Black transnational feminisms and the question of structure

Prophetic organisation

Perhaps, Keguro Macharia offers a more nuanced iteration of what I mean here in his article in the magazine Popula on ‘pole’. He writes:

Pole, a simple, two-syllable word that says “my heart is with you.” Pole, a simple, two-syllable word that says, “I am holding you, and you are held.” Pole, a simple, two-syllable word that can be said, a word uttered as a sigh that conveys how difficult it is to form words in the face of the unbearable.

Pole is a Swahili word that denotes care. When uttered, it ties ourselves to others, even when we are untied ourselves. But as we attempt to mend what is broken in others, we reveal our own cracks. And in finding others through care, we find newer ways to find ourselves.

We find ourselves through acknowledging our own fragmentation. We find newer ways to breathe when we “exhale” and “sigh” at the point of our failure. We find ourselves when, untangled, we reach out to others through care. We are done and undone when we say ‘pole!’.

- Eddie Ombagi, Nairobi, Kenya, 14 May 2020

Eddie Ombagi’s (2020) fragments of corona time is written as care, holding, unbearable, still, “We are undone – we have been made undone – we are undoing ourselves.” Eleven days after his words were published, George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, propelling thousands to protest in that city, saturating the global event-time of the coronavirus pandemic with the sigh for freedom articulated as Black Lives Matter. The second, equally long passage is drawn from Frederick Douglass’ 1855 My Bondage, My Freedom (Blacks in the New World) (Douglass 2022). ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ is the title of a speech Douglass delivered to 600 people on the invitation of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society,

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

   - Frederick Douglass, Rochester, NY, 5 July 1852

Ombagi’s pole has a lingering statis as its spatiotemporal zone, and despite the urgent tone of Douglass’s rebuke there resides a near prophetic remark on the past that will not pass, articulating a “[t]emporal aphasia [that] operates by way of retraction where what remains unsymboliseable in language - the Real, or the violence that precedes the id for Black people – gives way to speculative theories” (Terrefe 2018, pp. 128-9).

Events are frequently mobilised with the implicit connotation of a mark in the progression of time that is understood to be universally sensible to all who are presumed to occupy ‘it’; or at the least, to live in some shared sense of it. We are also aware of the role historiographic processes play in reconciling the extraordinary violence marked by colonial-modernity’s space-time and the well-orchestrated logics of progressive time. Stated in other words, “can we have a historiography that does not presume the ‘human’ subject of history and various capacities that this human possesses (e.g. freedom, temporal change, time/space capacity)?” (Warren 2016, p. 109). Douglass is clear on the question of freedom for black people: “the antebellum free black is more of a philosophical allegory than a historical agent” (ibid.). This philosophical allegory is one that operates at the thresholds of postcolonial, slavocratic nation-states whose metaphors of the present rely not only on historical breaks (see ka Canham 2023; Gqola 2010), but on the ‘free black’ who rests within the ruptures of time marked as the site of intensity that affects this rupture, a ‘diagnostic’ including, or perhaps even especially so within liberal disciplinary and theoretical practice.

Moshibudi Motimele (2019) speaks to the ‘rupture’ of time in her examination of the 2015-16 student movement, which is most frequently registered through a diagnostic rendering of the event of spectacle – “violent clashes between students and police, burning of paintings and images of students en mass outside parliament and the Union building,” at the absence of the critique presented by coalitions of students and workers concerning the neoliberalisation of the university and “an institutional culture still defined by whiteness, and dominant epistemological paradigms that foreclosed the possibility for an indigenous intellectual project” (Motimele 2019, p. 205). Motimele (2019) elaborates on these ruptures, defining them as: ‘curriculum-time’, that involves completion of the financial/curriculum year at all costs; ‘capitalist-time’, related to the balancing of the books; and ‘production-time’, an obsession with research output at the expense of teaching. Events as a means to organise time trouble me for several reasons. Elaborating on Motimele’s (2019) observations, one can run a short Google Scholar search and note the extent to which spectacular events operate as ‘diagnostics’, enabling the observer to not only mark a time as it has passed – a neat gesture in part to ease their own anxieties simply by this articulation to mark it as a moment that has passed – but further, the systemic reduction to the empirical of the intellectual labours of black people that these temporal ‘jumps’ also intend as a critical and organisational aim within this epistemic performance.

Shireen Ally (2005) makes a crucial observation of this practice of intellectualism in her analysis of the turn in South African sociologists’ critique of the apartheid state. Often indicated in the literature as the reason for sustaining liberalism as the dominant orientation, are the repressive conditions that limited opportunities to critique the state until the 1970s. However, the rupture towards an oppositional intellectualism that follows can be better diagnosed as an epistemic performance in sustaining ideological power and not a rejection of it. In 1968 when Steve Biko and Barney Pityana walked out of a meeting of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), founding the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) that based its ethical, political and intellectual sensibility on the philosophy of Black Consciousness, this event would operate in Motimele’s (2019) terms of rupture, shifting the internal politics of the country. Ally writes that by “directly challenging liberalism’s conceptualisation of the political role of white intellectuals and activists, Black Consciousness became the catalyst for accelerating a series of internal re-configurations of the white, English-speaking community of intellectuals” (2005, p. 78). The Marxist oppositional remains with us to the present, an epistemic liberalism that mobilises the empirical-reductive (diagnostic-spectacular) reading of race, or ‘race’, as a means to carve out a site of its own tautological relevance. The banning of black organisations in the 1970s made trade unions the only legal way to organise for black people, and “the phenomenon of ‘social-movement unionism’ was born as unions became the vehicles to secure not just labour, but social, political, and economic rights as well, [… and] the doctrine of nonracialism became a defining language for political incorporation in the 1980s” (Ally 2005, p. 87).

In this Special Issue, Sihle Motsa reads multiple symbolic registers rooted in the temporal schema of a ‘post’ (‘freedom’) as a problem-space, event space, and an index that is unresolved and requires a repertoire of manoeuvres “to contemplate an array of problems pertaining to the nature of blackness: its ontic qualities, the historical events that signal its foreclosures and the political and epistemic endeavours that have yet to retrieve it from the violent womb of the world” (Motsa). Much like the manoeuvres to reduce race to a discursive register within the terms of non-racialism, the ‘post’ ubiquitous in reading the present demobilises “how colonialism and capitalism are integrated in the present but not structurally interdependent, surmising that despite an apparent shift in the production of colonial enjoyment or jouissance, capitalism enjoys the very place of colonial pleasure” (ibid.), sustaining the status of the university’s foundational and prophetic organisational imperatives in the uptake of this pleasure.

Motimele writes that the “Bantu Education Act of 1953 vehemently opposed the idea of ‘open’/racially” mixed universities under the auspices that “it rendered Africans unquiet subjects by engendering in them illusory hopes of racial equality; culturally it ‘denationalised’ them’ to the apartheid government, education was an integral sphere to inscribe and maintain the system of apartheid. More important, the sphere of higher education was always used to ingrain in black subjects’ subservience and silence” (2019, p. 206), and perhaps ‘despite’ the virtue-signaling, empiricist (and gate-keeping) of the oppositional observed by Ally (2005) to proffer a critique aimed at a future orientation towards the liberation of the worker, it remains evident that the Bantu Education Act’s prophetic organisation towards the “utility of black people during apartheid was to be cheap labour dispersed around the state for the benefit of whites and the state” (2019, p. 206) meets its purpose. Following Peter Hudson’s (2021, p. 161) assertion that:

[c]apitalism allows the white capitalist ‘non-racial’ subject to continue to keep a proper distance – an ontological distance – between himself and the colonised subject. It allows him to be ‘white’ and to continue to enjoy his whiteness in his economic relations with blacks because of his individual sovereignty, so deeply installed and fiercely defended in capitalism: he can be white in his practice on account of the negative (non-interference) freedom to do what he likes, with his capital, his property, within law, i.e. he can be white without his being present to he which being conscious of this.

Motsa is able to observe that this continuous colonial temporality, within what Tshepo Madlingozi (2017) terms neo-apartheid, not only maintains the structural and ontological distance between black and white – it also produces whiteness as an aporia, as “whiteness is not subject to temporal estrangement.”

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2004) note the role that teaching labour plays as its social capacity and its future orientation as “a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organisation” (p. 102), despite the undervalued status assigned to teaching itself. The prophecy of the university as an organisation, embedded in Motimele’s (2019) recognition of its neoliberalisation, is that while the intention is for the university to undo itself, in order for the labour force to be able to create itself, we can instead draw the conclusion that the very same professionalisation that is most frequently under critique as the central structural relation from which representational or descriptive categories do not take up the terms of the Political, ‘proper’ – the organisation of the university and professionalisation are one and the same. This operates at a global scale, indicated by Hakima Abbas (2012, p. 520), who argues that the intellectual creation of alternatives was firmly and intentionally “squashed by means ranging from outright assassination to the weakening of higher education through structural adjustment”. Further, for Abbas (2012), ‘professionalisation’ in the terms implied by Moten and Harney (2004) provides the basis for the economic development modelled on the exploitation and expropriation of nature that mobilises science, technology and organisation in a global integration of natural wealth resources. This is directed primarily towards northern consumption, and “has led to multiple crises: a food crisis, driven by the commodification of crops, soil and land, a financial crisis and an energy crisis” (Abbas 2012, p. 521). The stakes of knowledge and power drawn from this orientation to structure are well elaborated in this Special Issue: the terms by or through which we can come to speak or the voracious effects of a global anti-blackness within a Symbolic and Real realm that renders our critical nouns, along with the routinisation of violence, that are critical in obscuring the point from which we might begin.

The banality of racial events

A dedication:

TO BE RELEGATED TO THE MARGINS is to be in a state of being perpetually emotionally charged. Feelings coursing near the surface. Catching feelings. Shackled to emotions. In a defensive posture. Touchy. Surly. Chips on our shoulders. Charged in ways that those who are fully human do not have to be. Charged in ways that surprise others. Seeing into the past and future and connecting invisible but sedimented histories of trauma. Over analysing. I write this book from the place of catching feelings. From the chip on my prickly body. From the disorienting vortex of repeated catastrophe and joyful paradox that is the black condition. This book is about amaMpondo people of Mpondoland, but it is also about black people who are subjugated throughout the world.

      - Hugo ka Canham, Riotous Deathscapes (2023, p. xii)

On March 13 in 2020, Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend Kenny were sleeping in their apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. Ruha Benjamin (2023, p. 4) writes:

Kenny was a postal worker, and Breonna, an aspiring nurse, was an emergency medical technician (EMT) covering two hospitals in the city. Kenny and Breonna were two of the millions of ‘essential workers’ who supported Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, until their sleep was so violently interrupted.

Essential workers faced the double shifts Benjamin (2023) describes in many places in the global south, and the fearful energy of the everyday was critically marked by the effects of racial capital (see Mupotsa & Motimele 2021). The police officers who entered Breonna Taylor’s home did not name themselves, or state who they were looking for, shooting 32 rounds of ammunition towards her, “[t]he ultimate threat to Breonna’s life was never COVID-19, but brutality at the hands of the police, licensed by the claim of upholding law and order” (Benjamin 2023, p. 5). The multiple pandemics of COVID-19, capitalism and white supremacy (ka Canham 2021) are marked with modes of representation that, embedded within the juridicial status of an ‘as is’, would otherwise operate as unremarkable, the ‘banalisation of racial events’, borrowing from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s (2014) conception.

On 3 June 2020, protests in South Africa ensued, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, following the deaths of 11 South Africans at the hands of the South African Police Services and the South African Defence Force; as ‘to matter’, ‘lives matter’, becoming a global index of a moment within the discourse of the everyday. Turned to a vernacular both within and outside the realm of a black intramural, the death-dealing of anti-blackness as a global structure of organisation is presented here, sensible in the contexts of Cameroon, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and France, as some examples, and crucially, as examples that make this structure legible without the ‘usual’ particularity often assigned to the American and South African cases. Katherine McKittrick (2014, p. 18) observes that anti-black violence

is repaired by reproducing knowledge about the black subject that renders them less that human. It is descriptive analytics of violence. The cyclical and death-dealing numeration of the condemned remains intact through analytical pathways that are beholden to a system of knowledge that descriptively rehearses anti-black violences.

This social irreparability, as it appears within scientific or perceptual knowledge, forecloses certain dialectics, and contributors to this Issue reflect in this territory on the social and cultural basis of our shared demands and visions of liberation: that is, what is it in our present and historical contexts that lend to us the continuities and affinities of speech, despite the reality of our unequal integration into the postcolonial world order and a global order of racial capital that structures ethical, political and social life.

The workings of this separability “rest on a double distinction which places racial subjugations outside the ‘proper’ domain of political theory”, also referred to as “the banal” (da Silva 2017, p. 61). Da Silva continues:

[e]xplicitly, this distinction appears as racial matters are placed in a moral (social and cultural) terrain, where affectability (emotions and attachments) rules; implicitly, however, it refers to a deep matter of modern thought, in which raciality functions among the conditions of possibility for articulating the proper subject of the Political as a self-determined (self-regulated or self-transparent) existent, while affectability is attributed to everything (bodies, places, and more-than-humans) that is not white/European.

As ‘banal events’, the ubiquity of state-sanctioned violence marked as historical ruptures, when marked in their particularity fall into a paradox, where the “(moral) subject of decision is self-determined and the political) functionary of the modern bureaucracy is affectable – disappears is we recall the depth of raciality’s work” (da Silva 2014, p. 62) The affectability of these events under this common sense allows them to only ever operate as diagnostics, reduced to empirical example in extension of an ‘as is’ that continues to assume its own coherence. To this end, ‘black common sense’ (Mupotsa) makes its distinction in the realm of ‘race’, in the oppositional rhetoric previously described, or the realm of political theory where this racial event belongs to the “(moral) matter (namely prejudices, believes, or merely evil); it has nothing to offer in the form of the Political, which identities with the ‘rational’, ‘the civilized’ (evolved or selected by evolution), and so on” (da Silva 2014, p. 64).

In this issue, SM Rodriguez’s ‘African feminisms for abolitionist futures: archival hauntings in a speculative geography’, sets forward the task for interdependent, collective agency “of making Black lives matter, even in the death-worlding structures of carceralism and coloniality”, by emancipating penal and abolitionist theorising from whiteness. Carceralism is the social mechanism that defines and determines spatial, temporal and material relations constitutive of these zones of separability (involuntary servitude, imprisonment, immigrant detention, displacement), as well as the maroon philosophies (James 2013) of resistance, that Rodriquez argues, “speak to penal abolition defined not as a movement against oppressive institutions, but that which seeks to end the ideologies that uphold and reanimate them.” Entangled in the logics of gender and prisons, Rodriguez, along with Lethabo Mailula, Chenai Mupotsa-Russell and Malose Langa, demonstrates how gender structures this total institution, invented in Africa as part of the substructure of a brutal slave economy.

Haydée Bangerezako and Pape Chérif Bertrand Bassene example is telling: Yewwu-Yewwi meaning ‘to awaken the consciousness’, based on the folkloric presence of the Priestess medium, Alandisso Bassene, a woman with healing powers whose shrine led to a clash with colonial intermediaries, leading to her imprisonment in 1919.¹ Read from Ayabulela Mhlahlo’s ‘demonic model’, this feminist movement in Senegal by, lodging its transnational method from the spatiotemporal zone of modernity’s nation state also maps the means by which

black wo/men’s vast inventions of symbolic and material space intercept with, and subvert, modern cartography […] we continue to uncover the hidden symbolic layers of the map, we begin to see that its telos far surpasses its material function of surveying, producing, navigating, and enclosing space. When we are aware of the map’s para-text at the symbolic and abstract zone of the imagination, the map transforms into a puzzle. It is at this point that the symbolic, graphic language of the map begins to appear like a game, more specifically a maze Mhlahlo.

Alandisso Bangarezako & Bassene is a maroon like La Mulâtrese Solitude of Guadeloupe in 1794, whose refusal awakens the resistance of an international Black Lives Matter movement when Solitude’s story was reborn in Paris in 2022 Rodriguez.

The terror of solidarity

The grape-picker holds out

his hand full of fruit but turns

his face, the slight, unavailable cast

of his head his most precious possession.

The woman who cleans your house

all day is in the places you cannot be,

touches your sheets.

You hate

what is held back,

not known to you,

kept, stolen, enchanted.

      - Gabeba Baderoon, ‘Fanon’s Secret’ (2006, p. 63)

Choosing not to deliver his speech on the fourth of July, Douglass’s commentary on the hypocrisy of American freedom is not only demonstrated in not speaking on the day of its celebration, it simultaneously gestures forward in time. Selamwit D Terrefe (2018) speaks to a distinction between the words we speak to communicate, against the rules of order, “expression versus systems of power” (p. 129), from which we can generate a grammar of a different subject of feminism:

[a]nd if violence is the a priori psychic and ontological construction undergirding Blackness, our methods for interpreting and articulating not only the machinations of the Black psyche, but also Black² intramural relations, must be attuned to the effects of these ‘high crimes of the flesh’ of ‘African females and African males’ who still registers this foundational ‘wounding’ – what [Hortense] Spillers defines relationally as ‘social irreparability’. (p. 129)

Athinangamso Nkopo’s ‘All the things you could be by now if Pinky Pinky wasn’t your Madam: Black, gender, Human, sexuality’, a theorisation of Hortense Spillers’ ‘incubus’ (1987, 1996), pursues this insistence, as Nkopo argues for Black Feminism in South Africa to frame its gender questions differently, accounting for the gratuitous, undifferentiated, undeterminable, constitutive and ontological violence underwritten into Black spaces. Pinky Pinky’s haunting is much like the way that haunting structural SM Rodriquez’s analytic of carceral feminism takes up the space of the (prison) house (gender’s conceptual territory). In Gabeba Baderoon’s (2014, p. 173) mapping of the house, it is “a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separated private lives and separate leisures in which to practice ways of living apartheid's ideological partitions into reality.” In this territory, the female cultural broker and mediator moves in between this space, where the “role of domestic worker translates between public and private, inside and outside, and is therefore associated with the anxieties of ambiguity and betrayal that translation always generates” (Baderoon 2014, p. 176) in this territory, or matrix in Joy James’ 2013 framing:

Democracy’s aggressions against the black matrix, its terror, its terror against black reproductive labour, its sanction of racial rape I describe ere as state ‘intimate violence.’ State violence and intimate violence are two related but distinct phenomena. Violations of black productivity coexist with terror against black reproductivity.” (p. 125)

For Nkopo, “feminist solidarity and hindrances to intramural unity strives to reframe and constitute afresh the organising sentiment and politics of any ideological outlook which considers itself Black feminism. Having been structurally excommunicated from the community of the Human and its gender-forming terms, which demarcate domestic spaces wherein gendering process are possible.”

Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara engages this paradox through a reading of the multiple meanings contained within the notion of personhood. For Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara the question of who possesses the moral and political authority to distinguish who is, and is not a person, or what it means, as this definition is tied to power, and in turn to freedom. The legal person, or legal personhood is, for instance, one who bears juridical capacities, “the significance of being a person is in the rights of the law, both public and private … only a person can have rights and duties,” adding that “[p]ersonhood is differentiated into natural (ostensibly human) and juristically (the state and incorporated entities such as companies) persons.” The terms of freedom, indicated by temporal markers incorporating a person into citizenship, or marked by the temporal indicator ‘post’, remains within the foundational architecture of the foundational architecture, attributing “dignity and self-determination, said to be exclusive to the modes of being human found in Europe, [which] extend to mental (moral and intellectual) and juridical and economic configurations” (da Silva 2014, p. 62).

Netsanet Gebremichael’s focus piece, ‘Mapping the notion of the Ethiopian transnational: A close reading of the Ethiopian Women’s Question in the publications of the Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM) in the 1960s and 1970s’, which tracks debates between transnational feminist scholars. Gebremichael offers three definitions within them: first, one that mobilises the transnational as a means to draw attention to the operations of difference, as a tool to generate a critical distance from an assumed and even notion of global sisterhood; the second instantiation of the transnational operates at the meeting point between feminist organising outside the borders of the nation state, where a motivation to move beyond that border is a strategic action to confront patriarchal and homophobic enclosures within the borders of the nation itself. The final definition observed in Gebremichael’s review is situated within the conceptual terrain of Third World feminism.

Gebremichael’s archive offers at least two critical interventions to this emplotment. Across the three definitions, sustained within them is an epistemological structure at play: a dichotomy between analytical and methodological approaches, and that of activism and praxis. These divisions have a spatiotemporal operation, with the analytical/methodological location in the global north, and the activist-praxis as the domain of the global south. Read this way, even while an attentiveness to difference is articulated as the principle of critique, the structural relation sustains the non-performativity of the gesture. Further, the very attentiveness to difference itself operates as a mask, in Maria Lugones’ (2014) conception of it; one that mobilises a rhetorical strategy to mask the sustained and false universalism. Gebremichael directs our attention to this epistemological ruse, noting how the disciplinary formations from which the analytical and methodological approaches emerge function as the means by which this monoculturalism is both masked and structurally reproduced. Gebremichael’s leftist transnational conception not only defamiliarises this geography, it embeds us in an archive of the transnational at the nexus of resistance and pedagogy. From the 1930s, global feminist organising took shape, gaining traction from the 1950s to the 1970s in the wave of decolonisation, and influenced by left and black radical movements in the global north (Salem 2018).

Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara’s critique of the Human (Wynter 2003) forges the demand to address the question of solidarity and if, as suggested otherwise by Nkopo, gender can be a meaningful operative relation for black people, drawing from Sylvia Tamale’s (2020) critique alongside Lugones’ (2014) practice of unmasking. Lugones (2014) contends that feminisms that mobilise solidarity often mask how that universal masks its own whiteness, moving further in her critique to extend the method of unmasking to intersectionality, arguing that “resistance needs to both recognize intersectionality and resist recognition through a superimposing of the recognition that oppressions intermesh. Otherwise, we see ourselves as fragmented beings, combined fragments of both white men and non-white men” (Lugones 2014, p. 75). Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara's effort/ conjoinment of Lugones’ (2014) and Tamale’s (2020) insights offers a critical meeting point that allows us to elaborate on ‘terror’s’ affect. As observed by several black feminists, embedded within Lugones’ (2014) method is the professionalised manner of feminist habit to put black women to the labour of rhetorical use. What Terrefe contends, is grounded on the very discourse of power and violence its theoretical orientation denounces (2020, p. 135; also see Jackson 2018). Terrefe (2020, p. 140) observes once again how this professionalised abstraction operates, as “the critique levels here appear to be aimed at intersectionality’s revelation of ‘racism at the fundamental theoretical and epistemological levels’ more so than its method. A lack of elucidation is concomitant with the erasure of the ontological violence”.

A puzzle of consciousness

Gebremichael writes that the

notion of the transnational at work here is a transnational that aspires to resist: a cartography that is mapped in ESM publications assemble inspiration and aspiration as modes of resistance against historical forces such as colonialism, imperialism, as well as local imperialist rule and cultural norms […] this is a horizontal gesture of the transnational’s that situates the local and the global around aspirational alliances against a palimpsest of oppressive structures

which charts the analytic and method ‘mapping’ in the symbolic, imagination and experimental territories proposed by Mhlahlo’s article, ‘Labyrinths and cartographies: Pathways to the folkloric imagination’, where she joins to concepts McKittrick’s (2006) use of Sylvia Wynter’s (1990) ‘demonic grounds’, Toni Morrison’s (1992) sensory perception, and Masithathi Zenani’s (1992) ‘labyrinthic puzzles’, exposing the structural force of colonial modernity’s cartographic regimes. Geography as a disciplinary formation retains an attachment to stasis and physical space, where space ‘just is’, “and that space and place are merely containers for human complexities and social relations” (McKittrick 2006, p. xii) as a seductive anchor of personhood, in Samaradiwakera-Wikesundara’s terms.

It is this physical space or public that directs Larissa Kojoué’s attention to at least two forms of publics, with a foreclosure of physical space for queer people in Cameroon from which “space building or space mapping”, as Mhlahlo presents it, can be possible. Community as a spatial, temporal and even hopeful model for the transnational operates in Kojoué’s reading of queer visibility. In a careful optimism about the possibilities of digital public spheres, Kojoué examples strategies of self-exposure for people who challenge conventional norms of heterosexuality. Within this space of encounters, and in a context of a foreclosed physical space in the nation for queer Cameroonians, this iterative public enables an alternative geography, or virtual geographies where “one is experiencing recognition, they can encounter new sensibilities of what ‘norms’ can be, and in so doing, build and sustain platforms that produce counter-discourses to dominant discourses”, “in this sense, the performative self that mediates physical and virtual space and the individual, are not only performed in dialogue with an anticipated audience, but are also intentionally a performative self that is in relation or community.” In its second sense; imprisonment, hiding, immigration, forced immigration and detention map the transnational for Cameroonian queers in flight at home and abroad, demonstrative of what Julia C. Oparah (2012, p. 242-243) calls the “(trans) gender entrapment of gender nonconforming prisoners” is the territory of ‘defying fear’.

In Maya Bhadwaj’s ‘Embodying transnational queer Black and Brown utopia’, the virtual, gestural and topological operate as a trans-space to mediate a form of livability. Kojoué is reticent to describe this territory with the same optimism in Bhadwaj’s formulation, describing this map as a “techno-centrist utopia”, continuous with violence, particularly when the more recent modes of legal-political repressions include the 2010 law on cybersecurity and cybercrime, wherein Article 83, Section one criminalised same-sex virtual erotic exchanges, and a later section adds further penalty if sexual intercourse followed the virtual interaction (Nyeck 2019). While the virtual mediates a space of recognition, it is still met with violence, “it will hurt you to see us happy”, is the overall “graphic language of [this] map”, to interpolate Mhlahlo’s reading of cartographic processes within the modern episteme.

For Bhardwaj, the DJ booth is the space-time of the transnational – as is Black and Brown resistance:

through activism, cultural organising, and the everyday of survival in the belly of the colonial beast. Crossing the border of the nation-state is again, strategic and enabling for black and Brown queer people that specifically explored the possibility of queer utopias and queer worlds beyond borders and the nation-states.

The map as a mediator between an inner world and an outer world is built upon symbolic language, or the consciousness of the culture it intends to represent, leading Mhlahlo to offer the two senses of the map she is concerned with: a literary/fictive test “that reconfigures the symbolic language of a given cultural consciousness into a graphic language to not only make sense of material space but to build strategies of shaping material space from its own political will,” and in the second “a more apriori sense of the map that is ingrained in the very symbolic language inherent in the material, graphic language of the textual map.” Gebremichael’s mapping situates transnational praxis in several ways, perhaps mediating both of the cartographic modalities offered by Mhlahlo.

Gebremichael’s method, to take up the ways that Tumi Mampane extends the symbolic language of surfacing in her Perspective, “to surface, a surface, surfacing is method and praxis from which knowledge production emerges and beyond a metaphoric significance within a transnational context that privileges north American feminist scholarship to the extent that it can be situated as universal”, aims to avoid historical erasure. The nexus of knowledge/praxis is further nuanced by its leftist consciousness, and this revolutionary process operates with a critical practice of autocritique, re-evaluating the terms of consciousness raising. Gebremichael’s insistence on a horizontal and affirmative reading of how these various locations operated in relation to each other gains its nuance in the analysis of the publications, where the debates concerned with the Women’s Question drew examples with explicit attention to a left-leaning and socialist global order, mobilising a comparative approach to anticolonial, anticapitalistic and anti-imperialist movements in countries outside of Ethiopia. To this end, at the level of consciousness, it is not only the manner of debate that mobilises this language, the world view and its spatiotemporal order defamiliarises a singular, vertical authority of the north/south hierarchy. The movements between countries in the then ‘east’ and ‘west’ geography of the period within the horizontal and affirmative reading Gebremichael suggests, are a critical aspect in disrupting the epistemic habits within transnational feminist scholarship, as the pedagogical orientation situates praxis, consciousness and knowledge in the same nexus, resonating with Grace Musila’s commentary on how her movements between countries, universities and disciplines animated a “becoming Black” (2019a, p. 69) as a consciousness.

Similarly reading an event-time of decolonisation, Bangerezako and Bassene note the strategic operative as it relates to the transnational. First, as invoked in Gebremichael’s reading, as a means to negotiate outside the borders of the nation state. Bangarezako and Bassene trace the emergence of the Yewwu-Yewwi Women’s Liberation Movement in Senegal from 1984 in this period of decolonisation, and gendered transformations leading to the independent nation state's invention. Under the pressures of structural adjustment programmes, collaboration with development feminisms could generate space and resources. They also note an explicit openness to global feminisms, as a means to reach outside the ambit of a national patriarchal culture. Postcolonial patriarchal masculinity’s inversion of ritual processes, like ceremony related the person, if we invoke Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara’s evocation of it, from itself. The colonial and national transformations of the meanings of both culture and the person materialise in gender logics that make these avenues, or affiliations to a global sensible. As Lyn Ossome observes, the “relationship between gender, wealth and power, anticipated the centrality of gendered labour processes in the survival of the family/ household by highlighting the articulation between reproductive labour and the productive economy” (Ossome 2021b, p. 556) and this shift in reproductivity is recognisable in gendered battles over land and food sovereignty in Bangerezako and Bassene' example.

Reproductivity

Working with the frame of Third World and agrarian feminism, Ossome’s article offers another genealogy of the transnational. Similarly, the analytical and strategic basis is redistributive, with emphasis on how social formations operate: structural racism and the capitalist exploitation of gendered labour. Framed in the term ‘death dealing’, Ossome contends that from a Third World and agrarian feminist perspective, a transnational question would be to example the extent to which global value chains of production explore unequal domestic gender relations. The spatial division of sex, value and labour is of course critically reflected in the house as a map:

Houses are unsettling hybrid structures. A house is, in all its figurings, always thing, domain, and meaning – home, dwelling, and property, that is, house, household, and home. A house is a juridical-economic-moral entity that, as property, as material (as asset), political (as dominium), and symbolic (as shelter) value. Houses, as such, refer to the three main axes of modern thought: the economic, the juridical, and the ethical, which are, as one would expect, the registers of the modern subject. It is in fact, impossible to exaggerate the significance of individual (private) property in representations of modernity. (Chakravartty & da Silva 2012, p. 362)

The scale of the household, much like the university, operates similarly, even to the extent of their comparative relation to neoliberalism’s reproductive order. This relation is explored by Rodriquez and Mailula, for example, and in strong accord with the Issue as a whole, the role of violence in establishing colonies, along with the centrality of gendered labour is a critical and foundational question. Rodriquez asks, “How we can recentre the transnational legacy of African women’s resistance to carceralism to better understand their contribution to today’s abolitionist imagination?”, pointing to the critical role penal abolitionist movements can play in terms of directly confronting and removing colonial institutions of control. The entangled logics of gender and prisons direct Mailula to an abolitionist feminist framework premised on advancing community-centred, restorative justice approaches, and this resonates with Mupotsa-Russell’s attentiveness to indigenous sovereignty, as well as methods towards healing justice (see Kim 2018). Perhaps as a tentative answer to Ossome’s provocation as it relates to how one presses against the depoliticisation of social movements, Rodriquez, Mailula and Mupotsa-Russell observe the penal system’s interconnected nature to structural violence, as “the critique giving rise to the term carceral feminism fundamentally centre on the depoliticization of social movements with politically radical roots” (Kim 2018, p. 221), and within this practice, indicated in Langa and Mupotsa-Russell’s frameworks of meaning-making and listening, the framework relies on systems of community accountability.

At the meeting point of racial capital and reproductivity, the history of the prison and its relation to colonial modernity is mapped across the volume. Mupotsa-Russell offers meaning-making practices as a form of healing justice – in exploring her own practice, shaped by a transnational, decolonial and feminist praxis – to explore this practice and an attempt to “invent this space of dwelling, coming up against a broader sentiment of an ‘even’ and inclusive national sentiment, and denials of the operational and constitutive forms of difference that are echoed in law”, returning us once again to the analytic of the human, which appears across the board. Perhaps beginning with the household, the question of land sovereignty, or the nation state’s role in a gendered reproduction of violence is not only embedded as the form and structure of anti-blackness, it is demonstrably what is constitutive of the Human and the Black (Wynter 2003). Langa’s, ‘Unbecoming to becoming men: Reply to Moshibudi Motimele’, engages with Motimele’s (2021) reading of his book (Langa 2020), whose area - ‘studied’ (Macharia 2016) is the ‘South African township’, and more specifically, Alexandra; and yet, his first point of reference to engage with the situation of black men and boys is the space-time of the prison where he enters as a psychologist and experiences “shock”.

Mailula speaks to the achievements of the history of policing and prisons in South Africa, as a “colonial legacy of criminalizing difference and asserting racial (and gendered) superiority of a population of people”, resonant with Langa’s re-spatialised encounter of study, alongside Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara’s legal personhood, the constitutive relation of blackness, black reproductivity (Nkopo, Sexton 2018), as well as Langa’s own situatedness both as scholar and practitioner, which is the work to, or work of repair, as Naadira Patel elucidates in this Issue. As Mailula states, the failure of the carceral system rests in its inability to not only offer victims substantive justice, but also to rehabilitate perpetrators of crime. This failure is demonstrably the structure of the machinery itself, expressed in Mupotsa-Russell, who in her practice as a therapist in various rehabilitative institutions saw the starkness of this pipeline and the unintentionality of its failure. Said in another way, “we must ground ‘rehabilitation’ in its necessary precursor of pathologisation and understand that punishment and incapacitation continue to coexist within if not supersede the reformatory logic” (Rodriguez).

Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.

(Jacobs 2000 [1861], p. 164)

These demons of urban legend enable my theoretical interventions of the question of Black gender which breaks with Human gender subjectivity, and which implies that there can be no solidarity between Human women and Black women.

(Nkopo)

Thobile Ndimande’s article, ‘So-Fire-Town: The representations of a translucent urban Black femininity in the Black Press through the signatures of Dolly Rathebe in the 1950s,’ poses the figure of the girl as one that sits at the nexus of contradiction. The girl, turned black femme (Keeling 2007; Sharpe 2010) materialises in Motsa, Mupotsa and Nkopo, for instance, or in Mampane’s Lady, and in Reshma Chhiba’s positional “this”, “these”, “Title Unknown”. This nexus’s possibilities conjure what in Chhiba’s words operate as

both translation and of imagining in several languages that I aim to use, that we do not simply look, we simultaneously read.

The girl, at the centre of reproductivity in Drum magazine performs as cover to print medium within a substructure of white capitalism. Ndimande posits that that the girl is at the nexus of contradiction, because she is at once cyclical and re-cyclical, precarious as she is often disposed and dispossessed (also see Tlelima). And yet, within the analytics of translucence, pseudonymity and ventriloquism, Ndimande looks to a space that can articulate Black sociality where, for instance, there is value in other black girls putting the image on the wall so it is not disposed of, which establishes some relation to permanence. Commodification of the body, black women’s reproductive labour and femininities connect Ndimande with the critiques lodged by Tiisetso Tlelima and Simran Anjari. We can also look at the question of value from the present, where copyrights to her image remain in the hands of the same. The use value, that is, as plotted by Wynter (1971, p. 99) in the plantation-plot dichotomy:

In the world of use Value, human needs dominate the product. In the world of exchange value, the thing made, dominates, manipulates, human need. (p. 97)

A dual oscillatory process in which Man adapts to Nature, and adapts Nature to his own needs

[with the discovery …] and its vast exploitable lands that process which has been termed the ‘reduction of Man to Labour and of Nature to Land’ had its large scape beginning. […] In new societies like ours, created for the market, there seemed at first to be no possibility of such a tradition.

We suggest that this plot system, was, like the novel form in literature terms, the focus resistance to the market system and market values.

Vertigo

Terrefe (2018, p. 124) observes a black intramural fixation on the “wounded ‘flesh’ of Black men, gazing upon contemporary images of their bullet ridden bodies as though these corpses were conduits for a mourning we refuse for Black women, cis and trans.” Jared Sexton’s (2018) reading of the politics of violence, particularly as it is cast within Black Lives Matter and as one that sanctions violence on black men and women from the lens of reproductive violence as its critical foundation – is related to personhood, matter, representation and the person. Developed across several articles in this issue, Spillers’ (1987, 1996) hermeneutics of the flesh mediate these intersections, which Terrefe (2018, p. 126) argues as necessary for

any ethical investigation into the intersection of race, gender, politics, and violence written within contemporary discourse in Africa and is diaspora must include a vision of the psychic life of Black subjects as theorised by Black people, […] Spillers (1987, 1996) extends her radical hermeneutic of flesh, that she defines as ‘that zero degree of social conceptualisation that does not escape concealment in the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography

For instance, operating from Kara Keeling (2007) and Christina Sharpe’s (2010) conceptions of the black femme, Mhlahlo, Motsa, Mupotsa and Nkopo’s ‘personhoods’ operate within the terrains of this extended hermeneutic.

At home in Ibuza, Nnaife’s people branded her a bad woman, and she had to go and live with her own people in Ogboli. She had expected tis, knowing full well that only good children belonged to the father … 

[…]

For a while Nnu Ego bore it all without reaction, until her sense started to give way. She became vague, and people pointed out that she had never been strong emotionally.

[…]

After such a wandering one night, Nnu Ego lay down by the roadside, thinking that she had arrived home. She died quietly there, with no child to hold her hand and no friend to talk to her. She had never really made any friends, so busy had she been building up her joys as a mother.

When her children heard of her sudden death they all. Even Oshia came home. They were all sorry she had died before they were in a position to give their mother a good life. She had the noisiest and most costly second burial Ibuza had ever seen, and a shrine was made in her name, so that her grandchildren could appeal to her should they be barren.

Stories afterwards, however, said that Nnu Ego was a wicked woman even in death because, however many people appealed to her to make women fertile, she never did. Poor Nnu Ego, even in death she had no peace! Still, many agreed that she had given her best to her children. The joy of being a mother was in the joy of giving your all to your children, they said.

[…]

    Nnu Ego had it all, and yet still did not answer prayers for children.

      - Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood, 1979, pp. 253-254

‘Vertigo’ is evoked in Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s (2016) ‘Sense of things’, as “both a symptom and metaphor for inhabiting a reality discredited (a blackened reality) that is at once the experience of the carceral and the apprehension of a radically distributed sensorium” (pp. 1-2). By coincidence, at the time of writing this introduction I was teaching Buchi Emecheta’s 1979 novel, The Joys of Motherhood, often read for its hermeneutic, one that situates African womanhood in a sexual politics. Operating in the conventions of the Bildungsroman that is generated within the terms of the self-reference and narratively demands a resolution that incorporates the subject into the social, what we observe in Nnu Ego’s ending is the failure to meet this achievement. Jackson (2016) notes the critical role of the novel form in establishing the supremacy of Western imperial humanism as universal, and in turn situating (or in Jackson’s terms, displacing) local knowledges to particularity, or culturally-specific orders, makes it a form of literature that supports “positivist knowledge as aspirational horizon, […] pursued via a combination of discursive force and a coercive (dis)possession of processes of sense perception and cognition on a global scale” (p. 3).

Emecheta’s protagonist, Nnu Ego seeks a proper status within the terms of motherhood, forced to leave her first husband in Ibuza when they could not conceive a child. In Lago, she marries Nnaife, and while she finally has her children, in a parallel to Emecheta’s own biographical ‘I’, where her own marriage failed under the pressures of the demands of reproductive labour under the conditions of its relation to racial capitalism – Emecheta’s hermeneutic and failure operates within a confrontation bound between ‘cultures’, or where tradition meets modernity. Jackson (2016, p. 4) continues, as “‘literature’ came to function as the transcendentalised index of a degree of ‘Culture’ which group, understood in the biologized terms of race and national identity, had achieved or could achieve based on their immanent ‘nature.’ ‘Culture, in the new episteme took the place that Reason had played”. In this instance, motherhood as an institution, an organisational a territory from which colonial modernity’s concept of gender emanates (Oyěwùmí 1997), is the point at which Nnu Ego’s body

subtends the transubstantiation of Black bodies into flesh [… and under] these conditions we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender specific. (Terrefe 2018, p. 128)

Ossome (2021b, p. 550) notes that one of the most salient contributions of postcolonial feminisms in

countering western hegemonic discourses on gender has been to return gender to its salience as a social and political category: that is, to locate its materiality in the historical institutions and structures that gave it meaning against the long shadow of enslavement, colonisation and imperialism. To think gender in its historicity is to confront questions regards its conceptual validity, the practices through which it enhances knowledge of the subjects defined through it, and the subjectivations that daily reproduce it as an organising principle in society.

Gender, the sexual division of labour and its materiality, comes to interact with structural, ideological and ecological factors, developed the term reproductivity that shifts the social relation to a horizon of freedom within the liberal that claims universally in the name of ‘rights’ a claim to power that in Nnu Ego’s case, collapses her. In the intimate and violent tie to the reproductive function of black women, Terrefe (2018, p. 131) argues that this role operating in the processes of boundless resentment and aggressivity “played unconsciously toward the black woman, phobogenic object, stimulates anxiety; vestibular, the principal point of passage between the human and non-human world) of the psychic process crucial to understanding contemporary Black intramural relations”, whose location obscures the syntactic particularity that locates Nnu Ego’s failed maternal relation in the realm of the nation state’s consciousness, and the Mother Africa trope’s own failed historicity, as it relates to the terms by and through which African women’s imago operates within that invention of culture (Macharia 2019).

Nnu Ego’s failed resolution demonstrates a teleological stuckness, or in Jackson’s (2016, p. 10) terms vertigo which

functions as a metaphor for the onto-epistemological predicament of black women in particular and blackness more generally under conditions of imperial Western modernity or the conception of Man with the terms of a telos [ from which Jackson traces] how an injunction against an avowed commonality in being, or humanity, but an ontologized conception of gendered race paradoxically provides access to an alternative conception of reality (commonly disqualified and discredited by as racially exclusive common sense)

Tracing my own sense-ability with my contribution to this issue, titled ‘Black common sense’, authors, in their considerations of the formations that structure anti-blackness in the world and our resistance against it, have attempted to engage with the same. But, as Wynter (1971, p. 101) reminds us, “the world had to be kept safe for the market economy […] history, to help in this task had to be distorted. The myth of history was used by the plantation to keep its power secure. […] but the plot too has its own history.”

Contributors trace the modes of domination and resistance in complex local/translocal dialogue, in part to listen for the vocabularies and vernaculars of anti-blackness cohering in this local/translocal, new modes of black geographic thought (McKittrick 2014); and further, to offer nuanced readings of iterations of Black transnational feminist organising. Our concern with engagements with the emergence of the Third World (Ossome 2021a) served the purpose of signalling a multiplicity of terms by, or through which a trans-praxis might travel, as well as it demands an attentiveness to imperialist processes that encompass the spectrum of cultural, economic and political conquest, and the uneven development that they entrench. Black transnational feminist solidarities are an important lens through which to examine this historical trajectory as a structure of domination that is not necessarily transcended by virtue of location in the global north. The social basis of transnational solidarity also emerges in the debate as a crucible of the political relevance of transnational feminist movements. That is, at the core of our insistence that Black Lives Matter is a social question and critique of the structures, conditions and institutions that reproduce Black life as immaterial.

The labouring materialises, meant within Jackson’s (2018) reading that Musila (2019a, p. 77) offers as

the gap between the academy and black life, the impossibility of hospitality to black life in the modern university as it is currently structured, and the risks of becoming what [bell] hooks terms cultural overseers or informers (askaris, in South African parlance) ‘mediating between the forces of domination and its victims.’

Working at the ‘branch plant’ within the cultural image of the University (Wynter 1996 [1968]) or said another way, “I contend that the mourning we refuse for Black women, cis and trans, rests upon differently affected responses to anti-black violence, not upon differential in its structure and practice” (Terrefe 2018, p. 124), and yet another, “The back academic as speaking flesh produces knowledge in the life-world of the brokenness of the blackened intellectual culture worker” (Isoke 2018, p. 159).

Under the conditions of an impossible black intramural (Nkopo), collaboration and even the method/analytic of “the native who wanders off” (Macharia 2016, p. 188; Musila 2019b, p. 292), vertigo takes the following shapes:

Simran Anjari’s ‘skin tone tensions’; Haydée Bangerezako and Pape Chérif Bertrand Bassene’s ‘mediumship’; Maya Bhardwaj’s ‘gestural enactions of queer utopia’; Netsanet Gebremichael’s ‘leftist transnational itineraries’; Larissa Kojoué’s ‘defying fear’; Malose Langa’s ‘identity disruption’; Lethabo Mailula’s ‘exchange of tools and strategies’; Tumi Mampane’s ‘thing of Blackwomen thriving’; Ayabulela Mhlahlo’s ‘abstract cartographies and labyrinthine imaginations’; Lebohang Mojapelo’s ‘gone’; Sihle Motsa’s ‘conceptual disingenuity’; Danai Mupotsa’s ‘anticipatory grief’; Chenai Mupotsa-Russell’s ‘meaning-making’; Thobile Ndimande’s ‘translucent femininity’; Athinangamso Nkopo’s ‘parasitic relation’; Ijeoma Opara’s ‘fear’; Lyn Ossome’s ‘colonising substructure’; Naadira Patel’s ‘work of making things work’; SM Rodriguez’s ‘speculative geographies’; Tiisetso Tlelima’s ‘collaboration’; and Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara’s ‘purposive analytical tools’.

Gratitude goes to our contributors, gently holding the fragments in a statis besieged by the unbearable. Gratitude also to our peer reviewers, and to Shireen Ragunan and Leverne Gething. Gratitude to my sister Chenai, who generously produced the cover for this issue. And finally, deepest respect and gratitude to my fellow guest editors, Lyn Ossome and Athinangamso Nkopo. I have learned so much from you both.

They burned the market down on the day Vivek Oji died.

- Akwaeke Emezi (2020), The Death of Vivek Oji

Dedicated to my Beloved, Dr Eddie Cavines Ombagi (24 February 1989–20 April 2023).

I am heartbroken.

“We are fragmented – we have been fragmented – we are fragmenting ourselves.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danai S. Mupotsa

DANAI S. MUPOTSA teaches in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is a member of the editorial collective of Agenda Feminist Media, and recently co-edited the Agenda special issue ‘Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics’ (2021) with Moshibudi Motimele. Danai has edited several other volumes, including a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled ‘Time Out of Joint: The Queer and the Customary in Africa’ with Neville Hoad and Kirk Fiereck. She co-curated the Power Talks Johannesburg programme, along with the exhibition Practices of Repair at The Point of Order with Naadira Patel in September 2022. Danai was part of the research team working in collaboration with Urgent Action Fund - Africa that recently published IDS Working Paper 576 (2022), Contextualising Healing Justice as a Feminist Organising Framework in Africa. In 2018 she published her first collection of poetry titled feeling and ugly. The Portuguese translation, feio e ugly (Sandra Tamele, trans.) was published in 2020 by Editora Trinta Zero Nove (Maputo). Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The arrest and subsequent murder of young African women are strewn all over the colonial archives of early encounter. In this issue, Rodriguez also points out that the incarceration rates of African women around the world have risen sharply, and often not on the basis of an actual infraction of the law.

2 The term ‘black’ will generally be indication with the small b, unless it is in a direct quote where the speaker indicates it with the capital, as it operates within the grammatical and syntactic structure of their argument.