This article proposes an interpretation of the term "racial enclosure," and examines its conceptual relevance for the field of African American literature and for Black Studies, more broadly. Enclosure's definitions and applications proliferate-it is at once a spatial and geographic form, a historical and legal process, and an epistemic system of individuation and taxonomy. I ask how we might work with a historically grounded concept of enclosure that does not reduce it to, nor dismiss entirely, its abstract and symbolic applications. I suggest that it is precisely the relationship between its historical and material valences and its abstract and conceptual valences, that makes "racial enclosure" an urgent formulation for scholars of black life, history, and culture.
This essay argues that Richard Ligon's A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657) represents taste as an appetitive desire for language, which in turn produces an ambivalent aftertaste for the contemporary reader, a sensorial concept that indexes debates in black studies about the relationship between the past and the present. I argue that Ligon's demand for language from figures of anonymous black women and girls troubles the black feminist search for redress, repair, and recovery by prompting us to sit with entangled forms of desire and disgust as they are indispensable to reading.
This paper analyzes pre-Emancipation U.S. runaway slave ads and pickup notices, which documented the unsanctioned mobility of enslaved people in the years preceding the conclusion of the American Civil War. These advertisements, in addition to offering physical descriptions of the self-emancipated, often also offered commentary on fugitives' diverse gender performances. This paper evaluates these performances using a queer lens, thereby bringing into focus the multiple ways Black gender was created and expressed throughout the era of U.S. chattel slavery.
This essay joins scholars interested in creating a more expansive and politically robust understanding of trauma and healing within freedom movements than traditionally imagined. It takes part in conversations initiated by Black and Latinx feminist and disability studies scholars who have unapologetically believed in the liberatory potential of Black and Latinx feminist thought in creating a new way of being "human." It examines practices centered on inner transformation as embodied by Aurora Levins Morales, Toni Cade Bambara, and Ericka Huggins to demonstrate how Black and Latinx feminist writers used their inner light as a guide to determine their actions in the world. Their attention to self-healing, intimate harm, and collective care allowed them to become familiar with their own pain and that of others. Being a witness to their own pain allowed them to activate their awareness of a sovereign self - a self that could thrive despite the terror of state violence and generate an alternative destiny for humanity.
South Africa's anti-apartheid movement has tended to be narrated as a monolith, but in practice, this has allowed one wing of the struggle - the African National Congress (ANC) - to stand in for the entire thing. In this piece, we recover the politics of an alternative tendency, which we term South Africa's radical tradition. Against the ANC's strategy of a two-stage revolution - first to a racially inclusive democracy, second to socialism - South Africa's radicals insisted that "stages" missed the point: these twin struggles were inseparable. We conclude by drawing lessons for activists fighting racial capitalism today, both in South Africa and around the globe.
This paper describes community education within Bathurst, a Black community in Ontario, Canada. The major objective is to use Walter Rodney's Groundings as an interpretive framework to establish continuities in Black (Caribbean) freedom efforts between those in the pre-independence and independence period (1930s to 1979) and contemporary activity. Groundings are a historical practice of community education for Black revolutionary initiatives. Community educational practices became an important tool in building revolutionary capacity and solidarity in Caribbean organizations because they build a critical bridge across the gap between idea and action. Idea and actions can belong to either intellectual elites or grassroots actors, but class factors usually result in a binary with the former restricted to intellectual elites and the latter arising from frustration and anti-discrimination efforts of (Black) masses. It is through community education that the binary is neutralized and revolutionary formation can build. Caribbean organizing was transnational in nature, and remain so today. Analyzing Diasporic spaces like Bathurst holds lessons for the Caribbean and vice versa.
We interviewed 103 Black people in the Chicago area as part of a collaborative, community-based project on Black safety. Black Chicagoans felt unsafe in their neighborhoods, in their interactions with the criminal legal system and in interracial interactions. They also felt that divisions and disaffection within the Black community contributed to their unsafety. The antidotes to unsafety included greater community unity and public investments, and the hope and conviction that things can improve. We highlight the connections between the subjective, individual experience of unsafety and the collective witness of what safety could look like with greater internal and external community investments.
This article keys in on antiblackness and distinguishes it from racism, laying bare the false universality of the Social and the Human: Racism takes place in the Social among the Human, while antiblackness continually casts Black people and Blackness out of those foundational modern categories whose definitions derive from the violent expulsion. To delineate, the article analyzes two paradigmatic texts that strive to deal uncompromisingly with antiblackness but through the language of racism: George Yancey's Who Is White? and "The Combahee River Collective Statement." The article concludes by suggesting the need for a Fanonian leap of invention and an all-encompassing abolition.
In a 1961 radio discussion about Black art and its relationship to Black nationalism, Lorraine Hansberry asked: “Is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?” James Baldwin quoted Hansberry in The Fire Next Time without citing her—words that circulated widely in the Black liberation movement. Variously attributed to Malcolm X, Baldwin, and King, Hansberry’s role in this literary political genealogy has been unacknowledged. She was riffing on Malcolm X’s idea of Islam as a “flaming fire.” But he also developed his parable of the master’s house on fire after Baldwin quoted Hansberry’s words, using the burning house as a symbol of revolution, class struggle, and the relationship between property and citizenship rights in a racial capitalist system. That Malcolm X influenced the Black Arts Movement is widely acknowledged, but he also read, listened to, and conversed with leftist artists, writers, and intellectuals that influenced the development of his own thought and rhetoric. This article explores the call and response between these intellectuals, their critique of integration, and call for a radical Black art—looking at Hansberry’s seminal contribution to these debates.
This article aims to understand why Black Marxists and white Marxists had different theoretical and practical responses to 1930s fascism. I argue this stemmed from different conceptualizations of colonialism. Following Marx and Lenin, many white Marxists viewed colonialism as an imperial extension of capitalist conditions from western Europe to non-Europe. In contrast, Black Marxists viewed colonialism as the site of capitalism and race: the practicing of white dominance and capital accumulation through territorial dispossession, material extraction, and forced labor in the colonies. Black Marxists understood fascism as extending these racial-colonial practices into Europe, while white Marxists failed to see this because of their foreclosure of race. In viewing fascism as primarily a threat to the spread of European communism, the Soviet Union made anti-fascism a priority exceeding anti-colonialism. The interwar Black Left therefore produced a more expansive conception of colonialism, widening the spatial and temporal horizons upon which to understand the emergence of fascism and remain committed to anti-colonialism.
On May 14, 1838 abolitionists, black and white, converged in Philadelphia for the dedication of a newly erected building constructed as a meeting place to freely exchange ideas about liberty and equality for all. Three days later, on May 17(th), the building was in ashes, burned to the ground by a white mob while government officials did little to intervene. Philadelphia, the former capital of the nation known throughout the country as a beacon of freedom and hub of abolitionism, became another setting of collective racial violence fueled by white rage. In response to the events, abolitionist Frederick Douglass condemned Philadelphia scathingly writing, "Shame Upon the Guilty City!" Almost two centuries later, the nation's Capitol and symbol of liberty was besieged by a wrath-filled, mostly white mob in a manner similar to the Philadelphia riot of 1838. The preconditions of both violent attacks, the role of the state in their unfolding, and subsequent historical amnesia in their wake underscore the cyclical nature of white rage. This article argues that analyzing the example of Pennsylvania Hall's destruction alongside the Capitol insurrection reveals historical trends within violent rioting incited by threats to the status quo of white hegemony.
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: Mutulu Shakurcommunity acupuncturepolitical educationCOINTELPROLincoln Detoxholistic healingdocumentaryEast Asian Medicine5-Point ProtocolNehanda Abiodun Additional informationNotes on contributorsAsantewa Sunni-AliAsantewa Sunni-Ali is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Kent State University. Dr. Sunni-Ali is the author of various publications and plays which explore her research interests: intersections of Black childhood, performance, agency, identity and liberation. In addition to writing her first book manuscript, she produces and directs research and documentary film series, Seedz of Revolution. She endeavors to utilize Seedz as a platform to document and share cultural practices and revolutionary strategies as tools for constructing a liberated future for African descended and other marginalized populations.Notes1 Abiodun Oyewole, “Two Little Boys,” The Last Poets, Re-issue Celluloid Records (1984) (Cat No: CELL-6101).2 Mia Donovan, (narration), Dope is Death (documentary), EyeSteel Film, Montreal, Canada. (2020).3 Ibid.4 Ibid.5 Ibid.6 “Benefits of NADA,” National Acupuncture Detoxification Association, acudetox.com/nada-protocol (accessed August 11, 2022).7 Carter, Kenneth, Olshan-Perlmutter, Michelle. “NADA Protocol: Integrative Acupuncture in Addictions.”(2014), www.nursingcenter.com/ce_articleprintan=00060867-201410000-00005 (accessed August 11, 2022).8 Alafia Pudim, “Jones Comin' Down”, The Last Poets.9 Walter Bosque, quoted in, Dope is Death.10 Cleo Silvers, quoted in, Dope is Death.11 Ibid.12 Felipe Luciano, quoted in, Dope is Death.13 Donovan, Dope is Death.14 Maliki Shakur Latine, quoted in, Dope is Death.15 Lumumba Shakur, quoted in, Dope is Death.16 Quote from sign from Protest, Dope is Death.17 Juan Gonzales, quoted in Dope is Death.18 Donovan, Dope is Death.19 Luciano quoted.20 Ibid.21 Ibid.22 Silver quoted.23 Ibid.24 Richard Nixon, quoted in, Dope is Death.25 Peter Bourne, quoted in, Dope is Death.26 Samuel Kelton Roberts, quoted in, Dope is Death.27 Bosque quoted.28 Kokayi Patterson, quoted in, Dope is Death.29 John Lichtenstein, quoted in, Dope is Death.30 Ibid.31 Mutulu Shakur, quoted in, Tyehimba Jess. “The Use of Acupuncture by Revolutionaries: An Interview with Brother Tyehimba,” (31 August 2014), mutulushakur.com/interview-on-acupuncture (August 11, 2022).32 Bosque, quoted in, Dope is Death.33 Shakur quoted in “The Use of Acupuncture.”34 Ibid.35 Bosque quoted, in Dope is Death.36 Shakur quoted in “The Use of Acupuncture.”37 Ibid.38 Ibid.39 Ibid.40 Makini Shakur, quoted in, Dope is Death.41 Susan Rosenberg, quoted in, Dope is Death.42 Sekou Odinga, quoted in, Dope is Death.43 Mutulu Shakur, quoted in “The Use of Acupuncture.”44 Ibid.
"To My Son Tupac." Souls, 23(1-2), pp. 75–76Keywords: Mutulu ShakurpoetryTupac Shakur Notes1 This poem was written in 1997.
