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Remembering the Life and Work of Manning Marable

2013; Wiley; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/nad.12002

1556-4819

Ray Codrington,

Critical Race Theory in Education

Much has been said about Manning Marable since his untimely passing last March. He was a scholar of the highest caliber, a mentor to many, and a skilled institution builder. His notion of transformation was a clarion call to academics and activists alike around defining an agenda for strategic social change. It should not take the passing of a scholar to awaken us to the significance of their work. But if anything, we can take these opportunities to remind us of our intellectual and personal lineages. We were able to pay tribute to him and consider his work in terms of anthropological contributions at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) panel in Montreal last year entitled, Remembering the Life and Work of Manning Marable. His deep connections to many became evident as we began to organize a panel to discuss Manning's life and contribution. The panel allowed those who knew him and those who did not to gain a sense of who he was and what he meant to his peers, colleagues, and friends. I asked colleagues who all knew Manning in different ways to limit their comments to 12 minutes. As this was a brief period of time, I felt as though I was asking them to contribute to the creation of a personal and intellectual map that would be both efficient and substantive. They all gave stirring commentary and reflection, and were extremely gracious in doing so. As such I must thank the following participants for agreeing to be a part of the panel: Lee Baker, A. Lynn Bolles, Dana-Ain Davis, John Jackson, and Mary Moran. As anthropologists we recognized Manning as a kindred intellectual spirit who acknowledged and operationalized the textured analysis that our discipline offers. A. Lynn Bolles outlined his engagement with anthropology as facilitated by his wife and dear intellectual partner, Leith Mullings. Lynn's comments characterized his interaction with anthropology in the following way, “Manning took on anthropological overtones under the guidance of Leith Mullings and their joint project are marvelous contributions to Black intellectual history. In Marable's (2006) Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future, he reminds us to reconstruct the hidden, fragmented past of African Americans we needed to employ the tools of oral history, photography, film, ethnography, and multimedia digital photography” (xx). As such, Manning drew out some of the most useful aspects of anthropological inquiry and analysis in his work. Lee Baker's insights reminded us of the breadth of Manning's work by focusing on the plight of people of African descent in the United States and the black diaspora more generally. Lee actually brought a number of Manning's texts, which more than likely comprised part of the “Manning Marable Section” of his library, and quoted directly from them to demonstrate both the volume and poignancy of his work. Lee's comments were a reminder that Manning's work has the ability to situate the social, economic, and political dynamics of contemporary events in a longer historical trajectory. For example, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy and Society (Marable 1983) has become one of the seminal texts dealing with the political economy and racism. In addition, in Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–2006 (Marable 2007), his examination of reconstruction demonstrates the recurring conditions that reproduce inequality in two distinct yet in many ways parallel periods in U.S. history. In a related sense, Manning brings up points related to the endurance and rigidity of structural racism and discrimination in America that are historically grounded yet have distinct implications for race formation and inequality in the current period in Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (Marable 2009). What I take away from Manning's work was his attention to the ways in which race and racism become seamless, yet defining notions in the maintenance of power and privilege. In this instance, policies are reified by legal, economic, and political institutions in ways that reveal the mechanisms that make the root causes of disparate racial at times difficult to pinpoint, yet no less pernicious. Manning's work encourages us to excavate the structures through which power is exercised in the effort to transform our realities. In this context, we are reminded that post racial and color blind have never been options in regard to understanding the plight of people of African descent in the United States and throughout the black diaspora. At the same time, we are challenged to not lose sight of the possibility that the conditions for change are attainable through strategic alliances, and bold intellectual and community-based action. Manning's body of work reminds us how fluid the line between activism and the academy can be. In addition to his activism seen in his role as a founding vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, his work as founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and the Center for the Study of Contemporary Black History allowed people to see the full potential and application of their work in and beyond the academy. Throughout his career he worked diligently to maintain a connection to a broad public. He was adept at engaging wider audiences as public intellectual when possible or needed, and he had an uncanny ability to move between audiences. Many will recall that his syndicated commentary Along the Color Line which appeared in a wide number of publications and radio stations was a global public sphere for the interrogation of issues related to black politics. Dana-Ain Davis spoke of her time with Manning working at the journal Souls and his connection to community and activism. In regard to this she commented, “by example Manning Marable taught us to pay attention to the scaffolds of our ideas and make sure those ideas were connected to a bigger purpose. We really had no choice but to be better colleagues, and use our privilege to provide access for those who followed us.” Both John Jackson and Mary Moran discussed the presence that Manning brought to academic departments, and the direct and indirect influence he had on their work. While the word praxis comes to mind, I sometimes think that this may be too limiting a term to describe the operationalizing of theory. For those anthropologists engaged in work around social change, Manning's work reminds us to pay less attention to disciplinary divisions between academic and public anthropology and instead to simply “do” anthropology. Our AAA session concluded with a short film by Manning's stepson, Michael Tyner, which captured Manning's work on the Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Marable 2011) biography for which he won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 2012. His work on A Life of Reinvention challenged widely held narratives around the intellectual, personal, and political development of Malcolm X. Adopting such a perspective requires not only intellectual breadth and research acumen, but courage as well. I will always recall Manning's intellectual courage and ability to communicate and translate this to broad audiences, academic and nonacademic alike, while making those who he engaged feel as though history was a tool for liberation and transformation. During his time working on A Life of Reinvention, Manning was engaged in tireless research and dialogue with a range of audiences. The film conveyed his love for the topic and his drive to tell the story and document history as he saw it. It is with this final note on which the panel came to a close and our memories of Manning continued.