In Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s “Diaspora,” the band plays along a consistent rhythmic and harmonic pattern, while Scott attends to the work of connecting with and to it. It is the convergence of the always and the necessary now, something Black music always done, something that marks it as Black and (blue). And it perfectly describes “the nature of the Black radical tradition.” It is both always and right now.
In Chapter Seven of Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson attends to the always after having narrated the right “then,” the historical archaeology of Black radicalism from San Lorenzo de los Negros to the Nongquase. What remained, “in the wake,” was a Black insistence on being whole. It calls to mind that what guided the Black radical tradition was not a material reality (though this does not mean that enslaved Africans were not aware of their material conditions), but the ways in which that material reality converged or diverged with how they saw themselves, and how they saw the world. And that world was both the world and beyond the world. The seen and the unseen. The separation of the material and ideal, a problem of Western thought, has led some to see Cedric Robinson’s work as “Hegelian.” This of course, assumes that Black thinkers cannot produce “theory,” that Black life is not theoretical without the crutch of Western philosophy.[1] In an unpublished paper, I wrote:
Rooted in the assumption that one could separate the articulation of ideas that would govern how we envision the future from actually enacting that future, this seeming paradox has too often been misapplied to activities embarked upon in the context of our long sojourn and confrontation with modernity. But this theory versus practice binary is only part of a larger philosophical question. Closely, if not inextricably related to the above, is the assumption that one can or should separate the mind (the mental, theory) from the body (the physical, practice), rooted in Cartesian logic, the philosophical contributions of the French thinker, Rene Descartes. This recent (in world historical terms) philosophical approach to the study of reality has engendered a set of misapprehensions of what constitutes the known and the possibilities of what can be known. It is perhaps a key node in unpacking what [Jacob] Carruthers’ terms “the metaphysics of alienation” for it structures the bulk of what we might consider academic knowledge. To be academic is to base claims of knowing and doing on what the mind can perceive. Thus, man becomes master of all things. “I think, therefore I am.”
And academic knowledge made enslavement legible and possible. And enslavement constituted a rupture of the convergence between the material and ideal world, one that was always there in African thought. It created a condition where “actual being” was transmuted; “historical being” was negated. The Black radical tradition ensured that this process would not be whole, that it would not be total. And the fight against enslavement, against colonialism, was simultaneously a fight for. It was to ensure that the metaphysical be joined with the physical again, that the ancestors whose lives were extinguished be—again, that God could be—again; it was a fight to preserve the ontological totality (171). For Robinson, being total meant recreating a life that would have never, could have never “allowed for property in either physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses” (168). The reality as outlined in the Black radical tradition’s phenomenology is that the level of rapacious violence that had characterized Western civilization (and Western radicalism) was neither desired nor always required for the preservation of African life—not just their physical essence. But their lives, their whole lives. If we are to continue what those ancestors stood for and enacted, the question must always be for what and whom do we live; to be total and ontologically so.
[1] See Lewis Gordon’s introduction to What Fanon Said (Fordham, 2016), for a response to these presumptions. See also the #BlackTheory hashtag introduced on Twitter, by @jmjafrx.
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