Louis Chude-Sokei

Introduction: Blackness as Method

So let’s recap. Afro-pessimism, Afro-futurism, Critical Race Theory, and Black Queerness, Intersectionality, Post-Colonial, Decolonial, and #BLM. Hotep-nationalism informed by Hip Hop’s patriarchal ghetto-centricity, Black Feminist and Trans interrogations of power and knowledge via sex and gender, and endless gestures of resistance and subversion, radicalism and refusal all in the name of blackness. Not to mention the increasing institutionalization and commodification of that blackness in and around academia and the broader world of culture and media commentary. One might think that there was something going on. And there’s more: a global explosion of black cultural production and critical/theoretical reflection from Europe and the UK to the Caribbean and the African continent; various new subfields and specializations marked by this generation’s penchant for neologism as they establish differences from each other and from their past, and establish the particular stakes of their mode and spaces of engagement. One might even call it a renaissance. However, cultural and intellectual renaissances have often implied a certain coherence of bodies and sweat. Think of the nationalism of Harlem’s New Negro Movement, which for many was our first modern renaissance. It was rooted as much in organized protest as in artistic expression, and dependent also on the movement of bodies —as in the case of migration and direct activism—and the need to focus their political potential. Central to that political potential was the act of generating its own criticism and critical paradigms from that coherence of bodies and sweat. Or think of the radically streetwise pan-Africanism of Black Arts or the deliberate communal consciousness-raising of post-Combahee Black Feminism and the daring to render feminism plural. Thesemovements and moments directly engaged the diffuse energies and differential needs of Black people in the service of collective articulation. Arguably, the seemingly endless possibilities of articulation have become much more a focus today than the difficult work of collectivity; yet the complex differences coded in the language of blackness has always functioned in two primary, sometimes contradictory ways: as an index of multiple responses to white supremacy, and as a sign of increasing fragmentation. This is very much the case today, where the panoply of Black intellectual/cultural methods and orientations also signals a departure from any easy set of priorities and definable publics. This is why it can be a struggle to synchronize this remarkable intellectual fervor with specific movement politics or easily deploy this array of options against the brutal uncertainties of our time. It is truly unclear what the drums are saying despite their furious pounding, because despite the galvanizing presence of, say, Black Lives Matter and the energizing of public protest in the wake of racist state violence and the election of an openly white supremacist and patriarchal status quo in the United States, one is hard pressed to simply accept the collectivity that

Reinventing The Black Scholar

The Black Scholar (TBS), established in 1969, emerged from a public confluence of black political and cultural movements—black power, black arts, Pan-Africanism and decolonization, black feminism, and the emergence of a black political class. As primary intellectual organ to that confluence, it had to be broad based and rooted in the stridency of demand and the humility of exchange. TBS relaunched in 2012, and its new editor, Louis Chude-Sokei, saw his challenges as, first, making sure the journal did not die, and second, alerting scholars—particularly of his generation and younger—that it had not died and could be a viable option for their efforts and, in time, a preferable one.

Race, Pornography, and Desire: A TBS Roundtable

These four black feminist scholars come together here despite (and also, perhaps, as a result of) centuries of silencing and censoring of black female and queer sexualities in the name of respectability, protectionism, and uplift. Yet while we have come far in what can be represented and acknowledged, certain depictions, practices, and relations remain persistently, and purposefully ignored and/or denigrated by many, both outside of andwithin black communities. Our participants––Ariane Cruz, LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Amber Musser, and Jennifer C. Nash––are helping to change that. As this roundtable makes clear, in the pursuit of increased awareness, knowledge, and positive engagement with the intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and class, such conversations necessarily include contentious topics in pornography—for example, “race play,” and BDSM––that are alive and well and growing in underground and mainstream markets and communities. Such practices have predominantly been understood as particularly oppressive and injurious to black women. However, to so confidently and frankly explore complex and at times difficult relationships between black feminism, desire, sexuality, and race, as the participants of this roundtable do, is crucial. Conversations such as this explore the myriad ways representations of black female sexuality negotiate a particularly fraught history of racial oppression and exploitation. This history undoubtedly continually informs our present. But what about agency and desire? The four contributors here also recognize and honor the many ways such negotiations seek pleasure and power therein through methods and practices we have collectively, for too long, been closed off to. In an era when respectability is facing necessary critique as a viable form of resistance and in which we seek to manifest paradigm-altering iterations of community, futurity, and selfhood, perhaps we are ready to reconsider.

Editor's Note: Backlash Blues

Forgive me if I indulge in anxiety. It should be understandable given the moment in which I write this introduction to an issue of The Black Scholar that might seem on the surface to be business as usual, that being an achievement in times such as these. But it would be unforgivable to ignore the layers of crisis around it. Of course I’d be remiss to not draw your attention to the remarkable array of materials collected here. They range from a brief celebration of the life and important work of the recently departed scholar/ activist Cedric Robinson to a truly groundbreaking conversation about race and pornography with a group of thinkers defining the sharper edges of gender and sexuality; from a revealing essay on Civil Rights pedagogy as necessitating an embodiment in material history, to an innovative reflection on that brief fiasco of Rachel Dolezal and its implications for discourses that hyper-fetishize “blackness.” And we are pleased to round it off with a poem by award-winning writer and poet, Anthony Walton. But despite the ongoing vitality of Black scholarship, art and activism, anxiety is in the air and cannot be ignored. It strains optimism and renders the triumphalism of resistance fraudulent, hence my need to address it. Though best described with the language of liquidity used by philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (perpetual threat, imprecise, ubiquitous and crippling), there is with this coming US election a strong sense that something is ossifying into a hardness that will target the gains made by generations of Black struggle in America. Barack Obama, now in his final months as US President, was certainly a towering product of those gains. Yet to paraphrase African-American historian Nell Irvin Painter, because he was unprecedented the backlash in his wake promises to also be unprecedented. That is where we are right now: watching it build and counting the bodies. Here is a map of this anxiety. Hillary Clinton has just won the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party amidst a cloud of controversy and more than small evidence of wrongdoing by her party apparatus. Despite the endorsement of socialist Bernie Sanders—many of whose supporters still refuse to back the democratic nominee— party unity is not a foregone conclusion. This latter might be the final blow for a candidate whose legitimacy has been under assault for decades by numerous forces: the Right, outright sexism, business and political rivals, foes of her husband, anti-war sentiment and a general suspicion of her intimacy with the economic and political status quo in a moment of sheer bipartisan disgust for it. With so much currently up for grabs one would have thought that the Democratic Party as a whole would have come under more criticism from Blacks than it has. In fact Black suspicion and ambivalence towards the political status quo has targeted Hillary Clinton herself, rather than the party she now commands. That Bernie Sanders had such little Black support despite these critiques of Clinton was telling, suggestive of an ongoing inability to break from a two-party structure that is, as we speak, more fragile than ever and that we may cling to at our peril. Prominent Black intellectuals have