Cold War Culturalism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches

Abstract

This article provides some theoretical sketches of the epistemological and intellectual impact of the Cold War on African Diaspora Theory. Starting in the 1950s, anticommunism/antiradicalism overwrote and built upon extant technologies of antiblackness that dispossess, subordinate, and marginalize the majority of African descendants in the United States and in the Global South. While concessions were made to a certain group of Blacks—particularly Cold War Liberals in the United States and Developmentalists in the Global South—these exceptions were directly contingent upon the repression of labor, radicalism, and any forms of mobilization that challenged the pedagogy of the Cold War state. Those who received entitlements from the dominant regime became complicit with the deployment of violence against those they were complicit in “niggerizing.” As a result, the Black radical tradition has been subsumed in African Diaspora Theory, rendering the latter insufficient for critical engagement with the material conditions of the Black subaltern.

Keywords:

• African Diaspora Theory
• antiblackness
• anticommunism
• black radical tradition
• Cold War

Notes

George Shepperson, “African Diaspora: Concept and Context,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, edited by Joseph E. Harris (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993), 41.

James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 265.

Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics at Home and Abroad (New York: Cambridge university Press, 2003), 75.

See Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Modernity, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11 (1999): 245–68; Reuel R. Rogers, “Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, African Americans, and the Politics of Group Identity,” in Black and Multiracial Politics in America, edited by Yvette M. Alex-Assenoh and Lawrence J. Hanks (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 15–59; and Shayla Nunnally, “Linking Blackness or Ethnic Otherness? African Americans’ Diasporic Linked Fate with West Indian and African Peoples in the United States,” DuBois Review 7 (2010): 335–55.

According to scholars such as Brent Hayes Edwards; Tiffany Patterson and Robin Kelley; and Michael O. West, the resurgence of sholarship on the African Diaspora and the development of African diaspora studies can be attributed to the accession of concerns about “globalization” and “transnationalism.” According to West, “The search for globalization in scholarship follows, willy-nilly, the globalization of capital, especially in the post-cold war era. Within the academy, the turn toward globalization has involved a parallel move movement away from the area studies approach. … Such is the broader content for the increasing popularity of what is now being called African diaspora studies.” Brent Hayes Edwards, “Unfinished Migrations: Commentary and Response,” African Studies Review 43 (2000): 61. Also see Tiffany Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review 43 (2000): 11–45; Gerald Horne, “Toward a Transnational Research Agenda for African-American History in the 21st Century,” The Journal of African American History 96 (2011): 288–303; Michael West, “Global Africa: The Emergence and Evolution of an Idea,” Review 28 (2005): 85–108; and Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Texts 66 (2001): 45–73. Also see Brenda Gayle Plummer, “The Changing Face of Diplomatic History: A Literature Review.” The History Teacher 38 (2005): 385–400. Although the author is specifically discussing new directions in diplomatic history scholarship, her exegesis is pertinent to trends in the academy generally.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2010), 62.

Kenneth Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing Diaspora,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 392–405.

Gates, Tradition and the Black Atlantic, 52–60.

See Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 441–49.

Examples of this iteration of African Diaspora Theory include: Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990); Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994); Manthia Diawara, “Cultural Studies/Black Studies,” in Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies, edited by Mae G. Henderson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 202–12; Anne Ducille, “Discourse and Dat Course: Postcolonialism and Afrocentricity,” in Skin Trade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 120–35; Houston A. Baker, Mathia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Urbana-Champaign: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); Barbara Ransby, “Afrocentrism, Cultural Nationalism, and the Problem with Essentialist Definitions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” in Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience, edited by Manning Marable (New York: Columbia University, 2000), 216–23; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2003); and Hazel Carby, “Postcolonial Translations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (2007): 213–34. Also see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).

For various critiques of culturalism and its effect on the marginalization of political economy in understandings of the Black condition, see David Chaney, The Cultural Turn: Scene-setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1994), 174–207; David Scott, “Culture in Political Theory,” Political Theory 31 (2003): 92–115; Alana Lentin, “Replacing ‘Race’, Historicizing ‘Culture’ in Multiculturalism,” Patterns of Prejudice 39 (2005): 379–96; Deborah Thomas, “The Violence of Diaspora: Governmentality, Class Cultures, and Circulations,” Radical History Review 103 (2009): 83–104; Barbara Foley, Specters of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); “The Culture of Race, Class, and Poverty: The Emergence of Cultural Discourse in Early Cold War Social Work (1946–63),” The Journal of Sociology and Welfare 30 (2015): 15–38; and Charisse Burden-Stelly, “The Modern Capitalist State and the Black Challenge: Culturalism and the Elision of Political Economy” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2016). An early treatment of this topic is Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture, and Society 2 (1980): 57–72.

The work of Mary L. Dudziak, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Gerald Horne, and Penny Von Eschen is especially pertinent here; for example, Penny Von Eschen, “Challenging Cold War Habits: African Americans, Race, and Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 20 (1996): 627–38; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights and Foreign Affairs, 1948–1988 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Gerald Horne, “The Crisis of White Supremacy,” Socialism and Democracy 17 (2003): 123–39; Mary L. Dudziak, “Desegregation as Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 41 (1988): 61–120; and Dudziak, “Brown as Cold War Case,” The Journal of American History 91 (2004): 32–42.

This subject has received considerable attention. See Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., “Seeing Red”: The Federal Campaign against Black Militancy, 1919–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang, eds., Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Eric Arnesen, “‘No Graver Danger’: Black Anti-Communism, the Communist Party, and the Race Question,” Labor 3 (2006): 13–52; F. Suzanne Bowers, “Pseudo-Democracy in America, 1945–60: Anti-Communism Versus the Social Issues of African Americans and Women” (M.A. Thesis, East Tennessee, State University, 2002); William A. J. Cobb, “Antidote to Revolution: African American Anticommunism and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1931–54” (PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2003); and Regin Smith, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004).

On the process of niggerization, see James Baldwin, “The Nigger We Invent,” Equity and Excellence 7 (1969), 15–23. Also see Lewis Gordon, “Sartrean Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,” in The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson, edited by S. Galt Cromwell (Berlin: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995); Lewis Gordon, Bath Faith and Antiblack Racism (New York: Humanity Books, 1999).

“The relationship between being Black and being a problem is noncontingent. It is a necessary relation.” George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2008), 87.

Analogy “derives its informative value because … ‘it says what it wants to say by comparison’ to a sign or signification that is already part of the structure of experience and understanding of people’s social world.” Percy Hintzen and Jean Rahier, “Introduction: Theorizing the African Diaspora: Metaphor, Miscognition, and Self-Recognition,” in Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diaspora, edited by John Muteba Rahier, Percy C. Hintzen, and Felipe Smith (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), x–xi. Here, analogy is the means through which the Black “renders visible” the non-citizenship and unbelonging of the Communist, thus opening up the ideological space for anticommunism. In turn, Communism constructs the Black as traitor and universalizes him/her as a fundamental threat to the state, thus reifying and reinscribing antiblackness in statist discourse.

Hence the use of anticommunism/antiradicalism.

Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 66.

Ibid., 92.

Ibid., 67.

Ibid., 68.

Hintzen and Rahier, “Theorizing the African Diaspora,” x–xi.

Carole Boyce Davies, “Deportable subjects: U.S. Immigration Laws and the Criminalization of Communism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (2001): 955.

Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 79.

Ibid., 69.

David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 122; Brent Hayes Edwards, “Unfinished Migrations: Commentary and Response,” African Studies Review 43 (2000): 48. Deborah Thomas explains, “Herein lies the root of the epistemological violence generated by the turn to [C]ulturalis[m]. … The question of where black populations stood in relation to states … became secondary to the question of how blacks in the West were connected to roots, to Africa … the language of cultural politics … abandons the impetus within internationalism toward imagining political community. It derails a more global political economic analysis … ” Deborah Thomas, “The Violence of Diaspora: Governmentality, Class Cultures, and Circulation,” Radical History Review 103 (2009): 93. Herskovitsian cultural analysis, which asserted Black humanity and equality based on evidence of African cultural legacy, inaugurated the shift from political economy to “the language of moralism.” See Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990) and “The Negro’s Americanism,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Alain Lock (New York: Touchstone, 1925), 353–60; Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 162.

Laura Curran, “The Culture of Race, Class, and Poverty: The Emergence of a Cultural Discourse in Early Cold War Social Work (1946–63),” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 30 (2003): 18; Thomas, “The Violence of Diaspora,” 84, 91; Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 79–114; Patterson and Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations,” 21–22.

Thomas, “The Violence of Diaspora,” 84.

“[A]nalyses of race and class began to privilege a focus on culture over a focus on socioeconomic inequality. This had both academic and practical effects. Academically, it supported a liberal view of development that naturalized capitalist competition and that positioned the cultural … practice of middle-class white Americans as normative … practically, the cultural model … directed attention away from the overall political economy of American capitalism and of how it ‘uses, abuses, and divides its poorly organized working class … ’” Ibid., 92.

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xxx–xxxii.

James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Vintage International, 2007), 263. Additionally, Black radicalism is the understanding that “Blackness is not ancillary to the category of labor, it is constitutive and essential to the history of Western exploitation and violence”; “the uncompromising structural understanding of American racial capitalism”; a “move away from American exceptionalism and toward a internationalist perspective”; and a mode of organizing that elicits a “violent response … [which] reveals the true intentions of the state.” Bill Lyne, “God’s Revolutionary Mouth: James Baldwin’s Black Radicalism,” Science & Society 74 (2010), 16, 25, 28, 32.

João H. Costa Vargas, “Black Radical Becoming: The Politics of Identification and Permanent Transformation,” Critical Sociology 32 (2006): 476.

For discussions and definitions of regimes of coloniality, see Anibal Quijano, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad,” Peru Indigena 23 (1993), 11–20; Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americans in the Modern World,” International Social Science Journal 44 (1992), 549–57; Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1995); Augustín Laó-Montes, “Unfinished Migrations: Commentary and Response,” African Studies Review 43 (2000): 56.

Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 12.

Cooke, who was one of the most prominent Black female journalist in the United States, was a radical political activist and organizer. She belonged to leftist organizations including the Civil Rights Congress, The Communist Party of the United States, the Angela Davis Defense Fund, and the American-Soviet Friendship Committee. LaShawn Harris, “Marvel Cooke: Investigative Journalist, Communist, and Black Radical Subject,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 6 (2012): 93.

Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” The Crisis 42 (November 1935). There is a similar discussion in Mary Anderson, “The Plight of Negro Domestic Labor,” The Journal of Negro Education 5 (1936): 66–72.

Harris, “Marvel Cooke,” 91–92.

See Buzz Johnson, “I Think of My Mother”: Notes on the Life and Times of Claudia Jones (London: Karia Press, 1985); Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Davies, ed., Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publisher, 2011).

Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around (2nd ed.), edited by Manning Marable (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2009), 316.

Ibid., 317.

Ibid., 324.

Ibid., 317–18.

Ibid., 320.

Ibid. 321–22.

Erik McDuffie, “Esther V. Cooper’s ‘The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism’: Black Left Feminism and the Popular Front,” American Communist History 7 (2008): 205.

The contribution of women to the Black radical tradition has received increasing attention in the past twenty years. These include, in addition to the works already cited, Ula Taylor, “‘Reading Men and Nations’: Women in the Black Radical Tradition,” Souls 1 (1999): 72–80; Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Kate Weigand, “Claudia Jones and the Synthesis of Race, Gender, and Class,” in Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: The John’s Hopkins University Press, 2001), 97–113; Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Rose Brewer, “Black Radical Theory and Practice: Gender, Race, and Class,” Socialism and Democracy 17 (2003): 109–22; Mary Helen Washington, “Alice Childress, Loraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones Write the Popular Front,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United Stated, edited by Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 183–204; Stephen Ward, “The Third World Women’s Alliance: Black Feminist Radicalism and Black Power Politics,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights- Black Power Era, edited by Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), 199–44; Fanon Che Wilkins, “Beyond Bandung: The Critical Nationalism of Lorraine Hansberry, 1950–65,” Radical History Review 95 (2006): 191–210; Erik McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women’: Sojourning for Truth, Justice, and Civil Rights during the Early Cold War,” Radical History Review 101 (2008): 81–106; Carole Boyce Davies, “Sisters Outside: Tracing the Caribbean/Black Intellectual Tradition,” Small Axe 28 (2009): 217–28; Dayo F. Gore et al., eds., Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: New York University Press, 2009); McDuffie, “‘I wanted a Communist philosophy, but I wanted us to have a change to organize our people’: The Diasporic Radicalism of Queen Mother Audley Moore and the Origins of Black Power,” African and Black Diaspora 3 (2010): 181–95; Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at The Crossroads: African American Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Cheryl Higashida, Black International Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011); McDuffie, “‘For full freedom of … colored women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States … ’: Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women’s International,” Palimpsest 1 (2012): 1–30; Rhoda Reddock, “Radical Caribbean Social Thought: Race, Class Identity and the Postcolonial Nation,” Current Sociology 62 (2014): 493–11; Keisha N. Blain, “‘[F]or the Rights of Dark People in Every Part of the World’: Pearl Sherrod, Black Internationalist Feminism, and Afro-Asian Politics during the 1930s,” Souls 17 (2015): 90–112.

James Roark, “American Black Leaders: The Response to Colonialism and the Cold War, 1943–53,” African Historical Studies 4 (1971): 254.

Davies, “Deportable Subjects,” 957–59.

Manning Marable, “History, Liberalism, and the Black Radical Tradition,” Radical History Review 71 (1998): 20.

James Roark explains, “America’s anticolonialism sprang from its revolutionary heritage, its desire for world peace and stability, and its commitment to unrestricted world trade. The nation’s conservative revolutionary tradition supported the principle of self-government achieved in an orderly fashion. International peace and stability required the satisfaction of the demands of militant Third World nationalism. And America’s interest in international trade demanded opposition to imperial preferential systems which roped off important markets and denied American goods and capita equal access.” Roark, “American Black Leaders,” 259.

Ibid., 260.

Ibid., 269.

McDuffie, “Black and Red,” 237.

For an excellent discussion of the “Horne Thesis,” see Erik McDuffie, “Black and Red: Black Liberation, the Cold War, and the Horne Thesis,” The Journal of African American History 96 (2011): 236–47. A notable refutation of Horne’s Thesis is Carol Anderson’s Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Gerald Horne’s extensive body of work presents myriad interrogations of this thesis. See for example, Red and Black: W.E.B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985); Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956 (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987); Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the U.S. and Jamaica (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Cold War in a Hot Zone: The U.S. Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African-American Freedom Struggle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); and Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Pluto Press, 2016).

Ibid., 236.

Mary Dudziak, “Desegregation as Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 41 (1988): 122.

Von Eschen, “Challenging Cold War Habits,” 627–38.

Ibid., 619.

Horne, Red and Black, 2.

Brenda Gayle Plummer, “African Americans in the International Imaginary: Gerald Horne’s Progressive Vision,” The Journal of African American History 96 (2011): 222.

“The American Negro revolution emphasized integration and assimilation, and looked forward to the irrelevance of color, but revolutions in the Third World stressed separation and national independence, and in the case of African revolution, Negritude, or innate racial characteristics. American Negro leaders wanted to participate on an equal basis in the existing society and to share in the decision-making process. Colonials, on the other hand, strove to supplant existing authority and to achieve self-determination … in America the leaders were advocates of capitalism and liberal democracy; abroad liberation movements were often headed by socialists and Marxists.” Roark, “American Black Leaders,” 269.

See Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Samir Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977); Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last State of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1969).

Roark, “American Black Leaders,” 269.

Plummer, “African Americans in the International,” 223.

McDuffie, “Black and Red,” 236.

Dudziak, “Desegregation as Cold War Imperative,” 113, footnote 299.

Ibid., 92.

Plummer, “African Americans in the International,” 225.

Dudziak, “Desegregation as Cold War Imperative,” 107.

McDuffie, “Black and Red,” 243.

Roark, “American Black Leaders,” 260.

Dudziak, “Desegregation as Cold War Imperative,” 102, footnote 243.

Von Eschen, “Challenging Cold War Habits,” 627–38.

McDuffie, “Black and Red,” 236.

Gerald Horne, Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 13.

Roark, “American Black Leaders,” 268.

Dudziak, “Desegregation as Cold War Imperative,” 64.

The Civil Rights Congress was a multiracial, radical organization that was in existence from 1946–56 until it was disbanded due to pressure from the Subversive Activities Control Board. The CRC, which combated “the twin evils of the era,” anticommunism and racism, defended both Blacks and communists. The advocacy of social progress for Blacks, workers, and those who suffered from political persecution resulted in the organization being red-baited, painted as a communist front, and ultimately eradicated. Gerald Horne, “The Case of the Civil Rights Congress: Anti-Communism as an Instrument of Social Repression,” in Anti-Communism: The Politics of Manipulation, edited by Judith Joel and Gerald M. Erickson (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1987), 119–23.

Ibid., 97.

Ibid., 98, footnote 223.

Horne, Black Liberation/Red Scare, 12.

Dudziak, “Desegregation as Cold War Imperative,” 76, footnote 77.

Sylvia Wynter, “Sambos and Minstrels,” Social Texts 1 (1979), 150.

Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis, 77, emphasis in original.

Lewis, “Sartrean Bad Faith,” 123.

Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, xix.

Linda Martín Alcoff, “Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 51.

Ibid., 48.

Ibid., 47.

Lewis Gordon, Bath Faith and Antiblack Racism (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), 11.

Lewis Gordon, “Sartrean Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,” in The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson, edited by Galt Cromwell (Berlin: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 122.

The fact that “during the anticommunist fifties, public recantations were the order of the day,” especially among Blacks, underscores this point. Dudziak, “Desegregation as Cold War Imperative,” 76 footnote 77. One particularly vitriolic Black Cold Warrior that renounced his previous affiliations with the Communist Party and the left and worked to discredit Black radicalism and internationalism is Max Yergan. See David Henry Anthony III, Max Yergan: Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and James Merriweather, Proudly We can be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 57–89. Other African Americans whose anticommunist civil rights platform helped to construct an ideal Black subjectivity include Mary McLeod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell, Rayford Logan, and Walter White.

As Gordon writes, “‘Nigger’ is forever situated in the third person; they are ‘niggers,’ he acts like a nigger; I can act like a nigger—which is an Other—but I can never be ‘nigger’ or ‘niggerness,’ only ‘a nigger.’ ‘Niggerness’ emerges as a universal category that alleviates responsibility. ‘Niggerizing’ the world hides one’s shame for one’s own ‘niggerness.’ Thus … [it] is a form of bad faith … since the image of a ‘nigger’ is black … the black who uses it can be interpreted as saying this to himself, ‘I am not that kind of black, I am not a nigger’ or ‘I am not a typical black, I am not a nigger’ or ‘I am not one of those blacks, I am not a nigger. No one is pro ‘nigger.’ Such a Black is mired in self-denial.” Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, 105–06.

Ibid., 106.

Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class & Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (London: Routledge, 2003), 12.

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Notes on contributors

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Charisse Burden-Stelly is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016.