Emancipatory social inquiry: democratic anarchism and the Robinsonian method †
2013; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14725843.2013.797282
ISSN1472-5851
Autores Tópico(s)Political Economy and Marxism
ResumoAbstract In Black Movements in America, Robinson observes that '[s]lavery gave the lie to its own conceit: one could not create a perfect system of oppression and exploitation' (1997, p. 11). This is especially so, in part, because oppression is after all, as Robinson argues in Black Marxism, only one condition of being, and racial regimes, however inventive and pernicious, are only the forgeries of actual lived experiences as illustrated in Forgeries of Memory & Meaning. He thus concludes, in Anthropology of Marxism, that 'domination and oppression inspire…an irrepressible response to social injustice' (2001, p. 157). Robinson's scholarship has trained several generations of radical scholars to recognize an epistemological advantage in insisting that 'men and women were divine agents' of history, instead of the 'fractious and weaker allegiances of class' or any other monolithic social positioning (2001, p. 139). Robinson thus peoples his theoretical terrains, potently mobilizing historical density as a guide for radical social inquiries. One of the main contributions of his most influential work, Black Marxism, for instance, is its claim that no matter how much we believe in the state (and the economy) as the only entities that organize modern life, the historical Black radical tradition, as it turned out, granted a previous ungoverned and ungovernable conception of life itself. Robinson's collective work provides a liberationist method for social research and theorizing – a necessary task for continuing feminist and ethnic studies as an emancipatory project. This paper explores the scholarship of Cedric J. Robinson and the ways in which he displaces state and capital forms of expression as epistemological a priori to render Black people and communities as liberationist subjects, and in so doing, he renders himself an intellectual anarchist. Keywords: liberationist subjectivityanarchismBlack radical traditionCedric J. RobinsonBlack Studiesethnic studiessocial movements Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Darryl C. Thomas, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Jean Sheppard, Peg Bortner, and C.A. Griffith for their comments and suggestions. Notes 1. Emphasis added; Cabral, 1972 Cabral, A. 1972. Revolution in Guinea: Selected texts by Amilcar Cabral, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 86–89. 2. Cabral was a movement organizer, spokesperson, commander, theorist, and, at the time of his assassination, the Secretary General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands – the main organ of the revolutionary movements of Guinea-Bissau, which was ultimately recognized by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1972 as the sole representative body of its people. 3. Even with the setback following Cabral's assassination by the Portuguese secret police on 20 January 1973, Guinea-Bissau achieved independence in September 1973. 4. For further information about intellectual influence on Robinson, see Morse (1999 Morse, C. (1999). Capitalism, marxism, and the Black radical tradition: An interview with Cedric Robinson. Perspective on Anarchist Theory, 3(1). Retrieved from http://flag.blackened.net/ias/5robinsoninterview.htm [accessed January 5, 2012] [Google Scholar]) and Quan (2005 Quan, H. L. T. 2005. Geniuses of resistance: Feminist consciousness and the Black radical tradition. Race & Class, 47(2): 39–54. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 5. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Smith observes that 'the term "research" is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism,' and research 'is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized' (1999 Smith, L. T. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous people, London: Zed Books. [Google Scholar], pp. 1, 7). Because of this, radical historiography requires a decolonizing of research methods. 6. For further reading on Robinson's methodological contributions to radical historiography, see Herard (2005 Herard, T. 2005. Writing in solidarity: The new generation. Race & Class, 47(2): 88–99. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Myers (2012 Myers, J. 2012. The scholarship of Cedric J. Robinson: Methodological consideration for Africana studies. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 5(4): 46–82. [Google Scholar]), and Quan (2005 Quan, H. L. T. 2005. Geniuses of resistance: Feminist consciousness and the Black radical tradition. Race & Class, 47(2): 39–54. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 7. Because 'racial regimes are commonly masqueraded as natural orderings' (Robinson, 2007 Robinson, C. 2007. Forgeries of memory and meaning: Blacks and the regimes of race in American theater and film before World War II, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. [Google Scholar]), the recognition of them as forgeries is inextricably linked to the recognition of power relations and thus threatens their own stability as racial regimes. As Robinson explains: 'Racial regimes are constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power…. [T]he covering of racial regime is a makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable. Nevertheless, racial regimes do possess history, that is, discernable origins and mechanisms of assembly. But racial regimes are unrelentingly hostile to their exhibition. This antipathy exists because a discoverable history is incompatible with a racial regime and from the realization that, paradoxically, so are its social relations. One threatens the authority, and the other saps the vitality of racial regimes' (emphasis added; pp. xii–xiii). 8. Although their ideational histories are distinct and perceived as dissimilar in fact, authority and order are kin (Robinson, 1980 Robinson, C. 1980. The terms of order: Political science and the myth of leadership, Albany: State University of New York Press. [Google Scholar], p. 30). While I agree with Robinson that order 'is the precept which is authority's precondition,' and that 'authority is the rationalization of order' (p. 30), I believe that the metastasizing of order is itself the rationalization of authority. 9. It is important to note that this is not a label used by Robinson. Rather, and in the next section, I characterize the Robinsonian method as one that embodies a philosophy of democratic politics and anarchism. 10. In consideration of history and theory of social transformation, I emphasize the importance of life and knowledge, as well as dream. 'Freedom dreams,' as Kelley (2002 Kelley, R. 2002. Freedom dreams: The Black radical imagination, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. [Google Scholar]) so successfully noted, are essential to assessments of movement's success and failure because the best social movements are ones that 'transport us to another place, compel us to live horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society' (p. 9). As he argues, these dreams transport us 'somewhere that exits only in our imagination that is, "nowhere"' (p. 2) or utopia, and dreaming of new worlds – 'from the dreams of an African utopia to the surreal world of our imagination, from the communist and feminist dream of abolishing all forms of exploitation to the four-hundred-year-old dream of payback for slavery and Jim Crow' (pp. 6–7) – is the essential task of radical movements. 11. Here, I argue that the ungovernable and ungovernability provide useful theoretical insights for thinking about life and the politics of life, instead of the politics of death or 'necropolitics.' On necropolitics, see Mbembe (2003 Mbembe, A. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1): 11–40. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 12. Here, Smith's understanding of knowledge-sharing is particularly instructive: Knowledge-sharing implies reciprocity and 'is a long term commitment' (1999 Smith, L. T. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous people, London: Zed Books. [Google Scholar], pp. 15–16). It is not 'simply sharing surface information (pamphlet knowledge),' but the sharing of 'the theories and analyses which inform the ways knowledge and information are constructed and represented' (p. 16). The Robinsonian method, as this essay will demonstrate, also contains a strategy for knowledge-sharing. 13. The problem with state addiction is that it pathologizes authority, reifies order, and forestalls the emergence of discoverable counter-alternatives. 14. For an exposition on the awesome power of the national security state, see Agamben (2005 Agamben, G. 2005. State of exception, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 15. See also Foucault (1970 Foucault, M. 1970. The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences, New York, NY: Vintage Books. [Google Scholar]) and Newfield (2008 Newfield, C. 2008. Unmaking of the public university: The forty-year assault on the middle class, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]). 16. As Rojas (2007 Rojas, F. 2007. From Black power to Black Studies: How a radical social movement become an academic discipline, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. [Google Scholar]) argues, the growth of Black Studies as an academic discipline is a consequence of social protests. 17. Especially on the appropriation of Black Studies and the disappearance of Black people from academic institutions, see Brown (2007 Brown, C. 2007. Dude, where's my Black Studies department? The disappearance of Black Americans from our universities, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. [Google Scholar]). 18. In May 2010, the Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, signed into law a House Bill (House Bill 2281; endorsed by the Senate; State of Arizona, 2010 State of Arizona. (2010). House Bill 2281, House of Representatives, Forty-ninth Legislature. Retrieved from http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s.pdf [accessed December 11, 2011] [Google Scholar]) that bans ethnic studies in public grade schools (K–12), specifically targeting the Mexican-American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. As codified in the House Bill 2281, no school district or charter school may provide instruction or courses that include the following: 1. Promote the overthrow of the US Government. 2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people. 3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. 4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of treating pupils as individual. (House Bill 2281, Title 15-Sections 112) Given the rise of xenophobia, nativism, and economic violence against poor Brown people, and neo-confederate politics in Arizona, that this bill was passed is neither surprising nor unanticipated. What is remarkable, however, is the fact that by conflating ethnic studies with treason and explicitly banning solidarity, the state and its allies reveal their own dysfunctions, panics, and anxieties about the capriciousness of their authority. 19. Okihiro, G. (2011). The future of ethnic studies: The field is under assault from without and within. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/The-Future-of-Ethnic-Studies/66092/ [Accessed 15 December 2011]. 20. Hersh, S. (2003, May 12). Selective intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable? The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact?currentPage = all [Accessed 15 December 2011]. 21. Not surprisingly, this charge would generate considerable debate among the practitioners of Black Studies. See, for instance, Fenderson (2009 Fenderson, J. 2009. Toward organizational dialogue in Black Studies: A critical rejoinder to Manning Marable. Journal of Black Studies, 39(4): 497–507. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 22. It is important to note that Rojas does not interpret this development as entirely problematic. 23. Some may argue that many practitioners of critical Black Studies have never left the source. The proliferation and potency of Black feminist scholarship, especially of activist scholars such as Alexander (2010 Alexander, M. 2010. The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, New York, NY: The New Press. [Google Scholar]), Cohen (1999 Cohen, C. 1999. The boundaries of blackness: AIDS and the breakdown of Black politics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Davis (2003 Davis, A. 2003. Are prisons obsolete?, New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. [Google Scholar]), Gilmore (2007 Gilmore, R. W. 2007. Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Smith (1998 Smith, B. 1998. The truth that never hurts: Writings on race, gender, and freedom, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. [Google Scholar]), and Young (2006 Young, C. 2006. Soul power: Culture, radicalism, and the making of U.S. Third World left, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar]), to name a diverse few, bear witness and attest to the importance of culture and the interconnectedness between movement praxis, knowledge production, and radical consciousness. 24. This framework is part of my larger book project, 'Why Not Life? The Politics of the Ungovernable and Democracy.' It studies anarchism, ungovernability, and tools for democratic living, and investigates practices of refusing to be governed. Empirical accountings of instances of withholding availability for governing, such as marronage, border crossing, prison abolitionism, and transgenderism, suggest that there exists an alternative genealogy of anarchism to the Western anarchist tradition. While conventional understandings of anarchy (without rule) suggest a contradiction to or an absence of democracy (rule by the many), this alternative genealogy of anarchism (as distinct from the anarchisms of the West) suggests that a democratic politics is a prerequisite of an anarchism that relies on justice in solidary (Hames-Garcia, 2004 Hames-Garcia, M. 2004. Fugitive thought: Prison movements, race, and the meaning of justice, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]; Mohanty, 2003 Mohanty, C. 2003. Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and egalitarianism as precepts. 25. For a sample of works that partially disrupt conventional narratives of anarchism, see Chomsky (2005 Chomsky, N. 2005. Chomsky on anarchism, Oakland, CA: AK Press. [Google Scholar]), Scott (2010 Scott, J. 2010. The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]), and Zinn (2007 Zinn, H. 2007. A power government cannot suppress, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. [Google Scholar]). 26. Robinson explains that this is so because anarchism in the West 'was a theory of society conscious of and in opposition to political society' (emphasis added; 1980, p. 187). 27. Perhaps, one of the most influential theorists on the acceptance of the political as theology is no other than Schmitt (Political as Theology). For instance, his great influence on the influential theorist Agamben's work on the power of the state is self-evident. For further reference, see Agamben (2005 Agamben, G. 2005. State of exception, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Schmitt (2006 Schmitt, C. 2006. Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. [Google Scholar]). 28. Jacques Rancière is one of the most provocative among contemporary anarchist philosophers. His work, especially on the hatred of democracy (Rancière 1991 Rancière, J. 1991. The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar]; Rancière & Corcoran, 2009 Rancière, J. and Corcoran, S. 2009. Hatred of democracy, New York, NY: Verso. [Google Scholar]) and artistic egalitarianism (Rancière, 2006 Rancière, J. 2006. The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible, New York, NY: Continuum. [Google Scholar]), is cogent for a radical reformulation of anarchism (May, 2006 May, T. 2006. The political thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating equalities, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. [Google Scholar]). Rancière (2006 Rancière, J. 2006. The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible, New York, NY: Continuum. [Google Scholar]) locates aesthetics as a site where equalitarianism is possible in ways that the political denies, and argues that through this 'aesthetics regime of art' artistic egalitarianism can create conditions for the destruction of other regimes of hierarchies. He also concedes that 'art and politics are not two permanent and separate realities' (2009 Rancière, J. 2009. Aesthetics and its discontents, Cambridge: Polity Press. [Google Scholar], p. 25). That Rancière fails to fully appreciate the fact that the making of aesthetics is, thus, not unencumbered by cultural violence and multiple regimes of hierarchy is not only naïve, but also tragic given the recognition of the possibility of a radical egalitarianism and anarchism that his work engenders. Without the benefit of a radical historiography analogous to that of Robinson's, Rancière's work is thus, at best, productively contradictory. Alain Badiou uncharitably sums up the problematics of Rancière this way: 'Always situate yourself in the interval between discourses without opting for any of them; reactivate conceptual sediments without lapsing into history; deconstruct the postures of mastery without giving up the ironic mastery of whosoever catches the master out' (Badiou, 2005 Badiou, A. 2005. Metapolitics, New York: Verso. [Google Scholar], p. 107). Robinson's Forgeries instantiates a more effective interrogation of aesthetics and politics, one that relishes in history and readily gives up the precepts of the order that it opposes. 29. As stated by Bull (1969 Bull, H. 1969. "Society and anarchy in international relations". In Diplomatic investigations, Edited by: Butterfield, Herbert. 35–60. London: George Allen & Unwin. [Google Scholar]), anarchy is 'the central fact of the international system and the starting place for theorizing about it' (p. 35). See also Waltz (1959 Waltz, K. 1959. Man, the state and war: A theoretical analysis, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]). 30. On the 'totally administered society,' see Horkheimer and Adorno (2002 Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); on the Frankfurt School, see Wiggerhaus (1995 Wiggerhaus, R. 1995. The Frankfurt School: Its history, theories, and political significance (Michael Robertson, Trans.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. [Google Scholar]). 31. Just as there exists many forms of anarchisms, there exist many forms of critical theory that engages with authority, relations of ruling, order, and meaning. Rebaka (2009), for example, documents an alternative and older genealogy of critical theory, one that is nurtured by the Black radical tradition – Africana critical theory. To make this case, he points, for instance, to Dubois' 'developing and doing authentic interdisciplinary critical social theory either before the Frankfurt School critical theorists were born, or at least, when they were toddlers' (pp. 6–7). As he explains in Africana Critical Theory, 'frequently the only form of critical theory that most people [recognized] is Frankfurt School critical theory…[but] there are many forms, many traditions, of critical theory' (p. 6). As a fruit of the Black radical tradition, Africana critical theory is, thus, inherently emancipatory: 'as a materialist social theory, [it] focuses on actually existing human needs and suffering, the ways in which hegemonic historical and cultural conditions produce suffering, and impede the changes necessary to eliminate human suffering and enable human liberation and social transformation' (2009 Dubois, W. E. B. 1999. Black reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, New York, NY: Free Press. [Google Scholar], p. 243). Precisely because it is so, it goes beyond the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Similarly, Robinson's deconstruction and reconstruction of authority, grounded in the life-worlds, lived experiences, and aspirations of the Black radical tradition, instigates a counter genealogy of anarchism than that of the West. 32. Foucault as cited in Robinson (1980 Robinson, C. 1980. The terms of order: Political science and the myth of leadership, Albany: State University of New York Press. [Google Scholar], p. 216). 33. In 'Geniuses of Resistance,' I demonstrate how Black Marxism is fundamentally an open narrative, conspiring and instigating co-conspirators into a larger plot to radically reform the past and present (Quan, 2005 Quan, H. L. T. 2005. Geniuses of resistance: Feminist consciousness and the Black radical tradition. Race & Class, 47(2): 39–54. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). † An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 'Critical Ethnic Studies & the Future of Genocide' Conference in March 2011 (Quan, 2011 Quan, H. L. T. (2011). Liberationist subjectivity, critical Black Studies and the scholarship of Cedric J. Robinson. Paper presented at the Critical Ethnic Studies & the Future of Genocide Conference, March, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA [Google Scholar]).
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