Cartographies of Blackness and Black Indigeneities

George J. Sefa Dei, Ezinwanne Odozor, Andrea Vásquez Jiménez, George J. Sefa Dei, Ezinwanne Odozor, Andrea Vásquez Jiménez

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781975501099
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Cartographies of Blackness and Black Indigeneities acknowledges the saliency of Blackness in contemporary social formations, insisting that how bodies are read is extremely important. The contributors to this volume elicit or produce both tangible and intangible social, political, material, spiritual and emotional effects and consequences on Black and African bodies, globally. It is a call to celebrate Blackness in all its complexities, including race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, spiritualities, and geographies. Understanding Blackness is to insist on Black and African political and cultural appreciation of the phenomenon outside of Euro-colonial attempts to regulate and define how Black and African bodies are perceived. This book intersperses discussions of Blackness with Black racial identity and cultural politics and the required responsibilities for the Global Black and African populations to build viable communities utilizing our differences—knowledges, cultures, politics, identities, histories—as strengths.

CHAPTER 4

Black Life: Theoretical Underpinnings

Marlon Simmons

Introduction

THOUGH BLACK COMMUNITIES have been in Canada for centuries, their experiences as citizens have been slowly becoming better. From being underpaid to unemployment, to credential devaluation, to perennial housing discrimination, Black communities continue to face substantial challenges integrating into the civic and economic life of Canada. What is needed are different ways of interpreting Canadian citizenry, which could inform their human rights, build transformative practices for educational policies, and critically inform leadership practices for Black youth as well as the broader context of Canadian communities. One of the foci here is to theoretically trace the untold social formations of Black life to understand how these different cultures engage intergenerational knowledge and cultural memory of the past and present to deal with the challenges of a globalized world in the context of Canada. I address the complex dynamics of how diverse Black communities come to situate their place of belonging within respective Canadian societies. The aim is with providing an alternative means of understanding how Black life experiences different forms of belonging through particular cultural understandings embedded within the African Diaspora. I conceptualize Black life through particular encoded discursive fields with historical specificities to colonization and plantation life that locate the socio-material on African peoples. In this discussion, I tend to the socio-materiality of Blackness by thinking through variant histories of Black life. Though these histories speak to the relational experiences of Black life, of movement—wittingly or unwittingly—the concern here is with how Black life becomes positioned within the nation-state and what sorts of becoming are made possible. These experiences cannot be denied historically. As such, the intention is with extricating Black ontologies as embodied within the land and Black life, to situate Black histories as unfolding within the nation-state and the ensuing text, rather than always already tangential.

Let me say a bit about how I am working to conceptualize these everyday moments experienced in Black life. I am interested in the variant modes and procedures of Black social formations in which Black peoples come to know and govern the self through particular identifications and popularized social media desires, which materialize in everyday performatives or ritualized practices. I am curious about how particular Black social formations come to accept these identifications as being performed through a constellation of histories as a continuity. My interest is with knowing how race and culture concomitantly produce performative desires that form the conditions of existence for Black life. I am thinking of Black life through innumerable material embodiments of time and space and socio-historic-cultural processes as interwoven by way of difference immanent to Black cultures as shaped through the uncertainty of Diasporic movement. I am writing to ease the tension of a historical, homogenous, singular, immutable read on Black life. Yet, as method, writing through the Diaspora presents complexities. With its shifting terrains, contoured historically through different sociocultural enactments, the Diaspora, as configured through the local and the global, materializes through uncertainty in ways in which Black life and its ensuing relationship with its social world speak to the infinitude of possibilities of what it means to be human (Mignolo, 2015; Walcott, 2003; Wynter, 2003). I am intrigued more so by the way in which Black life has become autonomous through the continuous absorption and withdrawal of local stories, traditional narratives, which inevitably come to propel the ordering of thought, the sociality, the peopling as imbued through the transferring of ideas as embodied within Diasporic relations.

Black Life

With Blackness, my foci involve understanding the ways in which meanings of Black life have been discursively and materially constituted and how such meanings are made anew in their contemporaneity. In so doing, and as a method of social inquiry, I draw from raw materials such as Blackness, race, relationships with the land, Indigeneity, nation-state governmentality as conditioned through colonial modernity, and immigration policies constitutive of the nation-building initiative in Canada. Black life gives us a place to think of historic specificities of expropriation of Indigenous lands, racism, Diaspora, White supremacy, African enslavement, and the project of settler nation-state. Through its anachronistic temporality as conditioned by way of colonial forays, Black life became organized, regulated, and recognized through the governing socio-material techniques of colonial power. Black life provides the social and material practices necessary for creating imaginative directions that can help with refashioning the historical work of writing difference and belonging. Such writing congeals through epistemological Diasporas, as embodied through African enslavement and made wholesome by quotidian events that are actually linked through time and place to current issues and a particular past.

We know Black life is deeply embedded within colonial enslavement of African peoples, that it concerns a way of thinking that orients itself through resistance, struggle, and social justice (Fanon, 1963). With Black life, I am thinking about the sociopolitical thought experienced among African peoples concerning the human condition of post-plantation life. In a sense, I am taking up Black life as an approach to understand how Diasporic African peoples worked through the imperial contours of the contested terrain of sovereignty. I am thinking of Black life as temporal, as an anachronistic interruption to colonial governance, which situates through space and time, liminal Diasporic sensibilities that integrate Black life by way of contrapuntal pedagogies. I am suggesting that writing and reading Black life involve Diasporic enactments, which holistically speak to the historical, cultural, and spirituality of African peoples. I would imagine then that Diaspora invites inclusivity amidst historical classifications of Euro-colonial modernity and Black life.

Of particular interest to Black life is the economic and social movement of peoples to Canada. Often enough this movement has been one dimensional, from archipelagos historically steeped in colonial manacles to harvesting territories that reap the materials of enslavement. This movement has also been enacted in ways that promulgated unbelonging for Blackness, as outside of what it means to be a citizen and engaging in civic participation as governed within the prescripts of a self-identifying democratic nation-state. Nested within this movement are troubles immanent to colonial-settler governance that saw educational systems, finance economies, and jobs being difficult terrains to navigate for Black peoples. Public sphere conversations concerning Black life have come under discursive surveillance (Browne, 2015), in which Black life comes to be articulated and socio-materially represented in ways that place their positionality as secondary within the history of the colonial nation-state. Indeed, the constitutive makeup of the nation-state is deeply entrenched within colonial violence; consequently, as the nation-state renews itself through imperial space and time, belonging for Black life continues to be positioned and marked through colonial inscriptions. With this in mind, I am seeking to write Black life beyond the parochial conduits that repeatedly shape Blackness through devalued forms of citizenry. In so doing, I want to have a conversation that speaks to the experience of Diasporic African peoples, in the context of being transnationally located. I want to trouble the ways in which these transhistorical experiences have been framed through particular theoretical frameworks. I am asking, “How might we begin to understand questions of what it means to belong for Black life when historically belonging becomes ontologically contrapuntal and co-terminously situated to the archetype human”; an understanding that dialectically speaks to the experience of belonging, through historical acts of movements. As a starting point, I want to consider how Black life, as located within the Americas emerging from Africa through Civil Rights encounters, comes into personhood through the unfreedoms of emancipation. In a sense, I am thinking about how Blackness comes to understand the variant terms and conditions of belonging through different articulations of the African Diaspora.

If, and as Hall (2007) reminds us, immanent to the self are histories of the past, then much of Black life involves working through the materiality of these narratives to get a sense of how synergies of the past and present come into discursive and material enactments in particular public spheres such as schools, job settings, community building, friendships, family relations, and just civic participation. Circumscribing these synergies of Black life are contingencies of globalization that mitigate Diasporic life. Understanding Black life in the context of self, difference, and sociocultural environments involves some mind work with specific questions cognizant of histories in the global context of coloniality and the attendant modernity. The study of Black life involves a host of methods and techniques, which have congealed into a discipline. Black life has become a place where scholars, students, activists, community, and family members can draw from to make sense of, or extend upon, the literature. With this approach Black life is less interested in being reduced to one fixed thing, but more so Black life is made durable through the different embodied practices and relational experiences.

You might ask, “What constitutes Black life in its distinctive forms? What are the ways in which the study of Black life becomes a field of knowledge, institutionalized and at the same time forming epistemological modes of inclusion and exclusion within academe?” After all, the study of Black life concerns understanding human practices, understanding human relations within the broader ecological sphere. What then are the ways in which the study of Black life diverges and converges from other schools of thought? And how do these diverging and converging pathways relate to the broader political relations of the world? These epistemic moments need not be neatly bound into some even compartmentalized moment as if human relations were evenly fashioned. Black life, like other socialites, has its own ontologies with specific characteristics and sensibilities as imbued through certain historical conditions. If one of our aims is with understanding how the relational experiences of Black life come to be consolidated through particular engagements with their broader, or let us say Diasporic, world, one could imagine, then, these narratives concern moments of resistance, survival, and self-determination as contingent to plantation struggles and embodied within Black life (McKittrick, 2006). I am suggesting Black life is contextually bound to the conditions in which it emerged. With the foci being material change, one of the aims is to make sense of how Black life comes into the means of this materiality when the starting point in a sense becomes the self.

For Black life to have to attend to the colonial, political, and economic organizing practices of employment involves deciphering public sphere institutional alignments, as well as designing particular ways of knowing that correlate to the past through public memory, which mitigates the present in its immediacy. I am asking, then, how does Black life, as interwoven with coloniality and Diasporic histories, come to share ways of living with heir own as well as with other communities (Simmons & Dei, 2012)? What are the ways in which Black life learns about the conditions in which it acquires its reality? If the concern, then, is about how Black life makes meaning of the conditions of its reality, then part of this project is with tracing what counts as knowledge when making intelligible the crystallization processes immanent to their ensuing sociocultural register.

Perhaps we should discuss some of the underlying assumptions regarding how we are thinking of Black life. What I am working through is the domain of transmissions that enable Black life with distinctive sensibilities as situated within particular sociocultural networks, institutions, organizations, and community establishments, conveying bearings, generative of synergies in the quest of solidarity through social memory. As Black life traverses through the different pathways of globalization, the ongoing route, in due course, sifts through historical modes of thought when socializing in its everyday life. At times, depending on how Black life is situated, it then becomes experienced through discontinuous histories or temporalities proving to be delayed or have latent growth, not yet materializing into actualizing the self.

Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason

Achille Mbembe’s (2017) compelling account in Critique of Black Reason, situates a re-reading of Black life through the historical contours of colonization, race, capitalism, and modernity. His underlying concern is with understanding what it means to be human through historical codifications of Black life. Weaving entwined narratives of Black experience as anchored within complex contact zones of Africa, apartheid, the Caribbean, America, and Europe, Mbembe provides signifiers and notes from the African Diaspora to signal the importance of linking plantation sensibilities in making sense of the enslavement of African peoples, the ensuing commodification of Blackness and simultaneous socioeconomic material production of Europe. With this discursive material making of Europe, Mbembe points to the stitching of colonial boundaries, which places Black peoples outside, as external to Europe. He amplifies how the colonial boundaries of modernity work to govern the institutional process of the unplaceability of Black peoples, of unbelonging; in a sense it speaks to the reification of Blackness into nonhuman entities. Attendant to this unplaceability, Mbembe points to the colonial affect imbued through the psychosocial insertions of colonization. His writing is less interested with some linear narrative of history, which provides cohesion to the coloniality of African peoples. Instead, he writes to uncover the entangled geographies of Black life as encumbered through indeterminate histories of racial classifications, cultural aesthetic practices, religion, language, and literature.

Mbembe is also thoughtful about the means of knowledge production and how these modes of relations allow for a re-identification of Black life within colonial logics. He leaves us thinking of how these terms and conditions of coloniality are made recognizable in ways that endow Black life with sociocultural practices as being contained within colonial conduits, yet at the same time moving beyond the boundaries of colonial logic. Through these historical trajectories, Mbembe presents particular sensibilities for Black reason—sensibilities allowing for different embodiments, constellation of voices, Enlightenment discourses, intergenerational knowledge, and shared consciousness of Blackness, sensibilities that make anew enactments immanent to everyday negotiations necessary for the self-determination of Black peoples as experienced within the globalized forays of modernity. Given the ethical proximity of essentializing Blackness, Mbembe invokes Blackness to historically dialogue with Europe’s duplicitous conception of man and Blackness as nonhuman. He leaves us thinking about the set of epistemic-material practices wherein which Blackness is made fungible in ways that promulgate colonial logics. Blackness becomes desired and made abject through interchangeable performatives, making permissible belonging and unbelonging of the human. In tacit ways Mbembe notes how fungibility as concomitant to market interests becomes surreptitiously steeped within practices of militarization, privatization, and digital technologies.

Across these layered textual readings of Blackness, Mbembe’s work is rife with language of the Black man. One is left wondering about the myriad ways in which Blackness becomes constituted through gender and Euro-modernity. How might such a gendered reasoning of Blackness and modernity make intelligible Black reason? And how might such reason help with offering different possibilities for Black life? What we are left to work through is the elision of the Black subject as configured through the said Western consciousness. At the same time we are pushed to think that counterhegemonic to this elision of Blackness resides anti-colonial critique. As such, this anti-colonial way of being provides reservoirs of life necessary for understanding what it means to be human in the global context of eco-planeterization. African enslavement, colonization, and apartheid are three events Mbembe recalls as bringing foreclosure to Black discourses. For Black subjects the resultant effects are social death and alienation of the self. Governing these historical events are the auspices of memory and religion, concomitantly infused through the politics of representation as constituted through ahistorical synchronic readings of Black life. With Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe offers futures for humanism through carefully retrieving genealogies of unmapped archives of Black life. Linking the material of Blackness through racism and histories of capitalism, Mbembe journeys through the historical consciousness of Black life to unearth what he calls the reservoirs of life. In marking these reservoirs as embodied by Black reason, Mbembe does well to identify possibilities for Black reason as such possibilities co-identify with racial classifications and stern organizing principles of life that suggest different ways of thinking about the social and the political.

History, Place, and Black Life

What it means to be human is constantly being reconfigured through different forms of belonging. How might Black life help one with understanding these shifting modes of sociality? Let us think of Black life and the history of movement as archived through Black memory. Thinking of Black life as emerging through anti-Black racism, survival, resistance, and modes of sel...