Carole Boyce Davis, AAIHS
My point of entry to this
engagement with Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black
Radical Tradition is as a black left feminist–thanks to the formation defined
by Mary Helen Washington and used by Erik McDuffie in Sojourning for Freedom.
Indeed, black left feminism is one of the political positions that describes
Claudia Jones in my book though it was not explicitly indicated by using those
specific terms.
In
an earlier essay, I briefly engaged Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, largely
because it dedicated a substantial amount of space to describing the primary
actors or exemplars in the Black radical tradition. In his work, Robinson identifies three
intellectuals as illustrative of the black radical intellectual tradition –
W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Richard Wright. In this framing, one would
hardly get a sense that any women were major contributors to the Black radical tradition.
My students are still amazed when they read the work and activism of Ida B.
Wells and that she remains erased in most accounts of black intellectual
activism, even when her praxis clearly warrants inclusion. In his final
chapter, “An Ending,” Robinson gestures to a new generation and includes Angela
Davis but only in a listing of radical intellectual/activists (p. 450).
Still, I argue there that
his is a recognizable position—limited perhaps by its time and the nature of
intellectual work of that generation in which there was an absence of gender as
a category of analysis from their intellectual frameworks. That would come
later, but even a piece assigned to C.L.R. James, “The Revolutionary Answer to
the Negro Problem in the US” (1948) has a section titled “The Case of Negro
Women”; and there was already the publication of The Black Woman (1970) edited
by Toni Cade as well as Claudia Jones’s “An End to the Neglect of the Problems
of Negro Women” (1949/1974). Indeed, while in most formal left framings there
was always a “woman question,” there was an avoidance or as Claudia Jones would
say a “neglect” of black women as intellectual contributors.
While Robinson offers the
critique that race and gender have been erased in Marxism, he repeats the same
error. The black gendered subject is also erased from his consideration at the
level of intellectual contribution. There is some diasporic breadth as he
includes C.L.R. James along with W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright as the most
representative thinkers; he also has sections which examine older political
movements in the African Diaspora such as The Haitian Revolution and Palmares
in Brazil. Thus the book fulfills the
articulation of the radical tradition offered by Robin Kelley’s expansion,
which described it as always having “some kind of diasporic sensibility, shaped
by anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics.”
On the omission of
gender, a much more supportive take is offered by H.L.T. Quan, in which the
writer–a former student of Robinson–asserts appropriately that the “simplistic
inclusion of women does not, of itself, render a text feminist” but instead one
gets instances of women as self-activating subjects involved in various forms
of liberation. She also points out that Robinson explores the contributions of
women in his subsequent work, Black Movements of America. I find this reading
useful but still limited. Black Marxism like many of the works of its time
authored by male scholars, particularly Marxists, extended the reading to
include class and race, but did not see or have the tools (or did not care) to
articulate how gender was also implicated. So Quan’s reading is useful in the
sense that she sees Robinson’s work as open-ended, providing the space in which
a range of other intellectual projects could evolve.
An
interesting and more recent essay by Aaron Kamugisha, raises a similar set of
issues about C.L.R. James’s omissions. In the James case, there is substantial
interest in women writers, his admitted mother’s influence, discussions with
his wife Selma James on issues that pertain to women’s labor, conversations
with Constance Webb and his assertion that Sylvia Winter was the brightest
brain in the Caribbean. But Kamugisha raises an interesting question in a
section titled “What if C.L.R. James Had Met Claudia Jones in 1948?” Here he is
not so much describing a possible physical meeting but an engagement with the
meaning of gender, race and class which Jones was able to articulate quite
seamlessly because her framework precisely included women, black people, and
workers–paying attention to where these overlapped. So let us also ask: what if
Cedric Robinson had read any work available on or by Claudia Jones? A perusal
of the bibliography reveals no such knowledge, even though that material was
available as indicated above.
One can offer, by way of
explanation, a modified version of the Fanon charge that each generation
advances its own analytical project and pursues different angles and new
readings based on what it is offered by history and its own conjuncture. This
is precisely what scholarship is supposed to do. So it is for me less a suggestion that the
omissions are weaknesses than a claim that they always reveal lacunae in a
certain mode of thought until there is that creative leap to a new set of
positions. That creative leap was advanced by the work of a subsequent
generation of black feminists.
The reach of scholars
like Cedric J. Robinson, whose career at Binghamton University (SUNY)–where I
also had my first academic appointment and was shaped as a scholar–was
legendary. As part of the World Systems Group, he deliberately situated the
black diasporic experience within an “international history of capitalism.” And
this remains a larger project even when the specific chosen primary actors are
re-engaged. What a Claudia Jones offers in this case then, within the context
of re-visioning, is a deliberate posing of where black women fit in this
arrangement and moves us beyond the tendency to “not read” black women’s work.
Still, we are definitely
in a period where there is the loss of a generation to which Cedric Robinson
belongs, and which attempted to theorize black left or new left politics.
Theirs was an optimistic politics, which assumed a forward movement and did not
anticipate the regressiveness of Trumpism. Missing now are the timely analyses
of C.L.R. James or Stuart Hall on the coalescing of what David Harvey calls the
“state-finance nexus” on the one hand in the person of a Trump and the
strategic alliance between transnational wealth and state in the person of a
Rodham-Clinton. In a way, we are left then with no optional leverage between
these two overlapping positions.
What would someone
writing about the Black radical tradition today find still useful about Black
Marxism given the numerous false starts, failures and categorical punishments
meted out to those like the Black Panther Party willing to seek out more
interesting systems? Perhaps we can say we reached the limits of what is
possible with Black Marxism—we have seen its various analytical weaknesses as
we have gained new modes of seeing. Perhaps we can also say that its subtitling
The Making of the Black Radical Tradition is what remains salient and usable.
Stuart Hall, for example, indicates that in their search for a third way they
wanted to hold on to what Marxism offered but account for what it left out,
trying to find a pathway between older anti-capitalist critique and new
formations. According to Hall, “In my reading, this centred on the argument
that any prospect for the renewal of the left had to begin with a new
conception of socialism and a radically new analysis of the social relations,
dynamics and culture of post-war capitalism.”
My sense is that we are
on the threshold of a new “conjuncture” in which 42% of millennials in the U.S.
say they would vote for a socialist government and the white working class
seems bereft of any union or left organizing and have therefore been allowed to
remain totally illiterate about their social conditions though with an innate sense
of being left behind. Trumpism enters that space of misinformation, illiteracy,
inadequacy and absence.
And what of Black left
thought today? We are still clearly in the looking back mode—a “fifty years
after” framings of major events—without theoretical guidance for the future. A
Black Lives Matter movement exists but its actions remain sporadic and more
responsive than proactive. Elaine Brown former chairwoman of the Black Panther
Party is quoted in Spiked as critiquing their tendency to be more pacifist than
assertive, still requesting rights instead of assuming them.
A number of questions
remain to be engaged. For me, the primary one is this: what kind of
theoretical/practical ideas can be generated–given the still tenuous lived
reality of black peoples worldwide–that can admit the limitations of past
movements (intellectual and/or political) but still move forward with new
agendas that refine past agendas and re-define new projects?
