Ibid. 90. Stow Persons, Ethnic Studies at Chicago 1905–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Morris, Scholar Denied, 112–29. 91. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337. See also Chandler, X, 21. 92. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 93. Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 44. See also Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 32–94; Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Yves Winter, Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

notes  .  207 94. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” 44. 95. W.E.B. Du Bois, “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford Logan (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001), 58. 96. Aldon Morris, “Sociology of Race and W.E.B. DuBois: The Path Not Taken,” in Sociology in America, ed. Calhoun, 505–34. 97. Rushton Coulborn and W.E.B. Du Bois, “Mr. Sorokin’s Systems,” Journal of Modern History 14 (December 1942): 506. They were reviewing Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (4 vols.) (New York: American Book Company, 1937–41). 98. Coulborn and Du Bois, “Mr. Sorokin’s Systems,” 511. 99. Du Bois, Autobiography, 254–325; Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 111–62; W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 1–15. 100. Anthony Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); G. Franklin Edwards, ed., E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz, eds., Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); John Bracey, August Meier, and Elliot Rudwick, eds., The Black Sociologists: The First Half Century (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971); Persons, Ethnic Studies, 131–50. 101. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: The Problem of the Color Line, ed. Chandler, 68. 102. Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13 (Spring/Summer 2003): 185. 103. Judy, “Introduction,” 32. 104. Ibid., 14. See also Clarke, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Fugitive Writing,” 179. 105. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Toward an African Future—of the Limit of World (London: Living Commons Collective, 2013). 106. For “faith,” see Du Bois, “Study of Negro Problems,” 10. 107. This phrase is borrowed from Lawrence Reddick, who, in distinguishing Negro history from the study of the Negro, wrote, “Negro History has a purpose which is built upon a faith.” Lawrence Reddick, “A New Interpretation for Negro History,” Journal of Negro History 22 (January 1937): 17; emphasis in the original. 108. On prayers and propositions, see Judy, “Introduction,” 15. 109. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Credo,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 105–106. 110. W.E.B. Du Bois, Prayers for Dark People (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 18. 111. Ibid., 64. 112. Ibid., 56. 113. Judy, “Introduction,” 12–13. 114. W.E.B. Du Bois as quoted in Judy, Sentient Flesh, 88.

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115. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Steps Toward a Science of How Men Act, ca. 1946,” 3, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/ view/full/mums312-b213-i071. 116. Judy, Sentient Flesh, 114. 117. Ibid., 115. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., 110. 120. Anthony Monteiro, “Being an African in the World: The Du Boisian Epistemology,” Annals of the Academy of American Political and Social Science (March 2000): 221. 121. Ibid., 226. See also Anthony Monteiro, “The Epistemic Crisis of African American Studies: A Du Boisian Resolution,” Socialism and Democracy (March 2011): 192–210. 122. Lindon Barrett, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 1–43. 123. W.E.B. Du Bois, as quoted in Monteiro, “Being an African,” 222. 124. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Renaissance of Ethics,” W.E.B. Du Bois Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, https:// collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10191170; Edwards, “W.E.B. Du Bois between Worlds,” 399. 125. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Pan-Africa: The Story of a Dream, ca. 1961,” 5; emphasis added, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://credo. library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b221-i079. 126. Ibid., 6. 127. Joyce A. Ladner, ed., The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Random House, 1973). 128. Sean Wilentz, “Touchstone Texts: The Historical Works We’re Reaching for Today, Part I” (Panel presentation at the 134th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, New York, January 4, 2020). 129. Sean Wilentz, “A Matter of Facts,” The Atlantic, January 22, 2020, www. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-timeswilentz/605152/. 130. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 186. 131. Du Bois’s work was similarly viewed as “racialist” by leftists—Black and white—while historians critiqued the use of sources, the sweep of his generalizations, and his fealty to the discipline’s standards of objectivity. For a sampling of these critiques, see David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 370–78. 132. Wilentz, “A Matter of Facts”; John Clegg, “How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism,” Jacobin, August 28, 2019. 133. Du Bois and Coulborn wrote in 1942 that the discipline of history was just beginning to recover from its earliest assumptions, “afflicted by a search for

notes  .  209 objectivity, the heritage of [Leopold von] Ranke, which became so far exaggerated as to tend to dehumanize it.” Coulbourn and Du Bois, “Mr. Sorokin’s Systems,” 507. 134. F. R. Ankersmit, “Hayden White’s Appeal to the Historians,” History and Theory 37 (May 1998): 182–93. See also Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, eds., Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline (London: Routledge, 2004); and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 135. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 725. 136. It is important to note here that Du Bois often called his work on behalf of the NAACP “propaganda.” See Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 113–14. 137. “To the Reader,” in Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, n.p. 138. In the updated version, Black people become the “perfecters of this democracy.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Idea of America,” New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, 16. See also Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: One World, 2021). On the conceits of American universalism and the question of race and democracy, see Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 15–57. 139. Cedric Robinson, “White Signs in Black Times the Politics of Representation in Dominant Texts,” in Cedric Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H.L.T. Quan (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 185. 140. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1896); Du Bois, “My Evolving Program,” 39; Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 111–13; Edwards, “W.E.B. Du Bois between Worlds,” 399–401. 141. Chandler, Toward an African Future, 12–13. 142. According to Cedric Robinson: “Moreover, since one of its functions was the legitimising of American society as it stood to subsequent generations, it was a discipline largely unprepared to investigate in depth itself, its mythology or the republic which it purported to describe. Instead, its practitioners were celebrants.” Cedric Robinson, “Class Antagonisms and Black Migration: A Review Article,” Race and Class 24 (July 1982): 48. 143. Vincent Harding, Beyond Chaos: Black History and the Search for the New Land (Atlanta: Institute of the Black World, 1970). 144. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 158. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” American Historical Review 15 (July 1910): 781–99; and W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Development of a People,” International Journal of Ethics 14 (April 1904): 292–311. And on their links, see James B. Stewart, “In Search of a Theory of Human History: More on W.E.B. Du Bois’s Social and Cultural Dynamics,” in James B. Stewart, Flight: In Search of Vision (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004), 65–85. 145. Anna J. Cooper to W.E.B. Du Bois, January 18, 1930, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Mas-

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sachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/ mums312-b184-i481. 146. Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1–16; Eben Miller, Born Along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 147. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 306–48; Singh, Black Is a Country, 70–100; Robinson, Black Marxism, 207–27. 148. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Negro and Social Reconstruction, 1936,” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/ full/mums312-b227-i017. On the controversy surrounding its publication, see Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 704–16. 149. Robinson, Black Marxism, 195. 150. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Marxism and the Negro Problem,” The Crisis (May 1933): 103–104; 118; Du Bois, Autobiography, 289–90; Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 306–11. 151. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 580–635. 152. Ibid., 3. 153. Ibid., 14–15. 154. Ibid., 122–26. 155. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 90–98; Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundation of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 283–90. 156. C.L.R. James, “Lectures on the Black Jacobins,” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 94–95. See also, Garry Bertholf, “Listening to Du Bois’s ‘Black Reconstruction’: After James,” South: A Scholarly Journal 48 (Fall 2015): 78–91. 157. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 342. 158. Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 267–76. 159. “For a particular stratum of Blacks and a select few, Republicanism retained its hold on the imagination, but for the masses it lost power. For the former, America was an unfulfilled promise; for the latter, America held little special significance. It was merely one more land of troubles. With this understanding, the mass of Blacks bent to the task of rescuing family, community, and their race. More emphatically, as historians have chorused, it was the church that rose to become the central institution, the signal agency at the core of the Black community.” Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 98. 160. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 347. 161. Ibid. 162. Ibid., 12; 700–701. Here, I am also borrowing from Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993): 1707–91.

notes  .  211 163. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 634. 164. Robinson, Black Marxism, 199–207. 165. Mercer Cook, “Translator’s Preface,” in Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1974), x–xi; Theophile Obenga, Cheikh Anta Diop, Volney et le sphinx: contribution de Cheikh Anta Diop a l’historiographie mondiale (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1996), 454. 166. Mario H. Beatty, “W.E.B. Du Bois and Cheikh Anta Diop on the Origins and Race of the Ancient Egyptians: Some Comparative Notes,” African Journal of Rhetoric 8 (2016): 45–67. 167. At least some of the tendency to only emphasize Du Bois as the “godfather of the civil rights movement” (see Cobb, Substance of Hope, 4) comes from a tradition of Black liberalism that never understood or forgave Du Bois for breaking with its faith. Most famous, perhaps was Roy Wilkins’s statement announcing his passing at the 1963 March on Washington, which began with the words: “Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path.” Quoted in Charles Euchner, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 181. This framing was consonant with Cold War erasures of Du Bois. Yet even many anti-capitalist framings also miss the saliency of Africa to his thinking beyond simply an example of imperial plunder. A framing that relates Africa as a pathway for thinking human reality and human experience, can be found in Chandler, Toward an African Future, and Eric Porter, The Problem of the Future World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 103–44. 168. Monteiro, “Being an African in the World,” 222. See Diop, African Origin of Civilization, xii–xvii. 169. Du Bois, “Pan-Africa: The Story of a Dream”; Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 59. 170. Chandler, Toward an African Future, 41. 171. Ibid., 43–47. 172. After The Negro, Du Bois published Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1939), and was working on another volume, This Africa: How It Arose, Whither It Goes, in 1955. W.E.B. Du Bois, “This Africa, 1955,” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://credo.library.umass. edu/view/full/mums312-b224-i073. 173. Du Bois, World and Africa, viii. 174. Ibid., 80. 175. Beatty, “W.E.B. Du Bois and Cheikh Anta Diop,” 52–54. 176. For some representative examples, see the eight-volume UNESCO General History of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981–1993); Kevin Shillington, History of Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and Molefi Kete Asante, The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony (New York: Routledge, 2019). 177. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” The Atlantic (May 1915): 707–14; and W.E.B. Du Bois, “Africa and the Peace Makers, ca. 1918,” W.E.B.

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Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://credo.library. umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b212-i038. Du Bois reprised this thesis several more times to speak to the stakes of the Italo-Ethiopian War and the Second World War. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War, ca.1936,” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://credo. library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b213-i054; W.E.B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945); and W.E.B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of Peace, c. 1948,” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/ full/mums312-b214-i001. 178. In a subsequent revision, This Africa: How It Arose, Whither It Goes, written a decade later, Du Bois again reverses the emphasis, beginning with the birth of humanity in Africa and tracing African history on its own terms and in relationship to the rest of the world, before engaging with the historical events of European modernity and bringing the conversation up to the independence and working-class struggles on the continent. See Du Bois, “This Africa,” 1–2. The research conducted for the Encyclopedia Africana (some of which is archived in the Du Bois Papers) and smaller texts and essays like Africa: Its Geography, People and Products and Africa: Its Place in Modern History, both published for the Little Blue Books Collection in 1930, demonstrated Du Bois’s considerable range and command of African history and material culture, despite his many apologies. 179. Du Bois, World and Africa, 149. 180. Ibid., viii. 181. Ibid., 149. 182. Ibid. 183. Ibid., 34. 184. Ibid., 54. 185. Monteiro, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Study of Black Humanity,” 619. 186. Du Bois, World and Africa, 255. 187. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 825.

chapter 2 Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis (copy in author’s possession), 9–10. Sylvia Wynter, “A Black Studies Manifesto,” Forum NHI 1 (Fall 1994): 9–10. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (Fall 2003): 311–12. 4. Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s 1. 2. 3.

notes  .  213 Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 158. 5. See Daniel Black, The Coming (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015). 6. On these folk traditions and their connection to community, see Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundation of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–28 and Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 186–243. 7. A sampling of the work that brings me here: Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1938); Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Morrow, 1963); James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Orbis, NY: Maryknoll Books, 2000); C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Washington, DC: Drum and Spear Press, 1969); Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: Towards an African Renaissance (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1984); Theophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 2000); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); and Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 8. Sylvia Wynter, “C. L. R. James and the Cultural Revolution,” The Revolutionary Legacy of C. L. R. James Conference, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 2, 1972, audio tape, Cedric Robinson Personal Papers. 9. Katherine McKittrick, “Yours in the Intellectual Struggle,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 2. 10. Wynter, “A Black Studies Manifesto,” 10; emphasis in the original. 11. See Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), and its surrounding controversy. See also

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12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

these commentaries from prominent historians on the New York Times’s 1619 Project, discussed in the previous chapter, and the right-wing hysteria regarding what they believe to be Critical Race Theory, Sean Wilentz, “A Matter of Facts,” The Atlantic, January 22, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-times-wilentz/605152/; and Matthew Karp, “History as End” (July 2021), https://harpers.org/ archive/2021/07/history-as-end-politics-of-the-past-matthew-karp/. See John Edgard Tidwell, “Clarifying Philosophy: Sterling A. Brown and the Nonviolent Action Group,” in After Winter, eds. John Edgard Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 379–96; John Edgard Tidwell, “Slim Greer, Sterling A. Brown, and the Art of Tall Tale,” in After Winter, ed. Tidwell and Tracy, 149–56; and Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1935). I am grateful for Alexis McKenney who reminded me of the Hurston connection. Bedour Alagraa, June 10, 2021, Text message to author; Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter, ed. McKittrick, 36. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and Carolyn J. Dean, “Metahistory and the Resistance to Theory,” American Historical Review 124 (October 2019): 1337–50. On its relationship to the ideas of Sylvia Wynter, see Demetrius L. Eudell, “Modernity and the ‘Work of History,’” in After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter, ed. Anthony Bogues (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2006), 1–24. Vikings, season 5, episode 20, “Ragnarok,” aired January 30, 2019, History Channel. Gerald McWorter, “Deck the Ivy Racist Halls: The Case of Black Studies,” in Black Studies in the University, eds. Armstead L. Robinson, Craig C. Foster, and Donald Ogilvie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 56. McWorter is now Abdul Alkalimat. Wynter, “On How We Mistook,” 114–15; Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” 47–52. Wynter, “On How We Mistook,” 110. Ibid., 162. Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., “Africology: Normative Theory,” in Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 97–134. Greg Carr, “What Black Studies Is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work,” Socialism and Democracy 25 (March 2011): 186; 188. See Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway, and David J. Sylvan, “Preface,” in Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), vii–viii; Simon Schaffer, “How Disciplines Look,” in Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences, eds. Andrew Barry and Georgia Born (New York:

notes  .  215 Routledge, 2013), 57–81; Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 3–5. 23. Anthony Bogues, “The Human, Knowledge and the Word: Reflecting on Sylvia Wynter,” in After Man, ed. Bogues, 320–21. 24. See Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 44–46; Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 121–79; and Miranda Hickman and John D. McIntyre, eds., Rereading the New Criticism (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012). 25. David Scott, “The Re-enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 127. 26. Walter Rüegg, “Epilogue: The Rise of Humanism,” in A History of the University in Europe: Volume I, ed. H. De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 442–48. 27. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 17–53. 28. Sylvia Wynter, “Creole Criticism: A Critique,” New World Quarterly 5 (1973): 12–36. 29. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 268 and passim. On the Enlightenment as foundational to emergence of “human” reason, see Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (New York: Random House, 2013), 96–148. 30. Robinson, Black Marxism, 86. See also R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1970); and Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 31. Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2 12 (Spring-Autumn 1984): 19–70; Wynter, “On How We Mistook,” 135–39; Wynter, “Unsettling,” 274–79. 32. Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 45–82; Southern, Western Society, 17; Blumenthal, Investiture, 1–22. 33. C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 227; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 127. 34. Jaeger, Envy, 7. See also R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 193–95; and Grant, God and Reason, 25–29. 35. For a treatment of charisma in the much later development of the university, see William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 36. Bolgar, Classical Heritage, 130–34; Grant, God and Reason, 17–19; Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 160–61. On millenarian movements of this period, see Cohn, Pursuit, 44–107.

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37. On the idea of the twelfth-century renaissance, see, inter alia, Arthur O. Norton, Readings in the History of Education: Medieval Universities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1909), 4–5; and Grant, God and Reason, 46–47. “Classical heritage” is from Bolgar, Classical Heritage, 13–26. On the early forms of the university as a site for this work, see Leinsle, Introduction, 121–42; and Pederson, First Universities, 122–34. 38. Anders Piltz, The World of Medieval Learning (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1981), 53. See also Gabriel Compayre, Abelard and the Origin and Early History of Universities (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893). 39. Peter Abelard, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). On the impact of Abelard on scholastic method, see Norton, Readings, 35–36; Bolgar, Classical Heritage, 158–62; Colish, Medieval Foundations, 272–73; Jaeger, Envy, 229–36; Grant, God and Reason, 45–65; Leinsle, Introduction, 90–94; and Kathleen M. Starnes, Peter Abelard: His Place in History (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981). On Abelard generally, see Joseph McCabe, Peter Abelard (London: Duckworth, 1901); and Leif Grane, Peter Abelard: Philosophy and Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964). 40. Peter Lombard, The Sentences, 4. Vols, trans. Guilio Silano (Toronto: PIMS, 2007–2010). On The Sentences, see Norton, Readings, 76–77; Grant, God and Reason, 65–66; and Monica Asztalos, “The Faculty of Theology,” in History of the University in Europe: Vol. 1, ed. De Ridder-Symoens, 418–20. On Peter Lombard generally, see Marcia L. Colish, Peter Lombard, 2. Vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 41. Norton, Readings, 55–76; Grant, God and Reason, 78–82; and Antonio Garcia y Garcia, “The Faculties of Law,” in History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, ed. De Ridder-Symoens, 388–407; James A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 96–125. 42. See Grant, God and Reason, 15 and passim. 43. Ibid., 58. Among those accused of heresy were Peter Abelard. See Grant, God and Reason, 64–65; for a broader treatment of “learned heresy,” see Leinsle, Introduction, 115–19; and Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1200 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). 44. Grant, God and Reason, 195–97; Gordon Leff, “The Trivium and the Three Philosophies,” in History of the University in Europe: Vol. 1, ed. De RidderSymoens, 320–22. 45. Bolgar, Classical Heritage, 224–30; Olaf Pedersen, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 278–84. 46. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 273. 47. Sylvia Wynter, “Ethno or Socio Poetics,” Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics 2 (1976): 84. 48. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), xiv–xvi.

notes  .  217 49. Leff, “The Trivium,” 331. 50. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964); Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965); Anthony Goodman and Angus Mackay, eds., The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (London and New York: Longman, 1990); and Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism, 56–82. On some humanist attitudes toward Aristotelianism, see Grant, God and Reason, 293–96. 51. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism, xvi. 52. Rüegg, “Epilogue”; Wilhelm Schmitt-Biggemann, “New Structures of Knowledge, in The History of the University in Europe: Volume II: Universities in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. H. De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 489–530. 53. Wynter, “Ceremony,” 33. 54. Ibid., 28. 55. Grant, God and Reason, 304–12; Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (London: G. Bell, 1949); Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957); A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science, 1500–1700 (London: Longman, 1954); Roy Porter, “The Scientific Revolution and the Universities,” in History of the University in Europe, Volume II, ed. De Ridder-Symoens, 531–62. 56. Wynter, “Ceremony,” 30–31; Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” 14–16; Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 176–78. 57. Robinson, Black Marxism, 24–26; 106–109. 58. Rüegg, “Epilogue,” 456. 59. Ibid., 467; emphasis added. 60. Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 61. 61. The survival of an increasingly market-driven neoliberal academy amid the economic recession of 2008 drove the context for these cries of “crisis” in the humanities, as more and more emphasis was placed on “competitive” academic programs in the more profitable areas of empirical science. See Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). But these were only the most recent declarations. The humanities, it appears, are perpetually in crisis mode, at least since the Cold War logic that birthed the American variant of humanistic discourse seemed to fade. See Menand, Marketplace; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Chad Wellmon and Paul Reitter, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); and Christopher S. Celenza, The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). Market motivations only foreground an assumed gulf between so-called humanistic knowledge and scientific knowledge that is rooted in a particular conven-

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tion of Western philosophical thinking and academic organization as well as the stories it tells itself of its own foundations. See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); Francis Oakley, Community of Learning: The American College and the Liberal Arts Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 39–72; and Bruce Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986). For Wynter, following C. P. Snow’s idea of two “unbreachable” academic cultures— the natural sciences and humanities—we must contend with the role that language plays in preserving the order, which governs ideas and empirical science. Jason R. Ambroise reads biologist E.O. Wilson’s attempt to resolve these boundaries—his concept of “consilience”—together with the stakes of Wynter’s critical project, largely showing how most models of a transcendent science keep the issues Wynter points out firmly in place. See Jason R. Ambroise, “Biocentrism, Neo-Ptolemaicism, and E.O. Wilson’s Consilience: A Contemporary Example of ‘Saving the Phenomenon’ of Man, in the Name of the Human,” in After Man, ed. Bogues, 209–36. 62. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 270. 63. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica; Or, A General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island: With Reflexions on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, 3 Vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1774); Devin Leigh, “The Origins of a Source: Edward Long, Coromantee Slave Revolts and The History of Jamaica,” Slavery and Abolition 40 (2019): 295–320. 64. Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, unpublished manuscript, 467. 65. Ibid., 128–29. On Long’s racism, see Suman Seth, “Materialism, Slavery and The History of Jamaica,” Isis 105 (2014): 764–72. 66. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 125. 67. Sylvia Wynter, “Oral History,” 21. Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program Interviews (SC0932). Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford Libraries, Stanford, CA, 2020. 68. Ibid., 22. 69. Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica,” Jamaica Journal 4 (June 1970): 35. 70. Ibid. See also Nandita Sharma, “Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization,” in Sylvia Wynter, ed. McKittrick, 164–82. 71. In Black Metamorphosis, Wynter talks about this tradition of retreat and resistance under the broad heading of “marronage.” The inhabitants of Hebron were akin to the same peasantry that retreated in order to preserve the familiar and most important aspects of Jonkonnu. They “were hidden in the intrahistory, in the frontier zone, deliberately secret and evasive to protect themselves in order to survive. They used tactics both of metamorphosis and of ‘marronage’ (escape) in order to play a totally new role … ” Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 116. The peasants did not creolize Christianity; they made it indigenous. She writes: “the unofficial religion of the slaves or natives drew Christianity into its own indigenous cultural dynamic

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72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85. 86.

and transformed it, freeing its original revolutionary impulse. This cultural dynamic converted the alien elements, the heterogenous element into an indigenous pattern and structure of meaning.” Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 180. See also Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade: Caribbean Cultural History and the Rehumanizing Project,” in Sylvia Wynter, ed. McKitrrick, 209–10. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 124. Ibid., 135–37; Daryl Cumber Dance, “Conversation with Sylvia Wynter,” in New World Adams: Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1984), 277. Here, I am thinking with Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44 (Summer 2014): 16–28. Sylvia Wynter, The Hills of Hebron (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2010), 121. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 139–41. On Guyana generally, see Kimani S.K. Nehusi, A People’s Political History of Guyana, 1838–1964 (Hertfordshire: Hansib, 2018), 425–617. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 140–41. See also Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, “Heretical Scripts: Sylvia Wynter and the Decolonial Atlantic” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2015), 65–68. On the New World group, see Norman Girvan and Brian Meeks, eds., The Thought of New World: The Quest for Decolonization (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2010). Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 141. See also Nehusi, People’s Political History, 445–46. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 142. Alex Gradussov, “Foreword,” Jamaica Journal 1 (December 1967): 3. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 147. Ibid., 148. On Wynter’s project and its connection to Black Studies, see Bedour Alagraa, “What Will Be the Cure?: A Conversation with Sylvia Wynter,” Offshoot Journal, January 7, 2021, https://offshootjournal.org/ what-will-be-the-cure-a-conversation-with-sylvia-wynter/. Sylvia Wynter, “Lady Nugent’s Journal,” Jamaica Journal 1 (December 1967): 23–34; Sylvia Wynter, “Bernardo De Balbuena: Epic Poet and Abbot of Jamaica, 1562–1627, Part I,” Jamaica Journal 3 (September 1969): 3–12; Sylvia Wynter, “Bernardo De Balbuena: Epic Poet and Abbot of Jamaica, 1562–1627, Part II,” Jamaica Journal 3 (December 1969): 17–26; Sylvia Wynter, “Bernardo De Balbuena: Epic Poet and Abbot of Jamaica, 1562– 1627, Part III,” Jamaica Journal 4 (March 1970): 11–19; Sylvia Wynter, “Bernardo De Balbuena: Epic Poet and Abbot of Jamaica, 1562–1627, Part IV,” Jamaica Journal 4 (September 1970): 6–15. Sylvia Wynter, Jamaica’s National Heroes (Kingston: Jamaica National Trust Commission, 1971). Sylvia Wynter, “‘We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture’: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism,” Jamaica Journal 2 (December 1968): 24.

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Ibid., 26. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 24. Sylvia Wynter, “‘We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture’: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism, Part II,” Jamaica Journal 2 (March 1969): 42. 91. Wynter, “We Must Learn,” 30. 92. Wynter, “We Must Learn, Part II,” 41. 93. Ibid., 39. 94. Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5 (June 1971): 95–102. 95. Sylvia Wynter, “Creole Criticism.” See Kenneth Ramchand, “Concern for Criticism,” Caribbean Quarterly 16 (June 1970): 51–60; and Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Faber and Faber, 1970). 96. Norval Edwards, “‘Talking about a Little Culture’: Sylvia Wynter’s Early Essays,” Journal of West Indian Literature 10 (November 2001): 37. 97. Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica,” 35. 98. Ibid., 48. 99. Ibid., 34. 100. Many of the articles from this period are now available in a single volume: Sylvia Wynter, We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays, 1967–1984, ed. Demetrius Eudell (London: Peepal Tree Press, 2022). 101. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 18; 46. 102. Ibid., 13–14; G. R. Coulthard, “Parallelisms and Divergencies between ‘Negritude’ and ‘Indigenismo,’” Caribbean Studies 8 (April 1968): 31–55; Léopold Senghor, Liberte 1: Negritude et Humanisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 1964). 103. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 14–18; Jean Price-Mars, So Spoke the Uncle (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1983). 104. Aaron Kamugisha, “‘That Area of Experience That We Term the New World’: Introducing Sylvia Wynter’s ‘Black Metamorphosis,’” Small Axe 20 (March 2016): 43. 105. Derrick White, “Black Metamorphosis: A Prelude to Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human,” CLR James Journal 16 (Spring 2010): 128–29. 106. Derrick E. White, The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011). 107. Vincent Harding, “The Vocation of the Black Scholar and the Struggles of the Black Community,” in Education and Black Struggle: Notes from the Colonized World, ed. The Institute of the Black World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 1974), 24; emphasis in the original. 108. Ibid. 109. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 9–10. 110. Ibid., 19–20. 111. Ibid., 45–46.

notes  .  221 112. On this question, see Bedour Alagraa, “The Interminable Catastrophe,” Offshoot Journal, March 1, 2021, https://offshootjournal.org/the-interminable-catastrophe/. This essay is based on Alagraa’s forthcoming book-length work, The Interminable Catastrophe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). 113. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 404–406. The story is taken from Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, [1937], 1947), 165–66. 114. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 407–408. 115. Ibid., 474–75. 116. Ibid., 162–63. 117. Ibid., 571. 118. See Robinson, Black Marxism, 316–17; and Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 156–57. 119. Wynter cites Karl Polyani, who argues that trade between Europeans and Africans was a “native monetary framework” where the former could not expect to make profit. With the development of trade in humans (to the Europeans, Negroes), the ounces trade was introduced to tie their value to gold, with a 100 percent markup. See Black Metamorphosis, 31–33; and Karl Polyani, “Sortings and ‘Ounce Trade’ in the West African Slave Trade,” Journal of African History 5 (1964): 381–93. On the idea of the commodity, see also Michael Ralph, “Commodity,” Social Text 100 (Fall 2009): 78–84. 120. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 495. See Dennis Duerden, The Invisible Present: African Art and Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 121. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 499. 122. Duerden, Invisible Present, xi–xii; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks. See also Kwasi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 123. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 516. 124. Ibid., 599. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid., 900. 127. Ibid., 554. 128. Ibid., 199–200. 129. Nicholas Payton, “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore,” Nicholas Payton (blog), November 27, 2011, http://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/ on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore/. 130. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 538; Robinson, Black Marxism, 170. 131. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 206–18. 132. Ibid., 834. 133. Ibid., 838–39. See also Wade Nobles, “Understanding Human Transformation: The Praxis of Science,” in Wade Nobles, Seeking the Sakhu: Foundations Writings for an African Psychology (Chicago: Third World Press, 2006), 71–86; and Wade Nobles, “Africanity: Its Role in Black Families,” The Black Scholar 5 (June 1974): 10–17.

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134. Ibid., 927. 135. Ibid., 931. 136. Ibid., 917. 137. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 172; Rodriguez, 98–103. The title of the course was “The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean.” Nancy Hartsock to Cedric Robinson, April 4, 1972, Cedric Robinson Personal Papers. 138. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 172–73; Greg Thomas, “PROUD FLESH Inter/ Views: Sylvia Wynter,” Proud Flesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics, & Consciousness 4 (2006): 28; Neil Roberts, “Sylvia Wynter’s Hedgehogs: The Challenge for Intellectuals to Create New Forms of Life in Pursuit of Freedom,” in After Man, ed. Bogues, 171–73. 139. Thomas, “PROUD FLESH,” 28–29. The phrase “the totality of this negation” is from Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 173. 140. Thomas, “PROUD FLESH,” 30. 141. Wynter, “Ceremony,” 24. 142. Olaf Pederson, “Tradition and Innovation,” in History of the University in Europe, Volume II, ed. De Ridder-Symoens, 452–88. 143. Robinson, Black Marxism, 91–103. 144. Wynter, “On How We Mistook,” 152. 145. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 288. 146. Sylvia Wynter, “Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos,” Annals of Scholarship 8 (Spring 1991): 251–86; Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the Americas, eds. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57; Sylvia Wynter, “Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and the Fables That Stir the Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters,” in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, eds. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 141–63. 147. Wynter, “Balbuena, Part I,” 4. 148. Ibid., 6. 149. Wynter, “Balbuena, Part II,” 20. 150. Wynter, “Balbuena, Part III,” 18. 151. Wynter, “Balbuena, Part II,” 21. 152. Wynter, “Balbuena, Part I,” 3. 153. Wynter, “Balbuena, Part IV,” 11. 154. Ibid., 9. 155. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 190–92. 156. Sylvia Wynter, “New Seville and the Conversion of Experience of Bartolome de Las Casas: Part One,” Jamaica Journal 17 (May 1984): 26–29. 157. Ibid., 29. 158. Ibid. 159. Wynter, “New Seville,” 31. The verse is Ecclesiasticus 34:18. See also Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire: From Columbus to Magellan (New York: Random House, 2003), 311–23. 160. Wynter, “New Seville,” 26.

notes  .  223 161. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 293. For background on the lectures, see Karen Gagne, “On the Obsolescence of the Disciplines: Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter Propose a New Mode of Being Human,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5 (Summer 2007): 256–57. 162. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 293–95; Thomas, Rivers of Gold, 397–413. 163. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 294. 164. Ibid., 289. 165. Ibid., 296–97. 166. In some circles, Wynter’s work has been linked to Afropessimism. But if it is fair to say that one of the central tenets of Afropessimism is that slavery is an irrevocable identity (in this political world or the next), Wynter’s recognition of the alternative worlds of Black life marks her work as distinct; her recognition of Black life against the logics of “slave” is a necessary part of her work. See Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afropessimism (2.0)?” Theory and Event 21 (January 2018): 300–303. 167. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 168. Michael Finkenthal, Interdisciplinarity: Toward the Definition of a Metadiscipline? (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 169. Among others, see Charles S. Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); and Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014). 170. For a representative sampling, see Emmanuel Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). 171. This literature is vast; see, among others, Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1966–69); Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Jonathan Israel, The Enlightenment That Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); and Pagden, Enlightenment. The quote about the United States is from Todd Gitlin quoted in Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 18. 172. Charles W.J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). 173. On this question, Wynter cites Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973). See also Arthur R. King Jr. and John A. Brownell, The Curriculum and the Disciplines of Knowledge (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), 37–50, on the categorization of knowledge in the nineteenth century.

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174. William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Eagleton, Literary Theory. 175. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 282; 318–22. 176. Wynter, “On How We Mistook,” 156. 177. Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” 28. 178. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” boundary 2 27 (Fall 2000): 37–44; and Du Bois, “The Study of Negro Problems,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (January 1898): 1–23, both discussed in chapter 1 of this volume. 179. Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black,’” in National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, eds. Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana (New York: Routledge, 2001), 31–66; Wynter, “Oral History,” 17. 180. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 310. 181. Thomas, “PROUD FLESH,” 3. 182. Vitalis, White World Order. 183. See, among many others, Jessica Blatt, Race and the Making of American Political Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 184. Wynter, “On How We Mistook,” 161. 185. Thomas, “PROUD FLESH,” 29–30. 186. Natasha Barnes, “Reluctant Matriarch: Sylvia Wynter and the Woman Question,” in Cultural Conundrums: Gender, Race, Nation, and the Making of Caribbean Cultural Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 135–73. See also Greg Thomas, “The ‘S’ Word: Sex, Empire and Black Radical Tradition (After Sylvia),” in After Man, ed. Bogues, 76–99. 187. Thomas, “PROUD FLESH,” 23. 188. Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 186; emphasis in the original. 189. Thomas, “PROUD FLESH,” 23. 190. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Liberal and Marxist-Leninist Feminism: Towards an Autonomous Frame of Reference,” paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, September 9, 1982, 3–4. 191. Thomas, “PROUD FLESH,” 24. 192. Wynter, “Beyond Liberal,” 15. 193. Ibid., 37. See also Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Imani Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 194. Carole Boyce Davies, “Occupying the Terrain: Reengaging ‘Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the “Demonic Ground” of Caliban’s Woman,’” American Quarterly 70 (December 2018): 837–38.

notes  .  225 195. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Woman,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, eds. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990), 362. 196. Ibid., 365. 197. Ibid., 364–65. 198. Joe Macaré, Maya Schenwar, and Alana Yu-lan Price, eds., Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). 199. Though Wynter refers to reports that only signified Black men, there are numerous examples of NHI being applied to Black women, many of whom were drug users or sex workers as well. On the use of this term in Southern California—though not limited to that region—see, among others, Zachary Wigon, “The LAPD Didn’t Catch an Alleged Serial Killer for 30 Years. Is It Because the Victims Were Black?” Vanity Fair, December 18, 2014; and Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015). It has also been deployed to refer to non-Black peoples who nevertheless also cannot occupy Wynter’s “classarchy.” See Rosa-Linda Fregoso, “For a Pluriversal Declaration of Human Rights,” American Quarterly 66 (September 2014): 583–608. 200. Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Forum NHI 1 (Fall 1994): 43; emphasis in the original. 201. Robert Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993). 202. Sylvia Wynter, Do Not Call Us Negros: How ‘Multicultural’ Textbooks Perpetuate Racism (San Francisco: Aspire, 1990); “Symposium Examines Black Thought, Identity,” Stanford Daily, March 4, 1994; “Key Quotes and Major Themes/Questions for Discussion and Proposed Solutions,” The Two Reservations: Western Thought, the Color Line, and The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Revisited Symposium, March 3–5, 1994, Cedric Robinson Personal Papers; Institute NHI, “Mission Statement,” Forum NHI (Fall 1994): 1–2. 203. Wynter, “Black Studies Manifesto,” 11. 204. Ibid. 205. Alagraa, “What Will Be the Cure?” 206. Ibid.

chapter 3 1. Jacob Carruthers, Science and Oppression (Chicago: Kemetic Institute, 2013), 14. 2. Jacob Carruthers, “The Weheme Mesu and Pan African Historiography,” The Compass 3 (Spring 2018): 63. 3. Jacob Carruthers, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought from the Time of the Pharaohs to the Present (London: Karnak House, 1995), xviii.

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My reading of this story relies primarily on Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 143–65. Carruthers offers his own translation of key parts of the text. For other translations, see Shemsw Bak, Smi n sekhety pn (Popenguine: Per Ankh Books, 2016); Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 169–83; and J. B. Parkinson, The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant (Oxford: Griffiths, 1991). 5. On ma’at, see Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 169 and passim; Jacob Carruthers, Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1984), 56–58; Mario Beatty, “Maat: The Cultural and Intellectual Allegiance of a Concept,” in The Preliminary Challenge: The African World History Project, eds. Jacob H. Carruthers and Leon C. Harris (Los Angeles: ASCAC, 1997), 211–44; and Maulana Karenga, Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egyptian: A Study in Classical African Ethics (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2006). Though Cedric Robinson does not discuss ma’at, he has written about the distinctions between truth and justice in Western thought: “Truth is inexhaustible, like irrational numbers, always expanding, moving, searching. Justice is fixed, always seeking to surrender the complex to the simplicity; the obscure to visibility, multiple possibilities to singular exactness. Justice seeks to tame the indeterminate, to subjugate difference to sameness. The rituals and procedures of justice are designed to give the appearances of justness by exacting revenge or manufacturing the fiction that something that has already happened can be rescinded or reversed. Justice, then, is either an intentional lie or a kindness. It routinely sacrifices truth, whether by fair or foul means.” “On the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H.L.T. Quan (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 356. 6. See, among others, Chike Jeffers, “Embodying Justice in Ancient Egypt: The Tale of Eloquent Peasant as a Classic of Political Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (2013): 421–42. 7. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 147. 8. Ibid., 144–45. 9. Ibid., 167–70. 10. On “African Deep Thought,” see Ibid., 1–36. 11. Greg Carr labels this approach the “unbroken genealogy” approach; see his “What Black Studies Is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work,” Socialism and Democracy 25 (March 2011): 181. 12. “The term ‘mess’ refers to the cultural, economic, intellectual, political and physical oppression of Africans during and after the Mid-Atlantic slave trade, chattel slavery and African colonization resulting from European hegemony and white supremacy.” Jacob H. Carruthers, African or American: A Question of Intellectual Allegiance (Chicago: Kemetic Institute, 2009), 22n2; Carruthers, “Weheme Mesu,” 67. 13. Carr, “What Black Studies Is Not,” 179–80. See also Jacob Carruthers, “John Henrik Clarke: The Harlem Connection to the Founding of Africana 4.

notes  .  227 Studies,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 30 (July 2006): 173–94; Russell Adams, “African American Studies and the State of the Art,” in The African American Studies Reader, ed. Nathaniel Norment Jr. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2007), 126–44; and Abdul Alkalimat, The History of Black Studies (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 180–88. For an extended theoretical treatment, see Molefi Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990) and his An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), among many others. The distinctions and convergences between and with Carruthers’s work and the work of the larger African-centered and Afrocentric intellectual movements must be emphasized, however. Some of these distinctions will be discussed in this chapter, but for a critical discussion, see Greg Carr, “African Philosophy of History in the Contemporary Era: Its Antecedents and Methodological Implications for the African Contribution to World History” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1998), 397–425. 14. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: BasicCivitas, 2009), 39. 15. Jacob Carruthers, quoted in Yvonne Jones, “My Sip from the ‘African Deep Well’: A Cultural, Spiritual, and Historical Journey,” The H30/Art of Life Blog, March 30, 2021, www.theh3oartoflifeshowomni-u.org/post/my-sipfrom-the-african-deep-well-a-cultural-spiritual-and-historical-journey. 16. Ifé Carruthers, “From the Trinity River to the Nile, The Historical, Intellectual, and Spiritual Journey of Jacob H. Carruthers, Jr., Jedi Shemsu Jehewty,” The Kemetic Voice 1 (Spring 2014): 8; and Jacob H. Carruthers Jr., interviewed by Larry Crowe, May 13, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. The balance of these biographical details comes from these two sources. On Pelham, see “On a Quest to Preserve History in Pelham, Texas,” Dallas Morning News, November 17, 2012. On Texas all-Black communities like Pelham, see Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad, Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 17. Carruthers, “From the Trinity River,” 8. 18. Carruthers, interview by Crowe. 19. Ibid. 20. See Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 171–289; Amilcar Shabazz, Advancing Democracy: African Americans and Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Gary M. Lavergne, Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 21. Carruthers, interview by Crowe. 22. Carruthers, “From the Trinity River,” 11. 23. Ibid. 24. Carruthers, interview by Crowe.

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25. Carruthers, “From the Trinity River,” 12. On the significance of the post office and Black intellectual and political life, see Philip F. Rubio, There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight For Jobs, Justice, and Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 26. Carruthers, interview by Crowe. On the Hempstead boycott, see “Students Step Up Boycott,” The Student Voice, December 30, 1963; and Moisés Acuña Gurrola, “Ignored News and Forgotten History: The Prairie View Student Movement,” in Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas, eds. Max Krochmal and J. Todd Moye (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021), 23–31. 27. Carruthers, interview by Crowe; Jacob Carruthers, “The Theory of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, Boulder, 1966), 154. 28. Carruthers, “Theory of Nonviolent,” 48. 29. Ibid., 204. 30. Carruthers, interview by Crowe. 31. Carruthers, “Theory of Nonviolent,” 188. 32. Ibid., 189. 33. Carruthers, interview by Crowe; Carruthers, “From the Trinity River,” 12–13. 34. Carruthers, interview by Crowe. 35. On Thompson, see Greg Carr, “For Anderson Thompson [Weheme Peri Kush], Maa Kheru,” DrGregCarr.com, August 18, 2019, www.drgregcarr.com/ blog/2019/8/18/for-anderson-thompson-weheme-peri-kush-maa-kheru. 36. On this era in Chicago, see Useni Eugene Perkins, ed., Rise of the Phoenix: Voices from Chicago’s Black Struggle, 1960–1975 (Chicago: Third World Press, 2017). 37. Carruthers, interview by Crowe; Carruthers, “From the Trinity River,” 14. On Chicago social science, see Andrew Abbott, Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Roger Bannister, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Stow Persons, Ethnic Studies at Chicago, 1905–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Barbara Ballis Lal, The Romance of Culture in an Urban Civilization: Robert E. Park on Race and Ethnic Relations in Cities (New York: Routledge, 1990). 38. Carruthers, interview by Crowe; Carruthers, “From the Trinity River,” 14. 39. Lal, Romance of Culture; Persons, Ethnic Studies. 40. For this critique, see also Joyce A. Ladner, ed., The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Random House, 1973). 41. Carruthers, “From the Trinity River,” 14. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. This is discussed most directly in two unpublished works: Jacob Carruthers, “Reflections on the Discipline of Inner City Studies” (unpublished paper, 1978), and “The Two Cradle Theory and Inner City Studies,” 1978,

notes  .  229 Box 1, Folder 4, Jacob H. Carruthers Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University (JHCP-ARC). See also Greg Carr, “Some Thoughts on African Centered Education: Black Study, Resistance, and Implementation Strategies” (Lecture, Northeastern Illinois University, Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, Chicago, IL, December 6, 2013), www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WbX1UV3_Vdo. 44. “Perspectives,” Black World (January 1972): 76. 45. “Annual Harold Cruse Symposium – Northeastern Illinois University Center for Inner City Studies, 1972,” https://vimeo.com/125971848. See also Josh Myers, “The Still Rejected Strain; Or How Black Thought Is Enough,” Black Perspectives, October 25, 2017, www.aaihs.org/the-stillrejected-strain-or-how-black-thought-is-enough. 46. See Perkins, Rise of the Phoenix; Alkalimat, History of Black Studies, 72–77; and Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 79–113. 47. Carruthers, “From Trinity River,” 15. 48. “To Our Readers,” Afrocentric World Review 1 (Winter 1973): 1. 49. Ibid., 2. 50. Jacob Carruthers, “Marx and the Negro,” Afrocentric World Review (Winter 1973): 7. 51. For this perspective, see Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 155–70. 52. Carruthers, “Marx and the Negro,” 15. 53. Jacob Carruthers, “Christian and Capitalistic Roots of Karl Marx’s Communist Theory,” Afrocentric World Review (Summer 1975): 6–51. This approach was very similar to the frame Cedric Robinson deploys in his understanding of Marx’s relationship to a more broadly conceived socialism in pre-modern European contexts. See Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 1–13. 54. Jacob Carruthers, Science and Oppression (Chicago: Kemetic Institute, 2013), 11. 55. Ibid., vii. 56. Ibid., viii. For Wynter’s similar point, see her “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2 12 (Spring-Autumn 1984): 19–70, and others discussed in this volume. 57. On the idea of a gold standard, see Martin Packer, The Science of Qualitative Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 17–42. 58. Carruthers, Science and Oppression, 12. 59. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” boundary 2 27 (Fall 2000): 37–44, and the discussion of Du Bois in this volume. For the idea of a social organism, see the discussion of Chicago sociologist Albion Small in Bannister, Sociology and Scientism, 32–46. Similarly, in his dissertation, Carruthers asserted “that the ends of modern science are more or less taken as self evident, i.e., the control of nature for human purposes and, thus, little valuation of the ends occurs within the methodology of science itself. This

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condition cannot apply to human action—what its value in science may be.” Carruthers, “Theory of Nonviolent,” 158. 60. Carruthers, Science and Oppression, 12. 61. Ibid., 14. 62. Ibid., 12. Thomas Kuhn would famously argue that agreement among scientists constituted the “paradigms” that produced “normal science.” These arguments opened up a new vista in the study of the history of science. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Many Black Studies scholars later found the frame of the paradigm useful for articulating what made the new discipline revolutionary. But this was something that would not have satisfied the epistemological break Carruthers was arguing for. See, for instance, Maulana Karenga, “Black Studies and the Problematic of Paradigm,” Journal of Black Studies 18 (June 1988): 395–414; Terry Kershaw, “The Emerging Paradigm in Black Studies,” Western Journal of Black Studies 13 (1989): 45–51; Perry Hall, “Paradigms in Black Studies,” in Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies, eds. Delores Aldridge and Carlene Young (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 25–37; Abdul Alkalimat, ed., Paradigms in Black Studies: Intellectual History, Cultural Meaning and Political Ideology (Chicago: Twenty-First Century Books, 1990); and Ama Mazama, ed., The Afrocentric Paradigm (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003), among others. 63. Carruthers, Science and Oppression, 14. 64. Ibid., 15. 65. This was the name of the famous National Science Foundation report that unlocked funding for university research, an obvious nod to the American myth of the frontier that had unlocked the idea of westward expansion. See Vannevar Bush, Science, The Endless Frontier (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1945). 66. Carruthers, Science and Oppression, 14. On the research university, knowledge, and colonial order, see, among others, Bernard Magubane, African Sociology—Towards a Critical Perspective: The Selected Essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000); Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); and Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 67. See Bedour Alagraa, “The Interminable Catastrophe,” Offshoot Journal, March 1, 2021; Kathryn Yussof, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams, eds., Racial Ecologies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018); and Rubin Patterson, Greening Africana Studies: Linking Environmental Studies with Transforming Black Experiences (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). 68. Wynter: “His [Western man’s] conceptualization of Nature as totally an object to be mastered is the reflection of his real life conceptualization of the

notes  .  231 black as object—as pieza. The conceptualization of object Earth and object man would be coterminous.” Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis (copy in author’s possession), 498; Cedric Robinson, “On the Liberal Theory of Knowledge and the Concept of Race,” 1. Lecture Notes, A.A. 100x, n.d., Cedric Robinson Personal Papers. 69. Carruthers, Science and Oppression, 12–13. 70. “To Our Readers,” The Afrocentric World Review 1 (Spring 1974): 3. 71. Ibid., 15–16; Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1931). 72. Carruthers, Science and Oppression, ix. 73. “Without portfolio” is from Earl Thorpe, who used the term to describe Black historians without PhDs. See Earl Thorpe, The Black Historians: A Critique (New York: William Morrow, 1958), 169–70. 74. Carruthers, “John Henrik Clarke.” See also John Henrik Clarke, My Life in Search of Africa (Chicago: Third World Press, 1999); and Clarke, Africa at the Crosswords: Notes for an African World Revolution (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1996). 75. John Henrik Clarke, “The African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA): Some Notes on the Conflict with the African Studies Association (ASA) and the Fight to Reclaim African History,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 6 (Summer-Autumn 1976): 7. 76. Carruthers, interview by Crowe. 77. Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations négre et culture (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1954), republished in English as The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1974); Cheikh Anta Diop, L’unite culturelle de l’Afrique Noire (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1959), republished in English as The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (Chicago: Third World Press, 1978). 78. John Henrik Clarke, “Cheikh Anta Diop and the New Concept of African History,” in Great African Thinkers, Volume I: Cheikh Anta Diop, eds. Ivan Van Sertima and Larry Obadele Williams (Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1986), 111; Pathe Diagne, Cheikh Anta Diop et l’Afrique dans l’Historie du Monde (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 10–15. On Diop generally, see Theophile Obenga, Cheikh Anta Diop, Volney et Le Sphinx: Contribution de Cheikh Anta Diop à l’Histiographie mondiale (Paris: Presénce Africaine, 1996); Cheikh M’Backe Diop, Cheikh Anta Diop: L’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Presence Africaine, 2003); and Lafayette Gaston, “Past Afrocentricity: Reassessing Cheikh Anta Diop’s Place in the Afrocentric Frame,” Liberator Magazine 8 (2009): 4–5; 22; 26–27, www.livefromplanetearth.org/2014/06/ past-afrocentricity-reassessing-cheikh.html. On the Mourides, see Jean Copans, Les Marabouts de l’arachide (Paris: Harmattan, 1988); and Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–1913 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 79. Cheikh Anta Diop, interview by Bara Diouf, “Les intellectuels dovient étudier le passé non pour s’y complaire mais pour y puiser des leçons,” in

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Alerte sous les tropiques: articles 1946–1960: Culture et développement en Afrique noire (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1990), 133. 80. Cheikh Anta Diop, Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Development, 1946–60 (London: Karnak House, 1996). For context, see Amady Aly Dieng, Histoire des organisations d’étudiants africains en France (1900–1950) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011); and Amady Aly Dieng, Les premiers pas de la Fédération des Étudiants d’Afrique Noire en France (FEANF) (1950–1955): de l’Union Française à Bandoung (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). 81. Carlos Moore, “Interview with Cheikh Anta Diop,” in Diop, Black Africa, 113–22. 82. Cheikh Anta Diop, Precolonial Black Africa (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1987); Cheikh Anta Diop, Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1987); Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1991). 83. Clarke, “Cheikh Anta Diop,” 113; Obenga, Cheikh Anta Diop, 454. 84. Antoine Tine, “Léopold Senghor et Cheikh Anta Diop face au panafricanisme: deux intellectuels, même combat mais conflit des ideologies?” in Intellectuels, nationalisme et idéal panafricain: Perspective historique, ed. Theirno Bah (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2005), 129–57; Boubacar Boris Diop, “Le Senegal entre Cheikh Anta Diop et Senghor,” 2006, https://liberalarts. utexas.edu/france-ut/_files/pdf/resources/Diop.pdf. 85. Carruthers, interview by Crowe. 86. The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script: Proceedings of the Symposium held in Cairo from 28 January to 3 February 1974 (Paris: UNESCO, 1978). On this conference, see Diop, Cheikh Anta Diop, 90–99; Carruthers, interview by Crowe; Gaston, “Past Afrocentricity,” 4; Carr, “African Philosophy of History,” 394–96; and Chris Gray, Conceptions of History: Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga (London: Karnak House, 1989), 13–15. 87. Carruthers, interview by Crowe. 88. Jacob Carruthers, “An Alternative to Political Science,” in Jacob Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare (Chicago: Third World Press, 1999), 75–84. On Black political science, see Joseph P. McCormick, “Beyond Tactical Withdrawal: An Early History of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists,” in Black Politics in a Time of Transition, eds. Michael Mitchell and David Covin (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012), 159–78; The Task Force Historical Record on the Founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, “Chronicling our Legacy of Leadership,” National Review of Black Politics 1 (January 2020): 80–131; and Mack H. Jones, Knowledge, Power, and Black Politics: Collected Essays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). 89. Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare, 77. On the debates around the purpose of NCOPBS, see Jones, Knowledge, 31–42. 90. Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare, 75–77. See Paul L. Puryear, Maurice Woodard, and Vernon Gray, “The Comparative Status of Black and White

notes  .  233 Political Scientists,” in Blacks and Political Science, ed. Maurice Woodard (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1977), 24–102. This report was another instance of the dual motives behind the creation of NCOBPS and the Black caucus within the APSA. 91. See, for instance, M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Melissa Lane, The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). Most major political science textbooks draw upon this Greek origin thesis, through either Plato or Aristotle. In order to demonstrate this, Carruthers cites Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1949). Plato’s Republic is considered required reading in many Western civilization curricula, thus having a wider impact than the perspectives to be found in introductory political science courses. On the implications this has had for broader American notions of democracy, see Cedric Robinson, “Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy,” in Cedric Robinson, ed. Quan, 117–45. 92. Jacob Carruthers, “Tawi: The Two United Lands,” quoted in Carruthers, “An Alternative,” 79. See also Carruthers, Essays, 109. 93. Puryear, Woodard, and Gray, “Comparative Status,” 30; Jones, Knowledge, 3–42. See also the most popular Black political science textbook, now in its ninth edition: Hanes Walton Jr., Robert C. Smith, Sherri L. Wallace, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2021). 94. Carruthers, “Tawi,” quoted in Carruthers, “An Alternative,” 79. 95. Ibid., 80; Carruthers, Essays, 110–11. 96. Vitalis, White World Order; Jessica Blatt, Race and the Making of American Political Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 97. Jacob Carruthers, “Kush and Kemet: The Pillars of African-Centered Thought,” Kemetic Voice 2 (Winter-Spring 2016): 18; Jacob Carruthers, “Cheikh Anta Diop and the Evocation of African Intellectuals,” in Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare, 225–26. For another example of a society for which the political never arose, see the discussion of the work of Cedric Robinson in the present volume. 98. Carruthers, “An Alternative,” 82. See also Jacob Carruthers, “The Wisdom of Governance in Kemet,” in Kemet and the African Worldview, eds. Jacob Carruthers and Maulana Karenga (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1986), 3–30. On the Sixth Pan African Congress, see Ronald W. Walters, Pan Africanism in Africa and the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 76–81; and Seth Markle, Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964–1974 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017), 141–76. 99. Jacob Carruthers, “Thinking about European Thought,” in Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare, 35. 100. Ibid., 38.

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101. Though Carruthers does not mention Hegel in this article, the connections to idea of dialectics are obvious. See G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991). 102. Carruthers, “Thinking,” 39. 103. Lane, Birth of Politics, 35–39; Robinson, “Slavery.” 104. Carruthers, “Thinking,” 42. 105. Ibid., 43–44; Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). 106. Carruthers, “Thinking,” 46–49. 107. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). Carruthers also mentions Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). 108. Carruthers, Essays, xi; Carruthers, interview by Crowe; Jacob Carruthers, “ASCAC Research Methodology,” in Study Guide: Building for Eternity: Book 1, ed. Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations [ASCAC] (Atlanta, GA: ASCAC Foundation, 2011), 19–20. 109. Carruthers, interview by Crowe; Jacob Carruthers, “Reflections on the Question of the Race of the Ancient Egyptians,” in Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare, 117–25; William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Debbie Challis, The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 110. Carruthers, Essays, 27–28; Charles Grantham, The Battle for Kemet (Chicago: Kemetic Institute, 2003), 1–6; Cheikh Anta Diop, “Origin of the Ancient Egyptians,” in General History of Africa, Volume II: Ancient Civilizations of Africa, ed. G. Mokhtar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 41–42; Josef Ben Levi, “The Intellectual Warfare of Dr. Jacob H. Carruthers and the Battle for Ancient Nubia as a Foundational Paradigm in Africana Studies: Thoughts and Reflections,” Journal of Pan African Studies 5 (June 2012): 182–83. 111. Carruthers, Essays, 25–26. 112. Ibid., 21. 113. Ibid., 25. See also Mario Beatty, “Martin Delany: The First African-American to Translate Egyptian Hieroglyphs,” International Journal of Africana Studies 11 (Fall 2005): 131–44; 151–53. 114. See Carruthers, interview by Crowe; Carruthers, “From the Trinity River,” 18–19; Nzinga Ratibisha Heru, “ASCAC Historical Profile,” in Study Guide, ed. ASCAC, 6–8; and Karenga and Carruthers, eds., Kemet and the African Worldview. 115. On philosophy and Western disciplinarity, see Gordon Leff, “The Trivium and the Three Philosophies,” in The History of the University in Europe: Volume I; Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. H. De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 307–36; Wilhelm SchmittBiggemann, “New Structures of Knowledge,” in History of the University in Europe: Volume II; Universities in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. H. De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),

notes  .  235 489–530; and Mattie Dogan and Robert Pahre, “The Fragmentation and Recombination of the Social Sciences,” Studies in Comparative International Development 24 (Summer 1989): 56–73. 116. E. Franklin Frazier, “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual,” Negro Digest 11 (February 1962): 28. 117. Ibid., 32. 118. Ibid., 36. 119. This critique would certainly be in line with his more well-known Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1957). For more on Frazier, see Anthony Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 120. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 10–14; See the debates in Richard Wright, ed., African Philosophy: An Introduction (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1977); and Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth or Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). Other important collections include Tsenay Serequeberhan, ed., African Philosophy: The Essential Readings (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1991); and Adeshina Afolayan and Toyin Falola, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy (New York: Palgrave, 2017). 121. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 16–20; see also Jacob Carruthers, “Outside Academia: Bernal’s Critique of Black Champions of Ancient Egypt,” Journal of Black Studies 22 (June 1992): 459–61. 122. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 33–34. See especially George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954). 123. Theophile Obenga, Ancient Egypt and Black Africa: A Student’s Handbook for the Study of Ancient Egypt in Philosophy, Linguistics, and Gender Relations (London: Karnak House, 1992), 51–60; Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 262–64. It is interesting and necessary to note here that the notion that Greek philosophy was “stolen” by Africa—one of the main targets of anti-Afrocentric critique and animus—is not a major pillar of Carruthers’s intellectual project. Of these critiques, the most popular was Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: BasicBooks, 1996). More extensive is the critique in Yacoov Shavit, History in Black: African-Americans in Search of an Ancient Past (London: Frank Cass, 2001). 124. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 35. 125. In a 1982 panel presentation on the status of Black social thought, Carruthers queried: “Is Black intellectual independence evidenced by supporting the general Western theories modified to include an anti-racist agenda?” “The State of Contemporary Afro-American Social Thought: Problems and Prospects,” Box 1, Folder 11, JHCP-ARC, 4. His answer was, of course, no—yet this tendency remains a strong feature of Black academic intellectual work. See Joshua Myers, “The Order of Disciplinarity, the Terms of Silence,” Critical Ethnic Studies Journal 4 (Spring 2018): 107–29. 126. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 39.

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127. Ibid., 42–43. 128. That is, lies or gossip. 129. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 40. 130. Ibid., 45. 131. Ibid., 50. 132. Ibid., 48. 133. Ibid., 49. 134. Ibid., 55–59. Chapter I of Part II of the text is devoted to Instructions, namely the text The Instructions of Ptahhotep. 135. Mdw Ntr, 59–61. 136. Amadou Hampaté Bâ, “The Living Tradition,” in General History of Africa, Volume 1: Methodology and African Prehistory, ed. Joseph Ki-Zerbo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 166–205. 137. Bâ quoted in Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 81. 138. Ibid., 66–82. Along with Ba, the works on basic Africa that Carruthers cites are as follows: Godfrey Leinhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêlli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); Modupe Oduyoye, The Vocabulary of Yoruba Religious Discourse (Ibadan: Daystar Press, 1972); Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938); Richard Onwuanibe, “The Human Personality and Immortality in Ibo Metaphysics,” in African Philosophy, ed. Wright, 183–98; William Abraham, The Mind of Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); and Gabriel Setiloane, African Theology: An Introduction (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1986). Additional works on this subject include Kwame Gyeke, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Segun Gbadegesin, African Philosophy: Traditional Yoruba Philosophy and Contemporary African Realities (New York: Peter Lang, 1991); Barry Hallen, The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Discourse about Values in Yoruba Culture (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000); John Anenchukwu Umeh, After God Is Dibia (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998); Ayi Kwei Armah, The Eloquence of the Scribes: A Memoir on the Sources and Resources of African Literature (Popenguine: Per Ankh Books, 2006); and Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo: Principles of Life and Living (Brooklyn: Athelia Henrietta Press, 2001). 139. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 87. 140. See the discussion of Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis in the present volume. In addition, there is also the work of Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983); Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981); and Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

notes  .  237 141. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, quoted in Jacob Carruthers, The Irritated Genie: An Essay on the Haitian Revolution (Chicago: Kemetic Institute, 1985), 6. 142. Ibid., 7. More recent treatments of the Haitian Revolution have also centered this revolutionary spirit; see Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); and Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 143. Those who “toyed” with that “Phantom of Liberty,” a characterization of Toussaint Louverture’s position, is also attributed to Dessalines; see Carruthers, Irritated Genie, 30 and passim. Carruthers’s book-length treatment was preceded by a short section that concluded the aforementioned “Marx and the Negro” where he argued for a Black history of revolt premised on the “collective wisdom of Black people” upon which Dessalines had come to depend. See Carruthers, “Marx and the Negro,” 31. For a discussion of the idea of “Free and French,” and Toussaint’s project, see Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 89–112. 144. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, “Appendix: Proclamation for a Solemn Abjuration of the French Nation,” in Carruthers, Irritated Genie, 125. 145. Carruthers, Irritated Genie, 111. 146. See Fick, Making of Haiti, 175–82. 147. Carr, “What Black Studies Is Not,” 178. 148. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 89–106. See also Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), also discussed in the present volume. 149. W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa has Played in World History (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 149. See also the discussion of this question in the present volume. 150. Anderson Thompson, “Developing an Afrikan Historiography,” Black Books Bulletin 3 (Spring 1975): 4–13. A revised form of the essay appeared as Anderson Thompson, “Developing an African Historiography,” in Preliminary Challenge, eds. Carruthers and Harris, 9–30. 151. Thompson, “Developing,” 15; emphasis in the original. 152. Ibid., 16. See also Thompson’s 1977 dissertation, “A Treatise on African Historiography” (PhD diss., Union Graduate School, Yellow Springs, OH, 1977). 153. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 261 and passim; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 154. Thompson, “Developing,” 20–22. See also “the Negro Problem,” as outlined in the work of Nahum Dimitri Chandler, X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem of Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 155. Thompson, “Developing,” 21. 156. Ibid. 157. Ibid., 10. 158. Ibid., 29; emphasis in the original.

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159. Ibid., 28. 160. The term is from Anderson Thompson, quoted in Jacob Carruthers, “Appendix 2: A Memorandum on an African World History Project,” in Preliminary Challenge, eds. Carruthers and Harris, 358. 161. Thompson, quoted in Carruthers, “Appendix 2,” 358. See Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 162. Carruthers, “Memorandum,” 357. Representative examples that Carruthers cites include Herodotus, The Histories (London: Penguin, 2003); Polybius, The Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999); Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Penguin, 2001). See also G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), and Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 163. Conservative examples include Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); and Rodney Stark, How the West was Won: The Neglected Story of Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2014). But there are also liberal interpretations; see, for example, Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilizations from Primates to Robots (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014). 164. Carruthers, “Memorandum,” 360. 165. Jacob Carruthers, “The Research Commission Report: A Recommended Ten-Year Research Agenda,” in Reconstructing Kemetic Culture, ed. Maulana Karenga (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1990), 205–15. 166. Greg Kimathi Carr and Valethia Watkins, “Appendix 1: Inaugural Meeting,” in Preliminary Challenge, eds. Carruthers and Harris, 330. 167. Ibid., 327; Heru, “ASCAC Historical Profile,” 7. On Temple’s department of African American Studies, see Asante, Afrocentric Manifesto, 31–54; 99–104. 168. Asante, Afrocentric Manifesto, 118–19. 169. Much like Carruthers’s break with Inner City Studies and development of an Africana Studies approach, the methodological breakthroughs in the study of ancient Africa were to be the basis for the conceptualization of the discipline of Black Studies. He describes the influence and contributions of Cheikh Anta Diop as necessary for building “more and more fiber into the discipline.” Carruthers, “Weheme Mesu,” 65. See also Carr, “African Philosophy of History,” 35–36; 114–32. For Asante’s intellectual project in relationship to Africana Studies, see Asante, Afrocentric Manifesto; Asante, Kemet; and Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). 170. Carr, “For Anderson Thompson”; Heru, “ASCAC Historical Profile,” 7. 171. Carr and Watkins, “Inaugural Meeting,” 327 and passim. 172. Ibid., 339.

notes  .  239 173. Ibid., 333–35. 174. Ibid., 338. 175. Ibid., 336; Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 107–69; Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (Fall 2003): 257–37. 176. Jacob Carruthers, “An African Historiography for the 21st Century,” in Preliminary Challenge, eds. Carruthers and Harris, 50–54. 177. Ibid., 53. See George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973); Faye V. Harrison, ed., Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology of Liberation (Washington: American Anthropological Association, 1991); Kwesi Otabil, The Agonistic Imperative: The Rational Burden of African Centeredness (Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall Press, 1994); Christian Jennings and Toyin Falola, eds., Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies Across the Disciplines (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002); William Martin and Michael West, Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstruction the Study and Meaning of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “Building Intellectual Bridges: From African Studies and African American Studies to Africana Studies in the United States,” Afrika Focus 24 (2011): 9–31; and Clarke, “African Heritage Studies Association.” 178. Carruthers, “African Historiography,” 67. 179. Ibid., 56–57; Carruthers borrows this idea from Joseph Ki-Zerbo: “Unless one chooses to live in a state of unconsciousness and alienation, one cannot live without memory, or with a memory that belongs to someone else. And history is the memory of nations.” Ki-Zerbo, “General Introduction,” in General History of Africa, Vol. 1, ed. Ki-Zerbo, 3. This sense of “nation,” or “national,” should not be confused for the nation-state. One of the reasons Carruthers uses the term “foundationalist” has to do with the ambiguity of the term “nationalist.” See Carruthers, “African Historiography,” 65–66. 180. Ibid., 49; Carruthers, “Weheme Mesu,” 40–45. Carruthers’s basic contention is that Greek historians from Herodotus to Thrasymachus were breaking from the traditions of the poets like Hesiod and Homer in order to craft tales that were premised on proof of the deeds of great men, rather than the poetic myths. There was indeed somewhat of a rational thrust among the historians who decried the tradition, a parallel to the scientism that would dominate later iterations of the discipline. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the

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American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 181. Carruthers, “Weheme Mesu,” 9. 182. Carruthers, “African Historiography,” 57; Greg Carr, “Inscribing African World History: Intergenerational Repetition and Improvisation of Ancestral Instruction” (unpublished essay). 183. Carruthers, “African Historiography,” 62–63. 184. Ibid., 64–65. See also Thiong’o, Something Torn and New, 69–98. 185. Robinson, Black Marxism; Fu-Kiau, African Cosmology; Thompson, Flash of the Spirit; Stuckey, Slave Culture; Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1962); Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Samuel Floyd, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Corinna Campbell, The Cultural Work: Maroon Performance in Paramaribo Suriname (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020). 186. Carruthers, “African Historiography,” 64. 187. Ibid., 65. See also Carr, “African Philosophy of History”; and Greg Carr, “The African-Centered Philosophy of History: An Exploratory Essay on the Genealogy of Foundationalist Historical Thought and African Nationalist Identity Construction,” in Preliminary Challenge, eds. Carruthers and Harris, 285–320. 188. Carruthers, “Weheme Mesu,” 36–54; Robinson, Black Marxism, 71–100. The second volume of ASCAC’s African World History Project will be anchored by this essay. The purposes of the project were reaffirmed in the “Atlanta Declaration,” delivered in 2000. See Carr, “Inscribing,” 10–11; and Heru, “ASCAC Historical Profile,” 7. 189. Alagraa, “Interminable Catastrophe.” 190. In the notes to the aforementioned African World History Project meeting, Carruthers addresses the Western distinction between science and technology, offering that the realm of speculation and abstract thought had been displaced in favor of practical know-how within the West. African conceptions of science such as those advanced or gestured to in the work of Cheikh Anta Diop had to contend with the problems of this inheritance as it related to the day-to-day practical questions of know-how that would inevitably arise in the lives of African people and in the movement for self-determination. The adoption of the practicality of science must avoid the traps of the West, while also avoiding an uncritical metaphysical reconnection. See Carr and Watkins, “Inaugural Meeting,” 345–46. See also, from another angle, Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). 191. Carruthers, “State of Contemporary Afro-American Social Thought,” 5. 192. Indeed, Carruthers, Carr, and others have argued the significance of such family histories for the development of an African World History. See Carr, “Inscribing,” 24–25. 193. Carruthers, “State of Contemporary Afro-American Social Thought,” 8–9.

notes  .  241

chapter 4 1.

Chuck Morse, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory (Spring 1999): 8. 2. Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 214–15. 3. See Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971). 4. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 5. Robinson, Terms of Order, xxix. 6. On the function of normative language through which to examine Black thought—and the ways in which the idea of developing such a project might be rethought and reinterpreted, see Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., “Africology: Normative Theory,” in Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996), 97–134; and Greg Carr, “Toward an Intellectual History of Africana Studies: Genealogy and Normative Theory,” in The African American Studies Reader, ed. Nathaniel Norment Jr. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2007), 438–52. 7. My thoughts here are inspired by Fred Moten’s reflections with a range of thinkers, including Edouard Glissant, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Saidiya Hartman. See, inter alia, Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), x–xiii; Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013); “Do Black Lives Matter? Fred Moten and Robin D.G. Kelley in Conversation,” December 13, 2014, https://vimeo.com/116111740; and “Robin D.G. Kelley and Fred Moten in Conversation,” April 3, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP-2F9MXjRE. 8. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 175–76. 9. Robinson: “There have been no sacred texts to be preserved from the ravages of history. There have been no intellects or leaders whose authority secured ideological and theoretical conformity and protected their ideas from criticism. There has been no theory to inoculate the movements of resistance from change.” Ibid., 316. David Scott rightly points out that within such traditions—particularly within intellectual formations—disagreements are inevitable. Those disagreements within traditions set the terms around which questions of ideology and questions of the future are settled. If there is a Black radical tradition, the question becomes: What constitutes the “within”? Scott’s provocation is critical, however, because it requires us to think about traditions and how they come to be defined and organized. If

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it is at all true that traditions map out ways of being in the world, then it is also true that those ways of being do not automatically appear; they have to be struggled for in order to persist. It is in that struggle and persistence that Robinson sees a unique Black radicalism that is both complicated and discernible in the history of Black resistance. See David Scott, “On the Very Idea of a Black Radical Tradition,” Small Axe 17 (March 2013): 1–6, as well as Fred Moten’s characterization of the Black Radical tradition: “To consent not to be a single being, which is the anoriginal, anoriginary constitution of blackness as radical force—as historical, paraontological totality—is, for Robinson, the existential and logical necessity that turns the history of racial capitalism, which is also to say the Marxist tradition, inside out. What cannot be understood within, or as a function of, the deprivation that is the context of its genesis, can only be understood as the ongoing present of a common refusal.” Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” African Identities 11 (2013): 238. 10. Robinson, Black Marxism, xxx. 11. Ibid., xxx; 169–70. 12. Black Marxism was first published in 1983 before being reissued in 2000. Its initial publication was met with a critical silence, although it was read and discussed widely in spaces Fred Moten characterizes as “on the edge or over the edge of the university.” On the reception to the 1983 edition, see his “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 239, as well as Robin D. G. Kelley, “Foreword,” in Black Marxism, xi–xxvi; and Darryl C. Thomas, “Black Studies and the Scholarship of Cedric Robinson,” Race and Class 47 (October 2005): 1–22. 13. On racial capitalism, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review, January 12, 2017, http:// bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-meanracial-capitalism, as well as the selections in Walter Johnson with Robin D. G. Kelley, eds., Forum 1: Race Capitalism Justice (Boston: Boston Review, 2017). Others have taken Robinson to task over the inclusion, non-inclusion, or characterization of Black intellectuals. These critiques are often more about the stability of and inclusions within particular categories used to contain Black thought than they are about the reasons Robinson engages W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright, and what Robinson accomplishes by interrogating their ideas. See, for instance, Carole Boyce Davies, “A Black Left Feminist View on Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism,” Black Perspectives, November 10, 2016, www.aaihs.org/a-black-left-feminist-view-on-cedricrobinsons-black-marxism/. Yet others have taken issue with Robinson’s historiography, asserting that his reading of the foundations of capitalism— and thus racialism—is wanting. See Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Black Radical Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 12–14. Makalani’s argument critiques the notion of a Black radical discovery that constituted a negation of Western radicalism and argues that if racialism really was an “eternal feature” of Western thought, non-Western iterations of such thought—non-white people’s extension of Marxism—render such earlier

notes  .  243 forms of racialism less powerful. In a more recent treatment, Makalani writes that what he “missed was Robinson’s attention to the manner in which European societies legitimized hierarchical relationships as natural, just as the language and structures of race would do after 1492.” Minkah Makalani, “Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race,” Boston Review, February 1, 2021. See also Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful”; Travis Tatum, “Reflections on Black Marxism,” Race and Class (October 2005): 71–76; and Joshua Myers, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021). 14. Robinson, Black Marxism, 125, emphasis in the original. See also Kelley, “Foreword”; Myers, Cedric Robinson, 170–74; Joshua Myers, “The Scholarship of Cedric J. Robinson: Methodological Considerations,” Journal of Pan African Studies 5 (June 2012): 59–61; and Joshua Myers, “Cedric Robinson and the Ends of the Black Radical Tradition,” US Intellectual History Blog, June 15, 2016, http://s-usih.org/2016/06/guest-post-cedric-robinson-andthe-ends-of-the-black-radical-tradition.html. 15. Robinson, Black Marxism, 121–22. To be clear, this does not mean that Marx and/or Marxist thinkers had to necessarily compromise on these questions, as not all who shared their physical and cultural locations did. The question here is not simply about ethical choices but about a conceptual logic that constricts how people understood the world (i.e., disciplinarity). In ways that are not always determinist, ethics, of course, rely on pre-existing systems of value, which rely on the very logic that determines reality. The failure would not be Western radicalism’s alone. See Avery Gordon, “The Future of Radical Scholarship,” Race and Class 47 (October 2005): 85. 16. For an example of the disavowal of the existence of the sort of Black radicalism Robinson and others narrate, see Asad Haider, “The Shadow of the Plantation,” February 12, 2017, www.viewpointmag.com/2017/02/12/ the-shadow-of-the-plantation/. 17. Robinson, Black Marxism, xxx. 18. Ibid., 71–72. 19. Ibid., 309. 20. Ibid., 168. 21. Ibid., 183. 22. Robinson writes: “In the seventeenth-century colonial North America, marronage appeared first. But as the eighteenth century succeeded the seventeenth, marronage as the prevalent form of Black resistance became increasingly difficult, as merchant and manufacturing capitalists expanded plantation slavery, rationalized the structures of domination between the colonies, and defeated the native Americans. … By the end of the century, new possibilities for Black radicalism arose with the first colonial rebellions and then the Haitian Revolution. … The evidence of the tradition’s persistence and ideological vitality among the Black slave masses was to be found not only in the rebellions and the underground but as well in the shouts, the spirituals, the sermons, and the very textual body of Black Christianity. … The anticolonial struggles that were increasingly mounted from

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the mid-century on were the beginnings of the transformation of Black radicalism into an engaged confrontation with European domination.” Ibid., 311–12; Myers, “Cedric Robinson and the Ends of the Black Radical Tradition”; Kelley, “Births of a Nation,” 132–36. See also Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 163–64, and passim. 23. On the Negro, Robinson writes: “The construct of Negro, unlike the terms ‘African,’ ‘Moor,’ or ‘Ethiope’ suggested no situatedness in time, that is history, or space, that is ethno- or politico-geography. The Negro had no civilization, no cultures, no religion, no history, no place, and finally no humanity that might command consideration.” Black Marxism, 81. See also Cedric Robinson, “Inventions of the Negro,” Social Identities 7 (2001): 329–61. “Nothingness” here is also inspired by Ashon Crawley, who thinks with and against the idea to see what can be “known, from the zone of those of us said to be had have nothing.” Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 197. 24. Robinson, Black Marxism, 71. 25. Here, I am thinking with Edouard Glissant. See his Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 26. See Robin D. G. Kelley, “Cedric J. Robinson: The Making of a Black Radical Intellectual,” Counterpunch, June 17, 2016, https://www.counterpunch. org/2016/06/17/cedric-j-robinson-the-making-of-a-black-radical-intellectual/; Robin D. G. Kelley, “Winston Whiteside and the Politics of the Possible,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso, 2017), 255–62; and Myers, Cedric Robinson, 14–15. Robinson would write about this incident, without declaring that it was his family, in Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 116. 27. On the “bad man” in folk traditions, see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 407–20. On its historical foundations in marronage and the Black Radical tradition, see Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 230–55. 28. Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 23–95. 29. Myers, Cedric Robinson, 20–26. 30. Ibid., 30–32. 31. Cedric Robinson, “Black Studies,” lecture presented at the University of California, Berkeley, February 8, 1986, 1, Cedric Robinson Personal Papers. 32. Ibid., 2. 33. Myers, Cedric Robinson, 57–74; Kelley, “Cedric J. Robinson.” 34. Cedric Robinson, 66–74. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Births of a Nation: Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson,” in Forum 1, ed. Walter Johnson with Robin D. G. Kelley, 128–30; Robin D. G. Kelley, “Southern Africa and the

notes  .  245 Making of Cedric J. Robinson’s Radical Theory and Practice,” lecture presented at UHURU Conference: The Black Radical Tradition from Toussaint to Biko and Beyond, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, July 4, 2017. A sampling of Robinson’s work on Southern Africa includes “The Utopian Break: South Africa as Other” (unpublished manuscript); “Notes Toward a ‘Native’ Theory of History,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 4 (Summer 1980): 45–78; and Terms of Order. 35. On the Afro-American Association and the Revolutionary Action Movement on the West Coast, see Kelley, “Foreword,” xv–xvi; Donna Murch, Living for the City: Immigration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Lee O. Cherry, Spirits in the Whirlwind: Evolution Towards the African-American Association and Beyond (Durham, NC: Lulu, 2018); and “‘We’re No Longer Afraid to Be Black’: Before the Panthers, This Group Was the Vanguard,” East Bay Yesterday, podcast audio, April 7, 2021. For the San Francisco State strike, see Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 43–78; and Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 36. Myers, Cedric Robinson, 88–97. 37. Ibid., 89. 38. Robinson, Terms of Order, 6. 39. Cedric Robinson, “Leadership: A Mythic Paradigm” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1975); Kelley, “Cedric J. Robinson.” 40. The Black Matters Committee included Archie Singham, William Ellis, and others. See Myers, Cedric Robinson, 114; Thomas, “Black Studies and the Scholarship of Cedric Robinson,” 2–3; Tatum, “Reflections on Black Marxism,” 74–75; and Matthew Johnson, Undermining Racial Justice: How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 41. Myers, Cedric Robinson, 119–24. On Detroit, see Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying; A Study in Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975); James Geschwender, Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Herb Boyd, Black Detroit: A History of Self-Determination (New York: Harper Collins, 2017). 42. Cedric J. Robinson, “Oliver Cox and the Historiography of the West,” Cultural Critique 17 (Winter 1990–1991): 5–19; Cedric J. Robinson, “C.L.R. James and the World-System,” Race and Class 34 (October 1992): 49–62; Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “Racially Subordinate Labour within Global Contexts: Robinson and Hopkins Re-examined,” Race and Class 47 (October 2005): 54–70; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 13; Terence K. Hopkins, “The Study of the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Introductory Considerations,” in World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology, eds. Terence Hopkins, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Associates (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1982), 9–38; Yousuf Al-Bulushi, “Thinking Racial Capitalism and Black

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Radicalism from Africa: An Intellectual Geography of Cedric Robinson’s World-System,” Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.018. 43. For the most salient examples of Immanuel Wallerstein’s project, see his The Modern World-System, 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). An interesting work that converges with what is gestured toward here is his work on the disciplinarity of the social sciences, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 44. Cedric Robinson, “Social Movements and the African Diaspora.” Box 16, Folder 750, Fernand Braudel Center Papers, Binghamton Libraries Special Collections, Binghamton University. For a broader discussion, see Myers, Cedric Robinson, 127–39. 45. The Braudel Center’s Review was a place where Robinson’s work often found a home in these years. See Robinson, “Notes Toward a ‘Native’ Theory of History”; and Robinson, “C.L.R. James and the World-System.” 46. See Cedric J. Robinson, “The Emergent Marxism of Richard Wright’s Ideology,” Race and Class 19 (January 1978): 221–37; Cedric J. Robinson, “The Emergence and Limitations of European Radicalism,” Race and Class (October 1979): 145–70; and Cedric J. Robinson, “Coming to Terms: The Third World and the Dialectics of Imperialism,” Race and Class 22 (April 1981): 363–86. 47. A. Sivanandan, “Race and Resistance: the IRR Story,” Race and Class 50 (October 2008): 1–30. 48. Myers, Cedric Robinson, 144–52. For a consideration of London, see, among others, Rob Waters, Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). 49. Cedric J. Robinson, “An Inventory of Contemporary Black Politics,” Emergency 2 (1984): 27. 50. Elizabeth Robinson, “Twenty-Five Years of the Third World News Review,” Race and Class 47 (October 2005): 77–81; Joshua Myers, “A Mosquito on an Elephant’s Behind: The Third World News Review and Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson’s Community Media,” Journal of Academic Freedom 12 (Fall 2021): 1–14. 51. Cedric J. Robinson, “Toward Fascism? Race, the Two Reservations, and the Materiality of Theory,” paper presented at Stanford University, The Two Reservations: Western Thought, the Color Line, and The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Revisited Symposium, 2, March 5, 1994, Cedric Robinson Personal Papers. 52. “Key Quotes and Major Themes/Questions for Discussion and Proposed Solutions,” The Two Reservations: Western Thought, the Color Line, and The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Revisited Symposium, March 3–5, 1994, Cedric Robinson Personal Papers. 53. Cedric J. Robinson, “Cruse Revisited,” unpublished paper, p. 4, 1994, Cedric Robinson Personal Papers. 54. Robinson, “Toward Fascism?,” 1–2.

notes  .  247 55. On the question of the origins of the term, see Peter James Hudson, “Racial Capitalism and the Dark Proletariat,” in Walter Johnson and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds., Boston Review: Forum 1: Race Capitalism Justice (2017): 59–65; and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Foreword: Why Black Marxism, Why Now?” in Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Revised and Updated Third Edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), xiv. 56. A few examples from a vast and ever-evolving list include: Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Karen E. Fields and Barbara Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Hakim Adi, Pan Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa, and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013); and Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom. 57. In the social sciences, a great deal of this work is inspired by Howard Winant and Michael Omi; see their Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); and Mills, Racial Contract. For a review of some of this scholarship, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “The Last Shall Be First: Best Books in the Race Field since 2000,” Contemporary Sociology 42 (January 2013): 31–40. 58. On the scores of articles, conferences, workshops, and other initiatives, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “Foreword: Why Black Marxism,” xxxn11. Another review of the recent literature may be found in Julian Go, “Three Tensions in the Theory of Racial Capitalism,” Sociological Theory 39 (March 2021): 38–47. 59. See, for instance, Charles Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). More popular treatments tend to be more sanguine about these possibilities; see Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019); and Heather McGee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (New York: One World, 2021). For a review of the nature of these arguments, see Singh, Black Is a Country, 15–57. Liberal antiracism received a further shot in the arm in the wake of the 2020 uprisings amid the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. A cottage industry of antiracist literature and philanthropic commitments emerged to

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ensure us that we can in fact be better, and that fundamental change starts with the changing of racist attitudes. See Lauren Michelle Jackson, “What Are Anti-Racist Reading Lists For?” Vulture, June 4, 2020, https://www. vulture.com/2020/06/anti-racist-reading-lists-what-are-they-for.html; and Darren Walker, “Are You Willing to Give Up Your Privilege?” New York Times, July 5, 2020. 60. On the white left, much of this work and thinking stems from, is inspired by, or is in conversation with whiteness studies, particularly its anti-capitalist variant. See Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 2012); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); and Roediger, Wages of Whiteness. Black left thought has many foundations, but a useful genealogy of those connecting critiques of Black middle-class liberalism and imperialism include “The Young Turks”, the collection of socialist Howard University faculty members in the 1930s; and more recently the work of Manning Marable, Roderick Bush, Adolph Reed, John McClendon, Carole Boyce Davies, and Cedric Johnson, among many others. See Singh, Black Is a Country; Michael Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Martin Kilson, The Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 61. Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regime of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), xii. 62. Ibid., xii–xiv. 63. See Hudson, “Racial Capitalism and the Dark Proletariat”; Michael Ralph and Maya Singhal, “Racial Capitalism,” Theory and Society 48 (2019): 851–81; Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Modern US Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights,” Monthly Review 72 (July/August 2020): 8–20; Michael Walzer, “A Note on Racial Capitalism,” Dissent, July 29, 2020; and Olúfémi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Bright, “A Response to Michael Walzer,” Dissent, August 7, 2020. 64. Robinson, Black Marxism, 9. 65. Ibid., 28. See Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean”; and Makalani, “Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race.” 66. Erica Edwards, “Foreword,” in Terms of Order, xvii. 67. Ibid., xvii. 68. Robinson, “Notes Toward a ‘Native’ Theory of History,” 46. 69. Gordon, “Future of Radical Scholarship,” 86. 70. Kelley, “Cedric J. Robinson.” 71. A. Sivanandan and Hazel Waters, “Introduction,” Special Issue, “Cedric Robinson and the Philosophy of Black Resistance,” Race and Class 47 (October 2005): iii; emphasis in the original. 72. “Unthinkable” is from Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 70–107.

notes  .  249 73. Cedric Robinson, “Historical Consciousness and the Development of Revolutionary Theory,” Review of Afro-American Issues and Culture 1 (1979): 229. 74. Ibid., 218. 75. Morse, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition,” 8. 76. Robinson, Terms of Order, 215. 77. David Oldroyd, The Arch of Knowledge: An Introductory Study of the History of the Philosophy and Methodology of Science (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1986), 2. 78. Robinson, Terms of Order, 9. 79. Ibid., 6. 80. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Vintage, 2010) and The Order of Things: The Birth of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994). Though Robinson’s interrogations of Western society went beyond Foucault’s emphasis on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he would find some of Foucault’s ideas on truth and power useful as points of departure for considering those forces power was unable to contain. See Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, xi–xiii, for his engagement with Michel Foucault’s ideas contained in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1972). Robinson’s ideas engage but are clearly of a different tradition than those critical theorists who identified the negations and contradictions of modernity and articulated ways out, under the rubrics of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and even cultural studies. These differences were not merely premised on their Eurocentrism (though this should not be discounted), but upon the idea that Robinson’s sites and sources for knowledge production otherwise were not and could not be legible to discourses that sought merely to recenter and resituate these knowledges as alternative sciences or as anti-science; it was rather a rejection of the very possibility that Blackness simply represented a negation—or as Foucault might frame it, an “insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 81ff. As demonstrated in Robinson’s Black Study, Blackness contained something more than just opposition to power. On the impact of these ideas on the discipline of political science, see also David Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics Scholarship and Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 275–88. 81. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 108. 82. Robinson, Terms of Order, xxx. 83. See Melissa Lane, The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 59–61. 84. Cedric Robinson, “Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy,” in The Changing Racial Regime, ed. Matthew Holden (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 18–35. 85. Ibid., 23–25. See Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (New York: Random Matters, 2013), 24–148.

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86. Pagden, Enlightenment, 65–95; 200–42. 87. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26. 88. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 89. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 26. 90. Robinson, Terms of Order, 14. 91. Ibid., 32. 92. Ibid., 36. 93. See Ibid., 38–71, particularly Robinson’s discussion of deviance. Cf. Schmitt, Concept of the Political. 94. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 105. 95. Ibid., 108. 96. Myers, Cedric Robinson, 123–24. 97. Erica Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). See also Robert C. Smith, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of Black American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 98. Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 99. See William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 100. “Reduction of chaos” is from the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson as cited by Claude Levi-Strauss, quoted in Robinson, Terms of Order, 38. LeviStrauss’s project asserts that all thought is essentially the desire for order, and that primitive thought is as capable of attaining this sophistication. Robinson, as we will see, was not as concerned with showing the ways that non-Western traditions met these criteria. 101. Robinson, Terms of Order, 198. 102. Ibid., 216. 103. Ibid., 188–89. 104. Ibid., 197–98. 105. Ibid., 196. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., 202. 109. On time, see Ibid., 110–23. Part of the ethic of Western rationality, and thus modernity itself, is the need to both measure and control concepts of time. Robinson argues that Western thought appropriated charisma and remanded eschatological time to “irrationality” in order to establish notions of order. In his disquisition on time, Damien M. Sojoyner views its imposition and its rationality as the marker and container for notions of human difference (i.e., racialization) as well as its enforcement in Western society.

notes  .  251 See Damien M. Sojoyner, “Dissonance in Time: (Un)Making and (Re) Mapping of Blackness,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Johnson and Lubin, 59–71; and Myers, Cedric Robinson, 1–12. 110. For these maxims, see “The Instruction of Ptahhotep,” in Ancient Egyptian Literature: The Old and Middle Kingdoms, ed. Miriam Lichtheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 63. Jacob Carruthers frames this genre of Ancient Egyptian thought as foundational for questions of governance, which he opposes to “the political.” See Carruthers, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection on African Deep Thought from the Time of Pharaohs to the Present (London: Karnak House, 1995), 113–42. 111. For this translation of iwa, see Kola Abimbola, Yoruba Culture: A Philosophical Account (Birmingham: Iroko Academic Publishers, 2006), 85. On Yoruba concepts generally, see, inter alia, Barry Hallen, The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Discourse About Values in Yoruba Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 112. And improvisation is in fact “work.” It is a form of producing and thinking that is not random nor arbitrary; it requires mastery of form and tradition in order to be fully and uniquely present and real. On improvisation, see, inter alia, Greg E. Kimathi Carr, “Inscribing African World History: Intergenerational Repetition and Improvisation of Ancestral Instruction,” in The African World History Project: African Historiography (unpublished essay); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 63–64; and Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 113. Robinson, Terms of Order, 202; emphasis in the original. 114. Later, Robinson would call “the nation-state” the “underserving venue” of African liberation in a critique of political Pan Africanism and its insistence on the state as the foundation for the Pan Africanism. See his “In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth,” Social Identities 2 (February 1996): 165. 115. Robinson, Terms of Order, 158–84. 116. Jacob Carruthers, Science and Oppression (Chicago: Kemetic Institute, 1972); and Carruthers, Mdw Ntr, 85–106. 117. Jacob Carruthers, “An Alternative to Political Science,” in Intellectual Warfare (Chicago: Third World Press, 1999), 75–84. 118. Myers, Cedric Robinson, 91–92; Robinson, “Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy.” 119. Joseph P. McCormick, “Beyond Tactical Withdrawal: An Early History of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists,” in Black Politics in a Time of Transition, eds. Michael Mitchell and David Covin (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012), 159–78; The Task Force Historical Record on the Founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, “Chronicling our Legacy of Leadership,” National Review of Black Politics 1 (January 2020): 80–131; Mack Jones and Ronald Walters, “Social Science and the Obligations of the Black Scholar: An Exchange between Mack Jones and Ronald Walters,” Endarch: A Journal of Theory 1 (Fall 1976): 51–56. For

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a consideration of the work of Jones and Walters, see Mack H. Jones, Knowledge, Power, and Black Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014); and Robert C. Smith, Cedric Johnson, and Robert G. Newby, eds., What Has This Got to Do with the Liberation of Black People?: The Impact of Ronald W. Walters on African American Thought and Leadership (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). See also Wilbur Rich, ed., African American Perspectives on Political Science (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), and Joyce A. Ladner, ed., The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Random House, 1973), for discussions of Black politics and the Black social sciences, respectively. 120. Rogers M. Smith, “NCBOPS and APSA,” National Review of Black Politics 1 (2020): 136–40. 121. Robinson, Terms of Order, 3. 122. Robinson, Black Marxism, 45. 123. Ibid., 65; emphasis added. 124. Cedric Robinson, “On the Liberal Theory of Knowledge and the Concept of Race,” 1. Lecture Notes, A.A. 100x, n.d., Cedric Robinson Personal Papers. This was yet another point of shared interest between Robinson and Carruthers. See the discussion in note 190 of the previous chapter. 125. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), 11. 126. See Marx’s 1877 letter to N.K. Mikhailovsky, quoted in Robinson, Black Marxism, 59. Of the many examples to consider concerning MarxistLeninist questions of “discipline,” one may usefully begin with Alyssa Trotz, ed., The Point Is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye (London: Pluto Press, 2020). 127. Both Marx and the larger Marxist tradition adhered to the same Enlightenment ethos that generated and drove the development of the academic disciplines. It is, as Foucault has argued, a product of the same nineteenth-century environment. That it did not survive in the same academic, professional settings was the result of a liberal hegemony that evacuated anti-capitalist thought from the academy, establishing the “academic profession” on such foundations. This has been uneven. For Foucault’s argument, see Michel Foucault quoted in Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 113. Robinson is quoting from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 261. For variations on the latter theme, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 53–142; and Henry Heller, The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States, 1945–2016 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 128. Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 8. 129. We know that notions of materialism precede the modern. However, if we graft the material-ideal split upon the foundational split between the mind and the body in Western thought largely associated with Rene Descartes and

notes  .  253 his Discourse on Method (1637), we may see how questions of materiality were shaped increasingly by the new dispensations to questions of epistemology and knowledge. These questions continue to have implications for philosophical and thus scientific practices. More importantly, the evocation of materiality as knowable sans idealism grounded what became known as the Scientific Revolution, which freed the more popular and influential traditions of Western scientific thought from having to concern themselves with the world of the unseen. Though Descartes attempted to resolve the “mind-body” problem, later thinkers like Kant and Hegel accepted its terminal condition, though they did not agree on how to structure thought in consequence of the permanence of the split. For Robinson, these discussions necessarily impacted Marx’s thought. See Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, 75–101. Though most thinkers understand the implications of the triumph of materialism, Robinson, Jacob Carruthers, and Sylvia Wynter have made connections to its meaning for questions of racial dominance and the intellectual genealogies that manage and produce it. For a larger discussion of the impact of Cartesian logic on Western thought, particularly as it was organized along proto-disciplinary lines, see, inter alia, Laurence Brockliss, “Curricula,” in The History of the University in Europe: Volume Two: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), ed. H. De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 563–620. For Michael Finkenthal, this revolution in thought contributed to what he calls “disciplinarian thinking”—not only the domain of a certain topic but a way of conserving meaning. See, particularly, his Interdisciplinarity: Toward the Definition of a Metadiscipline? (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 1–27. 130. Robinson, Black Marxism, 62–68. See also the organizational difficulties experienced by Black activists in Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom; Walters, Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora; and Trotz, ed., The Point Is to Change the World. 131. See Kelley, “Foreword,” and Kelley, “Why Black Marxism.” 132. Davies, “A Black Left Feminist View.” 133. Kelley, “Why Black Marxism,” xii–xiv. 134. Robinson, Black Marxism, xxxv; 1–2. This assertion is contained in the original preface, which is perhaps the clearest characterization of the political contexts that generated the interventions made in the work. In a more recent interview, the Robinsons reflect on the inspirations that led to Black Marxism. Of particular interest was the invocation of Harold Cruse, who had been an earlier influence on the Revolutionary Action Movement, a group that featured members who got their initial grounding in the Afro-American Association. Further, Cruse’s critical The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967) was necessarily discussed among those concerned and acting in consort with that historical Black struggle. The “life” of that particular text was indeed tied to the vitality of Black struggle. Black Marxism represented another attempt to say something about that tradition in response to Cruse’s characterizations of it. See Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, “The World We Want: An Interview with Cedric

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and Elizabeth Robinson,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Johnson and Lubin, 95–107. 135. Robinson, Black Marxism, 195. 136. Ibid., xxvii. 137. For Robinson, “the revolution had caused the formation of revolutionary consciousness and had not been caused by it. The revolution was spontaneous.” Later, he asserts: “The slaves had produced their own culture and their own consciousness by adapting the forms of the non-Black society to the conceptualizations derived from their own historical roots and social conditions … the human experience from which the rebellion rose,” including “principles of ‘right and wrong, vengeance and love … sweet Beauty and Truth’ that would serve as guideposts to the ex-slaves. It was the tradition critical to the framing of the survival of these new people.” Ibid., 238. See W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press, 2000), and the discussion in the present volume. See also Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 138. “Divine agents” is from Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, 139. See also the preface to Anthropology of Marxism, authored by Avery Gordon, which is framed around this phrase. Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, vii–xxii. 139. Robinson, Black Marxism, 280; emphasis in the original. 140. Black Marxism, 284. 141. Andrew Hartman, “W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James: Marxists?” U.S. Intellectual History Blog, March 29, 2017, https://s-usih.org/2017/03/w-e-b-dubois-and-c-l-r-james-marxists/. 142. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2004), 5. 143. Robinson, Black Marxism, 299. 144. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” boundary 2 27 (Fall 2000): 41; Robinson, Black Marxism, 170. 145. Robinson, Black Marxism, 237; 275; 302. 146. Lawrence Reddick, “A New Interpretation for Negro History,” Journal of Negro History 22 (January 1937): 17–28. 147. Cedric J. Robinson, review of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, Third World Coalition Newsletter 1 (June 1975): 15–16. 148. Robinson, Black Marxism, 17–18. 149. Robinson, Black Movements in America, 139–45. 150. Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, 2. 151. Ibid., 16. 152. Ibid., 41. 153. Ibid., 48. 154. Ibid., 46.

notes  .  255 155. Though woefully oversimplified, Marx has been accused of denying the liberatory potential of religion. This is perhaps another instance of Marxist programs for revolutionary change overdetermining Marx’s ideas. On Marx and religion, see, inter alia, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1957). For Jacob Carruthers, “what [Henri] Saint-Simon’s philosophy of history does is to emphasize that the uplift of the poor was the latent purpose of society from the beginning. Certainly Marx could agree with that. Saint-Simon thus identifies the Christian ethic with Socialism. Socialism is Christianity without Christ which ushers in Marx’s Communism.” Jacob Carruthers, “Christian and Capitalistic Roots of Karl Marx’s Communistic Theory,” Afrocentric World Review 1 (Summer 1975): 47. 156. Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, 152. 157. Ibid., 51. The other domain of evil was also a preserve of women: sex work. See Ibid., 52. 158. Robinson’s work draws upon the work of medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum, whose work considers the ways in which Christianity utilized a woman’s body as a site of self-definition. See her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religions (New York: Zone Books, 2001). For other perspectives on the foundations of gendered negation in Western thought, see Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 159. Robinson, Black Marxism, 177; emphasis in the original. 160. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning. “Conceptual incarceration” is from Wade Nobles, “Understanding Human Transformation: The Praxis of Science,” in Wade Nobles, Seeking the Sakhu: Foundations Writings for an African Psychology (Chicago: Third World Press, 2006), 71–86. 161. Cedric Robinson, “Radical Thought: Cedric Robinson,” YouTube, November 6, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK16BExR1KU. See also Jordan T. Camp, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Erica R. Edwards, Christina Heatherton, and Avery Gordon, “Cedric Robinson and the Black Radical Intellect,” session at the American Studies Association Conference, Denver, November 19, 2016, http://youtu.be/OaaYMjVwY8; and Erica Edwards, “Cedric People,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Johnson and Lubin, 251–54. On the background to the symposium, see Myers, Cedric Robinson, 235–36. 162. Cedric J. Robinson, “What Is to Be Done? The Future of Critical Ethnic Studies,” plenary session, Critical Ethnic Studies Conference, Chicago, September 21, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKnf100jCFI. 163. Robinson, Terms of Order, 215. 164. Robinson, Black Marxism, 318. 165. Robinson, Black Movements in America, 153. 166. Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, 157. 167. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 380. 168. Moten, In the Break, 85.

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169. Robinson, “What Is to Be Done?” 170. Robinson, Black Marxism, 170.

conclusion Toni Cade Bambara, “Salvation Is the Issue,” in Black Women Writers (1950– 1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor, 1984), 42. 2. Toni Cade Bambara, “Realizing the Dream of a Black University (1969),” in Realizing the Dream of a Black University and Other Writings, Pt. II, eds. Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed (New York: Center for the Humanities, Graduate Center, CUNY, 2017), 18. 3. Vincent Harding, “The Vocation of the Black Scholar,” in Education and Black Struggle: Notes from the Colonized World, ed. Institute of the Black World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Review, 1974), 3–29. 4. This thinking is in conversation with Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 8–12. 5. Toni Cade Bambara, “Preface,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: New American Library, 1970), 9. 6. Ibid., 7. 7. Toni Cade Bambara, “On the Issue of Roles,” in Black Woman, ed. Bambara, 109. 8. Ibid., 104. 9. Ibid., 108. 10. Ibid., 105. 11. Toni Cade Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” in Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, Conversations (New York: Vintage, 1999), 250. 12. Ibid. 13. Bambara, “Salvation,” 47. 14. Ibid., 46. 15. Toni Cade Bambara, quoted in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices, dir. Louis Massiah (Scribe Video, 1996). 16. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life in the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 422–23. 17. Bambara, “Realizing,” 14. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 15–16. 20. Ibid., 17. 21. Ibid., 21. 22. Ibid., 20. SEEK, which stood for Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge, was a program designed to help students disadvantaged by the education system adjust to the college experience. On its relationship to Black Studies and the Black student movement, see Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 115–41. See also the memoir of former SEEK leader Allan Ballard, 1.

notes  .  257 Breaching Jericho’s Walls: A Twentieth-Century African American Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 217 and passim. 23. Bambara, “Realizing,” 21. 24. Ibid., 24. 25. Ibid., 24–25. 26. Ibid., 25. 27. Ibid., 26. 28. Ibid. 29. Greg Carr, “What Black Studies Is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work,” Socialism and Democracy 25 (March 2011): 178–91. 30. On Afropessimism, see, among others, Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright, 2020); and Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes 29 (2016), http://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e02. 31. Carr, “What Black Studies Is Not,” 186. 32. Ibid., 180. 33. Ibid. 34. Vincent Harding, “Toward the Black University,” Ebony (August 1970): 159.

Index Abelard, Peter, 61 academy, the, 185; and Toni Cade Bambara, 185, 186; and Black Studies, 1, 2, 4; and charisma, 167; and the discipline of history, 44; and Du Bois, 19, 36; and legitimacy, 183; origins of, 64, 83, 87; and Cedric Robinson, 149, 151, 154, 160; and the undercommons, 7; and Sylvia Wynter’s critique of, 56 Addams, Jane, 26 King Afonso, 84 African American Studies, 7, 56, 133, 151 African Deep Thought, 13, 100, 103, 121–24, 127, 129 African Heritage Studies Association, 115, 117 African Studies, 48, 136 African Studies Association, 115 Africana Studies, 10, 17, 18, 109, 122, 134, 189, 192 AfriCOBRA, 110 Afro-American Association, 150, 245n35, 253n134 Afrocentricity, 7, 133, 134 The Afrocentric World Review, 110, 115 Afro-Christianity, 80 “Age of Discovery,” 64, 84 Ajamu, Adisa, 134 Akan, 128 Alagraa, Bedour, 55, 98, 194 Alienation, 79, 120, 126, 139, 130 Alkalimat, Abdul, 109, 188 Amen M Hat (Amenemhat), 136 Amenia II Conference, 45 American Political Science Association (ASPA), 117, 171

anticolonial struggle, 149; and Africa, 50; and Guyana, 71; and Haiti, 75, 129; and nonviolence, 107; and Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of, 52, 55, 56, 69 antiracism, 6, 138, 156 Aptheker, Herbert, 39 Aquinas, Thomas, 63 Aristotle, 39, 62–64, 162, 187 arithmetization, 22 Arnez, Nancy, 108, 115 Asante, Molefi Kete, 6, 133, 195, 238n169 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, 110 Association of African Historians, 109, 110, 112, 116 Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC), 122, 193 Atlanta Exposition, 30 Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, 28 Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, 30, 31 Atlanta University, 19, 28–30, 36, 38, 75 autonomy, 7 Averroes, 62 Bâ, Amadou Hampaté, 128 Bacon, Francis, 90, 120, 187 Balbuena, Bernardo de, 72, 85–87 Bambara, the, 128, 137 Bambara, Toni Cade, 3, 153, 183–89, 191 Baraka, Amiri, 95 Barnes, Natasha, 95 Bay, Mia, 18, 19 BBC, 69 Beatty, Mario, 134, 193

index  .  259 Benin, 81 Ben-Jochannan, Yosef, 116, 122 Berlin, 32 Bernal, Martin, 125 Bible, the, 61 Binghamton University, 88 biology, 20, 92, 93, 104, 148 Black Action Movement, 151 Black Arts Movement, 55 Black Books Bulletin, 131 Black Matters Committee, 83, 151, 152, 199n25 Black Metamorphosis (Wynter), 52, 75–80, 83, 84, 114 Black Panthers, the, 110 Black Power, 55, 107 Black Radical Tradition, 53, 68, 92, 180, 183; as an alternative to the political, 10, 13, 142, 167; beyond “resistance” and “opposition,” 144; and collective intelligence, 146; as critique of Western civilization, 140; and Divine speech, 128; and flight, 147; and the Haitian Revolution, 129; and the limitations of Marxism, 176, 177; and the preservation of ontological totality by Africans, 145; and racial capitalism, 155, 159 Black Studies, 4, 6, 10; and Toni Cade Bambara, 183–85, 187–89; and Jacob H. Carruthers, Jr., 119, 137, 138; in Chicago, 107, 110; and disciplinarity, 12, 18; and W.E.B. Du Bois, 9, 29, 51; and the Institute of the Black World, 75, 76; and June Jordan, 1, 3, 5, 8; and Cedric Robinson, 11, 79, 140, 142, 148–52, 158, 159, 162, 180, 182; and Temple University, 7; and the UCSB Center for Black Studies, 154; and Sylvia Wynter, 52–56, 74, 80, 83; and Sylvia Wynter’s “A Black Studies Manifesto,” 98 Black Student Unions, 5 Blackman, Peter, 153

Blues, the, 53, 54, 73, 80, 81, 128, 137 Boggs, Grace Lee, 151 Boggs, James, 151 Bondurin, P. O., 124 Booth, Charles, 26, 148 bourgeoisie, the, 66, 79, 83, 84, 145, 156, 175–78 Bradford, George, 30, 31 Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, 152 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 110 Brown, H. Rap, 112 Brown, Sterling, 55, 188 Bumstead, Horace, 30 Bureau of Labor, 28 Burgess, John W., 118 Caliban, 72, 73, 97. See also, The Tempest Calloway, Thomas Junius, 31 Cameroon, 81 Campbell, Tunis, 46 Canon, 52, 56, 57, 62, 98 Capitalism, 143, 155–57, 160; and Black Reconstruction, 46; and Black resistance to racial capitalism, 167; and Carruthers’s critique of, 139; and colonialism, 96; and contemporary misinterpretations of racial capitalism, 158; and global capitalism, 71; in Jamaica, 67; and merchant capitalism, 178; and the 1930s, 45; and the origins of social science, 20; and property, 97; and Robinson’s conceptualization of racial capitalism, 140, 143, 152–57, 159–61, 242n13; and slavery, 47; in the United Kingdom, 153; in the United States, 152; and the work ethic, 119; and Sylvia Wynter’s critique of, 77, 78, 80, 95 Carew, Jan, 69, 71 Carr, Greg, 7, 56, 130, 134, 189 Carruthers, Jacob H., Jr.: and “African Deep Thought,” 103, 104, 121; and

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Africana Studies, 109; biography of, 104, 105; and “Afrocentrism,” 110; and “An Alternative to Political Science,” 117, 118; and alienation, 120, 139; and the Association of African Historians, 110; and the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, 122, 133, 134; and “Christian and Capitalistic Roots of Karl Marx’s Communist Theory,” 111, 112; and Cheikh Anta Diop, 115–17, 119; and the critique of science, 138; and the djeli tradition, 127, 128; Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies, 122; and historiography, 131–33, 136; The Irritated Genie, 129; Kemet and the African Worldview, 122; and the Kemetic Institute, 121; and ma’at, 103, 127, 135; “Marx and the Negro,” 110, 111; Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought from the Time of the Pharaohs to the Present, 123–26, 130; mdw nfr (good speech) and mdw ntr (Divine speech), 102, 117; “The Nine Petitions of the Farmer Whose Speech Is Good,” 102, 103; and the 1963 boycott of segregated facilities of Hempstead, Texas, 106; at Northeastern Illinois University’s Center for Inner City Studies at Chicago, 107–09; and radical politics in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, 109, 110; Science and Oppression, 112–15; and Sweatt v. Painter, 105; and “The Theory of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience” (dissertation), 106, 107; and “Thinking about European Thought,” 119–21; and Anderson Thompson, 107, 108; and “The Weheme Mesu and Pan African Historiography,” 137 Cartography, 84 Catholicism, 84, 85

Center for Inner City Studies, The, 107, 108, 117, 122 Césaire, Aimé, 98 Chandler, Nahum Dimitri, 26, 33, 38, 39, 44, 48 Chicago: and the “Chicago group,” 110, 112, 115, 130, 133; and Northeastern Illinois University, 107, 108, 117, 122; and radical Black politics, 109, 111; and Anderson Thompson, 107, 108; and the University of Chicago, 108 Chicago School of Sociology, 34, 37, 42 Christian, Barbara, 3, 187 Christianity: and African history, 136, 137; and Afro-Christianity, 80; and colonialism, 87–89; and the Marxist intellectual tradition, 111, 178, 179; and the origins of the modern academy, 63; and slavery, 84–86; and racial capitalism, 94; and the transition to capitalism, 66 city, the, 84, 108, 109, 118, 162 City College of New York, 3, 186 Clark Atlanta University, 19 Clarke, John Henrik, 115–17, 122, 188 “classarchy,” 96, 225n199 clave rhythm, 137 closure, 15, 22, 54, 181 Communism, 17, 71, 174 Communiversity, 108 Comte, August, 20–25, 92, 187 Congress of Arts and Sciences (St. Louis Exposition), 20 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, 115, 123 Congress for Racial Equality, 105 Cooper, Anna Julia, 44, 188 Corinth, Mississippi, 46 Coromantee, 67 Coulborn, Rushton, 36 Coulthard, Gabriel R., 75 Cox, Oliver Cromwell, 152 Crawley, Ashon, 12 creation stories, 126

index  .  261 Cruse, Harold, 98, 154, 253n134; and The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 109, 110 Cuba, 87, 137, 117, 150 Curriculum, 58; and Black Studies, 5, 148, 184; and Inner City Studies, 108, 112; logic of, 4; and the origins of the humanities, 60, 63, 64; and Sylvia Wynter, 73 Darwin, Charles Darwinism, 28, 93, 94, 113, 124. See also Herbert Spencer Dave, Chris, 14, 15 Davies, Carole Boyce, 96 de la Renteria, Pablo de, 88 “Deep Thought.” See African Deep Thought. Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 129 Determinism, 21, 40 Deviance, 2, 35, 37, 38, 51, 77, 82 Diaspora: and Black Studies, 48, 119; and the Caribbean, 69, 75; and Carruthers, 123, 128, 130, 135, 137; and historiography, 131; and Sylvia Wynter, 70, 94 Dinka (Sudan), 128 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 47, 48, 115–19, 121, 124 Disciplinarity, 18, 50, 57; and antidisciplinarity, 76; critique of, 56, 103, 112; and interdisciplinarity, 6, 11, 152, 172, 199n31; limits of, 160, 180 Disorder, 140, 141, 177, 179 “diversity and inclusion,” 6 Djelis, 128 Dodson, Howard, 78 Dogon, the, 128 Douglass, Frederick, 78 Downs, Karl E., 105 Drum and Spear, 5 Du Bois, W.E.B., 8; and Africa, 47–49; and Atlanta University, 30, 36; and the asymptote, 39; biography of, 16; and Black Reconstruction in

America, 42, 43, 46; and chance, 24, 25, 34, 35, 39; and the Chicago School of Sociology, 34; and critique of prevailing standards of scientific inquiry, 9, 16; and the critique of sociology, 37, 38, 42; and the “Du Bois As” tendency, 16–19; and Dusk of Dawn, 21; and ethics, 41; and the Farmville Study, 28; at Harvard, 25; and late career of, 51; and “A Litany at Atlanta,” 29; and Marxism, 31; and the NAACP, 45; and The Philadelphia Negro, 18, 26–28; and “Sociology Hesitant,” 14, 15, 20–22, 32, 33, 38; and Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment, 31; and Souls of Black Folk, 28; and “Steps Toward a Science of How Men Act,” 40; and “The Study of Negro Problems,” 23, 32; and “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States, 44; and the tradition of Black livingness, 13; and Sean Wilentz’s critique of the 1619 Project, 43; and The World and Africa, 49, 50 Duerden, Dennis, 80, 81 Dunham, Katherine, 68, 69 Dunning School of Sociology, 42, 43, 175 DuSable Museum, 108 Dutty, Boukman, 129, 135 Edwards, Erica, 158, 159, 167–69 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 200n3 Edwards, Norval, 74 Egypt: and Diop, 116, 117; and the “The Eloquent Peasant,” 102; and Egyptology as racist project, 121; and language study, 117, 133, 134; as source of alternative epistemology for Carruthers, 118, 119, 122–24; and speech, 126, 127 Emergency (journal), 153

262 

.  of black study

Empire, 19, 22, 32, 170; British, 153; Carolingian, 59; and humanism, 86 encomienda system, 86, 87 Encyclopedia Africana, 51, 212n178 Engels, Friedrich, 31, 112 Erasmus, Desiderius, 64 Epistemology, 52, 63, 74; and Black Studies, 9, 11, 41, 172; and Carruthers, 111, 113, 117, 118; and charisma, 166; and crisis, 19; and Marxism, 111, 179; and order, 146, 147, 151; of racial capitalism, 94, 154, 155; and radical epistemologies, 143, 144, 159, 160, 162; and rupture, 41, 42, 50, 57, 77, 84; and social science, 22, 23, 32; and Sylvia Wynter, 74, 83, 89, 98 Eugenics, 33, 54 evolutionary biology, 20 exploitation, 2, 79, 109, 111; and Africa, 50, 90; and the Caribbean, 67, 71, 73; and racial capitalism, 154–56; in the thought of Du Bois, 26, 32; and the transition to capitalism, 178 Expositions, 20, 30, 31 Fanon, Frantz, 94, 98 Farmer, J. Leonard, 105 Farmer, James, 105 Farmville study, 28 Fatiman, Cécile, 129 Feminism, 95, 96, 184 Fido, Elaine Savory, 96 Fifth Pan African Congress (Manchester, England), 47 Finkenthal, Michael, 90 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar (1966), 47 Fisk University, 30 Folklore, 46, 69, 124 Folktales, 55 1492, 85 Frazier, E. Franklin, 37, 123–25 “Free University,” 3

Freedom, 52, 121; and “African Deep Thought,” 123, 132, 138, 139; and Black freedom dreams, 184; and Black politics in the 1960s, 171; and Black Studies, 5, 9, 183; and Du Bois, 19, 39, 42; as incomplete project, 73, 88; and meaning of, 13; and hesitance, 15; limits to, 44, 90, 121; and Reconstruction, 46, 47; Western ideas of, 119, 120 French Revolution, the, 22, 92, 175 Freud, Sigmund, 55 Galileo, 65, 66 Gandhi, Mahatma, 106 Gayle, Addison, 3 Gender, 91, 149; and Black Studies, 6, 12; in medieval Europe, 179; and racial capitalism, 143; in the thought of Sylvia Wynter, 93, 96 general strikes, 106 Georgia Sea Islands, 46 German school of historical economics, 31 Ghana, 47, 81 Gibbon, Edward, 133 Giddings, Franklin, 25, 33 Gikuyu, 128 Gilroy, Paul, 153 Glasper, Robert, 14 Gordon, Avery, 33, 159 Gordon, Lewis, 18, 19 Gradussov, Alex, 72 Grant, Edward, 62 Gratian, 61, 62 Gray, Vernon, 118 Great Migration, The, 36 Griots, 128 Guyana, 71 Haiti, 13, 73, 75, 104, 129, 137 Hamitic curse, the, 94 Hammurabi (booksellers), 110 Hampton Institute, 30 Hannah-Jones, Nikole, 42, 43 Harding, Vincent, 75, 76, 188, 189

index  .  263 Harney, Stefano, 7 Harris, Leon, 110 Hart, Albert Bushnell, 44 Hartman, Saidiya, 27 Harvard University, 25, 32, 41, 44 Hegel, G.W.F., 109, 120, 157, 175, 176 Heresy, 95, 179 Heru, Nzinga Ratibisha, 123 Hesitation, 15 hidalgo elite, 86 hieroglyphics, 122 Hill, Robert, 76 Hilliard, Asa, 122 hip hop, 7, 128 Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), 5, 29, 36, 75, 105–08, 147 Historiography: and Africa, 100, 109, 122, 131–38; and Du Bois, 43, 44, 47–49; Marxist, 176, 178, 181 Hobbes, Thomas, 91, 163 Hodge, Derrick, 14 Holder, Boscoe, 68 Hopkins, Terence, 152 Horne, Gerald, 19 Hountondji, Paulin, 124 Hose, Sam, 29 Houston, TX, 104–06 Houston, Ulysses, 46 Hubner, Kurt, 65 Hughes, Langston, 124 human, the: and An Anthropology of Marxism, 178–80; and Black Marxism, 143–45, 157, 158, 174–77; and Black Studies, 3, 4, 6, 56, 57, 182, 188, 189; and Carruthers, 113, 119, 123, 124, 127, 128, 134; and classical sociology, 21, 22; and colonialism, 84, 114, 136; and critical epistemologies, 50; and dehumanization, 77, 89, 94, 105; Du Bois and, 13, 14, 19, 30, 33, 34, 41; and Du Bois’s belief in the “essential humanity of Negroes,” 14; and exploitation, 2; and freedom, 5, 44, 47, 90; and gender, 96; and

the historiography of slavery, 43, 49; and “human development,” 24; and “human nature,” 91, 133; and labor, 80, 85, 93, 120; and liberation, 12; and ma’at, 101, 103, 126, 135; and Marxian visions of, 111, 112; and modern sociology, 36–40; and modernity, 87, 92, 130; and “No Humans Involved,” 97, 98; and the non-human, 34, 35; and the plantation, 81; and the principle of incompleteness, 169; and “progress,” 30, 135, 161; and reason, 66, 74, 77; and rehumanization, 92; and “Sociology Hesitant,” 20, 25, 27, 32–36; and The Terms of Order, 140–42, 164–67, 170; and unity, 76; and Western philosophy, 121; and Sylvia Wynter, 9, 52, 54, 55, 67, 69, 83, 88 Humanism, 8, 58, 62–67, 72, 86, 163, 173 Hume, David, 91 Hurston, Zora Neale, 55 Ibn Khaldun, 132 Ideology, 8, 52, 118, 151, 167, 184; and progressive “uplift,” 27, 30 Ifa, 128 Indigenismo, 75 Indigenization, 69 Institute of the Black World, 5, 75. See also Harding, Vincent Institute of Race Relations, 153 Interdisciplinarity. See disciplinarity Jackson, John G., 116 Jaeger, C. Stephen, 59 Jagan, Cheddi, 71 Jamaica, 57, 67–69, 71, 81, 82, 86, 87 Jamaica Journal, 72, 74, 85 James, C.L.R., 46, 151, 174–76 James, George G. M., 124 James, William, 41 Jameson, Fredric, 83 JanMohamed, Abdul, 96

264 

.  of black study

Jazz, 80–82, 169, 176; and avant-garde jazz, 107, 108; and Sylvia Wynter, 13 Jeffries, Leonard, 122 Jim Crow, 29, 30, 35, 45, 77, 104, 107, 124 John, Gus, 153 Johnson, Andrew, 46 Johnson, Charles S., 37 Jones, Mack H., 171 Jonkonnu ritual, 54, 67, 74, 79, 80. See also Wynter, Sylvia Jordan, June, 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 186, 187 Journal of African Civilizations, 122 Judy, Ronald A.T., 20, 22, 32, 33, 37, 39, 40 Just Title, 88 Kansas State College, 107 Kant, Immanuel, 39, 91 Karenga, Maulana, 122 Kemet, 125–28, 130, 133, 134, 136, 137 Kemetic Institute, 117, 121, 122 King, Rodney, 97, 98 King’s College, 57, 58 Knowledge: and “African Deep Thought,” 121, 123; and the Black Radical Tradition, 159, 160, 167, 179; and Black Reconstruction, 47, 48; and Black Studies, 9, 56, 98, 99, 149; and “Blues knowledge,” 73; and Carruthers’s concept of speech, 103, 104, 109, 117, 126–28; and Christian imperialism, 89; and colonialism, 36; and counter-knowledges, 152; and difference, 34; and Diop, 116; and disciplinarity, 67, 94, 95, 139, 165, 182; and Du Bois, 16, 19, 25, 26, 39, 51; and epistemology, 113; and Michel Foucault, 161; and the HBCUs, 30, 183; and historiography, 131, 137; and Anthony Monteiro on “being African in the world,” 41; and normativity, 2; and the origins of the

slave trade, 87; and the principle of incompleteness, 169; and the Renaissance, 64, 65; and science, 93, 112, 114, 172; and Cedric Robinson, 140, 143, 151; and scientific racism, 35, 94; and STEM, 138; and scholasticism, 61–63; and “Sociology Hesitant,” 20, 22–24, 32, 38; and the sociology of race, 37; and the university, 6, 7, 188, 189; and the “Western knowledge complex,” 4, 8, 10, 11; and Sylvia Wynter, 53, 54, 57–59, 70, 98 Korea, 105 Ku Klux Klan, 105 Ladner, Joyce, 42, 76 Lamming, George, 72 Lane, Hugh, 110 language study, 133, 134 Las Casas, Bartolome de, 87–89 League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 152 Lee, Don (Haki Madhubuti), 110 Liberalism, 9, 17, 46, 91, 133, 155 Liberation: and Africa, 104, 116, 124; and the “African Principle,” 132; and the Black Radical Tradition, 144; and the Black struggles of the 1960s, 107, 110; and Black Studies, 8, 12, 13, 188, 189; dreams of, 51; and rationality, 62; struggles for, 50; in the thought of Toni Cade Bambara, 184; in the thought of Jacob H. Carruthers, Jr., 137, 138; in the thought of Du Bois, 38, 40, 47; in the thought of Cedric Robinson, 181, 153, 164, 175; and the university, 183; in the thought of Sylvia Wynter, 73, 82, 85, 96, 98; Lindsay, Samuel McCune, 27 literary criticism, 72–74 Locke, Alain, 45 Locke, John, 91, 107, 120, 163 Lombard, Peter, 61 Long, Edward, 67

index  .  265 Lorde, Audre, 3 Lowndes County, Alabama, 28 Luthuli, Albert, 106 Lynching, 147, 186 ma’at, 101–04, 126, 127, 135, 136 Madison, Otis, 154 Mair, John, 90 Malcolm X, 149, 150 Malcolm X Liberation College, 5, 110 “Man”: and capitalism, 78, 81, 82, 96, 119; and colonialism, 83, 88; and homo oeconomicus, 93, 97; and homo politicus, 66, 89, 90, 91, 95; and nature, 77; and Sylvia Wynter, 52, 53, 57, 58, 65, 67, 74, 98 Management, 147, 169; and colonialism, 77; and order, 140, 141; and politics, 5; and social control, 37, 170; and the university, 7, 12 Manchester, England, 47 Martin, Lorenzo, 110 Martin, Tony, 134, 135 Marx, Karl, 31, 45 Maroons, 12, 69, 129, 132, 137, 145 McWorter, Gerald, 55, 76 Memory, 1, 14, 23, 180, 185, 187, 239n179; and the Black Radical Tradition, 53, 70, 149; and history, 49; national, 44, 136; and resistance, 75, 103; and Wynter, 68, 69, 71 Memphite Theology, 126 University of Michigan, 83, 151 Middle Kingdom, 102, 136 Minstrelsy, 76 Mirandola, Pico della, 63, 64 Modernity, 75, 77; alternatives to, 9, 182; and capitalism, 156, 157; and Carruthers on “the mess that we’re in,” 103; and Du Bois, 16, 21, 26, 33; and the origins of, 84; and Cedric Robinson on the Western episteme, 143, 160, 164, 174, 179, 249n80; and socialism, 111; and the structure of, 97; and tradition, 130

Monteiro, Anthony, 17, 19, 41, 48, 50, 192 Montesquieu, 133 Moore, Carlos, 117 Moten, Fred, 7, 181 Moynihan Report, 42 Music, 53, 64, 81, 148; in Jamaica, 74, 82; and jazz, 110, 169, 185; and slave music, 46 Myalism, 80, 82 Nashville, Tennessee, 30 Nation of Islam, 110 NAACP, 45, 105, 106, 150 National Association of Afro-American Educators, 108 National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), 117 Nature: African ideas regarding, 82; and the domination of, 77, 80, 120; and science, 113, 114 Negation, 70, 76: of Africa, 49, 50, 67, 77, 83; of Black people in the modern city, 108; and hesitance, 15; in the thought of Cedric Robinson, 141, 143, 146, 164, 170, 249n80; and white historiography, 44; and white supremacy, 137, 188 Negritude, 75, 116, 186 “Negro problem,” the: and Africa, 48; and Afropessimism, 188; and Chicago school sociology, 34; and Du Bois, 16, 23, 30, 32, 40; and the 1930s, 45; and The Philadelphia Negro, 18, 26, 28; and racial capitalism, 156 Neoliberalism, 153 New Criticism, 57 “New Jack Scholars,” 134 “new learning,” the, 60 “new native,” the, 68, 75, 76, 80 New World group, 71 Newton, Isaac, 90 Nigeria, 81 “nigger,” the, 70, 77–79 Nobles, Wade, 82

266 

.  of black study

Northeastern Illinois University, 107 Oakland, California, 147, 152 Obama, Barack, 17, 18 Obenga, Theophile, 117, 121, 125, 133, 134 Ocean Hill Brownsville, 4 Ogun, 129 Order. See Robinson, Cedric Organization of Black American Culture, 108 Outlaw, Lucius, Jr., 56 Pates, Harold, 110, 133 Patterson, William and Louise Thompson, 150 Pathology, 108 University of Pennsylvania, 16, 18, 28 Pentecostalism, 12 Petrarch, Francesco, 64 Pigeon, Gerard, 154 plantation regime, 54 Plato, 109, 162 Police, 2, 47, 54, 97, 105, 107, 163, 188 political science, 11, 148; and “An Alternative to Political Science,” 117, 118; Carruthers and, 105–09, 119; and challenges to by Black scholars in the late 1960s and 1970s, 171; and the limits of Marxism, 179; and Robinson’s critique of, 141, 150, 151, 159; and The Terms of Order, 164, 166, 167, 170 Portugal, 84, 85, 87 Positivism. See science and sociology postcolonial, the, 74, 116 Prairie View College, 106 Preliminary Challenge, The, 133, 135 Prescod, Colin, 153 Price-Mars, Jean, 75 “primitive,” the, 21, 135, 168 Progress, 141; and academic disciplines, 57, 161; and classical sociology, 22; Du Bois on, 30, 31, 49, 50; and liberal antiracism, 156;

and liberal historiography, 135, 176; and the nineteenth century, 92; and science, 25, 113 proletariat, the, 46, 77, 175, 176 Prospero, 73, 97 Protestant Reformation, 64, 86 Puerto Rico, 86 Puryear, Paul L., 118 Quashie, the, 77, 79 Race and Class, 153 racial capitalism. See capitalism racial regimes, 157, 181 Ramchand, Kenneth, 74 Ranke, Leopold, 43 Rastafarians, 54, 81 Reggae, 80, 81, 82 Regulation, 20, 21, 54 Renaissance, 48, 57, 84, 85. See also humanism Resistance, 69, 107; African practices of, 13, 137, 149; and Black Marxism, 174, 176; and Black Metamorphosis, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83; and the Black Radical Tradition, 128, 140, 143, 144–47, 177; and Black Studies, 153–55, 180; and charisma, 165, 167; and Du Bois, 39, 48; and Jamaica, 71, 72; and slavery, 68, 89, 131; and socialism, 172 Revolutionary Action Movement, 150, 253n134 Rhodes, Robert, 109 Rich, Adrienne, 3 ring dances, 137 ring shout, 14 Robinson, Cedric: and An Anthropology of Marxism, 177, 179–81; biography of, 147, 148; and Black Marxism, 142, 146, 153, 174; and Black Movements in America, 177; and the Black Radical Tradition, 142–45, 160; and Black Studies as a critique of Western civilization, 140, 142, 148, 159, 182; at the

index  .  267 Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Michigan, 151; at the Center for Black Studies at UC Santa Barbra, 152, 154; and Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 157, 180, 181; and graduate school experience at Stanford University, 150; and the idea of charisma, 166, 167; and the Ila-Tonga, 168, 170; and C.L.R. James, 175, 176; and “Leadership: A Mythic Paradigm,” 151; and Manicheanism, 178; and Marxism, 173; and the 1970 boycott of the American Political Science Association meeting in Los Angeles, 171; and order, 140, 141; and the principle of incompleteness, 169; and Race and Class, 153; and racial capitalism, 143, 156, 158; at SUNY Binghamton, 152; and The Terms of Order, 161–65, 172; and “Toward Fascism? Race, The Two Reservations, and the Materiality of Theory,” 154, 155; at UC Berkeley, 148, 149 Rodney, Walter, 76 Ross, Edward, 33 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 91, 107 Rüegg, Walter, 66 Russell, Bertrand, 106 Salutati, Coluccio, 64 Sambo, 78 “Sambo historiography,” 131 “savagery,” 21, 22, 133 Schmitt, Carl, 34, 163 Scholasticism, 61, 62, 66, 84, 159 Schwendinger, Herman and Julia, 21 Science, 21–27, 30–33, 35038, 57; and colonialism, 50; and the invention of race, 41; and the philosophy of science, 39, 48, 51; and positivism, 43; and racism, 42, 49; “Steps Toward a Science of How Men Act”

(Du Bois), 40; and theology, 63; and Sylvia Wynter’s critique of, 65–67 Scientific Revolution, 65, 66, 180 Scott, David, 68, 241n9 segregation, 29, 105, 106 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 116 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 76, 77, 84, 87–91, 163 sermon, the, 128 settlers, 2, 44, 67; and settler colonialism, 84, 92, 153 Sharpeville Massacre, 148 Sivanandan, A., 153, 160 Sixth Pan African Congress, 119 Sixties Revolution, 82 Sizemore, Barbara, 110 Slabtown, Virginia, 46 Slavery: in Ancient Greek thought, 162; and Black Reconstruction, 46, 47; and capitalism, 155; and colonialism, 90, 93; in Jamaica, 67, 68; and June Jordan’s vision of Black Study, 5; and nineteenth century sociology, 22; resistance to, 48, 243n22; and the 1619 Project, 42; and Western historiography, 131 Small, Albion, 25, 33 Smith, Don, 108 Sociogeny, 94, 95 sociology, 11, 43, 143; and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, 30, 31; and Black sociology, 37, 38; and call for the “death of white sociology,” 42; and Carruthers, 124; and the city, 108, 109; Du Bois’s critique of, 20, 25, 27, 48; as episteme, 23, 167; and The Philadelphia Negro, 28; and positivism, 22, 34; and racial capitalist foundations of the discipline, 21; and social control, 26; and “Sociology Hesitant,” 14–16, 20, 32–35, 39; and Pitirim Sorokin, 36 Sorokin, Pitirim, 36 Soto-Tswana, the, 128 Sovereignty, 68, 162, 163, 164

268 

.  of black study

Spain, 86 Spencer, Herbert, 20, 21, 23, 25, 39, 92 Stanford University, 83, 154 SUNY Binghamton, 152 Statistics, 28, 36 Stewart, James, 18 St. Louis Exposition, 20 Stone, Sonja, 108 Stories, 10, 44, 53–58, 65, 69, 93, 98, 99, 136; and African history, 134; and Toni Cade Bambara, 185; creation stories, 126; and origin stories, 159 Strickland, William, 76 student movements (1960s), 42, 106, 115, 148 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 106, 110 Sumner, William Graham, 25 Suriname, 137 Sweatt v. Painter, 105, 106 The Tempest, 72, 73, 97 Temple University, 7, 192 terra nullius, 88 Texas Southern University, 106 Thatcherism, 153 Theology, 12, 93; and Carruthers, 104, 125, 126; and colonialism, 85; and humanism, 65; in the medieval era, 59, 61–63 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa, 103, 130 Third World, 3, 83, 149, 150, 176, 184 Third World News Review, 154 Third World Press, 110 Thompson, Anderson, 107–10, 119, 131–33 Thoreau, Henry David, 106 Trauma, 2 Trinidad, 68 Tuskegee Institute, 30 Undercommons, The, 7 United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), 117, 132

University of California, Santa Barbara, 154 University of West Indies, 72 US Department of Education, 108 Van Sertima, Ivan, 122 Vikings (TV show), 55 Vodou, 128 Voice of the Negro, 30 Voltaire, 68 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 152 Ward, Lester, 25, 26 Washington, Booker T., 30, 106 Washington, Cliff, 110 Washington Park Forum, 110 Waters, Hazel, 153, 160 Watkins, Valethia, 134 Welsing, Frances Cress, 110 Western civilization, 8, 10, 17, 41, 49, 51, 98, 103, 125, 128, 131; Black Studies as a critique of, 140, 144, 146, 160; and heretical traditions, 178, 179; and racial capitalism, 161, 164, 165 Whiteness, 47, 56, 67, 68, 78, 181, 184 white nationalism, 18 whm msw, 130, 134–38 Wilentz, Sean, 42, 43 Williams, Chancellor, 116, 132 Williams, Robert F., 149, 150, 151 Williams, Sherley Anne Wobogo, Vulindlela, 133 Wolof, the, 115 Woodard, Maurice, 118 Woodson, Carter Godwin, 114 Worrill, Conrad, 110 Wright, Bobby, 110 Wright, Carroll, 28 Wright, Richard, 77, 78, 174, 176 Wynter, Hector, 72 Wynter, Sylvia, 99; and Bernardo de Balbuena, 85, 86; and “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Woman,” 97; and Black Meta-

index  .  269 morphosis, 52, 75–78; and Black music, 81, 82; and Jan Carew, 69, 71; and “Creole Criticism,” 74; and critique of humanism, 57, 58, 85; and critique of remaking of Black Studies into African-American Studies, 56; and dance, 68, 69; and Do Not Call Us Negroes, 98; and the Early Modern Era in Europe, 64, 65, 84; and feminism, 95, 96; and The Hills of Hebron, 69, 70; and the historiography of Christianity in Europe, 59, 60; and the historiography of Jamaica, 67, 68; intellectual biography of, 57, 58; and Jamaica Journal, 72, 85; and the Jonkonnu ritual, 54, 79; and Bartolome de las Casas, 87, 88; and Man, 90, 93; and “Novel and

History, Plot and Plantation”; and “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre,” 53, 55; and the origins of the academy, 61–63, 66; and progress, 92; and the “Sépulveda syndrome,” 76, 77, 84, 89, 91; and sociogeny, 94; at Stanford University, 83; and The Tempest, 73, 97; and theorization of capitalism, 80 Yale Black Studies Conference (1968), 55 Yoruba, 128, 169 Youmans, Edward, 21 Zuberi, Tukufu, 17, 28

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