[News] Black Art Matters: A Roundtable On the Black Radical Imagination

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/black-art-matters-roundtable-black-radical-imaginatio 



  Black Art Matters: A Roundtable On the Black Radical Imagination

Walidah Imarisha, Robin D.G. Kelly and Jonathan Horstmann interviewed by 
Red Wedge - July 26, 2016

/Can America ever truly face its racism – both past and present – for 
what it truly is? Or is the history of forced migration, bondage and 
slave labor, legal apartheid, incarceration and horrific state violence 
too much for it to survive such a revelation? Can it endure the psychic 
shock and endeavor in some kind of pursuit of truth or reconciliation? 
Or will it simply implode, come apart at the seams and make way for 
something new? Something which, hopefully, would not have genocide 
running through its veins? Langston Hughes tells of a man urging us to 
“let America be America again,” but Hughes is not so sure such an 
America ever existed. Neither should anyone today./

/These are just few questions conducive to a vast, intricate Black 
Radical Imagination. The concept is not a new one, but may raise more 
eyebrows now than in quite some time. With the Black Lives Matter 
movement insisting that the struggle for African America’s humanity is 
not over, there is incontrovertibly both more to fight for and more to 
imagine. The phrase itself is, as this roundtable suggests, amorphous, 
slippery. For some it might conjure up images of jazz singers decrying 
lynching. For others it might be young graffiti artists stealing across 
train tracks, leaving dynamic anti-police missives on walls. In all 
cases it is pregnant with dynamic, dangerous potential far more 
deserving and substantive than the vague, hollow promise of “the 
American Dream.”/

/Walidah Imarisha is an author, poet activist and educator who has 
taught at Portland and Oregon State Universities. Her writing has 
appeared in several books and anthologies. Most recently she has 
co-edited Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice 
Movements (AK Press/IAS) and is the author of Angels With Dirty Faces: 
Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption (AK Press/IAS)./

/Jonathan Horstmann //is a recording artist, social justice activist, 
videographer, actor, and illustrator based in Austin, Texas. He is one 
half of the futurepunk group BLXPLTN. The group’s first album Black Cop 
Down was released in the fall of 2014 and received wide critical 
acclaim. Their new album, New York Fascist Week, will be released in 2016./

/Robin D.G. Kelley is the author and editor of more than ten books on 
the subject of radical history, art, music and the Black struggle around 
the globe. These include Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the 
Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press), Thelonious Monk: 
The Life and Times of An American Original (The Free Press), and Freedom 
Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press). He is the Gary B. 
Nash Professor of American History at UCLA./

/The three were kind enough discuss with Red Wedge their takes on the 
meaning, history and potential of the Black Radical Imagination./

* * *

*Just starting out very broadly: using the term “Black Radical 
Imagination” can come off as somewhat nebulous to the uninitiated and 
practitioners alike. How would you describe the Black Radical 
Imagination? What comes to mind – both in a contemporary and historical 
sense – when you hear that term?*

*Walidah Imarisha:* When I think of the term “Black Radical 
Imagination,” I think of that force that has kept Black folks not only 
alive physically, but able to dream of new and better worlds while their 
bodies dwelled in hell. It is the Black Radical Imagination that also 
gave our ancestors the fortitude to pull those better worlds out of the 
ether and painstakingly build them into our lived realities.

I also think about the responsibility, right, and privilege those who 
came before us claimed for us to do the same, to envision new just 
futures, and then do the hard work of bringing them into existence. We 
can’t build what we cannot first imagine, and so our survival is our 
Black Radical Imagination time traveling, bringing us the resistance of 
the past, bringing us the brilliance of the future. As was said in /Star 
Trek: Deep Space 9/, we are the dreamer and the dream.

*Jonathan Horstmann: *I think Black activists have always thought 
outside the box when it comes to organizing for radical equality. Think 
of hip-hop's origins. Think of Black Lives Matter tactics. We create 
global cultural movements, we shut down freeways. The Black voice is 
forced to be imaginative because otherwise it will be silenced.

*Robin D.G. Kelley: *By employing the phrase the “Black Radical 
Imagination” in my book /Freedom Dreams/, I was referring to the ways in 
which Black Leftists, some nationalists, feminists, surrealists, etc., 
envisioned collectively, in struggle, what a revolutionary future might 
look like and how we might bring this new world into being. Contrary to 
misreadings of my book, I was not referring to some kind of dreamstate 
but arguing that we cannot divorce critical analysis from social 
movements. It is not enough to imagine a world without oppression 
(especially since we don’t always recognize the variety of forms or 
modes in which oppression occurs), but understanding the mechanisms or 
processes that not only reproduce structural inequality but make them 
common sense, and render those processes natural or invisible. The Black 
Radical Imagination is not a thing but a process, the ideas generated 
from what Gramsci calls a “philosophy of practice.” It is about how 
people in transformative social movements, moved/shifted their ideas, 
rethought inherited categories, tried to locate and overturn blatant, 
subtle, and invisible modes of domination.

But what makes it “Black Radical”? What is the Black Radical Tradition? 
Cedric Robinson describes it as “the revolutionary consciousness that 
proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people” and not 
merely formed by capitalist slavery and colonialism. It questions the 
capacity of racial capitalism to re-make African social life and succeed 
in generating new categories of human experience stripped bare of the 
historical consciousness embedded in culture. Black revolts, the 
expression of the Black radical imagination, were not necessarily formed 
by the logic of Western capitalism. But has modern racial capitalism 
formed in the afterlife of slavery so thoroughly shaped our 
consciousness as to make the kind of radical epistemologies Robinson 
identifies almost impossible to produce? Consider just how easy it is to 
fall into neoliberal logic of racial uplift, entrepreneurship, 
“branding,” or even the restoration of the liberal Keynesian welfare 
state as our movement’s main objective! This is why /discovering/ and 
recuperating the Black radical tradition/imagination is so /necessary/ – 
not in order to reproduce it but to understand its logic and fundamental 
demand: a complete critique of Western civilization and, as Fanon put 
it, a disordering of our current (colonial) social order.

That said, woman of color feminisms, certain autonomous and indigenous 
movements in the Americas, best grasp/exhibit the black radical 
tradition, what it means to go there, to the root. For example, The 
Combahee River Collective statement was not a call for a race and gender 
integrated social democracy but a deeper disordering of racist, 
capitalist heteropatriarchy that required a remaking of the whole of 
life, of centering life on multiple forms of reproduction and the body 
and pleasure. It argued that a non-racist, non-sexist society could not 
be created under capitalism, nor could the socialism alone dismantle the 
structures of racial, gender, and sexual domination. The struggle wasn’t 
just the public fight in the streets or the public fight for 
representation, nor was it just socialism defined as providing resources 
in a very public way – decent jobs, collective labor. The Statement made 
connections between production, reproduction, household labor, the 
exploitation of children, sexual violence and sexual freedom – issues 
that rarely find a place on the agenda of a lot of Black nationalist 
organizations, let alone socialist ones.

*Over the past few years there seems to be a resurgent interest in wider 
circles about notions like Afrofuturism, the Afropunk movement, so on 
and so forth. What do you think this can be attributed to? Is it the 
rise of Black Lives Matter or are there other factors at play as well? 
How much do the cultural differences between our time and, say, the 
Sixties, shake out in terms of this current artistic moment?*

*Walidah:* I think these pieces have always been there, these are just 
the names we have hung on them at this juncture. This is ancient 
knowledge, whether it is the non-linear way different African cultures 
thought of time as explored in the anthology /Black Quantum Futurisms/, 
or Sun-Ra’s Saturn ciphers. We have always manifested these ideas, 
whether it was W.E.B. Du Bois writing science fiction in his short story 
“The Comet,” or Bad Brains created hardcore. I grew up as a Black person 
listening to punk music and reading science fiction, and it felt to me 
these were the places where I had the opportunity to claim myself and 
make of me what I would. Where I could step beyond what I was being told 
I was by the larger society as a Black woman, and instead decide for 
myself who I will be.

I think movements for justice always feed art and creativity, and vice 
versa. So absolutely Black Lives Matter is part of that. As my 
/Octavia’s Brood /co-editor adrienne maree brown talks about, even the 
name is visionary science fiction, because to the mainstream, Black 
lives don’t matter. But we can dream of that world, we can envision a 
world where they do, and then we connect with the ways that world has 
been dreamt of and build by those who came before us, and add our pieces 
to it. Black Lives Matter on their website a few months ago asked folks 
to submit responses to the prompt “In a world where Black lives matter, 
I imagine…” They were offering all of us the opportunity to engage in 
collective ideation, so we can begin to pull that world into existence.

*Jonathan: *Blackness has long been exoticized, and not with the most 
convenient consequences to say the least. I am wary of this resurgent 
interest in “all things Black” unless it translates into actions taken 
towards Black liberation.

*Robin: *I cannot say for sure, only speculate. First, I can’t see a 
direct correlation between Afrofuturism and the rise of Black Lives 
Matter because I am of the minority opinion that neither is so new. 
Versions of Afrofuturism were already here, embraced, debated, struggled 
over throughout much of the 20th century. My chapter on surrealism in 
Freedom Dreams gestures at this, but so does the first chapter “In 
Search of the New Land” which links Sun Ra and Marcus Garvey. 
Afrofuturism is wonderful; it is also a new word for a longer Black 
radical tradition of Marronage, seeking out free space, liberated 
territory. Read Neil Roberts’s remarkable book, /Freedom as Marronage/ 
and you will see this pretty clearly.

Second, I don’t see Black Lives Matter as a sudden break from the 
movements that arose in the 1990s and early 2000s in opposition to 
Clinton-era neoliberalism. True, the eruption in Ferguson gave the 
movement against police violence a boost, but organized struggle against 
police violence goes way back, and many of those activists worked on a 
variety of racial, economic, social justice issue. I contend that they 
helped lay the foundations for the Battle in Seattle (1999), the U.S. 
Social Forum, Immigrant rights demonstrations of 2006, and ultimately 
Occupy. They include the Labor/Community Strategy Center and the various 
organizations they formed (i.e., the Bus Riders Union), POWER (People 
Organized to Win Employment Rights), Critical Resistance, SOUL (School 
of Unity and Liberation), the Black Radical Congress, Organization for 
Black Struggle (St. Louis), the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the Los 
Angeles Community Action Network, Miami Workers Center, Domestic Workers 
United, to name but a few.

The media is not interested in the genesis of movements or history; 
spontaneity gets higher ratings. But if you just scratch the surface a 
little, you’ll find that members of these organizations had some 
relationship with the current uprising – either as mentors or leaders of 
the new movements, including Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers 
and 67 Suenos, We Charge Genocide, the Dream Defenders, The Black Youth 
Project 100, and the Community Rights Campaign in L.A. Indeed, just 
consider the fact that the three women who founded Black Lives Matter 
were movement veterans and had led organizations that specifically 
focused on immigrants and undocumented workers. Opal Tometi, herself the 
daughter of Nigerian immigrants, runs Black Alliance for Just 
Immigration; Alicia Garza, formerly director of POWER (People Organized 
to Win Employment Rights), went on to join the staff of the National 
Domestic Workers Alliance, which is made up of mostly Caribbean, 
African, Latina childcare and household workers; and Patrisse Cullors, a 
former lead organizer of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and founder 
of the Community Rights Campaign, which defends Latino and black 
students from police harassment and the increasing use of the criminal 
justice system to manage student behavior. Patrisse is now founding 
director of Dignity and Power Now, an organization is dedicated to 
protecting incarcerated people and their families in Los Angeles.

I can imagine that my answer might be read as an evasion of the 
question.  On the contrary, I think we often err on the side of seeing 
movements erupting from elan or cultural trends without paying attention 
to organizing. We continue to do this at our peril, and when we do we 
follow the bourgeois media’s lead.

*Of course, as with anything that is created by people of color, there 
is a massive pull to sanitize African or African-American artistic 
expression and place it within a context that is very safe for a culture 
industry that likes to present itself as “color blind.” Would you say 
that’s a danger with this new artistic wave too? Do you think there’s a 
way in which the Radical Black Imagination bristles against being 
metabolized in such a way?*

*Walidah: *I think the word “radical” is incredibly important in the 
phrase Radical Black Imagination. As Angela Davis tells us, radical 
literally means to get to the root of things. To understand something on 
a foundational fundamental level. If that is truly in practice, that 
cultural manifestation can’t be sanitized, because as I said before the 
roots of our Radical Black Imagination are in the vast cultural galaxy 
that has and does exist in Africa, in the freedom dreams of enslaved 
Black folks and the cultures and communities of visionary resistance 
they built, in the Black Liberation-era imaginings of what 
self-determination and global autonomy would look like. We know our 
roots have been grown in blood; it is an integral part of its essence 
and once we know that, it cannot be removed.

*Jonathan: *The danger lies in allowing yourself or your work to be 
sanitized. Radical critique is woven into the fabric of what this 
project does, and if that is taken away you no longer have BLXPLTN. 
That's not to say that we don't want to create work that is light and 
fun, but even then I believe a rock band comprised of people of color is 
a political statement in and of itself. Every day that we live through 
without being arrested or killed is an act of revolution. We're not 
making any deals with the devil. In the end standing as Black and proud 
will always make you more than a few enemies, but having enemies is 
nothing new to our people.

*Robin: *Not sure I understand the question, nor do I think there is 
such a thing as a singular Radical Black Imagination. Nor do I believe 
the culture industry sees itself as “color blind.” Often the most 
reactionary elements of the “culture industry” plays into racist 
representations with all deliberate speed and no apology, if they 
believe there is money to be made. I’m less worried about how radical 
artists try to negotiate the culture industry or how that industry 
manages political content than with our continued investment in the 
industry itself and the kind of abject individualism that so many of us 
subscribe to in the name of being “radical.” First, there are valuable 
lessons from the Black Arts Movement and other movements of the need to 
withdraw from the industry, to create actual (and virtual) spaces 
outside of control or commodification. This is happening and worth 
talking about, but most of the folks I know would rather talk about 
Kendrick Lamar. That’s fine but limited politically.

Second, I keep coming back to collective movement, collective art, 
movement identities. We’ve come to believe that social media is, ipso 
facto, an expression of the “social” or the collective. Yes, it is a 
remarkable tool for making global connections, organizing, and seeking 
out alternatives to corporate media. However, there is a 
counterproductive tendency in social media and the “blogosphere” to not 
think and struggle collectively, but rather make pronouncements from 
one’s perch, and when there is push back or critique, to call the critic 
a “hater.” This is a new American phenomenon I can’t get my head around. 
And the implications for art are enormous. It basically means that 
artists need not be accountable, and they protect themselves from 
critique by having a following on Twitter or Facebook that function like 
a kind of gang. For example, when I published my essay “Empire State of 
Mind” that delved into Jay-Z’s entanglements with sweatshop labor in 
producing his clothing line, or his unwitting backing of privatizing 
water in Africa under the guise of philanthropy, or Alicia Keys’ refusal 
to join the cultural boycott of Israel on the specious argument that her 
music will bring Israelis and Palestinians together in a big lovefest, I 
received much push back for “dissing” artists who are doing such good. 
Really? I guess I’m old school and can’t separate the material realities 
of exploitation from art.

*On the other hand, do you think there’s possibility for these types of 
radical, Black and proud narratives to reach across and shift non-Black 
folks’ (Arabs, Latinxs, radical white folks, etc.) ways of thinking? 
What’s the difference between this and what we would call co-optation?*

*Walidah: *With /Octavia’s Brood/ we came up with the term visionary 
fiction, which is fantastical writing (whether it be sci fi, fantasy, 
speculative fiction, horror, etc.) that helps understand existing power 
structures and helps us imagine new just futures. We also came up with 
principles of visionary fiction – that change is collective, 
decentralized, that it focuses on people. That it centers those who have 
been marginalized, especially those who sit at the intersections of 
identity and oppressions (like queer and trans folks of color, like 
differently abled undocumented immigrant folk). If we are operating with 
shared principles, and have a mutual dream of freedom, then we will 
always have a center to return to.

I think dreams of freedom resonate with all those who want justice. This 
is where multiplicity comes in, and why I believe science fiction 
becomes incredibly helpful, because it allows us to see that instead of 
one “right” future, there are infinite futures, in a universe that is 
infinitely expanding. Instead of the one “right” way to liberation, 
there are as many paths are there human beings past, present, and future.

*Jonathan: *The shifts are already taking place. If you look at the BLM 
movement, the non-white allies totally get that they have skin in the 
game. In the fight for liberation we must prop up the most oppressed. We 
must work towards that end. There is something very encouraging about a 
lot of today's kids. They seem to understand a bit better than our 
generation that until Black trans folks are liberated we are /all/ 
oppressed.

*Robin: *Embracing, acting on, and furthering radical thought is never 
cooptation. No one should have a copyright on a radical critique of the 
world and visions of how to enact that critique. What we think of as the 
Black Radical Imagination or the tradition has not only informed other 
struggles –Palestinians, Egyptians, indigenous movements, movements 
across Latin America and Asia, as well as “radical white folks,” but one 
must also acknowledge that those movements elsewhere have informed what 
we think of as Black radical movements and thought. I can’t go into it 
now, but it is hard to imagine T. Thomas Fortune, Lucy Parsons, W.E.B. 
Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, etc., 
without Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Trotsky, or Che Guevara, or 
Rimbaud, or M. N. Roy and Sen Katayama. Consider George Jackson’s 
identification with Palestinian poet Sameeh Al-Qaseem’s “Enemy of the 
Sun,” one of several poems he wrote out from a book he read in prison? A 
book, incidentally, published by the Black run radical Drum and Spear 
Press out of D.C.?  None of this is cooptation. This is called solidarity.

Solidarity is becoming increasingly distant in a political atmosphere 
that can only see white people at “allies” and not comrades, or only see 
anti-Black racism as the only thing worth fighting for, or questions 
whether or not Black people should support struggles of people who have 
not succeeded in quashing all vestiges of anti-Black racism. It is a 
high standard, especially since our own communities/ – /I’m talking 
about Black people/ – /have continued to reveal lingering signs of 
anti-Black racism. Comradeship is not built on some metaphysics of race 
or some shared experience of oppression. Comrades are made in struggle, 
and they are never numerous and they don’t necessarily look like us. 
Comrades recognize that white people are a fabrication/ – /and for that 
matter, so are we as Black people, and indigenous people, as Latinos and 
Asians. Yes, we’re real with real desires and cultures and (contested) 
beliefs and histories, but we are forced to always remake ourselves in 
relation to Others, to whiteness, to racism/sexism/homophobia.  People 
of Color is not an identity but a relationship defined by racism, 
dispossession and imperialism. I’m not saying we’re just “people” or 
making some claim to universalism, but rather we need to recognize that 
as long as “difference” is structured in dominance, we are not free and 
we are not “made.” Making revolution requires making new identities, and 
that means new relationships and learning from each other. That is not 
cooptation.

/This interview appears in Red Wedge No. 2, "Art Against Global 
Apartheid," available for purchase at the Red Wedge shop 
<http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/shop/>./

/*Walidah Imarisha* is an author, poet activist and educator who has 
taught at Portland and Oregon State Universities. Her writing has 
appeared in several books and anthologies. Most recently she has 
co-edited Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice 
Movements (AK Press/IAS) and is the author of Angels With Dirty Faces: 
Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption (AK Press/IAS)./

/*Jonathan Horstmann* //is a recording artist, social justice activist, 
videographer, actor, and illustrator based in Austin, Texas. He is one 
half of the futurepunk group BLXPLTN. The group’s first album Black Cop 
Down was released in the fall of 2014 and received wide critical 
acclaim. Their new album, New York Fascist Week, will be released in 2016./

/*Robin D.G. Kelley* is the author and editor of more than ten books on 
the subject of radical history, art, music and the Black struggle around 
the globe. These include Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the 
Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press), Thelonious Monk: 
The Life and Times of An American Original (The Free Press), and Freedom 
Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press). He is the Gary B. 
Nash Professor of American History at UCLA./

-- 
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863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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