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Wangechi Mutu
So, What is this Theory Map Going To Do?
In this theory map we explore radical black theory through the frames of mind, body, and land.
We examine mind through the lens of both Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Frantz Fanon as presented by Lewis Gordon. Thiong'o is a renowned Kenyan writer and scholar, and Fanon is a psychiatrist and acclaimed philosopher from Martinique.
We examine body through the ideas of Ruth Wilson Gilmore a prison abolitionist and scholar. With Gilmore, we discuss
abolition and carceral geography, freedom as a place, and the infrastructure of feeling.
We examine land through the anti-colonial lense that Sylvia Wynter, a Jamaican philospher and essayest, presents in “1492: A New World View.”
Throughout this presentation, we will be highlighting some of our favorite quotes from these authors and discussing our collective responses to their work.
What is Radical Black Theory?
Radical Black Theory is the body of ideas that challenge, dismantle and re-imagine the social systems that we all take for granted today. These ideas stem from the unique global perspective of Black people, the perspective of those who live at the bottom of the racialized power and economic structures that form the foundation of the modern world. These ideas are not strictly for or by black people, but they do require people to see the world through the uncomfortable lens of racialized exploitation and to envision a world that exists beyond the systemic norms that we all take for granted.
Wangechi Mutu
For us, this quote masterfully illustrates the temporal aspect of the struggle for Black liberation. It acknowledges and appreciates the past while challenging us to do everything possible for the future. It provides for us a comfort of sorts, in times of perceived intellectual isolation. It calls for us to boldly live out the answer to the question: What are you if it’s not connected to what you’re doing? And in doing so, understand the theory we bring to praxis.
Sophia Dawson, @Iamwetpaint
If you look at the black resistance that's been coming that is a proper rebellion.
That is properly an uprising precisely because it's fighting not to eradicate the powers of people but to expand the powers of the people.
How do we know? Because of one crucial thing about today that's different from yesterday is that when you look across the globe, and at the people who are fighting against the brutality, you may notice that they are multiracial...
If you look at the people who are standing up against the state apparatus, the mediating force: the police, you see a multiracial coalition,
and you have to ask yourself, what is it that is driving young white people, young Asians, young Syrians to go to the streets around the solidarity of this issue.
And it's because they can't breathe.
(Fanon/Gordon 1:11:46 - 1:12:36)
In this quote, Gordon illuminates a fundamental piece of a true anti-racist revolution: inclusivity. Whether our skin is black, brown, white or somewhere in between, we all feel the choking grip of racist tyranny in our minds if not around our necks. It permeates the air we breath, the food we eat and the ways we think. From Belarus to Mali to Minneapolis, this fight, the fight against racism, the fight for freedom, is a global struggle, and the fists raised ‘round the world in solidarity are of every color. This is a fight for all, so we are all welcome in the fight.
As Gordon reminds, this inclusivity is more than just a nice aesthetic of the modern anti-racist movement, it is also proof that this is a true revolution. This battle really is about expanding the rights and freedoms of everyone. This is a fight that pushes people to challenge leaders, question assumptions and grab hold of intangible systems in the name of making the world a better place for everyone. All are welcome in the fight because this is a fight for all.
Of course, this fight will be long, the work will be hard and the solutions will be elusive, but with our hearts and minds united, we can find a way forward together.
For many of us, particularly those of us who are white, it can feel like our presence in this kind of revolution would do more damage than good. However, this is movement for all and all are welcome. If you are willing to put in the work, to be honest, and lean in to discomfort, then lend your voice to our battle cry.
Gordon makes a brief allusion to the connection between the police, socially legitimized use of force and the role of an enforcer social class (see the purple text). This connection is getting at a key series of questions in radical black thought:
Who gets to use force in a society?
What is the difference between use of force and violence?
Why is it acceptable for some people to use violence and not others?
This quote was a potent reminder about why remembering how colonialism behaves is important, as much as it is to stay vigilant in ways that won't be self-harming but rather lead to growth in the longterm. That, even as we work on piecing together the abstract social influence of colonialism, white supremacy and euro-centrism, it is still easy in this to lose touch with the everyday violations that people face as they struggle under the knee of colonial legacies. These works remind us of the visceral realities behind the abstract pathways we come to understand them in an academic context, that can help us stay connected to the ground and the lived experience of them. For example, Thiong'o's discussion of memories being replaced was particularly impactful as it relates to so many facets of our lives. But especially, through his discussion of map making and names. By destroying a native memory of place, by renaming, one can then “own” what one “found”.
"Colonialism attacks and completely distorts a people's relationship to their natural, bodily, economic, political and cultural base."
-Ngūgī Wa Thiong'o
Something Torn & New
p. 29
"If you are going to create a genuine revolutionary situation, it's not simply replacing people, but it's changing the systemic relations. And changing those relations, he argues, requires building new concepts. It requires changing the material conditions. It requires understanding the human being in a different way. The old way of understanding human beings were as things that are intact and the world changes around us. Fanon rejects that and asks us to understand that we are relationships." [Fanon/ Gordon 1:13:20]
This quote was chosen to pause around the thought of human beings defined as relationships. How do systems change if we define human beings as relationships? When a baby is born in a hospital system, often the baby is not immediately placed on the mother to bond, but taken away from the mother. This places the hospital’s needs over the human relationship of the mother and baby in the first moments of life. As humans operating in the system, it can feel isolating and diminishing to think about our value in terms of productivity where we are quantified and measured. Beyond this systemic impact of what it feels like to be a human being, there is the impulse to seek connections. It is the impulse to connect that can re-integrate the relationships into the pursuit of meaningful systemic change. The criminal justice system has often been an abolition example for imagining new forms of human relations to a system (restorative, transformative, and punitive), but it was asked how abolition goes beyond the prison industrial complex. How does abolition or the systemic relations change when discussing environmental justice?
Nina Chanel Abney
In Ruth Wilson-Gilmore’s depiction of the threat experienced by this Portuguese community, we see clearly the relationship between property, power, and unfreedom. So too in the questions posed by community members. Why us? Why here? Who else?Who decides? However, we also see a sincere glimpse into what it means for freedom to be a place. A trace of abolition geography and the home it imagined.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore gives a series of examples of abolition geography where this quote highlights new ways of responding to community violence by creating a different structure where the system that creates violence against women, is not perpetuated. These examples show the importance of acting in an unorthodox way—realizing we don’t need to go somewhere else in search of what we need to change our situation but that we can use what we have to affect change in our surroundings. People can create freedom as a place. In the conversations around criminality as a “moral” failing that can prevent individuals from reintegrating back into society by receiving jobs, the concept of religion for some groups can be ascribed as a motivating force to produce systemic change. The territory which is intercepted by faith-based organizations might center on the implication of ‘values’ (choices which are extrapolated off of the core values of a given faith). Faith and morality as influences of systemic relations could be connected to repentance and punishment for those that have sinned. Gilmore brings examples of locations where communities are actively participating and creating freedom as a place.
"We will, because we do, change ourselves and the external world. Even under extreme constraint" (238).
There is no doubt that creating meaningful systems change is extremely difficult. Somehow, people are supposed to tear down the ideological scaffolding that holds up world as we know it, while, at the same time, creating and implementing an brand new set of unfamiliar social structures. From this perspective, it seems like nothing can every change. It’s all too much. The systems are too big.
However, things are always changing. We see this every day in our minds, our bodies and the world around us. With each moment that passes, we see things get a little older, a little more experienced.
Systemic forces too, shall change. They have to. We can nudge that change towards something better.
To echo the words of Angela Davis:
We live in a world that does not reward this kind of optimism. We are told to keep our heads down, our feet planted in the ground and our dreams realistic. The systems in place are there because they are the ones that work the best and they are far too powerful to change. This mentality creates a kind of learned helplessness that is soul crushing.
For the sake of our own mental and physical well-being we have to hold on to hope. We have to let ourselves imagine that a better future is just over the horizon, and we will get there.
" I’ve always emphasized that we have to do the work as if change were possible and as if this change were to happen sooner rather than later. It may not; we may not get to witness it. But if we don’t do the work, no one will ever witness it."
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/angela-davis-and-ava-duvernay-in-conversation
This quote highlights how deeply we are stuck in a binary around "innocence", most of the anti-prison arguments have focused on tearing fairly narrow subjects like private prisons, solitary confinement, poor sanitation in prisons, lack of healthcare in prisons, prison over population, and the issues specific populations face in prisons. In the process, we have noticed how the most popular arguments usually focus on people who can be characterized as innocent or at least, redeemable. These polarities of “good-bad” or “criminal-innocent,” create an all-or-nothing application where individuals are described as inherently a criminal or inherently an innocent person. The binary being a tug-of-war that Gilmore notes, but can also be found in other systems outside of the prison system, such as the medical, when we think about it as a problem of an obsession with treating symptoms. In the same way that prioritizing trying to discern who is innocent is somewhat of a harmful distraction to the main issue and acts as a hindrance to discussions of systemic change, addressing symptoms works in the same way.
many advocates for people in prison and the communities they come from have taken a perilous route by arguing why certain kinds of people or places suffer in special ways when it comes to criminalization or the cage. Thus, the argument goes, prisons are designed for men, and are therefore bad for women. Prisons are designed for healthy young men, and are therefore bad for the aged and the infirm. Prisons are designed for adults and are therefore bad for youth. Prisons separate people from their families and are therefore bad for mothers who have frontline responsibility for family cohesion and reproductive labor. Prisons are based in a rigid two-gender system and are therefore bad for people who are transgender and gender nonconforming.Prisons are cages and people who didn't hurt anybody should not be in cages.
Now this does not exhaust the litany of who shouldn't be in prison, but what it does do is two things. First, it establishes as a hard fact that some people should be in cages, and only against this desirability or inevitability might some change occur. And it does so by distinguishing degrees of innocence such that there are people, inevitably, who will become permanently not innocent, no matter what they do or say. The structure of feeling that shapes the innocence defense narrative is not hard to understand: after all, if criminalization is all about identifying the guilty, within its prevailing logic it's reasonable to imagine the path to undoing it must be to discover the wrongly condemned.
-Ruth Wilson Gilmore p. 233
Bre’Ann White, Deity I, 2015
Kara Walker, Sugar Sphinx
Perception as the mode through which we know our reality is fascinating both in the biological, social, collective, and individual senses. Where do these overlap? Inform eachother? How do our development of neural networks and other biological elements that are shaped by socialization reflect our subjective understanding? Another way we can think about these questions is through what we define as “culture shock.” This phenomenon could be understood as a way of having our individual subjective understandings disrupted as we travel to a new place. Or perhaps, a more timely example is that of a pandemic, in which collective subjective understandings are shaken. Quite suddenly, we find ourselves adjusting to wearing masks, standing six feet apart, and taking classes through Zoom University. Ofcourse, this understanding of the pandemic is indeed very subjective, as evidenced by the wide ranging behavior where adhering to social guidelines is concerned. However, there was a time before and there will be a time after. In which a new order will be established.
In sum, these "stereotyped images" or labels served as boundary markers that represented the transgressive chaos that ostensibly awaited those who either acted outside the parameters of its mode of "subjective understanding." Thus, central systemic function of representing, through their total negation, the medieval Islamic way of life and mode of subjective understanding as being the only possible divinely sanctioned manner of behaving humanly, knowing rationally, and perceiving according to an ostensible absolute standard of right perception meant that what Moraes-Farias calls the categorical models in which they were encoded as interchangeable labels and stereotyped images were necessarily, in Wittgenstein's fine phrase, "impervious to philosophical attack." Sylvia Winter p. 21
Sylvia Winter describes stereotyped images, categories, boundary markers, and the systemic function of representation where there is an understood “absolute standard of right perception,” in a way that came to life when looking at the evolution of how maps described land through the lens of who was in power through the rise of colonialism and capitalism. When applying these concepts to the representations on the news, the root of old tropes and stereotypes through 24-hour news cycles can be seen, and increasingly younger generations are getting their news in other ways online. What might the news representing spaces and cultures look like next? In thinking about the evolution of maps in the next transition, I’m wondering if our tendency to map space can exist outside of its current and historical capacity as a visual depiction of stereotyped images. This point about stereotyped images serving as boundary markers in followed by our class discussion about maps has definitely made clear how space and perceived reality have been wielded as tools towards the supraordinate goals of both religion and the state. Between all these different ideas, I have started to see how larger cultural and political borders can wrap themselves around the minds and bodies of people and reproduce themselves in a variety of nearly invisible ways. If the physical barriers between places can create all these social and emotional barriers, then tearing these physical borders down should break down the emotional ones.
As the old adage goes, “history is written by the victor.” It is also written by humans who can only see, hear and research so much. No one history can ever capture the full story, so why not tell the story that makes you look good?
Although these assumptions have become a norm of historical storytelling, it does not have to be this way. Here, Wynter reminds us that history, true history, comes from the kaleidoscope of human perspectives and experiences that reflects the multi-faceted world we all experience every day. A history that does this is one that recognizes one of the key threads binding all these narratives together: people do not see themselves as the villain of the story.
However horrible the actions of history may be, people, victor and victims alike, see themselves as the hero, and in order to understand history, especially the history of colonialism, one has to see the story through some version of all these perspectives.
This view is that both the undoubted “glorious achievement” of the processes that led up to Columbus’s realization of his long dreamed-of voyage and the equally undoubted horrors that were inflicted by the Spanish conquistadores and settlers upon the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the Americas, as well as up the African-descended Middle Passages and substitute slave labor force, are to be seen as the effects of Western Europe’s epochal shift.
That shift – out of the primarily supernaturally guaranteed modes of “subjective understanding” (and, therefore, of their correlated symbolic-representational and ethico-behavorial systems) that had been common to all human cultures and their millennial traditional “forms of life” – was a product of the intellectual revolution of humanism.
Elaborated by humanists as well as by monarchical jurists and theologians, this revolution opened the way toward an increasingly secularized, that is, degodded, mode of “subjective understanding.” In the context of the latter’s gradually hegemonic political ethic, not only would the earlier religio-moral ethic then common to all cultures be displaced, but a reversal would take place in which the Christian church, of which the earlier feudal states of Latin Europe had been the temporal and military arm, would now be made into the spiritual arm of these newly emergent absolute states.
It was to be the global expansion of those states that would bring into being our present single world order and single world history.
(Sylvia Wynter p. 13)
At the dawn of the “age of exploration,” around the turn of the 15th century, Europe went through a tremendous ideological shift known as the enlightenment.
As a part of this process, the church became the institution of the state (instead of vice versa), and the accumulation of wealth became the unalienable right and main impetus of humans, at least those of a white and male variety, and institution alike. Without God to justify their actions, the budding capitalists of the world needed a new way of vindicating their actions as they ventured forth to gather the riches of the world for themselves.
Racism became a tool that white colonists used to rewrite the world. It let them think:
This land was made for… me.
Racism became one of the key tools of self-deception.
This quote pushes the understanding of individual action and cultural "approval" or also lack there-of in a different light that feels more honest to our own lived experience of this age-old quandary of the binary around innocence and perpetrators. Wynter’s third perspective calls that binary into question, offering a broader opportunity to understand conditions that led to the behavior of both the collective and the individual.
In this quote, we were reminded of deviance as the description of social behavior in a society that operates in binaries, because “deviance” assumes negative or criminality of behavior. Rather than a binary in our languages, Wynter urges this shift of perception, to imagine a world in which this binary is not our focus. Everyone is trying to push society towards the future that they want to see. Therefore, it is important to understand how these natural impulses bring out the best and the worst of what humanity has to offer.
The central parallel here is that Columbus was to be no less governed by the mode of "subjective thinking" than were the Aztecs. Consequently, the sequence, on the one hand, of admirable behaviors that lead him to persevere over many long years in putting forward the intellectual rationale, in spite of the mockery and derision of the learned scholars of his time, and that lead him to eventually carry out his successful voyage "against" as he later wrote, "the opinion of all the world" and the sequence, on the other hand, of ruthless behaviors that followed his landfall were both motivated by the same countermode of "subjective understanding" orientated about the then-emerging stratal-mercantile and this- worldly goal of rational redemption.
-Sylvia Wynter p. 15
Radical Black Theory is a part of our everyday lives, whether we are aware of it or not. We know these truths because they are a part of our minds, our bodies and the land around us.
In the West, have been conditioned to view the world from the norms of capitalism, individualism and domination. However, we know that there is a world beyond the suffocating confines of these invisible assumptions. We know that mutualism, empathy and human relations are critical pieces of human society because we feel these things guiding us through our everyday lives. We can dare to create a world of systems that is as centralized around these ideas as much as our own lives are. Fanon and Gordon, explored this in the lecture we watched on "What Fanon Said."
The ways in which we have been taught to inhabit space as physical beings is always interpreted and filtered through a larger societal system, it is after-all at the core of human existence to build communities and spaces together. Through Gilmore’s writing we learned about the differing ways in which our bodies are both subjected to and perpetrators of the ways in which racial capitalism, as one such system, manifests itself in our daily lives, characterized by the spaces we occupy both by choice and often not. We saw that the ways in which we are caught mentally (and for many physically suffer) as a result of this unfreedom is a cornerstone of the functionality of capitalism, enabling certain bodies to create systems which decide the fate of others without regard for the humanity of all.
Place is a concept running through mind, body, and land. Though our minds and bodies have been conditioned to have a very specific understanding of place through maps and categories, Sylvia Wynter argues that we can create a world “beyond 1492” with a third perspective, that doesn’t limit our understanding of events to victors and victims. We are challenged to expand our notion of how our understandings are shaped by the place and time in which we live.
Nina Chanel Abney: https://ninachanel.com/
Sophia Dawson: http://www.sophia-dawson.com/gallery.html
Wangechi Mutu: https://www.wellesley.edu/events/node/160291
Kara Walker: https://untappedcities.com/2014/05/09/brooklyn-artist-kara-walker-looks-to-history-tension-racism-sex-in-domino-exhibit-tar-babies-and-a-giant-sphinx/