Joyful Noise in Social Death: An Intergenerational Meditation

The term “critical Black studies” is now used by junior scholars and while reading Cherod Johnson’s graduate student paper, the term “critical Black studies” once again leaped off the page. As a senior scholar schooled in Black Women’s History, I immediately thought hasn’t Black Studies always been critical? Inspired by so many thinkers who loved and appreciated what W.E.B. DuBois called “unforgivable blackness, I noted how Black Studies has deep roots in critically narrating the everyday lives and “freedom dreams" of black people I questioned whether scholars have moved so far away from the core of Black Studies that we are no longer producing transformative work which explains the need for the word "critical"? Or, is something else happening here? The competitive need to keep pace with other disciplines—particularly Ethnic Studies and American Studies—a form of old fashion one-upmanship might be driving the need to name everything “critical,” or even to describe one’s work as “critical.” In the intergenerational spirit of trying to figure out where we are as a discipline, I have asked Cherod to join me in thinking about the “critical” mood in this moment.

Our essay is a collaborative meditation on what is at stake in the “critical.” We grapple with what appears to be a misleading assessment of the courageous thinkers who inspired Black Studies. Equally significant, this essay investigates “critical” debates and interventions in the field of Black Studies to determine whether there is an essential object to the critical or whether the critical is a proclamation crafted in opposition to an institution and a discourse.

We begin by engaging the early years of Black Studies scholarship as a way to situate the presumed necessity for the word “critical.” We ask, is the critical a way to push back against work that is now described as vindication history? Here we can place J.A. Rogers at the center. The scattered people of the African Diaspora could take pride in their heritage because Rogers gave us evidence of our greatness beyond the shores of America. As historian Thabiti Asukile explains, “Rogers’ analyses of the transatlantic slave trade support the notion that African history had to be negated in order to socially construct a new type of African in the New World.

Carter G. Woodson might also be of concern for some. Although he critically exposed our Miseducation, he also gave Black educators tools to inspire racial pride in segregated classrooms. Jarvis Givens points out that between 1926 and 1950, “Woodson and African American teachers strived to reimagine the experience of Black schooling altogether in their staging of Negro History Weeks. It became a medium to align curricular content with African Americans’ political desires and their critiques of the American school. Both Rogers and Woodson told us we were “better than the white man” long before Malcolm X. And while the stacking of facts at times covered up the pain and trauma of being Black in America, it was not their goal to ignore the power of hegemonic culture or to take the edge off of violent, racist laws. Quite the contrary, they told Black people don’t be afraid to embrace your identity in the belly of the beast, with racial pride serving as a shield to combat everyday racism.

The formative years are also rooted in data and description. Many scholars now profess that their work is “critical” as a way to underscore that it goes beyond the narrative form. Yet some of the most canonical scholarship that we constantly dip back into, and become intellectually refreshed by, is descriptive. Zora Neale Hurston described “Eatonville,” Ida B. Wells Barnette journaled the “red record” and St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton Jr. depicted the “Black Metropolis.” Capturing a time and place, of smells and sound; of heartache and possibilities; requires intellectual prowess. At its best, description is rich storytelling and one of the highest forms of critical analysis.

Maybe "critical" is a way to separate one’s work from the ever-growing pack of Black Studies scholars. Today one can earn a Ph.D. in Black Studies, African American Studies, and African Diaspora Studies at 17 universities in the United States. Additionally, almost every social science and humanities discipline now includes a specialization or sub-field called Black Studies. How does one push beyond all of these cohorts and become noticed? For some, the “critical” has become an onslaught critique of others’ work, exclusively chipping away without the end goal of passionately producing something else for us to think with. Sadly, graduate seminars are the breeding grounds for much of this. Often separating yourself in the classroom or on the job market involves not only being able to describe your work but also being able to lessen the value of scholarly arguments that are crucial to your intervention by way of critique. Clearly, the best kind of classroom space is when students are encouraged to push their peers into new realms by way of both description and critique.

As one puts closure on their Ph.D., institutional pressures mount and push some to quickly produce scholarship that tends to be more fleeting and lacks an intellectual suppleness. For graduate students, the academic pressure to break new disciplinary ground is often stifled by normative time. These circumstances have pushed more scholars to critique an archive rather than fully engage with it. Moreover, the misuse of autobiography as a means to supplement a thin archive has produced mixed possibilities. For this reason, it behooves us to ground our analysis in something other than opinion or personal experience. Autobiography too has its limits. In fact, it might be the most complex form of fiction.

All of the recent push back against the fiction of the "archive" and its hegemonic power is warranted. Marisa Fuentes’, Dispossessed Lives, Sarah Haley’s, No Mercy Here both “critique” and imaginatively complicate archival possibilities. Fuentes employs maps and first-hand accounts from the eighteenth century to “not re-inscribe the violence of the archive and erase the enslaved women who were a significant presence” in Bridgetown, Barbados Haley engages legal documents, police reports, medical records, and personal letters to show how the carceral regime of the South produced Black women’s subjectivity as criminally deviant For Fuentes and Haley, an interdisciplinary approach to writing about Black women’s history is an attempt to push against the fictions of the colonial archive and the Jim Crow carceral state.

There are so many other academic methods—ethnographic, sociological—for example, that are not always as fraught with hegemonic power and narrative fiction. This is why the interdisciplinary nature of Black Studies is so important to knowledge building. This is also why scholars intentionally choose Black Studies over other disciplines. Unlike other fields, to choose Black Studies is possessing the luxury of not having to choose one method, or one archive, or one theory, it’s about cross-fertilization and unbounded interdisciplinary possibilities. Our point here is to underscore why scholars of multiple ilks find an intellectual home in Black Studies and why Black Studies is the site where critical visions and bold ideas have emerged. We now turn to the canonical debates and cultural interventions in Black Studies to tease out the stakes of the “critical.” When taking an in-house survey (UC Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies) on “critical” Black Studies our colleagues all referenced the work of insightful thinkers—Cedric Robinson, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, and Fred Moten, for example. We so love and appreciate the intellectual power of these scholars and this list made us meditate more on the form and the framing of their work. Is it about a particular interdisciplinarity and the play with theories and concepts that delineate the past from the contemporary? We don’t think so because of Orlando Patterson, VeVe Clark, Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, June Jordan, E. Franklin Frazier, and James Baldwin who also provide a rich conceptual archive to mine.

Moreover, what makes Robinson, Spillers, Hartman, Wynter, and Moten so interesting is that their work is anchored by canonical Black Studies thinking. They all generously cite canonical work. And, in the case of Wynter, she was so brilliantly far ahead of us in terms of thinking about the human, she is both canonical and ’contemporary.’

The critique of the Human is indebted to Sylvia Wynter. She argues there is no corrective to the Human; instead, Wynter’s analysis is a scandalizing critique of western Man as a violent apparatus born out from the violence of coloniality and racialization. In a way, Wynter’s critical analysis awakens us to the very idea that any reworking of the human through gender and race should do so suspiciously while noting how the Human is indistinguishable from the violence of coloniality and racialized bondage. As Wynter writes, “while the Indians were portrayed as the very acme of the savage, irrational Other, the Negroes were assimilated to the former’s category, represented as its most extreme form and as the ostensible missing link between rational humans and irrational animals. Here, the “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being” article brings into view a volatile critique of and resistance to the ’brutal calculus’ of captivity and land extraction as (dis)possession, as historically espoused by the figure of western Man. It is because of Wynter’s analysis that we are able to theorize the epistemic violence of anti-black racism.

Antagonism to the normative order of violence by the western Man has always been crucial for the project of Black Studies. During the formative years of Black Studies critiques of white supremacy, hegemony, and crippling capitalism reigned supreme, however. When Cedric Robinson published Black Marxism in 1983 he pulled together canonical Black Studies scholars to weigh in on the ways that race is embedded in a capitalistic framework. Furthering the notion of racial capitalism, Robinson critiqued Karl Marx’s white modern bourgeois subject by “critically” engaging in close readings offered by W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright. Robinson, DuBois, James, and Wright’s conceptual theories of race and racialization offer a critique of the hegemonic status quo Being inside of racial capitalism, DuBois, James, and Wright were able to critique western civilization by exhausting the terms of the present world, which made possible other modes of knowing and naming race and Blackness. In the end, Robinson’s conceptual apparatus of racial capitalism made evident how critiques of capitalism devoid of an analysis of race are, by definition, politically and morally insufficient.

Today the violent erasure of racialized slavery and the primitive accumulation of black suffering are endemic to ’critical’ scholarship. In other words, the chronological distance from the legal institution of slavery, and the refusal of non-black people to recognize its lingering power in the twenty-first century has sharpened our grammar and conceptual tools in the rethinking of temporality. Intersectionality, for example, has helped us to deepen our structural analysis of inequality. Black women writing about intersectionality recognize that political economy cannot be separated or unhinged from cultural production and humanistic values. Simultaneously, it is imperative to recognize that political economy hasn’t fully come to terms with intersectionality as a paradigm that is grounded in power differentials.

One of the most exciting formulations of temporality is Saidiya Hartman’s “afterlife of slavery.” It is, by many accounts, a critique of time and modernity’s periodization. The afterlife of slavery is not only historically descriptive of the myriad ways in which the past invades the present, but it also complicates our capacity to contemporarily distinguish and definitively periodize the time of the now, particularly the time of modernity and “late” capitalism. “This is the afterlife of slavery,” Hartman writes, “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. As Hartman tells it, ’the afterlife of slavery’ is the subject inhabitation of Black people “still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. In other words, the diffusion of anti-black terror illuminates how the past is not past but has been reworked in the symbolic and material order to maintain racial domination. This afterlife signals a break from traditional narratives of historical progress and requires that we think collectively and anew in Black Studies about our methods and praxis, in the spirit of abolition.

The range of critical methods and strategies of narration in Black Studies have shaped other disciplines. Whether engaging Henry Louis Gates’s signifying monkey as a theory of the black vernacular tradition or Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectional lens to mapping subject position, Black Studies thinking swirls around and through the academy. Lately, Afro-pessimism has taken root. The “social life of social death” termed by Jared Sexton, who has taken serious Orlando Patterson’s notion of social death, pursues a line of scholarly inquiry that the social life of Blackness is inseparable from the question of social death. Sexton writes that “social death might be thought of as another name for slavery and an attempt to think about what it comprises, and social life, then, another name for freedom and an attempt to think about what it entails. Essentially, because social life and social death are entangled this presents a tension for scholars who might otherwise want to sever one from the other.

Stated another way, civil society’s dependence on black death and black suffering does not negate the social life of blackness–in other words, life itself depends upon the entanglement of the two. Given this distinction, the critical can be interpreted as a sharp analysis that exposes the structural conflict inherent in civil society or that which emerges in opposition to the constraint, as shown in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

It is here where Ula’s and Cherod’s generational embodiment shapes what informs their intellectual passions. At the same time, the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies allows for diverse conversations to meet or emerge in ways that would not otherwise happen in traditional disciplines. Cherod, writing about the ecology of nineteenth-century African American literature, is interested in how, under the harsh conditions of enslaved bondage, ‘the total climate’ of slavery brings into view the negative right of death as a compelling force in the life of the enslaved person More significantly, how critique as the negation of plantation life became “the captive’s central possibility for action, whether we think of … radical refusal of the terms of the social order or … acts that are sometimes called suicide or self-destruction. In Cherod’s reading of the nineteenth century, negation as a kind of negative freedom or “saving” force is an abolitionist appeal to an otherwise world that stands in a general antagonism to the normative order and violence of life itself. Also, as a young scholar coming of age in the time of blacklivesmatter, Cherod’s investment in death as a continual force in the everyday drives his political investment in how Black people come to terms with death. Ula, on the other hand, is not fighting to live but living for joy. Ula is reminded of what Frances M. Beal told us in 1969 that

We must begin to understand that a revolution entails not only the willingness to lay our lives on the firing line and get killed. In some ways, this is an easy commitment to make. To die for the revolution is a one-shot deal; to live for the revolution means taking on the more difficult commitment of changing our day-to-day life pattern

In the end, we agree that a joyful noise can happen inside and outside of social death. This is why the old folks say, “I’m laughing to keep from crying.” And, they also laughed when their feet were tickled by blades of fresh spring grass. A small reminder that life is precious and that joy comes in the morning. Certainly, there is room enough for all kinds of thinking in Black Studies because our field has always been a capacious interdiscipline.

So, if the new “critical” work is not actually isolated from the Black Studies past, why don’t we fully see the dialectic at play? This lack of sight raises a series of questions for us. Are we reading deeply? Do we repeat the well-worn assessments of others as opposed to reading for ourselves? Do we read beyond the first chapters or the legendary essays? Our queries are not to indict but rather to understand how we got here and what does this mean for Black Studies scholarship? Moreover, why does so much amazing work sit at the margins, lingering on the edge of academic power?

We fully understand that social media certainly has something to do with it. Most would agree that social media has changed the academy. Jessica Marie Johnson’s work at the intersection of the digital humanities and slavery studies is a stellar example of a Black digital practice of abolition that works to enhance the archive of the Black Studies project Unfortunately, Twitter has become a bully pulpit for some Black Studies scholars. Some are fabulously famous because of it. The impact of social media and the race to demonstrate being ahead of one’s intellectual peers has ignited a fast and furious grind that hovers around criticality. Sometimes the tweets remind one of an old school hip-hop battle, folks take sides as the ring leaders go back and forth with heated tweets. The debates are not about shifting paradigms or tackling systemic inequality in black life. It’s too often about meeting the marketplace of self-promotion. Fighting each other instead of the state!

In addition to the traditional takedown on social media that mirrors the Notorious B.I.G. saying, “I got more rhymes than the beach got sand” to all who would listen, a nuanced form of criticality is to claim being the first. “My book is the first that does this,” said the Black Studies scholar. No scholarly work is built in isolation. Skipping over canonical Black Studies thinkers, and thinly referencing scholarship that one’s work is in conversation with is an act of arrogance. Casting aside is an intentional effort of erasure, a double-down that banks on forgetfulness, and this is how one ensures being “the first.”

It would be unfair not to acknowledge the ways that social media has created a platform for critical ideas and social activism to flourish, as we’ve experienced with the recent hashtag of #sayhername and #blacklivesmatter. Recognizing social media as an evolving archive, rather than simply a platform for interrogating another’s ideas, is what we imagine as fruitful. This requires balancing social media as an archive with other forms of evidence. It’s important to ensure that social media is not trivialized, and can be used as an archive that has weight in the pursuit of social justice.

When we think of the work of John Henrik Clarke, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, St. Clair Drake, E. Franklin Frazier, Nell Painter, Beverly Guy Sheftall, Derrick Bell, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Cornel West, Kenneth and Mamie Clarke, William E. Cross, Lee D. Baker, Katherine Dunham, and James Baldwin, we are reminded of the social and intersectional component intrinsic to “critical” Black Studies. This scholarship has shaped Black Studies, and its themes touch and reflect profoundly upon black people’s lives. They deserve the honor of being cited and remembered.

We also recognize that it is difficult to discuss the critical in Black Studies outside of it being a militant critique of the institution. As Noliwe Rooks describes it, although it is well-known that the first Black Studies department arose from student protests at San Francisco State in 1969, it is less known that students “nonnegotiable” demands to foster racial and socio-economic justice on campus and beyond was interpreted by the administration as a sign of anarchy This perception has not gone away. Today Black Studies departments are embattled with a neoliberal society that has commodified Blackness. Everything is up for sale, everything is branded, in the hands of the big donors.

In conjunction with student protests at San Francisco State, students at the University of California, Berkeley had demanded a Third World Liberation College which put pressure on the university to fundamentally reorganize campus resources to prioritize the needs of minority students. The significance of this history is that the spirit and vision of a Third World College still “echoes” throughout the campus and in particular, in Barrows Hall, the home to Black Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. This echo is the spirit of freedom living on as “hair, skin, and bone,” as W.E.B Dubois once remarked In other words, these student protests were not just integrationist, or in effort of diversifying the academy, but a challenge to the very bureaucratic function of the university and larger society.

Engagements with Black Studies as an interdiscipline cannot be disconnected from its radical origins. This is why our classrooms are filled with students leading campus and community movements, and students who expect something more than traditional education. If we understand the ‘critical’ as not a break, nor a new fad, but instead as an act of commemoration, our thinking shifts to understanding the entanglement of the past and the present. This entanglement opens many different questions and arguments that defy temporality, thus the critical cannot be pinned down to a single definition. The pull and tug around the critical is a pull and tug around making space for voice and presence; to be seen and heard in an anti-Black world.