Cold War Culturalism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches

Theorizing the African Diaspora

The project of studying African descendant peoples as a “diaspora” gained significant influence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. George Shepperson argued in his pioneering work “African Diaspora: Concept and Context” that the concept was set to work to explain the condition and future of African descendant people against the backdrop of African independence movements.[1] Black trans-spatial and transhistorical connection was asserted on the basis of a shared history of white supremacist domination. As James Clifford explains, “Diaspora cultures are, to varying degrees, produced by regimes of political domination and economic inequality. But these violent processes of displacement do not strip people of their ability to sustain distinctive political communities and cultures of resistance.”[2] Scholars understood the African Diaspora as a process of identity formation born out of the experience of persistently coping with and resisting oppression in its multitudinous forms. Because people of African descent outside the Continent tended to constitute a minority group in a host country; were often subjected to myriad forms of injustice; and maintained a precarious relationship to citizenship,[3] narratives of the African Diaspora were profoundly vindicationist in order to prove that Black folks were worthy of rights, recognition, and the full benefits of society. Scholars also found it necessary to valorize African cultural retention, creation, and syncretism, and to emphasize artistic, aesthetic, and cultural connectedness to combat Eurocentric notions that people of African descent had no history or heritage worthy of study. Moreover, the African Diaspora concept built upon the historical idea that Black people worldwide have a linked fate and a common struggle against racial and colonial domination.[4]

As post-1970 academic and political discourse pivoted to “globalization,”[5] the focus of the African Diaspora underwent a substantive shift. The African Diaspora came to be deployed as a “trans-temporal dialogue”[6] that accounted for various ways of seeing, being, and knowing Blackness. Insofar as marginalization, dispossession, and oppression are experienced and reproduced unevenly and disparately throughout the Black world, hermeneutics of broken histories and divergent temporalities were employed to problematize earlier narratives of Diaspora that emphasized unity and continuity. Kenneth Warren, for example, writes that it is the ambiguities within diasporic thought—not perceived unity or continuity—that make particular imaginings possible.[7] “Essentialized” notions of Africanness that were integral to earlier conceptions of Diaspora were replaced by an emphasis on hybridity, movement, and flexibility. The African Diaspora came to be understood as cultures being made and remade, with Black identity being multiply constructed from different sites within the Diaspora. This contested the importance of elements retained from an African past. Further, Diasporic identity, instead of being fixed or rooted, came to be understood as a means by which people of African descent navigate how they are positioned by and in narratives of the past, and to engage in cultural retrieval and reconstruction. Diaspora now represented a dialogical site of contestation, negotiation, and refashioning.[8] At this point scholars began to interrogate Diaspora to expand its scope to include new patterns of dispersion, new identities, and new ethnicities.[9] Concepts like “decalage,” “articulation,” “bricolage,” “the changing same,” and “translation” were used to account for the disunity, misrecognition, differences, and disjunctures within the African Diaspora. These, along with the common experiences of Black people, were said to account for a more complete picture of the lived experience of Diaspora. Black British Cultural Studies was integral to this shift in Diaspora discourse, with intellectuals such as Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, and Kobena Mercer leading the way. The scholar that arguably had the most influence on this iteration of the African Diaspora was Paul Gilroy; almost twenty-five years later, his text The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness continues to be one of the most important in African Diaspora Studies.[10]

This article presents some theoretical sketches of the effects of the Cold War on the development and articulation of African Diaspora Theory. It presents three fundamental arguments. The first is that three interconnected phenomena—the Cold War, Black Liberalism, and decolonization—converged with two statist technologies of domination, repression, and co-optation—anticommunism/antiradicalism and antiblackness—to profoundly shape the conceptualization of the African Diaspora. The second, that concessions were made to certain group of Blacks, particularly academics that were committed to “Culturalism;”[11] political leaders that were committed to Cold War Liberalism;[12] and postcolonial heads of state that subscribed to Developmentalism and rejected Non-Alignment, Socialism, and Communism. This accommodation was directly contingent upon the repression of the left, Black radicalism, and forms of mobilization that challenged the pedagogy of the Cold War state.[13] The third is that the twin projects of Cold War Liberalism and Culturalism are forms of bad faith that are inextricable from antiradicalism and antiblackness. They have the instrument-effect of delimiting acceptable forms of Blackness and circumscribing antisystemic projects of Black liberation. The effect has been the diremption of the Black radical tradition from African Diaspora Theory.

The Cold War, Culturalism, and African Diaspora Theory

In the context of the Cold War, anticommunism/antiradicalism overwrote and built upon extant technologies of antiblackness that historically dispossessed, subordinated, and marginalized the majority of African descendants in the United States and in the decolonizing world. As a technology of domination that discursively produced the Black as “nigger”[14] on the constitutive outside of the state, antiblack racialization provided the template for disciplining Communists/radicals that fell outside the pedagogy of the American Cold War state. The Black, ontologically, was a political, social, and economic problem for the United States.[15] Anticommunism, as analogy[16] to antiblackness, became a metonym for various forms of antiradicalism[17] that derived its meaning from the unbelonging of the Black, the archetypal subversive non-citizen. As an instrument of governmentality, antiblackness confiscates the body of the Black, distorts it for the purposes of accumulation and exploitation, and returns that distortion to the Black as reality.[18] This process of distortion, or “niggerization,” is a “violent act of reduction and mutilation”[19] that produces the Black as economic, existential, and semantic surplus to be extracted by the state.[20] Anticommunism/antiradicalism became legible in and through this “surplus” of meaning by entangling the Black and the Communist/radical as “nigger.” The Black, as the “not” of white America,[21] was tied through analogy to the Communist, and the two became interchangeable. Because white supremacy and capitalist accumulation were inhered in “the structure of experience and understanding” of the United States, anticommunism derived “informative value” from the historical deployment of antiblackness.[22] Additionally, “Historically, states weary of radical thought have posed being a Communist as one of the most hateful identities.”[23] In this way, the Communist was niggerized insofar as the nigger is the most “inferior, stained, and impure”[24] non-white. The Communist/Black became entangled as not-white/not-American since whiteness meant citizenship, nationalism, patriotism, and belonging. The Black/Communist/nigger “[is] part of a larger historical imaginary, a social universe of white racist discourse that comes replete with long, enduring myths, perversions, distorted profiles, and imaginings of all sorts regarding the nonwhite body.”[25]

Culturalism, in which African Diaspora Theory became inscribed, is a direct result of this state-sanctioned distortion and repression. The cultural specification of Blackness and the forms of Culturalism that it takes are integrally related to statist technologies that facilitate the accommodation of Black intellectual and practical challenges to the capitalist state while, at the same time, ensuring their cooptation. These are the bases for the surveillance, disciplining, and punishment of Black radical critique. Culturalism institutionalized the hegemony of antiradical cultural politics by foregrounding cultural analyses of African retention and syncretism, cultural continuity, and comparative Diasporic cultures. The focus on cultural continuity codified the “assumption that the history and culture of peoples of African descent in the New World have to be argued out anthropologically in terms of an identifiable authentic past persisting into the present.”[26] This was determined to be the key to citizenship and equality for Blacks. As the Cold War entrenched the bifurcation of the world and influenced the direction of decolonization, “diaspora became reduced to its cultural aspects … the question of origins became a question of culture.” It divorced Blackness and the African Diaspora from the material realties of governmentalized, transnational state projects that sustain racial and class hierarchies.[27] Thus, Culturalism can be understood as a regime of meaning-making, or an epistemology, in which Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material, political economic, and structural conditions of dispossession through state technologies of antiradicalism. It is produced out of colonialist discourse and reproduces imperial logics, and thus does not fundamentally challenge the social constructions of Blackness that are vivified in and through relations of production that mark the Black as nigger. As such, this particular assertion of Black culture as the basis for rights and recognition reinscribes the Black into narratives of inferiority as abject. It is a function of antiblack and antiradical statist pedagogy, and after World War II, it became entangled with anticommunism as an instrumentality of surveillance and violence. Culturalism institutionalized the erasure of political economic critique in the theorizing of the global Black condition, the disciplining of Black militancy, and the cultural specification of Black connectivity.

Culturalism supports the constitution and maintenance of Blackness as a category of economic exploitation and dispossession and racialized abjection in three fundamental ways. First, it reinscribes the Black on the margins of the state by accommodating Blackness in a way that maintains their subordination and subjection on cultural grounds. The foregrounding of the culture, behavior, and performance of Black people leaves the effects of inequality, increased poverty, unemployment, and the global mode of production on Black people largely undertheorized. Thus, on the one hand, deteriorating conditions of Black people globally are understood as innate cultural lack or pathology. On the other hand, it is assumed that Black empowerment and equality can be achieved in the struggle over cultural representation. Both of these positions reproduce cultural specifications of Blackness that negate the role of state and capitalist structures in its production and maintenance. Second, Culturalism asserts a particular outlook, behavior, and set of goals for Black people,[28] and those who deviate from these norms that are ostensibly shared by the entire group are cast out. Thus, Culturalism is the technology through which the Black who subscribes to statist pedagogy niggerizes the radical Blacks who present a fundamental threat to the organization of global and statist structures on the basis of racialized capitalist exploitation. In other words, Culturalism provides a rationalization for the marginalization of those who occupy the constitutive outside of the state because they have been construed as seditious, subversive, unruly, and dangerous. In this way, Culturalism is consonant with technologies of state repression and subjection. Third, Culturalism has the dual function of erasing political economy as a means of understanding and critiquing the Black condition and of specifying Black articulations of freedom and equality in terms of culture.[29] Because it frames connections among African descendants in terms of abstract culture; asserts Black modernity and claims to equality on cultural grounds; and constructs culture and representation as the domain of struggle, it has resulted in the divorce of African Diaspora Theory from the Black radical tradition.

The Black Radical Tradition

In his seminal work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson defines the Black radical tradition as:

a collective accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle. In the daily encounters and petty resistances to domination, slaves had acquired a sense of the calculus of oppression as well as its overt organization and instrumentation. These experiences lent themselves to a means of preparation for more epic resistance movements. … As [it] was distilled from the racial antagonisms which were arrayed along a continuum … the tradition was transformed into a radical force. And in its most militant manifestation … the purpose of the struggles informed by the tradition became the overthrow of the whole race-based system. … It was a new vision centered on a theory of the cultural corruption of race. And thus the reach and cross-fertilization of the tradition became evident in the anticolonial and revolutionary struggles of Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. As a culture of liberation, the struggle crossed the familiar bounds of social and historical narrative … [and] has effused in myriad forms and locations.[30]

According to James Baldwin, it is the “force which set itself in opposition to that force which uses people as things and which grinds down men and women and children, not only in the ghetto, into an unrecognizable powder.”[31] The concept of “Black radical becoming” offers nuance to the Black radical tradition: “black radical becoming builds on the knowledge created and developed in sites of imposed racial marginality … [it] offers a blueprint of political consciousness and organizing that is potentially able to draw on the cognitive advantages the experiences of blackness generate … [it] is equipped to critically challenge the various hierarchies of social class, gender, color, sexuality, and nationality … ”[32] In effect, that Black radical tradition can be understood as the internationalist and leftist articulation of anticolonialist, anticapitalist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist conjunctures that have variously been targeted by statist and imperial authorities as communism, socialism, extremism, authoritarianism, and terrorism. Such attacks are used to rationalize the use of extraordinary force, violence, and exclusion. Black radical praxis aims to dismantle structures of domination that sustain racialized dispossession and exploitation, and to imagine and bring into being liberatory possibilities for all oppressed people. Moreover, the Black radical tradition traverses regimes of coloniality[33] to reveal the temporal and spatial linkages of African descendants wherever they are located. The role of women in theorizing gender, revealing interlocking forms of exploitation, mobilizing on behalf of the working class, and challenging respectability politics has been essential to the Black radical tradition. As Erik McDuffie argues, Black radical women supported socialist revolution over bourgeois racial uplift because,

adherence to middle-class notions of respectability did not protect black women from rape, violence, denigrating cultural representations, disenfranchisement, and economic exploitation … heteronormative, middle-class constructions and practices of sexuality actually inhibited black women’s and men’s freedom … [and] a socialist revolution that was attentive to dismantling racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism simultaneously was essential to black women’s liberation.[34]

One of the most notable—and most overlooked—contributions of the Black radical tradition is the analysis of the structural condition of Black women—that of triple exploitation, or superexploitation. An early delineation of this position can be found in an article by Marvel Cooke[35] and Ella Baker entitled, “The Bronx Slave Market,” in which the particular exploitation of Black domestic workers is interrogated. Because these subjects were female, Black, impoverished, and especially victimized by the ravages of the Great Depression, they were forced not only to auction their labor, but also to subject themselves to the indignity brought on by white housewives who paid them a “slave wage” of between fifteen and thirty cents an hour. Cooke and Baker write, “[T]he crash of 1929 brought to the domestic labor market a new employer class. The lower middle-class housewife, who, having dreamed of the luxury of a maid, found opportunity staring her in the face in the form of Negro women pressed to the wall by poverty, starvation, and discrimination.”[36] As such the conditions of Black abjection and extreme poverty were exacerbated by the reality of gender.[37]

For Claudia Jones,[38] the historical significance of the category “Black woman” was its relationship to the means of production, the labor market, and the social relations that resulted from superexploitation. In 1949, Jones published an article entitled, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women!” In it, she argued that Black women’s problems should be prioritized because this group of persons was the most militant and therefore the most essential to ending exploitation. She wrote, “The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women undertake action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced.”[39] This was because Black women were oppressed as women, as Negroes, and as workers, and therefore represented the most actively exploited population.[40] Though the Black woman was constituted by all forms of subjection, race was the primary mode through which superexploitation was experienced:

… the Negro question in the United States is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent that we fight all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro people and fight for full equality of the Negro people, can women as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights. For the progressive women’s movement, the Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to this heightened political consciousness.[41]

Jones asserted that Blackness caused the Negro woman’s overrepresentation in the labor market; relegation to the lowest-paying jobs; exclusion from all but the most menial fields of work; and confinement to wages lower than all men and white women. As the most devalued of the races and sexes, Black women were portrayed as “backward, inferior, and the natural slaves of others.”[42] Jones contended that Black women’s responsibility as partial or sole breadwinner, along with their treatment in the labor market, explains their active participation in the social, political, and economic life of the Black community; to exclude or relegate their role and experience was to reproduce the objective conditions of Black marginalization inasmuch as Black women were “the real active forces—the organizers and the workers.”[43] Furthermore, the failure of progressive unions to organize Black domestic workers, who were unprotected by social and labor legislation, or to support the Domestic Workers Union, continued the subjection of the most vulnerable groups of workers to exploitation and chauvinism.[44] Jones’s analysis confirms that of Esther V. Cooper, who argued in her 1940 M.A. thesis that the plight of Black women domestics could be solved through union organizing, and the argument that they were “unorganizable” was based on false, racist assumptions that continued the social stigma and vulnerability of this class of workers.[45] The unequal relationship between Black domestic workers and white workers of both genders perpetuated and normalized hierarchical relationships, and precluded organization for equality across race, class, and gender lines. Thus, to be “Black” and “woman” was to be subjected to structures of domination through technologies of racialization, marginalization, relegation, sexualized oppression, neglect, social exclusion, and super- exploitation. This relationship produced a form of militancy and radicalism that was unique to Black women, and that, if mobilized, contained the real threat of overthrowing capitalist relations of production.[46]

The “Horne Thesis,” Civil Rights, and Cold War Liberalism

World War II heightened the sense of connection and common history among African descendants because, as an international conflict, it provided opportunities for mutual contact: “Wartime events produced ferment among darker peoples everywhere; black men in America experienced a heightened sense of race consciousness and felt a surge of racial kinship with other colored peoples. As the war shattered the myths of white invincibility and white superiority, American negroes and other colored peoples acquired a new feeling of racial self-confidence and solidarity.”[47] This expanded sense of racial community among Black leaders and intellectuals was occurring during a period of growing strategic importance of Black spaces, including Africa and the Caribbean, to the United States in the early period of the Cold War. Thus, Black radical intellectuals, activists, and leaders—whether residing in the United States or positioned in the Global South—whose calls for equality and decolonization were grounded in radical internationalism, anti-imperialism, and antiracism were intentionally misconstrued as communist-leaning and treated as vehemently anti-American. Anticommunism became a technology for policing assertions of freedom, demands for economic justice, and critiques of the materialities of the Black condition globally that challenged American statist practice. The trifecta of the Smith Act, the Walter McCarran Act, and the Internal Security Act, all of which built upon the Immigration Act of 1917,[48] created a chain of signification between the Black/Communist/radical, and the nigger/anti-American/non-citizen. The subversive potential of one could easily and seamlessly be mapped onto another to legitimate discipline and punishment. This wide regime of surveillance produced a turn toward the projects of Cold War Liberalism and Culturalism and away from the Black radical tradition.

Black Cold War Liberalism on the one hand, and civil rights legislation on the other, allowed the state to cover over its antiblackness vis-à-vis the Black radical through the maintenance of a narrative of racial progress. According to Manning Marable, “The Black liberals represented the tendency of the Negro petty bourgeoisie that was trained in the humanities and the liberal arts. These were lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, journalists, and writers. This class stratum bitterly opposed the imposition of racial segregation and demanded equal treatment under the law … ”[49] Black Liberals realized the pragmatic importance of amending overt white supremacy and the spatialization of race, and seized upon the opportunity to improve their condition within the pedagogy of the Cold War state. Concomitantly, their Black Culturalist counterparts seized on the opportunity to link civil rights in the United States with demands for self-determination in the Global South through theories of the African Diaspora that asserted Black cultural equality and modernity. Civil rights narratives were deployed to gain the “hearts and minds” of the decolonizing world and to challenge the Soviet Union’s criticism of U.S. racism. It conscripted Blacks into the Cold War project of the racial state while at the same time occluding its foundational role in the continued denial of human rights to Black radicals. In this way, Black Cold War Liberalism became peculiarly tinged with the anticommunist rhetoric of the U.S. state by focusing on racism’s stultifying effects on progress, modernity, the spread of democracy, and the opening of markets. These calls for civil rights and decolonization in no way accommodated demands for the fundamental redistribution of resources. Rather, its focus was shifted to the goal of integrating Blacks into the U.S. (imperialist) state, and integrating decolonizing nations into the U.S.-led capitalist world-economy. In this way, Black Cold War Liberalism articulated a project of equality that folded neatly into the Wilsonian brand of anticolonialism that was consistent with, and even necessitated, accommodation of Blacks into the regime of bourgeois juridical and political freedom, which left intact the socioeconomic inequalities of an oppressive American racial order. In direct contradistinction to Black radical visions of freedom and liberation, predicated on the eradication of capitalist exploitation and entrenched polarizations of wealth, the Cold War vision of freedom was contingent upon the global spread of markets.[50] The project for the end of Jim Crow and the colonial racial order was incorporated into the “search for security”[51] as the condition of Black freedom precisely because it was based on a Culturalist rejection of the radical agenda of challenging a social order of material exploitation and structural lack. The emphasis on symbolism, meritocracy, the cultural specification of rights, and “keeping up appearances” on the international stage was very much in line with the State’s shift to antiradical racial policy. This approach allowed “civil rights for [N]egroes” to become disentangled “in the popular mind from ‘Communist agitation,’”[52] while maintaining the foundational idea, through the repression of Communism/radicalism, that the Black was the enemy of the State. This “ideological vacuum”[53] shaped African Diaspora theorizing and its institutionalization in the American academy, which continues to suffer from the epistemic effect(s) of Culturalist imposition and the suppression of the Black radical tradition.

The “Horne Thesis”[54] provides a framework to interrogate the ways in which, to escape the violence of anticommunist/antiradical repression, Cold War Liberalism sacrificed the Black left and rejected Black thought and practice organized around structural critiques of capitalism and demands for the global redistribution of wealth.[55] It consists of three major contentions. The first is that white supremacy and anticommunism were the major forces shaping post-WWII life and politics in the United States, and this greatly impacted African descendants and colonized peoples.[56] The suppression of Black militancy had the effect of preserving white supremacist logic and protecting capitalism from challenge. Domestically, white racists used red-baiting as a means of contesting even the most liberal claims to civil rights and dignity by, for instance, characterizing integration as a Communist plot of equality between all races and mongrelization.[57] The U.S. State likewise mobilized anticommunism as a technology of white supremacy and antiblackness to eradicate any claims made by Black radicals. The disciplining of militant struggle had a particularly deleterious impact on the Black left, especially because their articulations of freedom—including equitable distribution of property, better conditions for labor, eradication of poverty, improvement in living conditions, and an end to race-based job discrimination—were deemed un-American and seditious. Black demands for the redistribution of resources and the improvement of material conditions were often construed as Soviet-backed subversion. In this way, white supremacy came to be sutured to anticommunism to defend capitalist property and privilege. In the process, Black freedom struggles came to be seen as a threat to national security.[58]

It follows, then, that the “red-tagging” of Negro protest by the U.S. Justice Department was meant to keep Black Americans on the narrow path of Cold War civil rights.[59]

This “close identification between antiblack and antired”[60] led Black Cold War liberals to abandon protest against political economic oppression to focus on the acquisition of bourgeois rights of juridical and political equality. To distance themselves from Communism, they accepted attacks on trade unions and labor by the U.S. State so that the focus could remain on issues of discrimination related to color and race.[61] Given the interdependence of the politics of decolonization and the politics of labor, the pragmatic focus on ending Jim Crow became a distraction from and hindrance to the larger goals of Black internationalism, especially the liberation of colonized and working peoples.[62] The betrayal of the left by Black Cold War Liberals helped to make antiradical suppression a global phenomenon. Decolonizing countries that sought equality in the world-system were required to assert their willingness and ability to adopt the culture of development, modernization, and anticommunism. This was notwithstanding the fact that their insertion into the global political economy as sovereign nations continued relations of unequal exchange, declining terms of trade, and neocolonialism.[63] Thus, the “ … ideological conformity of civil rights leaders indirectly helped to sustain anticommunism and rationalize continued political repression in the Third World as well as in the United States.”[64] Ultimately, in their complicity with American imperial capitalism, Black Liberal conception of liberation undermined radical movements domestically and internationally. It served to deny support from Black Americans for anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation movements that leaned toward socialism or Marxism. As Brenda Gayle Plummer notes, “Communism remains crucial in what Horne portrays as a kind of ‘linked fate,’ that is, his sense that U.S. government repression aimed specifically at communism was also intended to take down other progressive formations, especially strong trade unions and militant civil rights organizations.”[65] In effect, the entanglements of anticommunism, antilabor, white supremacy, and free market capitalism ensnared Black Liberals, through their support of the status quo, in a regime of antiradicalism and antiblackness that manifested itself in class, ideological, and material warfare in the United States and throughout the Black world.

Horne’s second contention is that insofar as Jim Crow and legal segregation posed a threat to Washington’s campaign to bring the emerging “Third World” into the liberal–democratic nexus, ending racism was a Cold War statist tactic to combat communism.[66] Dudziak concurs: “During the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period of substantial progress in the area of minority rights by the Court, Cold War ideology informed the broader discourse on civil rights in important and powerful ways.”[67] U.S. Embassy officials were concerned that domestic race discrimination would fuel propaganda about the U.S. race problem and encourage the anti-American and pro-Communist leanings of Third World nations—especially those with significant Black/African populations.[68] Thus ending Jim Crow, while serving the international imperialist Cold War interests of the United States, did not entail challenges to capitalist interests at home because it was organized on the ground of liberal rights and inclusion. It also did not pose a threat to the racialized economic order because it was inscribed in Culturalist historicist narratives. The “Cold War imperative,” then, was to make U.S. racial policy conform with the image of democracy and justice that it wanted to present to the decolonizing world.[69]

The importance of enacting legislation to U.S. foreign policy is manifested in the briefs for important anti-segregation cases, including Henderson v. United States and Shelley v. Kraemer. In these, they referenced statements from the United Nations (UN) and the Soviet Union to underscore the belief that the practices and policies of segregation were having a negative effect on the fight against Communism.[70] In the liberal imaginary, the argument rested on the claim that American racism, which mirrored colonial abuses, created the conditions for the spread of communism. This position was meant to negate radical militancy both at home and abroad. In fact, “ … U.S. Cold War foreign relations … played a major role in overthrowing militant anti-racist, anti-imperialist regimes, and replacing them with corrupt, authoritarian, neocolonial governments.”[71] Further, “Only in the mid-1950s when the Soviet Union began actively to compete for the allegiance of colonial peoples and independence appeared undeniable did the United States undertake a concerted effort to convince its European allies to accelerate economic and political developments in their empires. When independence arrived, the United States rushed to embrace the new nations.”[72] Liberal anticommunism ensured that U.S. tutelage would be imposed on the decolonizing world—especially geostrategically important African and Caribbean countries that were considered to be intrinsically backward and thus susceptible to Communist manipulation—to discipline them into the global market economy and thwart the Soviet threat. Moreover, there was a clear economic imperative to ending civil rights abuses; according to the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, “[o]ne of the principal economic problems facing [the United States] and the rest of the world is achieving maximum production and continued prosperity,” and discrimination interfered with economic growth because it led to ‘[t]he loss of a huge, potential market for goods.’ Discrimination in the marketplace gave rise to interrelated losses in market and human terms.”[73] As such, the passing of legislation to end (overt) discrimination in the United States (i.e., symbolic change, not the actual enforcement of desegregation) was essential to the Cold War global strategy of managing the decolonizing world economically and politically. In aligning with Wilsonian anticolonialism, adhering to Cold War anticommunist liberalism,[74] and discrediting the Black radical agenda, Black Liberal organizations solidified their position as the only acceptable articulation of freedom, and tacitly supported the violent suppression of the Black left.

The third point of the “Horne Thesis” is that civil rights reforms and legal concessions were built upon the brutal suppression of African Americans on the left that pursued an “anti-racist, anti-imperialist, proletarian internationalist agenda.”[75] This move criminalized and delegitimized Black radical struggle. Horne writes,

After the war rulers decided to ease the horror of Jim Crow, partly because of the need to be able to charge Moscow with human rights violations. Yet this civil rights victory had to be carried out while ousting black Communists like [Ben] Davis from previously held positions of influence among African-Americans. This opening of democratic space for blacks carried the possibility of creating more room for Communists, trade unions, and so on. The trick was to open democratic space for blacks while closing it down for their traditional allies—in other words, black liberation/red scare. Thus, Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny came in 1954 in the midst of the Cold War and the Red Scare.[76]

For Black Cold War Liberals, “after 1947 full American nationalism apparently promised greater immediate rewards than racial internationalism.”[77] The concessions made to civil rights reformists were made possible through the convergence of Black domestic and white foreign policy interests. Mary Dudziak writes, “ … the consensus against [segregation] in the 1950s was the result of a convergence of interests on the part of whites and blacks, and that white interests in abandoning segregation were in part a response to foreign policy concerns and an effort to suppress the potential of black radicalism at home … without a convergence of white and black interests in this manner, Brown would never have occurred.”[78] In other words, desegregation was used as a means to seduce the Third World into aligning with the United States against the USSR; to enframe civil rights as a nationalist, not internationalist, issue; and to crush Black militant struggle that challenged the validity of the latter. By ruling that segregation was unconstitutional and therefore un-American and fundamentally incompatible with the most industrialized country in the world, the United States could validate the claims of civil rights activists that racism was backward, anachronistic, and unjust. Liberal antiracism became incorporated into the official narrative through statist pedagogy.

The difference between liberal accommodation and retaliation against radicals was evident in the different responses of the United States to two petitions filed at the UN. One, filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1947 was entitled, An Appeal to the World; and the other, filed in 1951 by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC)[79] was entitled, We Charge Genocide. The NAACP petition was filed under the USSR-initiated Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. Even though the petition was filed under a Soviet initiated sub-committee, there was no retaliation or backlash from the U.S. administration against the NAACP. This is notwithstanding its rejection by the United Nations. The U.S. response was starkly and stridently different in the case of the petition filed by the CRC under the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It was constituted as a radical rejection of American hegemony on the grounds of its inherent racism: “‘history has shown that the racist theory of the government of the U.S.A. is not the private affair of Americans, but the concern of mankind everywhere.’”[80] There was immediate retaliation against the CRC. The Justice Department demanded that William Patterson, a Communist and the primary architect of the petition, surrender his passport. Dudziak argues that, “The strongly negative domestic reaction to the Civil Rights Congress petition had much to do with the fact that the organization was considered to be left-wing, and was on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Consequently, its motives from anticommunism in the federal government … ”[81] The State’s response was rationalized through the threat of anticommunism that justified and demanded the deployment of its multifarious techniques of domination and disciplining, including surveillance, the curtailment of movement, the moderating of discourses of freedom, and even the use of physical violence.

The repression of Black radicalism through surveillance and punishment by “ … wiretapping, infiltrators, political jailings, long periods underground, and other harassments … ”[82] forced Black Liberal organizations, such as the NAACP, to separate themselves from their counterparts and to reject their militant agenda. They signaled such rejection by casting their platform in anticommunist terms. Dudziak writes, “A need to publicly distance the organization from the Communist party may have been considered to be politically necessary in light of the fact that many prominent blacks, including some NAACP members, joined the Party or espoused ideas associated with the Party during the 1930s.”[83] In their about-faces they not only discredited Communism, but also began to cast democracy—operating as a metonym for U.S. leadership—as the only hope for Black people to bring an end to racism and improve their conditions. The historicism of Black Culturalist thought was appended to American liberalism, which allowed official acknowledgement of U.S. racism while offering up the democratic process as the means to implement social change. Democratic order and gradualism—the antithesis of Communism—was put forth as the only means of social development and improvement of the Black condition. Communism came to be constructed as fundamentally incompatible with Black liberation. It had to be defeated and eliminated. Radical challenges to the U.S. state were construed as deluded, misguided, and antithetical to (Black) progress. As such, their containment and repression was justified.

By distancing and distinguishing themselves from those deemed “subversive” and “anti-American,” Black Culturalists and Cold War Liberals tacitly leveraged the Black radical tradition, political economy analysis, and challenges to capitalism to gain recognition, access, and liberal inclusion. This became the basis for their reinscription into a Euro-American civilizing discourse in which culture became the marker of modern subjectivity. Black leaders, activists, and intellectuals that were accommodated by the Cold War regime became complicit with the deployment of violence against Black radicals. Epistemologically and politically, Culturalism and Cold War Liberalism became hegemonic in the production of knowledge about Blackness and in articulations of the project of Black liberation. They were inhered in what Sylvia Wynter calls “ … the academic refusal to question the presuppositions of the egalitarian creed of the United States.”[84] Equality was asserted on cultural grounds that did not fundamentally challenge the material realities of the state, and political economy and radical critiques of racial capitalism were marginalized and invalidated. Black Culturalists and Cold War Liberals sought to contest the construction of the Black as morally, ethically, and culturally inferior and foreclosed from contribution to humanity. This limited the possibility for critical engagement with political economy and the fundamental and essential role it has occupied in the subjection and abjection of the Black. Moreover, intellectuals and activists that sought to fundamentally challenge capitalist exploitation and racism through a critique of political economy were (mis)represented as Communists, thereby subjecting them to investigation, deportation, incarceration, and the forfeiture of their civil liberties. The possibility for rights and recognition came to be pinned to a certain type of Black deemed fit to receive them. The Black population that fell outside of the conjuncture of Culturalism and Cold War Liberalism became niggerized and left open to the continued deployment of violence and to the forces of erasure and indignity for falling outside of the domains of “the good American” and respectability.

On Bad Faith and Niggerization, or Culturalism and the Black Ideal Subject

In arguing that the Cold War created the conditions for the inscription of African Diaspora Theory in Culturalism, my intention is not to negate the long history of Black cultural production and its impact on Black freedom dreams, or to deny the agency of Black intellectuals in identifying the potential of Black culture to create and imagine a better humanity for African descendant folk. Rather, my attempt is to explain how the impositions of Cold War surveillance and McCarthyism transformed the radical possibilities of culture through its repression of Black radical thought. Thus there is a fundamental distinction between culture, objectively speaking, and Culturalism. The latter is the pedagogy of Blackness inhered in and transformed by Cold War distortion in ways that conscripted culture into the service of the liberal capitalist state as a technology of violent erasure and intellectual apartheid. The institutionalization of anticommunism in the U.S. academy can be considered a regime of meaning-making and world-making meant to criminalize, marginalize, and discredit radical intellectual thought that moves beyond and/or contests the framework of Cold War liberalism. In this discourse, forms of dissent or critique of the state become constructed as anti-American, deviant, and/or communist-inspired. The bad faith of anticommunism builds upon a specific form of antiblackness aimed at the Black radical subject by demanding allegiance to the Cold War project in which he is always-already suspect. As mentioned previously, the failure of the Black radical to comply legitimizes subjugation and exclusion, erasure of history and “deeds,” and extreme repression: “As long as the justice of the status quo is presumed, any response that portends real change will take the form of violence.”[85] Anticommunism is fundamentally rooted in bad faith because of its denial of both Black radical history, and the role of Black radicalism in History.[86] As outsider to both the state and state-sanctioned forms of Blackness, the Black radical is “deemed [a] suspicious, vile, unclean, infestation of the (white) social body,”[87] while Culturalism is deployed to construct the ideal subject for liberal notions of freedom (e.g., the end of segregation, blatant/overt racism, and disenfranchisement).

Cold War ideology and surveillance have had a profound determinative effect on the types of scholarship produced in the field of African Diaspora Studies. Culturalism became the only viable (state-sanctioned) means of critiquing racism, colonialism, and imperialism in ways that were peculiarly compatible with U.S. market imperatives. At issue here is the anticommunist foundation of Culturalism, and the ways in which the latter becomes both product and process of knowing, in the Horkheimerian sense.[88] Anticommunism, as a metonym for antilabor, antiradicalism, pro-market capitalism, pro–Cold War United States, and antiinternationalism, leaves only the realm of the cultural as a viable and safe site for mobilization. If anticommunism can be characterized as “a type of subjectivity that forms patterns of perceptual attentiveness and supplies belief-influencing premises that result in a distorted or faulty account of reality,”[89] then its mobilization against Black radicalism by Black Cold War Liberals and their Culturalist counterparts can be postulated as a willful not-knowingness. As an epistemology of ignorance, Culturalism systematically expunges from scholarly engagement both the role of structural domination and the reality of coloniality in the constitution, maintenance, oppression, and dispossession of the Black, and the radical intellectuals that reveal these connections. It contains a scotoma.

Black Culturalist rejection of the Black radical tradition in favor of a doxastic commitment to the colonial and imperial ambitions of the United States led them to see the world wrongly, “through substantive epistemic practices”[90] of denial. In this manner, they willfully (if not pragmatically) marginalized Black radical thought to the detriment of labor, internationalism, and antisystemic articulations of freedom. The alignment of Culturalism with the state’s myth of the ultimate subversive, the Black communist/radical, creates the conditions for the disciplining of forms of Blackness deemed deviant, insofar as “‘[t]he other black’ must be punished at all costs because he carries in his gaze a powerful truth.”[91] This “powerful truth” is explained by Lewis Gordon thus: “from the standpoint of antiblack racism there is no difference between any of the following dyads—blacks versus a black, the black versus a black, blacks versus this black. In existential phenomenological language, this means that blacks are ‘overdetermined.’”[92] The legitimacy of Culturalism is fortified by severing its state-sanctioned claims from articulations of Blackness deemed hostile, undesirable, and potentially destabilizing. It is thereby epistemologically complicit with the Cold War state’s sanctioning of only the “ideal Black,” and with the continuing regime of antiblackness inhered in the elision of antiradicalism and anticommunism.[93] The ideal Black subject is created through the establishment of a stark distinction and distance between itself and the Black radical, foreclosing the possibility of mutual recognition on the one hand, and on the other hand, imposing the technologies of violent objectification employed by the Cold War state upon the radical/nigger.[94] As Gordon writes, If “the black who unleashes the word ‘nigger’ against another Black has adopted an antiblack standpoint on human reality,”[95] then niggerizing Black radicals is unquestioningly a manifestation of antiblackness. To be “pro ‘nigger’” coincides perfectly with being pro-communist—or, un-American, subversive, threatening, and therefore a necessary object of the discipline of the state. This act of niggerizing collapses antiblackness into anticommunism by both abjecting the Black radical subject from the Cold War state, and entrapping the possibilities of Blackness in the narrow confines of cultural specification to avoid its own process of niggerization. In the Cold War Culturalist framework in which anticommunism cannot be delinked from antiblackness, to be a nigger is to be Black and radical. African Diaspora Theory, as a Culturalist project, becomes aligned with anticommunism, Cold War Liberalism, and a regime of antiblackness built upon the body of the Black radical that calcifies Black performance and cultural production as the only acceptable modes of antiracist, anti-imperialist, and anticolonial critique.

Bad faith is foundational to the recruitment of the ideal Black subject because it demands “perfect evidence” for proof of humanity. As the ideal Black subject, the Black Cold War Culturalist—simultaneously a creation of and participant in bad faith—has only the “adequate” evidence of cultural production to offer, falling short of the requirement of perfection. Thus, the recognition of humanity is never fully realized. The evidence offered requires a hypervisiblity that is easily managed by and inscribed in the nation-state (through surveillance, co-optation, management, and discipline), thus inaugurating a new means of controlling the Black that replaces the legal framework of Jim Crow without substantially displacing the pedagogy of the racial state. According to this pedagogy, the ideal Black subject must constantly reveal itself to assert its humanity, and this ultimately requires that Black radical subjectivity be rendered invisible through epistemic erasure and complicity with physical violence enacted against radical bodies. The collusion of Black Culturalists with the Cold War state in the disciplining of the Black radical results in a doubling of the latter’s subversive threat: because s/he is foreclosed from the nation-state, Black radical subjectivity can only be fully realized in internationalist terms. As such, s/he constitutes a threat to both the anticommunist project of whiteness and the Culturalist/Liberal construction of Blackness, understood in relation to the U.S. nation. Domestically, Black radicalism threatened the Cold War order by demanding an end to racialized inequality through redistribution and human rights as opposed to liberal accommodation and recognition. Internationally, it jeopardized U.S foreign policy because of its potential to expose the omnipresence of the U.S. racial state to those emerging from the strictures of European colonialism whose loyalty the United States is trying to gain. Consequently, the Black radical subject is transformed into a derelict, or put another way, niggerized.

The Black Culturalist, in aligning with U.S. Cold War imperatives, becomes, “the perpetrator and the victim of a delusion” because, while exempted from direct force and violence, his/her complicity with this project of erasure, violence, and antiblackness against the radical subject contributes to his/her own precariousness by leaving intact class inequalities, the unequal distribution of resources, and the nationalist frame of reference. The object of critique on the national level then becomes Jim Crow racism and the exclusion of Blacks from the entitlements of full citizenship, argued in cultural terms. Beyond the United States, the same logics used to critique Jim Crow are applied to colonialism. The argument is predicated on the idea that the impositions of Jim Crow and direct colonial administration preclude the development of civilized culture and the “right attitude” among African descendants in the United States and in the diaspora, and therefore impede progress, understood as economic development, modernization, and the opening of markets. The enrapture of Culturalism results in the affirmation of Black humanity through various cultural practices that in no way challenge the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, the racial axial division of labor, or the entrenchment of the wealth gap within and between nations. This is not withstanding the reality that the latter perpetuate the devaluation and dispossession (i.e., the abjection) of the Black. Culturalism is thus a project of bad faith.

Conclusion: Against Culturalism

Culturalism, as a project of codifying Blackness in the pedagogy of the state, is largely antithetical to liberatory thought and practice. However, when articulated to the materialities of Black abjection, culture can provide epistemic challenges to capitalism. Scholarship of this kind can be found in Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Initially published six years before The Black Atlantic, it persuasively argues that the racial and cultural attitudes of then-contemporary Great Britain reflect the politics of class and nation over the last twenty years. The imagining of the United Kingdom as a white nation, according to Gilroy, produced antiblackness as an historical agent constituted by the entanglements of power, exclusion, and material deprivation. Additionally, the rise of identity politics and multicultural discourse fragmented and complicated Blackness as a political position.[96] Another such work is Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro, in which the author grounds the larger process of cultural production during the Harlem Renaissance in broader political economic and historical concerns. These include the post– World War I move to the left and the concomitant rise in popularity of class and economic analysis and radical politics; and the red scare of 1919, the rise of Eugenics, and its impact on New Negro cultural nationalism.[97] Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals, especially the section entitled, “Black Prophets,” is an additional exemplary work. Anthony Bogues argues that Africana political discourse, social theory, cultural production, and radical politics traverse the separation of action and theory, and history and lived experience. The narrative practices of “heretics” and “prophets,” including Bob Marley, C.L.R. James, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. DuBois not only challenge “the accepted historical narratives and representations of who the colonized people are,” but also construct an intellectual tradition in the process.[98]

Nonetheless, Culturalism has become an enduring feature of African Diaspora scholarship in which the spectacle of Black cultural production intersects with the spectacle of antiradical discipline. By positioning itself as the only acceptable articulation of Blackness and liberation, Culturalism renders invisible radical critiques of the conjunctures of capitalism, imperialism, and racialization that are foundational to regimes of coloniality. It is a form of epistemic injustice, instantiated in and through violence against the Black radical, that has given its adherents both testimonial and hermeneutic authority. Testimonial authority has been exercised through the distribution of credibility to articulations of Blackness that do not contest the reinscription of racialized inequality and market imperatives, and through the denial of credibility to antisystemic critiques of any kind. Hermeneutic authority has encoded Culturalism as the only acceptable challenge to racist governmentality, thereby foreclosing the possibility of radical critiques of the status quo. What has been produced is a culturalized, abstracted, and “anti-essentialist” conceptualization of connection, disjuncture, commonality, and difference among African descendants, which is insufficient for critical engagement with the material conditions of the Black subaltern. The bad faith of Cold War Culturalism has resulted in scotomas in radical, structural solutions to Black abjection and dispossession. The latter must be overcome if African Diaspora Theory aims to resurrect the radical foundations of Black critique and to develop the capacity for description, prescription, and correction.