Roots, Breaks, and the Performance of a Black Left Critique
Professor of American and African-American literature at Wayne State University
The weapon of criticism certainly cannot replace the criticism of weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory, too, becomes a material force once it seizes the masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses once it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem once it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp matters at the root.Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right"
1. Wendy Brown’s "Left melancholia," translated and adapted from Walter Benjamin, is the malaise of the "revolutionary hack who, finally, not serious about political change, is more attached to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present" (25).
2. Edwards refutes allegations of Cunard’s sectarian (communist) politics, cultural cruising, and sexual adventurism which, according to Michael North, "present African Americans as objects of pity or comedy" (qtd. in Edwards 315).
3. I would stretch Ronell’s characterization of Friedrich Nietzsche’s scientificity, as a "relation to science" that "is by no means driven by resentment but rests on appropriative affirmation" (561), to cover Du Bois’s critical embrace of scientific historiography.
4. As Bogues notes, Aimé Césaire’s Caliban, in his 1969 play Une Tempête, performs a Caribbean anticolonial appropriation of Shakespeare; the monster-turned-revolutionary’s first word, a curse to his master but a call to arms for slaves, is Uhuru, the untranslated Swahili word for "Freedom."
5. Moton and Edwards follow, update, and secularize Du Bois’s parabolic and allusive style. In his politicized musicology and/or soundtrack for Black Reconstruction, Du Bois nearly makes explicit his address to the black aesthetic and religious cognoscenti. The passages quoted above from Black Reconstruction nearly require the biblical gloss ("And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them" [Mark 4:11–12]) that Du Bois’s 1935 audience presumably had ready to memory.
6. Moten, Edwards, and Bogues allude to and borrow Nathaniel Mackey’s concept and metaphor "wounded kinship" (qtd. in Moten 6, 175–76, and elsewhere), which names the severed connections among Africa, Europe, and the New World that are sutured by black avant-garde syntheses of music, poetry, and criticism.
7. Philip Foner’s numerous documentary histories of black oratory and protest literature are invaluable; especially relevant here are Voice of Black America (1972) and Black Workers (1989). Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988) brought modern academic style and historiographic rigor to the fundamental theses beneath the florid prose of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.
8. While Edwards marks his Negritude and poststructuralist sources and the complexity of the "break" (as Moten’s more directly musical term) between English and French intellectual developments within a larger black diaspora by keeping décalage French, he gives the following translation of Senghor’s claims about easy translations among American and European black culture: "Despite appearances, the difference between Negro-Americans and Negro-Africans is more slight. In reality it involves a simple décalage in time and space" (13).
9. Edwards refers to Stuart Hall (33–38) for his definition of articulation as both joint and expression; the choice of Hall’s version of LaClan’s now commonplace poststructuralist pun seems strategic in that it finds precedents and virtuoso application of academic critical practice in the diaspora that Edwards privileges.
10. Biondi’s sources are numerous for this common legal strategy of standing up by quoting and galvanizing the contempt in which the legal establishment holds black rights and black civil rights discourse. See Coleman Young (128–29) for a classic and fully elaborated instance of indicting the law by incisive mimicry.
11. Cruse’s still-influential characterization of black Communists and fellow travelers as bourgeois, assimilationist, and bamboozled by white patronage and Soviet ideology is one target of Biondi’s "reevaluation of the narrative of the civil rights movement as a whole" (272). In fact, Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is implicitly but firmly corrected by Bogues, Edwards, and Moten, all of whom take issue with Cruse’s doubts about the political efficacy of black internationalism and his ad hominem Red-baiting.
12. Edwards notes that "such a project [as his own] necessitates unearthing and articulating an archive, in the sense not so much as a site or mode of preservation of a national, institutional, or individual past, but instead of a ‘generative system’; in other words, a discursive system that governs the possibilities, forms, appearance, and regularity of particular statements, objects, and practices—or, on the simplest level, that determines." This definition of archive quietly remarks an affiliation with Nietzsche’s genealogy, Foucault’s archaeology, Said’s A-B-C-Derium, and other examinations of the embedded politics of constructing and reading archives, including those of Moten and Bogues.
13. In explaining "the furor about whites being present in the Black Writers Congress, which most whites did not understand," Bogues says "that our historical experience has been speaking to white people, whether it be begging white, justifying ourselves against white people or even vilifying white people. Our whole context has been, ‘that is the man to talk to’ " (64).
14. Edwards’s recovery of a Modernist Francophone cosmopolitan diaspora extends Anderson’s insight about the role of newspapers in making reading and political communities ("fiction" being etymologically related to making and fabricating); see Anderson (23–35).
15. Moten recognizes and thus makes useful critique of such virtual hypostatization of movements as they enter popular and critical discourse, as he follows through its implications from Davis through Balibar to Spivak (Moten 230).
16. Moten’s opening presentation of critical and imagistic source texts properly gives Spillers’s psychoanalytic treatment in "Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe" of Black Nationalism’s repression of feminism pride of place as an "improvisational audition of sighting, non-sight, seen" (15) of patriarchy and issues with mothers that far exceed slavery’s institutionalized natal alienation. In part following Spillers’s suggestions and suggestiveness, In the Break plays on Baraka’s sometimes anxious masculinity by gently calling out, emphasizing, accepting, and depejorating "mama’s boy," a moniker that marks, among other moves, Baraka’s twinned and ambivalent indebtedness to Taylor and Holiday.
17. In "Thinking Cultural Questions in ‘Pure’ Literary Terms," Spivak similarly lays claims, and thus implicitly contests, African-American men’s special relationship with "the mother." The now-opened appropriation and critique of nationalism and postcolonialism is thus metaphorically and conceptually a matrix—note the proliferation of professional foremothers in Moten’s and Edwards’s work—of productive arguments which promises to destabilize fixtures of gender, class, nation.